Runway Journal
Runway Journal

Issue 41: LOVE

Quishile/Shila/Sheela: To uphold my Aaji’s craft as a namesake

Quishile Charan

I remember the day, sitting in my Aaji’s lounge in Nawaicoba, she explained the significance of my name, ‘I will always live on through you’. 


Quishile/Shila/Sheela.


I am a namesake. I am woven and threaded to my Aaji.

My name is an inheritance, a gift. Shila embedded the knowledge of craft, she fused it to my being, to my core. Looking at my hands I share the same lines and creases. Soon they will be wrinkles that warp time and hold knowledge passed down: new ways of making and the labour of my Aaji and Fua. 


These folds of time in my skin, the cracks inside my palms, are an embodied language of love. This love is unspoken, it stretches or rather collapses the space between my dead, the living and generations to come. Residues of ancestors, memories, generational labour and resilience converge with the needle and thread. 


My name was woven into my hands, which hold histories both old and new, becoming encoded in my body. As hands create and make, this is where I move slowly through a space to reclaim what was taken, to rebuild, where new stories will be told. Each stitch carries remembrance, it is entangled with the women in my family, to my female ancestors, to creating a future. 


My name sets out my responsibilities, to uphold and cherish the craft of the women in my family. Love is held in these hands as they return to the work of elders, of Aaji and Fua. One day my hands will be able to do all the things their hands can do.

Quishile Charan

Quishile Charan is an Indo-Fijian artist and writer living and working in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Charan’s practice focuses on healing through craft that speaks of hands, emotions, spirituality, and of women who resisted indentured labour during colonial Fiji. As a female descendent of Girmit (indentured labour), Charan undertakes her responsibility to build counter-colonial narratives for her female ancestors. Charan's practice looks at the multifarious forms of female resistance against colonialism and patriarchy that is threaded throughout Fiji’s history. These histories have become forgotten or lost under state-sanctioned colonial narratives of indentured labour in Fiji (1879–1920). 

She explores how textile narratives can stitch and thread together active forms of love, care and hope that function as a contemporary form of resistance to the present-day realities of existing under neocolonialism. Charan also seeks to use textile-making to challenge the colonial occupation of knowledge that pertains to the history of women’s bodily and mental experience of indentured labour in Fiji. 

Craft is used to keep these important histories active and within the present for her community. Charan upholds the values and significance of craft as a language, identity and hope through the intergenerational love shared between the artist and the women in her life. Knowledge is kept and stored with each length of fabric created, both a form of visually-expressed oral storytelling and an offering to the girmitiyas, the ancestors of indenture.

About the Work

This work is dedicated to my Aaji and Fua, the two women who blessed me with craft and their love. I will always honour your labour and uphold our practices of craft. 

Quishile/Shila/Sheela: To uphold my Aaji’s craft as a namesake
Quishile Charan, 2020
Video by Matavai Taulangau
Video, 16 mins 51secs