Dar Ku is a middle aged and exceptionally talented Karen back strap weaver, now residing with her large family in a home they bought several years ago in a town near Worcester, MA. When they first arrived as resettled refugees from Karen State, Burma, the household lived in a triple decker in South Worcester but now they have purchased their own home in a town right outside the city. Multiple generations live together in the home, as they did in Worcester. The adults all help out with expenses. Dar Ku learned to weave in her home village in Burma; her mother taught her the craft. After being forced from their village by the Tatmadaw (Burmese state military) they fled to a United Nations-sponsored refugee camp just over the border in Thailand.
The trek to the camp through the forest and rain was difficult for Dar Ku and her three very young children; only one of the youngsters was old enough to walk so she had to carry the others. It took them three weeks to get to the refugee camp. There, Dar Ku went to work in the craft workshop house to earn cash, making traditional Karen clothing and various cloth household items, which the camp staff would then sell outside the camp to increase family finances.
Dar Ku would often find motifs to copy from a special Karen textile pattern book she had access to in the craft house. Unfortunately, in the move to the United States for resettlement, this book was lost. Once living in Worcester and after she had teamed up with RAW, Dar Ku worked from memory to try to recapture the old Karen motifs for her new work.
This has not resulted in any loss but rather in a flowering of Dar Ku’s new weaving passion: That is, she has launched into an artistic focus on more and more intricate geometric patterns in her cloths. These have tended to concentrate on scarves with some continued interest in making Karen traditional over-blouses and skirts. The traditional wear dwells on the colors red and black but her scarf-length cloths are much more varied in hue.
For these, while at her back strap loom Dar Ku composes her remarkable geometric combinations of motifs (all tightly woven) in a vast variety of thread colors. She told us that these varied motifs come to her ‘out of her own head,’ so to speak. Virtually each new cloth that she has created for RAW to sell is different in geometric design from the previous ones. RAW directors Ellen Ferrante and Joan Kariko particularly value her work because of this dynamism. Dar Ku seems to be working out all possible, logical variations of design, as she goes from scarf to scarf.
In her abundant hand-production of fine weavings, Dar Ku is making textiles that were not ‘indigenous Karen fabrics’ per se nor were they generic “American cloth crafts.” Rather, her weavings are vibrant, bright creations that embody the refugee journey itself, with its gains and losses. These textiles have become quite popular at craft fairs and online.
In addition to all this artistic work, for years Dar Ku was also maintaining Facebook contact with her sister who was living in Thailand in difficult economic circumstances. Dar Ku would help her to market her weavings, at home and through RAW. In the RAW Burmese forced migrant community there are a great many Worcester-based refugee households trying to help support their relatives back in the refugee camps or out in the general Thai economy.
For a period of time over the last several years, Ellen and Joan acutely felt the loss of Dar Ku’s contributions, since for months she had no longer been collaborating with RAW. She had been quite busy. For years she held down demanding full-time jobs in the mainstream Worcester economy in addition to weaving at home in her “spare” hours. Her husband’s untimely death due to an unexpected medical condition led to additional family duties and stress. But now, the press of work and family obligations have eased up a bit and Dar Ku is once again a core member of the RAW artisans collaborative. She has returned to her earlier enthusiasm for selling her cloth creations in various entrepreneurial formats.
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