Performing Autobiography: Narrating a Life as Activism 3030645975, 9783030645977

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Performing Autobiography Narrating a Life as Activism Katrina M. Powell

Performing Autobiography

Katrina M. Powell

Performing Autobiography Narrating a Life as Activism

Katrina M. Powell English Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-64597-7    ISBN 978-3-030-64598-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 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. Cover image © Anoma Wijewardene, ‘Is it a trick of the light’. Used by permission of the artist and owner of the painting, Sheyana La Brooy, Sydney, Australia. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Jean Arasanayagam, 1934–2019, with love

Book Abstract

Performing Auto/biography analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in five authors’ auto/biographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the public implications of writing individual identity. Exploring the ways race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality might affect the form(s) in which writers choose to write (e.g., memoir, fictional autobiography, and poetry), Performing Auto/biography questions how autobiographers challenge notions of genre, truth, and representation. Specifically, this book argues that constructing identity is a performance, one that can simultaneously use and subvert traditional notions of rhetoric. By examining the auto/biographical texts of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Johnson, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim together, this book theorizes self-­representation as a rhetorical performance, one where discourses of power come in contact with discourses of identity. As a result, their texts can be seen as “performative auto/biography”—transgressive archives where readers are asked to consider their own identities and act accordingly. In doing so, this book contributes to feminist rhetorics and auto/biography studies, arguing that these performative genres advocate for life narratives as political and social activism.

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Acknowledgments

There are many family, friends, and colleagues who have supported me during the work on this book. I thank my colleagues Angeletta Gourdine, Robin Roberts, Peggy Prenshaw, and Katherine Henninger for their comments on early drafts. Thank you to Bob Siegle, Tom Gardner, and Sue Ott Rowlands for many conversations about art, writing, and theater and for understanding the complex and time-consuming processes of writing. I wish to thank the team at the Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies, Rebecca Hester, Brett Shadle, Georgeta Pourchot, and Katie Randall, for their patience while I finished this project. Thanks to Kelly Pender for friendship and willingness to double administer. A special thank you to Ginney Fowler for the gift of teaching her course on Zora Neale Hurston. I also thank the Virginia Tech Office of the Provost for a research leave, the Department of English and my chairs, Joe Eska and Rebecca Weaver-­ Hightower, for their support, and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Dean Laura Belmonte for research support and insightful guidance about writing along the way. Thank you to the editors at Palgrave, particularly Molly Beck, Rebecca Hinsley, and Lina Aboujieb, for the support and extension(s) during this trying time. I appreciate your guidance and understanding. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers who provided incredibly helpful comments and insights. Finally, thank you to my mom and dad, my sister and her family, my father-in-law and mother-in-law, and my husband and son for always ix

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finding ways to help me find time to write. This year has been especially difficult and I would not have been able to finish without you. To my friend, the artist Anoma Wijewardene, thank you for permission for using the likeness of your painting, “Is it a trick of the light” and thank you to the owner, Sheyana La Brooy, for permission as well. Anoma, your art inspires introspection and responsibility. This book includes significantly revised versions of previously published material in the following publications, used with permission: Powell, Katrina M. “Memory’s Body: Autobiography as Mentorship in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 31.3: (2009): 280–290. Powell, Katrina M. “‘How Can I Prove that I am Not Who I am?’: Layered Identities and Genres in the Work of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim.” Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature 8.1 (2014): 25–39. Powell, Katrina M. “The Embodiment of Memory: The Intellectual Body in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces.” Ed. Christopher John Stuart. New Essays on Autobiography and The Body. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009. 154–167.

Contents

1 Introduction: Intersections of Genre, Gender, Performance, and Rhetoric  1 2 Theorizing Rhetorics of Identity to Create Rhetorical Performativity as an Analytic 21 3 Zora Neale Hurston’s Craft and a Griot’s Refusal to Conform 43 4 Audre Lorde’s Intellectual Body: Scripting an Embodied Activism 71 5 Self-Representation, Genre, and Performativity: Dorothy Allison’s Performances Across Genres 97 6 Joyce Johnson’s Alternative Beat Narrative: Women Outside the Frame127 7 Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Embodied Memories: Academic Autobiography, Genre, and Mentorship159

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8 Performative Auto/biography as Transgressive Archives193 Author Index203 Subject Index207

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Intersections of Genre, Gender, Performance, and Rhetoric

In Among the White Moon Faces (1996), Shirley Geok-lin Lim writes in her memoir about navigating the academy as a scholar, poet, and professor, asking, “Do wild feminists live in universities? Can they?” (226). As she describes her search for a place where she can find a “society of scholars, an abundance of talk, an antagonism of ideas, bracing hostile seriousness, and above all a community of women” (227), Lim’s version of a wild feminist seems to me to be one of mentorship, where women are encouraged by each other to stand up and speak their minds. After teaching and writing about women’s autobiography for nearly thirty years, I see wild feminism as boldly resisting when someone says you do not fit in. Wild feminism recognizes that fitting into a sexist, racist, homophobic system is not actually desirable; indeed, women writers and feminist scholars have made significant contributions to critical thought around the literary and rhetorical genre of auto/biography by not fitting in. Informed by the works of the authors discussed in this book, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Johnson, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, among other women auto/biographers, I also define wild

In this book I follow Nguyê˜n and Pendleton’s discussion, citing Temple University’s Dr. Lori L. Tharps’s New York Times op-ed, in capitalizing both Black and White as a way to signify an antiracist approach. Where quoted material uses lower case for either term, I have left the author’s text unchanged. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. M. Powell, Performing Autobiography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4_1

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feminism as taking no bullshit, being caring and outspoken at the same time, and not being beaten down by the people or policies that mean to keep us in our “place.” If that is what Lim meant, then I am a wild feminist who exists because the women writers in this book exist, because the other writers who I teach in my courses exist, and because my students and colleagues exist. In every class period and committee meeting, we talk back, challenge, change policy, and promote other wild feminists. Women who write auto/biography are often criticized for being self-­ indulgent. For a long time, women’s writing generally and auto/biographical writing in particular were not regarded as worthy of study because the women themselves were not “exemplary.” The position that women’s experience is “anecdotal” is a way to keep people who identify as women hidden from each other. In her memoir/essay collection, The Cancer Journals, Lorde says that if she had agreed to a prosthesis after her mastectomy, then she would have become invisible to other women who had also suffered from breast cancer. With the political climate some 40 years since her memoir was published, we remain invisible to each other. By discounting one’s experience as anecdotal, as an anomaly, as not counting toward the big data, we free institutional structures from providing resources to address issues—like adequate resources toward breast cancer research or adequate resources to process backlogged rape kits. One woman’s tale of her evidence sitting idly in her local police station’s storage area, together with the thousands of other stories of women’s rape kits going unprocessed for years and years, becomes the data needed to move forward. What if we listened to and believed the first woman to begin with? Maybe then evidence would not have been backlogged to our legal system’s shame. Women who write auto/biographically, whether in memoir, diary, letters, lists, tweets, or some other life narratives, sometimes do so to redress existing narratives that do not adequately tell their stories. Because the act of writing such narratives involves genre, gender, performance, and rhetoric, I situate the analyses of this book within the broader fields of both auto/biography studies and rhetorical studies. I outline the interdisciplinary intersections between and among them and provide a sketch of the ways I see these disciplinary conversations overlapping, while also highlighting the ways that each informs the other in interesting and productive ways. Scholars such as Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Leigh Gilmore, Johnnie Stover, Nedra Reynolds, Wendy Hesford, Hildy Miller, and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, to name a few, have paved the way for these conversations, and this book extends these conversations by highlighting the rhetorical dimensions of identity and the rhetorical performances of these five writers as they engage in multiple genres to delineate their identities. The

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common interests of both fields make for productive analyses of the texts discussed in this volume. As autobiography scholar Sidonie Smith states, “Whatever the occasion or that audience, the autobiographical speaker becomes the performative subject” (Smith “Performativity” 17). In her seminal article discussing the ways that narrating a “self as identity derives paradoxically from the loss of consciousness of fragments of experiential history” (18), Smith focuses on audience and the ways that writers of life narratives create their texts with particular audiences in mind. Like many interdisciplinary scholars, Smith’s bringing together theories from philosophy (Butler, de Certeau), gender (de Lauretis, Mouffe, Russo), history (Chakrabarty), political science (Anderson, Schueller), literature (Armstrong, Emberley), sociology (Goffman), psychology (Bruner), and autobiography (Gilmore, Nussbaum, Eakin, Lejeune) makes for a powerful moment where the complexity of narrative, particularly narrating identity(s), challenges any sense that a self is unified or static. Indeed, identities change (Egan and Helms), and the ethical, performative, national implications for changing identities make for fruitful conversation about self and representation. Smith’s early focus on occasion (or rhetorical situation) and audience is a rhetorical approach, with an emphasis on conventions of identity, narrative, and autobiography. More recently, and heavily influenced by Smith’s theories of autobiography, performativity, and the body, Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley explore “how notions of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ might be especially useful in opening up the autobiographical genre. For a genre that is inherently confessional—an artifice insofar as it is about self-fashioning—the idea of performance teases out the choices made in terms of forms and narrative strategies employed, and the audiences addressed. In other words, if we look at autobiographical practice as a ‘self in performance,’ we begin to appreciate the historical, social, and cultural milieu in which the self was imbricated, and what enabled gendered subjectivity and speech” (1). The notions of self, identity, embodiment, and performativity explored by Malhotra and Lambert-Hurley are also key concepts in feminist rhetorics and rhetorical genre studies (Fishman, et  al., Hesford, Jarratt, Reiff and Bawarshi). Creating a theoretical frame based on these related yet different fields presents an opportunity to examine issues of conventions, convention disruption, and the ways that identity, performativity, and embodiment are part of genre transgressions in auto/biography. Feminist rhetorical approaches to women’s writing have focused on the ways that the rhetorical tradition is incomplete without the inclusion of women’s texts, whether autobiographical, social, political, literary, theoretical, or philosophical (Ritchie and Ronald, Glenn and Lunsford,

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Miller and Bridwell-Bowles). Indeed, as Miller and Bridwell-Bowles’s collection suggests, the rhetorical tradition remains in flux due to the “pivotal” rhetorical activity of women rhetors examined by feminist rhetorical scholars (10). Performing Auto/biography, therefore, suggests a continued “remapping” of the history of rhetoric (Glenn), by examining the rhetorical genre practices of women autobiographers through “rhetorical assaying,” a methodology emphasizing rhetorical action (Royster and Kirsch 16). While this book addresses women’s rhetorical practices, Performing Auto/biography is at its heart a study of autobiography and the rhetorical dimensions of representing a self within such a genre. Therefore, in addition to addressing so-called rhetorical traditions, this book engages theories of auto/biography scholars, adhering to notions of fluid identities and extending our understanding of rhetorical constructions of self. Working from the assumption that “Autobiographical acts are inescapably material and embodied” (Smith and Watson, 11), I examine the specific material contexts of these writers’ lives and the ways that their autobiographical acts intersect with their additional writing projects (such as essays, novels, poems). Scholars such as Smith and Watson, Smith, Stover, and Gilmore view autobiography as having the potential to disrupt, where the representation of self can dismantle dominant perceptions of a particular kind of identity. Much of autobiography scholarship is concerned with the ways that these disruptive narratives are constructed. This focus on “identity construction” has been productive for the field, and the notion of performativity in relation to identity construction has challenged the essentialized ways that writers of autobiography, particularly women writers of autobiography, might embody a particular identity. In Performing Auto/biography, therefore, I extend this productive conversation on identity construction and representation by using Anne Carson’s notion of “Decreation” to resist any sense of a stable or unified sense of self (or form). Indeed, the authors examined in this book perform “decreation,” dismantling a sense of self in order to make a “loved version” of the self. In this way, I combine theories of genre and identity to create a methodology to understand the transgressive ways that these writers archive their lives in innovative, political, and activist ways. The chapters in this book also question what we mean by activism and the act of writing a life as an activist act. The writers engaged in this book are not only making public their personal lives through life narrative but also performing genre by performing their narrative identity(s) in such a way as to draw attention to the social structures limiting those identities or genres.

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The authors in this book maintain an interiority and reflexivity that are key to performing the genre and therefore highlight the transgressive archiving of lives typically ignored, unseen, or dismissed. “Transgressive archives,” as I discuss in Chap. 8, are those which challenge and disrupt and make us rethink how work is catalogued, saved, and layered for future work and interpretation. This book takes the stance that it is ethically responsible to question what gets privileged in our archiving practices. Archives are value laden, but if we demand an engagement with identity, assume every text is mediated, and that archiving is a relational, living process, then we can recognize the subversive act of anyone archiving against the grain. The writers in this book speak back to archives of power and their work represents “living texts” or “witness narratives” (Rak), distinguishing between creating transgressive archives and being placed in the confines of one that is inaccurate, inadequate, or damaging. The interdisciplinary approach to Hurston, Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim expands current conversations on identity by examining the rhetorical nature of their autobiographical works together with the ways the rhetorical construction of the text itself serves to dismantle notions of identity. The choice of the five authors for this discussion is deliberate. Each writes in multiple genres, addressing moments of identity formation and life events multiple times in different ways. Therefore, their rhetorical strategies can be examined across the genres in which they engage. The rhetorical strategies these texts use simultaneously tell stories that have cross-cultural/historical appeal and challenge the norms and traditions normally upheld by the very audiences they address. As performative texts, their works assume interaction with the audience and are constructed in ways to reveal that assumption. However, their performativity moves beyond the traditionally understood notion of identity as a construction, as delineated by Judith Butler. Each author also addresses the embodiment of their identity, simultaneously challenging the notion of performativity and highlighting the corporeal realities of their bodily identifications. In doing so, to varying degrees, these texts ask audiences to consider their own political positionality and invite readers to action in some form. From Johnson’s more subtle castigation of the treatment of Beat women by their male counterparts, to the more blunt, unapologetic call to activism by Lorde, these texts represent the ways that diverse uses of language work to call attention to existing power structures and inequities, thereby subverting them. Each author’s agenda involves a more personal coming to know the self while also translating that self to a public sphere to address

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broader literary, historical, political, sociological, and psychological issues. Just as the literal embodiment of identity matters, the writing of that identity, in order to be considered performative, pushes boundaries of genre. The self-conscious approach to subvert generic form underscores both the limits and the affordances of that form. Analyzing these five writers together allows us to examine the ways that race, class, gender, and location inform the ways that writers engage with performances of identity. Focusing on the twentieth century in the United States, these writers variously engage in auto/biography. I begin with Hurston to show how she wrote as an activist, breaking down the racial implications not only of anthropological work but of African American literature as well. By moving then to Audre Lorde’s critical examination of the racial implications of the feminist movement, and her place in it, I situate the autobiographical form as an explicit activist act—as she says, “I’m here doing my work, are you doing yours?” (Cancer Journals). Like Lorde, Allison’s work is explicitly activist, not only in the way she lives but also in the way she writes. From there I turn to the ways Johnson constructs her narrative to create an alternative Beat narrative. Finally, Shirley Geok-lin Lim challenges the “American” narrative with an immigrant context. Like Gilmore’s Tainted Witness, Meg Jensen’s more recent The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truth and Frederik Byrn Kohlert’s Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics, Performing Auto/biography focus on a particular notion within autobiography studies and highlight the ways that rhetorical methodologies can provide insights into that historical development. Most of the scholarship relevant to this book occurs in autobiography studies; however, rhetorical genre studies (see Chap. 2) provides important ways of examining auto/biography as genre and the ways that transgressing genre convention is performative. Nan Johnson’s Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 and Krista Ratcliffe’s Anglo-­American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich also examine the multi-layered ways that women’s writing contributes to and subverts the rhetorical tradition. However, Performing Auto/biography focuses on writers’ gendered performances, highlighting the ways that their texts “[tend] to subject the reader to the writer’s reflexivity, drawing their respective subject-selves reciprocally and simultaneously into critical ‘intimacy.’ This process is performative precisely to the extent to which it defines the subject-self in/as the effect of a contingent, corporeal, shifting, situated relation” (Pollock 86).

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What counts as “activist” writing is connected to this notion of a performative genre. Indeed, much of the publication of autobiography, both as a primary source of one’s life and as an academic study, are focused on persons with public, political, or activist lives. For example, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur (a.k.a. JoAnne Chesimard), and Elaine Brown are the only women activists of the Black Power movement who have published book-­ length autobiographies. Margo V. Perkins’s book Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties is an important discussion of Davis, Shakur, and Brown’s autobiographies as testimony of their work during this turbulent time. In bearing witness to that era, these newsmakers wrote in part to educate and to mobilize their anticipated readers and their autobiographies are extensions of the writers’ political activism during the 1960s. Like Perkins, I am interested in the ways that writers document their lives as an activist act, though the writers’ “activist acts” in this book are different from the public activities that Davis, Shakur, and Brown participated in—activities that are easily recognized as “activism” because of the movement’s efforts. Expanding activism to include writing one’s life experience to redress history, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other misrepresentations, Performing Auto/biography sees performative auto/biography as a way to set the record straight by calling attention to its conventions as a form. Julie Fiandt’s discussion of autobiographical activism is useful here, as she sees the work of Aurora Levins Morales and Linda Hogan as texts that, “share the common aim of narrating potential methods of personal and cultural healing amid racism, sexism, post colonialism, mind/ body splits, and other global/cultural ruptures” (Fiandt 567). Participating in feminist activism and citizenship is an act of political dissidence and an “ethics of courage” that is part of democracy and that benefits from collaboration with allies (Sparks 76). In this book, I focus less on recognizable acts of activism and argue instead for writing and mentoring as activism as well. I argue that archiving one’s life is a form of deliberation, a kind of participation in the public sphere by calling others to action as well. By writing about one’s interior and everyday life, the writer’s act is transgressive, shifting the archives of what counts for particular identities. Demonstrating the courage to write a life and to take a stand is to expose oneself physically and emotionally (Sparks 95). If we do not, “the weight of that silence will choke us” (Lorde, Cancer Journals, 23). In Restoried Selves: Autobiographies of Queer Asian/Pacific American Activists, Kevin Kumashiro examines narratives that work against

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stereotypes, shattering misconceptions of activism and what communities do to stand up for their rights. Like Perkin’s volume, Kumashiro’s focus is on the lives of the activists themselves—their lives as activists. Performing Auto/biography, however, focuses less on the action of the life and more on the act of writing the autobiographical text, in relation to their other texts, to highlight the performative act of writing and hence the activist and transgressive act of writing. In so doing, the writers undo the self (Carson), modeling for others how to do the same and in this, I argue, extend a call to action to readers to share their lives to bring communities together. This book examines these particular writers in part because of the ways I encountered them as a rhetoric and autobiography scholar early in my career, and as I have continued to encounter them as I teach their texts in rhetoric courses on autobiography.

Reading the Chapters With interdisciplinary contexts of genre, performance, and identity for writing auto/biography in mind, the chapters in this book provide further detail about the methods and theoretical frames used for reading autobiographical texts by Hurston, Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim. Chapter 2, “Theorizing Rhetorics of Identity to Create Rhetorical Performativity as an Analytic,” creates a theoretical frame using genre, performance, and rhetorical theories to examine autobiographical texts. I provide an overview of the concept of identity in feminist and gender studies. Examining theories of self-representation and the body of such auto/biography theorists as Leigh Gilmore, Sidonie Smith, Barbara Smith, and Johnnie Stover, I establish a theoretical basis for exploring the rhetorical strategies of autobiography. Since this project seeks to extend the significant relationship between rhetoric and critical autobiography studies and to situate this study in both, I more explicitly address the rhetorical strategies involved in identity construction and the ways that fragments of identity become a recognizable narrative. Finally, using Anne Carson’s response to the fragmented poetry of Sappho and Eve Ewing’s layered archival approach to historical events, I highlight the ways that identity construction through genre becomes recognizable, even if the form is experimental or “fragmented.” Using feminist rhetorical methodologies (Royster and Kirsch, Rawson), I highlight the ways that writers challenge traditional form and suggest the multiple ways that form and content become political acts not only about identity but also about genre.

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I begin in Chap. 3, “Zora Neale Hurston’s Craft and a Griot’s Refusal to Conform,” by discussing the ways that Hurston challenged the conventions of several forms. While she defied expectation through narrative voice in her fiction and nonfiction, she also defied expectation in writing her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road. Initially ignored because of its “lackluster” feel compared to her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a closer look at Hurston’s memoir, in light of her tendency to experiment and not conform to genre convention, reveals a deeply layered text that challenges what it means to write a life. I discuss how Hurston’s autobiographical text is not only experimental but also performative. Compared to the ways she challenged the anthropological community, her performative auto/biography suggests that Hurston’s commitment to writing Black language and culture was a refusal to both White and Black readers’ expectations of the Black esthetic of the Harlem Renaissance. In Chap. 4, “Audre Lorde’s Intellectual Body: Scripting an Embodied Activism,” I discuss the ways that Lorde repeatedly declares her multiple subjectivities as a “black lesbian feminist warrior poet.” In writing Zami and The Cancer Journals, Lorde (re)writes herself by creating a fantasy self based on the myths of her matriarchal culture and the reality of her own life where her love of women is natural and “normal.” Read together, Lorde’s autobiographical texts work to form a cultural critique that moves beyond mere resistance—they demand critical consciousness and activism from her readers. Lorde’s “activist poetics” (Carr) in these two works, particularly of her intellectual body, resist cultural inscriptions of the body and also challenge the traditional (patriarchal) genre of autobiography. As a black lesbian feminist warrior poet, Audre Lorde was used to contending with culturally constructed identity as she examined her multi-layered marginalization. But when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Lorde became conscious of her body in yet another way. Lorde addresses difference and otherness in Zami, yet it is in The Cancer Journals, written simultaneously with Zami, where she writes as a means to reconstruct herself as a warrior against the disease and to resist the view of women with mastectomies as victims. I argue that the “intellectual body,” while present in Zami, becomes active in The Cancer Journals as it resists cultural inscription by refusing the prosthesis that doctors, nurses, and other breast cancer patients encouraged her to wear. In Chap. 5, “Self-representation, Genre, and Performativity: Dorothy Allison’s Performances Across Genres,” I discuss the ways that Dorothy Allison moves in and out of memory narratives and traditional

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storytelling. In her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she constructs an innovative form that challenges not only Southern stereotypes about “white trash” and lesbian identity but also narrative structures. As she “performs” traditional narrative, she also subverts that narrative by inserting explicit commentary on the constructed nature of “story.” Similarly, Allison performs motherhood. As she explores her relationship with her mother and her own potential to be a mother, she resists the definition of motherhood constructed for her by dominant culture. I argue that for Allison, motherhood is a performance, one that she can “get right” in the same way that she can get the stories right. Her performance, therefore, acts as a rhetorical device to resist hegemonic discourses of motherhood. In the performing of mother—the representation of motherhood in her prose—Allison can construct the story that tells the “loved version” of her life and avoid “becom[ing] them” (38), the women who so profoundly defined her. In creating this narrative, she creates an explicit dialogue with the audience, telling readers about her performative intentions within her texts. Chapter 6, “Joyce Johnson’s Alternative Beat Narrative: Women Outside the Frame,” examines how Johnson uses audience expectation of a love story to redress the history of a male-dominated literary scene. She simultaneously embraces Kerouac and the Beats and subtly indicts them for their misogynistic behavior toward the women around them. She represents herself as love-struck for Kerouac yet at the same time as an independent Bohemian writer. Her representation of multiple identities within her “traditional” memoir that is seemingly focused on Kerouac, serves to illuminate her underlying purpose—to situate the women writers who were “minor” characters within the male-dominated scene of the Beat Generation as central to this literary movement. Using her memoir, interviews, novels, and a collection of correspondence with Kerouac, I analyze her use of praise and her deference toward Jack, though sincere, as performative acts. In Chap. 7, “Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Embodied Memories: Academic Autobiography, Genre, and Mentorship,” I highlight Lim’s resistance to cultural definitions prescribed for her, creating a definition of immigrant woman that is multi-layered and complex. In her essays she merges academic scholarship and personal writing to dispel the notion that the two are mutually exclusive. In addition, she encourages women writers to “write out of turn” (MLA’s Profession 1999), resisting the colonizing forces that seek to define her. Throughout the memoir, Lim poses

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questions to the audience about the strictures of colonialism, higher education institutions, and definitions of immigrants and women. She uses the example of her life to illustrate the “tensions within her identity” to construct a self-conscious and interactive performance space, encouraging readers to experience her reflexivity about herself and about education. Lim’s narrative construction is self-consciously interactive and engages readers’ senses of civic, academic, and intellectual justice, while simultaneously interrogating traditional education and reflecting on her identity. By self-consciously constructing interactive texts that engage readers’ senses of civic, academic, and intellectual justice, the authors call readers to action. In Chap. 8, “Performative Auto/biography as Transgressive Archives,” I discuss the ways that the “outlaw” genres (Kaplan), like those of Hurston, Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim, are archival acts, assigning significance to an individual life through highly stylized and subversive performative writing. By examining what each text does as much as what it says, the analyses in this book highlight the ways writers “write out of turn” and dismantle the power structures that serve to reify dominant narratives of self, women, and autobiography. For the analyses of this book, rhetorical performativity as an analytic provides insights into the rhetorical strategies of authors’ writing across genres and provides contexts for creating transgressive archives in life writing. The writers in this volume are significant in the moment they were writing. Hurston’s work moves us from early to mid-twentieth-century genres, challenging multiple disciplinary communities including anthropology and literature. At the time, autobiography studies had a narrow view of the genre. As Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim were writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the field of autobiography studies was also expanding, building the theories of life writing, subjectivity, identity, and form as writers challenged tradition. Writers like Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Hertha Sweet Wong, and others, like the writers discussed here, were also challenging these forms, making it clear that traditional definitions of autobiography were not adequate to account for the complexity of their lives. In the next chapter, I address the theoretical implications of these developments that are important to the methodology of analysis in this book. Chapter 8 also discusses the ways that new and emerging writers are building on the works of these writers, further challenging what it means to write autobiographically. Writers such as Maggie Nelson, Zadie Smith, Suzanne Scanlon, and Eve Ewing are among many contemporary writers performing innovative auto/biographical writing

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right now. Additional writers like Marjane Satrapi, Linda Barry, and Allison Bechdel, among others, in their use of the visual, comix, and the digital are challenging our notions of what counts as auto/biography and the ways that the “self” can be performed. In Performing Auto/biography, I hope to highlight the ways that Hurston, Lorde, Johnson, Allison, and Lim helped set the stage for what has come in the early part of the twenty-­ first century. As contemporary authors use the technology and genres available to them, they are building on the historically significant work of the authors in this book. As the authors written about in this book point out, it is by highlighting one’s lived experience within contexts of oppression that make us visible to each other, so that collectively we might stand against that oppression. The women here encourage joining forces and becoming allies. The “nuanced space” (Smith and Watson 33) I’ve tried to create in this book highlights the ways that women writers have served as my mentors and in turn have helped me look for ways to support my colleagues and students as they face challenges as academics, as writers, and as women. The self-conscious construction of interactive auto/biographical texts that engage readers’ senses of civic, academic, and intellectual justice, reveal what Hurston, Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim add to performative autobiography: a call to action. Long accepted by feminists, the notion of the personal as political is extended here where the act of documenting a life, whether through memoir, fiction, poetry, or film, is an archival act, where the personal is general (Berlant), and where various publics are drawn together in solidarity and social change. The authors discussed in this book explicitly state that writing their lives is a political and social act, meant to challenge readers in their own lives. They advocate for supporting other women and underrepresented groups through the narrating of their lives and calling others to action, and in these ways their life narratives function as mentorship. Each of these writers challenges readers through direct address to consider their personal lives as having public impact not only on the literary tradition of autobiography but also on women in the academy more generally. Each life narrative offers, whether implicitly or explicitly, instruction on how to survive processes of marginalization and use that survival to assist others with similar struggles. Finally, Performing Auto/biography: Narrating a Life as Activism analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in these five writers’ autobiographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the

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broader implications of writing individual identity. Exploring the ways race, class, culture, ethnicity, technology, gender expression, and sexuality might affect the form(s) in which writers choose to write (e.g., memoir, fictional autobiography, poetry), Performing Auto/biography questions how autobiographers challenge notions of genre, truth, and representation. In the next chapter, I highlight the history of autobiography studies and rhetorical studies and their natural coming together to develop a theoretical frame for reading auto/biography, life writing, and memoir.

