A Brief and Uneventful History of Burlap
In order to save themselves some extra cash, the British Empire, at war with their colonies in the New World, hired German mercenaries instead of the much more expensive homegrown British soldiers. The number of these mercenaries turned deserters is high. Disastrous for the British’s efforts at suppressing their ungrateful subjects, among many other disastrous components working against the British in the wild lands of the Americas. Historians note these deserters deserted because they had no stakes in the Americas, no reason to fight besides the wages already given them, whereas the revolutionaries were fighting to be a nation, to be alike and unlike their counterparts across the Atlantic, to be the symbol of freedom itself. Parts of these mercenaries’ attire was constructed from the jute plant, the fibers coming together to create a fabric that was named Hessian, after the distinct group of Germans who wore them. Hessian fabric in the United States is known as burlap.
August 4, 2017: Mounds of it in the front yard. One after the other stacked up in three piles, slightly lopsided, nearly ready to topple over. Frayed edges of the fabric hang loose. Some are much longer than the others, jellyfish-like tendrils dangling down, split fibers curling at the end seams. Different shades of tan and brown. The coarseness of the material gives a hardness to the yard, the softness of the soil and the smoothness of the leaves in the trees making the burlap stick out, an artificial menace. Eyesore for those inclined to the visual aesthetic, but our house has never been meant to serve such a purpose. The house is a roof over the head, brick and wood and panels and sheetrock to get by in, a means to try and make it on this continent vast and sprawling.
Burlap is the most constant item in my father’s work. The burlap is used to protect the exposed roots of a tree or shrub when it is being transplanted into the earth. Moved from one place to another, for a plant is a dangerous, even lethal, affair. The burlap keeps the moisture in the roots, protects them from any damage the world might try to inflict. Burlap cares for the most vital part of the plant as it prepares for shipment to its final resting place: a middle-class home, a corporate complex, a private business, a university lawn. Burlap is needed until it is needed no more.
“Discovering” island after island, Columbus on October 14, 1492, divinely and monarchically sanctioned for his “discovering,” boasts: “for with fifty men we could subjugate them all [Caribs, Taíno, Guanahatabey, Africans, anyone and anything useful in their pursuit of gold] and make them do whatever we wish.” While en route to Jamaica in 1781, the British throw overboard 132 abducted African people into the water to make good on an insurance claim. In 1955, Gregory Pincus and John Rock, believing they had found the formula for an FDA approvable oral contraceptive but without the resources to do the trials on women in the United States, conduct clinical trials on Puerto Rican women, leaving many women infertile, and even dead.
Brinks of catastrophe, brinks of innovation, brinks of historical change—the history of the New World is a history of economizing, cutting corners no matter the human expense, a New World economics.
Utilizing my university’s subscription service, I plug the word burlap into the Oxford English Dictionary. History of words: etymology. Roots and beginnings and origins traced back to the first documentation of a word’s usage. According to the OED, the etymology of the word burlap is uncertain. The dictionary speculates the word derives from the Dutch word for “rubbing-clout, linen.” The dictionary also goes on with its speculations: “The first component may have been confused with boer peasant.” Another word, another etymology: peasant. Unlike burlap, the OED entry for peasant is more extensive, a longer genealogy. The nicest entry: “A person who lives in the country and works on the land, esp. as a smallholder or a laborer; a member of an agricultural class dependent on subsistence farming.” The definitions get a bit…rougher. “In negative sense: a countryman or rustic, regarded as ignorant, crass, or rude. Usually with derogatory modifying word.” They get worse: “As a term of abuse: a person of low social status; an ignorant, stupid, unsophisticated, or (formerly esp.) unprincipled person; a boor, a lout; (also more generally) a person who is regarded with scorn or contempt, esp. by members of a particular social group. Cf. farmer, villain.”
My father’s identification card issued to him in Mexico lists his occupation as “campesino.” My father’s job, his occupation in life, is a peasant.
William Carlos Williams’ 1925 book, In the American Grain, is a collection of microhistories about the Americas. Each essay-history is an origin story, a retelling of origins, an experimenting with any surefire notion of origins. Riffing off the conquistador logbooks, in his microhistory titled “The Destruction of Tenochtitlan,” Williams itemizes and lists in pages-long detail the gifts sent to Cortés and his compatriots by Montezuma who hopes to stop them from destroying, pillaging, stealing, creating a New World: “a gold necklace of seven pieces, set with many gems like small rubies, a hundred and eighty-three emeralds and ten fine pearls, and hung with twenty-seven little bells of gold…several shoes of the skin of deer…a shield of wood and leather…a large mirror adorned with gold…” and on and on do the gifts come. But as History has proven, nothing is enough for these foreigners. Gift after gift, plea after plea, treaty after treaty, the laundry listing of the pre-Spanish beauty, the splendor of the Americas before they are named the Americas: “But Cortés was unwilling to turn back; rather these things whetted his appetite for the adventure.” The Americas are more than enough for the Cortéses and the Columbuses. Insatiably enough.
