created 2025-04-24, & modified, =this.modified
rel:Quipu
Thought
This is an excerpt from a book, African Folklore - An Encyclopedia — Philip M Peek & Kwesi Yankah that I sought out after finding a reference in Book of Symbols - Reflections of Archetypal Images.
It’s too involved and lengthy for a full read for me but I can find Survey of Text Etymology, Connections to Fiber, Body information for the citation.
Textile Arts and Communication
In African societies, where oral traditions take precedence over written ones, visual arts play a vital role in their functions as language.
The cloth lends itself to this function
- cloth is inherently a flat surface
- symbols can be applied, operating as a page.
- it has a rich and varied syntax.
- it comes in a variety of fibers woven in any number of ways, determined by which type of loom is used.
- cloth is pliable, portable medium
Cloth and Language
Threads are interwoven to produce cloth, much like words are interconnected to create syntax.
Language involves the building of written symbols or sounds to communicate an idea. Similarly, weaving requires the gradual addition of weft-threads to the warp as the process progresses. And, just as warp threads interconnect with those of the weft, words interrelate to make up the syntax of a sentence
The Dogon of Mali are among a number of African cultures that readily acknowledge the existence of speech in cloth.
They would say that “to be nude (that is, without cloth) is to be without speech.” The Dogon word for cloth, soy, even has its roots in the word so, their word for the speech of their creator god, Nommo.
The Dogon also equate the weaving process to the nature of language, believing that the threads on their loom interconnect to produce fabric just as words are combined to make speech.
They, like many groups throughout West Africa, weave on a horizontal, foot-treadle loom that produces a long, narrow strip of cloth. The Dogon claim that speech came about through weaving on such a loom. They refer to the entire loom apparatus as so ke ru, meaning “secret speech,” and equate its individual components to the physiology of an individual’s speech mechanism. For example, the reed is equated to teeth, the shuttle to the tongue (because of its constant back-and-forth motion inside the mouth) and the heddles to the uvula that rise and fall like the words themselves. Even the creaking sound of the loom during the weaving process itself is likened to the sound of the first manifestation of the word from the creator.
Dogon cloth design generally consists of white and indigo checks, either uniform or varied in size. The color and design elements in the cloth carry or connote a specific meaning. For example, the white characterizes truth and the speech of the creator god, whereas the black refers to falsehood, obscurity, and the secret speech of male initiates. The check designs refer to the cultivated field (which resembles such a configuration), the white checks being fields on the plains (i.e., easy to cultivate), and the black ones being those of the plateau, where cultivation is difficult. In sum, cloth and its production for the Dogon is a metaphorical expression of their worldview, a view that encompasses the dichotomies of village/bush, plant/animal, daily/ritual, male/female.
Cloth as Written Text
Just as cloth is used as a kind of surrogate for speech, it functions as a surface onto which words and word-derived imagery are applied.
Islamic traditions throughout North Africa produce cloths with words encoded in them. One North African type, called tiraz, has prayers or praises to rulers woven into the cloth itself. Indeed, in some cultures, such as those of Algeria, the very name for weaver (reggam) has its roots in a word meaning to write.