The first matter

NARRATIVE, TENEMOS LAS MÁQUINAS

How and where did literature begin? To this ambitious question that many have answered by recovering oral traditions and epic poetry, Cynthia Edul finds it in women and weaving. Weaving an alternative tradition through historical yet poetic research, a material plot emerges for the shaping of our imagination: «We are woven of the same cloth as dreams,» to quote Shakespeare.
The research is interwoven in this book with the family plot itself: the lineage of Syrian immigrants who made America with a small textile emporium, struggling against the onslaught of the ever oscillating Argentine economy. From that web arise questions that always come back: Is it possible to break with the legacy? How to build a path of one's own? Where do the traces of what we were endure?
Thread, knot, fiber, plot. In this book the chapters become scraps with which Edul assembles a blanket to protect herself (and us) from the elements.
«Sewing, embroidering, cooking, cleaning, how many metaphorical ways to say writing». Tamara Kamenszain