Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine: Writing with Hélène Cixous 3031400518, 9783031400513

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Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine Writing with Hélène Cixous Edited by Elizabeth Mackinlay · Renée Mickelburgh

Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine

Elizabeth Mackinlay  •  Renée Mickelburgh Editors

Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine Writing with Hélène Cixous

Editors Elizabeth Mackinlay Faculty of Education Southern Cross University Bilinga, QLD, Australia

Renée Mickelburgh School of Communication and Arts The University of Queensland St Lucia, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-40050-6    ISBN 978-3-031-40051-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Hélène Cixous

Pronouns and Perspectives in (Another) Time of Plague: A Preface to Cixous and Critical Autoethnography

Pronouns matter these days. Subjectivity (still) matters. Poetry matters when fake news and truth-claims no longer inspire or comfort. It seems that nothing is reliable, or trustworthy, or solid, in this post-­ not-­really-post COVID era, this far-right resurgent quagmire, this big-­ dick-­bigger-bombs sequel between so-called east and west, democracy and everything else, capitalist industrial complex porn that passes for news these days. And in those desperately needed and increasingly infrequent moments of despair-defying hope, just three days ago Neslihan Kilic, a 29-year-old mother of two, was removed from the rubble of a building in Kahramanmaras, Turkey, after being trapped for 258 hours (12 days), after the worst earthquake in modern times, killing more than 40,000. Most of the survivors who were saved after the first 24 hours were rescued by the sounds of their voices. These are, undoubtedly, unsettling times. As Hélène Cixous and the authors of this volume remind us, voices matter. Elizabeth (Liz) Mackinlay and Renée Mickelburgh have put together a remarkable compendium of stirring and creative essays in the qualitative tradition of critical autoethnography and the artistic, philosophic, and literary tradition of Hélène Cixous. The editors and authors of this volume think with Cixous on the power and possibility of speaking in the first person and importantly the ongoing disruptive potential of troubling (and reclaiming) the “I.” Can the vii

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PRONOUNS AND PERSPECTIVES IN (ANOTHER) TIME OF PLAGUE: A PREFACE…

authorial “I” be not only conveyed in first person, second person, as a collective we? To what extent do orientations like “I” and écriture féminine reify persistent binaries, or perhaps help to unpick pronouns, subjectivity, and gender politics. Such questions contributed to Cixous’ groundbreaking body of work, but they also underscore the contemporary field of critical autoethnography (Boylorn and Orbe 2020; Holman Jones 2016; Holman Jones and Harris 2018) and form the beating heart of this book. The Critical Autoethnography (CAE) conference has been running since 2015 and was established in order to foreground the groundbreaking work being done by globally south, Pasifika, Australian, New Zealand, and Asian scholars (Iosefo et al., 2020). Its Facebook community group currently has over 3600 members with a lively international discussion board, sharing of emerging and established scholarship, and calls for new work. Since its inception, the conference has put inclusion and dialogue out front: we always try to invite one international keynote and one local. We keep the attendance small (usually around 40–50) in order to maintain a single stream of presentations, so no one misses anything. We feature ‘making sessions’ in which participants don’t just present, but co-create, working together in order to prioritise interaction, collaboration, and creativity. We are committed to anti-racist, anti-oppressive and First Nations scholarship and perspectives. The conference is always free or low-fee for all (usually about $50AUD). The first-day workshops that now form an important part of the three-­ day conferences are a cherished feature of CAE. Liz Mackinlay and Briony Lipton conducted the first one (as described by Liz in her introduction), and it was critical-autoethnography-in-motion. Colourful, passionate, poetic, political, smart, heartful, and interactive: we laughed, we cried, we wrote, we bonded. As a community, we decided this kind of immersive, embodied work with theorists was exactly what we needed. Liz has taken their workshop forward in her own way—allowing it to form the foundations of yet another smart and heartful feminist initiative—the DRAW (Departing Radically from Academic Writing) sessions at her institution, but attended by many from all over the world. These iterations and reverberations help us all stay afloat in our sometimes-heartless academic institutions, but just as importantly, they continue to expand what constitutes art, poetry, academic work, and knowledge creation. We thank Liz and our other CAE community members for this inspirational work, and we see its lifeblood, tendrils, warp, and weft in these pages.

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Cixous was critical of Freud’s bio-essentialising the differences between “girls” and “boys” and their psychological development when few others were. Yet her most famous concept and practice (with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva), écriture féminine, still ascribed to a “feminine” and “womanly” perspective, albeit one that was (and continues to be) marginalised in intellectual, academic, and artistic milieux. Yet what can be considered the feminine, then, now? Are there still “feminine” ways of writing, thinking, being? As with the concept of culture—that elusive subject of ethnography and anthropology—and its representations, can gender even be codified these days, or more directly, to what purpose? The intersections between these practices of écriture féminine and autoethnography are exactly the focus of this incisive volume. Ranging widely among these diverse chapters, authors help expand the fields of both Cixousian scholarship and as the now-well-established field of critical autoethnography. Most importantly, they both call for a revitalisation of the ongoing questions surrounding voice, subjecthood, and power in scholarship and in our troubled world. This book is timely, dynamic, and inspiring. And that is something we all need now, more than ever. Melbourne, VIC, Australia February 2023

Daniel X. Harris

References Boylorn, Robyn M., and Mark P. Orbe (Eds.). (2020). Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. Holman Jones, Stacy, and Anne Harris. (2018). Queering Autoethnography. New York: Routledge. Holman Jones, Stacy. (2016). “Living Bodies of Thought: The ‘Critical’ in Critical Autoethnography.” Qualitative Inquiry 22, no. 4: 228–237 Iosefo, Fetaui, Stacy Holman Jones, and Anne Harris. (Eds.). (2020). Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography. London: Routledge.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Jagera people and the Turrbal people as the Traditional Custodians of Meanjin (Brisbane), the unceded lands on which we live and work, and where this book was brought to life. This always was, always will be Jagera and Turrbal country. We are grateful to the many academic communities and colleagues that have nurtured our thinking and writing with Hélène Cixous. Stacy Holman Jones, Daniel X. Harris and the loving Critical Autoethnography sisters and brothers readily welcomed this imaginative and intellectual work into their heads, hearts and home, because that’s what this kind of very kind family does. We particularly want to pay homage to Briony Lipton, a Cixousian in-sister through and through whose love for her, and autoethnography, planted the seed from which this flower grew. Four years is a long time to wait for publication, and to all the wonderful poet-thinkers and critical autoethnographers whose work appears in this book, we thank you for your unwavering commitment, patience and yearning to see your words written with love for Hélène Cixous out and about in the world. To our editor Robin James, we are so very grateful for your belief in the interdisciplinary work this writing might do in the world as it shakes and shifts its way between philosophy, feminism, Gender Studies and autoethnography—we think Hélène Cixous would quite like that we have not answered the “Who are I?” question in this sense, but rather given it permission to grow its own roots. This book would not have been possible without the love and support of our families. Renée would like to thank her family and friends who are xi

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steadfast in their support of her writing and unwavering in their belief in her. It means the world. Liz would like to thank her boys Macsen and Hamish, and her partner Darren, who never cease to be curious about the words she is writing and readily share her love of writing by showing her theirs.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Digging, Unburying and Going to Writing School  1 Elizabeth Mackinlay Part I Writing is Learning to Die: Introducing the “School of the Dead”  15 2 Writing  My Self Back Together 17 Christina McMellon 3 The  School of the Dead and My Mother: A Story of Hunger 25 Joanne Yoo 4 Finding  a Language of My Own: Journeying to the School of the Dead with Cixous 39 Dewi Andriani 5 The  Narcissist Never Leaves, Only Dies: An Autoethnographic Account Inspired by Cixous 53 Vickie Howard

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Part II Writing Giving in to Itself: Introducing the “School of Dreams”  63 6 Your  Dreambody Must Be Heard: Writing Trauma in the School of Dreams 65 Laura Hartnell 7 The  Fatal Blow: “Who Are I?” A Feminist Autoethnographer’s Encounter with Cixous 79 Karen Madden 8 Writing  that Chews Itself: Roots and the Ragged Vitality of Teeth 91 Elizabeth Mackinlay Part III Borders—Birds, Women and Writing Gather: Introducing the “School of Roots” 103 9 L  earning Cixous’ Écriture Féminine Through the Flow of Words and Blood105 Rebecca Ream 10 Metis  and Cixous: Cunning Resistance, Bodily Intelligence and Allies115 Marilyn Metta 11 Denying  the Penis: Bringing Women to Writing [With/in and] Through Doctoral Supervision135 Gail Crimmins and Susanne Oliver Armstrong 12 Writing  Australian Gardens to Cross Borders Between the Online and Offline Worlds151 Renée Mickelburgh

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13 Inter-View161 Elizabeth Mackinlay and Renée Mickelburgh Index169

List of Contributors

Dewi Andriani  The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Susanne  Oliver  Armstrong University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, QLD, Australia Gail Crimmins  University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, QLD, Australia Daniel X. Harris  RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Laura Hartnell  Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Vickie  Howard The University of Hull, Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, UK Elizabeth Mackinlay  Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University, Bilinga, QLD, Australia Karen Madden  The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Christina McMellon  Edinburgh, UK Marilyn Metta  Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia Renée Mickelburgh  School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia Rebecca Ream  Christchurch, New Zealand Joanne Yoo  University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia xvii

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4

The first of my mother’s paintings My mother’s self-portrait My brother and me, forever immortalised in my mother’s painting Rembrandt, Bathsheba at Her Bath, 1654. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Source (Cixous 1998, 4) A couple of hours before full moon. Taken from Christchurch New Zealand. 8 November 2022. Source: Jillian Scammel Body, artwork by author (previously published in Metta 2013, 498) Living with Shadows, image taken from work-in-progress showing of Metis, June 2018 Being Swallowed, image taken from work-in-progress showing of Metis, June 2018 Mêtis, image taken from Creative Development, June 2016

28 30 36 107 113 122 129 130 132

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Digging, Unburying and Going to Writing School Elizabeth Mackinlay

Introduction On 12 May 2015, I was in Brisbane, the Brisbane I had not yet arrived at even though I had blown in here from afar almost 20 years ago. Sitting at my desk, I shrieked as a fiendish gust whipped through the study window and ruthlessly strewed dust and debris all over the words I had written. Looking at the layers of dirt that now buried words I had been labouring over for weeks, I threw my hands across my face and sobbed. This is what my life, my writing life, had become—stratified rubbish. It smelt of language not my own, it reeked of logic I could not follow, it ponged of disembodied prose, and in the process, my words and my worlds had begun to stink just like it. When I had stopped crying, leaden feet dragged me to the bathroom to wash my face, and in between splashes of water, I caught a glimpse of a woman staring back at me from inside the mirror— her eyes red and wild, white streaks staining her cheeks, strands of long

E. Mackinlay (*) Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University, Bilinga, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_1

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hair matted, and hidden inside deep creases all manner of shadows. I stared; I didn’t want to, for she was monstrous. My “I’s” caught unawares tried to look away, but she held my gaze, daring me to reach towards her. Without warning, she smiled, and I saw her clearly then for what she was: a beautiful, deadly, and stormy, laughing Medusa. I knew with every beat of my broken heart that I must become with her if I were to make sense of the mess I was living as a white settler tied up and tongue tied by my own coloniality, as ethnographer and educator on the edge of ennui, as a mother whose arms were wrapped tightly around her sons to protect them from the violence which had invaded their home, and as a woman about to let go of life. “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) was only the beginning; Hélène Cixous’ writing has become the wise, loving and radical work that sits in-sisterhood and sustains my own as feminist autoethnographer. In the introduction to this collection, my writing moves to share with readers the ways in which Cixous’ écriture feminine and Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing has moved others working across a range of disciplines in the field of critical autoethnography, to “Write!” letting no one hold them back. Together, we offer this edited collection as a way into conversation with Hélène Cixous as autoethnographers writing on the critical edge so that you might do the same.

Who are I? Hélène Cixous1 Who can say who she is, how many she is, which I is the most of her I’s?2 For her, I is always in difference. Watching her thinking poet writing as it does the same. A biography that brushes alongside her living-speaking-thinkingdreaming.3 Born Jewish French German Spanish on 5 June in Oran, Algeria in 1937. Child of Eve and Georges. 1  In writing an introduction to the poet-thinker Hélène Cixous, I have taken poetic licence from her to bring together pieces of her writing to share a snapshot of the many “I’s” of her. In conversation with Mireille Calle-Gruber, Cixous states loudly and clearly, “What is most true is poetic. What is most true is naked life. I can only attain this mode of seeing with the aid of  poetic writing…And while looking very very closely, I  copy” (1997, 3). This “poetic” reading of Cixous’ using her own words is intended as a Cixousian tribute to Hélène Cixous. 2  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xvi. 3  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xviii.

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In her writing a double childhood unfolds.4 Migrations and memories from the Occident and the Orient, from the North and South.5 There are two camps for the whole of time.6 Her passporosity. A woman’s life into the bargain.7 Married and divorced. Mother of Anne-Emmanuelle, Stéphane and Pierre-François. Lessons and learnings at the Lycée of Arcachon. Laying down and leading in Vincennes the Université de Paris VIII. Chair of English Literature and the Centre for Feminine Studies. Four or five forms of written expression—poetic fiction, chamber theatre or theatre on a world scale, criticism, essays—without counting the notebooks.8 Writing working philosophically in poetic form on the mysteries of subjectivity,9 on present passing.10 Life-long love affairs with James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jean Genet, Rainer Maria Rilke,11 a list that goes on; and yet, absent of the Law. Loving the “you ares” of the world as equals.12 It was always the men, where were the women? Phallogocentric logic be damned. Of course, she must and does in-sister with Derrida. What a feminist laugh she has! In the company of the French three and écriture feminine. Feminine writing that is not obliged to reproduce the system.13 Following the tracks of a courageous woman writing, Clarice Lispector, the one she respects the most in the entire world.14

 Cixous in Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 181.  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xv. 6  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xvi. 7  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xvi. 8  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xvi. 9  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xvi. 10  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xxi. 11  Sellers in Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xxx. 12  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, 136. 13  Cixous, The Newly Born Woman, 72. 14  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, 135. 4 5

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A woman’s-way of working, touching the living heart of things, being touched, going to live in the very close.15 Such a labour of love consists of leaving the other outside; love is not having Writing the body, for a woman’s body must be heard.16 Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.17 Breathing hard, inhaling loss and death, exhaling birth and life. She entered into writing when her father died.18 She felt she was going to cry dreadfully but she didn’t have time. Writing: a way of leaving no space for death, of pushing back forgetfulness, of never letting oneself be surprised by the abyss.19 This is the enigma: softness is born from strength. And now, who is to be born?20 She arrives, vibrant over and over again.21 Language: to live language, inhabit language, what luck and what a venture.22 The fastest and most efficient vehicle for thought: it may be winged, galloping but never mastering or ordering.23 Instead, breaking up the “truth” with laughter.24 A new insurgent writing25 can never be theorised, enclosed or coded.26 Words—what chance and what energy!27 They have to be written to the quick, on the now, Live28

 Cixous, Coming to Writing, 65.  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, 880. 17  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, 880. 18  Suleiman, “Writing Past”, viii. 19  Cixous, Coming to Writing, 3. 20  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, 49. 21  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, 882. 22  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xix. 23  Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, xxi. 24  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, 888. 25  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, 880. 26  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, 882. 27  Cixous, “From Her Presence”, 195. 28  Cixous, “From Her Presence”, 194. 15 16

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Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: The Story that Comes Before Dear Hélène, I am very honoured and humbled to be writing the introduction to this edited collection of critical autoethnography pieces written in relationality with you, and most especially, with the writing lessons shared in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I have taken the liberty of going back in time behind the story that comes before this publication to describe it—to the annual Wellek Library Lecture Series29 hosted by the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California Irvine in 1990. I can only imagine how it must have felt to be invited to present the 10th, knowing that only outstanding international scholars are asked to perform on this prestigious intellectual stage. Across a series of three lectures, presenters are required to develop and defend a critical position, and explicitly relate it to the contemporary theoretical scene. The lecture series—then as it is now—is promoted as an “opportunity for contemporary critics to exchange ideas, present innovative research”,30 which is then published by Columbia University Press. I imagine you had seen the list of past presenters, all of them men, and many of these critical theorists you knew well—Jacques Derrida gave his set Memoires: For Paul de Man in 1984, Jean-François Lyotard presented “Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event” in 1986, and three lectures under the title “Musical Elaborations” were given by Edward Said in 1989.31 I imagine now the moment when the first woman was invited to present her work in this context—writer and professor at the University of Paris VIII Hélène Cixous; that woman was you. 29  Named after the literature theorist René Wellek, a Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale who insisted that literary criticism required a thorough examination of the oeuvre of all those he studied, bringing them into conversation with the literary works discussed, and putting forth his own critical responses to both as clearly and fairly as possible (http://www. the-rathouse.com/ReneWellek.html). 30  h t t p s : / / c t a . l i b . u c i . e d u / c r i t i c a l - t h e o r y - u c - i r v i n e / r e n e - w e l l e k - l i b r a r y lecturers-1981-present. 31  The Critical Theory Institute at the University of California Irvine has a comprehensive archive of material related to the Wellek Library Lecture Series, available online https://cta. lib.uci.edu/wellek-lectures/rene-wellek-lecture-series.

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You called your lecture series “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing”. Lecture one, “The Hour of the Worst”,32 was delivered on Tuesday 24 April at 2:30 pm, lecture two, “The School of Dreams”, on Wednesday 25 April at 2:00 pm, and lecture three, “The School of Roots”, on 26 April at 2:00 pm.33 Attendees were recommended to read Family Ties by Clarice Lispector, in particular the story “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor”, which they could purchase from the University of California Irvine Clone Factory,34 and an invitation to a reception for Professor Helene Cixous after the first lecture was extended to members of the audience. “A Checklist of Writings by and about Helene Cixous: A Selected Bibliography” was compiled by librarian Eddie Yeghiayan35 and made available to those interested in reviewing Cixous’ already extensive body of work by and about her. The “checklist” dates from 1964 to 1990 and includes 260 references of your writings and over 80 pages of citations to writings which engage with and critique your work. At the time of its composition, this “checklist” represented 26 years of writing, Hélène, and roughly equates to the same number of years that I have been thinking and writing as a feminist academic. I can’t help but think and wonder, how did it feel walking into the conference room of Emerald Bay “A” to deliver your first lecture? Were you nervous, did you feel like an imposter (as so many of us do), or did this “checklist” fill you with confidence—did you need a sense of confidence with such an extensive checklist? Did you review previous presenters’ lectures to see if your style of scholarship would meet the standard expected? If you had, I am positive you would have noticed the abstract, third-person and disembodied academic prose of the men who had come 32  In the subsequent publication Three Steps, Cixous revised the title of the first lecture in the series, explaining, on this first day, “I had announced that we would go to the School of the Worst. This was inaccurate: I dared not in my letter that on the first day we would go to the dead” (1993, 7). Perhaps Cixous too felt that there is a limit to the danger that one is prepared to face in writing as the “first woman” to do anything—but in the end, to danger in writing she would go for her entire life, for who could say no to her? 33  There is some variation in the dates given for Cixous’ lectures—an editorial note at the beginning of Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing asserts they were presented in May 1990, the flyer advertising Cixous’ lecture series included in the archival material related to her lectures lists the dates as 24, 25 and 26 April, and on the second page of Three Steps, Cixous writes, “I speak to you today (today April 24, 1990, today June 24, 1990)”. 34  The Clone Factory was the University of California Irvine printer and publishing centre from 1974 to 2001 (Jackson and Engler 2017, 8). 35  https://www.lib.uci.edu/sites/all/docs/wellek/docs/Wellek1990HeleneCixous.pdf.

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before you, and perhaps hesitated, second guessing your first-person and poetic writing choices. But only for a moment. I imagine you taking a deep breath, Hélène, whispering urgently to yourself, “‘Burst!’—‘You may speak!’” (1987, 450), before releasing your words like a bird and letting them take flight36—“Let us go to the school of writing”, you open the first lecture, “where we’ll spend three days initiating ourselves in the strange science of writing, which is a science of farewells. Of reunitings. I will begin with: This is what writing is” (1993, 2). I cannot find any record in the archives regarding who introduced you at the first, but it is well documented that your dear friend Jacques Derrida Cixous’ declared in his opening to the second lecture that “Hélène Cixous is today, in my view, the greatest writer in what I will call my language, the French language if you like. And I am weighing my words as I say that. For a great writer must be poet-thinker, very much a poet and a very thinking poet”.37 I wonder whether Derrida was present the day before and was swept away by the words you shared—if he was there, how could he not have been? Three Steps is a then-performance-now-text kind of book which lives and breathes through the belief that “What is most true [in writing] is poetic” (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997, 2) and shares your insights on writing, as a writer on writing, and as a writing always already in relation with other writers. Three Steps is a book like no other “how-to-write” book I have ever read, for your thinking heart bleeds onto every page, unabashed and uncensored as you explore the entangled, evanescent and exhilarating relationship between the “I-s” and the “I-s” writing. The “School of the Dead” explicitly descends into discussion of the relationship between death and writing. Drawing upon your experience of writing your first book, which “rose from [your] father’s tomb” (1993, 11), you suggest that “we don’t know we are alive as long as we haven’t encountered death” (1993, 10) and as writers we must learn how to die in order to see our subjectivities as subjects—thinking and wondering in relationality with— so that our writing might live. For you, writing towards the last hour sends us in the direction of the truth, a dangerous move, but one we must at least try. The “School of the Dead” is one I return to often, for as 36  This sentiment is drawn from words Hélène Cixous shared in dialogue with Jacques Derrida in 2004. See Jacques Derrida, Jacques, Hélène Cixous, Alietta Armel and Ashley Thomson 2006, 2. 37  See the blurb inset on the back of the book cover of Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.

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terrifying as it is, doing this work of “digging and unburying” is a long apprenticeship. Concluding that “writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable” (1993, 53), you then invite us to approach the next school, the one nearest the “School of the Dead”, the “School of Dreams”. Dreams, dream writing, writing of dreams have always been your beloved teachers, theatres where you are able to fly beyond all the borders that binary logics have built to contain us. Never mind that dreams have a bad reputation in the academic world; in the “School of Dreams” you celebrate the power they hold to take us through an open door into the place of the unconscious—it is here that writing springs from and returns. In the final part, the “School of Roots”, you ask us to take courage and descend further, crossing all manner of lines and Laws, towards the depths where the joy of the imund can be found. You ask us to deconstruct the social constructions that force us to write, the social constructions of ourselves which are the forces that drive us to write, and, with fortitude born of love and joy, write the “book that takes life and language by the roots” (1993, 156). I do not know where I would be if Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing had not found its way through you to life, if this book had not found its way to mine. It is a rare gift to be taken behind the scenes of the crime, a book which reveals the ways in which a writer might willingly put themselves to death, into dreams, by way of roots, in order for themselves and their writing to live and love otherwise in the world. “From the heart where passions rise to the fingertips that hear the body thinking: this is where the Book (Alive)-to-Live (le livre Vivre) springs from…”38 you write on the very last page, and so it is here too, in this edited collection—permit me the liberty of paraphrasing you—that you have taken us, so many of us, on board writing with you, and here we are, our writing running fast as we learn thinkingpoetically from and with you the “strange science of writing”. With love itself in a letterbox, Liz

Let Us Go to the School of Writing Critical Autoethnography with Cixous This edited collection originates from a theory writing workshop delivered by Dr Briony Lipton and me on 10 July 2019 at the 2019 Critical Autoethnography Conference held at RMIT and the State Library of  Cixous, Three Steps, 156.

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Victoria, Melbourne. The workshop was something that Briony and I had been thinking and wondering about for a long time—we had been writing together autoethnographically as feminist academics for a long time using the work of Hélène Cixous as our inspiration,39 completely captivated by her personal-is-political-is-philosophical-poetics, and thought it was now time to share our love for her words and writing with others. As critical autoethnographers, we could see and feel the reciprocal and inter-­ animating relationship of critical autoethnography with Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine (“feminine writing”). The concept of écriture feminine emerged predominantly from the writings of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva to deconstruct the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text. In her renowned essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976), Cixous clearly sets out the central purpose of écriture feminine: “I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self, must write about women and bring women to writing” (1976, 875). Critical autoethnography is an embodied reflexive movement, a spiral “circling, pulling, and beginning again” (Adams and Holman-Jones 2011, 108). Similarly, Cixous employs a circular form and sensual, metaphorically illustrated narrative to create cohesion between her ideas about the need for writers, particularly women, to refuse the reproduction of androcentric knowledge and “write herself” (Cixous 1976), to write themselves. The interplay between critical autoethnography and Cixous’ écriture feminine is one where we seek to “oppose norms, break loose from rigid concepts, at our own risk and peril, to arrive at a new freedom for our thoughts” (Cixous 1991, 43) and encourage a new approach to writing. In a resistant way, Cixousian critical autoethnography insists then that this is what writing will do: writing must no longer be determined by the past and instead must seek to break up, to destroy, and to foresee the unseeable (1976, 875). The workshop invited participants to come to school with us and Hélène Cixous, most significantly through her work Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, to join together in a poetic, personal and political exploration of the “strange science of writing” (Cixous 1993, 3). On the walls and the windows Briony and I had printed in large text our favourite quotes from each School in Three Steps for others to engage, embody and

 See Lipton and Mackinlay (2017, 2020); Mackinlay and Lipton (2020).

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emotion within their thinking and writing. Following Cixous, the workshop was presented in steps with writing moments in between. Step One. The Life Worlds of Helene Cixous Themes: Her subjectivities as “in-between” and multiple; meditations on death; intimacies between women, birth, and the body; gender, femininity, and writing; the concept of écriture feminine; and, the ethics of loving, giving, and writing. Writing moment one: Who are I? You to Cixous Choose one paragraph from the writing you brought with you which speaks to you, one which you love. Choose one of the quotes from the Cixousian word gallery which speaks to both you and this piece of “love writing”. Write about becoming in-relationality with Cixous as a writer through these two passages. Step Two. Entering the School of the Dead Themes: Learning to die in writing in order to live; searching for the truth by experiencing the depths of the world and descending to the bottom to unbury life; learning to give oneself to writing; learning to “unlie” in writing; learning not to be afraid to lose in order to not. Writing moment two: Writing is learning to die Which parts of yourself need to die in order that you might live? Take the passage you chose from the writing you brought with you and “put it to death”. Rewrite this passage in conversation with the concept of “writing is learning to die”. Step Three. Flying through the School of Dreams Themes: What do/can dreams teach us about writing? Writing is not arriving, writing wandering, dreaming, travelling on foot with the body with the self towards the dark. Writing moment three: Dream writing Choose a line or fragment from your last writing moment about writing death. Use this as a stimulus for a stream of consciousness piece about breath, birth, body and life―about dreaming a writer into becoming. Step Four. The Earth of Writing in the School of Roots Themes: The necessity of digging, unburying, unearthing selves, sense-­ abilities, sentences from the depths; doing the humble work of writing in order to break up everything you have ever known; flying the coop in language and life. Writing moment four: Returning to write Reflect on the writing you have done in the workshop so far. Take one line from each writing piece to create a four-line Cixousian poetics about your work, your life, your world as a critical autoethnographer. If you feel comfortable, write it on a piece of butcher’s paper and share it in our Cixousian word gallery.

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When the lights went out later that afternoon, those present at the workshop and members of the international Facebook critical autoethnography community were then invited to expand their writing into an abstract for publication in this edited collection, by responding explicitly to the creative and critical writing provocations that Cixous offers, especially in relation to the thinking and wondering she presents in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Three Steps is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving reflection on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for writing: the School of the Dead—the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; the School of Dreams—the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and the School of Roots—the importance of depth in the “nether realms” in all aspects of writing. We invite chapters which speak to one or more of the following provocations inspired by this work: In what ways can Cixous’ work address our need for loss and reparation in writing critical autoethnography? How does Cixous’ writing introduce us to “make our body speak” through concepts of birth and the body in, through and of critical autoethnography? How might we write critical autoethnography as écriture feminine? How might writing in this way recast and reform prevailing orders of domination and oppression? How might Cixous’ writing around the ethics of loving and giving translate into response-able and non-violent forms of critical autoethnography in relation to otherness and difference?

Writing in response then ran fast towards us as we sprinted through the open doors of each School, and the collective running created the structure of this book. Cixous is waiting on the threshold, and I share her reflections on the contents of each School as the section begins. In Chap. 2 of Part I, The School of the Dead, Christina McMellon remembers her first meeting with Hélène Cixous as an academic in the field of public mental health. Surrounded by and slowly being drowned in a sea of white male philosophers and professionals, she writes on the ways in which Cixous’ work reached out and enabled writing to provide safe passage back to herself. McMellon’s work is followed by the writing of Joanne Yoo, who in Chap. 3 considers the impact of her mother, and her mother’s early life of hunger,

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on her writing and what happens when we search hungrily for the “I” in our personal and academic writing. In Chap. 4, Dewi Andriani considers the implications of writing grief in another language, the difficulties of writing in a language that you do not consider your own, and how Cixous has helped her embody such writing. In Chap. 5, Vickie Howard considers the difficulties of writing about abuse that cannot be seen or understood. Through considering the complexities of narcissistic abuse through the School of the Dead and the use of poetic writing, Howard can explore her own experience while also being able to choose her words care-fully. We then move on to chapters in the School of Dreams. In Chap. 6, Laura Hartnell reminds us in that Cixousian way that “writing is dreaming [and] dreaming is writing”. For Hartnell writing about dreaming is also the writing of past trauma; the strange fragmentation of dreams parallels the fractured memories and sensations of trauma. In Chap. 7, Karen Madden then returns the reader back to the conference room where she considers, as Cixous urged her to, “Who are I?” She considers this question as a “becoming” feminist, academic and autoethnographic writer. The loss of teeth and a mother’s slow memory decline concludes this section with me in Chap. 8 writing with Cixous to better understand “the jaws of this disease” and writing which “gives in and chews on it to explore the embodied, affective, and relational space between suffering and joy”. The final part of this book brings us to the School of Roots. In Chap. 9, Rebecca Ream writes about how she came to better understand Cixous’ écriture feminine as critical autoethnography through the flow of words and blood. Ream considers the way écriture feminine and menstruation forces her to confront her feelings about her own womanhood and what it means, for her, to be a woman. Marylin Metta takes Cixous to the stage in Chap. 10 by considering the way Cixous has influenced her autoethnographical writings for developing a script for a theatre production: Metis. She describes how she and her collaborators wrote about dreams and tapped into “the language of the body and the subconscious”. In Chap. 11 Gail Crimmins and Susanne Oliver Armstrong come together to write about their supervisor―student companionship and the way Cixousian writing has helped turn this relationship into a collaborative and affective experience, rather one that is hierarchical. And finally, in Chap. 12, Renée Mickelburgh wanders from the garden path in order to follow a desire line to Cixous and the School of Roots in order to become a humble and better writer. The book ends with an “interview” between myself and Renee to inspire others to engage with Cixous by entering into the school of writing offered by Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.

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Let us Now Begin Let us then go to the “School of [critical autoethnographic] writing” (Cixous 1993, 3) with the work of Hélène Cixous. Let us have the courage, the desire to “climb up toward the bottom” (1993, 6), to speak in a different way and through different veins of language, theory and experience. Let us write ourselves and our social bodies, for they too must be heard. Let us give ourselves to a writing approach that reveals the tensions, the paradoxes, the pains and the pleasures of writing with critical autoethnography in the contemporary university. Let us share what we have learned from Cixous, what we have learned to love about writing critical autoethnography from Cixous. Let us take Helene Cixous’ advice that reading and writing are not separate (1993, 21) and allow ourselves to enter into a “nondefensive, nonresisting relationship” with this text—to give ourselves permission to be “carried by it”, to pause and get out of it for a while, incessantly shuttling back and forth and trying “all possible relations” with it (1990, 3). Let us embrace this text as a provocation to escape—to leave the room and jump over the wall (Cixous 1993, 21) word by word, sentence by sentence, and fly with this text as it “flees, paragraph by paragraph” to, between, with and through the “immediate experiences of our lives” (Cixous 1993, 22–23).

References Cixous, Hélène. 1986. The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1987. “From Her Presence through Writing”, translated by Deborah Carpenter. The Literary Review 30, no. 3: 445–453. Cixous, Hélène. 1990. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1991. “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. 1976. “The laugh of the Medusa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4: 875–893. Cixous, Hélène, and Michelle Calle-Gruber, Mireille. 1997. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge. Jackson, Laura, and Samantha Engler. 2017. Guide to the University Archives Vertical Files Collection AS.163. Irvine: The UCI Libraries. http://pdf.oac. cdlib.org/pdf/uci/uarc/as163.pdf

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Lipton, Briony, and Elizabeth Mackinlay. 2017. We Only Talk Feminist Here: Feminist Academics, Voice And Agency In The Neo-Liberal University (Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Lipton, Briony, and Elizabeth Mackinlay. 2020. “Before the Door: Storying the Material, Affective and Ethical Dimensions of Inclusion for Women Academics.” Continuum, 34, no. 6: 914–922. Mackinlay, Elizabeth, and Briony Lipton. 2020. “The Doorway Effect: Stories of Feminist Activism and Survival in the Neoliberal University.” Emotion, Space and Society, 35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100675 Suleiman, Susan. 1991. “Writing Past the Wall, or the Passion According to H. C.” In Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, edited by Deborah Jensen, vii-xxii. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Elizabeth Mackinlay  is a professor at Southern Cross University’s Faculty of Education. Her research revolves around gender, decoloniality and education, focusing on feminism and higher education, consent education in universities, and decoloniality in the academy. She has a diverse teaching background in arts education, Indigenous Studies, Gender Studies and educational research methods, and currently teaches within the field of educational research methods.

