Juan Villoro
In December 2020, I spoke with Irene Vallejo in a virtual meeting organized by the Foundation for Mexican Letters. Suggestively, the Aragonese philologist took up a major theme of her book El infinito en un junco (The infinite in a reed): the decisive and nevertheless overlooked presence of women in writing.
It is often overlooked that the first signed text is due to a woman: Enheduanna, an Akkadian priestess who lived 4,300 years ago and composed hymns inspired by the goddess Inanna. Her literary exercise is inseparable from the woman’s body, since she associates creation with procreation: a birth of ideas, a “giving birth.”
Vallejo cited other examples of writers who marked a society as misogynistic as that of classical Greece: the poet Safo or Aspasia, the ghostwriter of the speeches of her husband, the famous speaker Pericles.
Although women’s contribution has been relegated, if not completely silenced, an indestructible remnant of that legacy lives on with us. My sister Carmen, who alternates poetry with psychoanalysis, wrote a beautiful essay with the title “There was a voice,” which alludes to the canonical beginning of fairy tales (“Once upon a time …”), but also, and more significantly, to the first person who tells us stories and allows us to associate them with affection. That voice is usually that of the grandmother or mother, a woman.
In the origins of the most diverse societies, women narrated while sewing. When contemplating the dazzling indigenous textiles, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún asks his readers in 16th century Spanish: “Open your eyes wide, see how they make a delicate way of texting and carving, and making paintings on the fabrics.” The double art of weaving and counting was a feminine heritage.
In her detailed study of the relationship between spinning and the peoples of Mesoamerica, María Oliva Méndez González, from the University of Costa Rica, points out that the backstrap loom is symbolically related to childbirth. Like Enheduanna’s religious poetry, this craft depends on the woman’s body. The loom is tied to a pole or a “mother tree” with a rope that refers to the umbilical cord.
From the Odyssey to The Spinners of the Moon, there has been no shortage of female characters whose destiny is defined by weaving. Penelope weaves and unweaves her cloth while waiting for Odysseus (or Ulysses), and Ariadna gives a thread to Theseus so that he does not lose his way in the labyrinth where he will have to kill the minotaur.
Textiles integrate a complex code of meanings. In its threads, the peoples’ memory, identity, customs, tastes, and living conditions are knotted. In the essay “El telar de cintura, inmanencia itinerante de la memoria” (“The backstrap loom, itinerant immanence of memory”), Méndez González studies the discourses of fabrics. It is not by chance that in Maya, the huipil is also called ilb’al, “pictorial manuscript” or “instrument to see.”
In its condensation of meanings, indigenous clothing is a moving narrative. His possible messages puzzled the conquerors. Consequently, one of the first ordinances of the Colony was to prohibit the brocade technique to force the indigenous population to dress with innocuous simplicity.
But an invisible thread forever linked the women to language and the skills they acquired while weaving. The oral accounts were forged not only to mitigate the effort of spinning but to imitate it. The person or the many people we know under the name “Homer” was a rhapsodist, a “weaver,” someone who threaded legends and popular stories.
When the writing settled, he could not do without the resources learned at the spinning wheel. Literature derives from the teachings of those who transformed a skein into a colorful drawing. The word “text” comes from the Latin textus, and textere means “to weave” or “to braid.”
The text is a fabric. There we find the thread of the speech, the plot knot, the warp of the plot, the ends that are tied, the threading or embroidery of adverbs and adjectives, the strings, the tangles, and, of course, the outcome.
Silenced or set aside as authors, women defined the uses of literary language. In every text, you can see the shadow hands of the weavers who turned the threads into stories.