Quilts & Carpets: Our Gifts for Kin
When the world began to change in the opening months of 2020, one of the first things we had to do was cancel our reunion, an international trip that promised to place two friends in the same place after years apart. A trip that promised to introduce one friend to the other friend’s first daughter. A trip that already felt over due after two years of whats up chats, emails, and laggy zoom calls before the pandemic. We were left wondering, like so many people, how do you mark affection for people in your life when your normal rhythms of giving love are disrupted?
We did not meet under cheerful circumstances. Nearly eight years ago, we had both enrolled in a PhD program, eager to join a research community in the arts and humanities. It did not take long to realize that the policies and ingrained practices in our community were alienating and disempowering to us as women, and exacerbated for Shokoofeh as a woman of colour. We met for the first time at a community meeting in a small attic office, determined to make a change. Over the next months and as others lost interest or were intimidated out of participating, we got to know each other through our shared goals and unrelenting rage at the realities around us. We walked to the bus stop together most days, and then ended up on the phone late hunched over google docs and email threads discussing what it would mean to foreground generosity in our workplace and invest in community care.
The work was not glamorous and ultimately our experience of agitating for structural change in our small corner of the ivory tower was sobering. One day, totally defeated in a parking lot Shokoofeh opened the trunk of her car and pulled out a camp stove, a teapot, and some mint. She made Jess tea as we sat on the curb. Six months earlier we had known nothing about each other, but we had built enduring trust. A white student and a Muslim student of colour who had grown up in the same town, attended the same university, but never met until graduate school; we faced vastly different ramifications for our shared effort. We ultimately experienced first hand what we already intellectually knew: that uprooting structures of Islamophobia and white supremacy is a life-long commitment but it is aided by a strong friendship that also invests in joy.
Life kept going, Jess moved. Then moved again. Shokoofeh called her one day in Mexico to tell her she was expecting. The last time we were physically in the same place, Shokoofeh was eight months pregnant. We sat in the nursery of Shokoofeh’s apartment in California, knowing Jess was moving again before the due date. Cross-legged on the floor, drinking black tea and eating dates, Shokoofeh described how she and her husband had designed the room. The centrepiece of the room was a carpet, gifted from her aunt to her mother in Iran, from her mother to Shokoofeh in California, and now from Shokoofeh to her daughter.
Carpets travel like this. They are intimate objects, made slowly with care by their maker but when released, they travel for decades, sometimes centuries, across continents, overseas and mountains, between families and friends. “This one,” Shokoofeh told Jess, “came with me when I moved out for college. Maybe she’ll take it with her when she moves out.” Animals made from clever arrangements of geometric forms dance across the rusty red surface of the carpet, contained only by bold borders. A stylized flower made from star points and interlocking lines unfolds as if blooming in the carpet’s centre. Likely a modern interpretation of nomadic Qashqais carpets, the motifs mix elements from central Iran and possibly also from Anatolia.
As Shokoofeh’s family gifts carpets, Jess’ family gifts quilts. Not long after cancelling her tickets from London to New York to visit Shokoofeh, Jess began to fill the empty pandemic weekends by making quilts. Having grown up tucked under the folds of a bed quilt sewn on the occasion of her birth by her great aunt, Jess took up the tradition as the summer promised yet more zoom calls. Like Iranian carpets, North American quilts readily turn a house into a home. An object traditionally gifted to mark life transitions such as a birth, marriage, or death, a quilt becomes a fixture of love passed down across generations. A useful heirloom, it too travels amongst kin.
The most basic form of a North American pieced quilt is called a nine patch. When you learn to quilt, you usually start by combining nine squares into three rows with colour combinations forming a cross or a grid. As Jess bought a scrap bag of colourful linen and began to practice, she found quilting focused her scattered mind and made her feel more at home in a new country during a pandemic. Calls to Shokoofeh who now lived in New York turned into virtual sewing bees as we took solace in cloth. Shokoofeh cut out dress patterns for her daughter, Mahlayli, and Jess let slip that the nine patch quilt was also for Mahlayli.
When you make something loving for someone who you have never met, you have to gather up all the fragments that constitute the person in your mind. While making the quilt, Jess thought back to video calls and the carpet in the nursery. She thought about how the little girl had reacted with wide-eyed curiosity to a gift of bright red Moroccan slippers Jess had sent while traveling, and to how even over grainy video Mahlayli was evidently strong willed. Intending to make the quilt out of only two or three colours of linen, Jess quickly found herself combining every colour in her stash. The nine patch became a wildflower meadow bursting into bloom at the height of summer. Like a field of wildflowers, you never know what beauty this quilt’s little girl will grow into next.
The quilt absorbed the strange and painful summer of 2020, holding the cancelled reunion and offering a new bond to our long distance friendship. We realised the traditions of gifting useful art in our families could equally apply to our friends. Mahlayli’s quilt arrived in New York at the close of the summer. At two years old, Mahlayli was too feisty and too eager to explore to take solace under the quilt for very long. Even a handmade quilt failed to facilitate nap time. Instead, together Shokoofeh and Mahlayli, laid the quilt on the floor in a corner of her bedroom between bookshelves and under cushions. It is now the centrepiece of the room, a little carpet, in Mahlayli’s own private reading nook. Whenever Jess makes a quilt the same size as Mahlayli’s she now calls it ‘a reading quilt.’
As Jess continued to quilt through the autumn making more quilts for kin under the studio name Public Library Quilts, Mahlayli spent a cold snowy New York winter in that corner of her bedroom. She sat cross-legged on a Summer meadow, reading, moving in and out of the worlds brought to life by other artists and makers. On the first day of Spring 2021(almost a year to the day of cancelling plane tickets), Shokoofeh called Jess to tell her she was pregnant with her second daughter. Jess is already working on another quilt.
Jess Bailey and Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh
Author Bio
Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh (she/her) is a writer of fiction and premodern critical race theory. Jess Bailey (she/her) is a writer in the field of premodern art history. They met at grad school and have been fast friends ever since. On the weekends, Jess runs the quilting studio Public Library Quilts (publiclibraryquilts.com, @publiclibraryquilts). Shokoofeh’s daughter owns Jess’s first quilt.