from Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress

Victoria Guerrero Peirano

I leave words  I forget
I thread needles red black blue fuchsia green
Tired of Public Competitions for Teaching Positions
I began to embroider each garment in my wardrobe
I arranged my doctoral diplomas and stowed them near the bookshelf
So they wouldn’t feel inferior
CV back to “0”
I file it
bury it
The market wants professionals at record speed
Titles and master’s degrees,
etc. in bulk
But we seamstresses are timeless




Poetry of my hands
Poetry of my eyes
I let go of “fine arts” and “belles lettres”
At last I realized they were out of my reach
I coined a new motto in silvery cut-out letters
on a black poster
DEATH
TO
HYGIENIC                     POETS 

And for now I don’t know what else to do
 



The bourgeoisie of the third world are ferocious murderers
And when they fall they take refuge in a lowly seamstress
Little woman of the house
Who only knows to sew and read
Read and sew




On the bus three women are embroidering
Two crochet pastillas
One knits
Nobody appreciates these arts anymore




My mother stitched all night
Her hands were her eyes
Did her eyes look at us?
She’s condemned to do things with her hands
Sew and sew
Embroider and embroider
Paint and grieve
Everything she couldn’t do
When death was only a word




I’ve often thought of jumping out the window
But then I get to writing or cutting paper and forget about it

translated from the Spanish by Anastatia Spicer and Honora Spicer

Read the original in Spanish

Listen to the original read by the poet:

This translation from Victoria Guerrero’s Diario de una costurera proletaria engages with the touch of globalized, capitalist forces on quotidian life and the body. The original book, handmade and covered in a thread-like combination of reproduced and hand-drawn images, was printed in a first edition of 250 copies by Máquina Purísima (2018). This book of threads begins with the first-person section excerpted here and gives way to a second section in the voices of factory workers participating in the 1909 textile strike in New York. That strike preceded the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The majority of these textile workers were immigrant women; 123 died in the fire, forced to jump from the windows of the burning factory. The speaker’s position as estranged from hand knowledge in the first section is part of the same process of industrialization and globalization of the textile industry, which exports textile knowledge out of the home. 

Throughout the collection are tensile relationships between individual actions or behaviors, and the systems of academic institutionalization, industrial production, and capitalism that govern them. This is exemplified in the textile project—a system composed of repeated actions—and became apparent in the process of translation, itself a negotiation between linguistic instances and systems. As a seamstress, Anastatia Spicer advocated that translation be an act of creating shelter for specific textile words becoming less common. Translating during the spring of 2020, we came to see literary translation as itself a home economy: a process of discerning the conditions under which these words would labor as we brought them home.

Victoria Guerrero Peirano is a poet, teacher, and feminist activist with a Ph.D. in literature and master’s in gender studies. Recent publications include Y la muerte no tendrá dominio (FCE, 2019), and the short novel Un golpe de dados (novelita sentimental pequeño-burguesa) (Trascender, 2017; Ceques Editores, 2015; and Kodama Cartonera, 2014). Her poetry collections include En un mundo de abdicaciones (FCE, 2016); the bilingual chapbook And the Owners of the World No Longer Fear Us (translated by Anna Rosenwong, Cardboard House Press -drone- series, 2016); a duet with the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, Zurita + Guerrero (Animal Fund, 2014); and a compilation of poetry, Documentos de Barbarie (poetry 2002–2012) (Parachute, 2013), which won the Premio a la Producción Artística PUCP (ProART) in 2015. She currently teaches at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

Anastatia Spicer is a handweaver, seamstress, and writer. She holds a B.A. in critical social inquiry and visual art from Hampshire College (2017) with study at the Penland School of Craft in the textile arts program. Her writing has been published in the Barnard Journal of Art Criticism and her woven textiles have been exhibited at the A.P.E. Gallery and Hampshire College.

Honora Spicer is a poet and educator living in El Paso, TX. She studied history at Harvard University (M.A., 2015) and literature at Oxford University (B.A., 2013). An experiential educator, she teaches place-based history at El Paso Community College. Her writing on borderlands has appeared in The Rumpus and local publications. This translation was a collaboration with her sister.