Pleats under My Skirt

Keepa Maskey

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25 February 2024

An encounter with Ganga Maharjan, a farmer from Lalitpur, Nepal, afforded me a space to imagine a stage: a stage where I invited the images that I had been making since 2020 to an imagined black tray in a garden. Those images helped me to reflect on memories and insights, and I have incorporated these into this composition. As a dyslexic learner, difficulty with language and comprehension has set me outside of certain spaces. Being able to write today with an understanding of my style is an act of softening the edges, whilst keeping intact my authenticity.

Here, the memory of learning through flashcards inspired me to limit text within a page, which is an approach to allow space for a reader like me—one who struggles to focus on reading for extended periods—not to be overwhelmed but to encourage participation. As I imagine a written page to be a stage, can an act of reading that page be a performance? The use of Courier font, in historical reference to typing, ignites a memory of my father and his typewriter. This is the font that I have been mainly using in my wider practice.

The loss of connection in our throwaway culture compels me to lean towards the term intra-action (Barad). This term directs us to rethink the way we exist—humans and non-humans—by discounting the hierarchy that the Anthropocene assumes. It recognises pre-existing mutual entanglements through which emergences begin to form. A kind of idea where, for instance, you and I would be connecting, fermenting, diffracting, and consequently moulding our existence: the process through which we shape ourselves into our becoming from within, not from outside, and not separately. Intra-action encourages me to reminisce and acknowledge my grandmother’s wisdom in caring for textiles and objects. In my childhood, observing her affection for these materials taught me the value they hold. I sensed the roles humans and materials play in the making of one another. I want to believe that the objects themselves feel: the feeling that wraps me warmly to form hope. This is the hope that, perhaps, whispered a message to these collected images, informing them to guide me in writing the story that I am sharing today.

Pleats under My Skirt 

 

The year is 1975.

A black tray, a garden.

Image description: A found cheesecloth, an old white piece, which I stitched under a red-coloured silk material that was purchased in Tibet by my father in the early 70s. The red silk material with golden floral prints is considered auspicious, and is used widely in Nepal, mainly to perform rituals. Attached along the ensemble of the cheesecloth and the red silk are a few smaller swatches of cheesecloth. These are square in shape, and I hand-dyed them using beetroots, giving off light pink hues. The photo is presented using filters, giving off a dim-yellow background and a translucent effect overall, with the red material foregrounded—almost giving the essence of a meaty organ.

On a sunny morning in April, Ganga is walking around the garden looking for a cheesecloth. She routinely uses the worn cheesecloth to wet the dry ground before the sun hits hard. Just then, having noticed a piece of red fibre lying by the door, Ganga picks up the fibre and stitches it onto the cheesecloth without giving much thought to it.

This particular piece of red fibre had just travelled a long way from a place called Tibet. The red piece had unfastened itself from a bundle of silks travelling in a truck with the Newar merchants. These are the days when Newar, an indigenous community of Nepal, is thriving and conducting business in Lhasa, Tibet.

Over the weeks, some of the pink hues which composed the red colour together started to escape. Gradually, by fading off the red piece, the pink hues were able to separate themselves altogether. This is a wise decision taken by the pink hues to avoid any risk that may arise due to the ongoing dryness of the garden. The pinks collectively manage the escape, supporting the ones that are not so quick to move, and enabling a successful escape for everyone.

The pink hues lay themselves in layers, gradually fading bit by bit off the red piece. The gruelling process of fading has been quite a journey for the hues, compelling them to evolve into dense mauve. Mauve by now understands the game and values trusting oneself. Mauve steps back in times of loudness to analyse critically first. This is a tool that mauve has stitched onto itself, becoming a part of its identity.

Image description: A white border encloses a sketchy charcoal drawing of my foot, merged with a photograph of a rose that is pink in colour—mauve, rather. The rose rests as the background, which highlights the sketch.

Coming to know of the journey, Ganga waters a small area in the garden, managing to bud a hibiscus flower despite the obstacle of the dryness.

The act of planting a hibiscus is to serenade the pink hues.

Soon, the young hibiscus grows up to be vibrant and dreamy. Often, though forbidden, hibiscus loves to play with the crumbled mud in the garden.

Image description: A bulge that sits in the centre of the image is protruding out of cracked ground. There is an off-white border, and the centred image is brown overall. The image has tiny white spots all over, randomly, which gives a vintage feel. Two specific cracks towards the bottom of the photo lure one’s attention.

