What an exam could look like

Crochet allows you to easily return to a previous round without too much fuss, unlike, perhaps, embroidery

As I was conducting the exam marking the end of the seminar on Gender Equity and Equality in Working Life situations that I delivered at the Free University of Bozen yesterday, I found myself in a conundrum. The classroom we had been assigned was windowless. Well, it had windows, but when you opened them, you were either confronted with a concrete wall or a view of the corridor. In the last two years, the exams always took the form of outdoor picnics with a game. But the last two days it had been raining, not incessantly, but the ground was wet, so this wasn't an option. I knew what we would be doing this year for the exam. I asked all the 23 students who would be present to bring along a crochet needle and a ball of yarn. They would each attempt to make a granny square. But I also wanted us to have music playing in the background. I wanted either the laptop or the phone to function like a jukebox. One of the students suggested we move to their ateliers on the second floor. It was a brilliant idea.

The students organised themselves onto chairs, but soon enough many of them switched to the floor. One of them connected the laptop to the speaker. The functional windows allowed for generous sunlight, which added an element of sparkle to our morning. Only three of the students in the group knew how to crochet. So, it was really a question of beginning from the basics. I told them there was no real goal; they didn't HAVE to make a granny square. They had already ‘passed' the exam. But I wanted them, most of all, to engage with a form of ‘craft'/art-making that had been historically marginalised. All of them were either design or art students. I told them it was shocking that crochet is simply not taught at their university. They had access to a module on 3-D design printing, but a crochet needle was not on the curriculum. I wanted them to think about this omission, and how forms of art-making that have been historically considered part of a female domain, practised by grandmothers, are seen as not valuable enough to be taught or to be considered art.

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.

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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