Objects 

Medz Mayrig Arousiag’s Hand-Crocheted Afghan: Storytelling Through Everyday Objects and the Telling of Design History

Arpie Gennetian

Objects hold memories, particularly hand-made ones. The stories revealed through objects and memories connect us to a time and place. Design history is steeped in the study of objects, mostly told in relation to broad sweeping art and design movements and famous designers, but there are micro-design histories that are just as significant and can be told through objects made by non-professional designers and makers. One such object is a crocheted afghan (Fig. 1) made by my ‘medz mayrig’ Arousiag (medz mayrig is ‘grandmother’ in Armenian). It was passed down to me as a ‘heeshadak’ (‘remembrance’ in Armenian), but it is more than a remembrance of my grandmother and more than a piece of her handiwork. The afghan tells a story of both everyday design and everyday life. In the preface to Wild Things, Judy Attfield speaks of her desire for others to take a second look at the value of objects considered as secondary or throw-away, that these objects are part of the quest for understanding design within the social context of the material world.¹ For me, the memory of my grandmother is embedded in this afghan, but the afghan is also a link to the lives of many other women who sewed, crocheted, and provided for their families in ways that introduced design into their homes. My goal in this essay is not to provide a biography of my grandmother or to analyze the design of her afghan—it is to explore how my grandmother’s story, through her afghan and my memory, can provide a crucial and broader understanding of design history. 

My grandmother was a maker, and the afghan she made can be linked to the untold stories of non-professional women who made their own clothes and household objects. Their stories have historically had less power and influence on the telling of design history, but they absolutely can serve to shape the experience of women as consumers, historians, and designers.² My grandmother was not the stereotypical 1950s consumer ‘housewife’ in suburbia. She worked in the Spaulding sporting goods factory in Chicopee, Massachusetts, sewing footballs to support her three children after her husband (my grandfather, Pilos) died in 1944. She sewed her own clothes, crocheted blankets, and made what she needed through thrift, craft, and resourcefulness. These object types serve as connectors to a personal landscape. It is the interconnectedness of handmade design objects and the personal landscape that can enrich the understanding of design history.³ 

Given the absence of any first-person told or written evidence, piecing together my grandmother’s history is challenging. Therefore, the object, in this case, her afghan, and my memories of her become the primary way to put together who my grandmother was as a woman in the 1940s and after. Her story is not autobiographical, or even biographical, but rather a reclaimed story manifested in this particular object that she made. In fact, the object has transformed through time into some-thing that represents everything about my grandmother to me and becomes part of the greater understanding and connectedness it has with design history.

Judy Attfield writes about ‘wild things’ as objects that are thought of as ‘domestic’ or ‘applied arts.’ These are the unconsidered and pervasive items of everyday life excluded from histories of design and, indeed, exist beyond that of memory.⁴ However, in Ben Highmore’s review of Attfield’s book, Wild Things, republished in 2020, he describes Attfield’s theory as one that claims the designed object world would benefit from being studied within the fields of material culture and everyday life, not from the scrutiny of the established world of design history or from visual culture. The idea of the ‘lived materiality of things’ is where these objects are embraced as a means to tell their stories. These objects must first go through the process of being used and worn before they are worthy of becoming design objects.⁵ The object takes on meaning through the passage of time—and, as it is, becomes further disconnected from the original intention of its maker. In the case of my grandmother’s afghan, the value to her was very different than for me at this very moment. For my grandmother, ‘making’ was not only necessary for basic needs but also served as a pastime and leisure activity. The afghan as a design object exists now for me as disconnected from its original intention. I hold it in reverence both to the memory of my grandmother and as an object of design. Like many historical design objects, the afghan’s importance lies in how it can reflect the period in which it was created. Attfield suggests that traditional design history filters out the story of these ‘wild things.’ They do not stand out for their provenance; they are what is left behind when scrutinizing design objects. However, these objects are often more authentic and original in their lived condition of everydayness.⁶

The value in these types of hand-crafted objects is indelibly linked to the hands that created them. The afghan alone cannot tell its story. The object needs to connect to the maker. My memory becomes the connection between the object and the maker. Highmore questions Attfield’s methodology; he claims that studying everyday objects in the context of ‘wild things’ may reveal a singular story instead of a larger story of history and culture.⁷ For me, however, Attfield’s theory is a way to understand how we view everyday objects and where they can fit within the larger context of design history.