Image description: This image was created by mixing a picture of a red hibiscus flower with a photograph of a white cemented wall. The wall has a portion cracked open, exposing the grey, crumbling cement. The abstract figure of a hibiscus flower is faded pink, flowing against the white background. Deep-grey cement, shot from close proximity, gives a look of crumbled soil within a horizontal frame.

However, one day whilst at play, the hibiscus gets crushed by the mud crumbles, making it bleed across the land profusely. Sigh! Nevertheless, the garden is proud of hibiscus; after all, it is such an effort to dance against the brittle and the restrictions.

Meanwhile, a bird has been trapped for years in a corner of the cemented wall by the garden. The bird often sings of the ancestral practices. The bird speaks of sorrows, displeased with the life she is living. She believes she could carve so much more in this world other than the traces of her own trapped reality.

That day, learning of the crushed hibiscus, something unexplainable is evoked within her, ultimately awakening the bird to carve herself out of the concrete. She realises that holding herself hostage for years, fearing dominance, had cost her a lot. She could no longer afford not to pay attention to her inner voice: the truth that speaks to her persistently.

A Bird

A bird, an ancestor, visiting by the nights in dreams. 

A bird, a breeze, feeling through the ground. 

A bird, a calm, holding through the wrath.

A bird, the wavering leaf.

Image description: A scarred, colourful painting of a birdlike figure against a black background. It is one of my unfinished wall paintings. The cemented surface gives a gritty texture, scored in such a way that reveals the white surface of the wall. The bird has been painted using glossy enamel paint. Dark yellow-ochre, aquamarine, red, orange, and light green colours are outlined with black. The bird is resting in a slanted position, with her beak angled into the lower left corner.

Now, it is October 2023.

The garden will be closing for good within a few days. Dryness has cracked multiple holes in the black tray. Out in the frail garden, I join Ganga standing cautiously on the stains of the bled-out hibiscus. Amongst us, roped in, are the bodies and a sickle.

Bodies stuffed and hung, abandoned and forgotten.

Image description: Hung closely together are five small and off-white, slightly muddy sac-like stuffed textile pieces that I had stitched roughly, and through which a few threads dangle loosely.

Image description: These two images each merge a picture of a spool of white thread, in which a slightly crooked needle is inserted, with a picture of a white rose. Their backgrounds are slightly different shades: one darker beige in tone and the other lighter—an off-white. The white rose gives the illusion that the petals cover the whole spool. These two images are mostly identical, besides their backgrounds and their layouts: one picture is positioned vertically, with the spool moving upward, and the other is laid horizontally, the spool towards the right.

So, I pick up a needle and a thread.

Stitch, to a pleat

Each stitch, to a dance of shift

Entangling a forest of pleats for care and space

A pleat to press, a stitch, a pleat 

Pleats writing ballads of the escaped silk, 

The evolved hues, and the cracked landscape. 

Pleats nestling seeds, the visions the bird had for herself;

Pleats cutting through the wounds of confinements and norms, making room for rest.

Pleats choreographing the traces of carved oppression:

A composition for the abandoned.

Is it to gather? 

Pleats under my skirt.

Sun is setting over the frail garden. I sit by the space where hibiscus once thrived. I am exhausted. I smell the reeking of the bodies. I hear the echoes of the cheesecloth and the panting of the hues. Amidst it all, I find the bird fluttering within me.

 Could we possibly consider the worn cloth which Ganga was searching for, one early morning, to represent our collective exhaustion from having repeatedly to validate ourselves throughout our lives? Perhaps, then, the faded hues that escaped off the red silk could be understood as the screams we hold within us, the hanged and the forgotten bodies breathing amidst lingering faiths in the dry garden.

Oh!

And the escaped bird: a second chance for you and me to carve our songs, shifting and folding.

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 Ganga Maharjan is a farmer who lives in Lalitpur, Nepal. I have known Ganga for a few years now, but never before had an opportunity to get to know about her and her life. I had an interest in learning from her about the ancestral farming practices and the knowledge farmers have about soil. We both come from an indigenous community called Newar. One day, we made a prompt decision to sit together in a field, where I listened to and recorded Ganga as she shared stories and a song. This new understanding played a crucial role in facilitating me to cognise the distance we stand away from the ground. I have been in conversation with Ganga since May 2023; our dialogue has encouraged me to create ‘Pleats under My Skirt’.

Image description: A black and white picture—almost like a pencil drawing—of a sickle that is hanging by a line. The image has been merged with another, giving a decorative feel to the sickle. This sickle was brought from a village in Nepal.

Works Cited

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.