PART I

Writing is Learning to Die: Introducing the “School of the Dead” Elizabeth Mackinlay

Standing on the edge, Cixous looked down at a decaying body of words lying at the bottom of the grave. Hundreds and hundreds of phrases and paragraphs that had struggled to breathe, and whereupon finding themselves unable to hear or speak the texts that gave their breath life, had willingly laid their bodies down and died. The executioner had gone too far and there was no axe for them or their writer to wield in reply. “Perhaps if they had frequented the ladder of writing offered here”, Cixous murmured, “‘travelling along the steps, the moments’,1 descending towards what I call the truth, ‘totally down below and a long way off’ to begin the work of trying to ‘unlie’2; perhaps, because after all, that is what writing wants”. Cixous then bent down, picked up and gently lowered the ladder into the grave. “To begin writing (living), we must have death. I like the dead, they are the doorkeepers who while closing one side ‘give’ way to the other”, she said, turning and placing one foot carefully on the top rung. “We must also have the courage, the desire, the approach to go to the door”.3 A hostile smile ran fleetingly across her face as she pointed below her. “Everything happens to me in a cemetery.4 Down there, in the direction of the dark—it is terrifying, dangerous even. But how will we know as  Cixous, Three Steps, 6.  Cixous, Three Steps, 36. 3  Cixous, Three Steps, 10. 4  Cixous, Three Steps, 9. 1 2

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writers who we are and what we have to give until we are and have nothing at all?” She nodded to herself, resolved, and closed her eyes. “Writing is learning to die. It’s learning not to be afraid”.5 Cixous then laid herself down, so close, beside the body of dead words. She breathed softly in and out, slowly giving way to writing as a gift from death to live at the extremity of life. References  Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New  York: Columbia University Press.

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 Cixous, Three Steps, 10.

CHAPTER 2

Writing My Self Back Together Christina McMellon

Opening A writing came with an angel’s footsteps,—when I was so far from myself, alone at the extremity of my finite being (Cixous 1994, 85).

I met Hélène in the first year of my academic journey and the same year that the medical profession first acknowledged that my mind was broken. I was stagnating in a degree of old male philosophers. I was taking medication that muted both the screaming in my head and any pleasure left in my body. I was desperate in my paralysis. I grabbed at her hand, never knowing whether she would pull me out or pull me in. At that time, I promised myself. I will make a space for angels to play. A place that is empty/full, vibrant/serene. They will dance and twirl and sing and talk and listen.

C. McMellon (*) Edinburgh, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_2

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They will laugh. I will make a space where angels chase soap bubbles and juggle with fire. I will make a space where I will be free to be me. (Christina aged 22)

But I got scared that I couldn’t create that space for me in the world. I ran back to the relative (un)safety of white men and career ladders and medication. I turned away from the angels. I divided my life neatly into my writing and my self. Until I couldn’t. Through the intervening (26) years I have written myself into a (no) woman’s land. There I am. (Where am I?) My work (and by false proxy my writing) has become a life support system that keeps me breathing long enough to maintain the illusion of a life. I am an academic. Junior in status, precarious in contract, senior in age. Still taking the pills each night before (trying to) sleep. My work is meaningful, but I remain muted; so privileged to be breathing in interesting air that I refuse to accept that it is suffocating me. (Where am I? Where am I? Where am I?) The writing that pays my mortgage is fuelled by caffeine and edited to remove all but the faintest residue of me. How differently I have written this chapter: I write my dreams, my meditations, my walks, my showers, my tears. Notebook at the ready to half-record glimpses of ideas and fast-­ moving truths caught out of the corner of my eye. I coax this writing out of my body. Sometimes I court the words, I play, I flirt. Sometimes I tear them out of myself with violent tears. Here (now, in this moment of presence) I bring my writing back to my self. Now (why now?) I am returning to Hélène, reaching out for her fingertips in the knowledge that she will be my wild guide back to the mindbody that I have circled suspiciously, longingly, but never fully realised. I will not turn my face away from the insistent inner whisper that refuses to be pinned down yet never goes away. I will not ignore that the demons berating me feed upon the distractions that I use to drown them out. I will not silence the voices in my head with randomised controlled trials and peer-reviewed papers and academic citizenship. I will not wave with a fake smile on my face, pretending that the me I have become is ok, when maybe that me (not me) wants to drown. With soft ferocity I am peeling back the layers of fear-imposed busy-­ ness. I know that there (not so deep, the deepest depths and all the layers

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in between) I’ll find voices saying things that I don’t want to hear. I am ready. Am I ready? For a long time, I thought (because people who know better confidently told me) that all my suffering rose from my father’s death. But that isn’t true. My suffering came from losing (repressing, brutally removing) my voice. My words. Rather than being directed out into the world, my words move inside me. I am variously strangled, angered, suffocated, exhausted, bludgeoned, worn down by the relentless barrage of words that I direct at myself. Layers upon layers upon layers. Layers of words to hide words. I lost my words before Dad died. I remember (aged five or thereabouts) swinging on the swing in our back garden, tears rolling down my face because no one at school would speak to me because I spoke to no one. I swung on that swing and as my toes scuffed the earth backwards and forwards, I spoke quietly to myself, explaining that they were right not to speak to me because I was boring and stupid and no fun to be with. Yet even though things were not perfect before it happened, it is Dad’s loss that has shaped and forever continues to shape my life. Hélène says that she “wouldn’t have had death if my father had lived. I have written this several times: he gave me death. To start with”. Hélène says this on page 12 of her book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing and when I was 12, my dad gave me death. He also gave me a heady mix of socialism, philosophical angst and unfulfilled potential. Did I start talking inside my head when I stopped talking out loud? (Did I ever talk out loud?) Or is my constant internal shouting at myself a way of trying to reach Dad? Am I angry at him for leaving me here, forever dealing with my 12-year-old interpretation of his shit? I have to believe that I am not (essentially) wordless. How can anyone ever tell a story when there are so many possible directions to take? I am writing these (my) words in Cuba. My way to maintain a modicum of authenticity in a crazy world is to travel. To pack only the things that I (think I) need and leave “normal” life for a few weeks or months at a time to “buy” myself (even my thinking space is commodified)…to buy myself what? To buy myself back. Can I use this space to write my self? First, I need to remember my self. In Havana I wander. Self-consciously I slow down and listen to my body, and she tells me multiple interwoven truths that reflect the layers of

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colourful stories around me. Layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. Communism layered on top of colonialism. The colours are allowed to fade and the stone crumbles, and life goes on. Capitalism is slowly layering over communism. I listen to my body in parallel to the politics. I walk where I want to walk, even when I have no idea where that leads. I (try to) focus on my breathing (which keeps me alive―do I want to live?). Layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. Where I want to walk is hidden underneath seemingly never-ending stories of who I think I might be and who I want to be. In Havana, revolution has entered my bloodstream via the mosquito bites. It keeps me awake at night. I have clawed at my skin, marvelling at how thin it is as I see blood bubbling through the surface like tiny ruby pearls. Revolution enters me and leaves me. What am I learning and what have I learned? A Cuban man tells me that revolution is the only important thing. He says that the meaning of being a revolutionary is not being beholden to anyone; to choose one’s own way even if that is more difficult than following the way set out by others. (We discuss Scottish Independence. He tells me that revolution requires death. My revolution? Surely not my revolution.) Revolution demands death. Am I prepared for death? No. (And yes.) My veins itch. I scratch until my skin is raw and the blood is, once again, close to the surface. Any moment now it will break through and prove that I am alive and that I am dying. I can’t stop scratching. (Don’t) open the vein. To think myself alive requires me to focus upon getting lost. To write myself alive reminds me that I am dying. He tells me that revolution doesn’t equal happiness. He is a computer scientist and expresses his frustration that revolution means that he can’t own the latest smartphone. In the middle of the night, I reach for my smartphone to distract myself from my poisonous, itching body. As an older teenager I went a few times with my family to a folk music festival that I loved. I remember rare moments on those idealised weekends when I knew who I was (even if I couldn’t yet voice it). And yet my overwhelming memory of that festival is the dread of it being over. I couldn’t allow myself to enjoy it because I didn’t know if I could bear the pain of losing it. When I first met Hélène, I was searching. I was searching for a me that I wasn’t ready to be. And in the searching, I was missing the me that I was.

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I say this as a 45-year-old woman looking back to her 19-year-old self, and mourning the fun that the young woman could’ve had if only she’d had the awareness to realise she was having it. I was studying dead white male philosophers in a university populated with people whose lives I perceived to be very different to my own. I felt different. I was coming to an understanding that not everyone had the shit that was going on in my head. Now I am (slowly, tentatively, defensively) coming to an understanding that maybe they do. (Or maybe I don’t.) Death was presented to me when I was 12, and I searched for a way to escape it. No one helped me to realise that escape was impossible. Aged 19, I searched for my individuality and caught glimpses (touched fingertips) but gave up and succumbed to my averageness. Aged 45 … I search for what? How can I say what I am searching for without falling into a mire of self-absorption? Another Cuban man tells me that searching means something different in his culture. We search for ways to get money around the system. “We pretend to work because they pretend to pay us”, he says. (My) system pretends to pay me, but does it take away more that is of value than it gives me? Am I pretending to work but not actually doing (the) work? What if the work is refusing to search? I am tired of feeling inferior because I don’t have the perfect family, perfectly laughing around a perfectly laden table. I am tired of knowing that nobody’s family is perfect and envying them anyway. I am tired of being given advice about how I could get a full-time academic job and explaining that I don’t want a full-time academic job and then going home and crying because even though I really don’t want a full-time academic job I wish I could believe that I could get one. I am tired of tying myself up in knots thinking about whether what I am feeling is normal (or abnormal) and about which one means that I have less value as a human. I’m tired of being the person in the yoga class who can’t hold downward-­ facing dog for more than 30 seconds. I’m tired of the weight of the certainty that I’ll always be that person. I’m tired of taking on every interesting bit of work that I’m offered in the hope that this offer is the one where I start believing that I’m good at my job. I’m tired of denying the evidence in front of my face: I keep getting offered work and therefore other people must think I’m good at my work.

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I’m tired of the disconnect between my knowing, my believing, my thinking and my feeling. I’m tired of trying so hard to make each person love me just a little bit more even though I don’t believe I deserve their love. What if I just stopped? (I’m tired of thinking about just stopping.) If I stopped, I’d have to hear the persistent voice whispering with quiet determination: “Now it is time to die”. What if I stopped ignoring that voice?

Closing Reading is a provocation, a rebellion (Cixous 1993, 21).

Writing is a murder. In finding my words I must kill others. In writing this sentence I am picking words to live and slaying others through my choices. I cannot write every word for every person. I cannot be all words for all (wo)men. Some writing sucks us out of our words; daily I am sucked out and (meagre) financial gain is injected into them to make them plump again. These are good words, but they are not my words. I continue to write them, not only because I need to pay the mortgage but because I believe they have value in the world. Other people’s words are precious. There is a never-ending privilege in living with other people’s stories and shaping them (plump and ripe) to share them with the world. But they are not my story, not my words. My words are my (ever-fluid) truths. I hide (“my truth”) in quote marks and parentheses because I am scared of the death that it heralds and because I don’t know how to represent its moment-by-moment transformation. “My truth” reacts, in this moment, to my fingers on my keyboard and, in that moment, to your body as you connect to my experience or as you turn away calling pretentious bullshit. If reading is a rebellion, writing my truth is my revolution. Postscript As I edit this piece I am in lockdown in Edinburgh. I am sitting on the sofa in my tiny two-roomed flat where I currently work from home and conduct my entire life. I live alone and I only see people on computer screens.

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The me that meandered through Havana has been forcibly physically stilled. Death feels close by. The daily radio statistics weave a narrative that I rely upon and yet do not entirely trust. Friends around the world are dying…of Covid-19 and also of the normal illnesses that continue to kill people, even in this virus-obsessed world. It is the surreal new normal. (Nothing is normal.) I knew from the beginning that I am scared of being alone and that the voices would be loud. Except that I seem not to be so scared anymore. The voices often grumble. Sometimes they shout. But sometimes they are quiet. Then in one dark moment, I felt more anger than I remember feeling before. The anger travelled through my body escaping at my fingertips where it needed expression so desperately that it begged me to punch myself square in the face. As tears rolled down my face and I noisily gasped for breath, I forcibly held my two hands together, refusing to allow this misdirection of the existential anger towards my own body. I realise that in many of these lockdown moments I feel alive. I have, so far, survived the fear, the anger, the boredom. I resisted the idea of self-­ improvement and realised that my life improved in the act of resisting. I write. I paint. (I cannot paint.) I cook. I watch shit TV. I resign myself to the mess of daily living in a small space. And then I beat myself up about unwashed dishes and then I resign myself again. I feel sorry for myself when I think of other people locked down with children and lovers and gardens and dogs. I remind myself that there will be a time in the future when I can get a lover or a garden or a dog. Although jealous of those who do, I’m relieved I don’t have children. Mostly I care about the dog. And in the meantime, the mortgage has to be paid. The work must be done and Covid-19 provides rich fodder for the social scientist. Spring is in full flow, and I saw a robin on Easter Sunday as children rolled eggs on Carlton Hill. A friend drops beer off at my doorstep and I marvel that she remembers what I like to drink. My mum calls to tell me that she is thinking of me. I take part in online writing groups and make unhealthy food choices and donate to causes for people in need of financial support. All these things are my truth. When faced with death I don’t want to die right now. Although I reserve the right to die at a time of my choosing. I don’t want my mum to

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die even though I know she must. Just because it is a truism doesn’t mean it isn’t my truth. Covid-19 has made a space for me to sit with the layers. In the absence of other people, I notice things about Christina that surprise me. I start to make choices about what I want to take forward into the new post-Covid world. I have no idea what that world will be like. I have no idea whether the possibilities of post-lockdown will seduce me and I will run back into old ways of doing things, but I start to cautiously voice my intentions to welcome some aspects of this unwelcome space into my life. Maybe this is my revolution. People will die. I will die. And, in the meantime, I will keep noticing who I am today and imperfectly reorienting my life towards myself. Revolution lies not only in writing my truth, but in noticing that my truth changes and circles and comes back to the beginning and moves on.

References Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1994. The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers. London: Routledge. Christina McMellon is a social researcher who specialises in participatory research with young people. Christina genuinely loves her work and is passionate about the values of bringing a multiplicity of authentic voices, ideas and experiences into all stages of the research process. And, sometimes she craves space to focus on her own voice.

CHAPTER 3

The School of the Dead and My Mother: A Story of Hunger Joanne Yoo

…Before the Workshop Two weeks before our creative writing workshop. There are only a couple of months left in the year and I am trying to finalise the details for a workshop on writing creatively in the academy. My colleagues and I had organised this event to create a community of creative writers, but we were struggling to garner interest. I find myself walking down the corridors, yet again, extending last-minute personal invitations. To recruit participants for this workshop, I wander the halls like a roving salesperson, trying to overturn the belief that pleasurable and subjective has no place in academia. In my wanderings, I continue confronting this belief that academic writing needs to be difficult, or even painful, to hold value. Finally, one person confides that she wishes her academic writing would be more joyful in her remaining years of academic work. The creative forms of writing that she reads for pleasure bear little resemblance to her academic writing.

J. Yoo (*) University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_3

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She would like to write for pleasure. Something for her children to remember her by. On the eve of her career, she declares that she is ready to try something different. Two months before. I receive an expression of interest from Leah, a non-­ tenured academic in our faculty. Leah is a prolific writer and has written a couple of unpublished books. She writes beautifully but struggles to adopt a traditional academic writing style. She has yet to find permanent employment and believes that increasing her publication output will improve her prospects. Leah is a single mother of a young child and works as a part-­ time tutor; she sustains four part-time jobs to keep afloat. Although she has recently completed her PhD and aspires for tenure, there are very few vacant continuing positions available. “Keeping her foot in the door” requires tutoring at two different higher education institutions, consulting on the odd morning, and then commuting to her main workplace for the remainder of the week. Leah is excited about the creative writing workshop, and hopes that it will open a new world of possibility. The morning of. Leah wakes up in a panic. She is disorientated and cannot remember where she needs to go. The pressure of insecure employment and the juggling act of multiple short-term contracts overwhelms, and she is frightened of dropping the ball. Eventually she recalls the creative writing workshop. Fleeting images of the marking piled up high on her desk pass through her mind and she questions whether she can afford to give up her precious morning hours. I have little idea of Leah’s struggles as I make final adjustments to the workshop slides in my office. I glance at my watch. There is only an hour until it begins. Signs need to be placed around the building and tea, coffee and pastries need to be set out. I catch Leah out of the corner of my eye as I rush to the workshop venue; her normally cheerful face is cast over by a shadow. Her body sags with fatigue and defeat. When she sees me approaching, she begins apologising that she is not well enough to attend. I reassure her that it is okay, and as I walk away, I see her take a paper off the top of a pile and sigh. Two months before. Something is bugging me about our creative writing workshop. We have asked participants to submit an expression of interest with a short piece of writing titled a story that matters. This prompt was to help them to sketch out an idea for a paper, but because I had not attempted the task myself, I was unsure how it would go. Sensing the irony of expecting vulnerability from others without first sharing something of myself, I set aside some quiet time to think about a story that matters. My reflections immediately bring me the story of my mother,

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who had planted the initial seeds for writing differently. Over the next weeks, I start to shape my response on the topic of hunger. Hunger. It is a thorn in our side. We need to satiate this desire to eat and to sustain our bodies; otherwise we will painfully shrivel away. But hunger can also be a powerful driving force. I see this in my mother, who had hungrily begun to paint a month ago. She bought some water colour paints and paper with the money she had collected over the years. The act of purchasing the painting equipment had taken weeks. The equipment she chose was basic. There was a pad of thick paper and a tray of dried cakes of paint. The process took so long as she was unfamiliar with expressing and feeding her desire. The first of her two paintings consisted of a field of sunflowers with bright yellow petals stretching out towards the sun. There was vast improvement even between these two first attempts, and by the time the date of the workshop appeared, my mother had amassed more than two dozen watercolor paintings of rich autumn leaves, mountain and water landscapes. She painted feverishly, spending most of the day and half the night, making up for the lost years. I took several photographs of my mother’s paintings to show the workshop attendees a glimpse of the woman who had been my muse. A few minutes before the workshop starts. I duck out of the workshop room to pass some pastries on to Leah. She looks at me with a teary look of gratitude, confirming my suspicions about her not having eaten. I sense her hunger. I do my best to comfort Leah and to make sure she has some food to nourish her body. She is worried that I might be disappointed, and I reassure her again. It is time for the workshop to start and so I leave Leah to return to the room. I am nervous about sharing my thoughts about a story that matters deeply to me.

A Story That Matters… I stand up and make my way to the front of the group. I hold my notes in my hand and take a deep breath to steady myself. I click onto the first painting (see Fig. 3.1). It is of two small fishing boats bobbing up and down on a calm afternoon. The water is a mix of purple, blue, white and hazel. There is a smattering of seagulls in the sky. I notice Leah creep into the room. Not confident that I can finish without choking up, I read from my notes without making any eye contact. The story that I wish to tell is of my mother, whose spaces I seek to trace. Always unfathomable, mysterious and slightly broken. My mother is

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Fig. 3.1  The first of my mother’s paintings

intensely beautiful, not just because she is my mother, but ever since I was a child, I noticed that she was standing at the edge of a precipice. A closeness of death. “I will live until I am 50”, my mother had declared as a young girl. That was my mother, who even when I was a child would express sentiments so strong that I would feel an ache in my heart. She had supposed that fifty was the age when the sun shone the brightest and wanted to leave the world with a heart beating fast, unable to bear the decline. She had not realised as a child how quickly this time would come. Thankfully, a desire for life emerged after the birth of her children. My brother and I gave her a will to live and helped her to overcome the melancholy of a childhood full of hunger. My mother was the third daughter in a patriarchal family. She was born in the middle of the Korean War when her country was being torn in half. Her birth was a time of mourning rather than joy, not simply because of the war. She could not carry down my grandfather’s family name, and because she would marry into someone else’s family, she would look after her husband’s parents in their old age. My eldest aunt had told her how their father had left their mother, exhausted from childbirth, alone in the

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room, facing the wall and wailing aloud in despair. My grandmother had disgraced her family by only producing daughters. My mother was punished for making her parents lose hope. Hunger. For six years of her childhood, my mother went to school without having anything to eat. A full day of learning passed by with nothing to sustain her. This was the cost of being the “third” daughter. My grandmother had packed lunch boxes for her four other children, but my mother’s bag was always empty. An extra lunch box was too much of a bother. This memory had slipped out not so long ago during a passing conversation, and without self-pity or emotion, she told me about her childhood. She had no food to eat at school and was only given milk to drink after her eldest sister begged their mother for it. My mother accepted all this without complaint, taking in whatever mistreatment she received as her “lot” in life, instinctively feeling, deeply through her body, that she was unloved and unwanted. “Even babies can recognise when they are a burden”, she said. Being rejected by the people who are supposed to care for you has a lasting impact. You are less able to ask for things as you think you do not deserve them. You are left feeling a hunger that eats away at you. Intensity. Hunger alerts you to the body. The ache of the body awakens the knowledge of being alive. It stokes the fire of intensity and gives rise to voices that sit on a knife’s edge. Cixous talks about becoming intoxicated by writers whose words evoke a pain so great that it feels like joy, labelling them “writers of extremity, those who take themselves to the extremes of experience, thought, life” (1993, 34). Such extremity impacts all fields of their life. It is fully embodied. I think Cixous would have felt close to my mother, whose emotions were like clear notes coming from an unknown place, resonating extremity in experience, thought and life. She spoke in a mortally wounded voice, as the hurt of her childhood was deeply embedded. Such writers, she declares, speak from the “direction of truth”, as they unravel and expose life for what it is, something which might only be attained through one’s “final hour”, which she defines as “the hour of relinquishing all the lies that have helped us live” (1993, 36–37). Such writers are hungry for something beyond. I tell you the story of my mother to provide food for thought. As academics, we often hide behind words, seeking to build our ivory towers with “impact” that can be measured and quantified. There is little space for acknowledging and expressing our deepest desires. But the story of my mother’s hunger impacts me unlike any other because it reveals the path

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of intensity and vitality. She is a rare individual who is aware of the “final hour”. Her existence was negated, and this brought about a raging hunger to speak “I am”. And now, in her retirement, she is finally coming to terms with what this means. The School of the Dead has taught me that I had been hungrily searching for this “I am” in both my personal and academic writing. Perhaps this is also why you are here today, to write from that sweet place “where blindness and light meet” (Cixous 1993, 38). I hope that your writing journey will help you to create this critical juncture in time and space, where you can find words that speak from you and of you to express your hunger, and to find the very words that give others permission to do the same (Fig. 3.2). I conclude my talk with my mother’s self-portrait. She is sitting in a cable car travelling over fields and an ocean, looking pensively over her shoulder, her gaze fixed on a distant image. My mother has exaggerated the sharp angle of her nose and the thinness of her lips, perhaps to emphasise her determination and grit. She is painting herself into being, I think. I become silent as I let her self-portrait speak. First there is stillness, and then applause. I make my way to my chair head-down, too afraid to look up, when Leah grabs my hand and whispers, “It was worth sneaking in just to hear this”. My mother, whose basic needs for concern and food had not been satisfied, has decided that she cannot simply go quietly into the

Fig. 3.2  My mother’s self-portrait

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night. Her bright yellow petals would have stretched out towards the sun much earlier. Instead, she stumbled onto a love of painting as an old woman. Her hunger, long repressed, had finally burst out like a swollen dam. It would no longer be negated, and her presence would not be erased.

The School of the Dead Six months earlier. I have clicked open a document attached to an email. It is an assigned reading for a pre-conference workshop on Hélène Cixous. It is a translated text titled Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I am instantly overtaken by the rhythmic cadence of her words. I go over and over each line again to access its meaning; her lyrical writing style demands contemplation. Cixous (1993) describes the three Schools of the Dead, Dreams and Roots, which make up the secrets of “writing well”. When I read Cixous’ description of the School of the Dead, I sense an unravelling of the belief that subjectivity and intensity was a contaminant or weakness. The School of the Dead reframes subjectivity and intensity as attributes of “good writing”. The fire burning inside of me whilst I wrote finally began to make sense. Cixous (1993) saw writing intensely at death’s door as the beginning of writing and living: “To begin (writing, living) we must have death. I like the dead, they are the doorkeepers who while closing one side “give way” to another” (Cixous 1993, 7). The “School of the Dead” is about speaking the “truth” (Cixous 1993). The pupils of this School spoke the language of my mother, who would helplessly speak the “truth” no matter how much it might hurt. Her face keenly reflected how she felt, and I would often observe it to forecast our future. Our family could barely make ends meet when I was growing up, and her face would reveal clues to how many hours she had stood behind an empty till. I was drawn to reading this “truth” no matter how much it hurt; like a moth to the flames, I would continue watching her face. Cixous (1993, 36) reveals how we become truthful in the face of death, explaining, “We cannot bear to tell the truth, except in the final hour, at the last minute, since to do so earlier costs too much”. The “truth” was preferred to being in the dark. The “truth” of mortality and the lack of time forces us to abandon self-protection and security to open up to life’s possibilities. To write from the School of the Dead is to express vulnerability and to venture into the unknown. Cixous (1993, 38) proposes how we can embrace the unknown by writing “what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words”,

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describing this to be the point at which “blindness and light meet”. When my mother finally had an outlet for her hidden vitality, I could see that she was a student of this School; as my father explains, “Your mother realises that at the eve of her life, she cannot just simply die without having lived”. Rather than going quietly into the night, my mother seeks to fight the dying light. Cixous (1993, 11) writes that this desire to savour the last remaining bits of light allows a vitality, an “overabundance” or an “extraordinarily vital stream”. She holds great respect for writers who exist in the final hour, with nothing and everything to lose, displaying an “extremity of feeling” that makes the most of time’s preciousness (1993, 37). Cixous (1993) finds such writing so powerful that it evokes a joy akin to the pain of being struck by an axe. This full-bodied intensity transports her into a place where time stands still. Metcalfe and Game (2010, 170) refer to this alternate place as a “non-linear now” that embodies a completeness and the entirety of a bright present, as they write: The eternal now is the time of the gift and creativity. The now makes possible a gift without sequence, without beginnings and ends, without source or destination, a gift where there is movement-and-stillness, sameness-and-­ difference. Rather than a gift based on the excess of subjectivity and time, this gift is based on the emptiness of being-time.

I think of my mother’s self-portrait. My eyes scan the picture looking for hidden clues, seeking her answers. But she remains forever elusive. The fact that she refuses to connect with another person’s gaze, and chooses instead to look away, speaks loudly. You will never know me, she says. Rather than to me, her gaze is turned elsewhere for all eternity. She exists in a time outside of time, as she is transfixed in pursuing what is unattainable “truths”. Frozen in time, her face reveals all. She has battled through the deprivation and hunger without becoming broken by it, and now, as I enter middle age, I find myself watching my mother’s face again. This time, it is to find guidance in navigating the challenges of ageing. How do I process this loss of physical vitality? How does one confront it with equanimity and courage? The answers seem to lie in her steady gaze, the sharp line of her nose and her closed lips. With grit and determination, she will exist in the dying light as a glorious sunflower in full bloom.

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Critical Autoethnography’s Extremity of Feeling I have respect and admiration for those writers who, in their lifetime, have approached that point where cowardice and courage are so close to each other they might fly into the flames if they were to say one word more (Cixous 1993, 37). My mother’s gaze constructs a timeless space of intensity and hunger. There is an awareness of preciousness that comes from a lifetime of hunger. Its strength of feeling holds me in rapt attention, “transporting [me] into alternative, ancient, and immortal worlds, moving [me] beyond the physical realm into a timeless dimension” (Yoo 2019, 7). Cixous’ personal and poetic writing style gives insight into this school of thought about “writing well” that resonates more closely with my own. I carefully read over her sentences to uncover the mysteries of her craft, as well as to better understand my own. Badley (2009, 213) explains how we need to deconstruct a text to work out how “authors have actually made them, fabricated them, that is constructed them” similar to how a poet uses metaphors to illuminate meaning. Three years earlier. Dissatisfaction about my academic writing practices led me on a new path of writing differently. I had been struggling with academia’s stifling focus on objectivity and was hungry for something more pleasurable and meaningful (Yoo 2019). I was a non-tenured academic, and was desperate to increase my publication output, but couldn’t seem to write in the correct way. The academic writing style felt constricting and distant; the process caused pain and discomfort and alienated me from my own voice. Rendle-Short (2015, 92) elaborates on this rigidity of traditional academic writing discourses, as she explains how conventional scholarly writing, its “natural order”, the linear arrangement around a central theme, the authoritative text of thesis-body-conclusion where explaining is the main function; where it is not considered entertainment and there is no place for digression or repetition, or “play”, prevents the expression of meaning that does not conform to this structure. After a decade of little success, I finally decided to let go of writing “as a means to an end” to pursue writing as a form of inquiry. I experimented with alternative, creative structures and “other arrangements and derivations, exclamation and phrasing” that indicated what to focus on and how to make sense of it (Rendle-Short 2016, 242) and tried different configurations to convey the evocative and poetic. Like the colourful strokes of a painting, I believed that evocative words could “create an impression of something

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more when seen within the particular circumstance and flow of writing or conversation” (Cunliffe 2002, 130). I sought to play with words, like Cixous (2005, 115) who conveys, “When I close my eyes the passage opens, the dark gorge, I descend…There is no more genre. I become a thing with pricked-up ears. Night becomes a verb. I night”. Such writing is seductive; it asserts power over us by making us “surrender to its pleasures” (Colyar 2013, 375). In “Writing into Position”, Pelias (2011, 666) equally notes that poetic arrangement of words conveys detail without overloading the reader, offering a “mouthful worthy of comment, encourages, lingering, savouring, remembering”. After a decade of clinically pruning and packaging my words, I desired savour instead. Poetic and embodied writing is inherent to critical and evocative autoethnographies. The “auto” suggests greater critical reflexivity as it involves inquiry into one’s own writing practices to convey “the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles” (Bochner and Ellis 2006, 111). Through examining the place of the “auto” in academia, researchers can resist dominant academic writing discourses that constrain voice and creative modes of expression (Yoo 2019). Critical autoethnographers explore alternative methodologies and forms of knowledge creation and expression to capture data that eludes traditional research approaches (Adams et  al. 2017). Their insider perspective also allows them to address gaps in the existing positivist research, which presents knowledge as measurable and quantifiable facts rather than intimate understandings of phenomena (Ellis et al. 2010). Critical autoethnography is consequently a methodology that embodies feminist principles, as the writing process itself reveals an author’s particular stance on life and how they construct their texts (Holman Jones 2005). It holds a bright light up to the broader social forces that shape a life. No topic is considered off limits and no format or mode of expression is discounted. Its inherent subjectivity and reflexivity can further generate texts that are written with greater fluidity and authenticity, making the knowledge-­ making process accessible to non-academic audiences (Ellis et al. 2010). In fact, autoethnographic writing can take on the melodic and rhythmic movement of thought, allowing the writing style to convey as much as the words themselves. The impact of such words is undeniable. Evocative writing or poetic ways of encountering the world lend themselves to multiple interpretations and endless possibilities for discussion. Beautiful configurations of prose can help us to consider things in new and insightful ways: “the

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engaging piece plays, open closed doors, discovers hidden passageways, creates new spaces” (Colyar 2013, 376). Cunliffe (2002, 133) relates to this multiplicity of knowing, describing how the term “poetic” originates from the Greek derivative poiein, which refers to “images/imagining rather than literal meaning, about creating possibilities rather than describing actualities, and about multiplicity not specificity”. This poetic lens allows us to live responsively as we engage in the “indeterminate and self-­ contradictory” parts of life to enable multiple possibilities for being (Cunliffe 2002, 133). Lines of discussion are opened up rather than closed down as we puzzle through the ambiguities and multiplicities. Our writing mirrors the reflexive lines of discursive thinking that conveys “the total movement of speech” by conveying the gaps, pauses and fragments of feeling (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 43). From a poetic lens, we can weave “beautiful” words that allow readers to inhabit fluid and borderless spaces (Britton 1971).

