Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress

Victoria Guerrero-Peirano

This book of threads binds the autobiographical and the bureaucratic, the maternal body and the factory floor. In fierce and tender lines, contemporary Peruvian poet Victoria Guerrero-Peirano pierces intergenerational silences with erupting screams. Three scenes probe the precarity of textile lineages tensioned against patriarchal violence and neoliberal industrial orders. “I leave words,” a daughter speaks in the face of her mother’s tactile engrossment, tangling with doubt what it means to “know enough” by a life of letters. Of immigrant seamstresses killed in one of the deadliest industrial disasters in United States history, the poet asks: “can poetry speak?” And a state’s forced sterilizations inhibit women from practicing traditional weaving by kallwa, shaping a verse of testimony. In the face of multiple unfolding violences and ruptures in practices of world-making, the Diary declares, “We seamstresses are timeless.”