Permanent Collection

I finger the ornate fabric, hand-painted batik, and wonder whose hands applied the gold, pink, brown, and curvy lines, the bright petals, the soaring birds. I see the scene and feel my skin getting sticky from the thick and humid air. I hear the cicadas rotating in sirens, and the frogs, like the call to prayer, beckoning dusk and night to come – inviting us into a perpetual ritual.

I felt like I was unraveling a blue thread from a beautiful woven fabric. I tried not to tug too long because I wanted to keep it intact. Like a child that saw the dangling end as an invitation, I could not help but pinch the blue string between my fingers and gently pull it, satisfied with the tension and the wavy pattern it unfolded before me. The story told is undulated layers, partial, blurred fiction and reality. The tale curves and shifts like the perspectives of those that touch it. I have looped yarn and magically turned a long piece of fibre into treasures, mittens, sweaters, hats. I have marveled at ripples I have seen elsewhere in clay tiles, in the patterns of Peranakan or Nonya ceramic plate boundaries. I love the swells, the rolls, like waves, and the high of surfing on them to get to a pleasing disclosure. I have pulled blue string from my pen, leaking it onto empty pages in a notebook, releasing a mother’s story, a tale of migration, fragments, homages, ghosts, sorrow, caution. Reading my writing, looking at the images of the beautiful art crafted by three artists, I am a sojourner, looking through stained glass, examining the architecture, admiring what adorns their dress. I don’t know them, but they feel like home, like they are in my present, my past, like they are found and were forgotten. They present to me the canon of our life curriculum, reminding us we are all colonial subjects, that our bodies carry an archive of loss, grief, and hauntings – of hand holding and the familiar lines in our hands. They narrate in the spaces where family is absent, missed, far away, where relationships are lost. We are not hysterical, mythical creatures, but manifest from the blurry edges that are scribbled in the margins, quivering, dancing, embracing.

I am haunted by what I cannot capture, by what I don’t truly understand, by what I might have been had we not migrated, by the family I could have in my daily routines, by the language not uttered by my tongue. I look behind and only see the oppressive forces that push people into movement, that give them no choice, to question where they belong, and to live lives as perpetual tourists, some separated from family long-term, indefinitely. In many ways, these fragments I respond to below are a reflection frozen at one point in time, moments that caused me to smile, to yearn, to mourn.

I have gone back home in various ways, through books, art, as a tourist, and in plying information from those that will speak with me, but I know it will never replicate being local.

I also find kinship with all these artists, in returning to the shape of my feet, hands, and seeing my mother, in becoming a mother myself and wondering what I can gift my children from our past, what identity is sewn into their names, memories, and hearts.

I have similarly looked at the sky and wondered if it is different, if someone else has done the same before me. I am drawn to blue ink and use it to draft my thoughts. I am an avid knitter and love the craft in slowly bringing beauty to the fabric of our lives, wrapping those in our cold homes in intertwined hugs. And I admire the art in the batik of my parents’ homeland, whether through spun embroidery or through the fine paintings by free hand or woodblock press.

And if I am honest, I mourn and grieve for the person I could have been had the world not forced us into these colonial characters. I think about the different tongues and poetry that would surface on my lips, the familiarity of the strangers walking past, and marvel at fantasies that I would have been more outgoing and popular if I was allowed to be myself. Would I have become an advocate though? Would I have found love with the same quality? Would I have written as I do now? I wonder, and I think of alternative realities. I imagine history unwoven and resewn. I watch the women and admire how their hair moves with them, taking note, trying to remember for those that come after them. I wipe the sweat from my nose, laugh at how I can’t handle the jungle heat, and hear the echoes of my mother who tells me to stay out of the sun. How lucky I am that the blue bucket sitting there was how she bathed as a child.

In response to Hangama Amiri

Her glasses are perched at the tip of her nose as she licked her fingers and took the thread between them, twisting them together, intertwined, tangled between her thumb and third finger. Then a knot formed. She didn’t know how she had done it, but it was tied tight, the thread now locked to the needle.

She said she normally would use her sewing machine, but this area, this part of the quilt, needed a slow, careful connection. She puts her own quilt down and then layers small square pieces of fabric, the top layer, the middle (or the wadding,) and a backing, and she invites me to copy her. I don’t dare to start yet, but watch.