Speaking From Our Wounds The end of the workshop. As the day ends, my body tingles with emotion. The positive vibe indicates success, but as people redirect their focus to getting home, the energy in the room falters. The magic of an academia where writing is raw, pleasurable and emancipatory is slowly fading away as we re-enter the real world. Was it just a dream? I think back to the piece of writing that I shared about my mother, who on the eve of her life was not willing to depart from the world without having lived. She wanted to experience these final moments intensely, vividly and passionately through artworks that spoke of her life’s possibilities. Her efforts to paint were more than simply a better late than never; they were an indication of how numerous detours can add richer textures and deeper colours to our journey. They illustrated how our wounds can draw us closer to the “truth” by providing a greater clarity of sight. I think back to Leah, who considers creative and subjective writing forms to be a luxury or a fatal flaw. Her face reflects the person who I was before I started the journey of writing differently, the vulnerable untenured academic who was unsure of but deeply hungry to express her own words. To bring our struggles to the surface, I share an intergenerational story of hunger. My mother’s story was my testament to how our deepest vulnerabilities could also be our greatest asset by generating an intense

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Fig. 3.3  My brother and me, forever immortalised in my mother’s painting

hunger that makes us feel alive. Rather than trying to disown this desire, I am learning to tap into its energy and to write with abandonment. From my mother, I have learnt the value of standing at the edge of a precipice; and within the School of the Dead, I have found a community of like-­ minded academic writers who tell stories that reveal the profoundness of being human. To learn to write from the School of the Dead is to risk burning up in the flames, so as not to die without having truly lived first (Fig. 3.3).

References Adams, Tony, Carolyn Ellis and Stacy Holman Jones. 2017. Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research. London: Oxford University Press. Britton, James. 1971. “A Schematic Account of Language Functions.” Educational Review (Birmingham) 23, no. 3: 205–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013 191710230304. Bochner, Art, and Carolyn Ellis. 2006. “Communication as Autoethnography.” In Communication as…Perspectives on Theory, edited by Gregory Shepherd, Ted Striphas and Jeffrey St. John, 110-122. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Cixous, Hélène. 2005. Stigmata: Escaping Texts, with a foreword by Jacques Derrida. London: Routledge Classics. Colyar, Julia E. 2013. “Reflections on Writing and Autoethnography.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Stacy H. Jones, Tony E. Adams and Carolyn Ellis, 363–383. New York: Routledge. Cunliffe, Ann L. 2002. “Social Poetics as Management Inquiry.” Journal of Management Inquiry 11, no. 2: 128–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 10592602011002006. Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. 2010. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum, Qualitative Social Research 12, no. 1. Holman Jones, Stacy. 2005. “Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yolanda S. Lincoln, 763–791. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs, translated by Richard C.  McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Pelias, Ron J. 2011. “Writing into Position: Strategies for Composing and Evaluation.” In Norman K. Denzin, & Yvonne S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 659-668. Los Angeles: Sage. Rendle-Short, Francesca. 2015. “How the How: The Question of Form in Writing Creative Scholarly Works.” New Writing (Clevedon, England) 12 (1): 91–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2014.983526. Rendle-Short, Francesca. 2016. “Parsing an Ethics of Seeing: Interrogating the Grammar of a Creative/critical Practice.” New Writing (Clevedon, England) 13, no. 2: 234–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1136649. Yoo, Joanne. 2019. “A Year of Writing ‘Dangerously’: A Narrative of Hope.” New Writing (Clevedon, England) 16, no. 3: 353–62. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14790726.2018.1520893. Joanne Yoo  is a senior lecturer at the School of Education at the University of Technology Sydney. She has worked extensively across a wide range of subjects in the primary and secondary teacher education programs. Joanne’s research interests include developing collaborative teaching partnerships, teaching as an embodied practice, action research, and arts-based research methodologies, such as narrative inquiry and autoethnography.

CHAPTER 4

Finding a Language of My Own: Journeying to the School of the Dead with Cixous Dewi Andriani

Facing Grief There is a long silence on the other end before I say hello, half asleep, unimpressed with this phone call in the middle of the night. And I hear a familiar voice trying to say something hesitantly. The voice sweetly says softly, “Dewi…” I am sitting up straight, and my eyes are wide open. That voice is so close but far away at the same time. Soft and warm. Yes, I am not mistaken. I am very sure this is Ibu’s voice, my mother’s, that I heard. Hearing her voice at this moment after watching the terrible news about the

This writing has been modified from my thesis (Andriani 2021).

D. Andriani (*) The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_4

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earthquake in my hometown on SBS1 evening news is soothing and assures me that she is alright. Long pause. In the silence, I can hear my heart beating. I am fully awake now. The feeling of relief hearing the voice on the other end pronouncing my name with a familiar and unique pitch. “Ibu…”, I reply. I realise with shock that I tried to call her a few hours before but could not reach her. “Ibu…are you alright? I have been trying to call you, but you were not home. Ibu…. Are you alright?” I shower the woman with questions. My body feels weak suddenly, and I do not know why. “Dewi, this is Auntie. Ibu is gone. Be strong, girl…”. I am confused by the straightforwardness. The woman is not Ibu. I recognise the voice now, Ibu’s sister. But I am sure the first sentence that I heard was in Ibu’s voice. That unique pitch belongs to Ibu. Auntie never called me like that. Nobody was calling me that way except my Ibu. It was so close, intimate and familiar. I ignore Auntie’s statement. Ibu? Gone? Where? It must be a not-funny joke. I shake my head, confused. I stare blankly at my husband. My mouth is wide open, trying to say something, but nothing comes out. My husband, standing next to me, quickly takes the phone from my grip and talks to Auntie. Slowly, I start to comprehend what I have just heard. My lips move to repeat what Auntie has just said. “Ibu is gone. Ibu is gone. Ibu is gone”. Then I slowly say the prayer. “Innalillahi wa inna Ilaihi Rojiun”.2 I am sorry, Ibu…Alfatihah3 for Ibu. I sit quietly, with my body trembling. I am crushed and feel cold.

 SBS is a national public television network in Australia.  We belong to Allah, and to Him shall we return. We use this expression when we experience a tragedy in life, such as someone’s death. It is a part of a verse from the Quran. 3  Al-Fatihah is the first chapter (Surah) in the Quran. When I was a child, I recited this and still remember the seven verses of this Surah in Arabic by heart. When we hear news or remember someone who has passed away, we recite this Surah. For me, reciting these prayers is one of the ways to release pain and to accept loss even though the meaning of this Surah is beyond these. 1 2

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Entering the School of the Dead I see a small yellow envelope icon appearing on the screen. A new email from the registrar of the school. I clench my teeth and fists. My body feels tense. I cannot yet tell what verdict I will get. My lips move following the words that I read on the screen that say, “Many thanks for sending your application for the School of Writing with Hélène Cixous. We are delighted to inform you that your application was accepted”. My eyes open wide in disbelief. I cover my mouth with my hand and hear my heartbeat pounding louder. I passed the school quite a few times with a lack of comprehension of what it really is. My application to write with Cixous in the School of the Dead was accepted, meaning I am ready to explore it through writing. I was welcomed to the school and am now a new student. Because of that email, I run off to the front of the school. I take a deep breath when I see the artistic front exterior with her name written in big, scrawly letters. I stop at the front page, admiring the sign. Anxiously I open the page slowly, not knowing where my path goes. “The School of the Dead”. What does it really mean? My heart wonders. The word Dead makes me shudder and feel unsettled. Does it mean I will learn about horror scenes? Or learn to explore sorrow, emotions, pains or hurts? Or about struggles and determination to get through them? I feel unnerved when entering the first Halaman4. The sign in front of the Halaman seems to bring the painful memory back to the surface. In my deep thinking about the pain and the feeling of the darkness, out of the blue, I am confronted with a big letter “H”, the first letter of Cixous’ first name. Is it the first lesson already? At least, where is the welcome and introduction? The feeling of melancholy turns into bafflement. The sense of fear gradually subsides. I do not expect to learn straightforwardly like this without a preamble. I see her silhouette so close yet distant and feel her presence here. She is—Hélène Cixous—the owner of the School. I imagine Cixous saying softly but clearly, “English pronounces it ‘hache”, and ‘ash’ in French, a letter out of breath” (1993). Slowly my lips move, trying to pronounce the letter between the two languages, and I translate this 4  Halaman is an Indonesian word that has two possible meanings. First, Halaman refers to the pages of a book. You turn the Halaman to continue reading and move on to the next. Halaman can also mean a front or back yard of a building such as a school, a house, an office or a museum. Halaman is where children play games and explore nature, where trees and flowers grow.

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character into my language by heart—“Ha”. Yes, haha… I laugh, like the laugh of the Medusa (1976). The letter H sounds relieving, free and different in my language. Why do I laugh when I pronounce her initial name? It is different to pronounce one letter H in different languages. I continue with a smile on my face. With this ordinary character H, I learn the first lesson about languages. How languages pronounce one character differently and how I am influenced by it. H is the first initial of her first name. This is the first day of the School of the Dead, one of the schools for writing. I am excited as I want to know more about Cixous and her writing. I know the School is going to be complicated. This is part of my journey through my writing process using English, which is not my native language or my second language. I use a foreign language, English, in a foreign language of writing. As this writing uses different languages, my writing in these languages is stammered and still in its infancy. I am reassured by Cixous (1993, 1) that “writing changes languages” and it is a challenge. To be able to write differently, students like me have permission to go to the School of Writing to use the languages fluently. I am now in the first school day, but where should I begin? Cixous suggests I begin with the letter H.  It is as if she can read my mind. I stare at the letter H, the ladder of writing, trying to comprehend it. When I entered the schoolyard, Cixous never told me what to write. She seems to make it a secret. That is what the school is about: a secret. As a student, I must find the mystery of the writing process. “Imagine you mine the earth like a miner…”, Cixous (1993, 5) says, and continues to walk while I try to follow her pace and the direction of her thinking. We stop by the ladder and Cixous is digging something buried from the deepest down inside. I look down searching for the clue. With this ladder coming from the letter H, I am searching for something: the unknown. Will I continue? I hesitate. I do not know what I don’t know. I feel lost and it reminds me of Patti Lather’s book Getting Lost (2007), trying to make a connection to it. Are these women friends? I wonder. I find it difficult to read and write in my native language,5 Bahasa Mining, the language of the Minangkabau ethnic community residing in 5  Bahasa Mining, or Minangkabau language, is a spoken everyday language. I spoke Bahasa Mining at home and used Indonesian when I was at school or with Indonesian peers who do not come from the same region. Indonesian is the formal written language. Bahasa Mining is hardly ever used in a formal context or formal writing. If any, Bahasa Mining can be used in a cultural context. We can find it used on social media recently. I sometimes find it hard to read Bahasa Mining. I need to read it aloud to have a sense of it.

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West Sumatra, Indonesia. I am not used to writing it in a formal setting. The oral literature of Minangkabau in the form of classical poems called Tambo, folklore, and local wisdom has been passed down by word of mouth in cultural ceremonies instead of in writing. Satire, simile and imagery in the form of verses and folklore instead of straightforward language are used to reflect wisdom. I am used to writing in my second language, Indonesian, the national language of my country of origin, Indonesia. I learned how to read and write in Indonesian at school. I think in my native language and transfer it through writing into the second language. When I write in my second language, my native language influences my writing. Today, I write in English, which is not my first or second language. When I have had an opportunity to pursue further studies that have required me to write about the topic, I was researching in English. I am just unsure how much distortion influences my writing in languages other than my native language. There are academic writing rules that I must adhere to and confine within my writing. I was told in some academic writing classes that students who are non-English speakers do not have a systematic way of thinking. Our ideas are chaotic and scattered around. We all laughed when one of the teachers in the English for Academic Purposes class showed us a depiction of our way of thinking: messy, intertwined threads that went nowhere. These academic writing classes were supposed to tidy up our way of thinking, to be linear and logical. But now Cixous invited me to look around the School of the Dead to write against all the rules and embrace the chaotic and messy way of thinking. This writing is a challenging process and something mysterious. Cixous allows me to find the other and push the limits (Andriani 2022). I will incorporate the complexity of the three languages that influence my writing. Through this school of writing, I explore the mysteriousness by learning to reach towards the bottom following Cixous, despite its difficulty. I am now unlearning a systematic way of thinking by writing creatively. Creative writing is indeed a difficult process, as Laurel Richardson warns (1997). Writing the other way (Andriani 2022) is twice as difficult when I write in a language which is not my native language. I am trying

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to set free my way of thinking following Cixous’ pathways of writing “to have one voice in common”; to write with a difference (1993, 5). I am now bringing back my chaotic way of thinking and writing and creatively arranging them into a melodious rhythm. It is not easy, but it does not mean impossibility. This is what the school of writing is for. I cannot wait for the journey that is coming after this.

The First Exploration of the School of the Dead My writing journey has not yet ended. My body shivers. What might this writing become? To begin with writing, Cixous guided me to the door in front of me and urged me to open it. I wonder what is behind the door. With a trembling hand, I reach for the door handle, turn it to the right and try to open it. It does not budge. The door is unlocked, but not easy to open. Does this door need a language to open? I close my eyes, take another deep breath and hold it. I try again a few more times, with more effort. To my surprise, it opens slightly. I can see a scene, blurry but not complete and clear enough. This is how I feel when I open the door of the School of the Dead to enter each Halaman, each yard. Each entry in this school has no key. Every time I reopen a door to a Halaman, I see a different scene, as if I see from a different lens. I see things more clearly, blurred, different and multiple. The words are the same, but why do I see things differently? As if reading my mind, Cixous (1993, 8) writes in one of the Halaman: “Until I discovered later that in the beginning of each one of them had an inaugural scene, from which writing sprouted”. The first apprenticeship is the school with a cemetery for Cixous. The first apprenticeship is a unique green book my mother gave me. I remember my mother handed that book to me in primary school. It was a unique book with a green cover and the image of an abstract illustration of tree branches. She made this resemblance of a book from the used book pages she collected and put them in a not-so-thick bundle and bound them. This became my friend. This was the book where I could write whatever I wanted. I wrote poems, song lyrics and short stories. It was meant to be private, but my mother opened the book with somebody I had never met to show how good my writing was. That made me stop writing in that book. I then wrote a diary in high school and hid it away from my mother. Then I stopped for no reason, and now I am writing again. This writing apprenticeship is like finding the resemblance of a book I lost many years

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ago. I follow and am trying to reach Cixous’ pace with difficulty from one Halaman to another Halaman—from one yard to another. Then I was confronted by these sentences: “Writing is learning to die” (Cixous 1993, 10). “…he gave me death. To start with” (Cixous 1993, 12). Cixous tells me without burden how the death of her father and her relationship with him gave her ideas for writing differently. I imagine that Cixous agrees that death is to lose something and is the prerequisite for the birth of writing. Coming across the word death made my body start to quiver, again. The old wound is open. The feelings of hurt, pain and sorrow emerge. It reminds me of the loss of my mother, Ibu, followed by the death of my father, Papa, the following month. I was shattered, but I believe God gave me a test of faith to accept the loss. This is the religious belief I have held and taught by my Ibu and Papa. I clearly remember the date. It was the same as the national mourning day in Indonesia, 30 September. No one in Indonesia would forget the date. Seven generals were brutally killed by the alleged PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) on 30 September 1965. This 30 September coup led to 500,000 to one million people being identified as communists. It was one of the darkest days in Indonesian history, but now this date has become another painful memory for me to remember. I feel loss and grief after the death of my parents. “I did not know what I was going to write until I started writing” (Bochner and Ellis 2016, 237). I begin to write my feelings in private, page by page, using any language that I felt was right. I have the freedom to write and express my feelings without anyone commenting that my grammar is wrong. I write and hide it as if I produced something and buried it deep down. I do not want to recall the painful memory. It is too painful to remember. But this School of the Dead taught me the same thing my religion taught me: to accept the loss. The loss of my loved ones inspired me to write and explore my emotions using my native language, the national language and another language. “We lose and in losing, we win”, Cixous (1993, 10) continues. It is now the time to have the courage and desire to dig things that I bury deep inside and share them. I must have the desire and courage to open the door to see things from different angles and be creative. Cixous (1993, 7)

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assured me, “…neither death nor the doorkeeper are enough to open the door”. It is me who is willing to go to the door and open it.

My Bodies Traversing the School of the Dead I wish I had attended this school long ago so I could write with my body, just like Cixous and other feminist writers. Tetapi lebih baik terlambat daripada tidak sama sekali.6 Cixous keeps reminding me/us to keep digging until we find something precious. I have felt I could not ascend to the bottom without being exhausted. I spent many hours sitting and writing, but words were not flowing. Indeed, as an apprentice, writing in a language not my native language is doubly hard and despairing. But Cixous keeps telling me/us that I am free to choose what I believe is precious. I keep trying, no matter how hard it is. It is just like doing workouts for my body, a body of writing in great shape. And ha! I also see something else from the quote “Writing is learning to die”. I see a different scene after I look away, and I look again. It has come to make sense that I am learning to die to stop mimicking the language structure without writing with my body. My attention was only focused on tenses with all the formulas, just like math and science, vocabulary and sentence structure. I have become submissive to phallocentric and masculinist approaches of academic research and writing (Mackinlay 2019), writing in the language that is not my native language. My sentences used to be dead, with no soul. I have felt that I was not given permission to explore my body through writing. Focus on grammar! Use plain sentences! I obeyed all the commands, but I had vague ideas of writing another way. I was scared to break the rules. I memorised and valued in the old school I attended. It was not writing school, really. It was a school learning the language structure. I then had the privilege to start my research journey with what standard mainstream research writing looked like. I felt like I continued to mimic “the language of science” (Dutta and Ambar Basu 2013). Academics are given the storyline where the concept of “I” should be suppressed in their writing (Richardson 1997). The lessons from the old school had stuck so strongly deep inside of me that I had to adhere to the rules of the writing

6

 But it is better late than never.

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process the old school created. Attaching my body to my body of writing is a big sin. I realised I did not want to do my research this way. After walking halfway through the research journey, I suddenly changed the approach and direction of my research. The works of other feminist writers were an eye-­ opener. They have daringly and adventurously challenged the status quo of academic writing and research. Sara Ahmed (2014) inspired me to be a disobedient, wilful postgraduate non-Western woman student. Liz Mackinlay cheekily and playfully wrote to challenge neoliberal universities by teaching and learning like a feminist. And now, being inside this School of the Dead gave me more and more encouragement to write the same way. The writing that I did before did not speak to me and did not sit well with my project. I feel privileged to have full support from thesis panel members: one of them has become my supervisor. I did my thesis all over again, but this time I wanted to write something radical, different and challenging for a woman who speaks a language other than English. It is different because it does not follow the mainstream pre-established rules of research writing. It is risky and difficult because I am writing as “an apprentice” (Cixous 1993), as well as a non-Western feminist autoethnography whose English is not my native language. As an autoethnographer, I use an alternative style of writing which is against conventional research. Mackinlay reassured me that writing autoethnography was an open moment to begin dis/placing an insurgent writing style (2016, 5). I am aware that using my own writing style influenced by feminist writings means defying those who uphold the standard of research writing or challenging the Eurocentric, masculinist knowledge validation process (Collins 1990). Will I be able to do this? I know I am struggling. Minh-ha (1989, 28) says, “we are triply jeopardised: as a writer, as a woman, and as a woman of colour”. After being released from the old school that had used the standard mainstream research writing, I feel free and can write the way I want, possibly with my chaotic thinking. I can write with freedom, but where do I start? What would this writing become? I felt another loss. Lather (2007) assured that to allow loss is to become the very force of learning. I got lost by leaving the old practice and turning my way to the new one. This new practice gave me a feeling of despair. I came across Laurel Richardson’s Fields of Play (1997). Reading Richardson gave me permission to come to a place where I can make writing an adventure and experimentation. I need a place of learning where writing is my playground so I can explore

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and play with words. I joined “The Laugh of the Medusa” reading group, a close-knit and supportive group of academic women I encountered in my research journey. This group influenced my thinking about feminism and showed me the path to feminism and an alternative way of academic writing. We met to talk about feminist texts, from the classic to contemporary ones. I glimpsed Cixous in those reading group sessions. She came, but her body of work was foreign. I sometimes peeped at her words after my reading group talked about her. I understood some of her expressions that released my tensions towards her work. I borrowed some and hung them in my thesis work. I smiled. I liked those words. “Women must write” and “women must put herself into the text” (Cixous 1976, 875). In passing the middle of the journey to the School of the Dead, I realised that Cixous taught me to think the unthinkable, a new perspective on writing. There is no universal truth in the way people think. This will lead me to the desire to know and enjoy this playground. I shape the way that lets me write with my body. I began my journey with Cixous, following Mackinlay (2016, 15) who had already begun the journey with “the possibility of a return to the selfsame disappeared beyond the horizon along with the dead heart of academic writing” that she left behind. Mackinlay calls this post/academic writing a “storyline” which considers an ethical, wise, relational and loving politic. Mackinlay (2019) also mentions a loving kind of critical autoethnography which insists that writing-as thinking-as-writing is a place of love―that heart, body, hand and blood touching in writing breathes text to life and life to text (59). “To write from those heartlines, to write her body” (Mackinlay 2016, 7). Now I have come to the school Cixous created after moving out of the old, suffocating one. This new school will show me the way in which I write freely and imaginatively without worrying about such kinds of restrictions. Do I want to go back to the old school? I sighed again and shook my head slowly. I need to communicate my thoughts and feelings and let my body have a voice, like Cixous has just taught me. Mackinlay writes that “perhaps heartline writing through body…is given life through the materiality of difference, the affective dimensions of alterity, the discursive performances of otherness…” (2016, 169). I will learn how to produce texts and touch the readers the way Cixous touches my heart. It is not about writing that adheres to the rules made for us. It is about writing in different ways when I need to put all my efforts into this. I write all my imagination to it. I do not have to adhere to the rules

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if I want to write freely. I can write things that make me happy. I can also write things that make me terrified. The story should strike people. “If the story does not move readers, it is not a good story”, I remember Liz, my panel and then my thesis supervisor once told me. That is why writing involves a lot of effort. It is not easy. It is done with difficulty. As an apprentice, writing is very hard. It is twice as hard when I write in different languages. How do I carry people away by my writing? I need a lot of practice, and to play around and experiment with this other language.

Returning to the School of the Dead: To Begin Again I am back in this room and learning again. I see Cixous by the door. She guides me to a very dark room. I cannot see anything. Then she turns on the light. “Since you read with your body, your body paragraphs”, Cixous (1993, 23) said. I can read and write through/with my body. What attracted me to this school was the love of reading as much as writing. “As soon as you open the book as a door, you enter another world, you close the door on this world” (20). I connect what Cixous just said with the saying I heard many times during my school time back in my country: “Buku adalah jendela dunia”. Books are the windows to the world. The light illuminates a classroom surrounded by various texts, unlimited texts. Bookshelves tower over me, and I cannot see an end to them. I am overwhelmed. Which one should I choose? English texts? Texts in my native language, Indonesian? I run around the room, trying to grab some. I collect a bunch of them in my hands. I collect them, yet I forget them shortly after. I do not even remember whether I read them. I don’t remember the contents either. There were a whole bunch of them. Sweat beaded on my forehead. I bit my lip, hard. Which one should I pay attention to? Cixous paces around the classroom. She might feel my confusion. Then she says to the class, “I obey the call of certain texts. The texts that call me have different voices”. Yes, I follow certain types of text now: texts that are/were written by women. I remember a text my mother wrote about the guerrilla history of

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Situjuh Batur which occurred in 1949. Indonesia tried to resist the Dutch military’s attempts to recolonise the country after Independence in 1945. She wrote the text back in the late 1980s. She also wrote a text for her students while teaching Home Economics. I flip the pages and find practical things for everyday life. She wrote some other texts that I missed acknowledging. Then, the last text that she wrote was the story of her and my father’s journey to Australia when they visited us for three months. Their visit was one of the best times in my life. Their time in Australia made me think it might have been a sign to say goodbye to me before their departure three months later. My mother wrote her travel experience to Australia in a book and in a USB flash drive. I found the book and the USB in her bedroom a few days after her death. I picked up the book, brought it close to my body. I was too unmindful that my mother was once a writer. With the book and the USB in my bag, I felt she travelled and accompanied me. I still could not face the reality that she was gone. I hid the book and the USB away as they brought traumatic and sad memories of the fact that my Ibu was gone. When I thought I was ready ten years later, I flipped through the book and saw her neat handwriting in black pen. Was this text the same as the one she typed into the USB? Slowly with trembling hands, I inserted the USB into my computer and tried to open the files. There was a blinking sign on the screen, but nothing happened. I could not open the file. The USB had been corrupted. Beads of tears emerged in my eyes. I shook my head in disbelief. I pulled my hair and wanted to scream. The feeling of regret and disappointment enveloped my body. I had lost those texts. I felt that Ibu’s spirit was taken away from me. I wished I could turn back time and talk to her about the texts she wrote. I wish I could listen to her voice even though I know it is not possible, but at least I feel blessed to have her voice in the book that she left, and now I have it, I will not let it go. I could not bear to lose it. I would read and type it, and together we would make music through my voice and her voice from the book she left. I still could not do it, to write her words. This is indeed “the book I don’t write” (Cixous 2007, 18). It is not my writing. It is my mother’s. I want to (re)write/(re) type the book, but it is not that easy. I flipped through the book one more time, and still, it makes melodious music to my ears now. I started to hum with the text. I feel relief I can enjoy the text. I celebrate the joy. I kiss the text. I sing and dance.

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And Finally… If I want to write creatively, I must read as much as possible. It is a solitary action, and you can do it in secret when nobody knows that you are already everywhere witnessing the outside world. I remember sensing that Cixous told me that when I am immersed in a book, I will feel like I am leaving my room and my body will wander with the book I read. Women like me always struggle to establish our right to write. This is historically men’s territory. The tradition of writing signals that women should perform the act of writing in passivity and mimic this tradition. I want to follow Cixous’ steps, daringly and dangerously challenging conventional notions of critical objectivity. Will I be able to do it? I cannot answer. This is the journey, and it is still in process.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2014. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1215/9780822376101 Andriani, Dewi. 2022. “How Can I Write Other? The Pains and Possibilities of Autoethnographic’s Research Writing Experienced by a Non-Western Female Student.” Journal of International Students, 12(S2): 141–157. https://doi. org/10.32674/jis.v12iS2.4227 Andriani, Dewi. (2021). “The Journey of Indonesian Female Students in Australia.” PhD thesis, University of Queensland. https://doi.org/10.14264/46a03c8 Bochner, Arthur and Carolyn Ellis. 2016. Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/978131 5545417 Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, translated by Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4: 875–93. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306. Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 2007. “The Book I Don’t Write.” Parallax, 13(3): 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534640701433543 Collins, Patricia. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics Of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Dutta, Mohan J, and Ambar Basu, A. 2013. “Negotiating our Postcolonial Selves from the Ground to the Ivory Tower.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Tony E.  Adams, Stacey Holman-Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, 143-161. New York: Routledge.

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Lather, Patti. 2007. Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mackinlay, Elizabeth. 2016. Teaching and Learning Like a Feminist: Storying our Experiences in Higher Education. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Mackinlay, Elizabeth. 2019. Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Minh-ha, Trinh. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Richardson, Laurel. 1997. Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Dewi Andriani  completed her PhD at the School of Education, University of Queensland. Her research lies in the area of autoethnography, post-qualitative, female students’ experiences and subjectivities. Dewi’s passion for experimental writing started when she joined a feminist reading group, Medusa. Dewi teaches Indonesian at the Institute of Modern Languages (IML), UQ.

CHAPTER 5

The Narcissist Never Leaves, Only Dies: An Autoethnographic Account Inspired by Cixous Vickie Howard

In Homage to: We Need a Dead (Wo)man to Begin “We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world, and that the world isn’t what we think it is” (1993, 10), Cixous writes. Her words capture and relay my experience of narcissistic abuse from a previous partner in one sentence. There are values and often unconscious realities on how we think the closest people in our lives will relate to us and how this directs our everyday experiences of where we fit in with the world. Experiencing betrayal through pathological dishonesty and his infidelity caused a maelstrom for the mind. It was a never-­ ending Rubik’s Cube where the colours would never match, and with every adjustment and turn towards seeking understanding my stomach lurched with despair and nausea. I had not been able to get the truth from

V. Howard (*) University of Hull, Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_5

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him; he would not give it. He remained silent when I asked why he had lied to me easily, and when he had laid down next to me later that night. I was left sobbing loudly, fragmented, shaking, confused, feeling so exposed, as though there was a crowd of people looking scornfully upon me, somehow blaming me because they could see none of this made sense and my attempts to make sense of it had failed. I felt lost in the world. I could not see the brightness; I was devoid of my senses. The ultimate betrayal, to be treated with such hatred and intentional cruelty. To be kept in the dark, to have accounts distorted and projected back on me. In his words, “At the end of the day you have caused all of this, it is your fault this has happened”. But I now re-frame this through Cixous’ words, “To begin (writing, living) we must have death. I like the dead, they are the doorkeepers who while closing one side ‘give’ way to the other” (1993, 7). And what of the concept of truth and my searching for it, believing he was the only one who could show me the truth? Cixous (1993, 6) reflects that the people she loves are driven and bent upon identifying the “truth over there” but there are such complexities involved in ensuring we don’t hear the truth including the “external and interior enemies”. The external enemies concern noise and rumour and the buzz of noise all around and the interior enemies centre around “our own fear of what we are made of and our weakness” and that “between the two, the work of descending isn’t accomplished” (Cixous 1993, 6). So, I am going on a journey, “descending” to search for the truth and to discover who may finally show they are in a position to yield it. Contrary to what my narcissistic ex-partner advised, I will be “digging” and “unburying” in order to give myself to writing (Cixous 1993, 6).

From False Beginnings to Never-Ends Flowers, statements of love within a few days, He’s asking what I’m doing and wishing he was here, 50 texts, And oh, he lets me know he has been so badly treated by others. I yield to being taken in, to feel sorry for him. ‘Red Flags!’ they would say now; the voices from the internet, And now I would understand, but not then. To move your life to somewhere unknown and start again, For the sake of him and being together. Then once uprooted and trying to grow again in a new place,

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He gives you the silent treatment, As your new job pokes at you and stresses you, He sits upstairs alone, sullen. Then apologies and forgiveness and everything levels again, While the wind whips around the front door warning unrest. Sometimes there are happy times and talk of travel, But it never happens. The never-end of unaccomplished dreams and plans dragging me in to the ground, So, I can hardly breathe. The unexpected baby news shines down on us like a bright star, But he shields himself from it, And the silent treatment is louder than ever. There is snow on the tops, and I push the pram knowing I cannot stay, I am out to let the icy air give me some feeling, The baby snuggled warm. “Smack!” goes the door and I jump back again as the wine hides under his desk. No more, I’m gone, but the worst is yet to come.

We were living in a rural location then. Most would say beautiful…but it is not just a place which makes your life beautiful, is it? Our daughter was a small baby and beautiful. Walking on eggshells may be an overused expression, but that is how my life felt on many days. I anticipated his sullen expression when he arrived home from work. I felt it was my responsibility to manage this, to change his mood, that I was the catalyst. Then, I did not question why I thought his behaviour was my responsibility. Before he arrived home, the house felt warm and comforting. When I heard the key turn; with the opening of the door I felt the icy chill and it penetrated through me like a paranormal entity. “What is the point of your job because no-one listens to you, do they? You just write reports that get filed away which nobody cares about. What a pointless waste of time”, said when we were on our own, and then repeated at a family dinner where everyone laughed. They were oblivious to the intentional hurt this would cause. I cared about my job in investigating unexpected deaths and serious incidents in healthcare. He knew statements like this would erode some of the essence of me. I felt parts of me crumble and subdue. “What do you like that music for? You never

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used to like that; I thought you didn’t like that. They are pathetic”; I turned the radio off. I was becoming a dying woman; my light was fading, but I was not dead yet. I decided to do something about it, and I moved to be near my family. I was not ready to detach from him then. I believed what he said. And what of him? Was he a dead man already? Maybe, but I didn’t know he was. I thought he was a real person—that his views, behaviours and values were all his, and he had grown them himself, like most of us do in becoming a person. His mask was mostly hiding his true self in those days. When it did slip and a venomous tirade of words escaped, I justified this with explanations like “He’s stressed like he said; this isn’t the real him”. But it was. The cognitive dissonance was like a snake loosening and tightening around my reality. When the oxygen was low, I told myself a lot of things to make the uncomfortable thoughts sink back down so I could remain in balance again. What I didn’t know is that underneath the carefully adhered-to image, this man was built with pieces of others which he had collected over the years. The pieces he no longer needed he discarded, and then when he met me, he consumed me to regenerate. He tried to patch his wounds with me. I then saw a mirror of myself when I looked at him and thought we shared the same understanding. It was an illusion and a trick to attach me to him, and one I would only make sense of when I understood what narcissism was. I did not know I was part of a pattern of relationships he had already forced others through, carefully hiding his intentions firstly with flattery and alignment, then with coercion and manipulation, and ultimately with emotional and psychological annihilation of the victim (me). When his self-esteem needs were not met, he moved on to the next, like a soul vampire. Only at the end would I understand and see that I had been part of this pattern of how he had treated women in his life. I would never believe that I could just be “another one”, to be used to build his self-image, and then when I challenged his behaviour and would not comply, I would feel the wrath of his narcissistic rage. Cixous talks about sexual difference being “torturous and complicated” (1993, 50). She asks if any of us really know who we are, though she concludes she knows some things about herself and knows who she is not. In relation to individuals who are considered to exhibit components of extreme narcissism, often referred to as pathological narcissism, a similar question is repeatedly asked: “Do they know who they are; how their pathological dishonesty impacts on others and do they care—do they know they are a narcissist?” Maybe if we knew all the answers to the mysteries of

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human behaviour and the parts we are made of which pertain to our sexual difference, it would be too much for our brains to bear. I hear Cixous’ (1993, 51) words echo this thought: “If the truth about loving or hateful choices were revealed it would break open the world’s crust”. Upon embarking on my journey of discovery about narcissism, narcissistic abuse and how to write about it, I didn’t know where to begin. How could I write about something I still did not understand? I also held guilt that I had worked as a practitioner in mental healthcare for over twenty years and had never heard of narcissistic abuse. What kind of nurse and therapist did that make me? How many times might I have missed a woman (or a man) presenting as distressed with common labels being attached to their distress such as “depressed” or “personality disordered”? How many times had I been an unknowing bystander to this or at worst a contributor by not helping? It is completely possible that their distress, which may have been confused and unclear during assessment, was because of an individual with severe narcissistic traits/narcissistic personality disorder unleashing their tirade of hidden abuse upon them. Approaching my writing about narcissistic abuse from this viewpoint gave me some courage to begin writing about it. The aim would be to raise awareness of it in mental health nursing practice and for other health and social care professionals. As I started writing the article (Howard 2019), I had a fear that I might just sound like a mad, ranting woman writing about something intangible, unfamiliar and farfetched. I turned to Cixous and heard my own voice in hers: And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it…I know why you haven’t written…Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great-that is, for ‘great men’; and it’s ‘silly’ (Cixous 1976, 876).