Personal Archives: Contexts/Convergences/ Encounters/Mentors/Invitations In many ways, the scholarly text is an auto/biographical text—it is the culmination of the time that a scholar spends, in her real life, with primary and secondary sources (Davis). These sources become a part of one’s scholarly identity, which is intricately intertwined with one’s personal identity. While not an auto/biography per se, I include here how the study of autobiographical texts was critical to my development as a person and a scholar and how mentorship from the authors and others influenced the methods and content of this work. While mentoring occurs in courses, conferences, coffee shops, and office hours, it can also occur through reading and scholarship. I include some of this personal history as a way to document the “scholarly lineages” and the hidden convergences, coincidences, and mentorships that led to this book, my development as a teacher, my identity as a feminist autobiography scholar, and my use of “rhetorical assaying” as a methodology toward rhetorical action (Royster and Kirsch 16). Personal history together with academic training is not often included in the same text, but I do so here to highlight how “[s]tudying rhetorics of autobiography has sustained and carried me through very difficult times. Feminist theory and autobiography studies provided a language for what I had experienced” (Powell “Layers” 149–150). As for the authors included in this book, my mother played a significant role in my development as a scholar and writer. At 21, she got on a military transport plane with me, then six months old, and flew to Naha Air Base in Okinawa to join my father who was already there, serving his first of two tours in Vietnam. We lived on base with other military families, waiting for the men to return from their two-week flying missions. My favorite photograph of my mother is from that time. She’s sitting on the

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rocky shore, holding a short-handled scythe, looking for mussels. The look in her eyes intrigued me as a child. She wasn’t sad, she wasn’t happy, she wasn’t content. There is a complexity in her face, a gravity of the moment, some understanding of where she was in relation to other American women her age, some understanding of the implications of her presence on the island. That photograph has come to symbolize what I always thought of my mother—brave, adventurous, thoughtful, critical. Raised in suburban California, my father’s hometown in rural Virginia, where we returned after the war, was an adjustment for my mother. We lived on my grandparents’ farm where we had a large garden and raised cows. When she found out the public pool had closed rather than integrate a few years earlier, she and my father set out to reopen the pool with equal access. She was a social worker too, and she instilled a sense of equity in my sister and me. My parents didn’t talk much about racism or social justice, but by volunteering their time on weeknights and the weekends, they showed us their commitment to the community. My grandmother founded the local rescue squad and was the first woman member of the county board of supervisors. My father’s oldest sister lived in Manhattan and we visited her often to see plays and learn about her work as a costume designer. Nobody in my family or school talked to me about feminism, but with a mother who had Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Our Bodies, Ourselves on the shelves, a father who taught me to split wood and play basketball, a feminist computer science teacher who told me not to let the boys take over our class projects, and a basketball coach who was the first woman and first African American to score over 1000 points at her college, I grew up with a sense that women could accomplish anything they wanted. At the same time, growing up in the rural South, I was aware of racial and gender inequities—but I didn’t have any idea how to articulate them or my privilege in relation to them. In 1986, I left Virginia for the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado. I was idealistic and naïve, but I was excited to attend the Academy’s college classes and to become an officer in the Air Force. I had worked toward that goal since I was 14, asking my father to help me with pullups and pushups. I thought going to work in a flight suit and combat boots would be a great way to live. When I was assaulted by another cadet, not only was I not prepared for my dream college to be a place of violence, I had no idea what to do or say about it. I had no idea that other women had experienced violence too—we were invisible to each other as our male commanding officers discouraged us from reporting. After trying to

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survive on my own, my academic performance began to decline. I left the Academy and finished my undergraduate degree in journalism at Mary Washington College in Virginia. While there I took “Teaching Writing” and “American Women Writers” from the same professor, Carol Manning. Over the next few years, I had a series of encounters with professors and mentors that not only shaped my academic career but also helped me understand how to name what had happened to me in college. While working as a technical editor, I took graduate courses at George Mason University including “Women’s Lives as History,” with Barbara Melosh, a professor of history whose class examined diaries as important historical documents. I interned with Wendy Werner, teaching technical writing units in her class at Northern Virginia Community College. My thesis committee included Peter Klappert (poetry/autobiography), Jim Henry (rhetoric and composition), and Barbara Melosh (history), an interdisciplinary committee willing to help me write essays about the Academy. I also attended classes at the University of Maryland (UMD), and Shirley Logan, then director of the Professional Writing program, hired me to teach technical writing. I took Rhetorical Theory with Jeanne Fahnestock and she encouraged me to apply to University of Louisville’s (U of L) Rhetoric and Composition PhD Program, which I did. While at UMD I attended lectures by visiting scholars Sidonie Smith and Martha Solomon Watson. All these experiences became the foundation for understanding rhetorical approaches to autobiography. Before I moved to Louisville, I attended a two-week residency at Bennington College’s Writer’s workshop, at the suggestion of novelist Howard Norman, my professor in a course on memoir, where he invited writers like Joyce Johnson to visit our class. While at Bennington I studied under Lucy Grealy, late author of Autobiography of a Face. She loved my story about rubbing camouflage paint on someone else’s face to prepare for battle, but her encouragement was not enough to keep me writing my own essays. As I visited Howard and the poet Jane Shore at their summer home in Vermont, Jane also urged me to keep writing. Despite that encouragement, I instead pursued what I seemed to be better at anyway—reading other’s writing and providing helpful comments for revision, skills I’d learned as a technical editor and strengthened as a writing teacher at UMD. I left my home state again, this time for Kentucky, searching for people who wanted to talk about writing and reading and teaching as much as me. At U of L I was trained as a writing teacher and as a rhetorician analyzing texts, including literature and autobiography. It’s not an accident that

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I am steeped in both literature and rhetoric. Two of my most influential professors at U of L are trained in narrative theory and came out of literature programs (Beth Boehm and my dissertation director, Debra Journet), but programs that analyzed literature from a rhetorical point of view. As Suzette Henke’s research assistant, I learned about Audre Lorde and Dorothy Allison for the first time and I read all their works within a very short time. I met Allison at a reading and later invited her to speak at Louisiana State University (LSU), where I was an Assistant Professor. During this visit she sat on my couch, drinking sweet tea, and answered all my questions about craft and story and trauma. While at U of L I attended a reading by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. She read from multiple places in her memoir, including the place where she says “Do wild feminists live in universities? Can they?” She looked out to the audience to all of us, graduate students and faculty alike. I wondered if I had the courage to be one. I was quietly trying to survive graduate school, to succeed in an academic world and discourse that was largely unfamiliar, and to recover from trauma in the process. Her challenge to understand our identities as shifting and contradictory and the imperative that we recognize them and use them to make changes in the university was directed at me, even though she didn’t know me then. Her discussion of contradictions of identity resonated as I faced my own tensions between rural Appalachia and academic discourse. Reading that Shirley experienced feelings of not belonging helped me see that I was not alone and that maybe the problem was not with me but with the institution. Her memoir emboldened me. I took up her challenges and began what I hope has been a long, slow burn of building up graduate students and emerging scholars as they too navigate the academic institution. When James Olney retired from LSU, he gave me more than a hundred books, many of them signed by his friends and colleagues, several in French. Part of what he gave me included early copies of the journal, a/b: Autobiography Studies. It was typed on a typewriter and mimeographed, and the first issues included a listing of the collective of scholars who established the field, highlighting their research interests, and included several book reviews of some of the first full-length studies of autobiography. Since then I’ve taught several iterations of courses on autobiography, focusing on the rhetorical strategies within them and the ways that writers engage in life narrative for social change. Auto/biographical writing by the women discussed in this book taught me ways of understanding privilege and a responsibility to heal in order to

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get the work of anti-racism, anti-homophobia, and anti-sexism done. The writers in this book have helped me understand that people, including me, are not irrevocably damaged. And I believe what Audre Lorde says about liberation: mine can only happen when all women are liberated. My experiences growing up a girl in a small southern town weren’t unique to me. They weren’t unique to me as a female cadet at a military academy. They aren’t unique to me as an academic. And they certainly aren’t unique to me given the hosts of violences perpetrated against people who identify as women around the world. Reading auto/biography taught me that. Writing about auto/biography helped me understand how people told their stories. Teaching auto/biography made me want to share with students ways they could craft their own stories. This book, then, is auto/biographical in that it highlights several of the many autobiographers who have influenced me as a scholar and as a teacher. I have served as mentor to hundreds of graduate students and undergraduate students since I started teaching nearly thirty years ago. In addition to encouragement, strategic planning, walking them to the women’s center, handing them tissues in my office as they share their difficulties in navigating classes, teaching, and family, I almost always hand them a book. I ask if they think writing it down will help. I tell them about the conversations I’ve had with Dorothy Allison, Lucy Grealy, Shirley Lim, and Jean Arasanayagam. That I have met and talked with some of these women does not make me unique—they talked to their own students, scholars, and their broader readership this way. What’s significant is that they all, to a person, provided this kind of caring and thoughtful advice. I know writing is not a cure-all and professors of writing and/or auto/biography are not therapists. But as a mentor I share what has helped me and I suggest reading that has helped me. While finalizing this manuscript in 2020, I was writing during a global pandemic and a renewed urgency for racial justice in the United States. In June of that year it was especially difficult as it became clear that the pandemic was not going to end quickly and that our country’s 45th president was not competent to lead us through either COVID-19 or racial healing. Indeed, his actions and speech exacerbated deep rooted racism. People risked their lives to protest that racism and its consequential violence during the pandemic. That’s how bad the violence against Black bodies was (is)—people took to the streets despite the risks. During this time my university had completely moved to online instruction as did my son’s middle school. Working from home, struggling with my own fear and

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depression from the pandemic and the killings, I investigated GirlTrek’s prodcast series, “Black History Bootcamp” as an activity for self-care. Listening to GirlTrek, which included episodes on Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde, helped me understand why I wanted to begin this book with Hurston. As she wrote across multiple genres celebrating Black culture and language, she set the stage for what was to come later—celebrating identity, history, and language and refusing to succumb to the many forces working to keep Black women silent. The founders of GirlTrek welcomed White women to be part of their movement but asked them to confront their privilege while doing so. In answering their call and the call of Audre Lorde to do our work, I realized that the relational aspect of performative auto/biography is critical to collective social action. I invite readers, then, to think about the mentoring relationships in their lives, their coming to scholarship or auto/biography, and the ways that their own lives might become part of social change.

Works Cited Berlant, Lauren and Jay Prosser. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant. Biography 34.1 (2011): 180–187. Carr, Brenda. “’A woman speaks … I am woman and not white’: politics of voice, tactical essentialism, and cultural intervention in Audre Lorde’s activist poetics and practice.” College Literature 20.2 (1993): 133–153. Davis, Rocio G. “Academic Autobiography and Transdisciplinary Crossings in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces.” Journal of American Studies 43.3 (December 2009): 441–57. Egan, Susanna and Gabriele Helms. “Autobiography and Changing Identities: Introduction.” Biography 24.1 (2001): ix–xx. Fiandt, Julie. “Autobiographical Activism in the Americas: Narratives of Personal and Cultural Healing by Aurora Levins Morales and Linda Hogan.” Women’s Studies 35 (2006): 567–584. Fishman, Jenn, Andrea Lunsford, Beth McGregor, and Mark Otuteye. “Performing Writing, Performing Literacy.” College Composition and Communication 57.2 (2005): 224–252. Gilmore, Leigh. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.

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Glenn, Cheryl and Andrea Lunsford, eds. Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and Feminism, 1973–2000. London: Routledge, 2014. Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Haynes, Cynthia. The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetorics in the Age of Perpetual Conflict. Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. Hesford, Wendy. Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Jarratt, Susan. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Jensen, Meg. The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical Negotiated Truths. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Johnson, Nan. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Kaplan, Caren. “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects.” De/Colonizing the Subject, Eds. Smith and Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 115–138. Kohlert, Frederick Byrn. Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. Kumashiro, Kevin K. Restoried Selves: Autobiographies of Queer Asian/Pacific American Activists. London: Routledge, 2003. Langellier, Kristin M. “‘You’re marked’: Breast cancer, tattoo, and the narrative performance of identity.” Narrative Identity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, 2001. Langellier, Kristin M. “Personal narrative, performance, and performativity: Two or three things I know for sure.” Text and Performance Quarterly 19 (1999): 125–144. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Among the White Moon Faces. New  York. The Feminist Press, 1996. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Writing Out of Turn.” Modern Language Association Profession (1999): 214–224. Lorde, Audre. “Transformation of Silence into Action.” The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980. 18–23. Malhotra, Anshu and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, eds. Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Miller, Hildy and Bridwell-Bowles, Lillian. Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Nguyê˜n, Ann Thúy and Maya Pendleton. “Recognizing Race in Language: Why We Capitalize ‘Black’ and ‘White.” Center for the Study of Social Policy, 2020. Perkins, Margo V. Perkins Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

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Pollock, Della. “Performing Writing.” In Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, ed. The Ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 73–103. Powell, Katrina M. “Layers: Refuge and Struggle in the Academy.” Me Too, Feminist Theory, and Surviving Sexual Violence in the Academy. Ed. Laura A. Gray-Rosendale. Lexington Books, 2019. 149–165. Rak, Julie. “Doukhobor Autobiography as Witness Narrative.” Biography 24.1 (2001): 226–241. Ratcliff, Krista. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. Rawson, K. J. “Queering Feminist Rhetorical Canonization,” Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. Eds. Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 39–52. Reiff, Mary Jo and Anis Bawarshi, eds. Genre and the Performance of Publics. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016. Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2007. Ritchie, Joy and Kate Ronald. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Roster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Smith, Sidonie. “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 10 (1995): 17–33. Smith, Sidonie. “Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body.” Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/ Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Sommer, Doris. “’Not Just a Personal Story’: Women’s Testimonios and the Plural Self.” In Life Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, eds Bella Brokski and Celeste Schenck. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 107–130. Sparks, Holloway. “Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage, and Activist Women.” Hypatia 12.4 (1997): 74–110. Stover, Johnnie M. Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography. Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 2

Theorizing Rhetorics of Identity to Create Rhetorical Performativity as an Analytic

Theorizing a rhetorics of identity is a way to address the ways that the authors in this study use self-representation to perform and consequently resist genre. Theoretical concerns of identity, representation, genre, and performativity have been addressed across disciplines, including in literature, auto/biography, feminist theory, communication studies, rhetorical genre studies, and rhetorical studies. In this chapter, I provide a sketch of the interdisciplinary intersections among the productive conversations about these concepts. Like Johnnie Stover, I see these disciplinary conversations informing each other in productive ways. Scholars like Stover, Nedra Reynolds, Karma Chávez, Hildy Miller, and Lillian Bridwell-­ Bowles, among others, have crossed disciplinary boundaries to provide insights into the rhetorical dimensions of identity. By examining these concurrent conversations across disciplinary lines, I join these scholars in an interdisciplinary conversation about rhetorics of identity in order to create a theoretical frame to analyze the rhetorically performative texts of Hurston, Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim as they engage in multiple genres to delineate their identity(s). By examining the multi-layered ways that writers engaging in auto/biography contribute to and subvert the rhetorical tradition by creating performative writing (Pollock) and resistance narratives (Beard), we can extend the notion of “outlaw” genres (Kaplan) and, like Beard, examine texts that on their surface might not appear to be resistant. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. M. Powell, Performing Autobiography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4_2

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Scholars in communication studies are also interested in autobiographical texts, particularly those written by political figures. Martha Solomon Watson’s rhetorical analysis of Elizabeth Cady Staunton’s autobiography highlights the rhetorical strategies used by exemplary women in the public sphere and the ways they had to highlight their femininity in order for their radical views (at the time) on women’s right to vote to be heard. In her article, Watson, “explore[s] the rhetorical role of such autobiographies within social movements…[and suggests] autobiographies complement and supplement formal arguments by offering sustained personal examples of a particular ideology enacted in real life” (355). This early rhetorical analysis of autobiography paved the way for understanding personal narrative as rhetorical strategy. Much more recently, Karma Chávez’s work on the embodiment of migrant narratives and lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans/ queer (LGBTQ) rights in narratives of belonging and home highlight the critical need for intercultural communication perspectives on issues of identity and rhetoric. In Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women, Jacqueline Jones Royster discusses the political writing of elite and educated Black women, providing strategies of analysis that challenge the assumptions of traditional rhetorical theories about authority and ethos through afrafeminist ideologies. Indeed, Royster’s methodology insists rhetoricians pay attention to the ways that the essays she studies require an attention to both “context and ethos” (32). She argues that the rhetorical strategies that African American women devised require that the rhetorical triangle be reconsidered. Rather than the limited communicator (ethos), audience (pathos), and message (logos), Royster convincingly urges rhetorical scholars to examine “rhetorical action” in order to focus on the action precipitated by the texts in question (Royster 32). She uses Alice Walker’s essay, “My Father’s Country Is the Poor” as a case to make her point. Royster suggests that Walker, “chooses involvement rather than detachment and unfolds her own pathway to enlightenment as an invitation to readers to walk with her and listen”  (33). Furthermore, the writers discussed in her study “capitalized on composing strategies across genres” (32, emphasis mine). Royster’s rhetorical methodology was a significant moment in the field—she highlighted feminist notions of invitational rhetoric, community building, and rhetorical action as critical analytics for understanding the rhetorical strategies of African American women’s writing in particular and underrepresented groups more generally. Similarly, Shirley Logan’s We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women also

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highlights the ways that current understandings of rhetorical theory need rethinking based on the ways that speeches, editorials, essays, and letters written by Black women challenge what we think we know about those genres. Royster’s and Logan’s studies of Black women’s literacy and persuasive tactics address the women’s personal backgrounds, but their approaches focus on  rhetorical analysis and are  not situated within auto/biography studies. Johnnie Stover’s study a few years later extended Royster’s and Logan’s work by examining the work of Black women autobiographers, “By approaching texts from their historical contexts” and arguing for their work as a “new and distinct American literary form” (Stover 2–3). In Rhetoric and Resistance in Black’s Women’s Autobiography, Stover examines the ways that Black women’s nineteenth-century autobiographies by Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, and Susie King Taylor were rhetorically constructed specifically because of their struggles “against sociopolitical enslavement” (3). Like Royster and Logan, Stover attends to the writers’ use of mixed genres and the rhetorical action and contexts for writing. Stover’s work also incorporates theories of autobiography as well as rhetoric to argue for the writers’ use of their “mother tongue” to create an innovative genre for the purpose of making a case against slavery. These works in both autobiography and rhetorical studies provide a way to situate genre theory, rhetorical theory, and autobiography theory together, using rhetorical methodologies with attention to a rhetorical understanding of genre. Because rhetoric is “an embodied social experience” (Royster and Kirsch 131), examining the material contexts of the texts is critical to understanding them. While it is reductive to say that the notion of genre within literary studies is often seen as a fixed form, it does have a history of being understood as way to categorize literary texts and has thus excluded some writing (particularly writing of marginalized groups) from entering the so-called literary canon. However, poststructural understandings of genre included understanding the ways that genres shift (Bakhtin). Similarly, rhetorical genre studies, also influenced by Bakhtin, has defined genre as “a social action” (Miller), with typified features but one that is fluid, shifting, and able to be resisted by writers in productive ways. In their 2016 collection, Genre and the Performance of Publics, editors Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi take this productive discussion about genre further by examining the public turn in rhetorical studies, where social justice is a key way to understand the use and deployment of genres outside literature and classroom writing, including a variety of

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nonfictional and technical communication texts. In their introduction, “From Genre to the Public Turn: Navigating the Intersections of Public Sphere Theory, Genre Theory, and the Performance of Publics,” they point to Anne Freadman’s early argument that it is not the genres themselves that cause social action (Miller 1994), but it is the “uptake” of those genres, the interaction with genre of the audience. Reiff and Bawarshi state that, “scholars in RGS have begun to examine the interand intrageneric conditions (material, embodied, temporal, affective) that inform individuals’ genre performances or what Anne Freadman (1994; 2002; 2012; 2014), extending the work of J.L. Austin in speech act theory, has called uptakes, which account for the dynamics of agency and the contingent, impromptu, multidirectional performances of genre in real time and space. Attention to genre uptake—to the interconnections, translations, and pathways between genres—extends a core understanding in RGS of genres as social actions…it is only in the uptakes they routinize (but never completely determine) that genres are performed as social actions” (3–4). The social and public nature of genre, particularly in the ways audiences interact with genres, are key aspects of the analyses in this book. Taking all these scholars’ approaches into account, then, I too extend the traditional ethos/pathos/logos model by attending to the public and social justice turns in the field, examining the ways that literary, nonfiction, technical, digital, and auto/biographical texts exemplify these characteristics and what function the text performs. The crossover among these interdisciplinary fields is very productive for auto/biography. As Halse explains that, “the ontological challenges of poststructuralism and deconstruction and the epistemological recognition that autobiography…is a performative act of authorial identity construction” (99)  that has meant opening up what counts as autobiography. Her analysis examines prefaces in rhetorical, rather than literary terms, highlighting the dialogic with readers and the ways that subjectivity is constructed to be persuasive. Finally, the methodology in this book is deeply informed by the feminist rhetorical practices described by Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch. In their 2012 book, they suggest a new metaphor for rhetorical analysis to account for the feminist approach to analysis. Defining “rhetorical assaying as a metaphor,” they suggest, “emphasizes the necessity of constructing an evidence-rich descriptive base and linking it by multiple mechanisms within the complex global matrix of normative, and

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perhaps nonnormative, rhetorical action” (16). By doing so, as feminist rhetorical scholars we can “focus on how language in all of its complexity might actually be functioning in the conduct of human endeavors and in setting the range of cultural norms and expectations that we deem valuable globally—across time and space” (16). In the remainder of this chapter then, I address the rhetorical strategies involved in identity construction and the ways that fragments of identity become a recognizable narrative (Carson, Karpinski and Chanksy, 2018). Using notions of mestiza (Anzaldúa), Black feminist poetics of the everyday (Smith, B., Lorde), embodiment (Smith, S., Butler, Chávez), and archival approaches to textual fragments (Carson, Karpinski and Chansky, 2018), I highlight the ways that identity construction through genre becomes recognizable, even if the form is experimental or “fragmented.” Carson suggests that avoiding categorization, that is, decreating, is one way to contribute to something outside oneself. In this way, I focus on the ways performative autobiography challenges traditional forms and suggest the multiple ways that form and content become political acts not only about genre but also about identity. All this work will create a rhetorical performative analytic that will be useful in reading the works of Hurston, Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim more closely.

Intersections: Critical Auto/Biography Studies and Rhetorical Approaches to Genre The history of autobiography as a written genre and the history of critical autobiography studies are long and complex (Spengemann, Lejeune, Smith and Watson, Gilmore  1994, Mason). While this chapter presents neither a complete history of autobiography as a genre nor a complete history of critical autobiography studies, I do highlight some of the significant developments of each, especially those moments that help us see autobiography studies as interdisciplinary and the ways that issues of genre, identity construction, self-representation, and performativity are relevant questions across fields. In addition, I point to the ways that Black Feminisms, indigenous feminisms, and queer theory have disrupted how we think about autobiography and scholarship about autobiography. Indeed, as a genre marginalized until the mid-twentieth century within traditional literary study, scholars interested in autobiography challenged the tradition and the scholarly practices used to interpret them.