She has made many quilts before, but this one is different. She says she was just missing home and missing him and this made her feel better. I look at the photo. This quilt is a replica, but it has different shading; it is like she is drawing from her own archives, filed away neatly like the stiches, lining up, adding thickness to his eyebrows.

She remembers this photo. He misses his family. His eyes are closed, and he is clutching a vase with flowers. The irises are stunning – she has included a purple fabric she admires –  but there are blue shades that remind her of those days when she looked up in the sky and wondered if she had ever seen that blue before. She imagines that he is trying to feel a heartbeat, resting his head against her in an embrace. She watches her move the needle swiftly but gently over his closed eyes, not wanting to linger, tears forming in her own.

Their conversations are daily reportings of their lives: he knows her routines, she knows his. Somehow, and occasionally, they argue, but she doesn’t know about what. She knows her own frustration is meted out through the needles she shoots through the phone. The guilt afterwards leads to messages and poetic exchanges and more longing, more intense than before.

How long they have been apart she does not know. She never speaks of it. Her own memory of him is in quick snapshots. She fingers the quilt and it feels soft. The texture doesn’t change even though the shading of the curtains behind him, his hair, and his shirt are different. She marvels at how she has connected all these different shades and thinks of the different ways one can connect to a person, by sight, sound, touch, apparition, dreams. She doesn’t have the confidence she could give him in the strokes of the thread, tying them tightly together. I watch her and feels so lucky she is building this. She could wrap herself in this image over and over again to package the longing, loneliness, rolling it to try to mute it. She takes her own layers and separates them, making them part, indefinitely.

In response to Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi

Is the sky blue where we are going? Is it still blue where we were? Have I seen this shade before? I can’t remember whether it is more vibrant here or back home. I remember that shade when I had first seen the ocean, the light slicing through the movement, reminding me that nothing stays the same or in place. Another shade reminds me of that time I was caught in a storm and was embraced by my mother who pulled me indoors. I wonder what shade she is looking at now. The memory pinches me like the eggshells I step on, flinching and dancing rapidly to move off them like my feet are moving across hot coals. I left them on the counter and they must have rolled onto the tiles. When I look down, they look like they are floating in the sky. I try to cook the way she did, but my mother was cooking in a different place. I look up again and wonder what she sees, and what she has never shown me. I think about what she has not seen and that the ocean here is a different blue, more cold, crisp, and I think she would not like it – but she would like to see it just the same. The pain makes me feel alive and makes me proud to see the same cheekbones on me. I hope I am as beautiful as she was when I last saw her.

In response to Erika DeFreitas

Blue pigment leaking onto manuscripts, tinting evidence in her mouth. What did they write? The scribes, long gone, ingested the blue intensity, but were also consumed in their profession, the only evidence in their teeth. Their transcriptions, interpretations, omissions, tangents, additions, and erasures shaped and only known by them. The pressing of sediments to reveal a vibrant lazurite, the earth not only transforming rock, but the strata released in the kisses of women. Tinting our present with questions of longing – what is missing? What are not seeing? What don’t we understand? Restless scribbles on pages, scratching messages, marking up others, overtaking some. Like faded photographs, they are like past dreams. Did their shoulders hurt from hunching over their work. Did the sediments hurt their teeth? Were their fingers blue? Were there tears or anger in their etchings? Did they insert themselves and their dreams in the text?

I imagine them draped in well-woven cloth, etched or embroidered with the finest patterns befitting a scholar’s robes. I imagine them writing in groups, laughing with one another, whispering, gossiping. I imagine open spats not just with each other but with those receiving the manuscripts. Headstrong women determined to have their interpretation undertaken and adopted. I imagine that they held firm and that the others had no choice.

I sketch in my notebook with my blue ink pen frantically, hoping that the words don’t leave me too quickly, trying to capture them like the fleeting pollen seeds floating in the sky. I try to move my hand across the page as fast as I can, letting the ink spill across the lines, and wonder which I will salvage later and which will be lost in the wrinkled pages. The ink runs out and I can’t find another pen anywhere. Where have I stashed them? I find one but it is not blue, and I have forgotten where I was.