Amateur handicrafts need to be seen through the eyes of those that created them. Understanding the maker is essential to understanding the object. Craft served as a leisure activity for many women in the 1940s and continued into the postwar. It also promoted character-building, encouraging resourcefulness and self-reliance. Most importantly, craft embodied a will to persevere.⁸ One took pride in making things for the home. My grandmother’s home was filled with such handmade items.  She pieced together patchwork rugs and sewed covers for worn chair backs. She also hand-crocheted doilies for every tabletop, and they were on every arm of every upholstered piece of furniture. These items are common to Armenian homes belonging to women of my grandmother’s generation. These handicrafts were a point of pride within the Armenian community—no matter where that community was located—as these skills were passed down from generation to generation. My grandmother, however, may have acquired these skills in the orphanage where she spent the better part of her childhood. During the years of the Armenian Genocide, sometime between 1916-17, when my grandmother may have been three to five years old, my grandmother, her mother, and her sister were forced to flee their home in Sivas, Turkey. They traveled on foot to Syria, where my grandmother was given up by her mother to the Red Cross. My grandmother was eventually moved to the Near East Syra Orphanage in Alexandria, Egypt, and this is where she remained until the age of eighteen, when she sailed to America, arriving at the Port of Providence sometime during the summer of 1931. 

Stories are sometimes only told through what is left behind. The afghan alone cannot tell the whole story, but together with an understanding of who my grandmother was, why she created the afghan, and what materials she used, we can piece together a richer story that can be significant to design history. The afghan my grandmother crocheted is made from ‘apple-green colored yarn and nylon stockings (presumably cut into lengths to create ‘yarn’). The materials themselves have a place in design history. Was the afghan’s design, its diamond-shaped pattern, based on an established manufactured and distributed pattern? Was using nylon stockings a suggestion in a craft magazine at the time? Was my grandmother part of a crocheting community of women at work or through church?  

Ruth Tringham, an anthropologist and professor at the Graduate School of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, uses the concept of ‘life-history’ as a biological approach to the study of objects and their interaction with people. This concept underscores that objects become more meaningful through whatever social interaction they involve and that these meanings change throughout the lifespan of the object. Objects do not necessarily change their stories based on their use but rather in their association with those that possess them. Similarly, Igor Kopytoff, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, states that objects accumulate their own histories and that these histories are derived from the connections they have with people and events.⁹ The afghan is an object that exists for me only in its present form and through the memory of my grandmother. My grandmother’s afghan is not something I remember from my childhood or from the many weekend sleepovers my siblings, cousins, and I spent with her. What I do remember, however, is her blue exterior-painted home on Gill Street with the birch and pear trees in her backyard and the tiny kitchen that all of us six grandchildren piled into to inhale her ‘fancy waffles’ with sliced strawberries and oranges at her red Formica and chrome kitchen table. I remember the metal bread box above the refrigerator that magically held an unending supply of Armenian lavash bread that she made by hand.

Objects thus can be the window into a period of time, a community, or a life. In the study of design history, objects provide a sense of humanity and connection to the story of a time period that goes beyond a movement. The making and designing of clothing and textiles at home, such as an afghan, is significant not only for the lives of those making them but also in connecting women’s experiences to a broader historical context. The lived experiences of real-life women, such as my grandmother and myself, bring us closer to understanding history from a different perspective; it fills in the silences of histories often told with very broad strokes. In Landscape for a Good Woman, writer Carolyn Steedman interprets her childhood in working-class England in the 1950s as she experienced it as a child and then reinterprets it as she gets older from a larger historical context. She connects her personal narrative or childhood to the larger historical narrative.¹⁰ The writing is not an attempt at a biography or an autobiography but a contribution to an already existing history.¹¹ It is a retelling of a life that embodies a larger narrative about mothering, gender, and class, and it broadens the history of the time.

My grandmother’s afghan inspired me to dig deeper into her life in postwar America to see how she fits into history and how the afghan fits into design history. The afghan sparked deeper questions about who my grandmother was outside of my memories of her. The afghan tells the silent storyteller of my grandmother. She did not want to speak of her childhood or early married life and, in fact, did not share any stories at all. I have been able to piece together her history from what documents survived after she passed away in 1987 and what my two uncles and my mother passed on to me—which includes the afghan.

