luna naumer mateos

A LOOM OF ONE’S OWN

I’m learning from womxn all the time. I look at older womxn and the womxn who passed away and I am eager to learn from them, to ask the right questions and to not repeat the same mistakes. We should continue to reopen their books, reread the words and create a contemporary narrative of it, relevant to our own. I want to focus on Virginia Woolf ’s essay A Room of One’s Own, which has been of great influence for every wave of feminism that followed it; dealing with the urgency of womxn claiming spaces.
In A Room of One’s Own Virginia takes us from one space to the other, into a room, into a bookshelf, into a book, into a story... and then back out. It feels like a conversation with Virginia Woolf in different times and spaces, from the personal to the historical. She tells what it was like for her to be a writer in the 1920’s. The privileges that she held to be able to be one and the context that brought her there. She repeats that because she has five hundred pounds a year for life (actually mentioned twelve times throughout the essay) she is able to write, think, and give us these words. She says that it’s as important to have this money as it is to have a room of one’s own. If she was here with me, and we were in a conversation I would have the need to tell her about what it is like nowadays to be a womxn. Patriarchy is still dominating, but we keep fighting. So many authors and writers have amplified the womxn’s writing. We had and have Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Judith Butler, Sarah Ahmed, Virginie Despentes, Andrea Long Chu and so many others who have empowered not only white women but also black, brown, lesbian, queer, transgender and the vast demographies with in the realm of womxn and femmes. We conversed with them too, they occupied spaces, not only rooms but bookstores, auditoriums and the streets. Our space is not only a private room, we are not only writing and speaking but we are also heard (sometimes). The horizon is broadening, yet the most marginalised of us are invisible. We (femmes and womxn) lead the revolutions, fight for our rights and freedom and actively change the world. Yet still we are being abused, raped, murdered and we are still silenced. There are so many voices that need to be heard. As Virginia proposes in her essay; if Shakespeare’s imaginative sister had too been able to write plays and to work at a theatre, if we had been heard in the 16th century, maybe patriarchy would not be so dominant and womxn would already be freed .The fight for freedom could be over. If Woolf hadn’t been able to write in 1929, would we be able to write today?
Virginia talks about the importance of a private room for writing. Looking at my own practice, weaving, I see the importance of a private space for both crafts. Thus, wanting to reclaim my space, I recently built my own loom. This construction created an urgency in me to compare the importance of the possession of our tools. It’s a frame wherein I can speak through my own language. This loom is my room. Whatever is framed inside is mine.
I think of how Virginia talked about women writing novels or fiction at first because poetry and play was too hardened and set for them to conquer that territory first. She writes: “both play and poetry had been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses” and “novel was young enough to be soft in her hands, perhaps”. I can see how, when fighting for freedom of expression, they needed to find their ways. When fighting for liberation there are many possibilities but I would like to focus on two methods. Either we take what is given to us (novel writing/weaving) and empower ourselves through it or we try to reshape what is constructed by the master’s tools (play and poetry/painting) and try to dissemble it. The examples are not arbitrary, they are for me two different forms of work that correlate in my experience with the writings from Virginia. Though, contrary to Virginia Woolf ’s statement about poetry being shaped by men, Audre Lorde defends poetry as being the least demanding art form and even challenges Woolf. Quoting her from her essay Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference “[poetry] it’s the major voice of poor, working class, and coloured women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter and plenty of time”. Here the two differ, but this is what I meant when learning from the older womxn. Lorde read Virginia too, and she adapted her essay. She doesn’t need a room anymore, her space is not a room but the in-between spaces. The train rides, the breaks in the shifts, the moments where she is her own agent. “They might allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support” Again womxn speak about spaces. A continuous conversation about the importance of owning our own space to achieve freedom.
To use one’s own tools. To take them and make them my own, learn the shapes and the gaps. Not to learn from men, since they don’t know the struggle and they have their own needs, but from womxn. The knowledge comes from the silenced womxn of the past, so how do we learn to make this if they haven’t been allowed to speak? The movements are already whispered to our bones. Our feminine bodies know. We are we born with the instinct, the ability to perform a behaviour when they are exposed to a proper stimulus. Is that how my body understood the need of weaving? Was weaving the stimulus, or was it the loom? The same way trauma and oppression is inherited also are our tools for liberation. Tools that haven’t changed in millennia.
When I look at the remains of prehistoric societies that wove, they already knew what to do. And it hasn’t changed. This knowledge is timeless, the tradition is timeless.
Looking at the loom I built I can imagine how little it must have changed from a loom made at home 60, 600 or 6000 years ago. We still need to stretch a warp, create shafts, pass the weft through the warp, press them together... What is the difference between all these womxn weaving through thousands of years? The situation and the context, for sure, but not the technique. Sometimes I think weaving could be the signifying to define humanity. We weave textiles to hold, to cover, to warm up, to carry or to wear.
I can see the parallel lines through Virginia Woolf as a writer and me as a weaver when we work in our mediums. Writing brings, as weaving, freedom composed through lines. The importance not of having specifically a room (or a loom) of one’s own but one’s own tools. Tools of independence created by ourselves and our ancestors to speak through our own language. There is no way we can speak our struggle with the mediums presented by patriarchy. We need to use our systems to connect, our language to express and our tools to produce.