However, I then heard Cixous say, “Writing is the effort not to obliterate the picture, not to forget” (1993, 7). She advocates for an inaugural scene from which writing emerges. I persevered, admittedly not just for my desire to raise awareness, but for my own survival. During the writing of this chapter, I was receiving communication from him. He did not like that the new partner he was now left with was unhappy with the information she was finding. It was a slow drip, drip on the pond of her reality. Then the woman herself started communicating with me via his email account and sometimes she sent text messages from his mobile pretending

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to be him: “You are unhinged. You are a bad mother and I feel sorry for your daughter. We are so happy together and we feel sorry for you”. Who was who and who was sending what? I heard my friend saying, “Keep your head Vickie, keep your head”, and writing the initial explorative article saved me (Howard 2019). But I couldn’t help it; I was struck with an unease. I had omitted, even thought it was probably inferred, that the exploration I had written was driven by my own direct experiences of narcissistic abuse. A colleague, upon reading it, said, “This is almost autoethnographic isn’t it?” But how could I get to an autoethnographic account without encountering more complexity and the uncovering of events I could not explain, as well as possibly causing distress to those around me and damaging my relationships with them? I turned once more to Cixous to find a way forward, to elsewhere. She captures my dilemmas when she states: Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth. It is in every way forbidden because it hurts everyone. We never say the truth, we must lie, mostly as a result of two needs; our need for love and cowardice (Cixous 1993, 37).

Following this and my disclosures in regard to privacy and the ethics of writing self-other stories in critical autoethnography, I have carefully chosen my words in this chapter. Some specifics of my experiences are presented directly, and streams of consciousness are presented in poetry to embrace Cixous’ representations of the painful implications of loss for the psyche and bodily and psychic wounding (Robson 2004). I also drew inspiration from the two women from my first article (Howard 2019) who had allowed me to use two statements from the stories they had shared in relation to their own experiences of narcissistic abuse. Reading their words, I realised I needed to find my own—I realised I needed to start writing from and for myself, to say the things I may not understand or have the answers for, and which ultimately still fill me with fear. This was the way forward for my writing and Cixous provided this encouragement: It can also happen that an author will kill himself or herself writing. The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed. It is combat against ourselves, the author; one of us must be vanquished or die (1993, 32).

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The Author is (Still) in the Dark The child tries to settle in her small bed, but her hot forehead and burning throat prevail. ‘Where is my daddy? Why will he not speak to me?’ The mother feels the misery. The pain behind her eyes from a tension prolonged. ‘If you had been nicer to daddy, would he have stayed?. I wish he was here’ she says to the mother. The mother’s eyes are watery. With every attempted answer, there was dissatisfaction.

Narcissistic abuse does not have a language to convey experiences and feelings, and maybe that is why many victims’ accounts sound vague and unconvincing. Sometimes they cannot quite get to the crux of an explanation of what they have been through. The poison they have consumed continues going inwards rather than being exorcised and banished with understanding. Maybe this language will come with time; how to explain the effects and feelings when you see a photograph on social media of your ex-partner and their new significant other, in the same pose and same location you both had; the same Interflora bouquets you were sent adorning the new supply’s Facebook page; the same hopes and dreams openly communicated of your future life together again over social media. You are a ghost now looking in on a life you once led. Many relationships are destroyed or diseased as a result. My communication with his parents has ceased as they appear to have difficulty facing any uncomfortable truths with the past now living again. Now, narcissism may be traced through a family like a genetic thread—like intergenerational trauma—that passes down and further down if left unacknowledged and unattended. It appears to be always here for them, never to be buried. We all remain in the dark; the questions and uncertainties still float around us like un-homed spirits, destined to never find their place but resigned to the fact. And then typically after two years of searching and stagnant acceptance there comes change. There is a message from him saying he wants to see his daughter and I agree to take her to a neutral venue near his home so they can spend time together (with me) and his parents. I hope this will help her, to know her daddy does want to see her, and that she is still connected. I am writing about this because I feel both dread and confusion at this prospect. I fear the unknown of what the reality of this meeting will result in and how I will behave, because I feel I

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cannot predict my behaviour and I cannot convince myself I will remain in control. There is still a seething anger, though mostly repressed. I am concerned it can erupt with unpredictability and I am afraid of it. Upon seeing him face to face again, how can I force a pretense of civil small talk for the sake of our daughter? But of course, I must because everybody tells me so. When he stripped me of his compassion and left me only experiencing his annihilation, I underwent my own death, so who are I? Cixous (1993, 38) reinforces this “known unknown” when she writes, The thing that is both known and unknown, the most unknown and the best unknown, that is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course thinking.

A Temporary Conclusion, for There is None Cixous (1993, 156) surmises, “But there is no ‘conclusion’ to be found in writing”. In appreciation, I have reached a temporary conclusion about the truth I was looking for. My truth is my experience. I will never fully know and understand all his motivations and the reasons why he is as he is (despite the clogging narcissism theory-knowledge which is now part of me). His “explanations” are just his most recent re-formulations of past events, twisted and dishonest to repair and bolster his self-esteem. But I know he is a pathological liar—“An explanation is the least you deserve”, he said, inferring he is thinking of me. This time my body is ready for it; I know this is a hook to entice me into listening to him again. I realise face-­ to-­face he is communicating with me as though we were still in an intimate relationship. This is the most disturbing and cruelest trick of the narcissist, and why some partners of narcissists keep going back and back and back. Their brains become confused regarding the abuse they have endured compared to the “love-bombing” partner they first knew who put them on a pedestal and promised them the Earth. There is a wanting to return into this cocoon of (not)love and feeling you are with your soulmate. I can hear Johnny Thunders (1978) implore, “You can’t put your arms around a memory…Don’t try”. It hits me hard. I must pull away from the stickiness of the cocoon as he smiles with false regret and false

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tears. I must remind myself there was never any love for me. He used me for himself for his supply of self-worth, and then when I would not be controlled his whole fury had turned on me. There was my world before narcissistic abuse and now there is another world. It is one where humanity shines more brightly because I see it more. It was a taken for granted “how the world is” but now it is cherished and nurtured and celebrated in those loved people around me, moving with Cixous, “Through death, toward the recognition of love” (1993, 41). For my temporary (not) conclusion, I am at least satisfied I have an answer for who provides me with the truth. It was me all along; my experiences were showing me the truth and reality. His actions spoke more truth than his words ever will. The truth in spoken form will never be revealed by a pathological liar, the disassociated psychopath, the keeper of themselves. We do not know if the narcissist will ever consider the ultimate question posed by Cixous (1993, 53)—it could have been constructed just for them. When do we reach the hour when we say we have deceived everyone in our lives in order to keep what we call life going? Through my writing I have come to a knowing of the situation two years post separation from a narcissistic abuser. I embrace that my personal experiences and search for professional knowledge as a nurse and therapist will propel me forward to continue writing, reminded by Cixous, “That’s the path of ‘the maturing of the soul’: go and see, and not only see but inscribe the abyss we are” (1993, 42).

References Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, translated by Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4: 875-893. Retrieved from https://www.jstor. org/stable/3173239 Howard, Vickie. 2019. “Recognising Narcissistic Abuse and the Implications for Mental Health Nursing Practice.” Issues in Mental Health Nursing 40, no. 8: 644–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/01612840.2019.1590485. Robson, Kathryn. 2004. Writing Wounds: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women’s Life-Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Thunders, Johnny. 1978. “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” [Recorded by J. Thunders]. On So Alone. Real Records ARE3.

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Vickie Howard  has been a lecturer in mental health nursing at the University of Hull since June 2016 and is currently the deputy programme director for the Mental Health and Wellbeing Practitioner Programme. She is a registered mental health nurse  and counsellor and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK. She holds an MSc in Effective Community Mental Health Care, an MA in Research Methods  and an MA in Health Research and is working towards a PhD by Published Work.

PART II

Writing Giving in to Itself: Introducing the “School of Dreams” Elizabeth Mackinlay

The rhythm of her breath fell into synchronicity with the body of words she embraced, and she slipped into the netherworld of sleep. Hélène Cixous then began to dream, she began to dream about writing, she began dream-writing. She watched herself below from above and saw a hand tug on her shoulder, “half gentle, half cruel”,1 telling her stories and trying to wake her as it placed an open box of writing in her lap. “How did I ‘write’2 this?” she asked, looking at fragments of words scrawled across the perforated sheets of the notepad lying in the bottom. She managed to make out a few of the words: Boom! a thunderbolt crackled over the city, unbelievably spread out, on and on…The sound rolled, rumbled, swelled in the air. Then, out of the sound flew a plane…a speck in a conflagration of boiling light, a sheet of yellow fire unfurled through the streets, right to the top of the world. Bombarded I say. A bom-bardment I say. The word scudded off my lips. The City’s public address system spoke. The voice went up and down the streets saying—I reconstruct —chopped—drowned out— swallowed up—this is a drill.3

 Cixous, Dream I Tell You, 1.  Cixous, Stigmata, 60. 3  Cixous, Dream I Tell You, 84. 1 2

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Cixous smiled at the secrets revealed to her from these words, words secret(ed) in that secret place of dreams where writing lives; see-crets that reveal to us “what we are when we are no longer ourselves”.4 In her dream, Dream said, “Write me”. And so, she did; she wrote in the dark as fast as she could, surprised at the “speed with which things happen at the edges of your heart”.5 The dream has her, carrying her, going at top speed, trying to escape. “What a giddy and delicious sensation!”6 she mumbled as her hand stumbled to keep up. Suddenly, she fell; and the writing ended. Cixous woke and got up. What had become of the ladder?7 References  Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New  York: Columbia University Press.  Cixous, Hélène. 2005. Stigmata: Escaping Texts, with a foreword by Jacques Derrida. New York: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène. 2006. Dream I Tell You, translated by Beverley B Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press.

 Cixous, Three Steps, 106.  Cixous, Three Steps, 60. 6  Cixous, Three Steps, 98. 7  Cixous, Three Steps, 108. 4 5

CHAPTER 6

Your Dreambody Must Be Heard: Writing Trauma in the School of Dreams Laura Hartnell

Introduction She has left them all asleep in the house: her mother, her sister, the men. The girl holds her arms to chest, cradling soft self. She is big now. She is eleven. She is barefoot. Wonders if she’ll die out here if she stays long enough, her nightie cotton-cold against the night. Her breaths judder out in little white gusts. The snowgirl wonders where the outline of her body ends: do you count the hairs sticking up from your arms, the warmth escaping out into the night, the bulbous cloud of thought and feeling that blooms around your head, trails behind you like stardust? The moon casts the snow into satin folds. She was taught that the moon was where women came to life, cackling in their forests. But now she thinks it might be the cruelest celestial body, mocking her in its cold white light.

L. Hartnell (*) Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_6

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I wake gently from a dream, half-ascended to the stars. My body drifts. I feel my cat’s corn chip-smell fur on my face. Distorted by sleepfog, images float to me from the “dream escaping [me] on waking” (Cixous 1993, 98): its beauty, its pain, its shivers, and half-screams and susurrations. Grief flutters from throat, to chest, to pelvis, settling in the crevices it finds there. The whispers of my still-dreaming body: a plunging stomach, a whimper, the smell of cold, powdered-sugar sweet. This was an important dream. “A self portrait of a future phantom” (Cixous 1993, 106). A dream to take to therapy. I roll over—“the dream hand tugs at the drawer to the left of my bed which serves as my box of dreams” (Cixous 2006, 1)—and write the dream down, trying to catch it as it unspools from me. It comes out in broken pieces, stripped of poetry, stark. Still, “the hand in the dark writes as best it can” (1). My cat shifts and trills softly in her sleep. “I had a dream the other night”, I say to my therapist after the pleasantries. “I’d like to work on it”.

“Great. Let’s Hear It”. “I am in a house. It’s snowing. I can see a girl—about eleven—outside in the snow. Men I don’t know are sleeping around me. I go out to the girl. It’s freezing. I am about to speak to her when the lights go on inside the house. We run. Just as the men start to leave the house I look back, grab the girl in both arms, and plunge us both into the snow”. As the words tumble from my mouth, I can feel my snowgirl coming into the room from a whiteout part of my childhood—it blooms in my torso, a deep, sad knowing. I need help loosening her from her icy tundra. I feel my reality shift, moving from the brick-and-mortar of everyday life into someplace else, somewhere soft-focus, full of fleeting images and embodied pushes and pulls that yearn for my attention. In therapy, we call this pointillism world Dreamland. When I visit Dreamland, Cixous comes with me, hovering in the corner of the room.1 She takes notes, like an incisive and loving grandmother, so that later, we can write. She loves when I feel into myself, into my dreams and my body, when I speak “from the heath where witches are kept alive; from [my] childhood which men have been trying desperately to make [me] forget, condemning it to ‘eternal rest’” (Cixous 1976, 877). When I 1  Evoking Cixous as a character in critical autoethnography is a technique I have lovingly borrowed from Elizabeth Mackinlay, editor of this volume.

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go to her School of Dreams, I can “return to the body which has been more than confiscated from [me], which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display” (Cixous 1976, 880). Instead, with the help of my therapist, and the encouragement of Cixous, I allow “the immense resources of the unconscious [to] spring forth” (Cixous 1976, 880). “Wow”, says my therapist when I’ve finished telling her the dream. She always does. An open breath to underscore the moment and give us both a chance to drift back down to Earth. For my therapist and me, dreaming is an expansive term. Process-­ oriented psychology, or process work—the modality my therapist and I work within—treats dreams not only as nighttime phenomena, but as unconscious personal processes that can also be glimpsed in waking life. Developed by Jungian psychoanalysis and physicist Arnold Mindell in the 1970s, process work was, in part, born out of Mindell’s observations that “nighttime dreams both mirrored and were mirrored in his clients’ somatic experiences” (IAPOP 2020, 1). Cixous likes that I do process work, where dreams “also exist in waking reality” (1993 103). Waking dreaming manifests as body symptoms, flickers of image, the shimmers of our affective experience, relationship conflicts, worldly synchronicities. “From the viewpoint of Dreaming [sic], dreams are pictures of ongoing creative experiences happening right now, every moment of the day in your body, feelings, and relationships” (Mindell 2002, 17–18). Nighttime dreams are a rendering of information that is also trying to get our attention through the affective intensities that underpin our embodied experience, but which often go ignored. “What is the most energetic part of the dream?” my therapist asks. “The most disturbing or strange thing? What gets your attention?” We always start here, tracking which dream image captivates me. That which has the most energy in the dream is where the biggest clues lie; the images that our subconscious is throwing up to try to get our waking attention. “The girl is shivering”, I say. I close my eyes and I can see her, looking up at me through tangled hair. She looks at me with big, soft eyes and takes my hand. “I want to hold her”. Something stirs inside my body, an old twinge of loss and need. “Go ahead”. My therapist’s voice is further away now. Cixous draws a little closer. This is how we unfold a dream.

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I press the girl to me. Two bodies, entangled in the snow. I can almost feel two heartbeats, our body heat melding together; a twist between my ribs and stomach, a reminder of something from long ago. I take the girl’s hands, press them between my own, willing warmth into her extremities. Our eyes lock. Hers are greyfog, far away and knowing. Here is a child who knows how to play dead. In a spliced second, our heads snap in unison over our shoulders. There is motion in the house. A light. Footsteps. “Men [are] coming out” (Cixous 2006, 66). I look back into her eyes. Her wizened, trustful look “twist[s] my heart” (Cixous 2006, 40). Her eyes say: we are going to die.

Sitting in front of my therapist, I can feel my body tensing against the dream images. Tears prick upwards, painful, from my chest. “Let’s slow it down”, my therapist’s voice cradles me back. “That’s it. Take a breath”. We pause the dream. Wait for me to remember where I am. Let the body settle, still. Cixous whispers gentle encouragement from her place on the ceiling. Cixous knows I sometimes hesitate to go to Dreamland—this strange world where things make a different kind of sense—because I am scared of what I might discover. But she knows, too, that it is exactly where I need to be to find the parts of myself I have carved off and hidden away. “You must write”, she whispers, from “this lightening region that takes your breath away, where you instantaneously feel at sea and where the moorings are severed with the already-written, the already-known” (Cixous 1993, 59). For Cixous, writing is a dreaming process that makes fuzzy the boundaries between our bodies and the world. There must be a classroom within Cixous’ School of Dreams for trauma. Like trauma, “[dreams] tell me their stories in their language, in the twilight, all alike or almost, half gentle half cruel, before any day, any hour” (Cixous 2006, 1). Like trauma, the School of Dreams teaches us that “right in the middle of life’s path; the apocalypse; we lose a life” (Cixous 1993, 63). Like trauma, dreams come to us drenched in strangeness; a wound that “cries out” in body sensations and affects, distorted images and snippets of memory (Caruth 1996, 3). “Only in dreams does one give pain the food it demands, give it the freedom to pain”, she tells me when I wake gasping, afraid (Cixous 2006, 6). Like dreams, trauma is information trying to make itself known.

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Our embodied experience is central to unfolding our dreams. Our dreams are not other-than phenomena that happen somewhere outside us; they are complex embodied processes. Dreamland is a part of us, and we’re a part of Dreamland; in therapy and when we write, we are using our bodies as conduits of dreaming, trying to preserve its strange ethereality lest we destroy its mystery. The affects of our dreaming cannot be captured, but they can be followed, unfolded, carried through us like a silver thread that leads us to some new understanding of ourselves, each other, the world, the universe. Like Cixous, process-oriented psychotherapists know that you cannot simply interpret dreams, because then “the flesh of the dream is no longer there” (Cixous 1993, 107). Rather than assuming the therapist can interpret a client’s dreams, process work uses dreaming as a sort of creative collaboration, understanding that the dream itself has agency within a broader energetic field inhabited by the therapist and their client. Process-oriented therapists tend not to impose phallogocentric meaning onto dreaming signals—it is not about making dreams describable, pin-down-able, able to be observed. Instead, therapists facilitate a client’s exploration of their own experience of the dream, respecting dreaming as a performative and ongoing embodied process. “That’s it. Stay with it. Go gently”, says my therapist. The panic is quietening in my chest. “You’re with this girl, holding her hand. We can pause the men in the background; let’s put them back in the house”. I rewind the dream like a tape in my head; the men walk backwards, the falling snow drifts upwards, and I focus on the grey-brown eyes of the girl, looking up at me, her little face convinced I will be the one to save her. “What’s going on for you?” my therapist asks. “Let me know how you’re going”. “I feel all wobbly. Like my limbs are honey, sticky and soft”. I am suspended between worlds: my honey-snow-body in Dreamland, in love with the wiry child in front of me. Scared for her. Scared for me. And the soft body of my adult self, the solid here-and-now on this couch, breathing, trying to hold onto image and flesh, letting my childhood be alive within me, without falling too far into the snowdrift. The body is the harbour of dreaming experiences; sensations, images and dreams come to us from Dreamland through our bodies. So connected are our bodies with dreaming that Mindell coined a new term—the dreambody—to describe their entanglement. The dreambody appears as sentient, generally unrecognized sensations that eventually manifest in dream images, body experiences and symptoms.

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The dreambody bridges the gap between our measurable, physical bodies and the immeasurable experiences of the so-called mind. What we see in our dreams we feel in our bodies. Likewise, what we experience in our bodies we can find in our dreams (Mindell 2011/1982, location 73). To work with the dreambody in a therapeutic context, a therapist will help their client notice what is happening within their body, and feel into those sensations until some form of meaning, however fleeting or fuzzy, becomes clear for a moment. The dreambody is not a static or easily graspable object; it is “a highly energic field intensity… a patterned experience without definite spatial or temporal dimensions” (Mindell 2011/1982, location 1143). The dreambody is non-dualistic, refusing a split between body and mind, or between body, mind and dreaming; the dreambody collapses all three in on themselves, celebrating their entangled intra-active exchange. In this way, the dreambody has much in common with affect, the embodied “registering of life as an assemblage of elements thrown, in the course of events, into a contact aesthetic” (Stewart 2017, 194). As the body is for Berlant and Stewart (2019, 18), the dreambody is “a contact sheet with a nervous system”, an ever-shifting energetic worlding of forces that shape the world and us, changing both. Connecting with the affect-dreaming of the (dream)body is a therapeutic intervention used in many kinds of psychotherapy; in particular, it is central to somatic approaches to trauma therapy. According to body-­ oriented psychotherapist Pat Ogden, the body’s dreaming signals are “more significant than the verbal narrative because a somatic narrative holds our history” (2020). By approaching trauma from a position of embodied knowledge, Ogden (2006, 15) uses “inner body sensations” to help clients constellate the story of the trauma, without re-traumatizing them by requiring clients to find verbal expression or linear narrative to resolve past traumas. She is joined in this sensorimotor approach by Peter Levine, for whom trauma responses are an extreme example of the disembodiment that, he argues, sits at the heart of Western culture because “most Westerners share a less dramatic but still impairing disconnection from their inner sensate compasses” (2010, 355). These inner sensate compasses are Mindell’s dreaming signals; when we sleep, they are imaged and embodied as nighttime dreams. Therapeutic interventions might ask a client to follow their internal compass—their affects, their dreaming signals—by turning towards the (dream)body’s felt sense. Levine describes the felt sense as follows:

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The felt sense unifies a great deal of scattered data and gives it meaning…[It] can be said to be the medium through which we experience the totality of sensation. In the process of healing trauma, we focus on individual sensations (like television pixels or melodic notes). When observed both closely and from a distance, these sensations are simultaneously experienced as foreground and background, creating a gestalt, or integration of experience. (Levine and Frederick 1997, 68)

My trauma’s felt sense—“the gaseous, vibratory, or field-like quality of the dreambody”—is the only way I can move towards all that has been visited upon my own body (Mindell 2011/1982, location 772). My dreambody—its felt sense— is all I have of my trauma: no words, no language, no scenes playing out across my mind. Just sensations, half-flickers, dream images, stuttered whispers, dark breaths of unknown memory. My beautiful, performative body’s dreaming signals grew on my skin like moss, a green fuzz that spread across me over years, bristling with the strangest of triggers: the taste of a mandarin, the sound of a draining bath, the smell of daphne. Trauma’s only job is to be known somehow, some way. And when it tries and fails to become comprehensible to us through the languages we have been taught in institutions, trauma turns to our flesh, our dreambodies; what we all, eventually, must know. “Just stay here for a moment, with the girl, holding her hand. Stay until you’re ready”. My therapist is there, gently holding us in this suspended space. I am safe. The snowpeople cannot get me here. I wait here, in this comfort, until I feel ready to dream the dream on, until I can unpause and let the men walk through that door. I wait, breathing, my hand in the girl’s, on my heart. Cixous (1993) floats down from the corner of the room, whispers to me: “We can hope to move closer to everything we can’t say without dying of fright through the School of Dreams” (61). Cixous makes me feel brave. I feel into the girl’s warm little hand. She looks up at me. She doesn’t want to run. She’s too tired. She just wants to be held. But if we don’t move the men will catch us. And she is too big for me to run with her, this girlbody cusping adolescence. There is shouting behind us. Male voices. A sick-feeling rips through me, an old jolt made fresh, “the horror…tucked away in the bottom of my heart” (Cixous 2006, 46). I clutch the girl’s hand, dragging her behind me, our bare feet stumbling through cold wet white. We run as best we can, carrying

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our own feral forms. But the men are big and the men have boots and they are too close. I feel into the girl’s skin. Her flesh is screaming: no more. Her legs are tangled beneath her, her reddened feet lurching her forward. She is nothing but flesh and bone and breath and it is my job, I realise with a pang, to bring her back to girl. I slow, stop, and she climbs onto my back, but she is too big, and I stumble, almost fall. There is nothing but mountain around us, spewing out in all directions. The girl’s legs dig into my flesh. Her head is heavy on my shoulder. I have a vision of our captured bodies, splayed out on tables, our chests barely rising, the hope drained from us like blood. I will not let this happen. I wrap my arms tight around her, and in one wild unthinking motion, I plunge us hard into the snow. We are enveloped in powder. Water works its way into every crevasse of our body, every follicle of our hair. “Not a hope. I try. This pitch black. The agony” (Cixous 2006, 46). We fall through the silver-dark cold, this child pushed up against me, all velvet-skin and musk-stick smell. My eyes can’t focus. My lungs are spent. “Little by little my mind goes blank, I am no longer attached to anything” (Cixous 2006, 29). She clings to me, believing still that I will save us. I weep into the folds of her neck, dissolving with the tenderness of her.

“She is so small”. My voice is softer than I meant it. “She is so small”. My therapist leans forward. I want to reach into the space between my stomach and my heart and find us both a safe space there. I love her, this little shivering, wild-­ haired girl. “I love her so much I want to eat her”. “You love her so much you want to eat her”, repeats my therapist. I gently open my eyes. “Yeah. Didn’t you ever want to do that with your daughter?” She smiles; a ghostly image of her tiny, milky newborn enters our shared dreaming. “Oh, yes”, she breathes. “Yes, of course”. “It’s like that. I just want to swallow her in one gulp”. “Go ahead”, she says. It takes me a second to realize she’s serious. Shyness washes over me; I have never been good at mime. Cixous tells me how to do it: “You have to take a rock, put it under your head, and let the dream ladder grow. It grows down—toward the depths…” (1993, 108). We are writing this story together, the three of us: my therapist, Cixous and I. This is simply the part of the story where I swallow a girl.

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I reach out into the air in front of me and pick up the invisible, miniature snowgirl with my hands. I cradle her to me, admire her long eyelashes and deep, wondering eyes. Open my mouth wide and take a huge gulp of air and girl. “What’s happening for you?” my therapist asks. I am elsewhere now. Not in the snow, not in the room. Inside a fleshwet body. I sink into my dreaming. I feel her sliding—safe, finally safe—into the pink cave of me. She lies there, curled up like a cat, soft and warm. My body turns inside out, the snow melts away, and the Earth is transformed into a fleshy pink cavern. The girl and I are both there together, limbs entwined, chests heaving, feeling aliveness return to our petrified forms. “This is what happens when one begins shifting the past around” (Cixous 2006, 29). This place is big enough to hold us both, unafraid. We will live here, together, safe. I can feel it in my body, a little stone dropped into a lake. We have thrown ourselves into a snowdrift, this girl and I, and we have survived. “We go like gods, I mean brimming with silent laughter, our triumph… It [fills] me with a world of joy. Walking like two columns of desire” (29).

We are in this together now—me, my therapist, Cixous—held in a suspended reality between Dreamland and the ordinary. I am vaguely aware, inside my fleshcave, that my therapist is watching me, asking me something. “What’s it like for you in there?” My therapist shifts in her seat. I let out a sigh. Cixous hunches over her notebook. Snowgirl is part of me now, inside this cave. She is resting in my torso, her limbs stretching out to fit inside my limbs, nestling there. The pink-red cave pulses gently around me, ever-expanding, cradling my whole world. And there is new life starting, over there. It starts as a flicker of red in my periphery. Something spongy and wet. Organistic, abject, beautiful and terrifying. “Follow it”, I hear someone say from far-off. I don’t know whether it’s me, or my therapist, or Cixous, but I close my eyes, inch towards it, and see a suppurating foetal figure, curled up and weeping like a wound. An intake of breath. A tiny recoil.

“There’s this thing, like an embryo”, I hear myself say to my therapist. “I don’t know what this is”.

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And I know as I speak that I don’t have to know. Cixous whispers: “Only the dream teaches us this sensation of ‘nobody knows’”—and somewhere within me a new state of trauma-healing slowly loosens a knot in my gut (1993, 106). The pink-white fleshbundle moves, grows, shifts a little on the edge of this vast body cavern. It is the girl, it is me. It is everything lost and everything birthed. It is all the unwanted touches, the shame and fear and grief and pain and survival and joy and love. I do not know what to do with it, this flesh of mine.

“It’s a tangle of flesh. Ligaments, fascia. They’re all knotted up”, I mutter dreamily. “Ask it what it wants from you”. The fleshbundle shudders, a gesture for me to untangle the knots. Please help, it says wordlessly. And as I sit patiently inside myself, loosening the binds, this secret shining thread spins up into new dreamfigures. I can feel them yawning awake, stretching their legs, learning how to use their voices, how to write, how to live inside the space of me, further and further into the safe deep red.

I open my eyes. My therapist, Cixous and I are in a dreamy cloud of not-quite-knowing. The words are on the tips of our tongues, the breath on the crest of our lungs. And in that suspended, dreamy split second, our dreambodies glow bright for a moment, yawning open and pure, and then language returns and our eyes focus and we come back to some kind of shared reality, guarded by a beautiful fleshydream spectre. “These dreams”, whispers Cixous in my ear, “...[are] what we are when we are no longer ourselves: our survivings. Prophets of our traces, of our ultimate metamorphoses” (1993, 106). After therapy, I curl up in bed. I feel cracked open, tender, but loved. I feel like my therapist is still with me, stroking my hair. Cixous sits on the bed with me, watching as I drift off to sleep; but no—there is writing balling up inside me that we can’t afford to lose. Cixous gently shakes me awake. “You are a Dream Writer”, she whispers as she leads me to my desk, “a writer of the dying-clairvoyant kind” (1993, 63). “Write your self. Your body must be heard” (Cixous 1976, 880). And I know she is right; there is something that happens to me when I write like Cixous has

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taught me, something that happens when I write “to touch with letters, with lips, with breath, to caress with the tongue, to lick with the soul, to taste the blood of the beloved body” (1991/1986, 4). When I write my embodied experience, using language that stirs up the felt sense of my dreambody, its densities and textures, I am re-entering Dreamland with an assuredness; this embodied knowledge is mine to write. My dreambody gives me “above all a structure of writing” (Cixous 1993, 94). My dreaming is a part of me, and my writing is a part of it. In the School of Dreams, we must give over to “the mysteries of writing” (Cixous 1993, 58). We must let writing move through us and onto the page without expecting that it should always make logical sense. Dreamwriting is not afraid of ambiguity—of trauma, grief, death—but rather moves “toward the dark” as we “leave the [singular, static] self” of phallogocentric psychoanalysis in favour of a multiple, contiguous, ever-­ unfolding dreambody approach to subjectivity (Cixous 1993, 65). By following our dreambodies, by writing them into language without subjecting them to phallogocentrism’s “infamous logic of antilove”, we gather “the strength to both deal with and to receive the axe’s blow, to look straight at the face of God, which is none other than [our] own face, but seen naked, the face of [our] soul” (Cixous 1976, 878; Cixous 1993, 63, italics in original). Dreamwriting is my trauma testimony. I do not require a police statement, a court transcript, traces of DNA. My dreambody has reminded me, over and over, for years and years, what happened. My dreaming is writing of a different kind, the part of me that is “wounded, split open...under the blow of the truth, [as] the eggshell we are breaks” (Cixous 1993, 63). Dreamland used to be doused in terror, a knife slicing through darkness, but now I can meet my dreaming signals as what they are: little performances that play themselves out on my beautiful, brave body that has always known what happened to it, has always wanted me to know. And even though I believe that we do not always need words to make our bodies’ stories real, I feel within me a tugging towards language. Not the phallogocentric language that would have me lay out my trauma in neat, linear, impossible lines. But messy, dreamy, felt-sense language that aims to connect with the body first, and cognition second. In therapy, I am loved on both sides by two women—my therapist and Cixous— each teaching me how to write my experience in embodied, dreaming forms. And so, I listen to my dreambody as it tingles and stirs, refusing to settle, calling out to me in an unknown language, and find I am already “a

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long way inside the country of writing” (Cixous 1993, 80). The snowgirl calls out to me— “someone in [me] has a presentiment of future recognition”—and I know I have to write her properly, bodily, this brave little girl, who lives in a tangled fleshcave inside me, who helps me untangle my trauma; the part of me who fights and fights, who survives and survives, who writes and writes, again and again and again (Cixous 1993, 106). Cixous takes my hand, “the dream hand” (2006, 1). “Write”, she whispers. “For from [dreamwriting’s] lands escape the ghosts who console us, mortals that we are…” (2006, 7).2

References Berlant, Lauren, and Kathleen Stewart. 2019. The Hundreds. Durham: Duke University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, translated by Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4: 875–93. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306. Cixous, Hélène. 1991. “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, with a foreword by Deborah Johnson, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 2006. Dream I Tell You, translated by Beverley. B.  Brahic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. International Association of Process Oriented Psychology (IAPOP). 2020. A Brief History of Process Oriented Psychology. https://www.iapo.com/history/. Levine, Peter. 2010. In an Unspoken Voice. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Levine, P. A., and Frederick, A. 1997. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Mindell, A. 2002. Dreaming While Awake: Techniques for 24-Hour Lucid Dreaming. Newburyport: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Incorporated. Mindell, Arnold. 2011. Dreambody: The Body’s Role in Healing the Self. Kindle Edition. Retrieved from Amazon.com (Original work published 1982).