Assignment in my junior year of undergrad: “Create a museum installation representing your life.” Found objects: a pill to control diabetes; a black-and-white photograph of an unidentified woman; miniature boxing gloves; a black lipstick container; a photograph in sepia of hot air balloons in flight; Goya seasoning wrappers; a piece of burlap.
Campesinos, peasants. I know them. They are the men and women who live next door in my childhood years, they are the men and women of my family, they are the men and women in my house, they are my neighbors in this Washington Heights apartment. Does this make me a campesino? Campesino is an identity category in places like Mexico, across Latin America, and other parts of the world. In the United States the word sounds rude, archaic, carrying the weight of the many OED entries. No one goes around identifying as a peasant unless they are trying to make a joke out of their poverty, crack a joke at how lowly they are being treated by someone in a higher social position. The United States versions of campesinos are probably “the poor,” “the downtrodden,” “the needy,” “welfare dependents.” Born in the United States as I am, in the borderlands of Main Street USA, in the borders of nations my family and friends and neighbors have brought to me, what am I?
In his not-so-micro history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, an important history of the largest revolution by enslaved persons against a colonizing nation, C. L. R. James writes: “There is no drama like the drama of history.”
1989: This is the year my father stops sleeping on the petate. The petate is a bedroll made from the palm of the tree Leucothrinax morrisii. The bedroll looks like a woven basket unfurled, laid out, turned into a sleeping apparatus. Petate is a Hispanicized word from the original Náhuatl word, petlatl. The bed doesn’t look comfortable but my father says otherwise.
In this year 1989, the same year my father finds himself sleeping in a petate in Mexico, my father risks everything, leaves behind everyone, nearly dies, crossing over to the United States. He cannot remember the date he left his home in Mexico and the day he arrived in his living accommodations in the United States. Dates are not my father’s specialty. In the United States there are no petates, perhaps no need for them. Tucked away in a pocket of the Americas, a part known as the armpit of the United States, my father transitions from the durable fibers of the petate to the much more cushioned material of the spring mattress. He identifies mattresses as pinche porqueria, pieces of shit.
Objects made in the modern world are not meant to last. They are to wear down, break down, wear you down until you break down and buy a new one. The petate can last for decades and decades, my father says to me, almost bragging. He notes how the metallic springs in mattresses lose their rigidity fast. Petates do not have springs, nor mass-produced construction. They are woven by a mother, a tia, a grandmother, a sister. They are the products of hands from those who are familiars, those who are loved. The palm leaves in the hands of these women, the hands twisting and braiding and mending and weaving, is memory at work. Memories of a time before time, of grandmothers and their grandmothers and the grandmothers before them. The rough hands meeting rough material is a skin history: a history of campesinos and illiteracy and dispossession and conversions and assimilations and impoverishment written into the hands weaving a bed, a blouse, a life. My grandmother weaves my father’s petate.
On a mattress, in the nowhere lands of New Jersey, he does not sleep comfortably for a long, long time.
Wikipedia entry for burlap: “In Jamaica and certain parts of the Caribbean (where it is only known as Crocus) many enslaved Africans who used to work on the plantations were not often given pleasant materials with which to make clothes. Some had access to cotton which was spun, woven, cut, and sewn into serviceable clothing (often called homespun) while others had to make do with clothing fashioned from roughly hewn sacking. Enslaved Africans used their resourcefulness to recycle discarded sacking and fashion it into garments that, although fairly uncomfortable by all accounts, provided protection from the heat and dust.” The words are copied and pasted verbatim from the website of the Costume Institute of the African Diaspora. The website notes how burlap is now used for fashion and art. Innovation is using what history has wrought to your advantage. Innovating a history that will not be forgotten.
A pink Post-it flag. Sticking out, waving proudly in the bibliography section of James’ revolutionary history. I always read bibliographies. The development of thought, how one worked one’s way to an idea or study, what someone disagrees with and what someone agrees with, is fascinating. Scouring the cited history of how something came into existence gives me an inexplicable thrill.
