The Radical Bandana

Can madras be decolonized?

Mar 3, 2021
I have often told the story of growing up in my mother’s export business; of the hours in a storeroom full of hand sewn dolls, mahogany sculptures and the full, fresh smell of woven straw baskets everywhere. There were books too, in that back room of Xaymaca, named after what the original people called the island we lived on. Xaymaca, the land of wood and water, though by then there were no original people to speak of it. In that room , I memorized and recited the poems out of Louise Bennet’s “Jamaica Labrish”, written in the patois we never spoke at home but heard daily. Somewhere between language that had been lost and language that was imposed, was another kind of tongue; something from a land, not of wood and water, but sweetness and sweat. These were the words and lives collected and pressed into the pages by a woman I knew as Ms. Lou.

Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley, more commonly known as the character, Miss Lou, was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, and educator. Bennet was in her mid 40’s by the time Jamaica was finally granted independence from Great Britain. By then she had she had been incorporating patois, the language of the laboring masses, into her creative writing and performance for over 20 years. In the years following 1972, that voice would be realized in form as Ms. Lou, Bennet’s witty, winking and culture defining creation.

While Louise was from a solidly middle class and educated Jamaican family, Ms. Lou was a working woman - a country woman – and savvy enough about the ways of the world to recognize inequity as global, historical, and constructed. For the newly liberated island republic, Miss Lou represented an evolving post-colonial identity, whose existence was both complex and creole. As one of Jamaica’s most influential figures at this time, Bennet is rightfully credited for using language to reimagine and reframe “Jamaican-ness”. Less discussed, however, is her full embrace of bandana fabric (also known as madras) as part of Ms. Lou’s iconic dress. Radical in its reconstruction of womanhood and nationhood in a moment of sheer possibility, the bandana now faces a dilemma in this new age…what does it mean to decolonize any artifact when that artifact is so deeply rooted in both colonialism and a post-colonial identity?

Traditional bandana is a loosely woven cotton textile produced almost exclusively in Chennai, India, formerly known as Madras. The textile we now know as bandana, or madras, began as a light, gauzy material prized by African and Middle Eastern merchants for its use in headpieces as early as the 12th century. When Dutch and then British traders arrived in India four centuries later, they would also recognize, and capitalize on the commercial opportunities of the textile. Originally imported to Great Britain in silk, madras was considered far too expensive for its colonial market. Demand for the material was so high, however, that British manufacturers would eventually copy the look in the cheaper cotton and sell that co-opted version to its West Indian colonies. Like an invasive species, this new transplant came to define the material landscape of the Caribbean.

Hand loomed madras in Chennai, India via Castaway Clothing

The story of bandana / madras in the Caribbean is, for all its transformation, an imperialist story, the mechanism and currency of a colonial economy. In this system, English laborers, British merchants, West African consumers, enslaved people throughout the “New World”, enslavers, landowners and free people were be inextricably bound together through the workings of cloth and clothing. What made Bennet’s use of banana particularly radical and progressive, was her confrontation of the colonial hierarchy, established and maintained through material signifiers such as textiles. She used language, performance, humor and clothing to engage and challenge the people of Jamaican to become Jamaican. Bennet’s work, and the work of countless individuals who formed and framed Caribbean identity through this textile, leaves us with the challenging question of our relationship to colonial material in an age of calls for decolonization.

In practice, decolonization is a calculated process of strategic engagement and diplomatic negotiation between colonial and anti-colonial forces. It is an epistemic disobedience that inevitably demands political change, economic independence, and cultural renegotiation. If colonization is an invasion and anti-colonialism is the defensive maneuver, decolonization might well ask, who are we who fight this war? Who were the crafts people whose trade and land were conscripted into this imperialist enterprise? What of the individuals who traded and were traded for a measure of cloth; the men and women for whom intimacy was bartered by the yard and the women who reclaimed a sense of self when belonging to oneself was rare? While decolonization has become a metaphorical catch phrase in popular culture, the true work of this movement is grounded in restoration and remembering.

From the Teodoro Vidal Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

There is an effort today to trend bandana towards something contemporary and fashionable. While I understand the impulse to do so, I continue to wrestle with the the disconnect between past and present implicit in doing so. Much like loaded words, bandana is heavy with history and meaning…should we expect it to be anything less? This desire to make bandana fresh, to purify madras in the baptismal waters of “fashion” is a false conviction and an unwarranted penance. In decolonization, Ms. Lou’s radical bandana may well have a second act, if only we grant it its full weight.