Germaine Geer In Search of Old Fabrics

Writer Germaine Greer has a short piece in The Guardian about how she was introduced to beautiful Indian fabric as a child later discovered that what she had seen as a child was nothing compared to the fabulous fabrics she would come across when she visited India in 1971. In the piece she casts herself as the insider, ‘waving away tourist tat’ searching for authenticity. Even the title itself smacks of heroicism:’I've braved earthquakes and bullets in my hunt for fabulous fabrics’.

She cites an old Indian woman for saying “Alas, they don’t make them like that any more.” Referring to some fabric, of course. As were she another Boas, Greer had to whizz around fast as she could to get hold of authentic old fabrics before it was all ruined by modernity and The West as it happened to The Hmong:

The Hmong have been driven backwards and forwards across south-east Asia. Many have been resettled in the west, where they wear jeans and T-shirts like everybody else. They complain that without their wonderful clothes they have lost their identity.

I am sure that Greer has heard someone complain about that, but I seriously doubt that Hmong people have no identity without wearing their traditional fabrics. After all they do have a language, food and many other things. There are even Hmong rappers now, and I doubt that they would like to wear traditional Hmong clothing, but maybe they are not real Hmong in the eyes of Greer?

Greer ends her article by stating that the wealthy nations haven’t done anything to save ‘…the great textile heritage left us by hundreds of tribal peoples. The great resources of the rich nations have been used instead to preserve work that isn’t a patch on it.’

I think there are some notable things going on here. First of all Greer seems to have this classic idea of cultures being separate and frozen in time. The Hmong have their identity when they wear what Greer expects them to wear, but with jeans they are just like everybody else.  As if the modern (or should that be Western?) culture homogenises everything.

She is saddened by the demise of the craft that she loves, which I can fully understand, but she doesn’t ask the important question: why don’t people make such textiles any more? Could it be because they don’t have to? Could it be because they don’t want to?  I don’t know the answer, but I sure think it is much more interesting asking these questions than sitting around complaining about how the rich nations should have saved everything that Greer likes, since they ruined everything in the first place with their cheap jeans.

I am sure that it is the last thing that Greer wants to, but she comes across quite essentialist and slightly arrogant in this piece. People change all the time and nothing lasts for ever. We have changed many of our practices. We don’t build houses out of mud, most of us don’t make our own beer any more or even bake our own bread or knit and sow or own garments for that matter. We have changed all these things and much more, but we are not less Danish, English, German or whatever because of it. But when it is a people such as The Hmong, suddenly it is a threat against their culture or identity?