The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 7 | Issue 0 | Article ID 3456 | Mar 16, 2009

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Weaving Lao Silk Into Indigo Nights　　ラオスの絹を織って藍色の夜へ

Melody Kemp

Weaving Lao Silk Into Indigo Nights

Melody Kemp

The air turned chilly as the sun sighed into thenearby hills. It picked up the smells of dustmixed with metallic and dung flavours. MissPhaeng watched, holding her breath as the lastsliver of red fell out of sight. Casting a quickmantra to the spirits of nature, she swallowed aglass of lao lao to start the evening.

Leaning mindfully over her loom, Miss Phaengraked her nails across the piano strings of silkwarp, plucking each to test its tension. A blacksheet of pin-straight hair fell over her face,hiding the claret birthmark shaped just like aspider, that crept over her right cheek, one legdisappearing into the fine hairs of her temple.

The coarse ivory silk recently spooled from thecocoons gathered in her garden pushed backagainst her hand.

A woman in Xieng Khouang twists silkfilament together to make warp thread. She wears a 'plain' woven silk sinh with

sewn on woven edge (tin sinh). Herdaughter wears a mutt mee (ikat) sinh with

a less ornate tin sinh befitting youngergirls.

She felt the fizz of anticipation low in her bellyas she gathered all the many shuttles holdingthe weft silk and dumped them into an oldblackened basket. Inhaling its heady stink ofash, grass and smoke, she placed the basketnext to where she would sit.

Her mother had warned her of the importanceof finishing the warp before sunset, as thespirits would tangle the threads on anunfinished loom. She had a broom ready toscare them away, and the lao lao was supposedto purify her soul against such happenings, butshe would remain vigilant as she workedthrough the night. After all, her wedding wasonly a week away and this was to be herwedding skirt.

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Deep purple, indigo and red of mutt mee dyedsilk shone from the spindles stained with thesweat of her mother’s hands and now hers.Each spindle had been polished with oil andrelentless use and they skidded effortlesslyacross the sheet of warp threads.

The previous day she had arranged the threehundred bamboo pattern sticks, which definedher complex design though the warp threads.She sighed, for an infinitesimal momentdaunted by her task.

Dreams married to ancient symbols filled hereyes and her intent. Despite it still being cool,the wet season had come early. Lightningspattered the hills with grey green flashshadows. The low rumbling caused her sharp-eyed red dog to hustle nearer to her feet,growling and turning in agitation. The dragonspirits had returned to the world and weddings

were now permitted. Her tribute and display ofworthiness was to weave her wedding sinh. Themore adept and complex, the greater themoney that would be given to her parents bythe groom’s family in gratitude for raising sucha creative and capable daughter.

Her insistently garrulous but now deadgrandmother was her teacher. She would scoldthe eight year old Phaeng as she fell asleep atthe loom, exhausted after sunrise forays to getwater and a day of sonorous state-providedteaching.

“The bears will eat you, if you sleep!” hergrandmother threatened, betel stained teethbared like the forest beast of which she spoke.“If you fall off the loom, you will become abear,” she insisted thrusting her face close toPhaeng’s; so close, the red spittle stained thesilk warp. Later she would die, the red oozingfrom her mouth being the blood of TB and notthe hunger suppressing betel.

This old lady who had lived off the rice fieldseating eels, weeds, frogs, crickets and tiny fish,had rough scaly hands as strong as pincers,hands that could create achingly gloriousweaves confined within rigidly straightselvedges. The pieces were reversible, thedesigns etched neatly into both sides. Her

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supplementary weave suffered no vagrantthreads. She had taught her granddaughterwell.

Phaeng kicked the dog from beneath her as sherose to give offerings and prayers inpreparation. She had made a posie of marigoldsand jasmine which she tied to the uprights. Shethen sprinkled the loom with holy water givento her by her cousin who had become a monk.In honour of him she had dyed some silk withmarigolds to add the flames of power to thenaga design she planned to begin with.

She set fire to a bowl of chilies to make surethat acrid smoke would persuade the nagaspirit not to blow his wild winds and disturb herconcentration. Then some incense to ensurethe spirits of the silk would guide her well.

Her neighbours thought Miss Phaeng a bitcrazy when she worked on her weaving atnight. Most preferred to lock themselves inside,afraid that passing phi phetu might take seed intheir souls. But Miss Phaeng had traveled. Shehad seen people at all hours of the nightworking and enjoying themselves without lossof sanity or being consumed by the spirits ofthose who had not made merit.

