red rooms past, passed to room to room

to me, this present present

Wombs and pearls and stories

like fleshy heirlooms

to birth you-

Soukeyna O.

Women and Wombs: Tangible History

The bilum bag is a frayed womb, a ropey stringy thing of not only dancing fibres, but legacies of strength and resilience, legacy intertwined like gentle whispers in its yarny midst. The bilum bag is a rite of passage, a story, an artefact and an heirloom carried by men and women alike throughout the course of their lives- a time capsule of their mother’s wisdom, their mother’s mother’s wisdom and of their ancestors and theirs and theirs.

From the Tok Pisin language of Papua New Guinea and directly translated as ‘womb’, the bilum bag is not only the beginnings of life but also the woven bag crafted by expectant mothers in circles of womanhood whereby post birth, their sleeping babies are laid in, their bodies taking the familiar position they once held in the womb. The sack, traditionally woven from foraged natural fibres, is often suspended from a high place, either from the head of the carrier and balanced across their back with the sleeping baby inside, or from a tree branch.

Fibrous strands are extracted from the plants by soaking off the outer layers, before being dried. Fibres are then twisted together by women rolling them along their thighs to form a string. The string is then woven in a knotless, continuous pattern of figure eights. When more string is required, more fibre is twisted directly onto the end and another section is woven before adding more fibre. 

BILUM & BILAS

A microcosm for the familiar and the unfamiliar, the old life pre-birth, the old knowledge and tradition that passed down through centuries and stories for the women to weave the bilum bag, the new world post-birth, that is strange and both curious and terrifying to a baby, the new knowledge that life must naturally bring, the bilum bag is a strange consistent and a liminal middle ground of the distant ancient and the new uncertain. 

With enough air coursing through the woven fibres to allow the baby to breathe uninhibited and with the slow care in adjusting the baby from nine months of the fetal position in the womb, to a now fetal position against the metropole, beaches, villages, undergrowth and clearings of Papua New Guinea when being carried or suspended from a high place, the bilum bag becomes the place of transition for the baby and a rite of transition when weaving it for the women and expectant mothers who gather to prepare for the arrival of the baby.

When the baby grows into adulthood, the bilum bag is not abandoned or discarded but rather adopted to be slung across the body to carry goods by women and men alike, used in ceremonies, as fashion statements and in trade to outsiders- often the basis of women’s economic empowerment in PNG’s tribes and clans and a vehicle through which subsistence and entire communities are kept afloat.

With differing patterns that hold differing significance for the women that weave the bilum bags (Diamond, Ovary, Spider-Web, Skin Pig, Mountain) bilum bags accompany Papua New Guineans from cradle to grave.

And so it is that the womb that carried the child, the same womb that wove the child one in turn to dwell in after birth into this world, this women-woven womb in which they transitioned into life on earth, the womb beyond that into adulthood which the now adult child carries as a mausoleum of their birth and the peaks and troughs of daily living and ceremony- becomes a comforting presence of age-old tradition, skill, craft, emotion, and mostly: profound generational care.

---