Underlined in green pen is this entry in reference to two books on the antislavery movement: “Both these books are typical for, among other vices, their smug sentimentality, characteristic of the approach of Oxford scholarship to abolition. As the official view, they can be recommended for their thorough misunderstanding of the question.” In green ink, undated, my marginalia beside this bibliographic entry reads: “Reading the official text knowing it will be wrong the value of official History is its wrongness and therefore we are more [word illegible], critical readers.”
Sandbags are sometimes made from burlap. On the news you see Floridians prepping for a storm every other summer, propping the bags up on their patios, complaining about another storm they have to prep for. The circulation of images from Hurricane Katrina shows storefronts piled high with sandbags, thinking they were ready, though in the end the sandbags prove useless against the waters that will engulf them, wash them away to distant locations. When Hurricane Sandy happens, I am in Washington Heights staying with a friend. The mayor of New York City tells us to stay away from the windows, in case they shatter from the windspeeds. No such thing happens. When we walk outside for the first time in days, a bodega storefront sign is on the sidewalk. The shards of its neon lights are scattered in all directions amid the many leaves and branches. My mother calls me after the storm passes to ask if I am OK, to express her concern, and to inform me an old man has died in Manhattan. The man’s name is Frank M. Suber, he dies in the basement of a building, and The New York Times reports, “It appeared that he had been walking on a sidewalk when a surge of water carried him into the building.” He dies on Broad Street, a block away from the dorm I was going to ride the storm out in. I keep thinking I am so lucky, I am so lucky, but I don’t know why.
“Four fishes, two ducks, and some other birds of molten gold…miters and crowns of feathers and gold ornamented with pearls and gems…several large plumes of beautiful feathers, fretted with gold and small pearls…”
2005: Piles of empty burlap are littered across the back of my father’s van. His many tools he uses throughout the day—shovels and loppers and hedge clippers and scissors and machetes—are carried around in a burlap sack. Trees soon to be transplanted are standing straight up in the back with burlap wrapped tightly around the roots. For some reason or other, burlap is also the cushioning of the front seats, and the floor mats. My father has found many uses for this inexpensive material. No corner of his dusty van can escape it.
The scent is overwhelming, pungent, distinct. Every morning ride to school, every evening on my way home, every ride to the train station, this is the scent of these voyages. As soon as the doors are open, it hits you, the odor a force, a sensation upon the body. I worry the other students during these high-school years will catch the scent, walk by and experience the odor, make assumptions. The odor of burlap tells them my father is not a firefighter, not a cop, not a fancy NYC corporate head-honcho, not a business owner. The burlap scent pouring out from the van lets them know my father works for their fathers. The aroma of the burlap tells them stories of who I am, and who I do not want them to believe I am.
The scent of burlap lingers on the clothes for the rest of the day.
One solitary eye, pure white, horrifyingly white, is exposed through the burlap sheathing his head. I aim for this eye. I think myself a digital sharpshooter. His closeness makes it hard for me to get the shot I want, the shot I need for a faster kill. I shoot. He is still lumbering toward me, chainsaw revving up in his hands, a bloodthirsty gurgling emanating from the burlap sacked head. I shoot again, and again, and again—too late. He has reached me, he has cut me in two. Game over.
This moment is from the video game, Resident Evil 5, set in an unidentified country in Africa. In the fandom Wikipedia page, the recurring enemy is identified as a “Chainsaw Majini,” a steroided villager-zombie wielding a deadly chainsaw. He is an enemy appearing many times throughout the game, reminiscent of the terrifying villain from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, Leatherface. Besides this, there is little else known about the enemy, about where the enemy lives, about the enemy’s life before being infected with a bioengineered virus. Africa, and whatever unnamed country the player is in, is without history. This is just a video game about zombies—pure, unadulterated shoot-em-up fun—and whatever real life allusions seem to be happening are incidental, accidental.
Nevertheless, history surfaces, history engulfs. The history of corrupt African politicians, of monstrous African warlords, of backwards African peoples are histories learned from a clickbait article or a cursory news segment or a government tweet or an NGO website or an outdated textbook while sheltered away behind a desk, air condition on, classical music playing. History, and history-making, always derives from a particular perspective. We live history at all moments, we choose sides at all times. Just as there is no one history of an event, there is never no history. Me shooting an African man with a burlap hood over his face, or throwing grenades at men all named Omar in a desert town with fake Arabic script on the signposts, or sniping narcos from a rooftop in some unspecified Latin American country, or mowing down mobsters with a machine gun in a teahouse decorated with dragons and bonsai trees, is history. Shooting certain kinds of bodies in virtual worlds makes sense only when we are doing it to certain kinds of bodies in certain kinds of places. Otherwise, violence against any other kind of body in another kind of place might terrify us to a point of no return.
