WAR SCENES STITCHED ON STORY CLOTHS

Villagers pick corn, plant seeds or feed chickens--while helicopters swarm overhead, planes drop bombs or douse huts and fields with Agent Orange; bloody, decapitated soldiers lie bleeding on the ground.

These scenes are not documentary photographs or newsreels capturing the horrors of the Vietnam War, but “story cloths” deftly embroidered in pink, purple, green and other vibrant colors by Laotian women survivors.

The “war quilts,” so named by their collectors, are on view in “Embroidered History: Hmong Story Cloths” at the Long Beach Museum of Art through Sept. 6.

For the first time in a long folk tradition of embroidered tapestries, the Hmong women of Laos in the 1970s began replacing typical abstract geometric designs with the war scenes they had been living through.

“There are several theories why Hmong women embroidered the war scenes,” said Daphne Dennis, who with friend and fellow former anti-Vietnam War activist Carol Goldstein collected the panels. “But from all we’ve learned, it seems it was primarily a catharsis, a chance to communicate in a way they were comfortable communicating--with a familiar craft.”

“Hmong were and are a hill tribe people in the upper mountain region of Laos, (a nation sandwiched between Vietnam and Thailand), added Goldstein, interviewed with Dennis at the museum. “They had no written language, practiced animism and were agrarians who cultivated opium,” among other crops.

“The Hmong were recruited by the CIA and fought on both sides in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” continued Goldstein, “but when we pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, those who fought for us were basically stranded in a country raided by the other side.”

So within the next year, Goldstein went on, about 75,000 Hmong fled to Thailand, swimming to refugee camps across the Mekong River, along the Laos/Thailand border.

It was at the camps in Thailand that the Hmong turned to embroidering figurative scenes rather than abstract imagery, adapting traditional needlework techniques inherited from their ancestors, Goldstein said. They sold the panels, along with other cloth tapestries, to help finance their eventual immigration to America where many settled in Central and Southern California.

Many of the panels tell of the Mekong crossing, showing Hmong afloat in inner tubes. Some contain phrases in primitive English--probably taught them by missionaries--such as one that reads, “many people had been killed no reason”.

“We were struck by the universalities of the panels,” Dennis said, “the universal theme of exodus and, unfortunately, the universal theme of war and how through the centuries people have needed to communicate about it.”

Dennis, a human services planner for West Hollywood, and Goldstein, a city planner with the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, discovered the “war quilts” in 1983 at an Asian art fair in San Diego amid tables overflowing with traditional Hmong tapestries.

“In a corner behind everything was one quilt with human figures and war scenes on it,” Dennis said. “It just seemed so unique and beautifully crafted, and so full of emotion--and about a subject that was directly related to both of our pasts,” which were punctuated by anti-war demonstrations during the late 1960s when the two textile collectors were in college.

After the initial discovery, Goldstein and Dennis have spent the last four years learning about and collecting more war quilts, all made in Thailand between 1975 and 1980. (Hmong women have now returned to their traditional abstract designs, probably because the war theme tapestries were less marketable, Goldstein said.)

“At some point in the collecting process, we made a commitment to assemble the story of these Hmong women’s perspectives and experiences in the war,” Goldstein said, a story which is vividly detailed in the Long Beach exhibit.

“You can’t walk out of here without feeling the total destruction of a culture by a war no one won,” Dennis said.