Saidiya Hartman, writer and scholar in African American studies at Columbia University, explores ‘what might have been’ in her writings about Black life. It is certainly a far cry from my grandmother’s story, but I see a connection with how Hartman chooses to tell her stories, or rather how to change the way the story has already been told. In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route, Hartman writes about a girl on a British slave ship who was tortured to death. Hartman says that since there is no autobiographical document about a female captive who survived the Middle Passage, she creates a story to fill the silence. She gives the reader a chance to imagine a life not defined by the way society views history but rather through a fictionalized individual life.¹² My grandmother’s afghan presents a story of my grandmother’s life that moves beyond the story of ‘Genocide survivor’ or the story with which she might be most associated. That is to say, my grandmother’s life was not only about the genocide she escaped; it was also about making a life in the U.S. after my grandfather died in 1944 when she was 31 years old and the mother of three children. This is the story that lives in the afghan, this object that she left behind. The afghan becomes the speaker in the oral history that she cannot tell, giving the afghan agency. The cheery pattern and colors of the afghan illustrate how my grandmother created a comfortable home of which she could be proud.

Relationships with objects reveal themselves through the subjective nature of memory.¹³ Objects serve memory by furnishing recollection; they can constitute a picture of the past, stimulating remembering; bringing back experiences, and forming records; storing information beyond individual experience.¹⁴ Textiles, in particular, help form our memories, and the way they are made provides connections to how memories are processed.¹⁵  How objects present themselves materially directly relates to how we perceive and connect them to cultural lives and values.¹⁶  Textiles are a powerful conduit to memory. They possess a materiality that differs from architecture, photographs, or other autobiographical information. 

Some memories become so embedded in certain objects, with emotions becoming so powerful, that the object is overtaken by the memory rather than remaining representative of it. These are the objects that become mediators of memory—the ones that help make non-verbal sense of the world. This is what Attfield calls ‘material culture.’¹⁷  Using textiles as an example, Attfield describes a particular quality of cloth, ‘textility,’ as a characteristic of textiles that makes them so amenable to memory.¹⁸ Clothes and textiles are predisposed to being storytelling devices. They are filled with memory and meaning. They tell the story of lives lived, yet they lose their meaning once discarded and disattached from their owner or maker.¹⁹ However, for me, when clothing or textiles are passed down as objects, as in the case of my grandmother’s afghan, they can serve as a fuller picture of the interconnectedness of an everyday life and the history of design. One can touch and feel them and also recognize the role they played when they were made, placed, and used in the home. Such is the case with my medz mayrig Arousiag and her afghan.

NOTES

1. Judy Attfield and Daniel Miller, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. 2020 (Originally published 2000), xiii. 
2. Cheryl Buckley, “On the Margins: Theorizing the History and Significance of Making and Designing Clothes at Home.” Journal of Design History11, no. 2 (1998): 157-71, 158. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1316192.
3. Buckley, 168.
4. Attfield and Miller, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life, 210-11.
5. Ben Highmore, “Reviewed Work: Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life by Judy Attfield,” Journal of Design History14, no. 3 (2001): 248-50, 248. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3527153.
6. Highmore, 249.
7. Highmore, 250.
8. Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham, A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women, and Design. London: Women’s Press, 1989, 175-176.
9. Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall. “The Cultural Biography of Objects.” World Archaeology31, no. 2 (1999): 169-78, 170. http://www.jstor.org/stable/125055.
10. Buckley, 159.
11. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for A Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008, 21-22.
12. Alexis Okeowo, “Secret Histories: Saidiya Hartman’s Provocative Writing Tells Untold Stories About Black Life.” The New Yorker, October 26, 2020, 44-51, 48.
13. Tim Dant, “Book Review: Material Memories: Design and Evocation,” Feb 2002, Published in Journal Sociological Research Online. Volume 6. Issue 4. Page 1-2, 1.
14. Dant, 2.
15. Dant, 13.
16. Elizabeth Edwards. “Photographs as Objects of Memory,” 223.
17. Judy Attfield, Bringing Modernity Home: Writings on Popular Design and Material Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, 135.
18. Attfield, 133.
19. 19. Emily Spivack. Worn Stories. New York, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014, 6-7. https://search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1487346&site=ehost-live&scope=site.