In the absence of facts, history takes up the slack. Maggie Nelson writes two books (histories?) about her Aunt Jane, and the murder which claimed her Aunt Jane’s life. Nelson presents a history in the face of no history, a history struggling, insisting, to be despite the lack of facts. Nelson pulls from the archive available to her: courtroom proceedings; news segments; testimonies of her family members. She gets lucky. In a closet, tucked away to be a history forgotten, Nelson finds the diaries of her aunt. Diaries give us the inner lives of people, their teenage angsts, their crushes, their woes, their dreams. The dates in a diary make history feel verifiable, and real. Here was so and so, doing this on such and such a date. Are diaries written for the diarists or those who come after them? For those left behind, those like Nelson, the diary is a history, a history enabling us to mourn, to find closure, to find openings, to get lost in a history otherwise unavailable.
I keep a diary. I make sure to date each entry. There are weeks where I am writing in it daily, and there are some weeks where I write nothing, huge gaps between one entry and the next. During these gap moments, I worry something will happen to me, some horrible accident or murder or catastrophe striking down upon me. I scramble to write something in my notebook: the food I ate that day; my thoughts on the woman sitting next to me in the subway; a line I liked from a book I am reading. Anything, any part of the day, any trivial moment proving to the next person who might read my notebook that I was alive, I have had things happen to me, I have had a history.
“two wheels, one of gold like the sun and the other of silver with the image of the moon upon it, made of plates of those metals…a variety of cotton mantles…a number of underwaistcoats, handkerchiefs, counterpanes, tapestries, and carpets of cotton, the workmanship superior to the materials of which they were composed…”
The scissors have a hard time cutting through it. The material is resistant to change. What I cut ends up fraying at the edges, warping the squared shape I intended. No matter. This assignment for class, this found-object history of me, will do.
The piece of cut burlap is in my hands. Coarse, no moisture in its fibers, rugged. From what little I can remember of my father’s touch, they feel a lot alike. Burlap on the skin invites history, that strange and volatile and metamorphic thing I call my history. I think of myself as a boy, holding his hand in the farmers’ market, at the summer fair with all the rides. I think of myself as not a boy, as a twenty-something-year-old, holding his hand, our hands around the same size, our hands rough and cragged from our labors. Two men, especially those related, especially those brown, do not hold hands. Perverse, perversion, not allowed. Intimacy as an adult is no longer that of touch. Whatever intimacy between a father and son exists, it must be in the shadows, unnamed and unnamable, a stare a mumble a goodbye through the phone a hug during a special occasion, if we are lucky enough. I want to believe the words intimacy and perversion are not mutually exclusive categories—together I want them to form the word love.
I realize I am gripping the burlap, hard. Gripping it as if it were a hand, palm against palm, my fingers extending to weave between the fingers of another, muscles and tendons and ligaments and flesh trying to grip, to contact, to feel. I unloosen my grip, tack the burlap to the box displaying my other found objects, and go to class.
Before Jane Austen becomes Jane Austen, she writes a short history of England for her sister. The Historian, as a title, as a role, as an occupation, is to know history. Facts on the ready, textbook-style prose to be administered all in the name of Truth. The Historian should be able to recount, to give dates, provide sequences of events, what happens where and when. But the Historian that is Jane Austen, young Jane Austen, Jane Austen before she is Jane Austen, plays at being the dumb Historian, plays up in a playful manner herself writing history. Concerning Henry V: “During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget for what.” On the apparent well-known-ness of Henry VIII: “ It will therefore be saving them [her readers] the task of reading again what they have read before, and myself the trouble of writing what I do not perfectly recollect, by giving only a slight sketch of the principal Events which marked his reign.” Her final entry is on Charles I: “The Events of this Monarch’s reign are too numerous for my pen, and indeed the recital of any Events (except what I make myself) is uninteresting to me.” She does warn us in the beginning this history is done by “a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian.”