2  Cixous wrote a collection of fifty dreams, called Dream I Tell You. The writing of my dream which ends this chapter incorporates lines from Cixous’ own dreamwriting, referenced using footnotes rather than parentheses, in the interest of fluidity.

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Ogden, Peter, Kekuni Minton, and Clare Pain. 2006. Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: W. W. Norton. Stewart, Kathleen. 2017. “In the World that Affect Proposed.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 2: 192–198. Laura Hartnell’s  (she/they) research is interested in writing as a resistive and transformative mode of meaningmaking. Her thesis explored performative writing as a form of trauma testimony, and she continues her research in performance studies and gender studies while also studying psychotherapy and group facilitation. Hartnell is an independent scholar working sessionally at Monash University.

CHAPTER 7

The Fatal Blow: “Who Are I?” A Feminist Autoethnographer’s Encounter with Cixous Karen Madden

The Workshop Begins We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing (Cixous 1976, 880).

The “Écriture Féminine and Critical Autoethnography: Coming to Writing with Hélène Cixous” (Mackinlay and Lipton 2019) pre-­conference workshop was held in a cozy room on the beautiful inner-city campus of RMIT in Melbourne. Three of the walls were glass, so I looked around to ponder what made the room feel so snug on this cold winter day despite the openness of the design to the elements. Beautifully weathered, old brick buildings sat sturdily around the room and vast, generous trees that had sprung up long ago filled every view with bountiful greenery. Being enclosed in echoes of the past and ever-present nature in this room, which was now filled with the aroma of coffee and broad, welcoming smiles, put

K. Madden (*) The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_7

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me at ease. I was not expecting to feel this way. I was in a room of one of Australia’s most respected institutions with professors and fellow postgrad students. Attending conferences at the Group of Eight university where I am a PhD candidate usually finds me feeling inadequate and out of place against the sandstone fortress backdrop, where each weighty stone represents a tome of Western, and most often, white male scholarship. Today I was here, in this room, with its muted warm brick enclosure and lush greenery, in the company of kind, open faces. There would be no talk of the canon here. Today, I was somewhere new. As was my habit, I began to imagine rows of hedges around the perimeter of the lane that the room overlooked. A leafy hedge at either end would block the views of the busy streets and make this space feel even more secluded. Yes, I would add a hedge, I decided. My favourite thing about the first farmhouse I lived in as a small child was a beautiful old hedge that wrapped itself around the circular driveway. My grandmother’s house at Grose Wold too had a wonderfully tall hedge that separated it from the busy work that went on in the driveway and orchard beyond it. One of my favourite games when I was a child was finding and building safe little spaces in which to hide away. I would run my hands along the soft green leaves until I found a gap. I’d peek inside to see if there was a hollow spot big enough to house me. Once found, I’d crawl inside and brush the topsoil away using a pine-needle brush to clear a comfy spot to sit. If the gap was visible from the outside, I would gather sticks and branches to fortify the entrance. I would sit inside the hedge for hours, sometimes with one of my brother’s matchbox cars, other times with a kitten or one of the other many pets who were my companions. I would receive a thrilling surge of delight whenever one of my family members walked past and I remained undetected safely inside.

‘“Only writing’, Cixous suggests, ‘can…convey the truth about identity’” (Cixous 1994, 199), Briony began as she cradled her baby, performing her mother/writer/academic/feminist identities in seductive harmony. “Who are I?” (Mackinlay 2019, 9) Liz asked, as she stirred and swirled and sprayed Cixous’ I-s around the room, placing “are” in the place of “am” in her purposeful calamity. As I listened to them speak, one of my “I-s” released itself from my body and hovered carelessly, looking down upon the “I” sitting at the table in her t-shirt with the letters F-E-­M-I-NI-S-T (em)boldened and blackened across her chest. I noticed there were two I-s in feminist; the word itself held room for more than one I within a singular feminist identity (Cixous 1993, 3).

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“She certainly wants the room to know she identifies as feminist,” my observing I thought as I looked down upon myself, who was looking intently at Liz and Briony as they spoke. “You’ve found your safe feminist writing space, I continued, and you clearly want them to know you belong—your t-shirt is screaming that you want to belong.”

The Axe is Poised As Liz and Briony spoke, Cixous began to persistently tug at the seams of my t-shirt; her words began to unpick at the fragile seams holding it together. I squeezed my eyes closed in the hope I could block out the unsettling vision of myself that was coming into view. It did not help. I opened my eyes and frantically scanned the room for something to steal my attention away from the Cixousian consciousness beginning to erupt. It was no good. I tried to fix on the beautiful surroundings, the brick buildings, the lush trees. It did not help; it was no good; I could not escape. Cixous’ words were everywhere; on Liz’s lips, coming out of Briony’s marker on the board; quotes were adhered to the windows. “The staggering vision of the construction [I have become, with] the tiny and great lies, the small non-truths [I] have incessantly woven” (Cixous 1994, 201) were all suddenly in clear sight. The unveiling had arrived with a brutality that shattered. “Under the blow of truth, the eggshell we are breaks. Right in the middle of life’s path…we lose a life” (Cixous 1994, 201), Cixous warned, but it was too late. Here and now in this room where I had just moments ago felt so safe, Cixous’ axe was raised above my head and ready to drop. “You don’t belong here. Your t-shirt is bullshit and so are you! This new feminist life—what a joke! No one is fooled.” I struck with force. I grabbed Cixous’ axe and swung it ferociously. It plunged straight through my ribs and pierced deep into my heart. Panicked, I searched the faces around me for a sign they could see what was happening to the I sitting at the table. They smiled back. “I have just been struck; oh my god, am I bleeding?” I screamed in shock, but without a sound. “Can they see I am not a real feminist? Do they know this t-shirt is a lie? Do they know I am a lie, and I don’t belong here? I don’t belong anywhere.”

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Desperate not to be exposed, I pasted a smile on my face and nodded in a show of obedient attention to the speakers, hoping I was still able to mask the terror raging within. Slowly, carefully, so as not to draw any attention, I reached for my heavy winter coat from the back of my chair, slid it around my shoulders, snuck my arms into the sleeves, and wrapped it firmly around me so no one could see the handle of the axe protruding from my chest. It had cut right through the F-E-M-I-N-I-S-T letters, the two I-s now torn apart, separated by the edges of the blade. I sat frozen, desperate for the moment when I could hide away on my own. From the safety inside the hedge, I could see what was going on inside the house. I could watch the comings and goings of my mother and sister who worked all day to feed and clothe my four brothers and me. I could watch my father leave in the early hours of the morning and return long after dark, when my mother would place his warm plate piled high with meat from the chicken yard or the pig pen, or sometimes, if one of my brothers had raised a steer, from the front paddock. She would smile through the lipstick that she had hastily put on when she heard his truck coming up the drive and sit in her seat to the left of his at the head of the table. My brothers would give an account of the work they had accomplished during the day and my sister would clear the plates and wash up in silence before reading me a bedtime story. “Can I sleep in your bed?” I would inevitably ask. “But I’m just across the room,” she would whisper back. “Please.” “Ok, just tonight,” she would relent, too tired to realise that she said the very same thing every night.

From Inside My Childhood Hedge Why do my thoughts always return to childhood memories when I start to write? I wonder/ed. I am so tired of re/living these stories. I have enrolled in a PhD and I have literally clothed myself in feminism. I have done this so I can write/live my way to a new story, one far away from the patriarchal world where I began. In this new story I am a woman living a beautiful, independent writer’s life that she has created for herself. I live in a feminist Woolfian room of my own now (Woolf 2015), not in some childhood hedge. “Why Cixous,” I implored, “Why am I always accidently slipping back into this story that will never leave me?” (Poulos 2009).

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Whenever I raise the pen to write, it is here. But it is not my story. It was never my story. I was just there. I was there as witness to the story being written about me, by them, and without my consent. Please, Cixous, please let me escape this realm of dreams where their story of me lives. You tell me that to write, “one has to go away, leave the self” (Cixous 1993, 65), so let me go! Please let me get away from this self—the one that they created and left hiding in a hedge. I want to live/love in the here and now as I live/love in this becoming-feminist life (Ahmed 2017, 19–88). Please Cixous, wake me up from this haunting dream. One time as I sat in the hedge, I looked out and I saw a spider weaving a web right in front of the butterfly who would become his prey. The butterfly sat nearby watching his every move. She never let her eyes move from him and the web he was weaving. Why didn’t she fly away? Didn’t she know the web was for her? Didn’t she know that if she got stuck in the web, she would never be able to leave? I sat there in the hedge watching it all happen and not doing anything. I now wonder if I could have shooed the butterfly away. I wonder why I didn’t come out of the hedge and at least try to shoo the butterfly away. I just sat there, watching the spider being watched by the butterfly. I loved the butterfly so much. Why didn’t she fly away? Why didn’t I try to shoo her?

As I continued to write with Cixous, she whispered, “Writing…does not come from outside. [It is not a t-shirt you can put on.] On the contrary it comes from deep inside…It is deep in [your] body, further down, behind thought…Somewhere in the depths of [your] heart…in [your] stomach, [your] womb” (Cixous 1994, 204). All around me, the professors and students were writing. With “wild abandon and recklessness, fully open…to tell [their] stories,” (Mackinlay 2022) they wrote. Caught in the flow of their ecstasy, I began to let my hand move freely across the page. I gave way to writing. Furiously the pen dragged my hand back and forth, back and forth across the page. Now unaware and unconcerned about the bodies writing around me, a frenzy of words spilled out of me and onto the page. A swarm of I-s began dancing, fighting, colliding and bouncing off each other. When one I was spent, she put down the pen and another would arrive and pick it up again. When it was done, I looked in the mirror on my page (Mackinlay 2019, 54). My coat had been flung across the room. The F-E-M-I-N-I-S-T t-shirt was lying in tatters,

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next to the bin in the corner. The axe in my chest was clear for all to see. The I sitting with a pen in her hand began to cry. How do I fix this? How do I write myself away from there and into here? I don’t know how to live/love here and now. I don’t know how to fix this. She moaned and wailed, letting the waves of realisation and pain rise and fall within her body. The butterfly struggled as her delicate wings became entangled in the sticky, almost invisible silk strands of the web. The web was glistening in the sunlight; its ghostly patterns shone as the morning dew clinging to its strands gave way to the warmth of the sun. I imagined how the butterfly might have felt flying closer and ever closer. Was she mesmerised by its sparkle, I wondered? Did she perhaps think she had found in the web a place that was equal to the beauty she held within her wings? For she was so very beautiful. Even now, as her struggle weakened and she slowly―very, very slowly― began to move less and less within her place in the web, she was exquisite.

I looked down at the axe wedged into my chest. It was in deep. It was wedged right into my heart. “You’re not a feminist! You didn’t even try to save her,” the axe screamed as I tore it from my body. “But I was a child,” the words offered so quietly they could not be heard. I did not bleed. I could not breathe. I was already dead. The gleaming web framed her stunning wings as it held them apart so we could all at once see all that she was. How strange that she could not move now. How strange that this was to be her end; that she would be no more.

“Now”, said Cixous, “now is the moment you can begin to write. To begin (writing, living) we must have death. I like the dead,” she continued, “they are doorkeepers who while closing one side ‘give’ way to the other” (Cixous 1993, 7). Drowsily, I eyed the destroyed t-shirt on the floor, and tried to make sense of what Cixous was telling me. I looked down upon myself sitting in that beautiful room enclosed in faded brick buildings with their echoes of the past. I stared at the trees and thought about the way they are at once a record of the past with their scarred trunks and also a vessel of the future with new branches emerging from tiny green buds. I considered my dead self giving way to my other selves. “Who and what do you write with once you are dead?” I wondered.

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I recalled Sara Ahmed’s words on becoming feminist. She said, “I return to experiences that were painful and difficult, but that were animating, that gave me life because they were how I was directed along a feminist path. If we start close to home, we open ourselves out” (Ahmed 2017, 19). Audre Lorde’s words too began to float in and out of my consciousness. “I have come to believe…that what is most important must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood,” (Lorde 2007, 40) she said. “My silences had not protected me,” she warned, “Your silence will not protect you” (41). Lorde’s words were now darting to and fro in the swirling current. “What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need to say?” (41) she asked. Before my own words could form in response, bell hooks swept in. hooks’ words were insistent upon the distinction “between that writing which enables us to hold on to life…and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully” (hooks 1999, 11). Around and around hooks’ words fluttered before settling on the page in front of me. “Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover,” (11) she said as I put my pen down. Cixous spoke the final word. “We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing” (Cixous 1976, 880). “Do you see now?” she asked.

Now Off You Go and Fly Away The workshop was over, and I found myself walking the streets alone. We were on our way to become better acquainted over a drink at a local pub when I wandered off from the group. The streets of Melbourne in winter are one of my favourite places in the world. When I am home, hot and bothered in the sweltering Brisbane humidity, I close my eyes and imagine I am there, walking the streets. Down Collins, a little detour into Flinders Lane for coffee—or soup or pasta depending on my level of hunger— along one of the cross streets until I get to Bourke—or little Bourke,

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depending on my mood—up Bourke and then cross back on Spring Street over to Collins and down again. It is a loop I know by heart; a loop that soothes me whenever and wherever I need to find ease in my mind. There was no need to imagine it now; I was here in Melbourne, losing myself in the parade of winter coats, scarves and boots. Dodging bicycles, trams and cars, I glanced at storefronts and patrons spilling onto the pavement from pubs, cafes and restaurants, for which, along with the arts and football, this beautiful city is known. As I walked, my mind began to play the autoethnographies I had read recently like a series of video shorts. The first scene was of Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner in their apartment, talking about teaching autoethnography to their undergrad students (Ellis 2004). A home enclosed in books; the tools of two writers’ lives strewn on every surface; lively discussion of theory and practice as Carolyn prepared a meal. How I longed for a home just like that when I read Ellis’ book. The next scene was Stacey Holman Jones sitting on the couch with her father, watching sport—was it football?—and wanting him to do something that was out of reach. Reading a book—that was it—Stacy wanted him to read her daughter’s book, but he couldn’t (Holman Jones 2015). I was overcome with an ache of loss and yearning, and I picked up my pace in an effort to escape it. I had recalled only a fraction of Stacy’s story and yet its emotion was immediately present. “In critical autoethnography, theory is a language available to us as we write our stories”, Holman Jones (2016, 234) had said, and I wondered if that was why the stories of critical autoethnographers stayed with me so long after I read them. Is it because they are imbued with theory that they become so much more than lively anecdotes that pass me by as soon as I put the book down? I wondered. Perhaps they become something else, something more. Before I could grasp the threads of the emerging idea, an image of Liz Mackinlay wrestling with her monstrosity of a bookshelf began to play. I smiled at the memory of her as she took the bookshelf outside for painting, and momentarily raised a hammer to it with fantasies of destruction when she was interrupted by a phone call from Cixous (Mackinlay 2019, 21–24). At the end of their conversation Liz hesitatingly agreed to paint over rather than destroy the holder of her memories, and the bookshelf was saved from a violent demise. “The bookshelf…sheds its anger and reveals a heavy sadness for all that has come to pass-t…[as Liz] appl(ies) one coat, two coats, three and several more and soon enough the bookshelf is transformed to a lighter shade of pale” (27).

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In writing écriture féminine, Mackinlay tells us, we write “feminine embodied experience, affective movement, material creativity, and fluid cycles of speaking-writing” (Lipton and Mackinlay 2017, 28). The call to writing autoethnography with Cixous, the answer to the question “Who are I?” begins its own explanation with words. “Words that manifest a moment, words in a moment of mystery [perhaps the mystery of a girl hiding in a hedge?], words that make material, words that meaning make, words that move, words that mourn, words that melt the world through writing” (Mackinlay 2019, 243). Mackinlay turns to Cixous’ words, “The origin of the material in writing can only be myself. I is not I of course, because it is I with others, coming from the others, putting me in the other’s place, giving me other’s eyes” (Cixous 1997, 87, cited in Mackinlay 2019, 243). And so, as autoethnographers looking to write with a Cixousian ethic, we write as Cixous urges us: We write as women who write our own selves; we write about women and we bring women to writing; we put ourselves into the text—and into the world and into history— by our own movement (Cixous 1976, 875). “Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable. Are we capable of it?...To approach the place where I can unlie?” (Cixous 1993, 53). I don’t know if I am capable of it, but I do know, with Mackinlay, “it is the only honest move—the only ethico-onto-­ epistemological line I know how to make” (Mackinlay 2019, 20–21). The butterfly lay unmoving in the web as if dead. Her only chance was to make the spider believe the fight was over, and so she ceased all movement and fixed her eyes unblinkingly on the little girl. The tortured face looking back at her broke her heart for she loved the little girl and knew the little girl loved her too. “It is time for you to leave the hedge my dear one.” She tried with all her might to speak a language the girl would understand, but the girl did not move. “Crawl out from under these branches, find your wings and fly,” she begged. “But I don’t have wings,” replied the little girl. “But of course you do,” answered the butterfly, “for you are my daughter. Now off you go and fly away”.

I looked up from the glistening pavement to see what establishment was throwing such glowing light and found I was at the entrance to the pub where my fellow autoethnographers were gathered, a lively assembly.

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“Join us,” they shouted when they saw me standing tentatively at the door. “Is she with your party?” the person on the door inquired. “Sure is! She’s one of us,” they sang out in chorus.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohens. Signs 1, no. 4: 875-893. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306. Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1994. The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers. London: Routledge. Ellis, Carolyn. 2004. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Holman Jones, Stacy. 2015. “Living Bodies of Thought: The ‘Critical’ in Critical Autoethnography.” Qualitative Inquiry 22, no. 4: 228–237. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1077800415622509 hooks, bell. 1999. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. New  York: Henry Holt. Lipton, Briony, and Elizabeth Mackinlay. 2017. We Only Talk Feminist Here: Feminist Academics, Voice and Agency in the Neoliberal University. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­ 319-­40078-­5. Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister Outsider. New York: Crown Publishing Group. Mackinlay, Elizabeth. 2019. Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­04669-­9. Mackinlay, Elizabeth. 2022. Writing Feminist Autoethnography: n Love with Theory, Words, and the Language of Women Writers. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003037484. Mackinlay, Elizabeth, and Briony Lipton. 2019. Écriture Feminine And Critical Autoethnography: Coming To Writing With Hélène Cixous. Paper presented at the Critical Autoethnography Conference 2019: Levity and Gravity, The Place of Humour in Critical Autoethnography, RMIT University & Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Holman Jones, Stacy. 2016. “Living Bodies of Thought: The ‘Critical’ in Critical Autoethnography.” Qualitative Inquiry 22, no. 4: 228-237.

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Poulos, Christopher. 2009. Accidental Ethnography: An Inquiry into Family Secrecy. New York: Routledge. Woolf, Virginia. 2015. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, edited by Anna Snaith. New York: Oxford University Press. Karen Madden  is a doctoral candidate examining educational leadership from a critical feminist perspective. Karen’s encounter with Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993) provoked an unveiling and unravelling of her feminist subjectivities and began a gradual awakening towards the possibilities of Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed 2017).

CHAPTER 8

Writing that Chews Itself: Roots and the Ragged Vitality of Teeth Elizabeth Mackinlay

Introduction1 The day it happened; I knew for certain. The flesh of Mum's memories was no longer rooted in her mind, and neither were her teeth in her mouth. When I walked in, she was sitting unshowered and crying on her unmade bed in a worn pale pink chenille dressing gown. She looked at me and I searched her face for an entrance into the fears encased in the folds of skin rumpled by time.  In this piece, I have opted to use footnotes for citations as well as detailed explanations to keep the rhythm and flow of this symstory in motion—to make space, as Laurel Richardson argues, for  “secondary arguments, novel conjectures and  related ideas” (1990, loc. 151 of 868) to be included. In-text citations in parentheses, she laments, reinforce the assumption that this is where knowledge that counts the most is constituted. If we are following a Cixousian approach to go deep down, then why not venture into the depths of thinking and wondering in the minor below the line of main text? 1

E. Mackinlay (*) Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University, Bilinga, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_8

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“I can’t find my teeth!” she sobbed, and quickly covered the tomb in her mouth with a trembling hand. I had read somewhere that people with memory loss are likely to lose their dentures at some stage, and I make a mental note to find out how to mark Mum’s name and phone number on the acrylic set she has worn for years, just in case. They used to fit quite snugly into the top right ridge of her gums, but I am not sure when she last had her teeth checked or how well she is taking care of them. As we get older, dental hygiene can deteriorate, and with each missing tooth, the risk of cognitive impairment increases by 48% and the risk of dementia by 28%.2 Who would have thought? When a person chews, the movement of teeth stimulates the brain’s hippocampus region, that embodied archive where episodic memories are formed, processed and indexed for later access. Tooth loss means that fewer of these signals are sent. My hand moves instinctively, protectively even, to cover the lightly stained and slightly crooked rack of ivories inside my own mouth. I wonder if early 50s qualifies as old and how many times I have brushed my teeth today. What about yesterday, the day before that, and further back? Those two teeth which finally cracked after years of clenching and grinding and have now been extracted–do they count as lost? “Oh Mum”, I squeeze her shoulder reassuringly. “They must be here somewhere; you just had them in to eat breakfast”. “Did I?” Her chest heaves. “But I can’t find them now and how will we go out if I don’t have my teeth?” I was hurled ruthlessly then, into familiar3 Cixousian “foreign country”4 where “instantaneously [you] feel at sea and where the moorings are severed with the already-written, the already known”, a place I already knew existed and yet was too terrified to move closer to without dying of fright.5 In the “School of Dreams” Cixous reminds us that as writers, we must be 2  I turn to dental experts to find out more about the links between ageing, memory loss illness and teeth. The National Institute on Aging published this piece in 2021 reporting current research concerning tooth loss in old age and links with dementia: https://www.nia. nih.gov/news/tooth-loss-older-adults-linked-higher-risk-dementia. 3  I use the term “familiar” here deliberately―I have been writing “with Cixous” as a feminist in the “house” of autoethnography for some time now. The term “familia” has origins in “family”, which from Latin means “household” (Merriam-Webster.com , s.v. “family”, accessed 2 February 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/family). 4  Cixous, Three Steps, 59. 5  Cixous, Three Steps, 6.

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prepared to write the worst; in fact, it is the School of Dreams which makes it possible for us to unveil and face, no matter how much the blow hurts, the “staggering vision of the construction we are”.6 Dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, mild cognitive impairment, dementia with Lewy bodies, mixed dementia—these are the medical terms slowly but surely structuring our social understanding of memory loss illness and thereby offering a way to keep it contained; to keep the cruelty it heralds in a cage, a mind trapped and tortured. I did not dream this moment with my mother—this happened and is still going on—but like a dream, what is happening is mysteriously fast and fast escaping, because that’s what memory loss is like. In this text, I invoke a Cixousian sense-­ ability of dreams, that is, the ability to “restore those moments when we are greatest, strongest in strength and in weakness”,7 when reality presents itself as dangerous, magnificent and cruel.8 This writing, just like a dream, gives in to itself.9 Its teeth chatter in conversation with Cixous as she anticipates the death of her mother in Hemlock. Its mouth pans wide and closes in on snapshots of her life Mum shared with me before being swallowed into a secret chamber somewhere.10 The entry shifts and knocks us off balance; neither Mum nor I is driving this text any longer; the key we once held clatters noisily onto the floor and falls down a crack “towards the depths”.11 We have no choice but to be carried along as life “passes through us”,12 to give in to the encounter of these felt experiences of self and social in collision and confusion,13 circulating and becoming as this writing continues to chew.

The Rawness of Gums I saw her fear and sat mine “down on the edge”14 of the bed next to her, taking her frail body into my arms. I don’t think I have ever seen my Mum without her teeth, and I do not want her to see me staring at “my cry in  Cixous, Three Steps, 63.  Cixous, Three Steps, 90. 8  Cixous, Three Steps, 89. 9  Cixous, Three Steps, 100. 10  Cixous, Three Steps, 100. 11  Cixous, Three Steps, 108. 12  Cixous, Three Steps, 100. 13  Adams, Holman Jones and Ellis, “Introduction”, 5. 14  Cixous, Hemlock, 5. 6 7

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her eyes”15; I’m afraid of getting too close to this secret which up until now the dentures have cleverly hidden in plain sight. But now the falsity has been stripped away, and laid bare by the rawness of her gums is this unlie: I have two mothers. The one who has teeth in her mouth by day and remembers where she puts them by night, and the other one, the one who doesn’t and can’t because the boundaries between are decomposing her very roots. I remember reading Hélène Cixous speak of a similar moment, where in the grip of age her mother could no longer smile because she too had lost her dentures. At the time I found myself swept away by the poetics of Cixous’ words and did not think anything more about what was happening between them; but I had one mother then, and now I have two. When Cixous writes, “Mama is not mama. She has been replaced”,16 I feel the bones composing my tiny mother beneath my embrace, I feel her rib cage rising and falling against mine as she tries to catch her breath in between tears, and I feel her increasing “passporosity”17 as she flits between the one and the other. Everything I have felt about Mum and her memory loss, I have felt “behind the back of my heart, to avoid catching sight of the occupant”18 I hold in my arms, and suddenly it is me, not her, decomposing. This is not the story I wanted to share about the roots of love in wording the life worlds of Mum and me as an ethical being in relationality with the one as two. I wanted to engage in Donna Haraway-inspired “compost narration”, to say something about the “symstory”. I am writing with Mum to “unearth a past” as Haraway reflects, “in order to make [our] mother present for her daughters’ [and their sons’ and daughters’] futures”.19 It was a gift from me to her on Mother’s Day in 2019. A message interrupted my on-screen reading advertising “Story-worth”, an online repository to make it easy to share, record and write personal histories. “Write your story, one week at a time with our inspiring prompts then get them printed in a beautiful hardcover book”, it promised. The plan was that Mum would write her own story, but each time she sat down to the computer she could not remember how to open a Word document even though she could touch type faster than anyone I knew. So, I  Cixous, Hemlock, 6.  Cixous, Hemlock, 6. 17  Cixous, “My Algeriance”, 261. 18  Cixous, Hemlock, 7. 19  Haraway, “It Matters What Stories”, 567. 15 16

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r­ emembered with her. Every Thursday morning at 9:00am I called Mum, my iPhone on speaker and my iPad ready to record, and pictured her sitting at the kitchen bench, a crossword puzzle in front of her and a fresh cup of coffee on hand. We began with a question: “What is the bravest thing you’ve ever done?” “What are your favourite memories of your mother?” “Who are the best cooks in the family?” “When was a time when you were worried you didn’t have enough money?” Before I began writing Mum’s story with her, the moments when we managed to catch up by phone had begun to stretch out in a long line from Sulky, Victoria,20 to Brisbane; sometimes a week or even two would go by without a word passing between us. I’m busy, I told myself; I’ll call her on Wednesday. She’s busy, I told myself; I will definitely call her on Sunday after church. Our lives are busy, I told myself, as another weekend came and went. She must be fine, or I would have heard, I told myself. I know she knows I’m thinking of her, I told myself. I know she’s thinking of me too, I told myself. Some days talk between us flowed footloose and fancy-free, and other days it was difficult to get a foothold at all because —snap,21 the lines of connection between here and now and then and there were broken. In 2015, without invitation, dementia opened the door into Mum’s world, kicked off its shoes, hung up its coat, put the kettle on and made itself at home. It was now busy misplacing the furniture of her memory around into unfamiliar, unrecognizable, and unreachable places without any hint of a please or thank you. Urgency and fragility sidled up and sat down with us, no matter how tightly I closed the door. Donna Haraway was not wrong, “compost stories are as full of pain as anything else”,22 and 20  Sulky is a small town of 235 people on a range in the Hepburn Shire of Western Victoria, approximately 105kms from Melbourne. Midway between the goldfields of Ballarat and Creswick, the story I grew up with is that during the Victorian gold rush in the late 1880s, Sulky Range was a watering hole for the drivers of lightweight carts and their horses. Mum and Dad have lived there for over 30 years on a 12-acre block, and wandering along the creek that runs through their property, I imagine the hustle and bustle of miners panning for gold, peddling their wares and angling for all kinds of property. I search for the faces of women, the faces of Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung peoples, but cannot find them, although I sense them in the shadows. 21  Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life. 22  Haraway, “It Matters What Stories”, 567.

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Cixous echoes her sense-ablities when she writes, “suffering and joy have the same root”23—the “richness of the story is in the interstices”.24 Suddenly there was no time to avoid it,25 and in Cixousian fashion, the telephone comes to represent the roots of love that speak into the scenes in between and bind us together.26 My Mum and I have always been close, and her weekly storytelling felt like it was bringing us closer still; I realised, perhaps in the same way that Carolyn Ellis did, how much I needed this “maternal connection”.27 “Hi Beth, how are you love?” she often asked as she answered. My heart would swell; there is something about the way she says the word “love”. “I’m good Mum”, I replied. “How about you?” “Pretty good love”, she always said—and together we would begin to remember, love.

22 February 2020: “Not Without My Teeth”28 I couldn’t live without your father, and I suppose the first cup of coffee is quite nice, isn’t it? Then there’s the daily crossword, especially the one in Saturday’s paper, it’s a monster and takes up the entire page—it’s meant to be quite hard. There is one thing I know I couldn’t live without—my teeth. Okay, well, I haven’t got many of my own teeth left, but I’ve still got my back molars. I was listening to a friend talk at bowls saying she has terrible trouble with her grandchildren when they come to stay because they don’t want to clean their teeth. All I could think was oh, golly, how lucky they are because when I was a little girl growing up in Cowra, I didn’t even know what toothpaste was—I never cleaned my teeth! I remember Dad cleaning his teeth with salt and Mum had false teeth, so she didn’t really worry too much. It was only when I started school that I started cleaning my teeth. The school dentist arrived one day and was quite taken aback at the state of mine. I don’t know if they gave me toothpaste or not, but they gave me a toothbrush and from then on I cleaned my teeth. Later when we moved to the city, Dad started working at Schweppes and brought home free bottles  Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 12.  Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 67. 25  Cixous, Three Steps, 7. 26  Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 49. 27  Ellis, “Maternal Connections”. 28  This is an  edited transcript of  the  story Mum shared with  me on  22 February, 2020 when I asked her, “What is the one thing in life you couldn’t live without?” 23 24

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of leftover lemonade. Nothing was going to save my teeth after that! It’s marvelous what they can do now isn’t it? I have dentures at the top, but they don’t worry me at all. At night I take them out, put them in a glass of water by the side of my bed and my mouth feels a little bit funny without them. I’ve dentures for the bottom too but I don’t wear those because they actually hurt a bit at the back of my gums—I only put them in when I am going somewhere, it’s not a good look being seen without your teeth!

Teeth have a “ragged vitality”, notes Haraway, arguably the most durable, admirable and enviable part of the body which refuses to deny irreversible destruction for as long as possible. They are with us for the long haul; our tooth buds begin to take shape before birth at six weeks gestation, and are one of the last vestiges of human matter to remain after death29; willful shards of bone that “will never really be gone...patterned with/in traces”30 of a life lived. Amidst all manner of trauma and disaster in life, Haraway writes further, teeth remain resilient through “loss, mourning, [and] memory”31 and even cease decaying upon death— enamel decomposes, and some may fall away from the jaw, but teeth survive. Cradling my mother, “I tell myself, everything depends on the teeth”.32 If we can just find her teeth, “maybe she can live, maybe she can be present, without having to be absent”.33 Time begins to drum a thick coat on the enamel inside my mouth, and I know there is none to waste. “You climb into the shower Mum, I’ll look for your teeth”; I help her from the bed and gently nudge her towards the bathroom. “But what am I going to tell your father if I can’t find them?” She grips my hand, and her eyes grow large. “I really don't want him to know about this”.

Returning to Roots When They No Longer Hold We found Mum’s teeth; they were nestled in the folds of a soft cotton floral handkerchief in her worn pale pink chenille dressing gown pocket. Later that night, her full mouth smiled mischievously, perhaps a little too 29  https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=anatomy-and-developmentof-the-mouth-and-teeth-90-P01872. 30  Cutter Mackenzie Knowles et al., “Staying with the Traces”, 110. 31  Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 86. 32  Cixous, Hemlock, 7. 33  Haraway, “It Matters What Stories”, 573.