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Critical auto/biography studies is a well-established field and most new scholars of autobiography will find several welcoming spaces to publish scholarly work about life writing, memoir, and other forms of autobiography. But when I first starting reading autobiography scholarship in the late 1980s, autobiography studies was a relatively new field, focused on making the case for autobiography as a viable literary genre (Andrews, Olney, Henke, Eakin, Nussbaum), worthy of studying as literature. During these early days of the field, most of the scholarship about the genre occurred from scholars in literary subfields. However, as the field has grown, interdisciplinary interests across the humanities and the sciences concerning memory, trauma, writing, history, legal testimony, and psychology, among others, are reflected in discussions about life writing. Scholars in rhetorical and writing studies, particularly those interested in personal narrative, testimony, and genre theory, are also engaged with the scholarship in autobiography studies. Several scholars have offered histories of autobiography studies that are very helpful in understanding its development, particularly the field’s development in relation to literary theory, poststructural theory, and postcolonialism. Smith and Watson’s Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (1998) and Leigh Gilmore’s Autobiographics (1994) are two of several histories of women’s auto/biography. As Smith and Watson suggest, “The status of autobiography has changed dramatically in the intervening decades, both within and outside the academy. Women’s autobiography is now a privileged site for thinking about issues of writing at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern critical theories. Processes of subject formation and agency occupy theorists of narrative and, indeed, of culture as never before. If feminism has revolutionized literary and social theory, the texts and theory of women’s autobiography have been pivotal for revising our concepts of women’s life issues—growing up female, coming to voice, affiliation, sexuality and textuality, the life cycle. Crucially, the writing and theorizing of women’s lives has often occurred in texts that place an emphasis on collective processes while questioning the sovereignty and universality of the solitary self. Autobiography has been employed by many women writers to write themselves into history. Not only feminism but also literary and cultural theory have felt the impact of women’s autobiography as a previously unacknowledged mode of making visible formerly invisible subjects” (Smith and Watson “Introduction” 5). As Smith and Watson suggest, the growing concerns with auto/biography studies corresponded with the growth of feminist theory, and while not

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every study of auto/biography is feminist, the field’s development was influenced by the parallel growth of feminist studies. Auto/biography studies as a disciplinary field gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly began in 1978 and often included essays specifically on autobiography. a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies was close behind in 1985. The copies of a/b that Jim Olney gave me were mimeographed on paper and stapled together with descriptions of works in progress by William Andrews (African American autobiography), Felicity Nussbaum (women’s autobiography), Mary G. Mason (women’s autobiography), and Estelle Jelinek (women’s autobiography). In the bibliography list of these early issues, there are announcements of special issues to come in each of those areas and others such as ethnic autobiographies, native American autobiographies, and Asian American autobiographies. While some of the early work on autobiography was male centered and focused on “great writers” writing diaries or memoirs, there were significant studies to indicate that autobiography, like literary studies generally at that time, was interested in overturning or at least broadening the canon. An early issue also featured an advertisement for a coming issue of The Southern Review, then edited by Olney. During the earlier decades of the field, there was a focus on the form and its generic limits (McCooey 2017). With the literary canon being challenged generally, questions about what counts as literature and what counts as autobiography or life writing was intensely discussed, and with poststructuralist approaches to literature generally, the forms of autobiography and pushing of generic boundaries became a central discussion within the field, including issues of printed, oral, graphic, and digital autobiographies. Hertha D. Sweet Wong’s contribution to the field for decades points to the ways community, as a way to invoke the relational or communal within Native American writing, for instance, resisted victim narratives. She says, “particularly when deployed by Native mixed-blood women writers, a conscious strategy to understand what over two hundred years of colonial rule has disassembled, and, by so doing, to resist the official tragic narrative of Indian loss and disappearance” (Smith and Watson Reading Autobiography 173). Her more recent work, Picturing Identity, highlights experimental and other forms that combine visual and textual representations of identity such as story quilts, word paintings, illustrated memoirs, and photo-auto/biographies. Likewise, Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography, edited by

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Sarah Brophy  and Janice Hlakdi, examines multiple genres including video art, film, and television to examine bodily identities as resistance. Within autobiography studies, defining the genre and what counts as autobiography was a critical step toward establishing the discipline. Defending itself as a field paralleled feminism’s establishing of itself as a viable theoretical approach. The focus of feminist studies on the recovery of lost texts meant that early auto/biography scholarship focused on diaries and letters, genres not considered to be literary. The recovered texts did not always conform to canonic forms of writing, but as scholars pointed out, the exclusion of these forms discounted writing about lived experience as legitimate. Women’s lives did not fit into master narratives about an “exemplary life,” that is, a public life, and feminists challenged this exclusion. With developments in deconstruction and feminist postmodern approaches to texts, the field moved from arguing for inclusion to arguing for the ways that autobiographical texts were producing knowledge. Intersections of race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality were written about in multiple forms. Scholars focusing on the embodiment of subjectivity and socially constructed understandings of forms of identity moved auto/biography as a form of cultural critique. An example of the ways that autobiography and rhetorical studies inform each other is Adrienne Rich’s autobiographical/critical essays. Well known as a critical figure in poetry, feminist, and lesbian studies, her work is taught not only in literature and women’s and gender studies classes, her essays are also taught in Rhetoric and Composition courses, including first-year composition. Indeed, two of her essays are often anthologized in Composition textbooks: “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” and “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision.” These essays have been used as models of personal narrative that demand political scrutiny through individual experience. Each of these texts works from a tradition begun by Adrienne Rich’s performance of the academic essay that flattens the hierarchy between academic discourse and personal narrative and where identity can be used critically as a site for social change. Despite the essentialist nature of some of Rich’s theories of woman, lesbian, and identity, her work represents a historical rhetorical moment where defining a self that resists hegemonic discourse is necessary. Auto/biographical texts by writers like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga created a critical moment where genre and identity were challenged through mestiza writing, where the complex and mixed form(s)

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illustrated the complexities of identity experienced by underrepresented, repressed, and erased groups where US discourses of identity excluded them. Anzaldúa points to “a mestiza consciousness,” a “struggle of borders, an inner war…we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference” (100). Together with the double consciousness withib  Black auto/biography (influenced by slave narratives), la mestiza frames auto/ biography as protest, propelled by writers resisting the colonialist history of the United States. These writers addressed ways of “grappling” with one’s condition (Moraga 53) as a means of political activism, to recognize, name, and destroy the systems of domination that repress people of color. Auto/biography as resistance, then, challenges accepted narrative forms and identity construction. According to Johnnie Stover, this resistance approach is heavily influenced by slave narratives as well. Stover suggests that, “The power and influence of the black woman’s autobiography that emerged out of nineteenth-century America was sociopolitical as well as literary. And of all the literary genres, autobiography is the one that best lends itself to historical as well as literary approaches. As creative nonfiction, autobiography suggests the importance that place and time have on the development of the author; writers of autobiography re-interpret ‘self’ for the reading of others. Unlike the poststructuralist or textual critique that is appropriate to a purely creative, fictional work, the historical self of the author is very much a part of any autobiography. We as readers need to know out of what social, spatial, and temporal location(s) that self emerged. Autobiography, especially the African American woman’s autobiography, rejects critical efforts to categorize the genre merely as literature or merely as history; instead, this autobiography took on hybrid characteristics as a merger of literary writing and personal history that grew out of and reflects the world that shaped both it and its writer” (Stover 4). Stover’s work is an important combination of literary and rhetorical approaches to auto/biography. Her critical argument is that “nineteenth-­ century black women struggling against sociopolitical enslavement and that these communicative techniques and characteristics continue to shape the works of twentieth-century black women autobiographers” and, as she suggests, other women autobiographers as well (Stover 3). Stover’s work has implications for all life writing texts and understanding auto/biography as activism, also studied in Barbara Green’s Spectacular Confessions (1997) and Margo V. Perkins’s Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (2000).

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Publication of The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader (2016), Paul John Eakin’s recent collection, Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography (2020), and Karpinksi and Chanksy’s Life Writing Outside the Lines (2020) illustrate that autobiographical scholarship is as relevant as ever. The field continues to grow, and questions of methodology and ethics, such as that in Kate Douglas and Asley Barnwell’s recent Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies (2020), have become important discussions. Within the last decade, a focus on transnational texts, trauma and testimony, transgender life narratives, social media and self-representation, and the function of auto/biography across a variety of purposes (e.g., truth and reconciliation commissions, trauma recovery) has emphasized cross-cultural understandings of the form and content of life writing. At each new turn in the field, issues of identity, self-­ representation, and form have been reexamined. Autobiographical narratives as testimony and resistance remain at the forefront of discussions among scholars of life writing. Gilmore’s The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony was published in 2001 but she began some of the work in her 1998 book Autobiographics, exploring what truth and identity can mean in a genre so influenced by narrative and craft. In the 2014 collection, ‘We Shall Bear Witness’: Life Narratives and Human Rights, edited by Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly, authors highlight the ways that human rights narratives and testimony necessarily bring together literary, legal, policy, and political perspectives. Understanding theories of narrative, storytelling, and autobiographical forms can have important impacts on the ways that legal proceedings incorporate testimony. Schaffer and Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives and Meg Jensen’s The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truth both suggest the critical understanding of the ways that personal accounts of human rights violations are steeped in narrative expectation and are necessary for accountability. More recently, Gilmore has taken up the discussion of testimony in her 2017 book Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. She points out that “Judgement falls unequally on women who bear witness” (1) and that “the testimonial network teems with histories of violence and legitimacy that exceed any specific case, and how judgments about race, gender, bodies, and the power of life story stick to witnesses who move through it. Testimonial

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networks are never neutral” (Tainted Witness 29). The emphasis on understanding the narrative power of documents of “truth” is a critical intervention of auto/biography studies, including those with a rhetorical approach to narrative and storytelling. How and whether to determine the truth in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the rhetorical role of healing and forgiving in that process are questions raised by scholars of auto/biography. Trauma and testimony in these works and others including Whitlock’s Postcolonial Life Narratives demonstrate the social justice turn in autobiography studies. How these forms are written and whether they are believed as “truth” has become a critical question within the field. Perpetrators must be held accountable, yet scholars value challenges to generic form. These discussions are fruitful, if not definitive or conclusive. Furthermore, the ethics of who “collects” life narratives, who translates, and for what purposes are productively under scrutiny. The #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements are also indicative of these tensions. Studies of autobiographical texts are now published in many other journals besides those focused primarily on auto/biography, which highlights its relevance across disciplines. As more and more life narratives provide evidence for racism, sexism, homophobia, and injustices across the globe, the ethical considerations across disciplines such as sociology, refugee studies, migrant studies, and human rights, among others, examine the issues of appropriating life narratives and the ethical considerations of doing so, considering who owns the narratives and for what purpose are they produced. With Sidonie Smith serving as president of the Modern Language Association, the 2011 MLA Conference held an unprecedented number of sessions related to autobiography, life writing, or life narrative. Other conferences on oral history, memory, and storytelling show the increasing relevance of critical autobiography studies across disciplines. Journals in other fields often have special issues about the relevance of life narrative in understanding theories of those fields (see, e.g., International Journal of Qualitative Education, special issue “Life History and Narrative” 2006). Indeed, it is autobiography’s interdisciplinary reach that provides a fascinating and fruitful place to understand rhetorical strategy and self-­ fashioning within texts.

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Defining a Rhetorics of Identity Leigh Gilmore’s “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre,” in Autobiographics, set the stage for the ways that genre and breaking generic features were an important way to understand autobiography, particularly by women. Understanding the form as one that “both resist[s] and produce[s] cultural identities” (4) situates the many forms of autobiography within postmodern theory and the ways that postmodern theory can help us question the form and the hegemonies it can produce and contest. This was a critical moment for women’s autobiography, as reproducing identities that were restrictive was not a goal. Indeed, many writers sought to write a self that resisted one produced for them, to write a story that illustrated how they broke the mold. While Smith and Watson chronicled the history women’s autobiography, Gilmore’s attention to the postmodern theoretical turn within autobiography pushed the field further. Indeed, her chapter, “Technologies of selfrepresentation,” asks scholars of autobiography to understand the discursive practices that restrict categories like genre, gender, and identity (9). This focus on discursive practices is critical to understanding autobiography and rhetorical approaches to autobiography. Gilmore and others point out that the text is not representative of “real life,” but rather a crafting of a particular kind of self. Gilmore’s discussion of what she calls the technologies of autobiography could also be called rhetorics of autobiography. Focusing on the tropes and figures of the genre, she discusses the moves that writers make in auto/biography to navigate self-­representation. Gilmore argues that in traditional (or male-centered) autobiography, the metaphor is the favored trope, while in alternative (or female-centered) autobiography metonym is the favored trope. The metonym has meaning in context and “allows for a variety of arrangements and indeed resists the way in which metaphors mean” (79). The relational, or metonymic, aspect of the ways that women tend to situate their identities underscores the ways that “autobiography more broadly [,] as part of a historically and formally changing discourse of self-representation, [makes it] possible to interpret it as a political site on which human agency is negotiated within and against institutions on the grounds of truth. If this is so, then autobiography may also be a site of resistance” (Gilmore 80). Furthermore, Gilmore argues, “Identity is not the explanation for gender. Rather, gender performance/existence, like metonymy, succeeds through repetition” (84). As autobiographers repeat or explore multiple identities and/or contradictions in the self, they

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expose ‘the technologies of autobiography” (85). Rhetorics of identity, then, are contested, relational, contradictory, and resistant. While Gilmore’s attention to rhetorical devices is clear, she does not invoke rhetorical studies per se. However, these similar approaches to textual analysis highlight the productive ways that rhetorical approaches to autobiographical texts can reveal the social and political dimensions of the genre. Disrupting social and political dimensions of genre is a key component of queer rhetorics in examining the performative possibilities in texts, including autobiographical writing. As Rawson argues, referencing Barnard’s Queer Place, “Queer is not an identity but a strategy, a politic, an outlook on the world. Once it becomes merely a sexual identity, it loses its utility as an analytic. Taking inspiration from Barnard, we might begin to address the problem of gender normativity in feminist rhetorical scholarship by also using gender as an analytic rather than an identity category” (Rawson 46). Understanding gender as an analytic provides insights into radical or transgressive texts, like the “outlaw” genres including transgender identities. When subjects are “under erasure” as Djebar, Bornstein, Namaste, and others suggest, writing one’s lived experience is a political act. At the same time, recognizing “the inherent relationship between embodiment and rhetoric, we can make all bodies and the power dynamics invested in their (in)visibility visible” (Johnson, Levy, Manthey, and Novotny 39). The connection between embodiment and representation in genre reflects the dual project of auto/biographers seeking to disrupt both. Debra J. Blake recognizes this duality in autobiography. She reads Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years as “radical autobiography” (71), resisting identity and genre at the same time. She argues that Moraga’s work “unsettles totalizing structures through a dual process that refigures subjectivity as mobile and multiplicitous and at the same time scripts an identity historically rooted and culturally based in Chicana Mexican (female experience), recovering and celebrating that which has been and continues to be threatened and denigrated” (72). Whether considered radical, queer, or an outlaw genre, the “transgressive feature of genre-switching” (Blake 73), such as poetry, short stories, journal entries, and essays in one text, like Moraga’s, points to the ways that autobiographical writing can be coalition building. As Blake suggests, “Including coalition efforts in life writing indicates the difficult strategies through which individuals and groups struggle to survive. Moraga’s writing weaves autobiography, biography, and community struggle to record a history of Chicana and lesbian survival in the metaphorical war years of physical,

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emotional and spiritual poverty” (76). Taken together then, these approaches to genre and identity are useful in building “rhetorical identity” as an analytic, recognizing identity as both embodied and discursive, and with the potential to transgress both. Writing about identity(s) and its constructed nature, calling attention to its constructed nature while at the same time recognizing its embodied and situated location, is a way to focus on identity as rhetorical, with a focus on the functionality of identity within autobiography. As I discuss in Chap. 8, the transgressive aspects of performative auto/biography can also make for coalition building by creating spaces for all bodies to script their stories. Carson’s approach to Sappho’s fragments also informs the notion of the self in relation to others. For Carson, the “suggestion of a thought” is an opportunity to engage with the text. Carson’s inclusion of detailed footnotes demonstrates the dialogue she, as a classicist, can have with Sappho’s fragments. Carson argues that Sappho’s fragments are actually more representative of the way memory and identity actually occur than a hierarchically structured narrative. The chaotic expression of fragments more easily reveals contradictions of identity. Together with her exploration of the notion of decreation, based on Simone Weil’s “undoing the creature within us,” Carson suggests that to decreate or undo any sense of self is a way to set the self in relation to and in dialogue with something outside ourselves. For the purposes of this book, then, rhetorics of identity are informed by performative or self-consciousness of construction of identity, a recognition of the relational/metonymic nature of identity, a consciousness of the way form says something about identity, and a recognition that identity is self-determined, embodied, and disruptive of the institutional powers imposing prescriptive discourses of identity. As a consequence, we will be able to understand performative auto/biography as including a call to action through direct address and making generic features visible.

Performative Auto/Biography Understanding rhetorics of identity as performative, and understanding genre and identity as interconnected, we can turn to understanding the performative nature of genre. Kristin Langellier explains that “In performativity, narrator and listener(s) are themselves constituted (‘I will tell you a story’), as is experience (‘a story about what happened to me’). Identity and experience are a symbiosis of performed story and the social relations in which they are materially embedded: sex, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, geography, religion, and so on. This is why personal narrative performance

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is especially crucial to those communities left out of the privileges of dominant culture, those bodies without voice in the political sense” (Langellier 1999, 129). This helpful explanation of performativity links the ways that identities are represented within genres. Genre is an aspect of the performative because of the ways identities are represented in them. Performativity is the link between the two. Writing (of any kind) and literature (particularly literary autobiographical narratives of several forms such as lyric poetry, memoir, literary nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and fictional memoir) are places of inquiry engaged with the performative. While performance studies scholars emphasize the transgressive nature of performance (Stephenson), Butler “theorizes both the transgressivity and the normativity of performative genres” (McKenzie 221). That is, a performance cannot be recognized as transgressive until its normative features are visible and distinctive and then consequently broken down. Therefore, the critical approach in this project uses Butler’s (contested) notion of performance of identity and applies it to the performance of genre. In Sidonie Smith’s seminal essay, “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance” (1995), she brings together Butler’s notion of performativity and autobiographical practice as a way to understand how identities are discursive, mediated, and represented. Autobiographical writing, then, contains narratives of identity that must be understood as a “reiteration of a norm or set of norms” (Butler qtd. in Smith 109). Examining both Gertrude Stein’s AB of Alice B. Toklas and Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years, Smith highlights how both texts undermine Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” with the audience, subverting gender norms and genre norms as well. Moraga’s genres within genres highlight the ways that the Chicana lesbian body has been viewed as “grotesque” (113). Just as her “racial identity can be performative” so too can her multi-genred approach to auto/biography be performed (113). While Smith suggests that genres can be performative, her focus on the ways that identity is performative is what makes genres have that potential. Della Pollock’s notion that writing is performative is a helpful way to extend Smith’s ideas about genre performativity. Informed by Butler’s explanation of the performative nature of identity, Pollock’s notion of performative writing focuses on the ways normative features are made visible then consequently transgressed or broken down. For Pollock, performative writing includes “the interplay of reader and writer in the joint production of meaning…[it] uses language like paint to create what is self-evidently a version of what was, what is, and/ or what might be” (Pollock, 80). This co-construction of meaning is critical to the understanding of performative auto/biography. By highlighting

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transgressions of identity and genre within auto/biography, the writer speaks to audiences directly (sometimes through direct address), therefore inviting the reader to participate in the meaning of the text. In this way, “Performative autobiography critiques its very form, while also engaging that form with readers to construct a life” (Powell 456). The focus is not so much on what it says but what it does, with a rhetorical attention to the way the genre functions to critically engage. Women autobiographers like the ones discussed in this book have found that constructing their selves through traditional means, in terms of accepted generic conventions, did not necessarily fit their own complex and multidimensional lives. Therefore, when engaging in autobiography, it was women writers who most significantly defied metanarratives (Gilmore 2001, xiii). In response to the community, parental, and institutional structures around them, women complexly represented their selves. They blurred generic boundaries by constructing narratives, and selves, that represented their lives in diverse ways and that resisted any notion of universality. When a writer performs autobiography, she is imitating, gesturing toward the discursive notions of that genre while at the same time recognizing the limit of autobiography to fully represent her experience. Therefore, “autobiography is itself a performance, it is inherently layered, a step away from either objective chronicle-making or the unmediated authenticity basic to certain readings of Truth” (Women and Performance 12). Each of the writers discussed in this book grapples with multiple identities and invents and reinvents those identities. Their rhetorical choices as writers are inextricably bound to their representations of self and their commitment to particular ways their identities matter, even if they are fluid and shifting. Institutional archives and discourses of power have not adequately included their lives and so they provide examples of redress, thereby creating space for others to write their lives as well. In addition, these authors represent a significant moment in autobiography history corresponding with the development of performance studies theories and in the ways they build an argument toward autobiographical writing as activism. Activism is itself a contested term. What counts as an activist act may not necessarily include picketing, attending marches, or writing political speeches. As the remaining chapters show, writing one’s life is one of many ways to protest. The act of doing so, however, can be altering, life changing, and perilous. In her important book, Cynthia Haynes suggests that “adrift is always where we are. And at play is always how we are. No

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matter how much we tinker, no matter how deep we dig, no matter how solid our edifice—play will push us out to sea every time” (Haynes 156). Haynes suggests that rhetoric has the potential for refuge (and violence), yet at the same time the refuge we might seek may unmoor us. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the work of “rhetorical retelling,” such as Haynes’s combined scholarly and autobiographical interactions with Heiddeger, “challenges us to resee a moment and to look more deeply at what we find in relation to all the other artifacts we have” (Powell 2018, 253). As we will see in the remaining chapters, Hurston, Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim all engage in rhetorical retelling, in order to protest not only the facts of their lives but also how we tell the stories of their lives.

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth. “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation.” Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 470–498 Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Towards a New Consciousness.” Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. 99–120. Bakhtin, M.M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Michael Holquist, Ed. Caryl Emerson, Trans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Barnard, Ian. Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Beard, Laura. Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Americas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Berubé, Michael. “Autobiography as Performative Utterance.” American Quarterly 52.2 (2000): 339–343. Bizarro, Resa Crane. “Shooting Our Last Arrow: Developing a Rhetoric of Identity for Unenrolled American Indians.” College English 67.1 (2004): 61–74. Blake, Debra J. “Unsettling Identities: Transitive Subjectivity in Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 12.1 (1997): 71–89. Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Vintage, 1995. Brockmeier, Jens and Donal Carbaugh, eds. Narrative and Identity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, 2001. Brophy, Sarah and Janice Hladki, eds. Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Burr, Anna Robeson. The Autobiography: A Critical and Comparative Study. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909.

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Butler, Judith. Gender Undone. London: Routledge, 2004. Carson, Anne. Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. New York: Vintage, 2005. Carson, Anne. ed. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Vintage, 2003. Chansky, Ricia Anne and Emily Hipchen, eds. The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2016. Chávez, Karma R. “Border (In)Securities: Normative and Differential Belonging in LGBTQ and Immigrant Rights Discourse.” Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies 7.2 (2010): 136–155. Chávez, Karma R. “Embodied Translation: Dominant Discourse and Communication with Migrant Bodies-as-Text.” Howard Journal of Communications 20.1 (2009): 18–36. Costello, Lisa A. “Performative Auto/biography in Ruth Kluger’s Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 26.2 (2011): 238–264. Couser, G.  Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Djebar, Assia. Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. Translated by Marjolijn De Jager. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Douglas, Kate and Asley Barnwell. Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies. London: Routledge, 2019. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Eakin, Paul John. Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2020. Freadman, Anne. “Uptake.” In The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change. R. M. Coe, L. Lingard & T. Teslenko, eds. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 39–53. Gilmore, Leigh. “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre.” Autobiography and Postmodernism. Eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 3–20. Gilmore, Leigh. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Green, Barbara. Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage 1905–1938. London: Palgrave, 1997. Gunn, Janet V. Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience. College Station: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Halse, Christine. “Writing/reading a life: The rhetorical practice of autobiography.” a/b: Auto/Biography 14.2: (2006): 95–115.

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Haynes, Cynthia. The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetorics in the Age of Perpetual Conflict. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Henke, Suzette. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-­ Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Holmes, Rachel. “Theatre of the self: autobiography as performance.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22 (2009): 399–416. Jelinek, Estelle C, ed. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Jensen, Meg. The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Jensen, Meg and Margaretta Jolly, eds. ‘We Shall Bear Witness’: Critical Conversations in Life Writing, Testimony and Human Rights. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Johnson, Maureen, Daisy Levy, Katie Manthey, and Maria Novotny. “Embodiment: Embodying Feminist Rhetorics.” Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition 18.1 (2015): Web. Oct. 2016. Johnson, Nan. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Kaplan, Caren. “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects.” De/Colonizing the Subject. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 115–138. Karpinski, Eva C. and Ricia Anne Chansky. “Finding Fragments: The Intersections of Gender and Genre in Life Narratives.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33:3 (2018): 505–515. Karpinski, Eva C. and Ricia Anne Chansky, eds. Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas. London: Routledge, 2020. Kennedy, Rosanne, and Gillian Whitlock. “Introduction to Special Issue: Witnessing, Trauma, and Social Suffering: Feminist Perspectives.” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 26, 2011. 251–255. Kirsch, Gesa and Joy Ritchie. “Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research.” College Composition and Communication 46.1 (February 1995): 7–29. Kuntz, Glenn. “What Remains: Sappho and Mourning.” Southwest Review 95.1/2 (2010): 246–254. Lacy, M.G. & K.A. Ono. Critical Rhetorics of Race. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Langellier, Kristin M. “‘You’re marked’: Breast cancer, tattoo, and the narrative performance of identity.” Brockmeier, Jens and Donal Carbaugh, eds. Narrative and Identity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, 2001. 145–186.

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Langellier, Kristin M. “Personal Narrative, Performance, and Performativity: Two or Three Things I know for Sure.” Text and Performance Quarterly 19(1999): 125–144. Logan, Shirley. We Are coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980. Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Mason, Mary G. “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 207–235. McCooey, David. “Introduction: The Limits of Life Writing.” The Limits of Life Writing. Ed by David McCooey and Maria Takolander. New York: Routledge, 2018. 1–6. Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70.2 (1984): 151–167. Miller, Hildy and Bridwell-Bowles, Lillian. Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Moraga, Cherríe L. Loving in the War Years. Cambridge: South End Press, 1983. Namaste, Viviane. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgender People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Olney, James. Metaphors of the Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Ostrom, Hans and Wendy Bishop. “Letting the Boundaries Draw Themselves: What Theory and Practice Have Been Trying to Tell Us.” Paper presented at Annual Meeting of MLA, San Diego, CA, December 27–30, 1994. Perkins, Margo V. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Peterson, Linda H. “Getting Personal in Academic Discourse: Why It Works.” Paper presented at Conference on College Composition and Communication, Washington, DC. March 23–25, 1995. Pollock, Della. “Performing Writing.” In  The Ends of Performance. Eds.  Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 73–103. Powell, Katrina M. “Reconciling Past and Place through Rhetorics of Peacemaking, Accountability, and Human Rights in the Archives.” College Composition and Communication 70.2 (2018): 250–272. Ratcliff, Krista. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

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Rawson, K.J. “Queering Feminist Rhetorical Canonization,” Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. Eds. Eileen E.  Schell and K. J. Rawson. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 39–52. Reiff, Mary Jo and Anis Bawarshi, eds. Genre and the Performance of Publics. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016. Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale. Southern Illinois Press, 2007. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986 (originally 1976). Rich, Adrienne. “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose: 1966–1978. New  York: W.W.  Norton and Company, 1979a. 157–184. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose: 1966–1978. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979b. 33–50. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Women’s Voices: Visions and Perspectives. Eds. Pat C. Hoy II, Esther H. Schor, Robert DeYanni. New  York: McGraw Hill, 1990. 290–312. Reprinted from Blood, Bread, and Poetry. New York: WW Norton, 1979c. Rose, Heidi. “Teaching Rhetorical Performance in the Humanities.” Text and Performance Quarterly (2013): 118–119. Roster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith, eds. Human Rights and Narrated Lives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Schweickart, Patrocinio P. “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading.” Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Elizabeth A.  Flynn and Patrocinio P.  Schweickart, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Sielke, Sabine. Fashioning the Female Subject: The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore, and Rich. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” Radical Teacher 7 (1978): 20–27. Smith, Sidonie.“Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance,” in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 10 (1995): 17–33. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/ Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

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Snitow, Ann Barr. “Review of On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978.” Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-Visions, 1951–81. Ed. Jane Roberta Cooper. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1984. 313–318. Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Stephenson, Jenn. Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Autobiography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Stover, Johnnie M. Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography. Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2003. Susan C.  Jarratt. “Sappho’s Memory.”  Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.1 (2002): 11–43. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Dir. Karel Reisz. Performances by Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. 1981. Watson, Martha Solomon. “Autobiographical Narratives as Rhetorical Narratives: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anna Howard Shaw as ‘New Women.’” Communication Studies 42.4 (Winter 1991): 354–370. Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. Eds. David Bartholmae and Anthony Petrosky. 4th ed. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996. Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind. London: Routledge, 1987 (1949). Whitlock, Gillian. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Wong, Hertha D.  Sweet. “First-Person Plural: Subjectivity and Community in Native American Women’s Autobiography.” In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 168–182. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography. Oxford University Press, 1992.

