EMBROIDERING IN THE MESHES OF POETRY: A POETICS OF SPINNING IN JUSSARA SALAZAR

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of the book Fia, by the contemporary Brazilian author Jussara Salazar. Published in 2016, the book is dedicated to the spinners of Gravatá do Gomes, in Pernambuco, and how they pass traditions among themselves and across generations through the telling/spinning of stories. Following the texts of Georges Didi-Huberman (2017; 2019; 2024), we will address the relationships between memory, writing, and desire with the act of embroidery. Furthermore, we will rely on Teresa Cerdeira’s (2000) article to understand embroidery and its reverse side in a multi-meaning dimension. We will also analyze, based on the reading of the poems, how the act of embroidering is a form of writing, survival, and weaving of poetic text. Finally, I intend to demonstrate how there is a metapoetic character in the labor of weaving in the meshes of the literary text. Crossed by fables, prayers, tales, desires, and people, Fia opens the horizons of readers and critics to a silenced story, to a gap in the historiography of Brazil: that of the spinners from the village of Poção, in the Agreste region of Pernambuco. There is a moving desire in the writer to unveil another Brazil, often erased and silenced, and bring it to light through poetic words. Jussara Salazar's writing thus emerges as a balm against a policy of extermination of the cultural memory of a people.