Short Summary
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About Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim
About Wafa Ghnaim
My mother, Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim, is the leading Palestinian folk artist specializing in fabric and fiber arts in the United States. She is of the Nakba generation, who left Palestine in 1948 -- and has dedicated her over 50 year career in teaching young women of color the endangered art of Palestinian embroidery and traditional art that she learned from her mother and grandmother. She has worked nearly without pay, only on grant funds, for decades -- in order to teach her apprentices the skill of embroidering by hand. She has been funded and honored by countless organizations, including the Oregon Historical Society, Oral History Center of Cambridge, Oregon Folklife Network, National Endowment of the Arts and the Regional Arts & Culture Council. A brief idea of her involvement in the Palestinian diaspora community can be found on her website: https://feryalabbasighnaim.wordpress.com/.
As new generations of Palestinians are raised in diaspora, it is becoming more crucial than ever to document our endangered traditional art of embroidery, the designs, meanings, context and history. I would like to assist my mother in translating, transcribing and publishing a series of e-books that give voice to our matriarchal ancestors, document oral history, as well as preserve the sacred tradition of Palestinian storytelling. We have attempted to fund this project entirely on our own over the last 8 years, and after my mother's injury last year -- I realized that I cannot hold back any longer. I need to write this book while I can, and I need your help. I cannot do this alone.
My mother and I need a laptop and audio recording device. If possible, my mother needs desperately to upgrade her phone so we can communicate more effectively (I live in New York and she lives in Portland, Oregon). With all the expenses we have and will incur as it relates to this book project, we are trying to alleviate the financial burden by crowdsourcing equipment.
What We Need & What You Get
We are currently applying to grants, to help fund the first of the series (15 designs) to be published in an electronic format by the end of 2016. None of the grants available to us will fund equipment for this book project. I need to purchase a new laptop and audio recording device in order to record interviews with my mother, and travel back and forth from New York (where I live) to Oregon (where my mother lives). I need to interview her in Arabic, record, translate and transcribe the content, as well as photograph the designs in a studio (which hopefully will be funded by the grants we've applied for). Please review the perks of this campaign to know how we will honor your contribution. Everyone who donates $5 or more will be considered a founding investor of the book and will be honored.
Goal Budget:
New laptop: $1099
Audio Recorder: Olympus Voice Recorder with Built-In-Memory: $47
2 Micro SD Cards: $23 each ($46 total)
= $1192
Stretch Budget:
Large monitor for my mother, $250
VHS to DVD Converter $80
Photograph and newspaper portable scanner (archival) $60
= $390
Grand Total = $1582 +5% = $1661
(Indiegogo takes 5% off the top, and payment processors have an additional fee)
Anything raised in addition will be saved to fill any grant funding deficits. We are told of the grant panel decisions December, 2015.
I have 4 trips budgeted to Oregon, to research the book, in our grants -- between now and December 31, 2016. The proposed goal to our grant funders is that the ebook will be published by December 31, 2016.
The Impact
Oral storytelling is an intimate experience, and in Palestinian women's culture it is done through a familial mentorship over a lifetime. My mother learned these stories through her mother and grandmother. As generations of Palestinian women grow in diaspora, our identities and stories remain silently coded in our needle and thread. But our ancestors stories cannot be forgotten. In publishing the meanings of our traditional designs, we give voice to our matriarchal ancestors, document oral history, as well as preserve the sacred tradition of Palestinian storytelling in women's craft circles.
Also, this book will be a unique, unprecedented literary contribution to the field of Palestinian folk art. The few and only books published about Palestinian embroidery share the beauty of the designs -- however, not a single book provides historical context or meaning behind what the designs on the garments mean. This book will decode our art for future generations to come -- and is in a downloadable format online. No other Palestinian embroidery book is offered in this format online.
Palestinian women's stories are documented through the designs -- a coded language used by women over centuries to communicate to one another -- which is decoded through dialogues between mother and daughter. In the same tradition, my mother and I would like to lock arms with you to make this long awaited dream come true -- not just for ourselves, but for all Palestinian women and men in diaspora who are seeking to construct their cultural identities outside of the political arena.
Risks & Challenges
There is a chance that our grants will not be funded through various funders and we will not have money to publish this ebook in 2016. In this case, we will need to increase the Indiegogo campaign to accommodate our full project budget. Please be assured that before I do this, I will apply to as many grants as we qualify for to get this project off the ground. I've fundraised for high profile Palestinian nonprofits in Washington, DC and New York -- and I feel confident that with enough will, I can get our project funded. Worse-case scenario is that the book is not electronically published by December 31, 2016 and it ends up being published in 2017. We will keep you updated on our process, so this will not come to a surprise. We honor and cherish your contributions and will do everything in our power to mitigate these risks.