CHAPTER 3

Zora Neale Hurston’s Craft and a Griot’s Refusal to Conform

In her memoir, Dust Tracks on the Road, Zora Neale Hurston writes about telling her friends stories as a child. Embellishing the characteristics of people and animals, she says she made “fantastic stories” that came to her in daydreams. When telling her friends these stories she says, “I got bold” (Dust Tracks 59) and created details and situations that thrilled them and made the lake near their home come alive. This early storytelling ability, influenced by the “lyin’” she heard on the village store porch, reflects her curiosity as an observer and chronicler of people, culture, and folktales. Her storytelling ability, honed as a child, influenced the work she did as an anthropologist, as she committed to documenting and understanding the stories of African Americans and African heritage. Hurston says later in her memoir that “Research is a formalized curiosity. It is a poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that [s]he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell within” (Dust Tracks 127). With purpose, then, Hurston wrote in many different forms to document the cosmic secrets, engaging in short fiction, essays, novels, ethnography, and a memoir. When she wrote ethnography, “What she discovered when she looked at her culture through the spyglass of anthropology was that the folktales she had always heard were not merely amusing stories or even relics of slavery, but living forces, strategies used in her own day for dealing with power inequities” (Meisenhelder 269). Hurston’s project, across these genres, was to instruct readers to understand power inequities of several kinds and the strategies for understanding them “within.” Long © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. M. Powell, Performing Autobiography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4_3

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discussed as the ultimate trickster (Gates, Jr., Harris, Lowe), Hurston documented African American folktales (and Haitian and Jamaican cultural practices) and retold them in various forms. Her writings can be seen as instructions to dwell within, both individually and nationally, to understand how a person and how a country can account for the inequities resulting from a country built on slavery. In this chapter, then, I examine the strategies Hurston uses as a writer to instruct her readers, much like a griot, to look to Black culture rooted in African traditions to understand how solutions come from within. As I write this chapter, the Black Lives Matter movement has taken a significant turn. Protests of the murders of a succession of Black men and women including Breanna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and Tiffany Harris, and many others sparked additional protests, with the pandemic creating an even greater urgency of the moment. Released during this time was a podcast episode of GirlTrek featuring Zora Neale Hurston. GirlTrek co-founder Vanessa Garrison said of Hurston that she was “unapologetically Black” and “dressed country in Harlem,” refusing “respectability politics” at a time when Black writers were being scrutinized for their literary abilities during the Harlem Renaissance. Co-founders Garrison and Morgan Dixon pointed to Hurston’s protests against “respectability” as a lesson for Black women during this moment of renewed protests and refusal not only of the slaying of Black people but also of a particular expectation of the way Black people, particularly women, are expected to “behave,” an expectation rooted in White Supremacy. As I discuss in this chapter, Hurston’s strategies as a writer resisted several kinds of expectations. She resisted the high modern prose of other Harlem Renaissance writers and was fiercely committed to including the dialects of her characters. This commitment reflected her desire to understand healing from within, turning inward toward community  to understand the lasting impacts of slavery and racism in the United States. Her writings, then, serve as instruction on how to do so. As actress Ruby Dee said at a panel in 2012  (played during GirlTrek’s Black History Bootcamp episode), Hurston “brings us to essences … she defines … why we had to come to this country, that we have a job to do, and that we’re still in the process of doing that job, that is to particularize the absolute stunning nature of human character of the human experience, of the human being”. This chapter addresses the instruction, as a writer, that Hurston provides in how to “particularize,” through performativity and

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specifying, and the significance that her work continues to have in constructing life narratives as activism and protest.

Hurston’s Influence Across the Disciplines Many of the characters in Hurston’s stories engage in telling tall tales, parables, playing the dozens, and signifying, forms of storytelling with long traditions in African and African American history. Indeed, the trickster in the African American tradition often “specified” or signified in order to get one over the master, to have a creative life outside the confines of the master and master’s language, or at least to appear to conform to the master’s demands but not so as the master could tell. This commitment to the Black oral tradition will be important when discussing Hurston’s life writing and the expectations she resisted in both form and content. Beginning with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s work about the “Signifyin’ Monkey” where he explores this storytelling device in Hurston and others’ work, critics have long noted Hurston’s commitment to the black oral tradition and to documenting folk storytelling. As scholars and Hurston herself explain, specifyin’, lyin’, playing the dozens, and signifyin’ are variations on the same approach and all have roots in African storytelling. Not only did Hurston recount particular specifyin’ stories in her work, she also resisted expectations of how she should write, specifyin’ her readership in the process and resisting through culture itself (Wallach). However, many critics assumed weakness in her memoir because of her resistance to certain themes and her inclusion of black vernacular. She moves “easily between” high modernist prose and Black vernacular (Wallach 84), confounding readers with contradictions and a seeming indifference to the racial politics of the time. While she was criticized for not being racial enough, her work was analyzed only in terms of her as an individual. Critics recognized her shifts in genre to “evade categorization” (Robey 668–669) but tend not to discuss her writing itself as mirroring the story of Black America: “Hurston does not confine the life she writes in her autobiography to the lifetime of her corporeal self but rather contextualizes—and extends—it temporally within the history of her community” (Domina 197). Her resistance to the way her story and therefore her community’s story is told, “portrays an individual persona that resists reduction to a coherent, consistent unity and instead portrays a person of many moods who is in tension with the world in which she moves” (Walker 388). Therefore, understanding her choices as a writer reveals the subtle

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ways she “gives her readers a hint for how to interpret her interpretations” (Wallach 79). Rather than read her work as a Black woman, Alice Walker suggests focusing on Hurston  as a writer. Walker’s tireless efforts, including her essay, “Looking for Zora,” to put Hurston’s work back into print have helped us understand her early critics. “We are better off,” Walker counsels, “if we think of Zora Neale Hurston as an artist, period—rather than as the artist/politician most black writers have been required to be. This frees us to appreciate the complexity and richness of her work in the same way we can appreciate Billie Holiday’s glorious phrasing or Bessie Smith’s perfect and raunchy lyrics, without the necessity of ridiculing the former’s addiction to heroin or the latter’s excessive love of gin.” As Walker alludes to, many critics, including her contemporaries, criticized her for their perception that she was not focusing enough on racial politics (Boyd, Bordelon). However, as several critics note, her seemingly apolitical or naive descriptions of white patrons or “friends” provided “shrewd” assessments of racial relations, including her childhood understanding of “condescension and tokenism” (Wallach 81). Understanding the memoir as deliberate, crafted, and resistant to form and content shifts our understanding of Hurston as “all too aware of the grim realities of racism, but she consistently resists letting the issue of racial justice become central in her reminiscence” (Wallach 77, emphasis added). As a writer, Walker and others have found Hurston’s work critical to understanding the history of African American literature for women writers. Sadoff explores the necessity of seeing Hurston as a matrilineal figure for Walker and others. She says, “Walker’s ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens transforms Woolf’s model of the white female tradition by inserting in brackets the black equivalents for Woolf’s exemplary writers and issues: instead of ‘Emily Bronte,’ ‘Zora Hurston’; instead of ‘wise women,’ ‘rootworkers.’ Yet the black and white female traditions are not, as Walker’s substitutions imply, symmetrical or identical. The Historical burden of black matrifocality and motherhood—slavery, sexual exploitation, forced loss of children, and as economic marginality—also creates the special ‘duty,’ as Walker defines it, of black literary matriliny” (Sadoff 11). It is critical then to understand Hurston’s work as deeply connected to her community and as situated in a particular history. To conclude that she is not aware of that history and her place in it is to ignore the clues she gives us in her autobiographical narratives.

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The scholarship discussing Zora Neale Hurston’s work is vast. More than 10 biographies have been written about her and more than 20 edited collections addressing her fiction and nonfiction have been published from the perspectives of gender and feminist studies, literary studies, African American studies, anthropology, folklore, and history, to name a few. In the introduction to the 2013 annotated bibliography of scholarship on Hurston, editor Cynthia Davis writes, “For the present generation of young scholars, Hurston has forever been a part of the American literary canon. Her progression from a minor star of the Harlem Renaissance to its leading lady and cornerstone of the period has been an eventful journey. Due to her meteoric rise to fame, some scholars’ questions of whether Hurston has been overhyped and overlionized should not be seen as an attack, but rather it should be seen as a solidification of her position in the literary world. The debates, queries, and analysis simply expand upon and build upon her legacy” (“Introduction” 1). Hurston’s contribution and importance to American literature is well discussed, and in this chapter, I focus on her legacy to life narratives. Arguably no other writer has impacted our thinking about autobiography in the way that she has, in terms of what she actually wrote, in terms of her protest against form, convention, and notions of the truth, and in terms of their broader implications for how all Americans view the nation’s history. In a 2020 biography of Hurston, Stephanie Li describes Hurston’s work this way: “Hurston worked across a variety of genres. One theme that permeates her life is her refusal to be contained by a single idea, category, or expectation. It is no surprise, then, that although she is best known for her novels, she also wrote plays, a series of provocative essays, and groundbreaking anthropological texts that describe her experiences in the American South, Haiti, and Jamaica. Although we can clearly distinguish between Hurston’s major fiction and academic work, much of her writing straddles these two forms” (190). The straddling of forms, borrowing and hybridizing to create forms that performed the content rather than reported it, is part of the legacy Hurston left for many writers after her. Li also notes, “Hurston made her own way. This would be admirable for any writer, but for a black woman in the early twentieth century, it is especially impressive and required a good amount of creativity, performance, and humility” (Li 192). Hurston’s engagement in a variety of genres allowed her to work out her literary commitment to highlight African American language, its use as power, and storytelling

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as testimony. It is critical to examine her work as a whole, then, to see the development of her case for Black language and storytelling as a form of protest.

Trickster Tales, Signifyin’, and Craft Whether writing short stories, essays, ethnography, novels, or her autobiography, Hurston’s texts attend to the trickster tale, both in terms of content and in terms of style (Harris, Lowe). The folktales she gathers in her anthropological texts Tell My Horse and Mules and Men exemplify what Gates calls “signifying,” that is, retelling the stories of the Black people she studied in South Florida, Haiti, and Jamaica (“The Signifying Monkey”). Many of the characters in Hurston’s stories engage in telling tall tales, parables, and playing the dozens, forms of storytelling in the African and African American traditions. Hurston was also known for not conforming to the standards of the Harlem Renaissance. During a time when African American writers like Langston Hughes were striving to demonstrate “intelligence” through high modernist narrative and poetry, Hurston was incorporating folk dialogue into her stories and novels. She was initially criticized for doing so because folk dialogue had been used to caricature African Americans. Yet she has since been praised for her experimentation with voice and form and for being one of the leaders in the Black Arts Movement for her conscious use of narrative voice and for “demonstrating that it was viable for the Afro-American writer to acknowledge the folkloric oral tradition as the foundation of a genuine Afro-American written tradition” (Fraile 27). Indeed, Fraile has described her experimental narratives as forms of protest, “against the genteel tradition, the sentimental novel, and the imposition of cultivated standard English on the Afro-­American literature that preceded her” (Fraile 29). Hurston is most well known for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the main character’s, Janie’s, defiance of expectation of African American woman’s identity. Told as a story to her friend, Pheobe, the narrative is highly constructed, with Janie recounting her independence and resistance to the confines of a Black women’s role within marriage, her desire to express her voice through stories, and her desire to be part of the conversation in her community through that voice. The novel is constructed as a tall tale, and the form that the novel takes is an indicator of the point Hurston is trying to make in all her writing. The critical focus on

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Their Eyes Were Watching God has often overshadowed Hurston’s overall project as a writer: “While Hurston published four novels and more than 50 short stories, essays, and plays, she is often discussed only in the context of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel attacked for its humor and use of dialect but praised for its central focus on a black woman’s voice in the context of her small town in early 20th-century Florida” (Carpio and Sollors B7). The focus on voice in Their Eyes deflects from the craft of Hurston’s work. But as Gates suggests, “Hurston’s narrative strategy [in Their Eyes] depends on the blending of the text’s two most extreme and seemingly opposed modes of narration—that is, narrative commentary, which begins at least in the diction of standard English, and characters’ discourse, which is always foregrounded by quotation marks and by its black diction” (Gates 191). According to Gates, Hurston’s Their Eyes “resolves that implicit tension between standard English and black dialect” (Gates 192) by foregrounding the power of language through her craft of the novel. The “speakerly” strategies Hurston used in her novel and other works were steeped in Black oral forms of storytelling (Gates 192). When Janie wants to participate in the mule stories on the porch and Jody, her husband, does not allow it, he is keeping her from her tradition. Gates says of the conversation on the porch in TEWWG: “When the Signifyin(g) rituals commence—rituals that the text describes as created by ‘big picture talkers [who] were using a side of the world for a canvas’— Jody forces Janie to retreat inside the store, much against her will” (194). Gates also suggests that  the Their Eyes narrative “Signifies upon James Weldon Johnson’s arguments against dialect” and “Hurston’s masterful use of free indirect discourses (style indirect libre) allows her to Signify upon the tension between the two voices … by adding to direct and indirect speech a strategy through which she can privilege the black oral tradition” (194). Gates further explains that while Jody won’t let her play (i.e., tell stories), Tea Cake encourages her to. It is Tea Cake who teaches her to play checkers, which symbolizes their play at love, that makes Janie fall in love with him. Janie “found herself glowing inside. Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play” (qtd. in Gates 146). But as Gates points out, “This repeated figure of play is only the thematic analogue to the text’s rhetorical play, plays of language that seem to be present essentially to reveal the complexity of black oral forms of narration” (195).

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In the foreword to a collection of her short fiction, Gates and Lemke discuss this tension as it resembles the tension in American race relations, where African Americans’ communication is a key element to resisting their oppression. They say, “The capacity to be ironic and to laugh makes the worker superior to their apparently better-off master. John is the figure of courage and faith. He embodies joy over misery and he is the hero who shows that all that counts is in the soul and in the imagination” (Gates and Lemke xx). More recent scholarship on Hurston’s short fiction emphasizes her commitment to highlighting the Black oral tradition, particularly signifying or playing the dozens, and that she used these storytelling techniques well before Their Eyes was written. For instance, “As Hurston’s first national publication, ‘Drenched in Light’ proclaims unabashedly the vitality and assurance that Hurston possessed as a young writer” (Davis, D. 274). Davis’s assertion counters criticism of Hurston’s early work as “lacking in complexity” and says rather that, “in these early stories Hurston shows admirable skill in employing trickster and signifying techniques” (275) where “manipulation, power, and control” are central themes, particularly for women in the stories. For African American men there is an “impossibility of open defiance” to the slave owner and then later to the boss. Davis, like several other critics, points to the ways the stories foreground what Hurston does in her novels: she illustrates how Big Sweet, Isis, Janie, and Hurston herself are tricksters, using language as power to survive (282). Furthermore, “Hurston seems to be not only the first scholar to have defined the trope of Signifyin(g) but also the first to represent the ritual itself” (Gates 196). Gates and Lemke stress that because Hurston’s oeuvre includes this focus on signifyin’, she is focused on the craft of telling story: “This level of attention both to the nature of narration and to the functions of figuration language underscores Hurston’s determination to represent black culture in the art of fictional narrative rather than primarily in sociological or political terms” (xi). In Their Eyes, for instance, the lyrical novel shifts from third person to a blend of first and third person, highlighting a similar awareness of self in Janie (Gates 287). Hurston’s Tell My Horse is another example of her resistance to form. In this work she blends genres of ethnography and the Black oral tradition (Dutton). She presents Hoodoo rituals “as a strategy of resistance to colonial politics” (Trefzer 299). Trefzer concludes that in Tell My Horse Hurston, “subtly subverts her mainstream, public, pro-U.S. discourse with her comments on Haitian cultural practices” by presenting voodoo as “a subversive, international political gesture that helps to produce a global

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trans-Caribbean space” (299) by adopting “strategies of masking, inversion, and ironic juxtaposition by fusing public with private discourses and patriotic imperialism with black globalism” (Trefzer 302). The performative aspect of her ethnographic work, then, highlights how Hurston “[f]aced with the dilemma of how to present her analysis in a ways that could bypass the censoring eye of her mentors and unsympathetic white readers, Hurston adopted a strategy of masking social conflict and critical commentary with humor. The persona she creates is crucial to this project. By presenting herself as a lovable ‘darky’ one who thanks white folks for ‘allowing’ her to collect folklore and who praised the magnanimity of her patron Mrs. Mason, she appears a narrator with no racial complaints or even awareness … however … the humor in Mules and Men reflects this complexity rather than the primitive simplicity and carefree gaeity seen by reviewers” (Meisenhelder 269). In this way, Hurston’s deference masks her critiques and “Like the Haitian peasant population, who had to resort to disguising their ideological insubordination, the black American writer traditionally had to find her own ways of negotiating between dominant narratives and social critiques” (305). Just as Gates suggests that Their Eyes is an instruction on oral form and the ethnographies provide a critique of racial injustice through oral traditions, her autobiographical work can be seen as rhetorical play as well, celebrating the Black oral tradition. If the language in Black vernacular is protest and signifyin’ as a form of storytelling is a form of protest, then telling stories on the porch is too a form of protest. In this way, Hurston’s stories like “Uncle Monday” disrupt expectations of African Americans. In her story, Uncle Monday is presented as a Griot figure and if we also understand Hurston as a griot as well as a trickster, we can nuance the way that Hurston’s commitment to documenting Black culture was a way to redress the archives of the history of slavery in this country, relegating Black vernacular and oral tradition as linguistic prowess and political commentary. While Hurston was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, not only did she resist White audience’s expectations of her, she also resisted the expectations of fellow Black writers Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, both critical to the literary scene in Harlem. In his criticism of Hurston, Wright said, “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe

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and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laugher and tears” (22). Additionally, Hughes said that Hurston “did not write fiction in the protest tradition” (qtd. in Marks 59, emphasis added). At a time when Harlem Renaissance writers like Wright and Hughes were defining a Black literary voice, the reductive nature of his assessment of her work fails to recognize the rhetorical prowess of her texts. Rather than a minstrel in the negative sense, Hurston’s role as griot meant that she was passing down not only the content of stories of generations but also the rhetorical and linguistic strategies within them, demonstrating the literary acumen of Africans before forced displacement, an acumen that Wright desperately wants to show. Hurston’s focus on craft, and that she was signifyin’ in form as well as content, is also clear in her later novel, Seraph on the Sewanee. This novel, with a White protagonist, is essentially a political commentary on eugenics. Hurston worked with the Federal Writers Project and served as an anthropologist from 1938 to 1939 interviewing white people in Florida (Lowe 265). Through this work Hurston was familiar with eugenics reports and the novel draws from her field notes (Bordelon x). Jackson concludes that Seraph “resists—perhaps even at times parodies—a eugenic ideology of tainted blood” (643) and explores eugenics’ White trash narratives, notions of racial purity, and the maternal body as abject. Jackson concludes that the negative stereotypes in eugenics field reports, “perhaps inspired Hurston’s desire to provide depth to this flat, inert figure [of the White trash mother]. Hurston carefully crafts Arvay’s character by making use of and resignifying traditional psychoanalytic paradigms in order to provide a complicated interiority for the shells of ‘bad’ white trash mothers reported in eugenic studies” (652). According to Jackson, Hurston’s “tracing of destitution, motherhood, class mobilization, and excretion shows how, for Hurston, racial categories always intersect with other categories, and the fluidity of the body always messes up any clean and proper understanding of the self” (641). At a time when White notions of purity were violently imposed on Blacks and Native Americans through racial integrity laws, Hurston’s novel shows how the concepts of “clean” or “proper” impacted poor and working classes of Whites as well. Maya Angelou’s description of Seraph also suggests that, “Hurston constructs an ending which confounds the expectations of her readership” (656) and a “winking critique of white paranoias about personal and social purity” (656). Hurston’s commitment to documenting and celebrating African oral tradition despite the history of slavery in the United States can be traced

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back to one of her earliest projects, her interview with Cudjo Lewis, or Kossola, at the time one of the last living Africans who had been forced to the United States via a slave trade ship. Only recently published as Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” Sexton argues that Hurston “shows a conflict between looking to testimony in order to access the atrocity of the past as a means of recovering this rupture, and the simultaneous recognition that the past is interminably closed off as inaccessible and intangible” (191). As Sexton explains, Hurston’s first article about Lewis was plagiarized. Following traditional anthropological methods, she was unable to obtain information during interviews with Lewis and, though she “revised” an earlier publication, she plagiarized nonetheless (Sexton 190). Her advisor, well-known anthropologist Franz Boas, insisted she go back and interview Lewis again. She did and the second time she was able to hold a conversation with Lewis, a conversation that she includes in the text of the second article, as a way to highlight the process of the research. In what became Barracoon, Sexton explains that Hurston uses the “performative” authentication text throughout in order to add missing voices to the “annuals of history” (194). Quoting from Hurston’s introductory material to Barracoon, Sexton highlights Hurston’s assessment of the history of the slave trade as focused on economics. Hurston says, “‘All the talk, printed and spoken has had to do with ships and rations; with wind and weather; with ruses and piracy and balls between wind and water; with native kinds and bargains sharp and sinful on both sides; with tribal wars and slave factories and red massacres and all the machinations necessary to stock a barracoon with African youth on the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle’” (qtd. in Sexton 194). Sexton argues that the structuring of this preface indicates that Hurston is crafting genre to redress the distorted history of the slave trade, to focus on the “contraband flesh [that] should take up space, should have a place, and their story finally heard” (195). Sexton points out Hurston’s “awareness of her position” (199) in the text, including the exchanges between researcher and narrator and Hurston’s deliberate highlighting of the structured nature of the text, making it a performative text where she is pushing genre expectations of the so-called objective observer in anthropology. By including the exchange between herself and Kossola, Hurston, “reminds the reader … that even she does not know how to ask the questions, and that it is this singular man of two worlds who has the answers” (199).

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During their interview, Kossola demonstrates for Hurston the call and response trope by repeating, “you understand me?” throughout his story. Sexton frames this repetition in terms of the interlocutor: Hurston receives the testimony and she records the repetition in the narrative to highlight its testimonial aspect (200). I would add that just as Hurston uses phonetic spellings to highlight the dialect/accent of Kossola, Hurston keeps these repetitions in the narrative in order to record the cadence of Kossola as a storyteller, a griot, and a speaker in the African oral tradition. Doing so, however, was a major break from the writing produced during the Harlem Renaissance. According to Torry Threadcraft in a recent, in-depth story in The Atlantic  about the release of  Barracoon, “Kossola’s origin story and vernacular English were shameful to no small portion of middle-­ class black Americans. Compared to narratives in which slaves obtained freedom through an unlikely stroke of fortune or by overachieving, Kossola’s journey from Africa to Alabama offers little to be read as political agenda. There were no white abolitionists who could be seen as saviors; Kossola didn’t earn his freedom through literacy or religion, nor did he escape through a concerted revolt. Though he did convert to Christianity in America—co-founding what is now Union Missionary Baptist Church in Africatown—Kossola became his own free man through simple communal reflection and remembrance. In Barracoon, Hurston illuminates his resilience without romanticizing it as necessary in the search for self-­ realization” (2018). Hurston’s explicit shift in narrative expectation, in terms of both slave narrative and anthropological text, highlights Hurston’s project throughout her works to come later. Kossola, through his storytelling techniques, teaches Hurston to be a griot, to document the lived experience through the lives of the people, rather than a narrative imposed on them. The interior reflection that he did, as a survivor of slavery, became the interior reflection of Hurston’s characters in her later works as well. Lynda Marian Hill notes that Hurston’s Barracoon in particular shifts away from the typical slave narrative and “offer[s] a heroic spin on repatriation” (69). Hurston’s recognition of this complexity and defying expectations of the ways that slave narratives were expected to be told underscore her nuanced storytelling as testifying. This approach to her work is critical in understanding her work generally and also in examining her memoir, Dust Track On The Road.

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Autobiography as Community Storytelling: Chronicler/Lyin’/Structure With an understanding of all of Hurston’s texts as a deliberate use of genre to document her community, then Dust Tracks can be read on its own as a signifying text—signifying about the genre, about her life, about Black oral tradition, and Black literature generally. Hurston says in Dust Tracks, “I accept the means at my disposal for working out my destiny. It seems to me that I have been given a mind and will-power for that very purpose” (278, emphasis added). In this way, Hurston points to her work as performative history and interior reflection, like Kossola, for the healing of a nation. Readers, White readers in particular, were likely looking for an autobiography that had the typical narrative arc of a Black woman overcoming many obstacles and through White people’s altruism, achieved success. Even though she did have White mentors, her memoir challenges the narrative of the generous White patron. In this section, I highlight the ways that Hurston exhibits being a chronicler of her community, using lyin’, signifyin’, and storytelling as deliberate devices for chronicling, and how the form her chronicling takes (by resisting genre as well as content) performs the role of a griot. In Dust Tracks on the Road, Hurston says, “I was and am thoroughly sick of the [race] subject. My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so, regardless of his color. It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms, yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no. But I said to myself that that was not what was expected of me” (Dust Tracks 151). In several of her short stories, such as “Spunk,” Hurston’s narratives highlight the ways that the knowledge handed down in Black communities was often dismissed as superstition, in part because the narratives were meant to circumvent Whites’ power over them. Characters such as John DeConquer say, “nobody don’t have to know where us gets our pleasure from” (xx). Hurston, however, in documenting Black vernacular and storytelling, used the structure she learned from Kossola to trace oral tradition in her stories and other writing, mirroring the structure of Kossola’s story in Barracoon. At the time when Dust Tracks was published, literary autobiography was expected to adhere to a specific form, in the tradition of stories about White exemplary men, overcoming great odds or great accomplishments. For White women, autobiography was acceptable if it adhered to

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particular gendered expectations—the woman could have a political or social cause so long as she also adhered to social norms of motherhood and wifeliness. In the late nineteenth century, the African American autobiography was steeped in the tradition of the slave narrative, where the freed or escaped slave was expected to tell a story of triumph, of overcoming a master and illiteracy, of making a new life, and finally writing that life as exemplary for others to follow (see discussion of Stover’s work in Chap. 2). Dust Tracks on the Road was initially ignored because it had a “lackluster” feel compared to her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. According to literary scholar Lynda Hill, “Hurston’s writing skills are evident in her autobiography; however, her strengths in fictional techniques and oral story-telling overshadow her ability to convey intimate details with the clarity, depth, or the confessional demeanour [sic] ordinarily expected of life writing” (449, emphasis added). Hill’s point here is about what was expected of life writing and  how the textual and rhetorical strategies Hurston employed in Dust Tracks defied that  expectation. Known throughout her life for lying about her age and for being ferociously silent about her love relationships, readers expected to find out more details about Hurston’s intimate life by reading her autobiography. Moreover, she destabilizes what she has previously written (and that one assumes as fact) in an early chapter as all “hearsay” (Hill 577), suggesting near the beginning of the memoir that what she tells in the autobiography will be suspect—intentionally breaking the autobiographical pact (Lejeune) and as discussed in Chap. 2, using autobiography to reflect the relationality of community. Throughout the memoir Hurston asks rhetorical questions, provides few details, and addresses the reader directly. Jervette Ward suggests that, “Hurston warmly engages with the reader in her writing, yet she also firmly limits the extent of the reader-writer relationship. Her famous autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, exemplifies her desire to let her readers in, but it also exemplifies her desire to give them only what she wants them to know—whether truth or fiction. Hurston’s elusiveness persists as scholars continue to peel back new layers of her literary existence” (Ward 2, emphasis added). Hurston’s memoir seems elusive as she is instructing readers to understand the broader picture of her role as a storyteller or griot. The details of her own life, she seems to suggest, are not as important as the ways she resisted what was expected of her. She does not hide the truth so much as to keep readers’ focus on craft, form, performance, and the history of oral

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tradition. In this way, her focus remains on the Black community and the importance of retelling stories from the Black point of view. Hurston also pointed to these commitments in recounting her abilities as a storyteller early in her life: “When I began to make up stories I cannot say. Just from one fancy to another, adding more and more detail until they seemed real. People seldom see themselves changing. So I was making little stories to myself, and have no memory of how I began. But I do remember some of the earliest ones” (Dust Tracks 52). This early recounting highlights her ability and early experience as a storyteller. However, being a storyteller was not always valued, especially for a girl. Hurston describes her grandmother telling her mother, “Why dat lil’ heifer is lying just as fast as a horse can troll. Stop her. Wear her back-side out. I bet if I lay my hands on her she’ll stop it. I vominates a lying tongue” (52). Hurston says, however, that “Mama never tried to break me” (52). Hurston intimated that her grandmother disapproved of her father and because Zora looked like him (in skin tone), she disapproved of everything she did. She resisted her grandmother and any beatings, she said, and “Furthermore, how was she going to tell what I was doing inside? I could keep my inventions to myself, which was what I did most of the time” (53). Her “inventions” (or “lyin’”) became her stories. And though she describes them as childhood inventions, she details what became the short stories that she published later, again emphasizing the ways that she was a storyteller early in her childhood. In addition, Hurston had “visions,” indicating another sign of her role as a griot: “When inanimate things ceased to commune with me like natural men, other dreams came to live with me … Little things that people did or said grew into fantastic stories” (57). She describes her early visions, such as when Mr. Pendir became an alligator: “Right away, I could see the mighty tail of Mr. Pendir slapping Old Lady Broson into the lake” (59). Her stories came to her in visions and out of the real life characters of her neighbors. Like Dorothy Allison who told stories to her sisters and cousins (see Chap. 5), Hurston says, “I told my playmates about it and they believed it right away. I got bold and told them how I had seen Mr. Pendir turning into a ‘gator at night and going down into the lake and walking the water. My chums even believed part of it in a way. That is, they liked the idea and joined in the game” (59). While her grandmother and her White “friend” warned her against lyin’ (storytelling), her friends encouraged her and she saw herself a skilled storyteller in doing so. As the memoir progresses, each story builds on itself as she instructs readers on the ways she came to understand the role of performance,

