Malinda Words: Gauze, blood-stained and torn

Gauze. The word came to me a few hours ago. It stayed with me. It remained with me as I was reading an essay titled ‘My Personal Hemingway’ written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Marquez describes the first and only time he had seen Ernest Hemingway. In the Spring of 1957, while walking along Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, Marquez had seen Hemingway walking in the opposite direction. He yelled, ‘Maeeeestro!’ Hemingway, so Marquez describes, ‘[realizing] there could be no other maestro among the crowd of students, turned with his hand raised, and shouted back in a slightly childish voice, ‘adióóóós, amigo.’

I was still thinking of bandages when I read his thoughts on how novelists read other novels: ‘In some impossible-to-explain way we take the book apart into essential pieces and put it back together again once we know the mysteries of its personal clockwork.’ They have to, he says, ‘decipher the stitching.’

I am not a novelist and don’t read novels in that way, but it occurred to me that what Marquez said could be applied to words as well. Like gauze for example.

Gauze. That was the one-word title that first came to mind. Gauze? I thought about it. Who would want to read about bandage-material, I asked myself. Yes, ‘bandages’ is what I associated gauze with. It’s more than that.

People who know about clothes and fashion would know better. ‘Gauze’ would make them think ‘fabric.’ News to me of course, but then I know very little about fabrics, outfits and fashion.

If someone asked me to describe gauze I might have said ‘well, essentially a bandage made of a thin, sheer fabric.’ I wouldn’t have said ‘used to make loose, unstructured dresses and blouses, curtains and baby carriers.’ I wouldn’t have added, ‘its open, airy weave makes it a perfect fabric to wear during hot summer months.’

It is all that. And there’s more.

Today I learned that it is typically made from ‘cotton, wool, silk or synthetic fibres with a loose, open weave.’ Apparently absorbent gauze is made of 100% natural cotton yarns. This is how it has been manufactured for centuries.

 Centuries? Some say ‘since the mid-16th century’ but Vanessa J Jones, in an article titled ‘The use of gauze: will it ever change?’ published in the International Wound Journal (yes, I didn’t know about that either!) in July 2006, states ‘woven gauze is the oldest dressing still in use and dates as far back as the Ancient Egyptians who used it to wrap bodies prior to burial.’

And to think that all these years I was thinking ‘bandages.’ And nothing more.

As I took apart gauze, first unwrapping and then unweaving, I realised that unlike in the case of dismantling and reassembling the essential pieces of a novel once its intrinsic mechanisms are understood, I cannot put it back together again. Gauze, I mean.

It’s far too delicate (not that novels are necessarily indelicate of course). Words are easier, naturally, but what they mean is something else. It’s not simple.

Not simple because of history, because of long history, because of the wide range of uses, because that which works for a wound also works to clothe the dead and the living, and because sometimes it goes underground, sometimes it is flaunted and sometimes it is is something few want to see and many want to pretend it simply does not exist.

Ok, that might sound convoluted, but two things will help unravel. First, etymology and second, poetry (says so much with so little).

There is a theory that the word comes from the word ‘Gazz’ (Arabic and Persian), which means ‘raw silk,' because that was what early weavers used to first produce gauze. Stronger is the opinion that the word is derived from Gaza, the region that first gained prominence for weaving the fabric.

Now read with me the following poem by Em Berry [@skinhungry] titled ‘Because of us.’ It is a short poem about a long history, a lengthy bandage and stitches which are hard to decipher only if we don’t note that they have been painted over so that art, artistry, tapestry and history can be denied.

This morning I learned
the English word gauze
(finely woven medical cloth)
comes from the Arabic word غَزّة. or Ghazza
Because Gaza’s have been skilled weavers for centuries

I wondered then

how many of our wounds
have been dressed
because of them

and how many of theirs
have been left open
because of us.

So now, let us check out wounds, inflicted and suffered. Let us think of bandages, crypts, shrouds and the tyranny, obfuscation and scandal of perfect fabrics to mitigate unfavourable climatic conditions. Let us think of a greeting floating over rubble and through dense smoke. Let us figure out what to say, think and do if there floats back in a child’s voice the response, ‘adióóóós, amigo.’

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 269th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

16 November 2023

Gauze, blood-stained and torn

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