Between the departures and arrivals: embodied experience, photography, and writing

Between the departures and arrivals: embodied experience, photography, and writing Azadeh Fatehrad My grandmother used to sew veils by hand. She would measure, cut, and tailor her own veil, and sometimes also my mother’s veil. I remember this clearly. When she bought a new piece of fabric, she would say, with an excited smile, ‘This is going to be for the New Year’, and a few days later, we would find her in the process of making her New Year veil. She would work slowly, but steadily. First of all, a square piece of blue fabric would be laid out on the floor to define her workspace – clean and tidy. Then she would unroll the whole five metres of the new black fabric and try to find the beginning and the end. This was the most chaotic stage, as folds and layers of black fabric would pile up on top of each other. My grandmother would take hold of the top and bottom edges of the fabric and carefully align them, before folding the material many times into a square. This was the moment when she would make her final fold, superposing one corner onto the opposite one to form a triangular shape. This process seemed to require a great deal of concentration. It was not easy for my grandmother to do all this by herself, but she would be enjoying herself so much that no one would dare to intervene, unless specifically asked to help. At this stage, my grandmother would cut a curve at the bottom of the triangular fold. I remember how expertly she would do this. Now the moment had arrived when someone needed to put the cut-out fabric on their head, so that my grandmother could make the appropriate adjustment. Usually, this would be my mother’s cue to join the process and stand on a stool wearing the unfinished veil. My grandmother would have her scissors ready next to the stool. My mother would gently place the unfinished veil on her head. Sleek black oil – this is how I saw the smooth and gentle dropping of the silky fabric onto her head. The fabric would espouse her body so gracefully that I was always envious of its embrace. This was the most beautiful fall of fabric that I remember seeing. 232 Reach I am fascinated by the fabric: the way in which the fabric embraces the body when worn, its curves, folds, layers crunched together. It is as if bodily gestures are transformed into living lines of fabric, as if there is a reproduction of movement presented on the surface of the skin. Here (Figure 18.1), there are a few layers: layers of skin, layers of fabric which interlock at a few points, bodily space, the architectural form of the fabric, and the environmental space – either an interior room or outside, consisting of other spatial dimensions connected to the room/outside itself. In Farsi, poshesh (“clothing”) derives from the verb pushidan, meaning to cover up or conceal from view, whereas the English term “dress” refers, amongst other things, to decorating or adorning. During the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran from 1789 to 1925, many women wore the chador (“cloak”), a Persian word derived from the Turkish chadir, now meaning “tent”, as Çagla Hadimioglu notes.1 In this way, the chador could be seen as a kind of mobile home around the woman’s body, which facilitates her movement around the city and dealings with men. I have always been fascinated by the folds of the chador. I remember when I was a child growing up in Iran, I would feel shy in social encounters and would hide beneath my mother’s veil and cling to her, to hide from people outside this secret confinement. The feel of the fabric on my face and its complex folds over my body felt heavy and yet soft. 18.1 Azadeh Fatehrad, Drapery Series, 2014 [152.105.160.14] Project MUSE (2025-07-04 11:15 GMT) University of Teesside Embodied experience, photography, and writing 233 The Quai Branly anthropology museum in Paris holds photographic archives in relation to folds of fabric, its curves, and layers. These photos were taken by Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault in Morocco between 1918 and 1934.2 De Clérambault was an early-twentieth-century French psychiatrist for whom drapery possessed an especially potent fascination; he used studio photography to capture the movement of drapes revealing...