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particularly with the White people in her life. When she worked for the actress, Miss M—, she said, “the company welcomed me like, or as, a new play-­pretty. It did not strike me as curious then. I never even thought about it” (98). Hurston’s recounting of the racism she experienced is presented in undertones—her focus was on earning her way to the next stage in her life. She performs her role as storyteller within the theater troupe because she “had a way of life inside me” (94), aspirations to be able to tell stories freely, not unlike Janie in Their Eyes. Indeed, Miss M—drops her off in Baltimore so that she can attend school and develop her skills as a writer. While in school in Baltimore there is a significant moment when she experiences poetry in a visceral and visual way while her professor reads from a Coleridge poem. She says, he “made me see the poem. That might seemed queer, but I am so visual-minded that all the other senses induce pictures in me. Listening to Coleridge’s poem for the first time, I saw all that the writer had meant for me to see with him, and infinite cosmic things besides. I was not of the work-a-day world for days after [my teacher’s] voice had ceased” (107, emphasis added). This significant moment illustrates the building on her early talents of telling stories to her childhood friends, writing clever “news” stories for the theater troupe, and her desires as a writer to evoke similar responses from readers as a writer. Through these stories focusing on Hurston’s development as a writer during her life on the road with the theater troupe and her education, Hurston builds her confidence to make readers “see” her stories and folktales. As she states, “This was my world, I said to myself, and I shall be in it, and surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God’s green dirt ball” (107). This statement is not a dreamy longing but a declarative statement revealing her tenacity and drive. While she experiences plenty of racism and harassment and disappointments along the way, she focuses on the kindnesses she experiences from her night teacher Mr. Holmes, the dean at Morgan College William Pickens, Miss M—, and her friend Verena, all who helped her get through her loneliness and hardships. She also describes her own tenacity and demonstrates that being a writer takes grit and determination and a willingness to work. In presenting her experiences this way, she is emphasizing a particular approach to life narrative. She says, “It would be dramatic” (109) if she recounted the various hardships she endured, but she does not focus on them. She recognizes her memoir as taking a different form, celebrating tenacity, celebrating White kindness (though recognizing the racist undertones), and celebrating her ability to use that kindness to get what she wants without feeling ashamed. Her narrative does not present Whites as

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saviors; rather, she reveals their limitations while at the same time her ability to accept their help. In Hurston’s story, she is the hero, but one with a growing list of mentors helping her along the way. One example of this is her friendship with wealthier girls, particularly Bernice Hughes. When the two young women find each other, she doesn’t “shrink away” and she emphasizes the kindnesses of the girls who loaned her clothes. Hurston’s narrative continually focuses on the community of people, Black and White, who helped her as she became a writer. Like the early part of the memoir depicting a precocious child, at school Hurston is smart. She took over the classes when the teacher was absent and the other students respected her. This story of the Morgan College preparatory school educating and preparing a Black woman for success is also juxtaposed with her observations of racism and her response to it. Working as a manicurist in Washington DC while attending Howard University, she practiced listening and observing at the barber shop. She writes about learning to tell stories from the customers and barbers there, observing people joking with each other and calling each other out. Eventually she makes her way to Barnard in New York City and it is only after finishing college and conducting anthropological fieldwork on fellowship that she reflects on the death of her mother within the memoir. As she attains this pivotal series of successes, she realizes the depths from where she came, the “waif of Eatonville,” and the daughter who had lost her mother young. As a storyteller, this return to the mother at this moment reminds readers of the enormity of her accomplishments, but not with an emphasis on race but rather an emphasis on the absence of her mother. Her memoir proceeds from these moments to recount her continued development as a researcher and writer. She learns the “right approach” to research from Franz Boas but also highlights her growing commitments as a researcher, particularly to reflect the realities of her community in her work and to be part of the communities she observed in order to do so. While describing her field work in Florida, she says, “My life was in danger several times” (129). She lived in the community to collect folk tales and describes the violence she witnessed and that was almost inflicted on her. In one story she reports on the murders (and the tall tales) that occurred in Polk County, Florida. As one of her informants told her, “Them white folks don’t care nothing bout no nigger getting cut and kilt, nohow. They ain’t coming in here. I done kilt me four and they ain’t hung me yet” (134). This comment on justice and about the “the wheels of industry” that must continue is a castigation of the white system of justice

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not caring if Black people were murdered as long as the work gets done. Part of what’s significant about this statement, however, is the strategic placement of it in the middle of Hurston’s four-page lyrical essay about the sawmill and Polk County. The rhythms of the sawmill and the working bodies of Black men are written about lyrically. The story, not typical of anthropology at the time and certainly not part of her training from Boas, is ensconced in the story of knife fights and tall tales. This placement in the narrative and the juxtaposition of lyrical description together with Black vernacular allows Hurston to illustrate the poetics of a Black man cutting wood while at the same time highlighting the working conditions that filled the White man’s pockets. She says in her memoir about this approach, “I aimed to show what beauty and appeal there was in genuine Negro material” (141). Hurston also suggests she was fearful at first to write the story she wanted because “from what I had read and heard, Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem” (151). She breaks out of the form/ context expected of Black writers, however, and comments about the ways that several of her works, such as her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, also break those conventions. Her memoir includes more details about Kossola’s life and experience than her own. In this way she honors his story as a way to show where she’s from and how she, as a writer, grappled with the violence of the slave trade that included Africans killing and capturing Africans. Including this story of her encounters with Kossola, as a writer, is critical to her understanding the importance of chronicling folk tales—not only to testify by having the stories written down, but also to learn from the interior reflection required within them. She was convinced that only by telling a more complete history about the slave trade would her community in particular and the country in general be able to heal. However, she also reveals how she knew that the way that she wanted to write would be criticized. She would be told by her mentors, patron, and the literary community what she could and could not do and what White audiences would and would not want to read or hear. She explains how she resisted her mentors’ advice on several occasions, including on her stage production of Negro spirituals as they were sung and improvised in real life. She knew that White people, like those who had been in her father’s church, would like the spirituals as they were actually performed— not the watered down version her mentors suggested. Just as she forged ahead with producing the spirituals, she also had to work to overcome

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expectation and “appropriateness” to “Let the people sing” in her novels and stories as well (152). The details about how she wrote and lived, such as how long it took her to write a novel and how much her rent was, all are details of her life as a writer and the struggle to maintain a writing life. She shares that, “I never expect to have a greater thrill than that wire gave me” (155) when the publisher wired her the acceptance of Jonah’s Gourd Vine. She says she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks because “It was dammed up in me” (155). Her experience as a writer is realistic in its hardship, but she also says, “If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would be written at all … the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you” (155–156). As she addresses her commitment to telling the stories she wanted to tell about ordinary, everyday people in the Black communities she knew, she comments in the chapter “My people My People,” the tensions between this commitment and issues of literacy. She explains the politics of the “well-bred Negro” who has “set himself to measure up to what he thinks of as the white standard of living. He is conscious of the fact that the Negro in America needs more respect if he expects to get any acceptance at all” (157–158). Hurston, however, refused to live that way and her commitment to elevating ordinary people and the stories of their lives necessitated her approach. She says, “The educated Negro may know all about differential calculus and the theory of evolution, but he is fighting entirely out of his class when he tries to quip with the underprivileged” (158). As several scholars have noted, Hurston’s focus on the individual (as opposed to systemic racism) seems to make her conservative in her politics—it was for her contemporaries and remains a controversial point (Wallach). However, if we understand the way she saw herself, as a chronicler, a storyteller, and a griot, then it is the representation of her people as they are that serves as a protest, a commitment to include the vernacular in the history, and to celebrate the ways of life of everyone in the community. Hurston’s whole memoir is filled with her interactions with stories. She hears them on porches growing up and was curious about how they worked. She was “confused” because “I found the Negro, and always the blackest Negro, being made the butt of all jokes—particularly black women” (164). But in coming to understand the history of stories,

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storytelling, playin’ the dozens, and lyin’, she establishes a rich history that needs to be told and indeed sees her chronicling of those stories as her responsibility.

Responsibility as a Writer and Storyteller By the end of Dust Tracks, Hurston says that, “Work was to be all of me, so I said” (183). She casts her life as a writer as her responsibility. She focused on the forms of the stories she heard and in this way the stories of her community become her auto/biography. The dissatisfaction of readers who expected gossip or love stories, I argue, was precisely Hurston’s project, as it was in most of her writing: to create a fissure that leaves the reader uncomfortable, questioning, and conscious of the non-adherence to form. “My People, My People” had been revised in the original printing to be less “political.” In this essay she states, “My People love a show. We love to act more than we love to see acting done. We love to look at them and we love to put them on, and we love audiences when we get to specifying … We just love to dramatize” (in Dust Tracks, 222). Given what she says in the Appendix and her reputation as a careful writer committed to chronicling her culture with the craft of an oral storyteller, I would argue that her literary gifts do not “overshadow” her abilities to write autobiography as critics like Hill contend. Rather, as Angelou’s description of “confusions, contusions and contradictions”  suggest, Hurston is challenging reader expectation (“Foreword” ix). Angelou’s discussion of race in her foreword asks us to consider the book more complexly. Angelou includes in her discussion two moments of interaction with White people when Hurston was a child: with the old man who took her fishing and the ladies who were impressed with her reading of Shakespeare and gave her presents. Angelou points out the subtlety: Hurston includes a footnote about the White man’s use of the N word. Hurston says he did not mean race but rather a weak person of any race. But Angelou says that anyone would have interpreted his advice as “‘act white’” (xi). This scene, together with Hurston’s description of the White ladies’ infatuation with Hurston’s ability to recite poetry, causes Angelou to wonder, “Is it possible that Hurston, who had been bold and bodacious all her life, was carrying on the tradition she had begun with the writing of Spunk in 1925? That is, did she mean to excoriate some of her own people, whom she felt had ignored or ridiculed her?” (xi). In her memoir, Hurston tells us that the White man basically told her, Don’t be black. The White ladies rewarded her for reading like a

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White person. As a writer she did not act or write White. If she is rebuking Wright and Hughes and others who fiercely criticized her for her work, as Angelou suggests, then we must focus on her skills as a writer. With the assumption that she crafted the memoir purposefully, her subversion of the autobiographical genre is clear, leading her to construct a life narrative that “specifies” readers. That is to say, readers expecting the “truth” and don’t get it are compelled to grapple with the nuances of race, history, and storytelling more complex than were expected in a memoir at the time. Gates characterizes Dust Tracks as a “controversial account of her life” (291). Parts are imaginary, Gates says, “like a masquerader putting on a disguise for a ball, like a character in her own fictions. In this way, Hurston wrote herself, and sought in her works to rewrite the ‘self’ of ‘the race’ in its several private and public guises, largely for ideological reasons” (291). Rather than assess Hurston as disingenuous, Dust Tracks can be seen as an account of a “writer’s life, rather than an account, as she says, of ‘the Negro problem’” (Gates 291). Hurston therefore signifies readers, while at the same time teaching them the necessity of understanding a complex history of African Americans within the history of the nation. Gates’s assessment that Hurston “moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly” (291), is evidence of a “revision of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’” (292) and a “‘full understanding of modernism’” (293). As Genevieve Sexton’s more recent exploration of Dust Tracks illustrates, however, more can be said about the complexity of the function of Hurston’s autobiography. Like Meisenhelder’s assessment of her ethnography, Mules and Men, Hurston “carefully arranged her folktales and meticulously delineated the contexts in which they were narrated to reveal complex relationships between race and gender in Black life. Underscoring the traditional subversive role of African American folklore, she highlights the continuing role folktales play in Black people’s struggles with economic and racial oppression. Hurston also details the function of folklore in conflicts between Black men and Black women, showing both how men use folktales to reinforce and legitimate oppression of women and how women use them to fight against a subservient role and to assert their power” (Meisenhelder 267). As Sexton notes, “much of [Hurston’s] writing demonstrates a desire to give primacy to African Americans—not just allowing, but celebrating the ways in which they reasoned and inventively re-cast the English language through signifying and other linguistic play” (193). Shifting away from the slave narratives that were “authenticated” by Whites (192–193),

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reading Hurston’s Barracoon as “testimony to Middle Passage” is more productive than reading (and critiquing) it as a slave narrative. Rather, Sexton argues, “Hurston taps into the silencing of a historical event shared by African Americans but which is largely absent from slave narratives” (193). A key moment in Sexton’s discussion is her description of the function of Hurston’s story: “consider Hurston’s attempt to ‘do’ something through this story: that is, to find a way for the missing voice of the Middle Passage to be heard. This contested, dismissed, unpublished text is rife with a passion that generates questions about the origins of African American identity, impelled by the desires of a scholar who recognized the importance of the project” (193). The authenticity, that is, is dictated by Hurston herself, not White readers. Therefore, both Barracoon and Dust Tracks can be read as protests—protest to representations of Black Americans as only victims and protest to autobiography as restrictive form. The structure that Hurston employs, including insertions of Black vernacular, in Dust Tracks reminds the reader that they are reading and listening, that they are part of the porch culture of tall tales and storytelling and in turn part of the African oral tradition. Her performance of autobiography brings readers back to that tradition repeatedly throughout the text. Within the first few pages she includes a history of the land where she grew up, essentially a land acknowledgment statement, much like Mossola telling her, “you have to know my land and ancestors in order to know me.” She deliberately intertwines the history of “Negro” and American history in Florida, structuring Dust Tracks like Mossola’s narrative. She presented contradictions and confusions not because she was secretive so much as they did not serve the purpose of her memoir—to chronicle her life as a writer and to document the history of ordinary Black Americans. In this way, her scholarship and her life narrative become witness to a complex history of the Black oral tradition and linguistic justice (Smitherman, Bell). The rhetorical strategies Hurston used as a writer to instruct her readers, much like a griot, pulled back the curtain on historical narratives to reveal the ways that Black culture rooted in African tradition is a critical part of that history. By challenging that history through memoir, and through the writing of her stories, novels, and ethnographies, Hurston reveals the inadequacy of conventions of those forms to account for the complex, racially fraught, and celebratory aspects of Blacks in American culture.

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Hurston’s work continues to influence our thinking about race and ways to reframe Black experience within historical moments of racial injustice. Her novels and autobiography are readily taught in high-school English classes and college courses. Recently musician Candice Hoyes released a single called “Zora’s Moon.” In a recent National Public Radio interview, Hoyes discussed the influence that Hurston has on her as a writer. Describing herself as an archivist, Hoyes expands spaces to embrace the Black community, which historically has been marginalized. She is influenced by musicians Roberto Falck, Sara Vaughn, and Billie Holliday, and also by writers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Sampling the radio interview of Hurston with Mary McBride (a queer radical, outspoken, radio host), where Hurston speaks of her joy of seeing the moon as a girl, Hoyes’s song “celebrates black joy.” Hoyes speaks to the power of Hurston’s words, and says, “As I connect with Zora, the moon goes through phases, but the moon itself never changes…the story about the moon become like a portal for me into the next work I want to make. It becomes an affirmation, and it closes a certain sister circle between myself and Hurston” (Hoyes 2020).

Works Cited Abbott, Dorothy. “Recovering Zora Neal Hurston’s Work.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (1991): 174–181. Abel, Elizabeth. “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation” Critical Inquiry (1993): 470–499. Angelou, Maya. “Foreword.”  Dust Tracks on the Road by Zora Neale Hurston. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. vii–xii. Bell, April Baker. Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. London: Routledge, 2020. Benesch, Klaus. “Oral Narrative and Literary Text: Afro-American Folklore in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Callaloo (1988): 627–635. Beverly, John. “The Margin at the Center.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Ed. Georg Gugelberger. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 266–286. “Black History Bootcamp.” GirlTrek Podcast. Co-hosts Vanessa Garrison and Morgan Dixon. 2020. Boi, Paola. “Moses, Man of Power, Man of Knowledge: A signifying Reading of Zora Neale Hurston (Between a Laugh and a Song).” In Diedrich, Maria and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, eds. Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Berg: New York, 1990. 107–126.

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Bordelon, Pam, ed. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project. New York: Norton, 1999. Borders, Florence Edwards. “Zora Neale Hurston: Hidden Woman.”  Callaloo (1979): 89–92. Boxwell, D. A. “‘Sis Cat’ as Ethnographer: Self-presentation and Self-inscription in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men.” African American Review 26.4 (1992): 605–618. Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston: New York: Scribner, 2002. Campbell, Kermit E. “The Signifying Monkey Revisited: Vernacular Discourse and African American Personal Narratives.” JAC: Rhetoric, Writing, Culture, Politics. 14.2 (1994): 463–473. Caputi, Jane. “‘Specifying Fannie Hurst: Langton Hughes’s Limitations of Life, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as Answers to Hurst’s ‘Imitation of Life.’” Black American Literature Forum (1990): 697–710. Carpio, Glenda R. and Werner Sollors. “The Newly Complicated Zora Neale Hurston.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 2, 2011): B6–B10. Charnov, Elaine S. “The Performative Visual Anthropology Films of Zora Neale Hurston.” Film Criticism 23.1 (1998): 38–47. Clarke, Deborah. “‘The porch couldn’t talk for looking’: Voice and Vision in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” African American Review 35.4 (Winter 2001): 599–613. Cluba, John. “The Worm Against the Word: The Hermeneutical Challenge in Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” African American Review 34.1 (2000): 119–133. Davis, Cynthia and Verner D. Mitchell, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism. Scarecrow Press, 2013. Davis, Doris. “‘De Takin’ Game’: The Creation of Psychic Space in Selected Short Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26 (2007): 269–286. Dee. Ruby. “75th Anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.’’ New York: The Greene Space at WNYC. March 20, 2012. Dolby-Stahl, Sandra. “Literary Objectives: Hurston’s Use of Personal Narrative in Mules and Men.” Western Folklore 51.1 (1992): 51–63. Domina, Lynn. “‘Protection in My Mouf’: Self, Voice, and Community in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road and Mules and Men.” African American Review 31.2 (Summer 1997): 197–209. Dutton, Wendy. “The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston.” Frontiers 13.2 (1993): 131–152. Edkins, Diana and Carole Marks. The Power of Pride: Stylemakers and Rule Breakers of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Crown Publishers, 1999.

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Feracho, Lesley. Linking the Americas: Race, Hybrid Discourse, and the Reformulation of Feminine Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Fraile, Anna Marie. “Zora Neale Hurston’s Experimentation with Voice in her Short Stories.” REDEN : revista española de estudios norteamericanos 13 (1997): 27–40. Fulmer, Jacquiline. Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, NiDhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Afterword: Zora Neale Hurston: ‘A Negro Way of Saying.’” Dust Tracks on the Road. New  York: HarperPerennial. 1991 (1942). 257–267. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke. “Introduction: Zora Reale Hurston: Establishing the Canon.” In Zora Neale Hurston: The Complete Stories. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke, eds. New York: HarperPerennial, 1995. ix–xxiii. Harris, Trudier. “African American Lives: Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver.” In Cambridge Companion to Autobiography.  Emily O.  Wittman and Maria DeBattista, eds. New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 180–194. Harris, Trudier. “Our People, Our People.” In Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond. Lillie P.  Howard, ed. Greenwood Press, 1993a. 31–42. Harris, Trudier. “‘Africanizing the Audience’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Transformation of White Folks in Mules and Men.” The Zora Neale Hurston Forum 7:1 (1993b): 43–58. Harris, Trudier. “The Trickster in African American Literature.” National Humanities Center online resources for high school teachers. TeacherServe, Summer 2009. Harris, Trudier. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Heard, Matthew. “‘Dancing is dancing no matter who is doing it’: Zora Neale Hurston, literacy, and contemporary writing pedagogy.” College Literature 34 (2007): 129–155. Hill, Lynda Marion. Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996. Holloway, Karla. Moorings & Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. hooks, bell. 1989. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Subversive Reading.” Matatu 5–23. Hoyes, Candice. With ‘Zora’s Moon,’ Jazz Singer Candice Hoyes Brings Black History Into The Present.” Host Tonya Mosley. National Public Radio’s Here and Now. Washington, DC. August 13, 2020.

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Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on the Road. New  York: HarperPerennial, 1991 (1942). Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Perennial Library. (1934) 1990. Hurston, Zora Neale. The Complete Stories. New York: HarperPerennial, 2008. Jackson, Chuck. “Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics.” African American Review 34.4 (2000): 639–660. Jirousek, Lori. ‘That Commonality of Feeling’” Hurston, Hybridity, and Ethnography.” African American Review 38 (2004): 417–427. Johnson, Barbara. 1984. “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. ed. Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Methuen. 205–219. Johnson, Barbara. “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 278–289. Jones, Kirkland C. “Folk Humor as Comic Relief in Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” The Zora Neal Hurston Forum (1986): 26–31. Kaplan, Carla, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Kim, Myung Ja. “Zora Neale Hurston’s Search for Self: Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The Journal of English Language and Literature (1990): 491–513. Kitch, Sally L. “Gender and Language: Dialect, Silence, and the Disruption of Discourse. Women’s Studies (1987): 66–78. Konzett, Delia C. Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Li, Stephanie. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in American History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc, 2020. Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun. Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. MacKethan, Lucinda H. “Mother Wit: Humor in Afro-American Women’s Autobiography.” Studies in American Humor (1985): 51–61. McKay, Nellie. “‘Crayon Enlargements of Life’” Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as Autobiography.” In Awkward, Michael, ed., New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990. 51–70. Meisenhelder, Susan. “Conflict and Resistance in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men.” Journal of American Folklore: (1996): 267–288. Moody-Turner, Shirley. “Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation.”  Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life. Ed. Tiffany R. Patterson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. Plant, Deborah G. “The Folk Preacher and the Folk; Sermon Form in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road.” Folklore Forum (1988): 3–19. Powell, Katrina M. “Reading Human Rights Literature through Oral Traditions.” Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Eds. Sophia A.  McClennen and Alexandra Shulteis Moore. London: Routledge, 2015. 136–147.

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Raynaud, Claudine. “Autobiography as a ‘Lying’ Session: Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road.” In Weixlmann, Joe, and Houston A. Baker, Jr., eds. Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory. Greenwood, FL: Penkevill. 111–138. Robey, Judith. “Generic Strategies in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road.” Black American Literature Forum (1990): 667–683. Sadoff, Dianne F. “Black Matrilineage: The Case of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston.” Signs 11.1 (1985): 4–26. Seidel, Kathryn Lee. The Artist in the Kitchen: The Economics of Creativity in Hurston’s ‘Sweat.’ Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991. 110–120. Sexton, Genevieve. “The Last Witness: Testimony and Desire in Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon.’” Discourse 25 (2004): 189–210. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. Threadcraft, Torry. “The Power of Untold Slave Narratives.” The Atlantic. 1 October 2018. Trefzer, Annette. “Possessing the Self: Caribbean Identities in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse.” African American Review 34.2 (2000): 299–312. Wald, Priscilla. “Becoming ‘Colored’: The Self-Authorized Language of Difference in Zora Neale Hurston.” American Literary History (1990): 79–100. Walker, Alice. “Looking for Zora.” In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. (Ms. Magazine  1975). San Diego: Harcour Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 93–109. Walker, Pierre A. 1998. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Post-Modern Self in Dust Tracks on a Road.” African American Review 32.3 (1998): 387–399. Wall, Cheryl A. “Mules and Men and Women: Zora Neale Hurston’s Strategies of Narration and Visions of Female Empowerment.” Black American Literature Forum (1989): 661–80. Wallach, Jennifer Jensen. Closer to Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Ward, Jervette R. “Introduction.” Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism. Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell, eds. Scarecrow Press, 2013. 1–5. West, M.  Genevieve. Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture. Gainesville: University of Florida, 2005. Wright, Richard. “Laughter and Tears.” The New Masses. 5 October 1937: 22–23.