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conspiratorially, as we clinked glasses of red wine over dinner; she was not about to let life be ruined by the cult of memory or regret, and besides they had already slipped through the holes. This is how it happens; one is ready and not ready when it does, when so much residue is washed away that roots no longer hold. And yet, I keep returning to roots and rootedness to try to hang on. Simone Weil34 writes that roots and rootedness are the philosophical, ethical and spiritual groundings that situate and sustain us, that form a partnership with those who are living, those who have died and those who are yet to be born. Paying attention to words and writing, for Weil, is indeed a significant move towards this. “Writers”, she insists, “do not have to be professors of morals, but they do have to express the human condition”.35 The condition that Mum has put in place a conditional clause that she did not agree to. In writing Mum’s story, I am trying to put in place a different relationship to her condition, one where the word “love precedes”36 memory and slips in quietly to gently holds Mum’s hand as together we seek out traces of memories she holds back into place, to return her roots, to bring her back to us when she is no longer there, and to remember—love. Remembering is making sure the bits and pieces of her heart—and mine—are made whole.37 These roots, as Cixous might say, are the “chain of associations and signifiers”38 that compose birds, women and writing, and this relational braiding gives us the capacity to fly—for Mum and I to fly the coop39 in the face of her dementia and steal her memory back. “Mum and I”; I keep talking as though it is the two of us writing but it is me writing her. When I first started writing our weekly telephone conversations into a short narrative, I sent them to Dad over email. He would print them and read them aloud to her, and with tears in her voice she would say, “That’s lovely Beth”. Everything I write—including this text— I send to her via Dad for her appraisal, hoping that I have captured the essence of the memory in a way that resonates with Mum, hoping that she loves the words I am writing about her life—the words I am writing about the mother I love. When I call Mum on the telephone, she undresses her past in the present and passes her life in words directly to the ear of my  Weil, The Need for Roots.  Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, 289. 36  Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 35. 37  hooks, Remembered Rapture, 87. 38  Cixous, Three Steps, 111. 39  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, 887. 34 35

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heart.40 They sit inside beating a rhythm down the line alongside each word of hers I write, conjuring up waves of deeply uncomfortable yet necessary ethical questions which ebb and flow into one another to cultivate more. They are akin to the kind that Laurel Richardson asks, “What do we write about? How do we write it? And for whom do we write?”41 And further, “How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become?”42 And the tide keeps turning around my reply. I am reminded once more of Carolyn Ellis’ (2007) experiences of writing autoethnography about her elderly mother while she was still alive. I hear Ellis’ hope when she speaks of not wanting to shame, hurt, upset or disappoint her mother; I feel Ellis’ fear of changing the relational dynamics between them; I sense Ellis’ anxiety associated with intimate revelations of their individual and interconnected lives; and when Ellis writes about her autoethnographic writing as a gift of care, compassion, companionship and love to her mother, to her self and to others, I see her becoming the stories she writes.43 “For we think back through our mothers if we are women”44; Virginia Woolf’s words join me as I turn over the ethics of “writing, life” together with Mum, “not life writing”, as Haraway suggests, “but compost writing, writing-with in layered composing and decomposing in order to write at all”.45 All the layers of Mum’s life, my life and our lives resonate in “the veins of language”46 that flow through this text. Her words are lessons of love to remember; how it is that a woman’s life, a mother’s life, a life in relation-with might be lived; and I never want to forget.

Remember, Love Mum has been in hospital since early December 2022 when her memory loss uprooted her and very nearly spirited her away. In this rootprinted symstory, I have barely dared to say the D word; because until the day this happened no one in my family wanted to call its clear and present danger into being. Dementia is a cruel disease, “a presence of departed acts, at  Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 48.  Richardson, “The Collective Story”, 199. 42  Richardson, Fields of Play, 295. 43  Ellis, “Telling Stories, Telling Lives”, 22. 44  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 44. 45  Haraway, “It Matters What Stories”, 565. 46  Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 37. 40 41

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window and at door”,47 her parties astir with axe in hand waiting for the right moment to strike another blow. “Refuse to be an accomplice”, Simone Weil suggests, “Don’t lie, don’t keep your eyes shut”48; indeed, attend to this unruly companion, urges Haraway, because making-with and tellingwith are necessary to becoming at all. Without death, we know nothing of life, insisters Cixous,49 so write texts that confront dementia and destroy its limits, write words that move, touch and wound with such joyful pain to remember, love. Love. It’s a word I hear my Mum say a lot. “Oh Beth, g’day love” were the first words she said last time I saw her, with a full set of teeth. “That’s good love”, she said as she listened to my words of a life lived far away. “Just a moment love”, she said as she shifted herself into a more comfortable position to find the words for there and then. “What did you say love?” she asked when she couldn‘t quite catch my words of here and now. “I should imagine love”, she said as she tried to bridge the worlds between us. “Sorry love”, she said as words she might have spoken about the world split in two, “I don’t remember”. And for a moment there are only those two words, love and remember: remember—love.

References Adams, Tony E., Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis. 2021. “Introduction Making Sense and Taking Action: Creating a Caring Community of Autoethnographers.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Tony E.  Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, 2nd ed. 1–19. London: Routledge. Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, translated by Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4: 875–93. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306. Cixous, Hélène. 1997. “My Algeriance: In Other Words, to Depart Not to Arrive from Algeria.” TriQuarterly 100, no. 100: 259–279. Cixous, Hélène. 2011. Hemlock, translated by Beverly B.  Brahic. Cambridge: Polity Press.

47  Emily Dickinson, “Remorse  – is Memory  – awake”, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 365. 48  In 1933, Simone Weil (2015) jotted this entry down in a notebook under the heading “List of temptations (to be read every morning)”, which detailed the kind of woman she wished to be—and was—in the world. 49  Cixous, Three Steps, 1993, 7.

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Cixous, Hélène and Mireille Calle-Gruber. 1997. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, translated by Eric Prenowitz. London: Routledge. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Amy, Shae L. Brown, Maia Osborn, Simone M. Blom, Adi Brown, and Thilinika Wijesinghe. 2020. “Staying-with the Traces: Mapping-Making Posthuman and Indigenist Philosophy in Environmental Education Research.” Australian Journal of Environmental Education 36, no. 2: 105–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2020.31. Dickinson, Emily. 1970. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. London: Faber and Faber. Ellis, Carolyn. 1996. “Maternal Connections.” In Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms, edited by Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner, 517–537. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Ellis, Carolyn. 2007. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives.” Qualitative Inquiry 13, no. 1: 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800406294947. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press. Kindle. Haraway, Donna J. 2019. “It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories.” Auto/biography Studies 34, no. 3: 565–575. https://doi. org/10.1080/08989575.2019.1664163. hooks, bell. 1999. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. New  York: Henry Holt. Richardson, Laurel. 1988. “The Collective Story: Postmodernism and the Writing of Sociology.” Sociological Focus (Kent, Ohio) 21, no. 3: 199–208. https://doi. org/10.1080/00380237.1988.10570978. Richardson, Laurel. 1990. Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. Kindle. Richardson, Laurel. 1997. Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Weil, Simone. 1978. Lectures on Philosophy, translated by Hugh Price. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weil, Simone. 2002. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, translated by Arthur Wills. New York: Routledge. Weil, Simone. 2015. First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge, translated by Richard Rees. Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers. Woolf, Virginia. 2004. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Penguin Classics. Kindle. Elizabeth Mackinlay  is a professor at Southern Cross University’s Faculty of Education. Her research revolves around gender, decoloniality and education, focusing on feminism and higher education, consent education in universities, and decoloniality in the academy. She has a diverse teaching background in arts education, Indigenous Studies, Gender Studies and educational research methods, and currently teaches within the field of educational research methods.

PART III

Borders—Birds, Women and Writing Gather: Introducing the “School of Roots” Elizabeth Mackinlay

The beating wings of a flock of swans taking flight high in the sky brought Hélène Cixous back from always. It was noontime, and she could not be sure if she was early or late for the border line inbetween was endless.1 Watching the expanse of birds soaring above her, she wondered briefly about things with feathers perched in her soul2; about the fate of women and birds; the ways their writing bodies and bodies of writing were considered and rejected as abominable and threatening thieves3; the emotional, personal and political problems wrought by such exclusions4; and imagined what it might be like to fly the coop elsewhere. She trembled slightly at the thought of crossing a border, as she always did. Nature, culture, offered a puzzle5 and Cixous felt then that the only way through was down, beyond this grave to the roots to that which is deep inside us where only sensation is left; the body the place of questioning.6 “The signs of the body, the roots of language”, she whispered, looking at the words and writing circled around her on the ground. She bent down and scooped them up.  Cixous, Three Steps, 139.  Readers will recognise the echoes of Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘“Hope’ is the thing with feathers” (1970, 116) in this opening paragraph. 3  Cixous, Three Steps, 115. 4  Cixous, Three Steps, 118. 5  Cixous, Three Steps, 138. 6  Cixous, Three Steps, 132. 1 2

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“A tangling of arms, legs, kinds, and species as well as spheres, perspectives, and experiences”,7 Cixous continued, “a ‘treasure’ of writing formed from the roots, ‘somewhere in the depths of my heart, which is deeper that I think’”.8 In the flash of that instant, Cixous knew she was “in joy and in love with writing”—she would cross the border and write words that are forbidden. References  Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New  York: Columbia University Press. Dickinson, Emily. 1970. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H.  Johnson. London: Faber and Faber.

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 Cixous, Three Steps, 135.  Cixous, Three Steps, 118.

CHAPTER 9

Learning Cixous’ Écriture Féminine Through the Flow of Words and Blood Rebecca Ream

New Moon 26 September–3 October 2022 Premenstrual and Late (Period Due on 26th) Creativity and energy surges through my body. I am full of anxiety, sleeplessness, impatience. Corporeal tension in my lower abdomen accompanies this frenzy, for it is a frenzy, an intoxicating frenzy which escalates the longer I wait to bleed. I fall to a low and then rise on a high. It is ecstasy akin to St Teresa of Avila’s mystical penetration of God but without the phallic penetration by an angel that looks strangely like Eros. Far from phallic, I know this burst of rapture comes from “the dark of the moon [and] the healing blood of the moon’s earth” (Diamant 1997, 118)— from the black above and the black below. It feels like the goddess, love and rapture—ecstasy—from the goddess. It is a waxing crescent. I have missed the lunar signs for reproduction, the time of women bleeding in the red tent, to begin the month again anew, a chance to ovulate on the full moon, so as to carry a child. But even though

R. Ream (*) Christchurch, New Zealand © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_9

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I am not usually a woman among other women inside the red tent I feel the great mother Inanna (see Diamant 1997, 118)—the ancient Sumerian goddess of love, sensuality, beauty and war, older than Aphrodite and even Ishtar. I open myself up “to give way to [her] very ancient furor” (Cixous 1998, 151). As to understand “what [I] have…in common with [other] women” (Cixous 1998, 86), is to understand that “[i]n me is the word of blood” (Cixous 1991, 5) and it is this that will “get [me] inside the interior Bible”, the place in which I “take the stairs, and plunge into [her dark] flesh. Down to the farthest memory” (Cixous 1998, 5). Down into the Earth to the “sovereign mother”, the “good mistress”, where “terrestrial vegetal writing” occurs (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 86). Where the black earth is dark blood red which receives the soft lunar light, turning it over and diffracting centuries of menstruating practice which dissolves the self (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 91), teaching me to care “carnally about what [I] say” (Cixous 1991, 154). Yes! The sovereign mother who has “not cut the cord binding words to body” (Cixous 1991, 154) where letters “come…straight from the flesh of [her] lungs, the fibers of [her] heart” (Cixous 1991, 154). The sovereign mother who “doesn’t know any other way of speaking, that is why [her] words are…strong and incandescent, because they are caused by a convulsion of [her] whole earthly body” (Cixous 1991, 155). She who excretes “black milk” (Cixous 1993, 78): Black words that are dark red. Dirt-­covered words that come from her womb (Cixous 1991, 9): Words written from blood. She is in the Bible—the goddess Inanna. She is from the “interior bible” (Cixous 1998, 3–15), the bible we cannot easily see for “the descendants of lovers of God” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 60); “the SuperFathers” (Cixous 1994, 59) and their “Phallocentric Performing Theater” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 41) have confined her and bound her to Man. Yet she slips out and that is when “all the history, all the stories [are] there to retell differently” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 40), to retell a narrative that is not “constructed on the premise of woman’s abasement” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 41). Like “the luminous body of Bathsheba” (Cixous 1998, 6) who by Rembrandt’s hand (see Cixous 1998, 3–15) is able to bathe without David (see Fig. 9.1) but bathe with her menstruation. Who could imagine Bathsheba without David? Yet here she is, Bathsheba, without David, without any man, for even though the name Bathsheba invokes David, this Rembrandt, this Bathsheba, does not (Cixous 1998). For Bathsheba here is part of the interior bible where women have hearts of their own and where she is not some representation of woman-to-be-conquered (Cixous 1998). Not representation at all (Cixous 1998, 4) but a naked woman who is not denuded, not undressed, not least all of by David

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Fig. 9.1  Rembrandt, Bathsheba at Her Bath, 1654. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Source (Cixous 1998, 4)

looking from far away on his balcony. You cannot see this woman from above and afar. You need to take twenty-four steps to see her, and I do with Cixous’ and Rembrandt’s hell (Cixous 1998, 3). There you can see the blackness surrounding her. “I say blackness, and not: black. Blackness isn’t black. It is the last degree of reds. The secret blood of reds. There are so many blacks…Twenty-four, they say” (Cixous 1998, 3), all actually dark red. It is from this dark red black that “I want to receive the secret messages”, the “secret blood” (Cixous 1998, 55), the “secret of blood” (Diamant 1997, 118) from the interior bible. Why? Because it is through the secret messages from Bathsheba and the women from the red tent, from the goddess Inanna, that I, in a premenstrual state, am able to write “black milk” (Cixous 1993, 78) with a frenzy, tap into

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a creativity that is ancient divine and feminine. Even the hint of blood arriving links me to those women who have always followed the cycles of the moon.

First Quarter 3 October–10 October 2022 (Still Premenstrual. Still Late) 3–5 October I have a phantom period. My body aches over the weight of menstrual pain but without blood. The adrenalin, the high, of premenstruality, has gone. The frenetic endless energy has dried up and I am just exhausted and sore. I don’t feel connected to the ancient practices of menstruating women. I sigh as I type, and my inflamed lower back pulsates with unease. The in-between liminal state of feeling like I have my period but it not actually flowing is an emotional blow: Am I a failed woman because I cannot bleed? Because I cannot bleed under the new moon? I waited anxiously the entire new moon period, each day believing my blood would come. Anxiety constricts me. My body causes me to believe I am a failed writer too as I cannot write. My fingers are too heavy, my head is drooping. The only thing I can do is read. I read Cixous’ thoughts on bisexuality. It’s not really the bisexuality I am familiar with—it is a bisexuality that allows the “other” in. “Becoming-­ woman”, she writes, is about letting in the “other”, the masculine (Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber 1997, 42). I ponder this whilst I am stressing about my lack of productivity and dreading when my period does actually arrive, which usually means low productivity too. I am caught in this discussion for different reasons than Cixous probably anticipated. For it is not the masculine “other” I need to let in. It is my femininity that evades me. My femininity is never quite feminine enough. I cannot synchronise with women under the new moon. I cannot paint my face, don a frock or grow my hair long. So, in this liminal stage of not having my period but feeling like I have it I am tortured with questions: Can I write écriture féminine? Am I able to let the “other” feminine in? 5–9 October Premenstrual pain accompanies my days and I feel a small surge of intoxication once more. I have an insight which alleviates my anxious thoughts: Menstrual “writing is the passage way [for me] the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me [my femininity]—the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know [quite] how to be, but that I feel passing,

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that makes me live—that tears me apart” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 42). I realise this elongated premenstrual phase is a necessary step in me “becoming woman” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 42), a way for me to wrestle with crafting my écriture féminine. My écriture féminine cannot be accomplished “without danger, without pain, without loss—of moments of self, of consciousness, of persons [I have] been, goes beyond, leaves. It doesn’t happen without expense—of sense, time, direction” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 43). My écriture féminine will always maintain a Cixousian bisexual sensibility, a sense of masculinity but a masculinity stripped of “phallic authority” (Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber 1997, 43), an écriture féminine that practices, even if it fails, the death, the murder of the Selfsame. For If there is a self proper to woman paradoxically it is her capacity to depropriate herself without self interest: endless body without ‘end’ without principal parts; if she is whole, it is a whole made u of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but varied entirety, moving and boundless change, a cosmos where eros never stops traveling [and is without his phallic arrow], vast astral space [guided by moonlight]. She doesn’t revolve around a sun that is more star than the stars (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 44).

9 October “Soon blood is going to flow” (Cixous 1998, 35). I can feel it, for real this time. I desire it but fear it. Cixous says she does not “know if it’s the flowers that make the blood beautiful or the blood that makes the flowers beautiful, but one can’t be without the other” (1998, 35). I wonder over the relationship between blood and flowers. It seems gruesome to me. Do I find my menstrual blood gruesome? Yes, yes, shamefully, yes. How can flowers make my blood beautiful and more perplexing? How can my blood make flowers beautiful? Cixous once again confronts and disturbs me and once again I doubt my femininity; I distance myself from my femininity; I struggle to identify with the practice of écriture féminine.

Full Moon 10 October–18 October 2022 10 October The full moon arrived today and so did my period. “I see my blood gush forth, I see [my] inside come out, and that there is an inside. With my own eyes I see the [feminine] stranger who lives inside me, the [feminine]

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inside who doesn’t obey me, [my masculine self], and who has [stolen] my numbers and my keys [that allow me to enter Rationality], I s[ee] my blood, my unconscious, my kinshi I see my invisible. I see the age, the blood, [the goddess]” (Cixous 1998, 54), and it is terrifying. Slowly it trickles under the lunar light. My lower back is throbbing as the red flow gets heavier, thicker, journeys down—it is a jagged, clumsy and clumpy “red staircase” (Cixous 1998, 6). The dazzling effusion of blood is frightening (Cixous 1998, 54). It scares me into a stupor. I am almost paralysed with pain, pain that circulates around my hips, pain that unleashes as the wall of my burning uterus is torn. I scream then, kneel down, double over, put my head in my hands. I sweat and breathe heavily. Eventually though, “the fire, the pain, are put out in the fountain of nourishing blood” (Cixous 1998, 65), for after the pain comes the flood. Nourishing blood comes that is not just mine. It is blood that comes from ancient women, a blood flow that links me to the red tent, to “the age of blood and passions, the age of the [red] garden…blood [that] rushes u and down, [causing] one [to] grow…pale, [then] blush ” (Cixous 1998, 70). I feel the “common origin of [sanguine] consanguinity” (Cixous 1998, 92), as I bleed and read Cixous’ “glistening red sentences spurt” across the pages (Cixous 1991, 83). In her red “black milk” (Cixous 1993, 78) words I “hear the voice of the Blood [where] all things touch one another and interchange themselves. [T]his common blood which circulates in [all menstruating women] is—the voice” I hear (Cixous 1998, 92). But then: I scream, “Fuck this!” at my “heavy layer of thick blood” (1998, 136), my clots that pour forth. Yes, my “red” awakes “revolt in me” (Cixous 1998, 136). I rush to clean myself—I don’t “want any blood on my bed” (Cixous 1998, 148), “on the carpet, on the [linoleum]” (1998, 147). I do not want my “house…flooded with blood” (Cixous 1998, 74). I want it washed away—the pain, the blood, the disgust. I take a shower. The most recent wave of sharp pain in my uterus passes so I turn to feel the heated water on my lower back to ease the continuing dull inflammation. I watch the consequences of the latest tear escape my body. Blood, some of it clumped, spills down my legs onto the shower floor. I think of the red tent and “the rhythm of the blood” (Cixous 1998, 139) that flowed in there, so different from mine, in time and place. “Suffering on the one hand, remembering on the other” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 191), I muse, both hands resting upon the back of the shower wall. I ponder over the last month and feel it being ripped free. I realise my period is a process of “self-murder, not suicide” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 191). I realise every month I need a “dead woman to begin” (Cixous

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1993, 7). “To begin (writing, living) [I] must have death” (Cixous 1993, 7). I realise, “I must have death, but young, present, precious, fresh death, (sparkling red) the death of the day, today’s death. The one that comes right up to us so…we don’t have time to avoid it” (Cixous 1993, 7)— menstruation death. Even though I am not in a bath I am reminded of Bathsheba menstruating without David as I am confronted with my naked woman’s body and the ritual of cleansing. Yet what cleansing? Cleansing to rid the body of the impurity of my period? Or is my period the cleanser? I wonder at the black-red backdrop in Rembrandt’s painting and Cixous’ insights. Was the black-red a symbol for menstruation? A symbol of Bathsheba’s womanhood—powerful womanhood without Man? And if so, and if I may see this as movingly potent —which I do—then why am I so ashamed of my own? I have already learnt that it was a custom in antiquity—in the Middle East at least—for women to bleed on the new moon and that this was an act of shedding the old to bring in the new—an act of cleansing. So, does bleeding on the full moon mean it is not cleansing and not letting go of the old and bringing in the new? Out of curiosity or, more so, driven by a sense of anxious displacement as “woman” and wanting to explore my shame, I investigate what bleeding on the full moon may mean. It seems there is an ancient tradition of bleeding on the full moon. It is a phase not linked to the cycle of pregnancy but a marker of something else. The red moon cycle, as it is called, is a phase associated with midwives, healers, keepers of wisdom or high priestesses. I am awed to learn this, and it provokes in me a feeling that perhaps there is a place for me in the red tent after all. Perhaps to be woman I do not need to be reproductive. 11 October This menstruation is a death I cannot avoid. Its abundance of blood ravages my body, leaving it drained as the clumpy red trickle runs into the shower drain once again on a different day. Despite the pain, I recall Cixous (1994, 10) saying in the School of the Dead: “Writing is learning to die. It’s learning not to be afraid, in other words, to live at the extremity of life, which is what the dead, death gives us”. My menstruation cycle is death at the extremity of life—a state of death and life at once and a state of extreme anguish and transgression. Cixous taught me how such a monthly ritual of death, life, extremities is intricately linked to my writing.

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Third Quarter 18 October–25 October 2022 18 October Under the waning moon my diffracting flow gently finishes. My blood has run dry, and my body is heavy as if filled with sand. I want to close my eyes and fall to sleep but I must write. I must write as observer, as witness to my cycle; I must express my écriture féminine marked in red stains. After the pain of becoming woman again, after the pain of growth and change, I begin to understand that “writing in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth…that [which] frightens us” (Cixous 1993, 9). Writing during my menstruation is a way to unerase and unearth my body-as-woman. That is something that frightens me almost to death. My womanhood unleashed from the rationality of patriarchy, the logic of misogyny—set free to be born again each month—frightens me. She is a figure full—overflowing—with unbridled desire. She is a figure who unleashes—indeed, unearths—a fire so all-consuming my flesh burns as I write. 19 October “Once in the fire one is bathed in sweetness” (Cixous in Sellers 1994, 121) and today a “secret fire…emanates from [my] flesh” (Cixous 1998, 5). I am able to write without the heavy burden of pain or the anxious worrying of anticipation. I take the time now to write and read and rewrite. Not as a way to order, rationalise or discipline my words but to make “black milk” (Cixous 1993, 78) out of blood.

Full Moon: 9 November It is the full moon once more and I am bleeding. Hours before it is full, the moon is tinged with yellow (see Fig. 9.2). Then, just past midnight (to be precise, 12:01 am), when the moon is at her fullest, it is coloured with red and sits behind a wispy cloud. My mind and body are already altered with pain and exhaustion. It’s a relief to feel my red moon cycle once more, for tension and words have been building like a torrent of river water trapped behind a dam. I revisit my writing with Cixous “suffering on the one hand, remembering on the other” (in Sellers 1994, 191)— “word in hand the descent begins” (in Sellers 1994, 89) as I feel the pain edging in and the flow of words and blood come once more.

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Fig. 9.2  A couple of hours before full moon. Taken from Christchurch New Zealand. 8 November 2022. Source: Jillian Scammel

References Cixous, Hélène. 1991. The Book of Promethea = Le Livre de Promethea, translated and with an introduction by Betsy Wing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1994. The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers. London: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène. 1998. Stigmata: Escaping Texts, with a foreword by Jacques Derrida. London: Routledge Classics. Diamant, Anita. 1997. The Red Tent, 1st ed. New York: Picador. Rebecca Ream  received her PhD at the University of Wellington. Her thesis is in cultural geography but takes an interdisciplinary and creative approach to explore issues of racialised and gendered identities and belonging to land, in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. She derives much of her philosophical thinking from Donna Haraway.

CHAPTER 10

Metis and Cixous: Cunning Resistance, Bodily Intelligence and Allies Marilyn Metta

Slowly Swallowed Whole A young woman becomes suddenly homeless, without her two young children with her. She has just fled her home where she was imprisoned for twelve years. She has suffered physical, psychological, emotional, sexual and economic abuse. She finds herself embarking on the scariest journey of her life. She has to stay alive. She has to fight to get her children back. She faces what seems to be an insurmountable and overwhelming task. Her body is deeply wounded, brutalized, absent. She bears the wounds of the feminine condition and masquerade, caught up in a cycle of violence and control that she now lives to tell. She has many stories to tell. Her body becomes both the chasm and the link to her recovery (Metta 2013, 486)

M. Metta (*) Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_10

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This was my story 17 years ago and this story has intersected with my encounters with Cixous and, some years later, the Goddess Metis. My encounter with Cixous began in the early 2000s at the start of my feminist lifewriting doctoral project. I embarked on what later became a form of critical embodied autoethnography where I discovered writing from and through the body. Returning to my autoethnographical writings, I can trace the shapes and textures of what Cixous calls the “dark continent” (1976, 877) and which reflect spaces and modes of writing that escape the masculine order and grip. This journey has often been chaotic, disjointed and organic. I have written most of these chapters in a space that I will describe as ‘child-like’ and playful. It has occurred at the beginning of a shift in my mode of thinking and writing from a masculine mode of thinking, writing and being to a more fluid and circular feminine mode of thinking, writing and being…. In this space, I write from the body for the first time; I have shed glimpses of embodied memory, which have been locked away for many years (Metta 2010, 223–224). Cixous’ écriture féminine provided me with a language to speak the unspeakable, a way of writing that subverts phallic language, the masculine symbolic order. Cixous’ work allowed me to tap into writing that unearths the “primitive picture” that terrifies us (1993, 9). She assures us that because women are decentred, and because the feminine is on the margins of the symbolic order, we are freer to move and to create. Women have access to a rich variety of symbolic resources and metaphors. So perhaps dreaming and writing do have to do with traversing the forest, journeying through the world, using all the available means of transport, using your own body as a form of transport…. But for this we have to walk, to use our whole body to enable the world to become flesh, exactly as this happens in our dreams. In dreams and writing our body is alive: we either use the whole of it or, depending on the dream, a part. We must embark on a body-to-body journey in order to discover the body (1993, 64–65). A decade later, I encountered the story of the Greek Goddess Metis in a domestic violence training workshop in 2013 presented by Allan Wade, a leading Canadian therapist and trainer at the Centre for Response-Based Practice in 2013. My encounter with this ancient mythological figure was a pivotal moment that eventually gave birth to the theatre project: Metis. Metis was a young Titaness goddess who had all the qualities and powers of a great leader: foresight, strength, resourcefulness and powerful

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shapeshifting abilities. Zeus, the God of Gods, impressed by her qualities and skills, seduced the young Metis, raping and impregnating her. And while she was pregnant with Athena and trapped in Zeus’ world, there was a great prophecy that the next child born to Metis would be a son who would ultimately dethrone Zeus, as he had done to his own father, Cronus. In fear of losing his throne and his desire to possess all of Metis’ powers and qualities, Zeus tricked Metis into turning into a fly and swallowed her whole. From inside his belly, Metis was believed to give him counsel, wisdom and knowledge. In the original text Theogony by Hesiod, Metis was the first wife of Zeus before he became the king of all gods. Zeus lusted after Metis who did not reciprocate his feelings. To escape his advances, Metis changed into all different forms but was unsuccessful and was caught by Zeus and raped. Consequently, Metis became pregnant with Athena. Zeus’ next move was to swallow the pregnant Metis. From inside his belly Metis spoke to him, giving him all her knowledge and wisdom (Hesiod cited in Jacobs 2004, 25). My encounter with Metis and her story for the first time nine years ago was a moment of complete rupture for me. Her story shook me to my core, rattled me on a deep cellular and subconscious level. Understanding my experiences through the lens of a mythological goddess being swallowed whole unleashed a completely different way to make sense of what I had experienced, a way of making sense of the senselessness and madness of my experience. “This is as close as I have come to fully understand what had happened to me” (Metta 2015). In that moment I understood how I was slowly swallowed whole.

Rupture The moment of rupture, the moment of being resuscitated, the edges coming together; is this the moment of mythological enlightenment? I have been swallowed whole, slowly digested, stripped of my bodily intelligence—my cunning —my power—my laugh.

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Swallowed whole. All of me now unites, with edges of me returning home. I now feel the entirety of my being. My mêtis my body. She has come home. (Metta 2015)

The lived and embodied experiences of intimate abuse and coercive control are often beyond language, beyond words. For many women and children who have lived through intimate abuse, their experiences are mostly inarticulable and often invisible and unspeakable. The worlds they inhabit seemed senseless and on the brink of madness. I want to pause here for a moment and focus on the use of language in this work. In the field, domestic and family violence is the standard term used but in this work, and in much of my writing and professional work, I intentionally use the terms intimate abuse and coercive control because the domestic and family violence obscures the more invisible and insidious forms of abuse and coercive control that may not involve actual forms of physical violence. Language is particularly important in terms of challenging the myths around this issue. Coercive control is a term coined by Evan Stark (2007), a renowned sociologist and forensic social worker, to describe a particular kind of abuse that is intended to achieve total domination of a person. Coercive controllers use particular and systematic techniques, like isolation, gaslighting, sexual coercion, financial abuse and surveillance, to strip the victim of their liberty and autonomy, taking away their sense of self. It is a strategic campaign of abuse held together by fear (Stark 2007). The insidious and invisible forms of abuse and domination are often felt and experienced on the body. My encounter with Metis provided me with a new language that allowed me to speak the unspeakable and tap into the “dark continent” (Cixous 1976, 877) and unearth the “primitive picture” that Cixous alluded to (1993, 9). In my previous works (Metta 2015, 2018), I’ve read the swallowing of Metis by Zeus and her subsequent erasure from Greek history and mythology as a powerful metaphor for what happens to women and children who have experienced and lived with intimate abuse and domestic violence. More importantly, Metis, the mythological

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Goddess, and the quality of mêtis, the embodiment of bodily intelligence, become “powerful metaphors for the wealth of bodily resources and cunning resistance embodied by women who lived through intimate abuse and domestic violence” (Metta 2018, 134). I read mêtis, in all its variety, as bodily intelligence and cunning which exists and operates in multiples and in constant movement, shifting, oscillating, fluctuating, metamorphosing, adapting and responding; its power lies in its capacity for metamorphosis, making it a dangerous threat which is impossible to seize (Metta 2015).

Metis Theatre Project The story of Metis resided in and on my body since that first encounter, and in 2017, I approached a dear colleague and theatre-maker, Leah Mercer, about creating a play that weaved my lived experience with the mythological story of Metis. In 2018, two work-in-progress showings of the play Metis were performed to an invited audience at The Blue Room Theatre. Metis is an original theatre work that weaves the ancient mythological story of the Greek Goddess Metis and her bodily intelligence into a contemporary narrative of resistance for women who have experienced intimate abuse and violence. This mythological story provided a powerful metaphor and “unflinching insight into the systematic patriarchal violence and control perpetrated on women’s bodies through intimate abuse and violence” (Metta 2022, 535). Zeus achieves his power through rape, incorporation and appropriation of the woman/mother. He cannibalizes Metis in order to rob her of her knowledge and wisdom, together with her reproductive capacity. From then on, she is silent and invisible (Jacobs 2007, 63). Inspired by Cixous’ call for women to bring women and their bodies to writing, Metis is part of an ongoing work of tracing the presence and embodiment of mêtis (bodily cunning, intelligence and resistance) in women’s lives and experiences. This is an excerpt from a scene from Metis: Metis: Her head knocks against the dark. She awakens two hours later. She stands, wobbly at first. One step, then another, then another. She walks out of that dark and piss-stained alley, hails a taxi, and goes home. The evidence is carving her body right now.

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Hours, days, weeks her belly grows. She does look odd. Have you ever seen a pregnant goddess turned into a fly? But nothing gets in her way. She knows she has a job to do, and she’ll do it.

Both the Goddess Metis and women who have experienced intimate abuse and coercive control have endured repeated attempts of erasure and having their lived experiences and voices silenced and hidden from public discourse. What I came to discover was how, in her absence, Metis remains a powerful and enduring presence and resource, and we can trace her in ourselves and in many places. If discovering Metis had such a profound and transformative impact on me and found such deep resonance with my own experiences, I wondered about what and how this story and mythology can offer other women who have experienced intimate abuse and coercive control. I felt compelled to write about my encounters with and discovery of Metis/mêtis, and as I did, the power of this mythology became apparent. The swallowing of Metis by Zeus and her subsequent erasure and disappearance from Greek history provides a powerful metaphor for what happens to women and children who have experienced and lived with intimate abuse. Even more powerfully, Metis embodies the wealth of bodily intelligence, resourcefulness and resistance that women and children have living with, responding to, surviving and escaping the abuse and violence and beyond. Metis/mêtis, as a metaphor for swallowed or shadow wisdom in the unconscious, subliminal spaces, provides women with a powerful source and resource, which are always accessible, always ready to be tapped into. Tapping into écriture féminine, I can immerse in ways of writing that subvert the phallic masculinist symbolic order. The writing of the Metis/mêtis story made accessible through écriture féminine creates the space to embrace and embody the circular, lyric, juicy, unruly, messy and permeable bodies that escape the masculine phallocentric grip. The story and embodiment of mêtis as a metaphor for the ‘dark continent’ celebrate the inherent lack of control over women and women’s bodies as well as the myriad ways women resist and defy the power, control and abuse (Metta 2018, 141). In the play, Mae, the female protagonist, is our contemporary heroine. This excerpt from Metis captures a conversation that Mae has with her inner Metis.

