Book of Maps

Songs for Orphaned Mothers

These are the poems that are inscribed on the artwork called "Songs for Orphaned Mother" that I exhibited at the Jamestown Art Center recently.  See photo at 5/13/19 "ART Update" post.

Songs for Orphaned Mothers

© Josephine Carubia 2019

            Song I

Do orphans make the best mothers?

            or grandmothers?

Are they grateful for the scraps

            and just one solid man?

Do they raise loyal children who

            gather on Sunday to eat

            their sustenance and

            witness their amazement?

Will they muscle nothing, no,

less than nothing,

into a noisy fragrant kitchen

full of helping hands?

Does an orphan mother mourn?

Does she know the whole cloth of

            what she doesn’t know?

Where were you born?

When were you alone?

You came so far.

Did you find it here,

what you lost?

Was it enough?

            What is enough?

            When is enough?

            How is enough?

            Who is enough?

            Where is enough?

The map of you has few places

            marked.

Places called together and

            places called alone.

Does being mother cancel

            being orphan?

How many stitches to hold it all

            together, but never quite

            repair?

Is it good enough? Or could it

            possibly be beautiful?

I am making this song for you and

all orphan mothers.

            Song II

You were broken when they died,

            but the needs of others

            fused your bones into

            shapes and purposes.

Silent and hurt,

            you submit your dreams

            of home to the required

            husband’s ambition.

Still a child, you

            bore a child with

            no mother of your own.

You fed the living children and

            the dead.

You hoarded scraps

            against the day

             of hardships beyond

            the dry charity

            of a suffering town.

The gabriel went over sea

            and under ground

            to return and leave,

            return and leave.

            Return.

Still, not much was

            something familiar on

            your tongue.

Broken again, in the dark,

            shaken, soiled and sick,

            holding only wisps

            of once familiar penury

            as beautiful memory.

Meanwhile huddled children caring

            for children iterate

            towards new trajectories

            invisible on the shifting dim

            horizon.

      Song III

You don’t smile toward

            the future—

Why would you?

If you knew I was

            coming, would you smile?

Between that girl with a

            ribbon in her hair

And me, mistress of comfort

            and machines,

A century of burdens

            borne across vastness,

            punctuated by rare moments

            of ease, if not joy.

The photographer’s moment,

            a pause before

            the abyss.

You, however, persisted.

            stepping forward despite

            the drag of events,

            towards this intersection

            of your hopes and my thanks.

A century passes.

A faded photo surfaces.

Lines intersect.

I recognize you.

Your hand held still and straight

            is my hand still.

Your wrist outgrowing

            its sleeve—

            your stance with weight

            on one foot—

Your face, the same and different.

All familiar; all family.

Girl!

One fancy dress over

            one heart.

            Beating.

I remember your words for

            a full belly in dialect.

I remember the heavy bucket of

            soapy water up and down

            the building hallways and stairs,

            and I remember the mop.

I remember you calling “Sal-lee”

            up the dark shaft window

            by the sink.

Do you recognize me?

This is my hand

            at the end of your arm.

            Song IV

This corner tells the story of

that time you cried.

Here you climbed the hill

            just to find she was

            already gone.

This piece is for when

            you waited,

            and waited,

            and waited.

But here you saw a star

            streaking across

            the sky and thought

            it was a sign of

            future joy.

This rough patch speaks

            volumes about harsh voices always

leaning against you.

Song V

She is not who you think she is:

a fat old woman in a faded dress

stepping from stove to sink to table

on swollen ankles.

Once she was an orphan girl,

an island girl, almost cinderella,

married at fifteen,

but not living the dream.

Not beautiful, but determined.

Sometimes looking out the window

to the others bustling on first avenue.

Sometimes falling asleep in the kitchen.

From discarded pieces and bits,

mingled with tears, blood, and love,

she generated family:

hard-won wedges

into uncertain futures.

Wearable Art

I recently sent this photo of my "wearable art" string backpacks to my sister and invited her to choose one for her birthday gift.  They are all fully lined and some have interior pockets.  Each one also has a story . . . of who gave me a piece of unique fabric from Africa, of what I learned while making it, of the dear teacher who suggested fabric/color combinations, of where I was when I purchased some component.