CHAPTER 4

Audre Lorde’s Intellectual Body: Scripting an Embodied Activism

In the film, A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, Lorde says, “the battles we fight in this country as Black Americans against racism, police brutality, unemployment, miseducation, destruction, destruction of our children, history, earth, planet, are not our battles alone. We are, as members of the international community of people of color, connected with these battles all over the world.” While #BlackLivesMatter protests against the murders of Black people continue well into the twenty-first century, Lorde’s words just before her death in 1992 are striking given the continued violence against Black people in the United States in 2021. Her insistence that we think of these issues globally was a way to draw communities together to fight them collectively. Many are turning to Lorde’s words, including renowned writer Roxanne Gay, who read from Lorde’s work on September 10, 2020, during a read-in titled, “A Celebration of Audre Lorde,” to commemorate Gay’s new edition of Lorde’s poetry the same year. During this live public reading with more than 400 virtual listeners, Gay stated, “I have loved Audre Lorde since I was a very young woman, nearly thirty years, and to be able to put together a collection of her work has been one of the greatest honors of my career thus far. You know, as I was thinking about this book, I couldn’t help but realize that a lot of what Audre was talking about in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s is still applicable now, which is a little depressing…she is both timely and timeless…a lot of us who are writing today are doing so because of what she did” (September 10, 2020). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. M. Powell, Performing Autobiography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4_4

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During the celebration, Gay and her colleagues, Mahogany Browne, Porsha Olayiwola, and Saeed Jones, discussed Lorde’s poetry and its relevance nearly 30 years later. During the conversation, Gay stated, “Every time I think, ‘Oh, I don’t have the energy to fight this fight,’ I think, ‘No, Audre had the energy.’” Several months before the Roxane Gay panel, the Third World Newsreel held a panel titled, “The Legacy and Power of Audre Lorde,” featuring a film screening for A Litany for Survival. Virtual readings and screenings like these, together with Twitter feeds, FaceBook pages, postcards, buttons, and Instagram posts, all contain photographs of Audre or quotes from her various poems and essays, especially, “Your silence will not protect you.” Like Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde’s contribution to literary and racial history is well cemented. Like Hurston, Lorde’s voice is booming and strong, confident, and assured in the work she is doing. In contrast to Hurston, however, Lorde is openly fierce in her racial justice work, outspoken about the “race issue,” and committed to uncomfortable conversations across groups to find common ground toward defeating common enemies: racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Her evocation of Afrekete, the granddaughter of a Dahomean goddess and known as a trickster, suggests that Lorde too is immersed in African oral traditions as ways to understand embodied experience through African storytelling and aurality.1 Central to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s together with Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez, among others, Lorde’s work “interrogates the position of women, the freedom of sexual preference, and black patriarchy in creating a black nation. Her poetry also challenges violence, homophobia, separatism, and women’s subjugation” (Simms-Burton 80).2 Well known for discussing her personal experience as a way to understand and self-define in a world hostile toward her, Lorde saw her life narratives (including essays, speeches, poems, a biomythography, and journals) as ways to understand broader systems of injustice and, furthermore, as a way to connect across communities. While Hurston was criticized for her comment about overcoming racial injustice as being “up to the individual” (Dust Tracks 172), Lorde’s insistence that individuals interrogate their lives to understand race, class, gender, and sexuality inequities together with understanding institutional systems of oppression made for a huge moment in the Black feminist movement in the 1970s and beyond.3 Lorde asks of her audiences, just a little over a decade after Hurston’s

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death, “What are the particular details within each of our lives that can be scrutinized and altered to help bring about change? How do we redefine difference for all women? It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences” (Sister Outsider, 122). She encourages her audiences/readers to change from within, recognize their life, understand their complicity, so that little by little, person by person, a change can come. At the same time, however, community is a key refrain—as she repeatedly asks women to see their commonalities across their differences, to bear witness to oppression, and to use their differences as the strength to protest and overcome injustice.4 She suggests we “recognize and solve our problems together” (Sister Outsider 43) and listen to the women who are different than us. She says, “where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives” (“The Transformation of Silence into Action,” Sister Outsider, 43). Lorde sees the work of poetry as testimony and witness. Using the collective “we” in several of her poems as well as her essays and speeches, Lorde’s poems record, “visual images, metaphors, sounds, rhythms, and emotional impact—that can give voice to having survived” (Steele 3). The notion of survival, through generational trauma (of slavery) and the violences of racism, is addressed in Lorde’s poetry in ways that show “that it is through literature that we may heal from traumatic histories” (Steele 5). Lorde’s work serves as a “poetry of witness” which “enables…listen[ing] across our differences, that we might begin to reconstruct these skipped histories, claim them, and heal from them” (Steele 6). Knowing that “traumatic histories continue to affect black women both individually and collectively” (Steele 8), “Lorde’s witnessing took place in the context of the feminist and civil rights movements” which “makes it possible for readers to remember, reconstruct, and bear witness to our culture’s history of violence toward women and African Americans” (Steele 10). Steele suggests that Lorde, among other writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, draws on her respective cultural mythologies to imagine “healing for our own times” (12). In her poetry and prose, Lorde’s writing works against silences of abuse. In her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, for instance, Lorde’s account of her friend’s abuse and resulting suicide serves as testimony, “providing a model for collective and individual healing”

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(Steele 35). In Zami, Lorde also discusses her multiple identities, as a way to provide connection: “It was hard enough to be Black, to be Black and female, to be Black female and gay” (Zami 224). Invoking mythology and a connection to her ancestors including the trickster Afrekete, Lorde writes her identities as a collective and historical struggle. Provost suggests that, “as a woman and a lesbian, Lorde found resonance in the fluid gender orientation and free engagement in unconventional, even taboo, sexual practices that these trickster figures enact. In Zami, as well as in a number of earlier and later poems, Lorde repeatedly returns to the power of the trickster’s heterogeneous identity and ability to communicate, connect, and survive despite (and because of) difference” (47). Lorde’s attention to historical and collective healing, a relational and invitational approach to understanding racial and gender inequities, is part of what made her a key figure in Black feminist thought. In “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara Smith5 makes clear that Lorde’s first volumes of poetry are significant to the development of Black feminist criticism. Smith also highlights how dangerous it was to write her 1978 article about Lorde: “Long before I tried to write this I felt that I was attempting something unprecedented, something dangerous merely by writing about Black women writers from a feminist perspective and about Black lesbian writers from any perspective at all” (Smith 20). Smith’s fears reveals the racism and homophobia that existed at the time and says that, “Even at this moment I am not convinced that one can write explicitly as a Black lesbian and live to tell about it. Yet there are a handful of Black women who have risked everything for truth. Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Ann Allen Shockley have at least broken ground in the vast wilderness of works that do not exist” (Smith 26) and she footnotes three of Lorde’s poetry collections, New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), and Between Our Selves (1976), that do that work. The editor of Sister Outsider, Nancy K. Bereano, also considered Lorde’s voice as “central to the development of contemporary feminist theory. She is at the cutting edge of consciousness” (7). Healing, community, and breaking silence were always part of Lorde’s work, including her very early poetry. While Lorde is less interested in the competitive aspect of playing the dozens, she is interested in the ways that wordplay can, “challenge damaging beliefs and practices” (Provost 55). According to Provost, “Lorde refuses to become a passive victim or conform to excessively limiting roles” (56). Working with linguistic prowess, Lorde is able to break down oppressive silence through language and articulate that oppression (Provost 57).

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Through the use of direct address with her readers, she points to readers’ complicity but in ways that inspire action because “while Lorde challenges she can simultaneously connect, inspire, and energize” (Provost 57). For instance, in the poem “Between Ourselves,” Provost states that “Strong individual and community identities cannot be built on a normative homogeneity, Lorde suggests, whether the basis be race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other factor…she challenges herself and her readers (note the ‘we’) to confront our fear of difference and our tendency to define ourselves by pointing to, and often stigmatizing, what we are not” (50). Responsibility for each other is an aspect of community in another poem, “To My Daughter the Junkie on a Train” (New York head shop and museum). In this poem, Lorde addresses the multiple ways that Black girls are abandoned and how that abandonment manifests later in their lives and in the community. Lorde opens the poem with the collective we: “Children we have not borne,” making readers accountable to the plight of the drug user on the train. With compassion she thinks about the girl: Little girl on the nod if we are measured by dreams we avoid then you are the nightmare of all sleeping mothers rocking back and forth the dead weight of your arms locked about our necks heavier than our habit of looking for reasons.

Lorde asks readers to see the drug user as a “little girl,” the child that Lorde and the community cannot give “what you once needed.” According to Steele, in this construction, Lorde makes readers complicit, not able to look away from the girl: “Through this poem, as in many of her poems, Lorde speaks to an addressee—a daughter, a friend, a lover, a sister, a reader—who shares in the witnessing process with Lorde” (Steele 74). In this way, we see Lorde discussing how a community cares for each other yet the difficulty of that care given the history of trauma within the community. The history of slavery, Jim Crow era laws, racism, and ongoing violence makes its way into everyday occurrences that, while different, are forms of “annihilation,” as she suggests in another poem, “Cables To

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Rage or I’ve Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time” (Cables To Rage 1970). Here she describes being passed by on the street by a white bus driver: I have been given other doses of truth— that particular form of annihilation— shot through by the cold eye of the way things are baby and left for dead on a hundred streets of this city but oh that captain marvel glance brushing up against my skull like a steel bar in passing and my heart withered sheets in the gutter passing passing booted feet and bus drivers old yentes in Brighton Beach kitchens SHIT! said the king and the whole court strained passing me out as an ill-tempered wind lashing around the corner of 125th Street and Lenox.

Not unlike the girl on the train, forgotten and blamed for her addiction, the look from the “captain marvel” is a “particular form of annihilation,” where passing her by highlights the ways White people ignored her solely  for the purpose of making her feel invisible, not worthy. Lorde’s poem, like many, addresses the ways that Black people are left behind, ignored, erased, made invisible, or not worthy because of their Blackness. The poem addresses multiple ways she deals with racism everyday—from a neighbor, a bus driver. This everydayness of racism, “that particular form of annihilation,” while different than lynchings or physical forms of violence, is damaging to the Black community nonetheless. In a poem titled, “The Dozens,” (Cables of Rage) evoking the signifying tradition in Black storytelling, Lorde speaks of the racism of a lover, one who ignores her on the street. She says, Nothing says that you must see me in the street with us so close together at that red light a blind man could have smelled his grocer— and nothing says that you must say hello

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as we pass in the street but we have known each other too well in the dark for this and it hurts me when you do not speak. But no one you were with was quite so fine that I won’t remember this and suffer you in turn and in my own fashion which is certainly not in the street.

In this poem, Lorde describes the way that the snub of a lover based in racial attitudes has impacts when understood within the broader impacts of community and race relations. At the same time, she says that ignoring her will hurt her but she will not show that suffering in the street, in public—she will not let racism define her. Like “The Dozens,”  many of Lorde’s poems, though addressing oppression, do so in a way that celebrates individual and community culture. In the following from “Coal,” originally published in the volume The First Cities (1968) and edited by Beat poet Diane DiPrima, Lorde celebrates Black identification: Love is a word, another kind of open. As the diamond comes into a knot of flame I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside take my word for jewel in the open light.

The celebratory identification with Blackness in this work highlights Lorde’s early treatment of the ways that self-naming has power. In another poem, “Black Mother Woman,” she assesses Black celebration through the mother: But I have peeled away your anger down to its core of love and look mother I am a dark temple where your true spirit rises

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beautiful tough as chestnut stanchion against nightmares of weakness and if my eyes conceal a squadron of conflicting rebellions I learned from you to define myself through your denials.

While the narrator loves and honors the mother, she must not do what the mother did—she will not remain silent. She indicates the rebuilding of the inside that is necessary when the outside seems worthless and the community needs to help. In this way, she documents a life and the racism experienced by it, all while dismantling it for what it is. This kind of bearing witness, “is the way to survive ‘the horrors we are living,’ horrors that result from the histories that affect the present and will continue to affect the future until they are acknowledged. Witnessing opens the way to survival by creating the possibility of a collective ‘we’ that was destroyed by the history of traumatic violence” (Steele 80). Understanding Lorde’s work as witnessing places her at the center of African American women activists including Fannie Barrier Williams, Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, and Angela Davis, among others, highlighting her role in breaking silences for survival and community building. Lorde’s early poetry volumes such as The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), Coal (1976), and Between Our Selves (1976) were published before her cancer diagnosis, but “Like her prose,” argues Morris, “Lorde’s poetry is a performance of the embodied self. Just as many of her [later] essays were originally speeches, so, too, her poetry emerges from an oral impulse” (Morris 176). Well published and increasingly popular with WW Norton’s publication of Coal in 1976, Lorde was already revered as a voice of the women’s movement when her famous “Translating Silence into Action” (1977) speech at the Modern Language Association was given and where she revealed her cancer diagnosis. Her early poetry volumes are subtle and nuanced, but their attention to the silence of African American women’s multiple oppressions, rooted in the history of slavery in the United States, were her commitments well before Zami and The Cancer Journals were published in the early 80s. While survival and embodiment become keenly felt in these later works, she was writing about these themes earlier as well, particularly in the ways that Black women were forced to remain silent.

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In the poem “A Litany for Survival” (Black Unicorn 1978), Lorde repeats, “we were never meant to survive” (31–32). As Steele’s explains, the history of African American women’s literature as witness has been a traumatic silencing of experience. Steele says that, “While black women indeed have endured multiple oppressions in American history, the trauma at the core of their oppression is sexual. The enforced use of black women’s sexuality under slavery, compounded by generations of sexual violence, together mean that black women must not only struggle against multiple oppressions from outside, from the exterior, but that they must also contend with a legacy of silence at the interior of their being” (Steel 32). This legacy of silence, then, is what Lorde’s work speaks against. Focusing on issues of community, protest, and testimony by writing the way her body moves through systems of marginalization, Lorde’s refrain “as a black lesbian feminist warrior poet,” a phrase she repeats throughout her work, Lorde was used to contending with culturally constructed identity as she examined her multi-layered marginalization. A key question of this chapter is how these multiple identities get inscribed. Lorde simultaneously named her identities and resisted any essentialist categories, not only in terms of identity but also in terms of the forms her writing would take.

Disruptions of Identities/Disruptions of Form In the same way that Lorde resisted certain representations of Black identity in her early poetry, Lorde also “experimented with genres. Thus, for her, it was no longer autobiography and poetry and essay and journal, but all of them at the same time. She opened up all genres and made them autobiographical. Her multicultural self is thus reflected in a multicultural text, in multi-genres, in which the individual cultures are no longer separate and autonomous entities but melt into a larger whole without losing their individual importance” (Birkle 202). By examining identity, collective history, and silencing across genres, Lorde was able to challenge institutional oppression, “expos[ing] the destructive effects of oppression in material terms while revealing the positive effects of experience fully lived in opposition to institutionalized destructiveness” (Morris 183). While embodiment is a central theme in her early poetry, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she became conscious of her body in yet another way, writing of this transformation in The Cancer Journals, which is often discussed for representations of lesbian identity, illness narrative, and

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commentary on the cancer industry. Lorde’s biomythography, Zami, an innovative genre written simultaneously with The Cancer Journals, invokes mythology to place ancestry as central to community healing. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, written the year after her mastectomy, Lorde (re)writes herself by constructing a fantasy self, protesting the self expected of her and based on the myths of her matriarchal culture and the reality of her own life where her love of women is natural and “normal.” A biography of the women in her life, including her Caribbean immigrant mother, friends, lovers, and coworkers, we can see the poetics of community, protest, and mentorship in the biomythography. Lorde defines “Zami” as “a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers” (255) and  seeks to redefine the American dream by retelling it through African American myth and oral history (Henke 104). This autobiographical fiction has long been studied for its role as an African American text interweaving fact, fiction, myth, and fantasy (Raynaud). She creates the  Black lesbian  as artist, where “there is no dichotomy between the woman and the poet…[by] insisting on an identity that encompasses all the parts of herself” (DiBernard 209). Lorde describes her experiences of being overweight, resistant, lesbian, and Black in her narrative and the ways the systems of power work to subjugate her through these identities. However, Lorde reconstructs these identities through the body, the body/fantasy self in Zami. In understanding and accepting her body she is able to understand and accept herself, but it is only through discovering her physical body in conjunction with reading and writing about her body that this occurs. She intellectualizes her body, without becoming detached from it, in order to resist the “other” status placed on her body. For instance, to understand where her body came from, her island “home,” she hunts for Carriacou in the library—looking for it on the map. But when she, “hunted for the magic place during geography lessons or in the free library time, I never found it, and came to believe that my mother’s geography was a fantasy or crazy or at least too old-fashioned” (Zami 14). Her quest to understand her body, as it would inform her intellectual thinking, became a necessity as she struggled with difference and repression. Her quest to understand her body through community and geography also includes a yearning for Caribbean food, which represents a “yearning for a lost homeland: Caribbean immigrants in New York treasure fruit that is sent by relatives back home” (Lindenmeyer 473). While her mother,

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Linda, refuses to discuss her body, Audre’s longing for understanding her body is connected to understanding her mother’s homeland. At the doctor’s office, her mother and the doctor whispered about her body without her. As a girl, Audre, “knew as much as [she] could have possibly found out in those days from the hard-to-get books on the ‘closed shelf’ behind the librarian’s desk at the public library, where [she] had brought a forged note from home in order to be allowed to read them, sitting under the watchful eye of the librarian at a special desk reserved for that purpose” (Zami 75). Her mother is unwilling to discuss menstrual and sexual matters with her daughter. However, when Audre reveals that she has had her period, this “released a flood of newfound knowledge and forged a semimystical bond with a maternal genealogy that leads back to rites of empowerment associated with African Orisha transported to the new world” (Henke 107). Even Linda, who is strict in her silence, cannot deny the African heritage that values myth and matriarchal bonding, suggesting that the body is knowledge. Audre’s mother’s silence in several matters, including bodily functions, the homeland, and experiences of racism, all confound the young Audre in her quest to understand herself and her experiences. She realizes the devastating effects of her mother’s silences when her friend Gennie asks to stay with her rather than go home to an abusive father. Audre remains silent about Gennie’s situation and she has to go home. Because her mother refuses to acknowledge racism, as if confronting it meant acknowledging some kind of shame, and because she “had grown up in such an isolated world that it was hard for me to recognize difference as anything other than a threat” (Zami 81), Audre keeps silent about her friend’s distress. When Gennie commits suicide, Lorde writes, “I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing” (251). In high school, Lorde finally found kinship with the “Branded,” her best friends who celebrated the ways that they were different. Rather than difference being a threat, with her friends their difference was a source of pride: we were proud of our outrageousness and our madness, our bizarre-colored inks and quill pens. We learned how to mock the straight set, and how to cultivate our group paranoia into an instinct for self-protection that always stopped our shenanigans just short of expulsion. We wrote obscure poetry

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and cherished our strangeness as the spoils of default, and in the process we learned that pain and rejection hurt, but that they weren’t fatal, and that they could be useful since they couldn’t be avoided. We learned that not feeling at all was worse than hurting. (Zami 82)

The intellectual activity of the Branded taught young Audre how to deal with racism that her mother’s silence could not. Henke describes Lorde’s depiction of her experiences in Zami as, “her journey toward political agency [that] requires a long initiation” (106) and where, “she comes from a long line of survivors” (108). Lorde’s narrative highlights her refusal “to be a victim of racism or homophobia, she reconstructs the subject-position of her autobiographical person by ignoring phallocratic social organization and re-creating a gynocentric and Afrocentric space of survival in the heart of white heterosexist society” (Henke 113). She recreates her mystical self, Zami, renames herself, taking the pieces of her life experiences that have taught her and empowered her, through her study of them. The “intellectual body” develops in Zami, its presence is felt as one that knows survival, yet is yearning for more. This yearning is evident when she moves out of her mother’s house as an adolescent. The shapes of the women who helped her during this time “join Linda and Gran’Ma Liz and Gran’Aunt Anni in my dreaming, where they dance with swords in their hands, stately forceful steps, to mark the time when they were all warriors” (Zami 104). Lorde’s biomythography normalizes her multi-layered identities by challenging accepted notions of the body, race, sexuality, and feminism. Through pride of each she reflects her strong advocacy for women, particularly in their stance as feminists seeking change. She was acutely aware that the color of her body and the way she chose to love her body placed her outside societal norms, but her trick, her reimagining, is to refigure societal norms as perverted, not her identities.

Rewriting the Body While her mother’s refusal to admit racism (because she saw doing to as admitting a weakness) was an example of revising that caused damage for her daughter, Audre did learn the skill of recreating from her mother, but for the purpose to cast a self that was loved and accepted. Her challenge to societal notions of the body and sexuality were brought into sharp relief when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Lorde wrote through her

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illness and mastectomy, challenging patriarchal expectations of how women were to “act” during their illness and the decisions that such an illness provokes. Just as her mother “rewrote” a racist scene of White people spitting on her child, Lorde rewrites the self, not the damaged or othered self that White people see, but a celebrated and mythological self. Like Hurston, Lorde utilizes the Black oral tradition and mythology, including the trickster in the “way she constructs both text and identity within the text. The two are intertwined” (Provost). Invoking the Afro-Caribbean mythical figures Afrekete and MawuLisa “establishes her linguistic authority identifying herself with [the] black goddess” (Keating 28). In doing so, Lorde is able to challenge the dominant values of a society. Where her poetry evokes images, Lorde’s essays after her cancer diagnosis reflect an urgency and anger. She says that, “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy to service progress and change…[A]nger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification” (“Uses of Anger,” Sister Outsider 127). For Lorde, translating or writing about the forces of racism and sexism and homophobia that warrant anger become “acts against oppression [and] become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within” (“Erotic as Power,”  Sister Outsider, 58). In each of these instances, she encourages other women to write the injustices they have faced not only for their own healing, but also for the collective healing as well. While she addresses difference and otherness in Zami, it is in The Cancer Journals, where she writes as a means to reconstruct herself as a warrior against the disease and to resist the view of women with mastectomies as victims. The “intellectual body,” while present in Zami, becomes active in The Cancer Journals as it resists cultural inscription by refusing the prosthesis that doctors, nurses, and other breast cancer patients encourage her to wear. Read together, Lorde’s autobiographical texts work to form a cultural critique that moves beyond mere resistance—they demand critical consciousness and activism. Furthermore, Lorde’s self-­ representations in these two works, particularly of her body, not only resist cultural inscriptions of the body but also challenge the traditional genre of autobiography.

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If Zami is a self-declaration, a self-construction of a strong mythological figure surviving trauma, childhood pain, and racism, The Cancer Journals is a documentation and witnessing of her pain at the recurrence of her cancer and masectomy. Lorde wrote journal entries over a two-year period where she documented the process of integrating the cancer crisis into her life and in turn how she refused to succumb to it, even in death. One of her most popular publications, fusing journal entries, poetry, and essays, Lorde wove her commitments to protest and community through testimony of her pain with critical commentary on the limitations of the health system, especially for Black women. Despite Lorde’s illness and pain, she continued to write and ask provocative questions, insisting that she would not be silenced, even by her illness. When a White woman approached her at the hospital about prosthesis after her mastectomy, Lorde resisted by saying, “that socially sanctioned prothesis is merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and separate from each other” (CJ 16). Her political commentary on prosthesis is intermixed with her reflection on her relationship with Frances. She asks, “What will it be like making love to me? Will she still find my body delicious?” (CJ 43). Lorde poses what might seem like contradictory questions: critical reflection on bodily expectations of women by hiding the scars of surgery and the insecurities and fears about her body being desirable. Having both in the same text was a revelation: one could take a political stance against gendered norms and have sensual and sexual desires. This kind of disjuncture in the text demands that readers address the simultaneous opposing forces acting on women as they face trauma or illness. The Cancer Journals has been used in narrative of medicine courses, book clubs, and women’s and gender studies courses. But like Zami, The Cancer Journals disrupts what’s expected of illness narratives. Included in The Cancer Journals is her essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” This essay appears together  with the journal entries, interwoven with her later reflections on those entries and that period in her life. She integrates her poetry into these entries as well. In her essay, she challenges her audience: “perhaps I am the fact of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am black, because I am lesbian because I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?” (21). She not only challenges through the naming of her identities but also challenges the audience to consider the ways they are doing the work of combatting racism and oppression. If in Zami Lorde

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rewrites herself, in The Cancer Journals Lorde challenges women to rewrite their selves as social and political activism. In Recovering Bodies, Thomas Couser calls attention to autobiographies of illness and disability that demystify suffering. He delineates narratives of illness to explore the ways writing becomes a means of unifying a self fragmented. He states that the relation between bodily dysfunction and personal narrative is a complex one; the former may both impel and impede the latter. Bodily dysfunction may stimulate what [he] calls autopathography-autobiographical narrative of illness or disability—by heightening one’s awareness of one’s mortality, threatening one’s sense of identity, and disrupting the apparent plot of one’s life. Whatever form it takes, bodily dysfunction tends to heighten consciousness of self and contingency. (5)

Couser suggests that personal narratives of breast cancer represent self-­ reconstruction and that breast cancer in particular can radically alter a woman’s life narrative because of its distinctively gendered nature. Nancy Mairs, who writes the foreword to Couser’s work, states that some people who write about their illness or disability: were obviously people who relied heavily on language (rather than, or in addition to, alcohol and sleeping potions) to get them through an ordeal. Some underlying motives might be to aestheticize pain, memorialize the beloved, rage against fate or the system (these are often conflated), order chaotic experience, or merely hold hands with an imagined reader in similar distress. (xi)

Mairs and Couser suggest that autopathography, writing the illness of the body, serves to heal. Henke also suggests that scriptotherapy is a way of (re)writing illness or trauma as a means of healing, of having some sense of control, asserting that Lorde’s writing of her illness mirrors her previous writing about her body and her sexuality. According to Henke, The Cancer Journals “provides, in contrast [to Zami], a stark confrontation with illness, physical mutilation, and the specter of mortality” (113). For Henke, scriptotherapy is autobiographical writing that in the face of impending disintegration reintegrates the various selves dispersed and beleaguered by illness and focuses personal creativity on the

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artistic management of depersonalization. If cancer threatens to rob the subject of its unique individuality, then scriptotherapy can create a temporary bulwark against the onslaught of debilitating disease. (117)

Lorde’s autobiographical self is reconstructed through her writing after trauma where “writing was the only thing that made me feel like I was alive” (Zami 118). Henke also suggests The Cancer Journals as a chronicling of pain and Zami as a retrospective narrative, each with very different autobiographical purposes. In The Cancer Journals, Lorde “determines to take a bolder, more dignified and creative stance” where: writing Zami proved to be a source of spiritual sustenance in the wake of her struggle with cancer—a way to work through and work out the traumatic events of her youth in order to cultivate an irrepressible energy and a will to live, create, love, and teach. By delineating her adolescent self as a developing subject strengthened by a growing Afrocentric consciousness and the discovery of lesbian sisterhood, Lorde could further enable her mature self to rage against the extinction of vitality and to challenge the physical, sexual, and personal devaluation imposed by a racist and homophobic culture. (115)

Lorde’s innovative construction in both autobiographical texts serve to challenge other women to make active and political use of their scripted bodies for the dual purposes of constructing a survivor self and speaking back to the  medical community treating  breast cancer. While healing might occur in the process, Lorde is committed to sisterhood and political consciousness in writing the body. Lorde not only addresses women who may face breast cancer and mastectomy, but also speaks to feminists who face the challenge of political activism. She says, “if we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is the women with mastectomies must become visible to each other” (CJ 60). Lorde argues that the silence around breast cancer, particularly when it is caused by hiding it with a prosthesis, serves to keep women invisible to each in their survival. When Lorde refuses a prosthesis, she is chastised by doctors, nurses, and volunteers who, “told me I was bad for the morale of the office” (52). Because Lorde’s body no longer designates a “complete” woman and because she refuses to cosmetically perform that completion, she is subjected to displacement within society. Lorde realizes that her refusal to “perform” as a proper cancer “victim” places her outside societal

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demands. Her non-performance, her refusal to complete the gestures of socially accepted breast cancer patients, serves to resist political, medical, and societal norms. While a  hospital volunteer encouraged Lorde that wearing a prosthetic bra will make her “feel better,” Lorde determines that this gendered act hides the real issue behind cancer—facing death. She concludes that, “the real truth is that certain other people feel better with that lump stuck into my bra, because they do not have to deal with me nor themselves in terms of mortality nor in terms of difference” (64). While Lorde poignantly describes the loss of her breast, she simultaneously recognizes prosthesis as, “lifeless, and having nothing to do with any me I could possible conceive of” (44). Instead, through her critical reflection of the illness, she says that, “I began to feel that in the process of losing a breast I had become more of a whole person” (55). For Lorde, the prosthesis emphasized the physical pretense of her body only; therefore, her reclamation of herself and body without the prosthesis positioned her as warrior. Discursively, then, her refusal to perform as breast cancer survivor with a prosthesis serves to fight not only for her life but also for the way that women as breast cancer patients view themselves—not as mutilated victims but as survivors of a life-threatening illness. She insists that the bodily scars from mastectomy do not mark her as a victim or as other, but rather as part of a sisterhood that has realized the body in its limitations and its beauty—no matter the composition. Lorde’s autobiographical texts celebrate bodily composition and challenge textual composition. In order to write a body that is black, lesbian, poet, and prosthesis-less, Lorde must construct two very different genres, both of which transgress traditional autobiography. Her autobiographical manifesto “is a revolutionary gesture [which]…offers a point of departure” for women “to resist a former generation imposing its multifarious technologies of identity” (Smith, S. 438). Lorde models not only writing as healing and survival, but as political activism and resistance by challenging women to do the work of understanding and embracing their own embodied selves (CJ 21). Lorde’s autobiographical prose, then, challenges cultural inscriptions of the body. She represents her body and her choices about her body with self-conscious clarity and purpose. The work in her autobiographical texts remains relevant as women seek ways to work together to fight systemic racism and other injustices. Lorde was aware of the ways that White and Black women experience sexism, homophobia, and racism differently. She states: “You [white women] fear

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your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons that are dying” (Sister Outsider 119). By engaging in “confrontational conscious-raising” (Olson “Liabilities,” 462), through a process of identification and difference, Lorde brings White and heteronormative audiences to the layered experiences of Black women. By addressing audiences directly, she both indicts and encourages. By comparing her work to her illness, she tells readers that, “Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer” (Burst of Light 116). In this way, she implores women to work to fight these battles together, even if they are experienced differently.