In this day and age of Wikipedia and high-speed internet and Google, history is an easily retrievable thing. It is ready for us to access, ready for us to manipulate. In her history, Austen does what we do today: omit or bypass facts to humor our audience, to win them over; mock or poke fun at the political parties we do not agree with to disparage them; exalt at all costs our political allegiances no matter the faults or misdeeds they commit. History, and how one writes it, creates a world in an image of our liking.
Austen’s history is prefaced with this note, “There will be very few Dates in this History.”
“And books made of tablets with a smooth surface for writing, which being joined might be folded together or stretched out to considerable length, ‘the characters inscribed thereon resembling nothing so much as Egyptian hieroglyphics’…”
Any year between 1989 and the Present Day: The slamming of metallic doors. Sun in the sky. A bird in flight, shadows of wings extended on the earth, en route to whatever point is its destination, whatever worm is to be its feast. Muscles straining, bark against skin, burlap in the palms of my father’s hands. He lugs this tree weighing forty pounds or so across synthetic grass. One of his friends, or a stranger who looks like a friend, installs the grass, cuts the grass, maintains the grass. He waves to these friends and strangers when he sees them on the road. He waves to the mother of three trooping down the street, stroller in hand like a tank, three pairs of small hands firmly bound to the stroller’s side. He waves to the man who owns the gas station, turbaned each day in different colors, beard white as snow. He waves to the man who hangs out in front of the local Wawa, a man unlike many of the other men in this small town, hair in luscious coils, hair a lustrous black. He waves to the shadows in cars passing. In all brown faces my father sees friendship.
He stops in place. The tree is put on the synthetic grass. He returns to his van only to come back momentarily with a shovel. He digs. Striations up and down the arms, bicep bulks, downward plunging of the shovel head. He’s so fast. Unnecessarily fast, it seems. What is the rush, my brown Atlas? The features of his face are solid, rock-solid concentration. Everything is being put into this digging action, everything for him is in this moment. An explanation, a saying: time is money.
Soon enough a hole is in the ground. A foot or so of negative space. He places the shovel on the ground with an unusual thoughtfulness, for some reason he is attuned to the impact of shovel on earth. He walks over to the tree, and bends over to the roots. Fingers maneuver at the twine binding the burlap to the roots. The intricacy of the knots explains to me why my father keeps his nails so long: they must be used to quickly and efficiently work their way through the durable twine. He yanks, he loops, he wiggles. The twine, after a minute or so of laboring, is off. The burlap lies on the ground in a crumpled flatness. The roots of the tree are exposed. The dampness is visible.
He lifts the tree and places it, gently and carefully, into the hole. He scoops up the soil with the shovel and chucks it back. In no time at all the tree is in its proper place, its new home. The leaves bright pink, the thin, extending branches, the grayish-black bark: they give a newfound quaintness, a sense of orderliness, to whatever space they settle in.
He picks up the burlap. Pause in action, a beat in time. The material is familiar in his hands. Years upon years of history in the gripping of its rough texture, the coarseness of the fibers in the palms a history of a life. Burlap is a provisional fabric. It is not meant for permanency. Its function is transference, to be a transitory component in the process of cultivating life, its use-value dependent on a situation, a circumstance of vegetal vulnerability. It takes no part in the ultimate design of a landscape. It is what enables the aesthetic, what allows for its existence, the hidden-away actor in creating the beauty of some sprawling home or university campus or corporate complex. When burlap can no longer serve its purpose, to protect and to enable and to transfer and to store, it is expendable, disposed of. Burlap exists to exist for others.
Burlap’s history is the history of enabling history. What would Princeton University be without its lawns, its sprawling greens and browns on the university website, the foliage and shrubbery so exquisitely maintained to create the most appealing tour for incoming students. Imagine Google Headquarters without its foliage, the trees so exquisitely shaped for employees old and new to take pride in, the bushes so tamed for potential business partners to enter thinking how respectable, how put-together, these partners appear to be. Try to think of Main Street America without its potted plants in intricate design, the waxy leaves welcoming as one passes by in the car, believing nothing could be wrong about such attractive places, the well-maintained grasses appealing to the eye, for the human eye is trained to believe such displays in the landscape are symbols of cleanliness, respectability, goodness, community. History is written into the landscape. History in a place tells us how to view the place, or how not to view a place given the history of its creation. Burlap fosters history and history-making without anyone even knowing. No one remembers how burlap takes part in the cultivation of life, much as no one remembers History—not one history of one particular thing, but all History, Histories of the many, History itself—is tended to by those excluded from it, erased from the very History they cultivate. History excludes the history of those who labor at creating it.
“And then the end:”