The label on each says the following:

Persnickety PACK

Carry your snack

Larger than a pocket

(Smaller than a rocket)

Whimsy for confections

Inspiration for affections

Under, outer, or inbetween

Wearable art meant to be seen

Fabricated for delight

(c) jo.carubia 2015

Work in Progress

This piece is called "Small Village by the Sea."  It is 12" by 12".  I showed it to V yesterday and he commented that it is "whimsical."  I've heard that comment about some of my work before, but somehow it never sounds quite like a compliment.  How should I take that word?  Does "whimsical" mean the same as my own phrase: "Fabricated for delight."?  Hmmm..... Something to ponder in my quest to investigate the conjunctions of text and textiles. 

Ambitious Apron: Mother is a Closet Polyglot

Ambitious Apron: Mother is a Closet Polyglot

We had no idea.

She hid behind the safe places.

She put on the disguise

and portrayed the staid

design of predictable

colors and patterns.

The choice of red, maybe,

Was evidence of bold.

Now we know.

Mother is a polyglot.

She speaks Cinderella and Spanish,

French and Esperanto.

She is fluent in Sleeping Beauty

And in Aramaic.

She can read musical notation

As well as slang,

And her calligraphy is meticulous

Through Mandarin, cuneiform, and hieroglyph.

Scherezade comes to her in THE original language.

She listens to the news in vernacular

and hears it with her heart.

She speaks indigenous

as well as ingenious.

She speaks in tongues.

Mother reads the news in

all the many codes of despair,

Yet she can tell you the etymology

of marmalade as she ladles it hot into jars.

Mother can sing sweet ditties

In baby babble,

And unravel the tangled

Threads of Babel.

Mother is a closet polyglot.

Audacious Apron: Mother is of Two Minds

Audacious Apron: Mother is of Two Minds

Mind #1:

These muddy browns and muted greens are perfectly good colors!

Your father was wearing brown shoes on the day we met.

This green is practical.

Brown is embedded in the earth and that’s a good thing.

Brown and green form a reliable base; feet planted firmly in soil.

Rooted and stationary in the natural and organic order of the universe.

Mind #2:

My name should have been Sojourner or Mecca or Athene or Poseidon or Mercury, that one with wings.

I could have been happy as one of those women who traveled the world:

Nellie Bly, Gertrude Bell, Amelia Earhart, ……

Brown says “stick in the mud, stuck at home making the best of it.”

I walk by the sea and collect starfish skeletons and sharp teeth shed by sharks.

From Thailand, I gain blue horizons and wild proliferation.

Mind #1:

The thrifty housewife is the happy housewife.

Make do is the motto of imagination.

Leftovers are better than money in the bank.

Mind #2:

I want to spend my life with great abandon!

Joy is a bottomless, heart-shaped bucket.

For once, I WILL shoot my own arrow and follow it through the galaxy!

(c) 2018 "A is for Apron: Tales from the Domesticity Jungle," Artwork, Narratives, and Poetry by Josephine Carubia, Ph.D.

Auspicious Apron: Mother Has a Wild Heart

A is for Apron #1

Auspicious Apron: Mother Has a Wild Heart

One side of the apron is an updated version of the traditional patchwork.  Patchwork is an art form that utilizes the diminutive detritus of primary textile construction projects.  For example, a woman fabricates a new garment every year for each of her daughters to wear for the first day of school. She saves all of the material scraps in a basket.  Eventually, she has a stash of odd shaped pieces and random strips that call out to be arranged in juxtapositions of color and texture.  She saves the scraps for the purposes of thrift, but she will mobilize them for the purposes of delight. One day, her artistic sensibility kicks into overdrive and she presses all the wrinkled pieces with a hot iron and begins to stitch them together forming a collage of abstractions. The piece grows organically: a triangle added here on this side, and a rectangle fit along this other side, with perhaps an irresistible and original polygon as anchor at some sort of off-kilter center.