Working Together: Mentoring Women Across Continents In 1979, Lorde wrote to Mary Daly asking for a conversation about their theoretical differences. Unsatisfied with Daly’s conclusions about feminism and her lack of attention to Black women, Lorde wrote, “In this spirit I invite you to a joint clarification of some of the differences which lie between us as a Black and a white woman” (“An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” Sister Outsider, 67).6 When Lorde received no response from Daly, she published the letter, engaging again in confrontation as a way to have a dialogue about the importance of White and Black feminists to work together. In her letter, Lorde says, “So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question” (68). In this letter, Lorde insists on a dialogic approach to feminism. She is willing to stand up to practices that ghettoize “work of women of Color…by a white woman dealing only out of a patriarchal western European frame of reference” (68). She identifies with Daly, noting that, “As outsiders, we need each other for support and connection and all the other necessities of living on the borders” (69–70). While dialogue is important, sugar coating the racial divide is not: “The white women with hoods on in Ohio handing out KKK literature on the street may not like what you have to say, but they will shoot me on sight” (70). Pointing out the stark difference between White and Black feminists’ experiences was

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and is necessary if the very real dangers to Black women’s bodies are to be mitigated. As Roxane Gay has noted, Lorde “wasn’t going to let Mary Daly leave anyone behind” (September 10, 2020). Lorde’s imperative that women work together remained her commitment throughout her life. In a recorded reading of poems in Berlin, Germany in September of 1992, Lorde discussed the ways that women stand can together to challenge the systems that oppress them. It is one of the last filmed recordings of her reading and her voice is weak and strained. She is thinner because of cancer treatments, and watching the readings is heartbreaking knowing that her death is just two months away. But in the strain of reading aloud, she continues to discuss injustice, such as Eleanor Bumpurs and police brutality in the Bronx, and apartheid in South Africa. Bringing together transnational contexts during this late stage of her recurring cancer, Lorde encourages her audience to work together. At the end of the reading, she apologizes for her voice, but says, “I hope you could hear the love, the love with which I share these” (1992). Lorde’s influence on women and the importance of love in doing work with and for each other has had lasting impacts since her death nearly 30 years ago. In a recent publication with students, Professor Andrea Baldwin and colleague Kimberly Williams state that, “Black love looks like magic, an alchemy that is capable of creative and revolutionary possibilities in everyday acts” (Williams and Baldwin 196). Under Lorde’s influence, black feminist pedagogy, “does not divorce scholarly work from affect, attachment, or one’s own emotional responses to what we write and the people for whom we write” (Johnson 221–222). In another example, in their 2014 article, the Santa Cruz Feminists of Color Collective wrote about their experience taking a seminar from Angela Davis at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005 Feminists of color, including  Black, Latina, Asian, and Native American discussed the transdisciplinary reach of Lorde’s work. The group of feminist philosophers say that, “This collectively written article illuminates the complicated layers of women of color feminist philosophies. Women of color and decolonial feminist philosophers offer approaches that enable the decolonization of knowledge-production” (24). Like the Combahee River Collective inspired by Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad, the Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective “retrofit[s] memory by tracing the intertwined roots of this coalitional approach through our own collaborative writing, different anthologizing practices, and accountability through responsible citational practices” (32). Lorde’s work is part of

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what informs their interdisciplinary approach to embodied scholarship. Her work continues to be influential today, inspiring new scholars, activists, and poets. There are many recent texts, art collections, and creative gatherings based on Lorde’s work. The recent collection, Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies, focuses on Lorde’s influences on Europe. Lorde’s work continues to be evoked in these spaces, evidence of her enduring mark on the ways that self-determination, activism, and poetry for change hold power for communities. As Bolaki and Broeck explain, “Seeking and forging connections and challenging silence and invisibility were organizing principles of Audre Lorde’s life and work” (1). In one of the essays in their collection, “The Cicadas of Courage: Let Us Perform Audre Lorde,” author and teacher Kristina Lambrinidis asks, “What if a black poet of Caribbean descent met them and took it on herself to change the song of the cicadas—not surveillance of obedience but instruction for empowerment? What if language were theater and within its chthonic auditorium time acquired race, gender, and class?” (214). Lambrinidis’s students, working during a course she taught in Greece, never met Lorde but “recognize[d] that they are supported” (218) by Lorde and her work.

Biographer Alexis DeVeaux met Lorde years before writing her biography: “When I met her, I shared with her that I was ill at ease in such an illustrious group, she was immediately generous. The affirming nod of her head, her words, her acknowledgment of our shared sisterhood as black women writers, paid me the highest compliment at a time I sorely needed someone like her to shore up my resolve, and to keep writing. She gave me a hand to hold, and a mirror to hold in my other hand” (64). Even writers who have not met Lorde express feeling connected to her and the encouragement she offered. Lorde wanted her work to connect with readers: “I want my poems—I want all of my work—to engage,” she said, “and to empower people to speak, to strengthen themselves into who they most want and need to be and then to act, to do what needs to be done. In other words, learn to use themselves in the service of what they believe. As I have learned to use whoever I am in the service of what I believe” (qtd. in Rowell 1). In The Cancer Journals, Lorde frames her writing, whether through poetry, memoir, or essay, as work, work that not only sustained her but that also was politically important to make change. Lorde wrote about

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how her work was a lifeline. She says, “My work kept me alive this year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name” (CJ 13). She described her love of her women friends and her partner as crucial to her survival. She insisted on a construction of herself as a warrior, not a victim, and she is sentimental in these moments: “From the time I woke up to the slow growing warmth of Adrienne’s and Bernice’s and Deanna’s and Michelle’s and Frances’ coats on the bed, I felt Beth Israel Hospital wrapped in the web of woman love and strong wishes of faith and hope for the whole time I was there, and it made self-healing more possible, knowing I was not alone” (29). After her mastectomy and during her recovery she says, “I woke up again at about 7:30 to smell Frances outside my door. I couldn’t see her because the sides of my bed were still up, but I sat up as best I could one-armed, and peeped around the corner and there she was, the person I needed and wanted most to see, and our smiles met each other’s and bounced around the room and out into the corridor where they warmed up the whole third floor” (36–37). Lorde intertwines depictions of sisterhood with her commentary on her illness, the medical profession, and the societal norms surrounding illness and sickness. Writers and scholars continue to turn to Lorde’s work at crucial times in their own lives. Afro-Scot poet Jackie Kay, a contributor to the recent Transnational Legacies, says, “I remember reading The Black Unicorn for the first time in Brixton in 1981 (when Brixton was burning in the riots), before I’d ever met Audre, and then asking Sisterwrite bookshop in Upper Street, Islington, to order everything they could by her. It was like finding a friend” (qtd in Transnational 9). This mentorship through her writing is also described by Nancy Bereano, the editor of Sister Outsider. She writes in her introduction about the impact of Lorde’s work on her both intellectually and emotionally. She says, “I read ‘Man Child,’ and it was one of those occasions when I can remember something major shifting inside me” (9). She quotes an interview in The Feminist Renaissance where Lorde says, “When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from the joining—I’m broadening the joining” (qtd. in “Introduction,” Sister Outsider, 10). Lorde’s invitation to join remains urgently  relevant and necessary. Lorde says of her work in A Burst of Light: “It’s power doesn’t lie in the me that lives in the words so much as the heart’s blood pumping behind

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the eye that is reading, the muscle behind the desire that is sparked by the word—hope as a living state that propels us, open-eyed and fearful, into all the battles of our lives. And some of those battles we do not win. But some of them we do” (80). As writers like Roxanne Gay and others continue to respond to Lorde’s invitation, her mentorship through poetry provides the “fight” we need to not remain silent.

Notes 1. See Morris, Provost, Keating, and Grahn for further discussion about Lorde’s references to African religion and mythology in her work. 2. See also Alexis De Veaux’s biography where she discusses Lorde’s poetry in comparison to others during the Black Arts Movement, especially in relation to the male-dominated movement and the ways women poets navigated the moment. 3. See Wallach’s discussion in Closer to the Truth. 4. See Lester C.  Olson’s “Liabilities of Language: Audre Lorde Reclaiming Difference” where he discusses the ways that Lorde’s “rhetorics of difference” build a sense of community through rhetorical principles of identification, enactment, and embodiment and where he also discusses Lorde’s influence on the feminist movement’s understanding of difference. 5. Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. 6. See Alexis De Veaux’s biography where she discusses Daly’s response.

Works Cited A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde. Dir. Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson. 1995.s Alexander, Elizabeth. “’Coming out Blackened and Whole’: Fragmentation and Reintegration in Audre Lorde’s Zami and The Cancer Journals.” American Literary History 6.4 (1994): 695–715. Audrey Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984–1992. Dir. Dagmar Schultz. www.audrelorde-theberlinyears.com Bereano, Nancy K. “Introduction.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984. 1–10. Birkle, Carmen. Women’s Stories of the Looking Glass: Autobiographical Reflections and Self-representations in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Muchen, Germany: W. Fink, 1996. Bolaki, Stella and Sabine Broeck. Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.

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Brislow, Daniel. “New Spellings: Auto-orthographies in Zami and Vanity of Duluoz.” Life Writing 11.3 (2014): 275–292. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carlston, Erin. “Zami and the Politics of Plural Identity,” in Susan Wolfe and Julia Penelope, eds. Sexual Practice/Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. 226–236. Carr, Brenda. “’A woman speaks…I am woman and not white’: politics of voice, tactical essentialism, and cultural intervention in Audre Lorde’s activist poetics and practice.” College Literature 20.2 (1993): 133–154. Chambers-Letson, Joshua. “The Queer of Color’s Mother: Ryan Rivera, Audre Lorde, Martin Wong, Danh Võ [straight line?].” TDR: The Drama Review 62.1 (2018): 46–59. Clements, Alexis, Flavia Rando, and Shawn(ta) Smith. “Living Our Lives through Their Words: Reflections on the Marathon Reading of Work by Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, November 17, 2012.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 34.2 (2013): 261–269. Couser, G.  Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa (1975).” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. 1090–1102. De Veaux, Alexis. “Searching for Audre Lorde.” Callaloo 23.1 (2000); 64–67. De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New  York. WW Norton & Company. 2006. DiBarnard, Barbara. “Zami: A Portrait of an Artist as a Black Lesbian.” Kenyon Review 13.4 (1991): 195–213. Enszer, Julie R., ed. Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974–1989. A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2018. Gagnier, Regenia. Review Essay: Feminist Autobiography in the 1980s. Feminist Studies 17.1 (1991): 135–148. Garrait-Bourrier, Anne and Sipyinyu, Njeng Eric. “Audre Lorde: Black Feminist Visionary and ‘Mytho-poet.’” Revue LISA (2000): 94–103. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Bearing Witness: selections from African American autobiography in the twentieth century. Pantheon Press, 1991. Gay, Roxanne. “Introduction to The Legacy and Power of Audre Lorde Panel.” New York: The Third World Newsreel. September 10, 2020. Grahn, Judy. Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds. Boston: Beacon, 1990. del Guadalupe Davidson, Maria. “Albert Memmi and Audre Lorde: Gender, Race, and the Rhetorical Uses of Anger.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 20.1 (2012): 87–100. Hall, Lynda. “Introduction.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 4.4 (2000): 1–19.

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Henke, Suzette. “Audre Lorde’s African-American Testimony.” Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 106–119. Hua, Anh. “Audre Lorde’s Zami, Erotic Embodied Memory, and the Affirmation of Difference.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2015, pp. 113–135. Jimenez, Fernanda. “Unifying Difference in Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” The Morningside Review (2019): 15. Johnson, Sharon. “Afterword.” Standpoints: Black Feminist Knowledges. Eds. Andrea N. Baldwin, Ashley V. Reichelmann, and Anthony Kwame Harrison. Blacksburg: Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019. 219–227. Joseph, Gloria. The Wind is Spirit: The Life, Love, and Legacy of Audre Lorde. Villarosa Media, 2015. Kader, Cheryl. “The Very House of Difference: Zami, Audre Lorde’s Lesbian-­ centered Text.” Journal of Homosexuality 26.2–3 (1993): 181–194. Keating, Ann Louise. “Making ‘our shattered faces whole’: The Black Goddess and Audre Lorde’s Revision of Patriarchal Myth.” Frontiers 13.2 (1992): 20–33. Kemp, Yakini B. “Writing Power: Identity Complexities and the Exotic Erotic in Audre Lorde’s Writing.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 37, no. 2, 2004, pp. 21–36. Kovalova, Karla, editor. Black Feminist Literary Criticism: Past and Present. Oxford: Peter Lang Edition, 2016. Kynard, Carmen. “’This the Conscience Rebel’: class solidarity, congregational capital, and discourse as activism in the writing of black female college students.” Teaching Education 22 (2011): 217–238. Lambrindinis, Kristina. “The Cicadas of Courage: Let us Perform Audre Lorde.” Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies. Eds. Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. 230–237. Lindenmeyer, Antje. “’Lesbian Appetites’: Food, Sexuality and Community in Feminist Autobiography.” Sexualities 9.4 (2006): 469–485. Lorde, Audre. Between Our Selves, 1976. Lorde, Audre. Cables to Rage, 1970. Lorde, Audre. Coal. New York: Norton, 1976. Lorde, Audre. New York Head Shop and Museum, 1974. Lorde, Audre. Our Dead Behind Us. London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1986. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Lorde, Audre. The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: Norton, 1978. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980. Lorde, Audre. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. Ed. Roxanne Gay. New York: WW Norton & Co., 2020. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A Biomythography. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1982.

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Mairs, Nancy. “Foreword.” Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Couser, G. Thomas, ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Mangrum, Benjamnin. “Audre Lorde, Theodor Adorno, and the Administered Word.” New Literary History 49.3 (2018): 337–359. Morris, Margaret Kissam. “Audre Lorde: Textual Authority and the Embodied Self.” Frontiers: A Journal of Feminist Studies 23.1 (2002): 168–188. Ngcobo, Lauretta. “African Motherhood: Fact and Fiction.” Critical Fictions. Ed Philomena Mariani. Seattle: Bay Press, 1991. 194–199. Obourn, Megan. “Audre Lorde: Trauma Theory and Liberal Multiculturalism.” MELUS 30.3 (2005): 219–245. Odhoji, Benjamin. “Restorying: The Maternal Myth of Origin in Zami and Makeba: My Story.” Safundi 9.2 (2008): 155–192. Olson, Lester C. “Liabilities of Language: Audre Lorde Reclaiming Difference.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 448–470. Olson, Lester C. “On the Margins of Rhetoric: Audre Lorde Transforming Silence into Language and Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 49–70. Park-Fuller, Linda M. “How to Tell a True Cancer Story.” Text and Performance Quarterly 28.1–2 (2008): 178–182. Parker, Pat. “For Audre.” Callaloo (special edition “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender: Literature and Culture”) 23.2 (2000): 68–72. Parmar, Pratíbha and Jackie Kay. “Frontiers: An Interview with Audre Lorde.” Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies. Eds. Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. 74–84. Perrault, Jeanne. “’That the pain be not wasted’: Audre Lorde and the Written Self,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 3.2 (1988): 1–16. Provost, Kara. “Becoming Afrekete: The Trickster in the Work of Audre Lorde,” Melus 20.4 (1995): 45–59. Raynaud, Claudine. “‘A Nutmeg Nestled Inside Its Covering of Mace’: Audre Lorde’s Zami” Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography. Eds. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. 221–242. Rivera-Fuentes, Consuelo. “Sister Outsider.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 11.3–4 (2007): 178–187. Rowell, Charles Henry. “Calling (Out) Our Names: An Editor’s Note.” Callaloo (2000): 1–5. Simms-Burton, Michele. “Writing Nation: Giovanni, Sanchez, and Lorde and the Black Arts Movement.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 29 (2009): 79–98. Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” Radical Teacher 7 (1978): 20–27. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

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Streitmatter, Rodger. Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples. New York: Penguin Random House, 2012. Srinivasan, Amia. “The Aptness of Anger.” The Journal of Political Philosophy 26.2 (2018): 123–144. Steele, Cassie Premo. We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and the Poetry of Witness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York, NY: Continuum, 1986. The Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective. “Building on ‘the Edge of Each Other’s Battles’: A Feminist of Color Multidimensional Lens.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 29.1 (2014): 23–42. Wall, Cheryl A. “The Writer as Critic in the Emergence of Black Feminism.” Black Feminist Literary Criticism: Past and Present, Oxford: Peter Lang Edition, 2016. 18–28. Williams, Kimberley and Andrea N. Baldwin. “Black Love, Black Loving, Loving Blackness.” Standpoints: Black Feminist Knowledges. Andrea N. Baldwin, Ashley V.  Reichelmann, and Anthony Kwame Harrison, eds. Blacksburg: Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019. 188–214.

CHAPTER 5

Self-Representation, Genre, and Performativity: Dorothy Allison’s Performances Across Genres

In addition to being a novelist, poet, essayist, academic lecturer, and short story writer, Dorothy Allison is also a performance artist. She originally wrote her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, as a performance piece and presented it in several cities before her health made it impossible for her to engage in this rigorous physical activity. Just after Bastard Out of Carolina was written and right before it was published, Allison took Two or Three Things to five cities, performing on a stage alone while the photographs included in the printed version appeared behind her on stage. Several years later, at Hawley-Cooke Booksellers in Louisville, Kentucky, Allison read from her novel, Cavedweller. She actually “performed” from her novel, referring to the written text periodically but mostly reciting the selections from memory. She told the audience in her South Carolina drawl, “If you’re trying to follow along, you won’t. I change it all the time. And since I wrote it, I can change it.” The audience laughed and many seemed to know this already about Allison, that her readings were performances. I stayed after for the book signing. I stood as far back in the line as I could so as to muster the courage to talk to her. As I waited, I could see and hear that many of the people there had copies of her best-selling novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. I could also see that many were connecting with her on a very personal level, that they had experience with some of the subject matter in her writing. She held hands with people, looked at © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. M. Powell, Performing Autobiography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4_5

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them intently, speaking words of encouragement. Several people left with tears in their eyes. I wondered if this happened at every reading. When my turn came and I handed her my copy of Two or Three Things for Sure, I asked Allison about the process of its performance on stage. She signed my book and looked up at me, pen in hand, and said, “the performance piece is designed to be rearranged.” I asked her if she meant “rearrange” in the same way she had performed that night’s reading. She responded, “Precisely. To do the whole script is an hour and forty-five minutes, which is too long. So the performance is about 50 minutes. It took a year to write the published version—it’s completely different. The spoken word has to be a lot looser because it’s a poem. I teach a class in performance where I tell my students to get trashy, loosen the language. On the page, though, it works differently.” As she suggested to me at the reading, Allison’s attention to form, audience, and performativity occurs across genres. Whether in memoir, poem, novel, or essay, she employs expected generic conventions; yet, she “rearranges” them according to audience expectation but also according to her agenda to subvert audience expectation. The “self” represented in these texts can be performed, constructed in ways that “gesture” to certain modes of identity, modes that the audience can recognize in some way. However, it is her construction of those conventions that challenges generic norms. What she told me about the differences between the poetry of the performance piece and the narrative of the written piece suggest her deliberate consciousness of genre and its generative nature. She “rearranges” narrative form to suit her specific goals of telling and retelling the stories until she “gets it right,” often using and re-using memories as they represent the “truth” in any given context. In this way, Allison’s work highlights the performative nature of genre, a performance that incorporates politics of time, space, region, and subjectivity. While not all of Allison’s prose is autobiographical, her motivations in writing are: “I make fiction, construct it, intend it to have an impact, an effect, to quite literally change the world that lied to my mother, to my sisters, to me. The fiction I make comes out of my life and my beliefs” (“Context” in Skin 55). She weaves the stories and fictions of her life into multiple genres, producing multiple texts. Much of the scholarship that exists about Allison explores the multiple identities she constructs and the ways that she resists categoric boundaries, such as lesbian identity, “white trash” and  working class identities, the adolescent narrative, and sexual trauma.1 The discussions in these areas have been fruitful for Southern

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literature, lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans/queer (LGBTQ) literature, and trauma studies. The discussion here emphasizes Allison’s narrative and how her works are centered in the southern oral tradition. Her repetition, direct address, and re-re-retelling stories where she repeats, “Let me tell you a story,” emphasizes oral tradition, call and response, and transformative storytelling. She says, “In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of magic inside myself, magic to use against the meanness in the world” (Two or Three Things 68). Like Audre Lorde who creates a mythical self, Allison recreates a self that is strong/bold/loved/ magical. Though working from different traditions and experiences, Allison’s approach is similar—remake the self into one that can traverse the world and not succumb to it. Because Allison writes in multiple genres, shifting both narrative form and self-representational strategies, it is useful to explore her work through an interpretive frame that encompasses theories of self-representation, genre, and performance. In creating such a framework for this book, I highlight Allison’s complex narrative strategies, the ways she invites multiple and diverse kinds of audiences into the narrative of her life, and the subsequent calls to action she makes as readers participate in her life story, calling on audiences to interact with her texts, creating a “loved version” of herself through recurrent discussions of motherhood, narrative, and performance.

Motherhood as Performance When Audre Lorde defined a self that refused silence, she was simultaneously refusing her mother’s coldness, lies, and silence. She was determined not to be silent like her mother. She was determined to expose racism for what it was and is. To speak out immediately. At the same time, she learned from her mother to define a self that was strong and how to perform in ways to never reveal a true self to  those who could hurt her, predominantly White people. Dorothy Allison’s mother also figures centrally in her writing, her identity making, and her performance of class. While Lorde creates a self in Zami that incorporates all the strength of her ancestors, Allison takes what she learns to make “a loved version” of herself as well. Dorothy Allison’s representation of her mother in her work is seemingly fraught with nostalgia (Huffer 136). She returns over and over to her mother, rewriting her mother’s story across multiple genres. Allison’s complex “literary and political agenda” consists of constructing an

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identity through a “series of marginalized subject positions” (Irving 95), one of which is motherhood. From her early short story “Mama,” (1988) to her best-selling novel Bastard out of Carolina (1992) (made into a film with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jena Malone), to her more recent novel Cavedweller (1998) (made into 2004 film with Kyra Sedgewick), Allison explores the complexities of motherhood and deconstructs the notion of what it means to be a mother. As Jo Malin suggests, it is through the telling of her mother’s story that she is able to tell her own (20). While on the surface it may appear that Allison is nostalgic for her mother and the relationship they could not have because of their family situation, Allison “performs” motherhood, that is, represents motherhood, in ways that resist mere nostalgia for the mother. She recreates motherhood through her narrative performances, constructing a performance that not only resists discourses of motherhood, but also constructs a definition of motherhood that Allison can live with. Just as stories provided Allison a way to veil the truth about incest and her sexual desires, so too did they mute the truth about sometimes hating the mother she also fiercely loved. Yet, it is from her mother that she learns to avoid the truth. In fact, Allison attributes much of what she knows and who she is to her mother. Allison learns and attributes theater/performance to her mother and how she performs in a way that’s distinct from her mother’s as way to transcend the life she’s known and, ultimately, to perform motherhood in a way that is redeeming for her, her mother, and her son. While Allison credits her knowledge of performance to her mother, she also makes a distinction between her mother’s notion of stories and her own. Her mother tells stories to hide the truth of her hard life—otherwise she won’t tell them. She either jokes or is silent. As Allison has written, she also learns that the lying almost killed her—as it “killed” her family metaphorically; that is, by not telling the truth about them, their names and stories are forgotten (“River of Names,” Trash). While Allison is deeply in love with her mother, she must break from the tradition that her mother and her aunts set up for her. Allison’s chronicling of her mother’s life begins early in her work, suggesting that “Allison’s texts reveal a compulsion to write this story, her mother’s biography within her autobiography, before writing any other text. She needed to complete this task before she could move on to others” (Malin 61). As Allison herself has said, she had to understand her mother and her mother’s decisions in order to come to any peace in her

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own life. This importance is evident in her first book, Trash. In the preface to this collection of short stories, titled “Deciding to Live,” Allison explains that it was the look on her mother’s face that helped her see that her life was headed in a dangerous direction and indicates the profound influence her mother could have on her life. She says, one morning I limped into my mama’s kitchen and sat alone at her dining table. I was limping because I had pulled a muscle in my thigh and cracked two ribs in a fight with the woman I thought I loved. I remember that morning in all its details, the scratches on my wrists from my lover’s fingernails, the look on my mama’s face while she got ready to go to work—how she tried not to fuss over me, and the way I could not meet her eyes. It was in my mama’s face that I saw myself, my mama’s silence, for she behaved as if I were only remotely the daughter she had loved and prayed for. (“Deciding to Live” 7–8)

In this passage, Allison suggests two things. First, it was the love of her mother, the look she tried to hide, that moved Allison to re-evaluate the kinds of violent relationships she tended to pursue. Second, she points to the way her mother is silent about the truth, as if talking about her daughter’s obvious injury makes it too real. Allison sees that she has been like her mother, hiding from the reality of violence, trying to make it go away by ignoring it. In this preface, Allison introduces the notion that she must do something other than mimic her mother’s silences. However, before she explores those options, she must first make clear how absolutely devoted she is to her mother. In her short story, “Mama,” for instance, we begin to see Allison’s treatment of the one subject she’s said is the most important in her life. She writes “My lovers laugh at me and say, ‘Every tenth word with you is mama. Mama said. Mama used to say’” (43). Allison’s near obsession with her mother and her conflicting emotions surrounding her mother are treated in many of her works. In another short story, “I’m working on my charm,” Allison opens at a pretentious party in New  York, where the narrator meets a northerner making assumptions about southerners. This encounter takes her back to waiting tables with her mother, where she learned how to get tips by playing into the “Yankees’” expectations of southerners. In one case, a couple demanded food that wasn’t served on Sundays. Allison says that her Mama “might go over with an offer of boiled eggs, that ham, and a biscuit. She’d

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talk nice, drawling like she never did with me or friends, while she moved slower than you’d think a wide-awake person could” (78). Allison describes the way her mother would perform as poor southerner in the way the “Yankees” expect: slow and stupid. She would “grin wide and start slowing her words down, while the regulars would choke on their coffee” (78). Allison’s narrative reveals how the regulars and the other waitresses know that Mama is performing. In one sense it is a joke among them all, that the Yankees think they’re all stupid. By performing what they expect, Mama is subverting their power over her. At the same time, the narrator learns from Mama not to let them get the best of her, so that their contempt cannot hurt her. Part of what Allison learns from her own mother is that despite their economic and social position, they should never let the contempt of the world get to them. Mama performs humorous stories to mask the shame and fear of what was really happening, as a way to never admit to anyone that they might be able to hurt her. Allison writes that, “Mama told funny stories all her life, charming strangers out of quarters across a diner counter, teasing a little more time out of bill collectors, coaxing a discount out of repairmen or car salesmen, and always, and most important, distracting my stepfather out of his rages so that his hands would fall less heavily on her daughters. My mama used charm, funny stories, and that seemingly easy confidence to fight off a world of hurt and deprivation” (“A Question of Class,” Skin, 238). She tells her children to keep their “heads up and refuse to act ashamed” (240, emphasis added), even if what they really felt was shame and hurt. The importance for Mama, and what Allison consequently learns from her mother, is that by performing, she can resist the social and economic position she’s in. Allison provides readers with an alternate history of the working class through her mother’s actions and attitudes, foregrounding “the complex web of social, cultural, political, and relational economics within which her mother is caught” (Griffin 52). She shows us a woman who is tender toward her children, but who is defiant of those who represent the system. Even while she was desperate and afraid that her children were going hungry, she talked a big game: “Coarse, crude, rude words, and ruder gestures—Mama knew them all. You assfucker, get out of my yard, to the cop who came to take the furniture. Shitsucking bastard! to the man who put his hand up her skirt…Say anything but begin it with Jesus and end it with shit. Add that laugh, the one that disguises your broken heart. Oh, never show your broken heart!” (“Mama” 39). In this way, mama never let them see the pain and fear that

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she lived with. If she did, it would be admitting defeat. She therefore performed as though she were not defeated, subverting expectations of the poor as weak, meek, and ashamed. In addition to masking her feelings, Mama’s performances worked to her economic advantage. In the memoir, Allison’s mother performs for her customers to “tease” quarters and dimes out of the truckers she waited on. Allison explains that performing was a way to make others see what they want to see, a way to avoid the truth. In the following sequence where she describes her mother’s job as a truck stop waitress, Allison addresses explicitly what she learns about performance from her mother: but few of Mama’s customers knew how stubbornly she had to put on that smile for them. She was an actress in the theater of true life, so good that no one suspected what was hidden behind the artfully applied makeup and carefully pinned hairnet. ‘You should have been in the movies, like Barbara Stanwyck or Susan Hayward,’ I told her once as we looked at those pictures of her as a girl. She just shook her head. ‘Life an’t the movies,’ she told me. Mama always said I was tenderhearted, I trusted too easily and would have to learn things the hard way. She was right, of course, and the thing I learned was the thing she knew intuitively: the use of charm, the art of acting, the way to turn misery into something people find understandable or sympathetic. Theater was what Mama knew and I learned. Theater is standing up terrified and convincing people you know what you’re doing—eating oysters with a smile when the only fish you’ve known has been canned tuna or catfish fried in cornmeal. Theater is going to bars with strangers whose incomes are four times your own; it’s wearing denim when everyone around you is in silk, or silk when they’re all wearing leather. Theater is talking about sex with enormous enthusiasm when nobody’s ever let you in their pants. Theater is pretending you know what you’re doing when you don’t know anything for certain and what you do know seems to be changing all the time. Six days out of seven I am a creation. (27)

Allison tells readers that no matter how true the events of her life are, her crafting of them are performances nonetheless, performances learned from her mother. Like Hurston’s portrayal of her community, Allison’s portrayal of her mother is realistic yet loving. The constant embracing and rejection of her mother and the women in her extended family reveal the complexities of identity with which Allison struggles.

