What is the telephone code for Kabul?

Sometime ago I practiced immigration law. One of my roles was to sit in on interviews with asylum seekers as the Home Office representative, through an interpreter questioned them about the stories they had given in their initial applications for political asylum.

I remember well one man, a small, weather beaten man with hands wrinkled from hard manual work who claimed to be a hill-farming Pashtun from a remote village in Afghanistan. His story related to fear of persecution from the Taliban. The problem was that his tribal area spans the border with Pakistan and the Home Office were suspicious that he was actually an economic migrant just pretending to be Afghan and trying to take advantage of a political situation.

So how do you establish the true identity of such a man in those circumstances? On that day the fresh faced twenty-something civil servant tapped his pen on the desk, leaned forward and, somewhat smugly asked,

"What is the telephone code for Kabul?"

Supposedly this was something every Afghan and no rehearsed Pakistani would know. Unless of course this Afghan lived in a village with no electricity and had never used a telephone.

So, when I began to think about this theme I started with the thought that part of our identity is about where we live and also about what we know about where we live. I also thought about how you prove your identity - here we show bank statements, utility bills and so on, but how do you become identified in a community where none of that matters? I imagine it is much more about kinship and individual characteristics.

So, my quilt features photocopied pages from my journal - a documents which details my more private identity - rolled up and encased in an outer shell of my public identity documents - photocopies of sections of bank and credit card statements etc. They are painted with Stewart Gill Byzantium paints - mostly because they are pretty and I wanted to play with them but also because they were bought for me by my husband but chosen and ordered by my Best Quilting Buddy -and so represent the kinship element of identity. I then signed them.

The resulting beads are distributed between segments of strips taken from a street map of the area I live in. Woven around the beads is a fabric strip printed with phone codes for significant places and people in my life.

The quilt itself is about law, travel and textile art - three activities which themselves form a large part of my self-identity

Oh and by the way, if you call someone in Kabul the number will start with 93 and then one of the numbers fron 20 - 24.