When linen remembers

Deborah Valoma

“…the green flax is full of loveliness, Inanna, the green flax is full of loveliness…”

The Bridal Sheets, Sumerian poem, ca. 2800 BCE

Deborah Valoma, shroud, 2019, plain weave, unbleached linen, 3 x 10'. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree, courtesy of the artist.

Linen is difficult to weave. Not supple, not pliant—it is stately and proud. It does not bend freely to the will of others and is downright defiant at times. But as we dress our looms, we are enticed by linen’s whispers. We hear its origin story, we understand its stalk-straight lineage. So we come to linen with honey and dates, herbs and leaves, water and smoke, and together play the loom in a rhythm of remembering. As we weave, its archaic memory flows into our hands, its golden seeds flood us with the gift of recollection. Memory is linen’s mother tongue.

Linen remembers back a thousand generations when it was wild and tempestuous, when it was plucked by its throat from the earth in the Caucasus foothills and spun in a dizzying dance. It remembers when it was tamed and planted in the company of date palms along the great diluvial rivers—between the Tigris and the Euphrates, along the Nile and the Jordan. And it remembers when it nearly drowned in the watery stench of its own decaying body and took the beating when it was turned first into fiber and then thread—that moment when they changed its name from flax to linen.

Linen’s body is sturdy, its back firm, its hand strong, its skin sleek. Its muscles relax in warm water and its beauty ripens in aging. It delights in its silvery-brown complexion and defies those who attempt to sully its earthbound flesh. Linen wears no adornment, no embellishment to detract from its plain-woven and plain-spoken radiance. It resists the whitening of tamarisk ash, oil, and sunlight—however insistent. And it does not thrill, like the commoner wool, to gaudy color—however seductive.

Remains of a linen shroud with a knot above the right shoulder of the deceased, Ein Gedi, ca. 2nd–1st centuries bce, 13 x 9 cm. Photograph by Clara Amit, © Israel Antiquities Authority.

Linen is a second skin. Draped on human bodies, it gently wicks sweat to cool and lifts dirt to cleanse. It has the power to make the tactile visible: it memorializes movements, mapping gestures of sitting, bending, and lifting. But they are not always so kind to linen. They boil it over fire, soak it in lye, and press it with muscle and heat and stone in a futile attempt to obliterate their sometimes sordid deeds. But linen rebels against such acts of subjugation. It definitely writes the next chapter of their memoirs with its creases and folds and stains, telling secrets whether they consent or not. Linen is a faithful storyteller.

Heavy with the pleasure of gravity, linen falls. It sinks into horizontality, it crumples into a topography of lion-colored hills and river-cut valleys, as if in commemoration of its indigenous landscape. There, linen’s feet sink into warm, wet sediment, its waist-high stalks blow in the breeze, and its short-lived blue flowers ripple like water. Linen’s rival wool is coarse and impure, sheared from the backs of mindlessly bleating sheep, following their masters in the drylands. But linen bows to no one; servants laboriously tend it because it alone is worthy of draping sacred objects, spaces, and bodies—mortal and immortal.

Linen has been called by many names in many homelands: eight in the Torah and twenty-six in ancient Egyptian. In Sumerian they called linen gada—the flaxen cloth of protection. There in the Land Between Two Rivers, it was divine cloth, woven by acolytes in sanctuary workshops. It, and it alone graced their exalted places and clothed Inanna, who walked flanked by lions. It alone adorned her mosaic temple at Uruk, the House of Heaven for the Queen of Heaven, with lengths of its sacred simplicity, perfumed with aromatics, mediating between the mundane and the divine.

Wooden chest filled with folded linen, tomb of Hatnofer, ca. 1492–1472 bce, height of chest 17 5/16". Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, New York. Photograph courtesy of Creative Commons.

Further west in the Land of Milk and Honey, linen alone draped the statues of the Canaanite Asherah, goddess of weaving and the sacred palm. It was woven along the marshy Jordan and its tributaries in the fertile valley of the springs. There it grew green; it swayed to the pulse of buzzing bees and was nourished by the rotting sweetness of fallen dates. Following the meandering river downward to the salty blue basin, it alone covered the holy scrolls and enfolded the dead in caves tucked in the goat-trodden cliffs above the western shores of the Dead Sea.

And further west, in the Land of Linen, it bound the bodies of the departed with boundless lengths of its own body because it alone was ritually clean. With the help of Egyptian Tayet, the cloth-carrying goddess of funerary rites who carried the dead to heaven, linen alone purified remains for entombment—winding extremities, wrapping organs, filling cavities. Linen circled the lifeless with Book of the Dead incantations to deify the deceased and ensure recollection of their own names.

Recalling the dead, calling in the dead: linen has held postmortem bodies in an intimate embrace for millennia. At Çatalhöyük it swaddled an infant, rocking tiny bones in a sooty grave for nine thousand years. In the heights west of Jericho, linen cradled the warrior in his cave for six thousand years. At the necropolis at Thebes under the reign of the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, it enfolded the embalmed remains of Hatnofer, and folded within a chest, kept company with her in the afterlife for more than three thousand years. And in the stony hills of Jerusalem, where the scent of warm wind blows through pines, linen enshrouded the corpse of Jesus with spices as was the custom two thousand years ago.

Linen wraps, winds, binds mortal bodies—skin to skin, flesh to flesh. It merges with decomposing, darkening tissue and absorbs seeping bodily fluids. It is up to what some might regard a gruesome task because it unflinchingly accepts its mission. It does not retreat to purposeful forgetting, the balm of the inconsolable. Linen sings out remembrance—the song of the dead.

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Deborah Valoma is an artist, writer, and professor. Her work considers textiles through multiple theoretical lenses including embodiment, materiality, ephemerality, and indigeneity. Deborah is currently working on The Armenian Postmemory Project, a multi-year interdisciplinary project that began when she inventoried a collection of heirloom textiles inherited from her grandmother—most made by her foremothers in villages in Ottoman Turkey and the Armenian diaspora. Combining research, archiving, and responsive making, the project addresses the role of textiles as signifiers of identity and agents of cultural continuity.