Sitting alone with her snuffling dog, she threwthe first shuttle of silk across the warp,poisoning the pristine ivory with a streak ofmidnight blue. The sun was now well on its wayto Burma, and the dark settled around her likeblack snow, smooth and silent. The kerosenelamps sputtered but stayed alight. Next monthshe had heard the village, only 40 kilometersfrom the capital, would be getting electricity.Too late for her.

She leaned into her work, eyes swimming intothe threads and mesmerised by each throw ofthe shuttle. She worked silently, the only noisebeing the insects croaking and trilling in theindigo night, and the bamboo’s groan as shepressed the pedals that separated thealternative warp threads.

As the night became cooler, she adjusted thethin pillow on which she sat within the squareconfines of the loom and pulled her old sinhmore tightly around her legs.

Her mind was crowded with memories,impressions, dreams, and visions. Snakes andbuffaloes, grandmothers with milky eyes andfew teeth, grandfathers with bent backs andulcerated legs.

As her arm flew she wrote her mother’s life intothe silk, then her grandmother’s. Hergrandmother appeared in the silk, pale andexhausted, sunken into the kapok pillow as sherasped her last prayers for a more propitiousrebirth.

She wove the fair skinned French official whotook her aunt as a concubine, leaving her poorand with three ghostly children when he wascalled back to France. She wove the gravewhere the children were buried after malariakilled one after the other.

Other shapes emerged. Flames leapt from thesilk as thatched houses burned while Frenchplanes f lew overhead. She fashionedtrumpeting elephants being shot by thecolonists with their royal consorts. At a point ofcalm she created the placid faces of monks onthe morning tak bat, receiving the offers ofsticky rice with chants of blessing.

The weaving entered a new phase asVietnamese faces emerged in the marginsdressed in black baggy pants and carrying theparaphernalia of war. While they faced theweaver, the backs of Lao women carrying allthey owned as they fled from ceaselessAmerican bombing appeared dark and bentwith terror as the fire rained from the sky. MissPhaeng’s hands threw arcs of white phosphorusburning into the air, scalding and stealingoxygen, clinging to screaming children.

Holes appeared in the textile where bombs hadpierced the fabric, the selvedge withering

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under the effects of defoliants and otherchemicals heaved onto the hapless peasantsbelow. She created airfields where Americanmen in civilian clothes boarded planes andsmoked locally grown opium to mitigate theimages of the ravaged people.

Faces of deformed babies their limbs curled indefence against the chemicals that killed theforests, appeared in a complex supplementaryweave, surrounded by protective nagas whoheld their souls up to the limpid eyes of Buddhathe Compassionate.

As the household dog settled more tightlyunder her seat, legs twitching and growling ata canine dream, Miss Phaeng plummeteddeeper into the trance of the night worker,tossing the multicoloured shuttles and movingthe patterns sticks from above to below theloom, as each design floated into view.

Her nails, stained dark with indigo plucked atthe stray ends of the interwoven colours,shepherding each to its place.

Sweat glistened on her skin despite the cool ofthe night. It ran in rivulets along her neckblending at a confluence along her shoulders,spreading like a Rorschach blot against hercotton blouse.

The fabric of her sihn spread tightly around herbuttocks as she settled into the rhythm of herweaving. More nagas roared under the handswith flowers drifting between the rays of powerthat shone from their heads, before streaminginto her hands.

She sighed as a baci tableau emerged from thesilk, like the one she would have as part of herwedding. Guests sat around the focal cone ofbanana leaves clasping threads that linkedthem together in common humanity while anold man chanted wishing them health anddelight.

She puzzled at the lines that then appeareduntil she recognized the scaffold of a dam beingbuilt near her home. The sharp angles werepicked out in colours from hemp roots.

Behind the scaffold glinted a river pregnantwith fish soon to die: their ancient migrationroutes cut off by the massive structure. Shepicked out weeping women leaving the land ofthe ancestors, leaving the buried placentas thatbound their children’s souls to the household.She wove helmeted engineers watching as thewomen filed by, while in the background theforest ebbed like a receding tide.