The developing patchwork has no extrinsic orientation of top or bottom, but it develops a personality as it grows.  It begins to express preferences: “Here I need a bright red!” or “I fancy a geometric pattern next to this floral,” and “Yes, this IS up and THIS is down.”  The choices emerging from the basket of scraps are multitudinous and subtle. A pair of scissors may be as significant as an artist’s brush or knife in fine-tuning the thrust of a particular shade or shape. Eventually, the amorphous construction reaches a level of maturity and commitment. The patchwork becomes an apron. 

But, in the practice of patchwork, the woman herself has also been gathered and transformed.  She recognizes herself in the process and knows that she is more than a basket of gently used and useful qualities. She forges her own coherent statement of desire from the disparate urges set aside over the years. Still, she will keep the new fabric of herself hidden (but ready for action) on the reverse of her domestic utility; the patchwork apron.  Did her family guess at what was hidden beneath her quiet competence? In retrospect, her daughters will not be surprised to learn that their mother had a wild heart.

A is for Apron

A is for Apron: Auspicious, Audacious, Ambitious

Tales from the Domesticity Jungle, 2018

Artwork, Narratives, and Poetry by Josephine Carubia, Ph.D.

This photo is of me (center) and two of my friends in the International Women's Book Group, Azza Hussein (left) and Duygu Sevasci (right).  They kindly agreed to model my Audacious Aprons at one of our meetings.

This entry is an overview of the project.  The introduction is below and subsequent posts will be focused on each of the aprons. 

Introduction:

The apron is a garment of domesticity. It signifies the seemingly insignificant labor of women in the containment of the home kitchen.  The apron covers and conceals potential and strength while claiming to protect delicacy and beauty.

The professional male (or female) chef may wear an apron, but it is structurally a different apron. Moreover, it is worn under the sign of the chef’s hat (toque), which dominates the view.  The chef’s apron is also diminished in significance by the chef’s coat which broadens the shoulders and visibly projects dominance.

The aprons in this “Abstract, Bold, Conceptual” artwork were constructed with a paper pattern called “Church Ladies Apron.”* The narrative implied in the pattern title is that “do-gooding” women—often in the extraneous years after raising their children—are baking cookies and cakes, and arranging flowers and ceramic elephants for the church penny social.  They are not executive women, not tech-savvy women, not explorers, not officials.  They are not even WOMEN; they are “ladies.”                These reimagined/reconstructed aprons have two distinct sides, presenting two aspects of a woman.  One side may represent her traditional roles and the expectations of her family.  The opposite side reveals her true aspirations, inclinations, and genius.  These are the first three aprons of an endless series.

*“Church Ladies’ Apron Pattern,” ©Mary Mulari Designs

Evening News: AYUDAME

I recently submitted this piece for a two-year traveling exhibit called "Flight of Ideas" in my local SAQA area (Rhode Island/Massachusetts).  Sorry this isn't a better photo!  I must have been rushing to get the piece packed and delivered on a deadline.  I'll take better photos when I visit one of the exhibition sites.

My statements with the piece:

Materials: Vintage and new fabric, including fabric from Thailand and Africa and prayer flag fabric.

“Artist’s Statement”

J. Carubia creates unique abstract, bold, conceptual forms by following threads of imagination combined with words, colors, patterns, textures, and shapes.  Juxtaposition of opposites is an inherent trait of her work.  Finished pieces take the form of fiber fables, longevity banners, memory banners, text-tiles, crops, and wearable arts.  “Evening News” (2019) employs vintage and new fabric from three continents deployed in complex forms to reveal gruesome bulletins of devastation alongside the heartbreaking ironies of a typical evening news broadcast. The word AYUDAME (Help Me!) screams through the piece, but does anyone understand or even notice?

ART Update

Here is my artwork at two recent shows!  "Songs for Orphaned Mothers" was accepted into a collage show at the Jamestown Art Center.  I will post the text (poem) separately.  My "Audacious Aprons" were part of the Feminist Art Show at URI recently.  I will post the text that accompanies the art separately.