Jazmina Barrera has embroidered with pieces of history, literature, own and others, a novel left with passion and patience.It has, for example, that during World War II, captive women in the field of Changi, SingaporeFor their husbands and children in a military field, each woman had a piece of the fabric where Flores embroidered, their name, words of encouragement and code messages where they were told that they were alive and well.
The narrator, essayist and editor born in Mexico City in 1988, achieved in “Cruz Point” (Almadía/Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, 2021) interwoven with fine plot stories such as that of a group of Chilean women who during thePinochet dictatorship embroidered burlastras - a community fabric - and there they told the stories of their disappeared, denouncing violence and demanding justice.Several of those embroidery left Chile to tell the world the atrocities, the harples were persecuted and harassed.
“There was always, since the most intuitive feminisms of centuries ago, small rebellions through embroidery;This same tool that occurred to suppress women too, and I think that more directly since the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, they were taken by the feminist, starting with the suffragists of Scotland, who recovered the embroidery, whatThey claimed, they began to use it as a fundamental tool for communication, expression and protest, ”says Jazmina Barrera in an interview.
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How did the embroidery of repression to a denunciation tool happen?
It is a tradition that is still alive today more than ever.In Mexico, embroidery is essential for all movements to search for missing persons, it is essential for feminist movements;The marches are full of embroidery, the Internet is full of embroidery with protest phrases, denunciation, sexual phrases of denunciation, this book seeks to be a small tribute to all those women who once sat down to create or say something from the embroidery from the embroidery.
In your case, embroidery as a release?
I was very privileged because the embroidery never imposed me as an obligation, I learned it with my grandmother when I was a child and then at the school where I studied, my computer teacher gave us a embroidery workshop that was where I finished learning, notI went through what thousands of women in history passed, which is forced to learn sewing and embroidery, to spin like a female activity.There were many who took advantage of those tools to subvert that repression and there were others that did not, my grandmother for example never enjoyed embroidering and still did very well and still taught me, but I really hated it.
Photo: Courtesy Almadía.
"Is cross point" a tribute to friendship, women's struggles?
That was also one of the main ideas, exploring how friendships between women, in particular in adolescence,Violence that is going through in that stage of the life of these girls, I think I sought to portray those complicities, those sororities, those resistances and resiliences and also everything else, conflicts, complexities, desires, everything that mixes there.
Embroidery and write to heal that stage of violence and learning?
I think it is the first time I do it so aware and with these new eyes that I have, it is very different to live what I lived and return to it so many years later with the tools I have now, it was an exercise at the same time difficult and painfuland healer and very interesting.
A tapestry novel where embroidery and literature are paired, is there a text by Margo Glantz that the embroidery has constrained women?
I wanted to speak without talking a little about the coincidences between writing and embroidery and looked for fragments of literature where the embroidery appeared, and embroidery or seam manuals where an involuntary literature was made.And in that search of course I gave a wonderful text by Margo Glantz that is a fundamental reference for Mexico, for many young writers, especially those who seek a more experimental writing, more independent of generic canons, I think Margo's workIn the fragment it has been spectacular, and in my personal genealogy it is a fundamental reference.
There are several quotes of writers, does literature also as a release?
Yes, I believe that the same thing happens with embroidery, the story of these three women is written in this history with capital letters of embroidery in so many cultures, in so many times, and are directly linked, the gestures they make, the stitches made by theThey link with women of all time and from all over the world.
Here is the friendship of three friends, one of them dies. The embroidery as healing?
I think there is a very strong link between memory and embroidery because at the time of embroiderNames is a tribute where the body stays and well the fabric has always had these ritual links because the clothes we use are permeated from our essence, the shape of our body, of our smell, it is our second skin, and that is whyThe garments of the people who are no longer are so treasured, there is a whole link, a whole relationship between memory, absence and embroidery that is an unbarkable topic.
The embroidery as a metaphor of life?
I recently read that the first uses that are found to spin are possibly before agriculture, without a doubt to writing and other technologies, it is a technology the yarn, sewing and embroidery, are technologies that have also been fundamental to historyof humanity: the fabric that was made with the thread that women spoke with such patience for hours and hours a day served for the sails of the ships, for the sacks of the flour, for the clothes of the people, it was something thatHe was always on demand and that he took a lot to do a lot, so they were looking for new technologies that accelerated the processes, because they always took a long time, but they are a fundamental part of the history of mankind.
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A memoir detonated by death?
People who accompany us for so long, as in the stories of these girls, witness our life and those shared memories, once one of the people is not, it is necessary many times to document them, write them, leave their markof them, embroider them;That is also one of the important ideas of the book.
Is it a tapestry novel embroidered from the fragment?
One of the main reasons I write is to dialogue with other books, with other ideas, with other people, in that sense literary references I hope they work as bridges towards other books and other ways of thinking and towards other heads.I also believe that this book is enrolled in a current conversation that many contemporary writers participate that has to do with rethinking the world from feminism, from environmental care, from a lot of things that are transforming into the world.
