Becoming Halima

I grew up a farm kid from a very crafty family.  My mother’s mother was a creative seamstress who had sewn for years in a baby clothes factory and in her early retirement had made a small mint of money on the craft show circuit selling cabbage patch kid clothes during the big cabbage patch kid fad.  My father’s mother crocheted fine doilies with tiny thread and crochet hooks.  She quilted one quilt a year and always darned my holey socks even though I tried to explain that people didn’t need to do that anymore, socks are cheap at the store.  My mother and her sisters are also talented crafters.  Over the years they have each bounced around from craft to craft, quickly learning to skillfully execute each one including sewing, basket weaving, knitting, tatting, embroidery, and spinning to name a few.  I absorbed fiber arts as if through osmosis.  In my youth I did a lot of sewing, including making my own prom dresses.  But when I moved to the more urban environment of the University I lost some of the context for these crafts.  I wasn’t continually surrounded by them.  Obviously home made garments didn’t seem to fit in an urban environment.  It wasn’t cool to be country.  Fiber arts became a forgotten part of myself, until I met a friend in the SCA.  When I found the SCA I felt like a kid in a candy store.  I had forgotten the joy of “making stuff” and resumed the activity with a vengeance. 

    When I first began in the SCA I chose the name Liadan, an Irish name.  I was attracted to the elegant simplicity of the garb and its accompanying textiles arts, spinning, weaving and embroidery. Taking on a new name was not as easy though.  I enjoyed the name Liadan but found it strange to introduce myself as her.  It felt like a lie even though I knew taking on a medieval name was part of the game.  After so many years of being Lorna it was hard to pretendto be Liadan.  In our culture we place such permanence on our given names, as if it is somehow magically fussed to our very essence, and not just a name our parents picked for us.  People who choose stage names or even just choose to legally change their names for any reason have the same problem.  People wonder, “is that their real name?”

     At the same time I was trying to become to become Liadan my friend Kristin was becoming Fatima.  She had been taking belly dancing lessons outside of the SCA and wanted to have a middle eastern persona to go with her dancing.  She had been teaching me a few moves and often enticed me to try dancing at events, so I made a middle eastern dance outfit (actually a Northern Indian outfit).  Eventually I moonlighted enough around middle eastern dancing that I thought I needed a middle eastern name.  I heard a recording of an Egyptian folk song.  I could not understand one word the man was singing except that he kept singing a woman’s name over and over again, Halima.  Something about the tune felt like me, like me when I was dancing, like me when I am happy.  Halima was my new name.

    At this time in my SCA career I thought of myself as pretending to be my persona, something I put on like garb, so by changing my garb I felt I was changing my persona, changing my person, acting a different character.  This caused some identity crises for me back in my tent.  Who did I want to be today?  Liadan or this Halima?  Would there be drumming and dancing tonight?  Will my Celtic friends want to hang out with me in Middle Eastern garb? Will I confuse people by calling myself Halima with this garb and Liadan with that garb? What if I dress in Irish garb and drumming and dancing suddenly breaks out?  Do I run to my tent and change, dance in Irish garb or stand by and watch? Up till this point I hadn’t really become either Liadan or Halima.  Each were very flat characters in my imagination.  Liadan made things like tablet weaving and Halima was a dancer.  Never the two did meet. 

     It was in the search for accurate Middle Eastern clothing that I started to become Halima.  I quickly learned that there isn’t just one Middle Eastern culture, there’s lots of them and lots of distinct periods to choose from.  I made garb for Mameluke Egyptian, Tunisian, Ottoman Turk and Northern Indian women.  And the biggest revelation of all was that Middle Eastern people did fiber arts too!  They did just as much weaving and embroidery and other crafts as European cultures only some crafts they did long before Europeans, like knitting.  With this discovery I found Liadan falling by the wayside.  I hardly ever chose to wear Celtic clothing anymore, I was too excited about my Middle Eastern creations, I found myself spending much more time on researching and creating Middle Eastern garb and artifacts.  Halima could be both things artisan and dancer.  I had lost the urge to change names with different garb.  People were relating to me, not a persona, not a time and place.  So I made the switch.  At first I felt guilty telling my friends, “remember that name you tried so hard to remember, maybe the only name you have ever known me by? Forget it and call me Halima now.  No I promise I won’t change again.”  It took almost a full year to fully change over.  Some people only saw me once or twice a year, and some people had to be reminded a few times of my new name. 

     During this time I discovered a new craft.  I had already sworn off learning any new crafts.  I saw myself as being too flighty and not really sinking my teeth into anything long enough to become a real artisan at anything.   I fell in love with crafts like cat ladies fell in love with kittens.  So like an addiction I swore off new crafts.  But one very hot Pennsic day I was invited to sit under a friend’s shade fly and have a drink, which I of course accepted.  She just happened to be teaching a class that involved using soapy water to turn wool into felt.  Somehow I’d never heard of felt before and I was hooked from the very moment I saw how those little fibers were sticking together under my hands like magic.  I went right to the merchant area and found the only vendor at the time to be selling any un-spun wool and started felting.  I discovered felting was like pottery in that to gain any skill with the craft one must make a lot of pieces.  I also discovered that other people had a strong attraction to my felted work.  At the time I was working only part time and looking for a way to support my SCA habit.  These factors made it conducive for me to start selling my felt as a merchant in the SCA. 

    From the very beginning my merchant booth made me feel the most medieval I had ever been.  Doing actual work gave me insight to what a possible medieval person may have felt like more than playing dress up and waltzing around with my beer mug ever had. It was there that the illusion of pretend ended.  How could I be pretending to be a medieval artisan selling her wares, when I am actually an artisan selling my wares for real money that I then fill up my car with to get back home?  What part of me was remembering to pretend to be Halima when I was busy with customers?  It was then I realized I am Halima. Just as much as I am Lorna. If I was walking down a street modern or SCA and either of my names were called I would turn my head.   I sometime caught myself wanting to introduce myself as Halima in the modern world.  My garb no longer felt like a costume, it was my clothes, just like there are going to work clothes, mowing the lawn clothes and going to a wedding clothes, these were my SCA event clothes. 

     Becoming Halima helped me discover more about who I am.  We all have different hats we put on and some of them have different names.  Parents naturally feel different about themselves when someone calls them Mommy or Daddy than when someone calls them Mister or Misses.  The names evoke a different part of their identities.  In the same way, when we can put aside a name we have known for so long, and all the ideas we have about that name and take on a different one under different circumstances, we can discover new parts of ourselves.  As Lorna in the modern world I was tempted to forget my heritage, and find no use for my skills in a mechanized world which makes so much factory sewn clothing cheaper than one can buy the materials.  As Halima I was able to find a use for my skills and an open arena, to explore and perfect them, to become an artisan and to find value in creating for the sake of creativity.  Sure, I could have gone to art school to discover these things, but I didn’t, I joined the SCA.