Patch and writing by Hannah

This is the first patch I made, and there is something neat and perfect about its simplicity to me.  The theme: women singing in jail to create a certain sense of freedom that reaches beyond the prison bars that are holding them in. 

This patch comprises two different stories from Chile (though the setting could really be any of a number of countries).  The first story comes from Victoria Díaz Caro, daughter of a disappeared man.  She joined the group of women making arpilleras, as well as the folkloric group that created the Cueca Sola (among other performances).  After chaining herself to the Congress building in protest with other women, Victoria spent five days in jail.  The women, in order to keep their spirits up in the jail, sang and even wrote songs.  “We noted the words on scraps of paper,” she reports, “and right there in the jail we began to sing.  We sang it with so much love and passion that they didn’t say anything.  They couldn’t make us be quiet.”[1]

The second story comes from Isabel Allende.  Two female political prisoners who are friends wait each day for their male friends to be paraded by blindfolded on the way to the latrine.  The guards try to make the experience a humiliating one, but the women will not let this happen.  Because they cannot reach out to the men with their hands, they reach out in song: “Each time they passed, Ana and Alba sang with the strength of their despair, and female voices rose from the other cells.  Then the prisoners would stand up tall, straighten their backs, and turn their heads in the direction of the women’s cells… One of the guards was moved by the women’s hymns.  One night he brought them three carnations in a can of water to put in their window.”[2]

And there we have it: my first patch.  Breaking through the bars that just can’t seem to contain these women’s spirits; spreading light and song to the world.