She wove men struggling to make new landproductive, opening its surface for the firsttime, their heart-beats quickening at thenightmare of buried munitions. Too deep a cutand the angry nagas of the earth would eruptand rip their hard resinous bodies into charredlumps. As Miss Phaeng ran her shuttle, a man

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appeared in one corner, his leg ending in aflash of red where the foot should be. Shecaptured a look of surprise and puzzlement onhis face as the man’s blood mixed with the newearth and the buffalos fled for the remnantforest. Laq insect, blood red, blended into themangosteen brown of the earth.

It was almost three in the morning when MissPhaeng started to shape the expensive cars ofthe nation’s rulers, gliding effortlessly up thenew asphalt of the capital. She wove their fixedsmiles above white shirts and crisp black suitsthat hid the deafness of their ears to thecascading rage of the people. She wove smilingpoliticians taking money from smilingbusinessmen.

The voices of her mother, her grandmotherwhispered to her, urging her to hold theselvedge straight and true, to weave faster andmake the cloth sing. And sing it did with thetones of the Lao women who had been makingsilk and weavings its glistening glory forhundreds of years. They called to her. Teasingand threatening, “Don’t fall off the loom nomatter how tired.” Laughing, crying, dying andsinging, they were with her as she finished thework.

Her eyes pricked and her body sagged withfatigue, shoulders sighing and sagging over theloom as the first rays of the returning sunshone on her back.

As the rooster crowed its late strangledgreeting to the day, she felt the first stiffeningpangs of her period. Miss Phaeng cut the workfrom the loom and threw it at the rising sun.

Epilogue

Hand woven silk, sticky rice and ant egg soupare cultural icons of Laos. While you can’t put abowl of the ubiquitous but seasonal soup inyour bag, those fortunate enough to visit Laoscan take home a sample of the weavers’ skill.It’s part of women’s cultural lineage – though itis not an exclusively female domain, and is stilla part of Lao living culture; the elegant silksinh (tube wrapped skirt with ornately wovenhem) still being extensively worn.

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But western fashion and the advent of cheapChinese clothing, the gaudy colours attractingthe eyes of young modernistas, is dimming theluster of Lao silk. Once a part of young girls’socialization, Laos silk mavens are now havingtrouble attracting those who want to spendhours at the loom.

This despite evidence that most ruralhouseholds generate the cash needed to keepthe wolves and corrupt officials from the doorby producing silk. Once again cultural andeconomic homogenisation is being conveyed viathe vector of development.

“For the first time I have more trainers thanstudents” said Kommaly Chantavong, thefounder of Laos’ first Fair Trade CooperativeMulberries and Nobel Prize nominee. It wasshe who re-trained the weavers after the PathetLao had declared silk to be a fibre of the

bourgeoisie and had ordered women to weaveproletarian cotton instead. Kommaly had keptalive the patterns imprinted from pieces hergrandmothers had left her. Carol Cassidy, whosome have claimed resurrected Lao silk, foundher talent in Kommaly’s workshops. It would beironic if the ancient art remains only alive inWestern exports businesses.

The old women whose eyes shone with thedreams of designs are now leaving the earthand taking their knowledge with them. Manyare illiterate in the ways of words but writethrough their designs and know forests for thecolours they yield.

“You should write a book before they all die”many of the weavers have said.

Yes I guess I should. I started with a short storythe one you can read above . I haveincorporated stories told to me by womenthemselves although the plot and political tingeis mine alone. My friend Paul Wager aluminous gifted photographer whose work canbe seen here and here is pleased to be mypictorial muse. But despite living in a Buddhistnation for over 6 years, we are not suitablyenlightened to yet live off air, so am looking forsomeone or an organization who is willing totrust us to the tune of USD8000 so that we cantravel in our adopted home and capture the

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skills, designs and knowledge of the older onesand prepare a gleaming manuscript. In doingso we hope to re-instill pride in the young and aburr in the knickers of the developmentagencies who on the whole refuse to equate silkweaving with progress or dignity.

Melody Kemp is a freelance writer who haslived in Asia for over 23 years. A gypsy by

necessity and nature, her caravan is firmlyparked in Laos right now where she is pleasedto hang out with weavers and document thedevastation (and the benefits) of development.You can contact Melody at musi@magma.ca.

Recommended citation: Melody Kemp,“Weaving Lao Silk Into Indigo Nights,” TheAsia-Pacific Journal Vol 8 Issue 50 No 2 -December 13, 2010.