Looped Holes in My Loom

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

I am knitting a scarf.  It is the first scarf I have ever knit.  I am using a dark green wool that’s very soft.  

 When I was seven, or maybe eight, my grandmother decided to teach me how to knit.  She knits sweaters that are coveted in my family.  Each year she only makes a few, so each person receives a new one only periodically.  There is a dedicated queue; everyone wants one.  Over the years I’ve accrued cardigans, crew-neck, and v-neck sweaters in pink, green, brown, lilac, and beige.   

Although I learned the mechanics of knitting then, some decades ago, I never kept up with it, which is perhaps to be expected when you’re seven- or eight-years old.  Last Christmas, however, I asked for a knitting kit––and a crocheting one, though my grandmother pointedly reminded me that crocheting is very different from knitting––with the intention of relearning, of becoming a knitter myself.  But, before I knew it, the next Christmas had arrived with its polite snows and balcony lights warming dark afternoons, and I had not touched the needles and yarn besides to take them out of the package in which they had come wrapped.  I decided to regift it to myself.  So, I placed the knitting kit under our makeshift tree: a tropical plant with small, battery-operated lights strung around the branches.  

Some days later, as they glared at me from the living room floor, I took up the materials.  When I started, my hands moved in ungainly gestures, dropping needles and missing yarn loops.  Discouragement raged drowsily through my veins as I remembered how, over this summer, I sat beside my grandparents in their living room and watched my grandmother’s hands expertly, rhythmically, interweave needle and yarn.  I admired how deft she was with the instruments, despite her being an octogenarian whose limbs ache with occasional arthritis.  I wondered if I would eventually be tinged with the stiff shakiness were I to continue down a path towards a life of knitting.  Then I dropped a needle and realized that I was getting ahead of myself. 

I resituated the needles in their proper position, fell back into the rhythm. My mind floated to the summer again.  In moments I spent watching her mechanical expertise, I realized that her hands look a lot like mine––or, rather, that mine look like hers. 

A week into my knitting attempts, I texted my grandmother a picture of my first, incredibly mediocre, attempt at a small knit square––a swatch, it’s called.  She told me she was very proud of me.  She wrote, “você foi a única,” “you’re the only one.”  It was then that I properly understood that no other members of my on-the-larger-side family had taken the time to learn her craft, despite the sweaters’ longstanding coveted status.  

I remembered her teaching all my cousins, not just me, the mechanics of knitting those many years ago, and I wondered why no one else had ever taken up the habit. I didn’t ask her what she thought. My grandmother told me that she would teach me new patterns when I visited her again, if I would like that.  I told her I would like that, and started to knit my scarf. 

Over the past two years, I have made an effort to be with my grandparents.  I spend stretches of time with them at their ranch, and I call my grandmother about every two weeks.  In these conversations, as we sit over post-lunch cafézinhos or holding each other aloft on small screens, we discuss our shared love of bossa nova rhythms, Spinozian metaphysics, and reading, and the astonishing realization of how much I am like them falls again and again into my lap like the soft heads of their big, loving dogs.  It returns me to the realization that I have had many a time, that this ‘I’ I understand as myself is merely a conglomeration of known and unknown narratives woven into the fabric of my being––that I am less of an isolated and unique self than I am a soup with a mysterious composition of ‘others’ whose experiences over different, previous periods of time allowed me to be sitting here, meditating with wonder on that fact of existence. Although I feel indebted to this design of recurrence, for these facts of genetics and habit that entrench me as my grandmother’s kin, as her progeny, I have also felt somewhat unsettled by some of it. 

For indeed the nature of these inheritances do not always fall into the realms of merry or benign wonder.  They can be confusing, or devasting.  For instance, William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! is a novel peopled with “baffled outraged garrulous ghosts” that come, or remain, alive in the stories told by Miss Rosa, its primary narrator.  The protagonist-listener, Quentin Compson, sometimes feels like he’s already dead, already become a ghost because he cannot exist in any other world besides one infested by the burdens of the past and teeming with its life, which is, in turn, death of the present.  As Faulkner writes, “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.”  I thought about Faulkner’s words as I watched my own hands grow in their deftness with the objects of craft, the needle and yarn. 

Each night I spent at their ranch, my grandmother invited me to watch the sunset with her.  As we sat side-by-side, often holding hands and watching the fluorescent oranges and pinks dance and chiffon themselves through puffs of clouds, she told me stories of her past, of her family––stories that in my twenty-three years, I had never heard.  The one which worries me the most pertains to my great-great grandfather. He shot the man who was to marry his mother, left him for dead, and escaped to Brazil; I am Brazilian because a man was killed.  I thought about Faulkner’s words, then too. His foolhardy and misguided attempt at salvaging through violence some value lost to time or delusion leaves me feeling like Quentin, living in a world, and inhabiting a self, colonized by mysterious and fearsome ghosts.  And when I try to remind myself that I am not him, I return to my previous premise that ‘I’ am more them than me. 

So, now what, I ask myself. I circle and circle an endless mental round-a-bout as my fingers loop my loom, ceaselessly. Then, I step out of the motion, break the order of circulation, and stand in the middle. I pick up the conclusion in the dead grasses of consciousness that life is just what happens, what accumulates, and that the content and form of that accumulation––despite the far-reaching arms of the past––lie in my hands, which are now knitting, but must stop; I have come to yarn ball’s end. Perhaps I will give my grandmother this scarf, amateur as it may be. Or perhaps, I’ll tug each loop gently out of its straight pattern, letting the loom come undone, and try again tomorrow.