Joanna Barakat, Narrative Threads: Palestinian Embroidery in Contemporary Art (Saqi Books, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Joanna Barakat (JB): When I first learned to embroider for my painting Heart Strings, I began a journey with Palestinian embroidery that would eventually lead me to write this book. My extensive research, teaching workshops, and creating The Tatreez Circle all grew from a sense of connection that Palestinian embroidery gave me, in a way no other medium had. I began to investigate this sense of connection and the growing popularity of Palestinian embroidery. When I discovered the essential role artists played in shaping how we associate Palestinian embroidery with Palestinian identity, I wanted to start a conversation about how artists transformed a localized, embodied form of storytelling on a dress into a prominent symbol of Palestinian collective identity. As Israel continues its efforts to erase and appropriate Palestinian culture, I also felt the need to document and contextualize how and why artists use Palestinian embroidery in their artwork.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
JB: In the introduction, I provide a brief history of Palestinian embroidery and its evolution to the present day. I then discuss the role that artists played in cementing Palestinian embroidery as a signifier of Palestinian identity. Since the 1970s, Palestinian artists have used pastoral imagery to evoke a sense of national consciousness while evading Israel’s censorship of Palestinians. In the artwork, the figure of a Palestinian woman in her embroidered dress is an emotive metaphor of Palestine, conveying a sense of Palestinian identity, belonging, and home to the Palestinian viewer. Palestinian embroidery and its symbolism have evolved, and while some contemporary artists continue to use it in the same way, others reimagine it to express new concepts and ideas in various mediums.
There are three essays in the book for additional context. Tina Sherwell’s essay lays the framework and background for the metaphor of the female figure in her embroidered dress as the Palestinian motherland. In Wafa Ghnaim’s essay, she discusses Palestinian embroidery as an indigenous ceremony and the importance of an ethical approach when citing, teaching, and engaging in the practice. Rachel Dedman shares the stories behind the artwork that she curated for the “Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery” exhibition at the Whitworth, University of Manchester, in 2023.
The following twenty-four individual artist chapters feature some of the top Palestinian artists of our time, with a focus on the role Palestinian embroidery plays in their work. The featured artwork in the chapters addresses topics ranging from identity and indigeneity to memory, meaning, and narrative. Through their work, artists challenge historical, orientalist, and colonial ideas and constructs. Some artists center advocacy, activism, and awareness in their work. Others focus on process, materiality, and the preservation of Palestinian embroidery as a medium.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
JB: Though Narrative Threads is a book rather than visual art, it is still deeply connected to the work I do. It is still a way to express many of the ideas presented in my artwork in a different format and to expand on them by including so many other artists. In the book, I aimed to offer perspectives beyond my own through the essays and quotations from the artists, allowing for more interpretations and opportunities to engage with the featured artwork and the practice of Palestinian embroidery. I wanted the artist’s voice to be heard in their chapters, which is why I limited the curation of the artists’ chapters to artists I was able to interview.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
JB: Understanding the context behind our affinity for Palestinian embroidery is essential to engaging with it in a meaningful way. This book is for anyone interested in Palestinian embroidery, art, and culture. I hope to honor the artists who have shaped and continue to shape the meaning of Palestinian embroidery, and to show how artists carry it forward and reimagine it across all mediums. I want people to see how Palestinian embroidery and the artwork it appears in are dynamic and evolving, not static or frozen in the past. Hopefully, the book will create space for connection and conversations about Palestinian culture and the concepts presented by the artists.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
JB: I am currently looking at how we learn ancestral knowledge and craft through screens and strangers, rather than being taught by family or community. I am interested in how this shift changes our relationship with heritage and informs how we engage with cultural traditions. People consuming AI material about Palestinian heritage is concerning because of the misinformation and misrepresentations it provides. I am also curious about how the consumption of heritage through technology disembodies it. In my current body of work, I am using tahriri embroidery, the Palestinian couching stitch from Bethlehem. Though the stitching techniques I use are traditional, I am experimenting with new materials that connect to the concept behind the work.
J: How does this book relate to what is currently happening in Palestine?
JB: Narrative Threads documents Palestinian stories and artwork amidst the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Since 1948, destroying and stealing Palestinian culture has been a key instrument of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land. This is because our culture and heritage, especially the practice of Palestinian embroidery, serve as evidence of our existence and indigeneity. The genocide of Palestinians in Gaza includes Israel systematically targeting Palestinian culture by killing artists and destroying art studios, galleries, cultural institutions, collections, archives, universities, and heritage sites. This devastating loss and destruction are harsh reminders of the urgency around the documentation and preservation of our culture and heritage.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, by Joanna Barakat)
Palestinian women speak of life and land through their embroidery. Historically, Palestinian embroidery communicated and embodied the story of Palestinian women living in villages, farms, cities and Bedouin communities. Along with the artistic skill of embroidery and dress construction, a girl learned many life lessons stitching her future wedding dress while sharing stories with the women of her household and neighbourhood. With a needle and thread, she wrote her autobiography in a language of motifs passed down to her.
Her hand-embroidered dress, or thobe, is a conversation with the onlooker about her environment, beliefs, marital and socioeconomic status – all fundamental aspects of Palestinian village life. The thobe was cherished and passed down generationally, along with ancestral knowledge accompanying its creation. Palestinian embroidery is much more than decorative embellishment. It is an indigenous language which has transmitted Palestinian cultural knowledge for centuries.
When discussing Palestinian embroidery generally, Palestinians use the Arabic word tatreez, meaning embroidery, and refer to the wide variety of regional styles, stitches, colours and motifs by their specific names. In Arabic, Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery is tatreez fellahi falasteeni, or Palestinian farmer embroidery, designating it to a rural class within Palestinian society that included farmers, villagers and Bedouins. In nineteenth to early twentieth-century Palestine, middle-class urban women preferred Western-style clothes.
[…] Established in 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) recognised how art, culture and heritage could shape the Palestinian national consciousness. Israel’s theft and cultural appropriation of Palestinian cultural products reinforced the emphasis on creating Palestinian art and preserving Palestinian culture and heritage. Artists Ismail Shammout, founder and director of the Department of Arts and National Culture of the PLO in Beirut, and his wife, Tamam Al Akhal, head of the Art and Heritage section of the Department of Information and Culture, played a prominent role in cultural production and ensuring the preservation of Palestinian heritage. Artists in Palestine and those displaced in other countries worked with the PLO to produce works predominantly about liberation and Palestinian nationalism, introducing a visual vocabulary and iconography still prominent today. Posters of these paintings made the work and imagery accessible and widespread among refugee camps and Palestinian homes worldwide.
These artists transformed embroidery into a collective symbol of Palestinian identity. For example, Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarrara’s vivid bas-relief paintings celebrated traditional village life by portraying women wearing embroidered dresses. In scenes of resistance, they became primary characters representing strength and liberation. Posters and paintings by Palestinian artists like Ismail Shammout, Abdelrahman Al Muzayen and Mustafa al-Hallaj featured rural imagery with the Palestinian woman in her embroidered thobe, personifying the motherland. This mother figure is a metaphor for the reciprocal deep-rooted connection, longing and unconditional love Palestinians maintained for their native land. Other notable artists whose paintings depict scenes of rural life include Nasr Abdel Aziz Eleyan and Ibrahim Ghannam. Paintings of the utopian Palestinian village shape how many people imagine Palestine.