The Carpet Dealer’s Daughter
They say: turn your weakness into your strength. For a long time I didn’t know how that was supposed to work. I looked blindly at my origins and saw only what didn’t fit.
I felt foreign. Strange – but not in the sense of special. I felt shame.
When, as a young woman, I was asked what my parents did for a living and I answered: “My father owns an oriental carpet shop” – a questioning look often followed. Or a smile that tipped over.
Oh, I see, you’re the cliché: the carpet seller’s daughter. At some point I stopped talking about it.
Only much later did I begin to approach my origins differently. Not through the voices from outside. Not through what was in the news. Not through what is wrong with “us”. But through what I feel. What lives on in me.
What I change through my presence – simply by being.
And then they came back, the images.
I see myself between stacks of silk and wool. A scent all of its own hangs in the air – warm, heavy, familiar. I jump from carpet to carpet. Thick layers, thin layers. I comb the fringes with my fingers, trace the colourful patterns. My eyes lose themselves in colours, lines, contrasts. I hide between the layers of carpets, curl up, grow quiet. I remember the feeling of being carried by this soft world. A universe of patterns. Of hands that knotted.
Today I am grateful for this early, close encounter with a beautiful craft that has been forgotten and is slowly disappearing.
For all of it that lives on in me – and continually inspires me anew.
