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In the cool evening breeze, a man is dyeing cotton fabrics indigo in a dyeing pit using the fermented leaves of the garga shrub (Indigofera tinctorial / true indigo)*. This technique of indigo dyeing is a centuries old tradition in West Africa, as is the cultivation and weaving of cotton. These dyed fabrics are sold at the market to earn a cash income.
Years later, I was given an indigo dyeing workshop as a gift from my colleagues to celebrate passing my PhD half-time seminar. So, one rainy day in late 2019, I joined a workshop at @secondsunrise_sthlm. I loved it. It felt like weaving together several threads that had been running through my thoughts over the past years: the old geographer’s fascination for people and their connection to landscape, a budding ethnobotany nerdiness, and the ever-growing passion for textile-based crafts.
And even though my PhD research had shifted my focus from savannahs in West Africa to boreal forests in Sweden, it felt like a perfect celebration of my academic achievement. I remembered that old man, using a long pole to distribute the dye in the pit, rhythmically humming to himself. The sun had just set, turning everything pink and comfortably warm after my long hot day of walking back and forth across the village to collect groundtruthing data. There, somewhere, is where my life as a researcher began. Learning how to dye indigo felt like connecting back to that evening, those days of walking with my GPS device and camera, across newly harvested fields and over rocky hills. The sweat rash and exhaustion and thrill of learning through both mind and body.
*All plant names in this series of posts are the local Moore names, with the scientific and/or English names in brackets.
Photo: Man dyeing fabrics in a village west of Kaya, Burkina Faso, November 2014 & Me with my indigo-dyed fabric, November 2019 & the test piece I later framed, on the wall it now shares with the linen my Finnish grandmother cultivated, spun, dyed, wove and sew into a robe, an engagement gift to my grandfather, and the dress designs my Swedish grandmother drew when in fashion school in the 1940s – I’ve got craftswomanship in my blood and bones. Posted on Instagram January 20, 2021.
Katja Malmborg 