My Mother’s Best “Set”: Diasporic Threads of Crochet

Abstract

In an oral history workshop as part of the installation-based exhibition The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ at the FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2016), black women from Soweto shared stories about the crochet doilies they had made and brought with them, which resonated with me on a trans-diasporic level by invoking memories of how my mother acquired crochet ‘sets’ from friends and work colleagues. They often made their crochet doilies as domestic labourers in the homes of white employers under apartheid in South Africa, and before my mother came to England in 1960, she worked as a maid for a Dutch family for six years in Curacao. As a form of knitting thread with a hooked needle, black women across the African diaspora have transformed colonialised crochet into colourful three-dimensional sculptural pieces where each doily is unique to the individual maker. This essay will look at how crocheting in the diasporic domestic interior create express postcolonial modernity, aspirations, creative agency, entrepreneurship, creolised aesthetics, femininity, belonging and becoming that challenge and resist colonial representations of black women as not respectable, good spouses and home-makers.