Weaving a Story of Friendship, Stitch by Stitch
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By Jude Burke-Lewis
“The stitches are figures, crosses that seem to be separate but are in fact a chain and a single thread. One thing.” This is how Mila, the narrator of Cross-Stitch, the debut novel by Mexican author Jazmina Barrera, describes the embroidery stitch of that name. But the same can also be said of the three friends at the heart of this tender novel, and of the novel itself; it is both an exploration of female friendship and a meditation on what it means to be a woman.
The novel opens with a death: Mila’s childhood friend Citlali has drowned in the sea off the coast of Senegal, and it may or may not have been intentional. Mila receives the news via Facebook message from Citlali’s aunt, and it triggers a visceral reaction; while her husband and young daughter play in the other room, Mila sits on her bed “hugging my towel, trying to cry silently,” while her “head hurt like I’d been punched in the face.” In the days that follow, weighed down by grief and the memories of their shared friendship, Mila agrees to help organize a memorial for Citlali. While looking for her address book, she uncovers a journal from a trip that she, Citlali, and another close friend, Dalia, took to Europe when they were nineteen, which prompts her to reflect on their friendship.
The trio first met in middle school, in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City. Initially just Mila and Citlali are friends; sitting next to each other in English lessons, they bond over a packet of condoms falling out of a teacher’s backpack, which has them in fits of laughter. Soon they’re spending lunchtimes together, then almost every day after school, progressing to sleepovers where they “eat cream-filled Miguelito pastries” and “listen to albums, discussing and memorizing the lyrics.”
Dalia joins the pair later, in high school, after they all take part in the same community literacy project. Their friendship develops with an intensity that is unique to youth, despite their differences. Mila is a self-described “misfit”—the “nerdiest” person in her class—while Dalia is the “beautiful, elite student and sports star” whom “everyone fell in love with.” Citlali, meanwhile, defies categorization: with her “raucous laugh,” she “was the one who pulled hilarious faces, did great impersonations, and told marvelous gags,” but underneath the humor she is steeped in sadness. She is too thin—the sign of a possible eating disorder—and there are hints that her verbally aggressive father is sexually abusing her: “He’d shout at her, call her stupid, neurotic, a waste of space, and in the next moment be tender—too tender, I thought, disturbingly tender.”
By their final year of high school, the three friends have become inseparable. Mila observes “[we] had our own way of saying things, spoke with the same lexicon and the same intonation; it was the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing telepathy.” They share secrets, jealousies, notes in class, parties, books they’ve read, and a love of embroidery. But once they’re through with school, their paths start to diverge. While Mila and Dalia go to college, Citlali “didn’t want to be cooped up in lecture theaters for four years.” Instead, she goes to work in Europe, where the other two join her midway through their first year at college. This trip is where the cracks in their friendship start to reveal themselves: Citlali has already physically and geographically separated herself from the other two, and in the final days of the trip, Mila and Dalia argue.
This argument is a foreshadowing of the separation that will follow. By the time of Citlali’s death, Mila is a mother and published writer, Dalia is a feminist academic living in Spain, and Citlali is working for an environmental organization. It has been some time, possibly years, since the three friends have all met up. At their last such meeting, Citlali says she is “growing more and more like myself and less like you every day,” and as such “it’s inevitable that the equilateral triangle of our friendship becomes more isosceles.” It’s telling that after Citlali dies, Mila has to explain to her husband who she was.
On its own, the story of Mila, Citlali, and Dalia’s friendship would make for an engaging enough read. But what gives it greater depth and meaning is the innovative structure that Barrera employs to tell this story. Interwoven among Mila’s narrative are short, factual, but wildly diverse snippets relating to embroidery. Mila has recently published a book on embroidery and the silence of women, and these excerpts may have been taken from that book, although it’s never made clear in the novel. They touch on embroidery’s history, uses, and traditions, as well as the ways it has been used for dissent, subversion, and protest, and to create myths and identity, among other subjects. Together these fragments create a picture of an art form that, far from being meekly submissive, is imbued with a uniquely feminine strength, one that underpins the novel.
In this context, the friends’ shared love of embroidery gains greater significance. It is what binds them together as friends, while also being one of the ways they express their different personalities. Mila and Dalia are “obsessed with mimesis,” with Mila “experimenting with different fonts for writing on clothes” and Dalia “copying increasingly sophisticated patterns.” In contrast, Citlali’s designs are very different and individual to her; she sews “without doing any preliminary sketch on the fabric,” using a variety of different stitches and techniques, including some that she herself invents.
It also shows how their story forms part of a wider narrative of womanhood and identity: one of sexism and oppression, but also of community and defiance. As young women, Mila, Dalia, and Citlali experience violence and sexual assault from the men around them. Dalia is raped at a party, and a man exposes himself to the three of them on the Paris metro, while their schoolteachers and college professors often engage in predatory behavior, particularly toward Dalia. But as adults, both Dalia and Mila are working to challenge the kind of behavior they accepted as teenagers: Dalia, by helping to get two male teachers at her university fired for sexual abuse, and Mila, less overtly, through her book.
Citlali, on the other hand, is never able to overcome the trauma in her life. She was, in Dalia’s words, “so deeply wounded, like a jug full of holes. When we managed to plug one, the water poured out from another.” After her death, the two remaining friends do what Citlali was unable to do in life: together they complete a piece of her unfinished embroidery. By ending the novel in this way, Barrera shows that sometimes the most powerful weapon a woman can wield is a thread and needle.
Jude Burke-Lewis is originally from the UK and now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband and two cats.
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