Excerpts from H. R. P. Dickson’s The Arab of the Desert, 1949

The work responds to the hababa, a child’s hammock documented in H. R. P. Dickson’s The Arab of the Desert. This simple object reveals women’s knowledge of the land and their ability to create protective structures from available materials. Yet despite the book’s detailed observations, little is said about what the hammock was made from. This absence reflects a broader pattern in historical documentation, where women’s material knowledge is often under recorded.

In response, I reconstructed the hammock using banana peels from my own daily consumption.  Although the banana peel fibers are capable of holding a visible form, they cannot support the weight of a baby. The object exists as both a form and a refusal. The work therefore questions the social expectations placed on the female body, particularly the assumption that fertility defines womanhood.