MOVEMENT AND MENTAL TRAVEL: REINA MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ’S TEXTILE POETICS

In the special bilingual issue of MaComère, the journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 16, no. 1, 2024-2025, pp. 144–176. Read here (available for free).

Abstract

Cuban poet Reina María Rodríguez writes that “el poema es el lugar de una espera, un sitio hacia donde llegar juntos con otros, con alguien. La búsqueda de un tú” (the poem is the place of a waiting, a place to arrive together with others, with someone. The search for a you). For Rodríguez, poetry offers a space for encounters between the intimate and the social, a space for what she calls viaje mental (“mental travel”)—a way for the lyric subject to defy circumstances of immobility by imagining relations beyond one’s present place and time.

This article begins by analyzing Rodríguez’s understudied “Prendida de alfileres” (Stuck with Pins), an essay written in the early 2000s and inspired by her mother’s garment-making work. Working with the original Spanish and my own English translations, I read the essay as a statement of the author’s poetics that combines the textile with the liquid: the metaphor of the pin and motifs of mending, folding, doubling, and slippery fabrics articulate a poetic vision that shuttles between a desire and a refusal to “pin down” the self. By reading several of Rodríguez’s poems through the lens of her textile poetics, I show how her lyric subject grapples with conflicting desires for mobility, stability, and community, particularly in the wake of increasing emigration from the island from the 1990s to today. Ultimately, I argue that the poetics of the pin—along with themes of emigration, scarcity, and makeshift creative practices—mark a refusal to reproduce a bounded vision of the self and instead construct “drifting subjects” for whom movement rather than stasis forms the connective seam between self and other.