Since October 7 there has been a steady stream of reports about the kufiya: their growing use and visibility, and, in response, efforts to squelch or silence or even arrest people for wearing them. I'm too overwhelmed to keep a full accounting, but occasionally I will try to post about the phenomenon. Here's one incident. Layla is a grad student in Social Work at Columbia, very active on Twitter/X and elsewhere.
At the Grammys last night, jazz bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding (double nominee)
showed her support for the Palestinians by donning a kufiya.
Also: poet Aja Monet, up for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album, carried a watermelon clutch.
and...boygenius wore arists4ceasefire pins.
And finally, Annie Lennox gave a shoutout for #ceasefire
October 7 and its aftermath have produced multiple kufiya spottings, and a fair bit of news coverage. I've been too overwhelmed by the events to get on the blog to write about it. I will try to make more of an effort in future, but all I can promise is dribs and drabs. This represents some housekeeping, in fact, a photo that has been on my hard drive for some time but never managed to post.
John Lennon spent some time in Bermuda in 1980. A friend sent me this photo, found on reddit. The description says only this: "new release photo, on deck, Bermuda June 1980." Do we presume then that John was on some yacht, and needed to cover himself from the sun, or protect himself from the wind. And why did he use a kufiya? Kufiyas were starting to become somewhat common street wear in US urban areas by the early eighties, as I've written about elsewhere, so I guess it was simply something he came across in New York City, where he lived. That's all I've got! Check out the photo:
My book chapter, "The Kufiya," published in Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera, Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century, University of California Press, 2021, is now available here, as a pdf.
Note that there is even a kufiya on the cover of the book! (On the shoulders of Edward Said, from a mural.)
Note too that if you search this blog there is lots of kufiya/kaffiyeh/keffiyeh content.
My 1992 article, “Seeing Double: Palestinian-American Histories of the Kufiya,” published in Michigan Quarterly Review 31(4): 557-577, can now be found here, as a pdf. It also appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review's 60th anniversary issue--60(1): 341-362 in 2021.
The last video shown yesterday (June 13) at the House January 6 hearings featured several insurrectionists explaining that they were present at the Capitol that day because Trump had called them to it. I think this is the last of the insurrectionists interviewed. I noticed that he was wearing a kufiya, but didn't manage to get my camera out in time to take a picture. Luckily my very alert friend Tim did, and he sent this photo to me.
I've written rather extensively about the push by the Palestinian rebels to impose kufiyas on Palestinian males at the height of the 1936-39 revolt, in fall 1938. And I just came across another story about those events, courtesy Zeina Ghandour's A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine: Imperialism, Property and Insurgency (Routledge 2010). This is from her interview with Said Hassan Me'ary, originally from the village of Sha'b, in the Acre district, found on page 113.
As is often the case, someone sent this to me (thanks, can't remember who did!), and it took some time for me to get around to posting.
In Berlin the popo are keeping a close watch on kufiya wearers.
The kufiya, they seem to have determined, is a sign of anti-Semitism.
(posted May 20, 2022)
The #NoDAPL movement is doing more than bringing people from all walks of life together, it's helping to usher in new ones. Independent journalist Mary Annette Pember reports on the birth of the first baby at the water protector camps in North Dakota:
For Zintkala Mahpiya Wi Blackowl, Sky Bird Woman, the birth of her baby girl at one of the water protector camps in North Dakota was the ultimate act of resistance. Baby, as yet unnamed, was born early in the morning in a tipi on October 12 directly into her mother’s arms as their family slept nearby. The family’s tipi is pitched alongside the Cannonball River. Baby is healthy and thriving. Blackowl plans to take her to Indian Health Service this week for a well-baby check-up. “I birthed her by myself,” said Blackowl, of the Sicangu and Ihanktonwan Lakota tribes. Although her husband and family were sleeping in the same tipi, the birth was a private event. In the traditional Lakota way, the mother gives birth alone. “That space in which we give birth is so holy,” she said. “At one time our people realized that.”
The source is here.
His archive of photos, from his time in Palestine between 1921 and 1923, is quite remarkable. I particularly like this one, as it shows a kufiya pattern unlike anything I've ever seen before.
For more on Scholten:
Simon Peres, former Israeli PM, former president of Israel, former Defense Minister of Israel, and oh so respected in US official circles, on what he thought of Palestinians wearing kufiyas and tarbushes, when he landed up in Palestine in 1934. From his 1995 book, Battling for Peace.
More in the theme of the military or "tough guy" kufiya. Kufiyas show up all the time when far-right, white power militias mobilize. At Charlottesville, Amon Bundy's 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the Oath Keepers and other fascists fighting with 'antifa' in Portland, and so on. This has so much to do with US wars, with veterans from Gulf War 1, Iraq and Afghanistan, who got into kufiyas while abroad -- whether because they were very useful, given the environment, or they just thought they were cool, or they functioned as a kind of "sympathetic magic," a putting on of a garment identified with the enemy that serves to endow one with potency. Kathryn Belew's essential book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, shows how important, since Vietnam, veterans of US imperialist adventures have been to the growth of the white power social movement. No wonder, then, that we frequently see kufiyas in all the far-right mobilizations of the last few years. (I've documented the phenomenon quite extensively here, but don't have time right now to put in all the links to previous posts -- you could do a search!)
More photos of white power kufiyas to come!
This photo is from the New York Times, Sunday, January 31.