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Mae: Metis visits me in my dungeon, in the half-light… Metis: What do you mean when you talk about Metis? Mae: She’s a lot of things. She’s a feeling…an instinct. My Metis showed me that my shame was silencing me and protecting him. She showed me he can’t live with the truth, but I can’t live without it. Metis: What do you want? Mae: I don’t know. Metis: Yes, you do.

Metis is a feminist project that places my lived and embodied experiences at the centre of the performative and critical storytelling and storymaking. Stories of intimate abuse and coercive control are confronting and unsettling, and in spite of the massive public and social campaigns in Australia in recent years to shift this private issue into the public discourse, it still remains an uncomfortable and difficult one to tackle. How do you tell and stage stories and experiences that are unspeakable and inarticulable? Trauma and traumatic narratives are difficult to tell. The staging of these stories brings the fleshed bodies and their embodied scripts into presence, from the shadows onto centre stage (Metta 2018, 136).

Writing From and Through the Body Much of the autoethnographical writings for the developing script for Metis emerged out of weekly creative and embodied writing sessions with my colleague, Leah Mercer, who was my collaborator and co-devisor for the project. We would meet every week and do free-flowing writing which tapped into the language of the body and the subconscious, into Cixous’ écriture féminine. We worked on themes that emerged organically through the creative process. We wrote about dreams, we wrote to Metis, from Metis, and as Metis. To write from the body requires risks and is dangerous work because it requires “putting the body on the line” (Metta 2013, 498). Writing from and through the body requires me to face my own body and everything it holds. It requires me to traverse and trace the trauma lines from within. “Writing is not put there, it does not happen out there, it does not come from outside. On the contrary, it comes from deep inside…It is deep in my body, further down, behind thought…somewhere in my stomach, my womb” (Cixous 1993, 118). Art provided another language to speak from

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Fig. 10.1  Body, artwork by author (previously published in Metta 2013, 498)

the body. The artwork in Fig. 10.1 encapsulated the writing as my body spoke to me. The body is present. The body bears witness. The body hears everything. She sees everything. (Metta 2013, 498).

The most raw and difficult writing I’ve ever had to do emerged out of a dark and messy period in the early stages of my doctorate project in 2006. It coincided with a 12-month writer’s block where I could not write a single word for my doctoral thesis. This dark period was like walking through a long and what seemed like an endless pitch-black tunnel. It was during this period that I was forced into a different kind of writing—raw, messy and senseless scribbles on blank pages. It was my first experience of writing from the body.

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I wrote to stay alive. I wrote to feel and release the pain. I wrote to immerse myself in the moment. I wrote from the body. I wrote in and through silence. I wrote to find voice. I wrote in ways that made no sense to me. I struggled each day to write but I wrote anyway. I wrote because the writing took over. Some days, my hand seemed to do the writing and I had little or no control over it. I wrote in and through fear. I wrote into floodgates. I wrote into the floods, the drought and the heat waves. I wrote past myself, I wrote past walls, genres, borders, boundaries, censorship and the familiar. I wrote into unfamiliar and unknown territories. In entering the dark phase, I entered into myself. I wrote the hidden and silenced passage into myself (Metta 2010, 185). Writing is not put there, it does not happen out there, it does not come from outside. On the contrary, “it comes from deep inside…It is deep in my body, further down, behind thought…Somewhere in my stomach, my womb” (Cixous 1993, 118). The Phantom Metis, she flows in your veins, She powers your mind She’s the architect of your dreams, The burning fire in your belly She’s showing you the signs, giving you little signs, signals, messages that she is here, she is present. She surfaces in your moments of desperation, she’s the light that seeps through the fractures, the ruptures She is always just lurking in the shadows, the dusk light She appears in your dreams She takes you places in your daydreams She speaks in tongues, shows up in metaphors, she comes with the moons, she rides with the tides that ebbs and flows, she’s the rock that sits submerged at the edge of the cliff She appears in those Déjà vu moments, across time and space She is everywhere, always in disguise, blending in, unseen She cannot be captured, you see She escapes the masculine grip She evades the authorities for thousands of years. (Metta 2018, 141–142)

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Lurking in the Shadows Discovering Metis/mêtis allows us to trace and re-story narratives of resistance and resourcefulness, stories of cunning and bodily intelligence in women’s experiences and their survival. It’s about changing the dominant story that sees women as passive victims of male control and abuse. Metis/mêtis offers me and other survivors of intimate abuse and coercive control access to shadow forms of knowledge—perceptions and bodily resources that are not readily visible or obvious, the gut feelings, intuition, somatic sensations, the symbolic language of daydream, imagination and the unconscious. Understanding how I survived intimate abuse, violence and the brink of madness is about knowing and unveiling the hidden, shadowy signs, signals and messages that have always lurked beneath the surface and the multiple ways in which I have resisted all the way. For the twelve years I was trapped, I fought, in silence and in protest; I never stop resisting. Even in my darkest moments, I could never fully ignore Metis’ howls (Metta 2018, 141). For Cixous, the power of Clarice Lispector’s work comes from her capacity to read the “signs of the body”. It’s as if she were capable of reading the signs of the body: not those of the unconscious, which is already speaking—the unconscious is a language—but the body signs that are of the same order as those of the unconscious, though before language (Cixous 1993, 135–136). Metis operates in the realm of the symbolic, the metaphorical, the imaginary, the unconscious and the dreaming.

Metis She speaks in tongues, symbols She appears in forms not yet recognised Unseen, like an iceberg lurking below the surface She speaks our unconscious, the tongue of the bodily My Belly, My Womb, My Gut What have she been trying to say to me all these centuries? despite centuries and decades of cultural repression and denial She is always accessible, always present She surfaces in moments of dark desperations, of fractures, of ruptures; She appears in moments of despair, darkness and madness Open the doors that lurk in the shadows Feel her pull, her scent in dusk light

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Metis sits at the centre of my throne She has never abandoned me The universal mother within us The scared feminine She is centuries old, full and voluptuous with bodily cunning She’s a shapeshifter, a trickster Ghosts I encountered while sleepwalking She speaks the language of the dead She is the embodiment of pure unmediated pleasure, sexual pleasure Female sexuality in full force She is fertility, birth, pregnancy, life itself She is power, untapped, desired and unattainable She simply cannot be captured, ever-evolving, ever-changing, ever-moving Slippery, moist and illusive She is transformative, cunning and artful intelligence that Cannot be swallowed, cannot be owned Zeus who rapes Metis Rape—the patriarchal conquest of her body, her intelligence, her powers Frightened of her powers, her secrets, her unruly and uncontainable bodies She escapes his masculine, controlling grip.

Writing the Dead Recovery from intimate abuse and coercive control and writing about the experience had required close encounters with dying, death and the dead. I had to learn to sit with the darkness and rawness of my trauma, and come to terms with the deepest, darkest and scariest shadows that haunted me. I had to come to terms with my dungeon and face the inevitable task of opening the dungeon door. Through the cracks, the light enters. What has been the birth scene of my writing? At my Papa’s death bed. I started writing about my father a year after his death in September 2004. I wrote out of the senselessness and the immensity of the pain, loss and grief I felt pounding through my body. I remember, in the evening after his funeral, the tsunami of grief rocketing through my body and how I screamed and howled in my mother’s living room, my body shaking uncontrollably. My father’s death happened as I was mid-way through my doctorate project weaving my mother’s biography and my autoethnography. His death forced an unexpected detour and change of trajectory in my

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doctoral writing. I was haunted by his death and I started writing my father’s imagined biography completely out of necessity. The primitive face was my mother’s. At will her face could give me sight, life, or take them away from me. In my passion for the first face, I had long awaited death in within my sight. Bad move. On the chessboard, I brooded over the queen; and it was the king who was taken (Cixous 1991, 3). I wrote to bring my Papa back from the dead. Cixous and I share this “strange and monstrous treasure” and writing that rose from our fathers’ tombs (Cixous 1993, 11). Cixous reminds us that we inherit something from death through writing, through the act of unerasing and unearthing the buried, the silenced. Secrecy lurks not only in stories told and untold, but in the silences, nuances, gaps and pauses that lie in-between words, utterances and voices. As I make the detour from writing my mother’s biography to writing my papa’s life, I know intuitively that I will have to confront many silences and secrets. Through writing my papa’s imaginative biography, I inevitably stumble upon the unspoken and the unspeakable silences, gags and hesitations that find their way into my writing (Metta 2010, 256). Writing the dead requires sitting and living with the dead, coming face to face with death itself. Writing in this way requires us to confront our deepest and most paralysing fears and open the dungeon door buried deep within. It is often the hardest writing we have to do. The only book worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed (Cixous 1993, 32). It is at my father’s death bed where his death gave birth to my inheritance, my voice, my writing. I understand what Cixous means when she says that writing comes from facing death. Writing is learning to die. It’s learning not to be afraid, in other words to live at the extremity of life, which is what the dead, death, give us (10). There is so much to be gained in writing in these ways. This kind of writing allows the unearthing of our legacies, both our mothers’ and fathers’, both masculine and feminine, both yin and yang, and it has the power to heal our split selves. My papa died in September 2004. As I write his imagined biography, he returns to me in ways that I never experienced when he was alive. I write out of the necessity to heal, to forgive and to remember what has been repressed and silenced (Metta 2010, 270).

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Writing the Womb Metis was pregnant with Athena when she was tricked by Zeus to turn into a fly and was swallowed whole. Metis survived in Zeus’ stomach while she was pregnant with Athena. She nursed her unborn child in the dungeon while she cunningly plotted and continued to give Zeus counsel from his stomach. In the dungeon, she secretly built an armour for her unborn child, preparing her for the world of Zeus. Mothering through intimate abuse and coercive control is a complex and delicate act of survival, resistance and resilience. The physical, psychological and emotional traumas women have experienced have impacts on their mothering. For many women, motherhood and their relationships with their children are powerful sources of strength, resilience, hope, tenderness and comfort (Metta 2013, 2016).

Mothering with Clipped Wings My heart breaking As the little hands held mine The sad young eyes tucked at my heartstrings I returned again and again To the wolf’s den He knows the bait, the innocent younglings I gathered them close to my heart I tried to speak but I had no voice Yet they knew They knew all along He clipped my wings so I couldn’t fly He thought he could clip my spirits too Swallowing me whole Grinding me down, and down and down Driving me to the brink of insanity Mothering with clipped wings I built a fragile cocoon of love around my little ones We stole moments of tenderness Amidst the brutality and violence It has a name—patriarchal terrorism Mothering with clipped wings The day came when I took flight My only chance of freedom I had to leave my younglings behind

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My heart bled that day Found my little cave on the hill Where I hid and hibernated Days, months and years passed My wings slowly healed and I waited For the day when I soared We now know what he could never touch Our cocoon of love and tenderness Even after years of separation With my babies safely tucked under my wings It’s now time to heal your young wings. (Metta 2016, 151–152)

Metis’ story has deep and profound resonance with my own experiences of mothering through intimate abuse and coercive control. It gave me a way of making sense of what I had experienced as a mother, how I, along with my children, have resisted and survived being swallowed. More importantly, how we can recover, thrive and flourish beyond survival. Recovery requires women and children to return to their bodies, to “invent the impregnable language” that will break through the masculinist grip and burst open Zeus’ stomach (Cixous 1976, 886). Returning to our bodies and embodying our bodily intelligence and power, women and children who have been “swallowed” will realise that Zeus does not have the stomach to digest us.

Bringing Metis with Us Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies…Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement (Cixous 1976, 875). In June 2018, a work-in-progress showing of Metis was presented to an invited audience of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) women who’ve experienced intimate abuse and violence and professionals who work with them. Despite many of the women from CALD communities not understanding the spoken English words in the play, they connected with the story through the embodied and non-verbal elements of metaphors, shadow-play, symbolism and projections.

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Fig. 10.2  Living with Shadows, image taken from work-in-progress showing of Metis, June 2018

Metis provided a platform for the telling and witnessing of lived experiences that are often beyond language, as demonstrated by the response by one audience member who was also a survivor of intimate abuse and violence: “I recognised the shadows. They’re the ones I live with” (Fig. 10.2). Another audience member said, “I’m a survivor of domestic violence and today I learnt that Metis was my one and only girlfriend”. Opening the dungeon door requires facing my own death; I had to enter the darkest parts of myself and my existence. Writing about being swallowed meant that I had to write into the dark passages and into my dungeon. When I close my eyes the passage opens, the dark gorge, I descend (Cixous 2005, 139) (Fig. 10.3). Another audience member, a professional who works with survivors, wrote: The metaphor…as it is very hard to put words onto such an awful reality. And the visual image like the fly being swallowed into the deep darkness.

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Fig. 10.3  Being Swallowed, image taken from work-in-progress showing of Metis, June 2018

The responses we received from the women and professionals in the audience affirm the power and potential of the Metis story and mythology to articulate the lived and embodied experiences as well as bodily wisdom and resources that are often beyond words. The play’s unique performative and symbolic uses of language express and tap into what Cixous calls the “dark continent” (1976, 877) and the immense resources of the unconscious and “the inexhaustible feminine Imaginary” (Cixous 1986, 97). Write yourself: your body must make itself heard. Then the huge resources of the unconscious will burst out. Finally the inexhaustible feminine Imaginary is going to be deployed (Cixous 1986, 97).

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Recognising our own bodily intelligence and language allows us to recognise our own inner mêtis, and discover what Cixous calls “traces of sexual difference, of the unconscious, of the body, and of sexual pleasure” (Cornell 1990, 39). The body is linked to the unconscious. It is not separated from the soul. It is dreamed and spoken. It produces signs. When one speaks, or writes, or sings, one does so from the body. The body feels and expresses joy, anxiety, suffering and sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is the least constrained, the least bridled manifestation of the body. ‘Feminine’ sexual pleasure (la jouissance feminine) is overflowing, undecided, decentralised and not caught up in the masculine castration scene, and is not threatened by impotency. The body lets desires pass through and this desire creates images, fantasies and figures. Feminine desire is flowing, so we often find images of spring, of liquid, of water (Cornell 1990, 39).

To fully embody my mêtis, my power, I had to learn to see in the dark, as Metis had to learn to grow new eyes in Zeus’ stomach. I had to learn to see myself, not through the male gaze, not through the masculine lens, but fully through my own newly born eyes, to see myself as fully woman, full of power, cunning intelligence, tenderness, sexual prowess. Full of mêtis I had to relearn how to make love to myself, giving myself deep unmediated deep-bodied orgasmic pleasure. I had to reconnect to my nine-year old self, the free-spirited mêtis child reborn (Fig. 10.4). Mêtis flows and moves in the breaths She flows in our blood Circular/lyric/maternal/unruly—lines Connecting/blood lines/breath lines/ancestral lines Metis is the murmuration of birds, effervescent movements, Coming together, breaking apart, then coming together again differently, In organic, spontaneous and fully responsive ways. She simply cannot be captured, framed, it cannot be reproduced, copied or owned.

In conclusion, I offer these questions and reflections: What does it mean for women and girls to connect with their own inner mêtis, their own power? To fully embody their inner mêtis? What would their sense of self, their relationship with their bodies, look like? What would their sense

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Fig. 10.4  Mêtis, image taken from Creative Development, June 2016

of being and place in the world, their relational being with others, be like? What would that feel like? What would that do to the male gaze? What would fully embodying mêtis mean to women’s voice? What would she sound like? What stories would she speak? What would that do to history? What would that mean to women’s relationships to themselves, their relationships with women, with men? She would have access to her body and her mind’s shadow realms and forms of knowledge; the bodily sensations, gut/belly feelings, somatic language, subconscious/unconscious knowledge; she would have access to the language of the imagination, the language of the dead and of dreams—all of which evades the ‘authorities’ and the surveillance of the male gaze. She would be unstoppable and magnificent. My work in tracing the presence of Metis/mêtis in women’s experiences of intimate abuse and coercive control is an ongoing project. We need to continue to push to create bold spaces for women to speak and to write from their lived experiences and living bodies so we reclaim our own sovereignty and our “unique empire” (Cixous 1976, 876). There is simply too much at stake.

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References Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, translated by Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4: 875–93. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306. Cixous, Hélène. 1986. The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1991. “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, with a foreword by Deborah Johnson, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 2005. Stigmata: Escaping texts, with a foreword by Jacques Derrida. London: Routledge. Cornell, Sarah. 1990. “Hélène Cixous and les Etudes Feminines.” In The Body and the Text: Helene Cixous, Reading and Teaching, edited by Helen Wilcox and Keith McWatters, 31–40. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Jacobs, Amber. 2004. “Towards a Structural Theory of Matricide: Psychoanalysis, the Oresteia and the Maternal Prohibition.” Women: A Cultural Review 15, no. 1: 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/0957404042000197170. Jacobs, Amber. 2007. On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother. New York: Columbia University Press. Metta, Marilyn. 2010. Writing Against, Alongside and Beyond Memory: Lifewriting as Reflexive, Poststructuralist Feminist Research Practice. Bern: Peter Lang. Metta, Marilyn. 2013. “Putting the Body on the Line: Embodied Writing and Recovery through Domestic Violence.” In The Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Tony Adams, Stacey Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, 486–509. New York: Routledge. Metta, Marilyn. 2015. “Embodying Mêtis: The Braiding of Cunning and Bodily Intelligence in Feminist Storymaking.” Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge, no. 32. http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-32/marilynmetta. Metta, Marilyn. 2016. “Embodying Feminist Mothering: Narratives of Resistance through Patriarchal Terrorism from both Mother and Child’s Perspectives.” In Feminist Parenting, edited by Lynn Comerford, Heather Jackson and Kandee Kosior, 144–167. Bradford: Demeter Press. Metta, Marilyn. 2018. “Metis-Body-Stage: Autoethnographical Explorations of Cunning Resistance in Intimate Abuse and Domestic Violence Narratives through Feminist Performance-Making.” In International Perspectives on Autoethnographic Research and Practice, edited by Lydia Turner, Nigel Short, Alec Grant and Tony Adams, 133–147. New York: Routledge.

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Metta, Marilyn. 2022. “Reclaiming the Maternal Metis Body: Pregnancy, Birthing, and Mothering through Intimate Abuse and Coercive Control.” Journal of Autoethnography 3, no. 4: 526–543. Stark, Evan. 2007. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marilyn Metta  is passionate about working with marginalised communities and stories. Marilyn is a senior lecturer and a feminist scholar in the social sciences, feminist studies and human rights at Curtin University. She has published widely on autoethnography, feminist research and domestic violence. She has over 18 years’ experience as a counsellor working with women and children who have experienced intimate abuse and violence. She is the CEO and founder of The Metis Centre, an educational and advocacy organisation working to address gender inequality and violence against women and children ­ (www.themetiscentre.com).

CHAPTER 11

Denying the Penis: Bringing Women to Writing [With/in and] Through Doctoral Supervision Gail Crimmins and Susanne Oliver Armstrong

Denying the Penis/Writing the Self: Gail’s Story The act of [traditional] writing is equivalent to masculine masturbation (and so the woman who writes cuts herself out a paper penis) (Cixous 1976, 883).

I was born in Cardiff, South Wales, into a “proud-to-be-working-class” family of four, living in a “two up two down” terraced house down the road from the literal and figurative “bomb site” that we used as a playground. It was on this site that I would be dressed up and married to local boy Mark O’Conner, as 6-year-olds, by my 8-year-old sister and our friends. Dirty white dress, dirty hands and feet. We played at being grownups, ritualising customs of respectability. Our dialect and forms of communication were as far from the “Queen’s English” or “proper” writing as is possible within a UK-based community. Our street, local school, church,

G. Crimmins (*) • S. O. Armstrong University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_11

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shops and working man’s/social clubs were steeped in a language and rhythm informed by Irish Catholic and Black African/Caribbean settlers who had migrated to Cardiff to find work in the docklands—predominantly in the early twentieth century. I therefore shared a rich, colourful oral code full of slang, colloquialism and short-hand. I wrote very little at that time, preferring practical “subjects” at school such as drama, PE (physical education) and art. But when I did write I (poorly) emulated the formal codes and structures I encountered in school textbooks. I code-­ switched, and adopted roles—student, bride, sister, friend—without reflection. I later studied drama at University (the first member of my family to undertake any study beyond compulsory education). My undergraduate course offered a practical drama training, and whether it was novelty or the general left-wing/progressive politics of the faculty, my working-class-­ accent-ways were accepted, and I felt no (conscious) need to be otherwise. We were only required to create two short written pieces of work throughout the 3-year programme so I became a confident and competent performer, but was intimated by written communication. As I discuss in Crimmins (2017), I could communicate clearly and with ease in my colloquial South Wales dialect and through character in physical and vocal performance, but neither of these languages seemed to resemble university or “formal writing”. As a result, and not fully consciously, I was implicitly aware of the discord between my codes of communication and academic writing, and so produced work that Professor Peter Thomson, respected theatre scholar/teacher/friend, described as “a tendency to write wearing your Sunday best”. My Sunday best: resonating mid-length skirts, shoulders covered, sensible shoes. Conservative, gendered but asexual. “Proper”. Without further explanation, I knew what Peter meant. I had adopted the role of university student akin to a character from Little House on the Prairie. Although initially embarrassed, I gave little more thought to the comment for almost 20 years. Yet, when undertaking a PhD in my mid-40s, I was required again to communicate in writing, and reflected on my gravitation towards writing in “my Sunday best”, and the status I’d ascribed to the formal, terse, “objective” and masculine form of traditional discourse in academia. I understood that I was dressing up to fit in and “legitimise” myself, adopting a white, middle-class accent/code of academic convention—complete with clean hands and feet (finger-print-less). I didn’t trust that I could

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write as myself, write myself, and still be heard, understood or taken seriously. But that all changed when I encountered the writings of Cixous (1976, 2005). MacLure (2013) talks of “the wonder of data” and the arresting impact of engaging with exciting or startling data; I had a similar response when I first read Cixous’ work. She not only illuminated for me how p/ restrictive traditional discursive forms are, but also that women ought not write (with) a paper penis (by adopting a masculine guise), because to do so alienated ourselves and other women from our bodies and ability to be heard or seen as women. I physically shook when I read Cixous’ work, chrysalis crumbling. It reflected to me, magnified, the barriers and embarrassment I’d felt about my ability to write, illuminating the structural barrier and gendered inequities imposed by formal writing requirements. In short, and although my writing was cliché-ridden, Cixous’ écriture féminine liberated me by encouraging me to write as myself, to write myself. I subsequently took to writing as a creative and generative process, not merely a process of relaying that which I knew but creating knowledge through the process of writing. And rather than relying on forms of received syntax and supposed logic, I listened for an authenticity in the rhythm of my words, sought clarity through metaphor, and ‘sense’ through promiscuously (Childers et  al. 2013) blurring various forms of expression. Cixous’ work also helped me to reconceptualise who could write, and I was eager not only to take myself, as a woman, to writing but to bring other women to it too. A few years later, I was invited by a wonderful colleague, Paul Williams, to meet a Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) candidate, Susanne. Susanne had hitherto been supervised by two male academics—both very experienced academics and supervisors. My colleague thought that my background and interest in feminism and women’s lived experience might align with Susanne’s area of study (an exploration of the intergenerational transference of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), through the methodology of creative writing). We three met: Susanne, Paul and me. It was late November 2017. It was hot and humid in Queensland; I wore a hive of humidity hair. Café C was busy and loud, and we sat a table to the right of the serving counter. I was facing Susanne who was bright and smiley with wild and wonderful dark hair and an easy smile/laugh. The meeting was hopeful and animated. Susanne discussed her research, some of the frustrations at the writing process and at some people “just not getting it”. I wrote notes, my

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pen nodding in agreement. Susanne “strumming my pain with [her] fingers, singing my life with [her] words”. Her experience closely aligned with my own. She was feeling pressured to adopt a paper penis (Cixous 1976), to write in a masculine form, and focus on the masculine metaphor of war. I nodded with humidity hair, though not adequately expressing how much her story had resonated with mine. That evening, in between preparing dinner for my two young children and booking flights to visit my dying father (in the UK), I sent Susanne some of Cixous’ writing. It felt like an important life-giving thing to do amidst the domesticity of pasta, and my choking grief.

Denying the Penis/Writing the Self: Susanne’s Story I was born in Western Australia, the daughter of a shearer, and lived near the banks of the Swan River. Unfortunately, we were working-class people who lived in an affluent suburb surrounded by public servants, bank managers and lawyers due to War Service housing allocations. So, I always felt a fish out of water, belonging to the only rough diamond family in the neighbourhood fettered with family violence and alcoholism. I was the first in my family to have a degree, not graduating until into my 40s, and did it the hard way—raising three children and working. My parents had no idea what university had to offer people, and besides, those toffee nose ones with degrees are up themselves and should get a real job and earn an honest day’s pay. Even graduating with a doctorate was unimpressive to my parents. So, my doctoral journey was to be an immersive expedition into the unpleasant terrains of mental illness, suicidality and dysfunctional relationships. I wanted to explore the lives of those who came before me/us; to understand how their experiences of trauma had impacted us; how their negative emotions had transferred on to us and to our grand/children. I commenced writing about my grandfathers and the unspeakable events of war, to divulge their legacies and the destructive cellular impacts of their unresolved traumas. The men’s stories were interesting, and the research made sense, but I felt stifled, straightjacketed. I recall the day Gail was co-­ opted into becoming my co-supervisor, a great insight and manoeuvre by my fabulous primary supervisor who recognised the need for a feminine (feminist) touch. Gail was a breath of fresh air, and the timeliness was perfect, for as I tried to explore the pain of my ancestors, the cognitive dissonance became palpable. How can I share the pain of my grandfathers? I

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haven’t lived the experiences of a soldier, and I’ve never lived life through the embodiment and lens of a man. Gail shared her impressive doctorate with me, and a plethora of feminist papers including work by Hélène Cixous. Instantly I recalled the wonder of working with women, the generous nature of the collective, the collaboration and sharing. I remembered the wonderful times working in women’s health in the 1990s and the great comradery women shared intuitively. Immediately I felt very supported, nurtured and uplifted. But as Gail deeply touched my heart with her unconditional generosity, it was Cixous who touched my soul. That night, for the first time, I wrote in the first person. I dared to express from the “I”. My shadow emerged to become the spot lit focus, centre stage. I was vulnerable, naked—and loving it. To Be or Not to Be? – Cixous Grants Me Permission to Be!

In my DCA I knew I wanted to share the experience of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), not merely to describe it. I wanted the reader to engage at a deeper level, to reflect, to be tantalised, to want to know more. I wanted my exegesis to offer the reader an opportunity to experience the emotional, physical and cognitive disturbances of persons suffering with PTSD—to generate greater understanding and compassion for those who suffer with this debilitating condition. I found the writings of Cixous gave me permission to feel, to be heard, to be read. My flame was ignited by her suggestion that woman “must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (Cixous 1976, 880). Indeed, my history did transform from therein, just as Cixous predicted, for it was then that I engaged with my mother’s story and my grandmothers’ stories, and these women’s stories became the epicentre of my exegesis. Finally, I felt validated to tell my story—herstory—the one of heartache as a mother, of suppression as a victim of violence. I was no longer bound to be satisfying the needs of the patriarchy—to remain invisible, to be compliant, to behave, to fully suppress my true self, a self that had been given no voice for a lifetime. As my father said before he passed away, “What happened to you? You used to be such a good little girl”. Yes Cixous, I was no longer going to be a good little girl! I found the titillating process of writing naked in first person facilitated a feeling of

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liberation from all social constraints. I truly felt Cixous’ call to arms, to demonstrate my own personal literary freedom, to find my own voice. Cixous’ (1976) invocation to literary freedom also influenced my strategy to counterbalance the minimalist form of my creative artefact against the écriture féminine style that now emerged within my exegesis. I found the exegesis began to unveil with great intimacy; it slowly undressed to reveal more personal story and insights into my deeper relationships with the writings in shellshocked, the artefact. This loosening of form allowed me to abandon the lifelessness of objective reportage contained within minimalist personal reflections. I also felt, for the very first time, I could explore my traumatic stories of family and domestic violence safely within the first person, without any physical symptoms or unpleasant sensations arising. Quite the contrary—I felt a deep sense of relief, calmness and accomplishment after every ejaculation. Cixous (1976, 881) beckoned to me, “[w]omen should break out of the snare of silence”. And silenced I had been. Once I had finished telling my painful story, now rewritten within a deeply intimate relationship with my silenced self, what emerged was a strong desire to connect and to re-­ connect; to become active once more within my community, to become a voice for others, to advocate for the marginalised, those silenced by violence and trauma. Within this rejuvenation, I found my empathy and insight into others’ suffering had awakened more fully through the interconnected creative process of writing myself, my woman’s story. After several silenced decades, I finally recognised and accepted my own lived and living experience of trauma, suicidality and complex PTSD—of being invisible and mute. In my grief, my loss of self, my loss of so many things, I had circled around the five stages of grieving (Kübler-Ross 1997) and avoided the four tasks of grieving (Worden 2018). Unconsciously I lived within the terrain of denial, anger and depression. I was held under water navigating the masculine world of social constraint and submissiveness. In countertransference, my subconscious had even chosen the profession of grief counsellor, to remain immersed in my own and others’ pain. The expressive process of finding/unleashing my woman’s voice through writing and creative arts unlocked the shackles of my chronic trauma. I finally felt free, externalising my psychache (Shneidman 1998) and deep pain through non-verbal creative forms such as writing, painting, sketching and photography, methods that enable me to stand back and view tangible artefacts/manifestations from a distance. These creations enabled me to see myself and others from different perspectives, through

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different lenses, in different landscapes. As Cixous stated, “women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible” (1976, 876). I bask wantonly in the new interconnectedness experienced through these phantasms, and in the cathartic presence of accomplishment felt through immersion into women’s writing. Merci Cixous!

On Reflection Our stories reflect the capacity of écriture féminine to transform not only how we write (as our fully embodied selves, imaginatively, with creativity, and using our “I”) but also who we write, and whom we write. Inspired by Cixous, we write (ourselves)—we bring ourselves to writing, and we write other women/Others into our stories: women who have been submerged, invisible, silence/d. I bring myself to (my) writing and bring Susanne to writing as a doctoral student; Susanne brings her embodied self to writing, and she brings her mother and grandmother to her writing, creating or birthing a familial herstory. Through écriture féminine all subjectivities and subjects are changed. Cixous gave us permission to take off our “Sunday best”; there is no need for formalities or self-regularities in the labour of writing oneself and birthing our herstories. In the process we/women emerge as protagonists, centre stage, in/vulnerable and naked. And as our stories and herstories emerge so “the education project” is rewritten. Écriture féminine replaces the education project from one of knowledge transmission which places students as passive receivers of “knowledge”, and ideological constructs hitherto disguised as universal and valuable truths are exposed as hegemonic and phallogocentric. Moreover, écriture féminine transforms women from “space invaders” (Puwar 2004) into protagonists. It also breaks open the categories of “competent knower” and “legitimate knowledge” to support women to create their own knowledges and ways of writing, and in doing so écriture féminine helps to nurture epistemic justice. Finally, doctoral supervision based on the principles of écriture féminine creates what Arendt (2013) described as an agonistic space, a space in which dominant ways of seeing and representing can be contested and new forms of power created. Yet, the power that is created is not yielded over another, nor is there a struggle between two parties. There is no need for power relations between student and supervisor because the supervisor who engages in écriture féminine isn’t concerned with “regime[s] of

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person formation” (Manathunga 2007, 211), s/he is only concerned that women find power to write themselves, not in the image of who has come before, but as the woman is, as herself. In concert with Childers et  al. (2013), writing ourselves provides opportunity to discover, describe and explore approaches that disrupt academic business as usual. It seems fitting, therefore, that we (in this chapter) pander not to the conventions of the well-made essay that introduces the substantive focus, predetermining how it might be read, what you will learn and know, from reading on, and “concluding” with a neat summary and series recommendations. We instead, in the fluid form that écriture féminine affords, introduce ourselves and experience of Cixous’ ideas, before framing that experience in academic explanation/discourse.

