I don’t know where to begin my recounting of how wonderful the atmosphere was. I’d told the students to bring something to eat, some of them had baked cupcakes, some brought hummus and bread, some watermelon, some got treats from the bakery. They went out and got themselves coffee and soon enough the classroom was filled with the sound of them gossiping and chatting and teaching each other and failing and trying again and again and unspooling the yarn and deciding their needle wasn’t the right size for the yarn. By the second hour, many of them had made great strides! They had gotten further than I had when I had taught myself crochet using YouTube videos during the first lockdown in India. I saw two of my students who have been diagnosed with ADHD feeling a little overwhelmed by their failures, so I took a moment, asked for the attention of the whole class and seized the opportunity to tell them a little anecdote about ‘Penelope Time’.

This was the term I had come up with once for the sensation of flow one enters into while doing crochet. I had written about it in an essay about the power of mistakes while learning a new language. I had begun by recounting how I was un-entangling my crochet doily because I had made an error in the pattern. Crochet allows for this, it allows you to easily return to a previous round without too much fuss, unlike, perhaps, embroidery. Later I would learn about the first essay in a book by an Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero titled ‘In Spite of Plato’ in which she examines marginal characters from Greek literature, speculatively investing them with feminist agency. It is a fascinating essay because she positions Penelope, the wife of Odysseus as inhabiting the realm of the domestic which is considered in opposition to the world of the outdoors, which is where the action of the Odyssey takes place. Cavarero narrows in on Penelope’s subversive act of buying time by spending her day making a shroud on the loom and then undoing all the hours of this labour at night so that the finished product remains elusive. This is because she had announced she would only choose a suitor when she had finished making this funerary shroud. Cavarero argues that as long as Penelope is doing and undoing the shroud at the loom, she belongs solely to herself. She inhabits time. This is her act of resistance against the patriarchy.

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I offered my students the opportunity to leave after the second hour (the exam was scheduled for between 8 am and 11 am). But at 11.15 am, I still had more than half the class in the room, one of them so intensely engaged, she refused to leave until she had finished. ‘We need to tell the other professors that this is what an exam can look like,’ said one of the students. All of them paused to thank me on their way out and I felt emotional because I don’t know yet if I will be considered to teach again next year, which would make this my last exam. If that is the case, I feel quite proud of my swan song.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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