Images of Needlework: The Category of Memory in Aurora Levins Morales’s Remedios

Abstract

The present paper is devoted to the exploration of Puerto Rican female identity through individual and collective memory in Aurora Levins Morales’s prose poetry cycle Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas. To preserve the past against oblivion and restore justice the author intertwines personal accounts and historical records, combines archive documents and oral narratives, highlights verbal and non-verbal texts. The stories of the lost ancestors passed through such acts of creation as weaving, knitting, embroidering and sewing are of special interest in the present paper. These acts of non-verbal creation described in Remedios are associated with social, philosophical and other issues and as a result become memorial representations of women in history and culture.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n9p69