Writing the Feminine On the face of it, this chapter explores how a doctoral supervisor and student employed the ideas of Hélène Cixous to liberate the student’s felt knowledge and cognitive understanding into creatively written and artistic form/s. Yet it is more than that, as autoethnography is always more than personal storytelling; it is deep analytical and theoretical discussion. We therefore frame our narratives with critiques of the role of higher education to provoke reflection on epistemological matters, such as what are considered valuable ways of knowing, and who is considered a valuable knower in the academy. We identify the methodological framework employed in the chapter after sharing our stories of how we employed Cixous’ écriture féminine to bring forth a Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) thesis. T(r)ipping convention/denying the penis. Through this process we hope to invite to reflect on the potential of écriture féminine to disrupt deeply embedded academic hierarchies, regimes of truth, and the self-­ regulatory function of the academy, by extending what and who are considered valuable knowers and ways of knowing, and what, why and how we communicate ourselves and our knowledge/s in the academy. Context: The University as a Site for Knowledge (Re)Production The asymmetry of the students and teacher relationship and the gatekeeping role of education as a form of social control and reproduction are well established. Robinson and Aronica (2009) argue that education is an impersonal and linear process, a type of assembly line, similar to factory

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production; Bourdieu (1973) had previously identified education’s role in social and cultural (hierarchical) reproduction; and Freire (1970) posited that through a reproductive, linear process a received truth becomes an absolute truth. What is common to all these theories is the notion that education and educators transmit knowledge onto passive students, and in so doing, reinforce particular ideological constructs, masked as universal and valuable truths. Furthermore, Brennan (2004) conceives that a key aim of higher education is to prepare and shape the mind-set of students from the most dominant class. So not only is the student/teacher relationship considered to be a narrow, mono-directional exchange but it is also designed for the dominant class only. Relatedly, universities—as institutional spaces—assume certain bodies (usually white, male, heterosexual, middle-class ones) to be the norm, transforming the “others” into “space invaders” (Ahmed 2012). Gordon and Bose (2022) identify that this has led to the institutionalisation of who can be said to be a competent “knower” and who is considered incompetent (Shillam 2018). We extend this notion by suggesting that the process can also institutionalise what is considered legitimate knowledge and how it ought to be communicated. Within the framework presented above, universities are a site of knowledge (re)production with “the power to decide which histories, knowledges and intellectual contributions are considered valuable and worthy of further critical attention and dissemination” (Gebrial 2018, 19). These ideas compel us to consider our role and responsibilities as teachers in Higher Education. Do we propagate hierarchies, exclusions, assembly lines of (re)production? Do we negate “other” bodies and bodies of knowledge? Or do we consider how we might create inclusion and dialogue, and how we can value different forms of knowledge by encouraging student autonomy and creativity? In this chapter, we specifically position the doctoral process as a site through which new knowledge and ways of knowing can be created, as a place for political manoeuvres designed to displace old and tired hierarchies and exclusions. Similarly, Gordon and Bose (2022) see the doctoral process as a potentially agonistic space (Arendt 2013) in which dominant ways of seeing and representing might be contested. They further, in concert with Arendt (2013), proffer that when performed with others, action yields the potential to create new forms of power. This notion of working together through doctoral study contrasts with traditional supervisor/student relationships and models.

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Doctoral Student and Supervisor Relationships The doctoral student and supervisor relationship is often conceived of and communicated in metaphoric terms. Indeed, Lee and Green identify a “proliferation and intensity of metaphor, allegory and allusion in the language of candidature and supervision” (2009, 615). This, in itself, is a curiosity. I wonder why? Is it because people prefer to couch the relationship euphemistically to subtly mask its overtones of coercion and intrusion? Green and Lee (1995) further note that pre-eminent forms of supervision carry with them powerful connotations of “overseeing”, “looking over” and “looking after”. In contrast, Parry and Hayden (1999) describe the role of doctoral supervisor as “gatekeeper of science”. These and similar metaphors are described by Bartlett and Mercer as male-­ dominated metaphors of power, “which assumes a knowing supervisor who passes on knowledge to the unknowing student in a sort of rite of passage”, often linked with master–apprentice metaphors (2001, 57). Zeegers and Barron (2012, 57) observe that within such frameworks, the doctoral student is positioned as “under the watchful eye of the master” with the potential to create “the tertiary equivalent of the brutalizing experiences so often documented in the lives of boys in traditional British public schools”. An examination of such metaphors makes (brutally) visible the power differential established in traditional supervisor/student relationships. Manathunga (2007) adds a gendered lens to this analysis by describing paternalistic impulses within supervision. She also contends that in mentoring doctoral students, supervisors often blur the boundaries of offering discipline- or study-specific guidance and regulating students’ identities. For “while we may not necessarily be wiser about other areas of life, as supervisors, we are helping students to develop selfregulatory behaviours and assisting them to develop particular technologies of self” (Foucault, 1988, Manathunga 2007). This idea of the supervisor employing subtle “regime[s] of person formation” (Manathunga 2007, 211) contrasts with findings in Devos’ (2004) study, where students expressed a desire for autonomy and self-regulation. There appears, therefore, to be a contrast between the effect and affect of traditional doctoral student/supervisor relationships and the aims of students. There is also a conflict between the impact of the traditional doctoral study process and student/supervisor relationships and their potential to create an agonistic space (Arendt 2013) in which dominant ways of seeing and representing might be contested

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and where performed action with others might yield new forms of power. We therefore explore how engaging in écriture féminine impacts the doctoral process and student/supervisor relationship.

Methodology We specifically investigate, through an autoethnography, how écriture féminine might inform the doctoral process, and assess its capacity to “bring women to writing” (Cixous 1976, 875) and support epistemic justice. We understand that our lived experiences reflect, illuminate and critique cultural practices and phenomena and agree with Reed-Danahay’s notion that autoethnography is “research (graphy) that connects the personal (auto) to the cultural (ethnos), placing the self within a social context” (1997, p.145). We further employ autoethnography because it supports our conscious attempt to place ourselves in our work. It is also a political tool, as re-presenting incidents of lived experience helps make manifest the structural patterns of gender and epistemic discrimination exercised in academia. We finally share what are often hidden experiences to make them knowable and speak-able (Wright et al. 2017). We also write in the first person, and talk of our feelings and values in order to bring forth fully embodied reflections (Merleau-Ponty 2013) to this chapter. We deliberately adopt autoethnography as methodology because it connects to a feminist politics of actively seeking to write our-selves-our-bodies. Hélène Cixous (1976) reminds us that our bodies must be heard. We must tell stories that are about our embodied moments if we seek to connect to a feminist politics—a politics where we can interrupt and challenge the norms of writing for/in academia (Livholts 2012; Lipton and Gail Crimmins 2019). Snapshots of a Doctoral Study/Relationship Based on the Principles of Écriture Féminine We offer a brief outline only of the main tenets of a feminine form of authorship, which is designed as an alternative to patriarchal writing and social/political structures, and a process through which women might embody their writing and embody themselves through their writing, as we wish to focus on our application and reflection of using écriture féminine. Suffice to say, Cixous (1976) deliberately challenges the focus on logic, objectivity and linearity within traditional writing structures, and suggests

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that women embody a different—not greater or lesser—physical and psychological landscape and inhabit a uniquely feminine language. She writes of her time, which might suggest a gender binary. Yet, Cixous’ notion of the feminine need not only be used to denote or relate only to women. She offers a theoretical framework that rejects masculinised processes and exclusions that can be explored or employed by all genders. For instance, Connell (1995), in concert with Freud, posits that masculine and feminine currents coexist in all genders, and that adult sexuality and gender are not fixed by nature but constructed and relational (Connell 1995). Connell also suggested that while the social structures that shape each person to varying degrees are explicitly historical, they are also dynamic, subject to change and resistance, as well as to being reproduced or recuperated. In this regard, Cixous’ conceptualisation, that “women” should disrupt the masculinised discursive form that keeps them subjugated, by “writing ourselves”, in a language that is intelligible to them/us, can therefore be adopted by people who identify as male, trans, gender non-binary, genderfluid or the myriad nomenclatures that folk might choose to use, as the writing process is a rejection against a masculine structure of Othering, not a gender or sex.

Non/Conclusion We finally offer no firm conclusion, as to conclude is to restate our thesis and, by closing an argument, foreclose on other interpretations. We instead repeat the provocation that écriture féminine can create an agonistic space (Arendt 2013) in which dominant ways of seeing and representing can be contested, power relations dissolved/resolved, and new forms of power—not yielded over another—created. To bring women to writing through écriture féminine provides a power “to” allow our bodies to be heard, connected to a feminist politics, to disrupt traditional power relations in doctoral relations, and traditional ways of knowing and communicating: She said let me remind you that open moments of non-conclusion are possibilities for something more. (Black et al. 2019, 539).

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included. Durham: Duke University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1215/9780822395324. Arendt, Hannah. 2013. The Human Condition, 3rd ed., introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bartlett, Alison, and Gina Mercer. 2001. Postgraduate Research Supervision: Transforming (R) Elations. Eruptions: New Feminism across the Disciplines, Volume 11. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Black, Alison, Gail Crimmins, and Linda Henderson. “Positioning Ourselves in Our Academic Lives: Exploring Personal/Professional Identities, Voice and Agency.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 40, no. 4 (2019): 530–544. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1973. “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.” In Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education, edited by Richard Brown, 71–112. London: Tavistock. Brennan, John. 2004. “The Social Role of the Contemporary University: Contradictions, Boundaries and Change.” In Ten Years On: Changing Education in a Changing World, 22–26. Childers, Sara M., Jeong-eun Rhee, and Stephanie L. Daza. 2013. “Promiscuous (Use of) Feminist Methodologies: The Dirty Theory and Messy Practice of Educational Research Beyond Gender.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26, no. 5: 507–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09518398.2013.786849. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, translated by Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4: 875–93. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306. Cixous, Hélène. 2005. Stigmata: Escaping Texts, with a foreword by Jacques Derrida. London: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. 1997. Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge. Connell, Robert. 1995. Masculinities. Sydney: Polity Press. Crimmins, Gail. 2017. Theatricalising Narrative Research on Women Casual Academics. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­71562-­9. Devos, Anita. 2004. “The Project of Self, the Project of Others: Mentoring, Women and the Fashioning of the Academic Subject.” Studies in Continuing Education 26, no. 1: 67–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/158037042000199489. Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of Self”, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Gutman, Huck, Patrick H. Hutton, Michel Foucault, and Luther H.  Martin, 87-104. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

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Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Gebrial, Dalia. 2018. “Rhodes must Fall: Oxford and Movements for Change.” In Decolonising the University, edited by Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nisancıolu, 19–36. London: Pluto Press. Gordon, Rebecca, and Lakshmi S.  Bose. 2022. “Reflecting on Representation: Exploring Critical Tensions within Doctoral Training Programmes in the UK.” In Strategies for Supporting Inclusion and Diversity in the Academy: Higher Education, Aspiration and Inequality, edited by Gail Crimmins, 49–68. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022. Green, Bill, and Alison Lee. 1995. “Theorising Postgraduate pedagogy.” Australian Universities Review 38, no. 2: 40–45. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1997. On Death and Dying. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lee, Alison, and Bill Green. 2009. “Supervision as “Metaphor.” Studies in Higher Education 34, no. 6: 615–630. Lipton, Briony, and Gail Crimmins, G. 2019. “New Bottles For New Wine: Arts Based Research as a Form of Feminist Resistance to Masculine Discourse in Form and Content.” In Strategies for Supporting Inclusion and Diversity in the Academy: Higher Education, Aspiration and Inequality, edited by Gail Crimmins. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Livholts, Mona. 2012. “To Fill Academic Work With Political Passion: Nina Lykke’s Cosmodolphins and Contemporary Post/Academic Writing Strategies.” Feminist Review 102, no. 1: 135–142. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2013. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. MacLure, Maggie. 2013. “The Wonder of Data.” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 13, no. 4: 228–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086 13487863. Manathunga, Catherine. 2007. “Supervision as Mentoring: The Role of Power and Boundary Crossing.” Studies in Continuing education 29, no. 2: 207–221. Parry, Sharon, and Martin Hayden. 1999. “Experiences of Supervisors in Facilitating the Induction of Research Higher Degree Students to Fields of Education.” In Supervision of Postgraduate Research in Education, 33-53. Australian Association for Research in Education. Puwar, Nirmal. 2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg. Robinson, Ken, and Lou Aronica. 2009. The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. New York: Penguin. Shneidman, Edwin S. 1998. “Perspective on Suicidology: Further Reflections on Suicide and Psychache.” Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior 28, no. 3: 245–50. Shillam, Robbie. 2018. “Black/Academia.” In Decolonizing the University, edited by Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nisancıolu, 53–63. London: Pluto Press.

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Worden, J. William. 2018. Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner, 4th ed. New  York: Springer Publishing Company, Inc. Wright, Hazel R., Linda Cooper, and Paulette Luff. 2017. “Women's Ways of Working: Circumventing the Masculine Structures Operating Within and Upon the University.” Women’s Studies International Forum 61: 123–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2016.11.006. Zeegers, Margaret, and Deirdre Barron. 2012. “Pedagogical Concerns in Doctoral Supervision: A Challenge for Pedagogy.” Quality Assurance in Education 20, no. 1: 20–30. https://doi.org/10.1108/09684881211198211. Associate Professor Gail Crimmins  is a feminist academic who employs artsinformed and narrative methodologies to uncover and re-present the oftenunheard voices and experience of women. She is associate dean in the School of Business and Creative Industries, and committed to equity, diversity and inclusion in higher education. Susanne Oliver Armstrong is an independent scholar, a peer support worker on acute mental health wards, and an advisor to national suicide prevention organisations. She has a background as a grief counsellor, nurse and adult educator.

CHAPTER 12

Writing Australian Gardens to Cross Borders Between the Online and Offline Worlds Renée Mickelburgh

I wandered off track and towards the path Cixous carved with her axe after the words I had wanted to use in my PhD thesis crumbled into a fine dust that powdered my keyboard and danced in the wind. Going off track is an aimless, drifting movement. To wander away is to become lost, or at the very least to go in the wrong direction. But I didn’t feel lost. When I wandered off track and towards Cixous it felt like I was leaning towards something rather than drifting away. Cixous’ work intrigued me and so I followed it, wondering about the way it intersected with my own path. This is how our writing paths crossed. The path, and wandering along it, is a constant theme in Cixous’ work. Wandering, says Cixous, is a humble word and humble “is what is close to the earth—humus—bespeaks the humility of writing” (Cixous 2008, 3). I needed to become humble to become a better writer. For some time, I wasn’t humble. I had marched confidently forward on a route smoothed by years of academic writing, peer-reviewed papers and

R. Mickelburgh (*) School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_12

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distinguished titles. A strict academic formula shaped the contours and curves of my writing path. A clear rationale doused my words in a rigour that promised clarity and conviction. The safe confines of clearly defined paragraphs and chapters smoothed out any rough edges. All I needed to do was toe the line: collate all the information gathered—a series of podcasts, pictures and words created online by women—and combine it with clear analysis and concise conclusion. That smooth path soon began to smother me. Choking back words I wanted to use, the words I did use became stifling, suffocating. There was no music, no rhythm for my words to dance to the story with and colour my writing. Everything was black and white. Desperate to escape the confines of their containment, my words became muffled and restrained: wrapped in cling film. Around this time I glanced outside my office, and around Australia and around the world, where people—students, mothers, grandparents—were taking to the streets, demanding action on climate change. Their words were chants and numbers monstrous; they moved as one giant, winding, wilding creature. Hands clasping cardboard signs, mouths demanding answers, fists raised in fury. Unstoppable and determined they roared for change, urging world leaders to open their ears and their minds and their hearts to the increasingly dire environmental situation we were immersed in. From my level six office in the sandstone university, I felt my words eager to escape and join the churning, roiling serpent of protest on the streets. They wanted to sing with the crowd, dance to a rhythm that would truly capture the theory that grew like a vine in my mind. The words that had become stuck to the edges of my heart. I began to feel uneasy. Months cross-checking the words and pictures of Australian women gardeners with theory of ecofeminist writers made me question the direction in which I was going: Was I on the right path for writing this work? Gardens are rituals of the soil. Gardens stake a claim; they are a sign that signals another way of living. Gardens prompt the reader to ask, like Cixous did, “to feel rich, in myself, what does that mean?” (2008, 16). When I placed my ecofeminist sensibilities  across these words and pictures and sounds I sensed a different way to communicate community, communion and a common ground. But the words I was told to use to describe and analyse what I saw and heard and read did not seem to provide an adequate account of how I really felt. Despite the best intentions and promises paving this path, I found myself in a place on pause.

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R is the way a memory swings forward to the present then circles back to past and then moves down to move higher. Cixous says giving myself to writing means doing the digging, the unburying, the apprenticeship (1993, 6). Being a student in this home school garden means grabbing a shovel to learn how to listen. To write about memories is to excavate them, to “attempt to unerase, to unearth” (8). The monologue of lawn consumes the soil into silence. But gardens remember, gardens signal dialogue, because gardens leave a trace.

When I sit in my garden, I hear Cixous murmur that “we are from the same garden” (2008, 172), and I sense she has lessons I can learn about writing for the work I want to do. She says that the garden is a central trope in her writing—that is, “the real garden and all the other gardens” (Cixous 2008, 150). Her words make me wonder about the garden I share with Cixous and the garden I share with the women I study. Cixous’ work became my homework and I began to study the three lessons lodged in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I sensed similarities between her writing world and mine. Cixous’ writing is situated in nature; her words emerge from a garden and nature permeates the soil. There are borders and boundaries here, but also places where writing unearths and exhumes. The women gardeners I studied took time to go online, to walk out of their gardens and breach the borders of their backyards to reach those who wanted to connect. They brought their garden stories to the digital place, stories about ways of living differently in the world. These ways question understandings of what it means to live a good life; what do we have in common? To consider their words I gathered around me the work of ecofeminists who saw the direct link between the oppression of women and the oppression of the environment. But here and there I saw slivers of light in their writing; hints of another way to describe what they wanted to say. Writers like Susan Griffin wrote theory in prose that sounded like poetry and poetry that begins with feeling (1978, xv). She says that form could “be transgressed for transgression’s sake, but it can also be transgressed in an attempt to lean in a certain direction” (1993, 9). Critics note that Griffin’s renowned work, Women and Nature, reveals language as “as much a function of nature as nature is of language” and that neither can be contained by the other (Cantrell 1994, 198). To explain her theory Griffin’s writing was colouring outside the lines. When I drew a line between my writing and their writing and that writing and those writings and Hélène Cixous’ writing, the words scattered

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onto the page in joyful freedom. I sensed Cixous laughing with me for taking so long to meet her and the women who wrote about nature and language and women. I realised that Cixous sounded like Griffin when she said, “I and the world are never separate” (1994, xv). Artists use a blending tool to smooth out the harsh lines of a pencil, and here too the lines between the writers I studied and the women’s words I studied could not be harshly defined and separated but softly blurred and smudged at the edges. I felt Cixous’ words: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies” (1976, 875). I turned, stepped forward, and moved towards the route that was messy, unkept and hard to follow. I have also become a student of Cixous in this home school garden. I embarked on this new, untidy path and studied in my home school garden. In my usual messy fashion, I have not followed these schools in the order Cixous set out. I backtrack here and there, my process as messy as the words on the page. R is re-tracing the shape of the garden path. Gardeners tread lines of desire around their gardens, connecting lines that are recreated through their stories. These are paths of discovery, but they are also a gesture towards “the experience of disappearance, from the feeling of having lost the key to the world”. Garden writers have been thrown outside. When they are outside gardening they can sense what is rare and mortal. Their stories are an attempt “to keep the trace” (Cixous 1994, xxvi).

Cixous, as I have already mentioned, uses her H as an axe “to clear new paths” (Cixous 1993, 4). I think of myself as carving a desire line, that is, a path that deviates from the designated one. Desire lines are created when the walker does not want to follow the designated path, but rather walks a path that is better suited to her needs. Like the words of the women I studied, like the words of Cixous I studied, I was drawn towards a more obscure line; the lines I most desired. Yet desire, like gardens, is complicated. One might want to walk paths of desire around and through them but gardens, of course, are bordered in place by fencelines. And fencelines are containment lines. A garden, like words, requires some semblance of containment. Cixous’ trail clears the way forward, but it also clears things up. I am writing about women, but not all women. However, I can’t ignore the feeling that there is something in common with the women in the stories

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I study. They have all seeded their stories in a common ground. In the School of the Dead, Cixous takes my hand and explains that all texts have different voices but they also have a voice in common. She says, “they all have, with their differences, a certain music I am attuned to, and that’s the secret” (1993, 5). I feel the seeds I have planted in my writing garden begin to sprout as she explains that what she has learned about writing “cannot be generalized, but it can be shared” (Cixous 1993, 7). I wish to share my story and the stories of the women writers. Avoiding generalisations and universalisations, but insistering that somewhere, in there, we might find something in common. The women I have studied tell stories of gardens that tell stories of other ways to live. What stories might we find if we all find ourselves wandering into the same garden? Cixous says her ladder is climbed by authors she felt an affinity for. Similarly, this new-old path I find myself on is scattered with the work of writers who influence the way my hands press down on the keyboard. Pages flutter in the wind, words catch my eye as the sun begins its slow decline. Cixous says she is called to these texts; they are texts that call with different voices but which all have one voice in common. It is the voice-­ in-­common that I wonder about (1993, 5). From the moment I started my project I was called by the texts in letters. As I follow the desire line, the trail carved out by Cixous’ axe, my writing-as-research leans forward in search of secrets, rather than the certainties of conclusions. I sketch rough paths through and into a post-­ qualitative world of ecofeminist writing and consider what this might means in terms of contemporary communication. As I travel my writing meanders along long neglected, unloved ecofeminist paths which still insist on the need for “alternative transformative discourses” to change the way the natural world is spoken about, and lived in (Bullis 2015, 125). R is re-tracing the shape of the garden path. Gardeners tread lines of desire around their gardens, connecting lines that are recreated through their stories. These are paths of discovery, but they are also a gesture towards “the experience of disappearance, from the feeling of having lost the key to the world”. Garden writers have been thrown outside. When they are outside gardening they can sense what is rare and mortal. Their stories are an attempt “to keep the trace” (Cixous 1994, xxvi).

Cixous helps me see that my green pen is also a shovel, a digging tool. I have taken up the green pen to do this digging, but what emerges must

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be written about in white ink (Cixous 2008). As I scrawl my white ink along the page, it burrows beneath the earth and exhumes words and ways of living and dreaming and doing. The white ink revealed a wrinkle in time. These wrinkles lined the crumpled papers scattered around me, linking their work and my work with ecofeminist and feminist work. They were wrinkles that carved a line between the ways that women, often confined to the home for caring responsibilities, noticed when water became dirtier, plants failed to thrive, and children became ill. Garden borders are dreams that can be rickety and bend with time and weather. Through my wondering about the lives and stories of the women gardeners I study, I consider how they breach the borders of their online and offline worlds. In School of Roots Cixous teaches me about words without borders and writing through time. Text crosses borders, she says. Crossing borders can occur in such a sudden and subtle way that we don’t even realise it (1993, 122). In seeking out stories of the garden I am searching for a “world under the world” (Cixous 1993, 126). Like Cixous I am on the side of the roots, and the flowers. I reached Cixous’ School of Roots while searching for meaning between the words of the women I studied and the words of women who wrote about gardens before. It seems silly to say but it felt like I was searching for something magic. Cixous says that to get to the roots, “that magic place, we must descend crossing over borders” (1993, 122). Letters are the roots of my thesis; they are the words that anchor my work, keeping a link between the past, present and future. There are secrets scrawled on their pages. Cixous, an expert on secret matters, insists that “as soon as one writes to exhume, one secretes secrets” (2008, 178). Stories about gardens contain secrets. The letters I have come to love sit quietly in university libraries, lying in darkened boxes that protect their secrets from dust. Cixous says, “the book is a letter on the run” (2008, 176), and I know these letters have been lying in wait for the chance to run away with writers and scholars. Australian environmental historian Katie Holmes took letters on the run in her book Between the Leaves: Stories of Australian Women, Writing and Gardens (2011). I held one chapter, The Poet’s Gardens, tight so it might stop running for a moment. In it, Holmes runs with the letters of poet Judith Wright and wildflower illustrator Kathleen McArthur. She reveals the ways, in corresponding about their gardens, the pair developed a deep friendship that bloomed into a fierce conservation ethic. Holmes tells how their almost fifty-year correspondence started in 1951, when

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Wright lived at Mount Tamborine in the Gold Coast hinterland and McArthur resided at Caloundra, on the Sunshine Coast. They were a pair of mothers living unconventional lives for the time: conservative, 1950s Queensland. They bonded in outrage at unfettered progress, development and what they believed was the almost certain destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, K’Gari (Fraser Island) and the Cooloola region. The letters founded a friendship that bloomed into a determined and resolute environmental activism. These letters prompt me to I take up my pencil once again and draw a line from myself and my work towards McArthur and Wright. They lived where I lived; they loved their backyard and the environments I knew so well. I create stories out of the past from what the historians have presented as fact, in order to press closer to the present moment. R worries it will become a cliché when it joins the path and the women who attempt to cross borders. Cixous speaks first about words without borders; it is text which crosses that border, she says. Crossing borders can occur in such a sudden and subtle way that we don’t even realise it (Cixous 1993, 122). Perhaps this is why then, the garden, and stories of the garden, forces the gardener to ask the question Cixous poses: “who are I” (1994, xvii)?

Cixous says dreams are the ancient gardens of a forgotten life, and so I find myself going backwards and re-turning to Cixous’ School of Dreams in search of better ways to understand what the past has to do with the present. I skipped school, “wagged it” as we used to say, in my urgency to get to the root of the matter. I know there is a void in my understanding; I need dreams in order to discover those “ancient gardens where I spent a forgotten life” (Cixous 1993, 104). They are the dreams beneath the earth where “the languages before languages resound” (1993, 104). It is hard critical work in this part of the garden, where words must work better, harder, more completely to communicate what I suspect I am seeing in the women’s words I study: the desire for a new language of land, a language of everyday life. I suspect I am searching for what ecofeminist Val Plumwood insists is “nature in the active voice” (2009). I am searching for the “tongues in trees” Plumwood speaks of (2009). Gardens trace the common space: they leave a trace. Both planting a tree and planting words leave a trace, a hint, of what might be in common. Re-turning to ecofeminist thought and theory and writing about the commons is re-turning to a new type of old-world garden agenda. While I

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studied gardens inside my computer screen, an environmental growl was growing into a roar about a re-turn to a common space and common ground and its potential to unbound boundaries and borders. I needed to ask: When the word common is re-turned to the garden, what communication blooms in this space? What happens when green is re-placed by something-in-common? I am trying to understand what happens when the word common self-seeds and takes root in other common words. I sense it hints at a common refrain, a way to communicate something in common. Re-turning to the commons requires imagining the women who once lived in the commons. I had to dream her. I had no name for this common woman or women; I only understood her as “she”. As I listen to the sound of these words, I pick up my green pen and fill the page with white ink of my imagination once more. I sense that in doing so I mimic Cixous (2007) and “in-sister” on the connection, on the thin threads of a web between their worlds and my world and other worlds outside garden boundaries. I imagine the invisible line connecting us all through time and place. I did not know her; she existed in the white margins of the history books. She did not write her stories, but that did not mean she was voiceless. She worked on, and at, her home place and garden space (Ahmed 2017, 7). She and the other women told their stories as they gathered and gleaned the common land. Her plants and ideas went to seed but I attempt to re-seed them in my thesis through my dreams. This is not as unusual as it sounds. Seeds of her common land seasons will one day find themselves in another soil, pressed in by the hands of other women. Their lives so far apart, yet their work so similar, despite the centuries and oceans in between. She had no medium to tell her story, no way to write her heartlines (Mackinlay 2016),  and communicate her message to the world. So her garden became the story, created with tools and inscribed in the land. Her garden story, then, brought her mind in communion with other minds, now, even if she never knew it (Le Guin 2004, 209). Community acts communicate but to do so they must all be playing the same tune. What lies beneath is where the stories lie, composted together. She left objects along the paths to lead the way. R is a letter that has pushed too far forward; it has embarked on a violent adventure called writing because, “now comes the time to say the worst (Cixous 1993, 72). I am crossing over and under in my

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­ arden-writing-­thinking, heading towards that “feeling of secret” (Cixous g 1993, 85). I feel alone in my expertise on gardens and women and stories, knowing both too much and too little. Coming together, speaking of a borderless garden with borderless writing, feels like a trespass of sorts.

Writing desire lines into the soil of my thesis became a joyfully mundane process. It was not glamorous wandering. It did not receive widespread accolades; no trophies line the shelves gathering dust. Desire lines are paths that wear the language of everyday life into the soil. They plant a common ground, but also bloom with difference, staying with the trouble rather than making trouble (Haraway 2016). Faded desire lines reveal forgotten words hidden in the understory. It takes a humble effort to follow in the footsteps of Cixous and better understand how our text does or does not cross invisible borders (1993, 122). My wandering becomes gleaning when I borrow the writing tools Cixous offers. To wander while gleaning is to become willfully and usefully distracted by what comes near (Ahmed 2014, 83). I lean closer into this writing and watch words unfurl into worlds. To unfurl is also to curl. To write as method of inquiry pays attention to writing like Cixous: “of un-forgetting, of un-silencing, of unearthing” (1994, 83). These words and women are entangled amongst each other, in and through time. It is not a matter of straightening them out, of dis-entangling; it is a matter of better understanding the entanglement. Diverting from the traditional is a precarious move with the potential for complaint and criticism. Yet I am now wandering the path in search of the magic words Cixous promises are on this path (1993, 90). When I find these magic words I will be able to tell you my story so you might imagine a garden built on common ground. I am not sure what the ending will be, although Cixous does hint that “everything ends with flowers” (1993, 151). Cixous has held my hand as I have wandered to the earth of writing. And now I must humbly go back to work.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2014. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Bullis, Connie. 2015. “Retalking Environmental Discourses from a Feminist Perspective: The Radical Potential of Ecofeminism.” In The Symbolic Earth:

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Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment, edited by James G.  Cantrill and Christine Oravec, 123-148. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Cantrell, Carol H. 1994. “Women and Language in Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her.” Hypatia 9, no. 3: 225–38. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1527-­2001.1994.tb00459.x. Cixous, Hélène, and Calle-Gruber, Mireille. 1997. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, translated by Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4: 875–93. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306. Cixous, Hélène. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 2007. Insister of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 2008. White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics. Stocksfeld: Acumen. Cixous, Hélène. 1994. The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers. London: Routledge. Griffin, Susan. 1978. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New  York: Harper & Row. Griffin, Susan. 1993. “Red Shoes”. In Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman, 1-11. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Holmes, Katie. 2011. Between the Leaves: Stories of Australian Women, Writing and Gardens. Crawley: UWA Publishing. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2004. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. New York: Shambhala. Mackinlay, Elizabeth. 2016. “The Heartlines in your Hand.” In Global South ethnographies: Minding the senses, edited by Elke Emerald, Robert E. Rinehart and Antonia Garcia, 153–165. Boston: Sense Publishers. Plumwood, Val. 2009. “Nature in the Active Voice.” Australian Humanities Review 46: 1–13. Renée Mickelburgh  is a feminist communications scholar based at the University of Queensland. Her PhD engaged with ecofeminist, feminist and affect theory to examine the kinds of stories contemporary Australian women tell online about and around their gardens. She is the recipient of Australian Garden History Society’s Nina Crone Award.

CHAPTER 13

Inter-View Elizabeth Mackinlay and Renée Mickelburgh

Subject: Writing the conclusion - or not? From: Liz Mackinlay Sent: Wednesday, 8 February 2023 4:59 PM To: Renée Mickelburgh Hi Ren, Our deadline is fast approaching and Cixous might say, “I have a feeling it’s time to finish this race” (1993, 156)—we need to bring this book to conclusion and you and I are no strangers to running on and off the page. In so many ways though, writing a formal conclusion feels like quite an un-Cixousian move to make, particularly if we think about the way in which she ends Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: “there is no ‘conclusion’ to be found in writing …”, she writes (1993, 156).

E. Mackinlay (*) Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University, Bilinga, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] R. Mickelburgh School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Mackinlay, R. Mickelburgh (eds.), Critical Authoethnography and Écriture Feminine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_13

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I am wondering whether instead of a conclusion, then, we might bring our thinking and wondering about this text, the authors and of course Hélène Cixous into view through conversation—by way of inter-view. I like the way she splits this word in Rootprints as a way to press her words close together with those of her co-author Michelle Calle Gruber. You know how much I love following words around, and if we go right down below to the roots of inter-view, the hyphen highlights the sixteenth-­ century origins of this word, that is, to “see between”. If we combine this with the etymology of conversation, which comes to life in the 1400s as to “turn around with”, then we have to “see and turn around with and between”. Writing which chooses the interval space with and between, writing that turns and refuses to stand still―it is there in Cixous work that “everything is played out” (1997, 37). The same might be said of autoethnography―it is there in the interchange between the self and the social that writing puts out “gangways” (1997, 23) between registers and makes words and worlds come alive. Besides, we would be in very good autoethnographic company if we conversed our thinking and wondering inter-view. Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge’s “The Sea Monster: An Ethnographic Drama” (1991) playfully employs movement between their two voices to dramatize their experience of writing lived experience. Carolyn Ellis’ individual work (The Ethnographic I, 2004) and her collaborative writing with Art Bochner (Evocative Autoethnography, 2016) often take the form of dialogue between them. The chapters in this collection have been placed here to deliberately show—not tell—the ways in which Cixousian écriture féminine can inspire explicitly feminist critical autoethnographic writing whose hand runs “from the heart where passions rise to the finger tips that hear the body thinking” (1993, 156). Shall we try then to run our writing inter-view through an email conversation? Your in-sister, Liz From: Renée Mickelburgh Date: Thursday, 9 February 2023 at 10:19 am To: Liz Mackinlay