Patricia Kayobera

Patricia Kayobera, an older woman of great personal presence and charm, is a highly skilled weaver of baskets in the Agasake style. The conical shape of her woven crafts traces to basketry in Rwanda, Patricia’s country of origin. She is a member of Tutsi ethnic society in Rwanda and her home language is Kirundi. She and family members were forced to flee to a refugee camp in a nearby country due to extreme sectarian violence in Rwanda. Patricia has overcome a great deal. Her deep faith has helped to sustain her along her challenging journey from Rwanda to the refugee camp and also much more recently, in the face of her husband’s death due to illness in Worcester, where the family resettled several years ago.

In her home in the city, she is now raising her granddaughter, who has recently graduated from public high school. Patricia’s income from the sale of her crafts through RAW helps the household; her elegantly proportioned tall baskets are gaining a reputation throughout central Massachusetts.

Unlike some of the other RAW artisans, Patricia did not learn how to make her crafts in a home village or town in her nation of origin, before becoming a forced migrant. Rather, as she told us in a series of interviews in her apartment, she started to make baskets in the refugee camp – not primarily for extra cash at all but for a need to find solace and respite from her worries through the physical act of art-making.

Here is the story she told us. One time she was walking along a path in the camp and as she glanced over to the side of the walk way she glimpsed some tall grasses growing there. She plucked some and began to work them casually into the shape of a rough basket, moving her hands back and forth in informal imitation of the movements she had seen the skilled basket makers use in her town and also in the refugee camp’s craft making shop. To her surprise, these movements and the tactile shaping of a small basket in her hands temporarily cut off the constant flow of excruciating memories of the killings she had witnessed in Rwanda. 

She had been distressed for weeks after first fleeing to the refugee camp by frequent flashbacks to the violence she had seen. The flashbacks were intrusive; she had little rest or happiness. After her insight that making something in her hands gave her relief from these painful memories, Patricia decided that she needed to learn how to weave baskets in a more formal way. So, she sought lessons in the camp’s craft workshop.

She was an apt student and through long effort refined her craft making skills. Making her own Agasake baskets brought her hours of pleasure (and a cash income in the camps, as the crafts were sold to markets by the camp staff). But, making the baskets also gave her concrete relief from the frightening flashbacks. In other words, Patricia’s basket weaving skills derived from the refugee flight itself and ultimately from the personal dislocations tied to Rwanda’s large-scale civil war. She is crafting a new home for herself within a new place of greater psychological equilibrium, within  challenging resettlement experiences..

Even today, in her new homes in Worcester (there have been several in succession), Patricia finds the dexterous, repetitive hand movements in making a basket calming and enjoyable. In her interviews with us she always stresses how many hours a day she likes to devote to craft making. In an earlier apartment she dedicated part of her kitchen as a weaving studio; today in another apartment across town she does her basketmaking in the front room, sitting on the sofa, often with videos of ceremonies from her home ethnic society playing along on a color television set on the wall. Watching the video with her and listening to its lively soundtrack we learned that the large sizes of these baskets are used in rituals in Rwanda to carry fruit and festive food gifts to a family hosting the event.

She makes her crafts of willow reeds. Ellen and Joan of RAW get these for her from a broker in Kentucky. Patricia softens the reeds when she first acquires them, by  soaking them in water. Pliability of the strips is an important quality of good basketmaking materials, she told us. That is one reason why she sometimes also makes baskets from the plastic strips she gets from disassembling large plastic rice sacks from African traditional markets. In her early years of resettlement Patricia did use rice sacks from Africa, procured by friends and relatives; today she gets her plastic rice sacks from Asian markets in Worcester.

Patricia makes two major types of baskets for sale through RAW: the ones with closed tops (these are the Agosake ones) but also open top, oval-shaped ones, which can be used as bowls. The first type of basket is used in Rwanda in ceremonies to give the host family gifts of fruit and other tokens of esteem, as just noted.  Placing gifts into such a highly crafted container makes them weightier presentations. The open-topped oval ones can be used to present gifts or to hold things in the home such as fruit. Both craft types have the same basic type of motifs as decoration: flashes of designs in black, rust, green, or blue. The background color of her baskets is the natural color of the willow reeds, a light tan.

The conical baskets vary greatly in height, from about 25 “ tall to only 4 inches high. The latter, new-style ones came from a specific commercial circumstance that Patricia was asked to pursue. One time a Jewish family in Worcester was planning a bar mitzvah for a young son. They wanted to give party gifts to all the attendees and they wanted these to be crafts made in Worcester. So, they asked RAW if Patricia could possibly retain the same shape of her usual big closed-top baskets but miniaturize them, to make tiny 4” high creations. 

They had a further specification: they wanted the motifs to be made from reeds dyed turquoise (not exactly a traditional Rwandan color).  Patricia in effect answered, Why not? And, her Worcester-born bar mitzvah baskets came to be.

Patricia is indeed an astute businesswoman and is keenly interested in market trends in Massachusetts crafting. She is also an artist working at the height of her weaving powers. The Massachusetts Cultural Council has recognized her as a master basket maker and her works have been documented by Massachusetts State Folklorist Dr. Maggie Holzberger.

Her granddaughter Nisha has captured Patricia’s personal resiliency and verve and her artistic excellence well in a short video that the young woman recently created, called “Dear Grandmother.” Patricia’s granddaughter asserts in her storytelling that her grandmother is an inspiration to her.

Over the years Holy Cross students Jennifer Feraud, Tildah Fredua, and Martina Umunna have collaborated on many interviews with Patricia and this entry draws on their insights.