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Juxtaposing Likeness and Difference In multiple places, Allison highlights similarities with her mother, yet she is in constant negotiation with those likenesses. While on the one hand she shows the ways they are alike, she is simultaneously resisting those similarities, outlining the ways they are different despite them. One way she does this is through her descriptions of her and her mother’s bodies. Allison is proud of the ways she and her mother are alike, both physically and mentally. She says proudly in “Mama,” “And I am my mama’s daughter— tougher than kudzu, meaner than all the ass-kicking, bad-assed, cold-assed, saggy-assed fuckers I have ever known. But it’s true that sometimes I talk that way just to remember my mother, the survivor, the endurer, but the one who could not always keep quiet about it” (39). Allison sees her mother in herself and on several levels this is comforting to her—she deeply loves her mother. In another instance, she describes her own physical likeness to her mother’s: My muscles hug my bone in just the way hers do, and when I turn my face, I have that same bulldog angry glare I was always ashamed to see on her. But my legs are strong, and I do not stoop the way she does. I did not work waitress for thirty years, and my first lover taught me the importance of buying good shoes. I’ve got Mama’s habit of dropping my head, her quick angers, and that same belly-gutted scar she was so careful to hide. But nothing marks me so much her daughter as my hands—the way they are aging, the veins coming up through skin already thin. I tell myself they are beautiful as they recreate my mama’s flesh in mine. My lovers laugh at me and say, ‘Every tenth word with you is mama. Mama said. Mama used to say. My mama didn’t raise no fool.’ I widen my mouth around my drawl and show my mama’s lost teeth in my smile. (“Mama” 43)

Representative of the conflicting feelings Allison has about her mother, here she at once loves her mother, is proud of the ways she is like her. But at the same time, she shows how she is and will be different from her and refuses to repeat her mother exactly. Her narrative construction often follows this pattern: she writes first about the ways they are alike, then juxtaposes those likenesses with ways she is different. She says, “I am not as powerful as she, as immune to want and desire…but I have her talent for not seeing what I cannot stand to face” (“Mama” 43). Allison points out the similarities between her and her mother, but she is also careful to show the ways that she must constantly not be her mother, or she will repeat the

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past. One of the ways that she fears being like her mother is “not seeing what I cannot stand to face.” That is, she has her mother’s talent for telling stories. She writes of her constant love of her mother’s stories, how they represented precious times between them: “That was a special thing between my mother and me, the way she’d give herself the care of my hands, lying across the daybed, telling me stories of what she’d served down at the truckstop, who had complained and who tipped specially well, and most important, who had said what and what she’d said back” (“Mama” 34). However, Allison reveals, her mother tells stories in a way to mask the truth, so that she doesn’t have to face the reality or the horror of the truth. In the same way that Allison juxtaposes their physical differences, she also sets up a dichotomy between the ways her mother tells stories and the ways Allison at once admires those stories yet realizes their inability to represent truth in her own life. Allison begins this juxtaposition by writing about their shared love of reading. Allison’s mother not only told superficial stories to escape but also read books to escape the reality of her life. In an interview, Allison tells Minnie Bruce Pratt, “My mother believed in books, as peculiar as that was. She was a secret reader. I can remember both my mother and me trying to sneak away to read when I was a girl, and being really messed with [by] my stepfather…He really was that voice, that demagogue that distrusted the book, distrusted the intellect, distrusted education…my mother read mysteries. It was her lifeline. Mysteries, adventure books, some kind of escape…And I would read anything. Anything. I was just hungry, desperately hungry” (Pratt 30). For Allison, reading became resistance to her stepfather and what his beliefs represented. In addition, reading was a means of escape from the reality of her home life. Mother and daughter would read together, stealing quiet moments. In each of these ways, telling stories and reading, Allison represents shared moments between her and her mother that were precious. Her devotion to her mother is present in other works as well. For instance, in her essay, “Skin,” Allison writes, “The way you talk about your mama is extraordinary,’ women would tell me, and I would blush, knowing that sometimes they mean not ‘extraordinary’ but ‘strange,’ that I talked about my mama with the passion of a lover, obsessively, proudly, angrily, tenderly, insistently. I knew, too, that what it sounded like was not what it was, that I did not want to possess her but to free her. The touch of my mother was always a reminder that she was caught in a trap I could not have survived one day more than I did” (236). While Allison mostly writes about her devotion to her mother, we

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begin to see in this narrative how her way of telling stories is different from her mother’s. In “Mama,” for example, she says, “Sometimes I hate my mama. Sometimes I hate myself. I see myself in her, and her in me. I see us too clearly sometimes, all the little betrayals that cannot be forgotten or changed” (“Mama” 44). While Allison loves her mother and is proud of some of the ways they are alike, she is constantly trying not to be like her, not to lie about the truth the way her mother did. While Allison’s mother reads to escape her everyday life, Allison desperately wants to literally escape, to leave the life of her mother and her aunts and to be as different from them as possible. The ways that Allison simultaneously loves her mother and rejects her mother is also reflected in her descriptions of the other women in her family, particularly her aunts. As she describes her family and the desperate situations they endured, she also says, “Then there were all these incredibly strong women all around me, really, really strong, dangerous women who I loved madly” (Rowe 6). She loved them certainly, but she also represents a desperation to escape them. She says, “Every night I prayed a man’s prayer: Lord save me from them. Do not let me become them” (Two or Three Things 38). One of the things she points out about women in her family is that in order to survive, both literally and figuratively, a woman had to physically escape the pain and destruction of life in Greenville, South Carolina. Allison says, “Women run away because they must. I ran because if I had not, I would have died” (4). Yet almost immediately after this line, Allison says, “My mama did not run away” (4–5). She establishes that leaving that desperate situation was essential, but that her mother didn’t do it. While Allison seemingly praises her mother’s stubbornness and ability to survive, she places her own actions in contrast to her mother’s, blending admiration with castigation and accusation. As Allison begins to realize the limitations of the women in her family, she represents the difficult struggle in both loving and despising where she comes from. She says, “I’d stared into mama’s face, and looked from her to all of them, to those wide, sturdy cheekbones, those high, proud eyebrows, those set and terrible mouths. I had always thought of them as mountains…The women of my family were all I have ever believed in. What was I if they were not what I had shaped them in my own mind? All I had known was that I had to get away from them—all of them—the men who could do those terrible things and the women who would let it happen to you. I’d never forgiven any of them” (“Don’t tell me you don’t know” 101). As she moves from awareness to decision to leave, she

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realizes that the act of forgiveness will only come after she leaves. She realizes that living in her mother’s home, she would never get over being angry with her. As she tells us in the essay, “A Question of Class,” “The truth was that I feared the person I might become in my mama’s house, the woman of my dreams—hateful, violent, hopeless” (22). In the home of the woman she loves so much, she would destroy herself with stories that lie and hide behind truth. While the abuse she suffered happened in her stepfather’s house, in this passage she calls it her mother’s house, indicting her mother for not protecting her. However, Allison is careful to point out that her mother is the one who saved her, even if she couldn’t protect her. While Allison tells us that she desperately wants to be far from the women in her family, it is the women in her family who ultimately save her. It is her mother’s belief in her that makes her pursue writing. For Allison, “[Writing] became the way I figured things out. When I couldn’t find my story, I wrote it. I trusted books; I grew up that way. And so I made my own story, writing it down so that it would be real, and I could see it and step outside of it. It was some kind of comfort, and yes…sometimes the whole purpose is to make yourself a heroine” (Megan 73). Allison couldn’t find her story in her mother’s house: not only could she not tell the truth of her abuse, her mother also would not talk about their family’s history. Juxtaposed with the fact that her mother wouldn’t tell stories, she wouldn’t tell Allison the names of her family members in the photo albums—it would make their lives (and the way they ended) too “real.” At the same time, when asked who encouraged her to write, Allison replied, “My mother and my aunt. My mother, most powerfully. My mother believed that I was a genius. She believed I was this incredibly special, rare, exotic creature, and the most important person in her life. That kind of existed at the same time as the fact that she had very little time for me, and was constantly having to fight off my stepfather’s resentment of that. That’s the way it was, but at the same time, she used to be the backbone. Then there were all these incredibly strong women all around me, really, really strong, dangerous women who I loved madly” (Rowe 6). This is the way that her mother ultimately saves her. By sharing a secret passion for reading, and by encouraging her as a writer, Allison’s mother saves her from the life she leads, even if she couldn’t save her daughter from the physical and mental abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather. While Allison critiques her mother’s storytelling, stories do in fact have a redemptive nature for Allison, an ability to help her survive: “I know the

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use of fiction in world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth…the story can become a curtain drawn shut…a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended. The story becomes the thing needed” (Two or Three Things 3). Allison suggests the necessity of stories to survival, yet also tells us, “My mama never told me stories” (24). While her mother told stories about people at the diner, she would not tell stories about her family, the truth of what happened to all her cousins who died, the women who lived and died desperately. Allison represents her adolescent self as yearning for the names of the faces in the pictures her mother and aunts have. She incessantly asks her mother, “Who’s this?” of the “scores of ancient snapshots stuffed in a box in the end table in Mama’s living room” (17).2 But her mother refused to tell the stories of the people in the pictures: “Mama would touch the pictures tentatively, as if her memories were more than real images, as if she did not want to look too hard at the reality of all those people lost and gone. Every time I asked, she promised…to write it all down…I knew it wasn’t likely that she would keep her promise” (19). While Allison needs to know who is in the pictures, her mama “didn’t want to know who they were” (93). As Allison represents her, it is difficult to determine whether her mother is escaping painful memories or whether she’s yielding to silence because her relationships are too complex to force into stories. In either case, Allison’s juxtaposing clearly situates storytelling as privileged and necessary for her own survival. In these two ways, leaving her home and telling stories, Allison’s mother does not do what Allison indicates is necessary for survival. As readers we are in constant contradiction between a love and adoration and a recognition of her mother’s limitations. Just when Allison’s mother has seemingly failed her, she describes her mother as beautiful, comforting. Allison recognizes this complexity when she says, “Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand” (7). While it is evident that Allison understands and recognizes the complexity of her mother’s life, the way she feels about her mother, and how she did and did not “save [her] as a girl,” Allison must go through a process of understanding and forgiving her mother for abandoning her. But as Allison tells more stories about her mother and herself, it becomes evident that she does not understand her mother, why she abandoned her daughter, and why she stayed with the man who raped her daughter. In several different genres she rewrites her struggle to understand why her

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mother did not leave her stepfather: “The hardest thing for me to understand was why my mother stayed in this bad, bad marriage with a brutal man. And it took me my whole life to begin to understand. And I didn’t really understand it fully until I started going to meet the few of her sisters who were still alive. Looking at the choices they made and seeing how powerfully caught they were in the things they were supposed to do…keep kids safe, find a good man, save him, and hang on for dear life. The concept of giving up and leaving was so alien to them. They believed that they could tame and heal the men in their lives with love” (Megan 76–77). Allison, however, says that for her she must tell the stories in order to understand—if not to understand her mother, then at least to make a “loved version” of her life. Through the writing of multiple genres and exploring these themes over and over in different forms, Allison is able to begin to understand and ultimately forgive her mother.

Moving Toward Forgiveness Writing short stories first like “Mama” and later essays and the novels, Bastard out of Carolina and Cavedweller, was a way to pay homage to her family. But, “in order to write about her family, she had to forgive them. Her most difficult task was to forgive her mother” (Malin 60). Allison says in several of her essays that she was angry with her mother and her family: “Before I could be angry at them, I had to get past being angry at myself and dig my way down to who really hurt me, and why we had worked so hard to pretend nothing was happening. No, it was not the truth to say my mama was at fault, not the truth to blame the child I had been, not even the whole truth to blame my stepfather” (“Question of Class” 232). She had to work through the anger first, before she could begin a process of healing and forgiveness. Malin suggests that it was Allison’s material conditions that caused her to write “Mama” before Bastard, suggesting that as a writer writing at night after her day job, the short story was what she had time to write (61). However, Allison has stated that she had to work through her rage first, before she could grapple with the complexities of her life and be compassionate in her representations of her family. She says she had to begin with the story of her mother’s life: “I worked my way back to that story, knowing it was the one I needed to tell to be able to write. I had to believe in the use of writing, and the primary use was to reject hatred, simple categories, shame. The first rule I learned in writing was to love the people I wrote about—and loving my mama, loving myself,

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was not simple in any sense. We had not been raised to love ourselves, only to refuse to admit how much we might hate ourselves” (“Question of Class” 236–237). In “Mama” Allison tells us that her insistent prose about her mother does not mean that she wanted to be her “mother’s lover; I wanted more than that. I wanted to rescue her the way we had both wanted her to rescue me. Do not want what you cannot have, she told me. But I was not as good as she was. I wanted that dream. I’ve never stopped wanting it” (42). While again establishing the differences between her and her mother, she refuses to say that her mother is a bad mother. Her narratives reflect a complexity about her mother’s life that resist any easy or simple way to explain her mother’s decisions and actions. This complexity is addressed even more in the novel, Bastard out of Carolina. In her best-selling novel, the girl narrator, Bone, tells the story of abuse by her stepfather. Bone is a compelling narrator, and Allison’s decision to write from the perspective of a young adolescent is critical to the immediacy in the story. Bone’s mother, Anney, is caught between providing for her children and an abusive husband. Malin says that, “Categories such as good mother or bad mother don’t work in this text [Bastard]. This is a daughter’s autobiography with her mother’s biography at its core, which is, at least in part, about betrayal. The daughter feels betrayed by the mother she cares so deeply about…Allison subverts the reader’s expectations and questions fictional scripts of the mother-daughter story…Her narrative refuses to privilege or legitimate one experience or another” (Malin 64). That is, we expect that her mother should have chosen her daughter over her abusive husband. But she stays with him, forcing Bone and her mother to part. Despite this seemingly obvious betrayal, Bone forgives her mother. Specifically, Allison shows how Bone’s increasing awareness of her mother as a person is what leads to her being able to forgive: “Bone’s perspective shifts to an augmented understanding of the constraints under which women like her mother live. At thirteen, she realizes that the constraints of womanhood are hers as well: ‘[Mama’s] life had folded into mine. What would I be like when I was fifteen, twenty, thirty? Would I be as strong as she had been, as hungry for love, as desperate, determined, and ashamed?… I was who I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a Boatwright woman’ ([Bastard] 309). Such a reframing exemplifies one of the greatest risks Allison’s fiction takes: the risk of understanding what leads mothers to fail their children in this way, without forgiving such failure in any easy way” (Moore 15). In addition, Bone’s aunt Raylene asks her to consider

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what she’s really mad at. According to Moira Baker, it is Raylene’s lesbian life that moves Bone toward forgiveness. Baker suggests that In the lesbian space of resistance afforded her by Raylene, Bone does think hard about the rage that she has directed primarily at her mother. Allison explores here the process of surviving sexual abuse, questioning the pervasive bias toward ‘mother blame’ in dominant discourses of sexual trauma and recovery….When Bone returns to Raylene’s place after being raped by Glen and abandoned by Anney, the child is consumed by hatred of her mother, and the reader is drawn into a similar response. But the text nudges the reader beyond this initial response to a fuller understanding of Anney’s position. Raylene urges Bone to see how wrong it was for Glen to put Anney in the position of having to choose between her child and her lover, a position Raylene herself had imposed upon her own woman lover years before. (26)

Anney is so trapped by her socioeconomic condition, that she feels too desperate to leave Glen, to be a woman without a man while caring for children. She feels she cannot make it without him financially and “is faced with a crippling duality grounded in a patriarchal capitalist system that simultaneously demands that she access economic security by whatever means necessary while also preserving, protecting, and nurturing her children to the standards defined by those with gender, racial, and economic privilege. Unfortunately, in Anney’s case, these two demands prove mutually exclusive, and she must sacrifice one in order to achieve the other” (Sweeting-Trotter 78). Allison’s narrative construction leads readers through the assumption that Anney is a bad mother and then complicates that motherhood identity, as a performance, asking readers to consider how Glen and their socioeconomic situation limit Anney’s choices. Ultimately, Allison forgives her mother as a way to resist dominant discourses of “mother blame” in order to refocus criticism toward the forces of patriarchy and capitalism which perpetuate the discourse of mother blame in order to maintain power, keeping women in a marginalized, powerless place. As Baker suggests, “Bone’s growing awareness of her mother’s difficult life now moves her toward forgiveness: ‘Maybe it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t mine’” (26). Bone, and consequently the reader, begins to see Anney’s life in context. She asks, “Who had Mama been, what had she wanted to be or do before I was born?” (Bastard 309). As Allison further explains in “A Question of Class,”

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When I was eleven years old I loved my mama more than my life. When I was twenty-six I was so angry at her I could not even speak to her on the telephone. When I was thirty-six I could no longer pretend that my stepfather, her husband, had not broken me, body and soul. Years between and after, I bargained for every quiet moment she and I could steal. I was forty-­ one the year Mama died, and sometimes I was angry, sometimes not….All I knew was that I loved my mama and that she had always loved me, and that most of what was strong and healthy and hopeful in my life was possible because of her. (249–250)

Again, Allison constructs a complex relationship, at once fraught with tension and confusion of a child abandoned, yet also deeply in love. Allison’s construction of this relationship and her mother’s decisions as complex reveals a deeper struggle that Allison has with her own sense of becoming a mother.

Allison’s (Re)construction of Motherhood After writing through her anger in “Mama,” and the complexities of a mother’s life in her essays and her novel, Allison then writes her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, which is ultimately a poetic elegy to her mother and a great act of forgiveness. Different from her earlier writing, her memoir begins to explore Allison’s role as a mother and her fear of her own acts of violence. Through a continued exploration of motherhood as performance, Allison proposes a version of performance that will redeem both her and her mother. In the essay “Promises,” written before her memoir, Allison says she wants to make to her son “the promise my mama could never keep to me. I will make this place safe for him, bring him back to this landscape throughout his life, this wild country of beauty and hope and mystery. Each time he calls for me from those trees in the dusk, I promise again. Each time praying I can keep my promise” (261). As she suggests in the essay, she is worried whether she can, given her past, be a mother who can provide safety. As she suggests in Two or Three Things, she worries that she would repeat the kinds of mistakes her own mother made, namely, not protecting her children and making a safe space for them. After spending much of the first part of the memoir about her mother, Allison does not mention her again for nearly thirty pages. Then, Allison suddenly begins her own journey toward motherhood in her conversations with her niece. She caresses her niece’s face, “using the gestures my

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mama had used on me” (83)—in this way performing the comforting aspect of motherhood that Allison learned from her own mother. However, she must not be a mere imitation of her mother, which is what Ruth Gibson does—imitates the women before her. Allison rewrites motherhood by telling her niece stories about her mother, about her grandmother, about herself, in the way her own mother wouldn’t do for her. Allison tells her niece that her mother is beautiful, that her sister Anne is beautiful like her, and that her niece is beautiful like them both: “Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form” (86). Despite her mother’s abandonment of her and the potential destruction of that act, for Allison, her mother has to be written beautiful or she will never be able to know beauty in her own life. At this moment near the end of the memoir, Allison moves directly from rewriting and forgiving her mother to the time right after her own son was born. Her sister tells Allison, “Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut” (88). For Allison, the ability to love was a shut door, but through motherhood and “the act of storytelling…[there is a] life that might be possible” (84). Allison does not suggest that having children is what might save her. Rather, it is the reframing of the story, the act of rewriting her mother’s and her story through forgiveness that she can become a “good” mother herself. In the final sequence in the memoir, Allison depicts a dream of her mother. All throughout the narrative Allison shifts between memory and story and dream, where there is little distinction between dream and reality as the narrative seamlessly weaves in and out of each: She reached for me, put her arms around me. I fell away. She was holding onto her mama’s neck, saying the same thing, saying “Mama” in that same cry. My hands met the brick of her flesh. She fell away.    My son was climbing up my lap into my arms, putting his arms around my neck.    He said, “Mama.”    The last brick fell down. I was standing there looking up through tears. I was standing by myself in the rubble of my life, at the bottom of every story I had ever needed to know. I was gripping my ribs like a climber holding on to rock. I was whispering the word over and over, and it was holding me up like a loved hand. I can tell you anything. All you have to believe is the truth. (93–94)

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In this dream-like prose, Allison simultaneously performs narrative and motherhood, depicting the literal building toward a motherhood she can accept. Allison also points to this construction of motherhood when she says, “When, in the night [dreams], she hears me call her name, it is not really me she hears, it is the me I constructed for her—the one who does not need her too much, the one whose heart is not too tender, whose insides are iron and silver, whose dreams are cold ice and slate—who needs nothing, nothing. I keep in mind the image of a closed door, Mama weeping on the other side. She could not rescue me. I cannot rescue her. Sometimes I cannot even reach across the way that separates us” (43). While Allison longs for her mother, she cannot mimic her mother’s actions and decisions. The longing only serves to represent the life of her mother, to tell her mother’s story through her own. But that nostalgia only goes so far. In reconstructing the mother, performing her own motherhood, Allison can move away from that past and construct a future self that is safe and loved. Allison suggests that as a performance, motherhood is something she can “get right” in the same way that she can get the stories right. Allison’s narrative performance rhetorically resists dominant culture’s construction of Southern and lesbian identities and motherhood, to show that despite its limitations, “telling the story all the way through is an act of love” (90). For Allison, the truth represented in the story is too horrible to tell, but in telling it she owns it—she decides her identity, the meaning of the past, and how it will affect her present and her future. Telling stories is learned, performed: motherhood is learned, performed. In telling the story “right,” Allison suggests, a kind of forgiveness can occur. In her novels,  Allison returns to the theme of forgiveness, further exploring the complexities of motherhood and abandonment.

Performativity Through Genre Just as the exploration of motherhood as a performance highlights identities as performative, “Allison uses the trope of storytelling in [Bastard Out of Carolina] to deconstruct the notion of coherent and stable identities and communities, and to explore identities that fall outside the normative, white, heterosexual matrix […]. Her work articulates […] that subject-­ positions are always constructed within the context of human, social, and economic relations and stories” (Sandell 218). Sandell’s description also fits Allison’s other texts, where she highlights the ways that her life, her

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conception of herself, does not fit into the categories defined for her by the dominant culture. In the same way that she deconstructs identities through narrative representation, Allison also deconstructs the notion of genre. In Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison evokes certain expectations in her audience, especially in what means to be a poor, illegitimate child, particularly in the South. The novel reads very traditionally, and as the front cover of the first edition suggests, it is an “adolescent coming of age story.” Bone is compelling as a narrator for she is “trustworthy, persuasive, and above all, neither innocent nor tragically suffering from loss of innocence” (Curry 95–96). The narrative construction appears traditional, working within the “parameters of the realist genre” (Irving 95). In this way, Allison “performs” to readers’ expectations of the genre of the coming-of-­ age story. Bone is growing up poor in the south, and the novel tells of her struggles to overcome this adversity. But when Bone exhibits a self that we do not expect, that is, of a smart, smart-mouthed tomboy, our assumptions of the illegitimate child overcoming adversity are overturned. Bone’s character works to “subvert the cultural narrative that says girls are passive victims, reframing the terms by which the body has been traditionally represented” (Boudreau 43). Bone does not accept her plight, she does not change her behavior to please those around her, and her mother does not save her. These various character and narrative devices serve to challenge our expectations about who a bastard child in the poor south is. Because the novel’s narrative construction—as a coming-of-age story is appears to be traditional, Bone’s identity as tough and mean and a great storyteller is compelling and challenges readers’ expectations of identity and narrative.3 In this way, Allison subverts  generic conventions of the novel, conventions  presenting  alternative versions of southern, white trash, bastard, poor, female, and lesbian identities. Allison’s rendering of Bone in Bastard illustrates a rhetorical performance of identity, highlighting the ways that Bone recasted her identity as she faced scorn from several angles. As Allison has suggested, “Even the fiction I write is never wholly fictive. I change things. I lie. I embroider, make over, and reuse the truth of my life, my family, lovers, and friends” (“Believing in Literature,” in Skin 180). Allison gives Bone these skills as well, making her a skilled inventor and it becomes clear her storytelling becomes a survival technique.

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While Bastard is categorized as “fiction,” Bone is the first-person narrator and, as Allison states, this character is partly a construction of her girl self. However, she has modified this girl self so the story has an ending that she controls, transforming Bone into the heroine Allison couldn’t  be. Narrating an identity of power and strength was what she practiced in her life as well. She constructed a self she thought would help her survive, but as she grew older and fell in love, it became more and more clear that her fictionalizing might not be enough. Allison’s discourses of identity are constantly coming into contact with the discourses of power surrounding the established categories she engages. For instance, in her short story, “Monkey Bites,” she describes how she loves the butch women who work real hard at looking tough, the lesbians who hang out at dyke bars. Then she describes her lesbian friends at the feminist collective who don’t “approve” of the dykes’ hard ways. Even within this marginalized group, a hierarchy of what is acceptable exists. Allison, though identifying as lesbian, resists any definition of lesbian that would not include every kind of woman or her way of expressing her sexuality. Most of Allison’s stories represent an autobiographical narrator who doesn’t just want sex. Her desires are violent and Allison explores the complexities of her desires in relation to her traumatic past. In many passages describing desire and sex with her partners she uses words like cunt, fuck, suck, smear, swallow, and pinch, juxtaposed with academic explorations of representing the body, the self, the past, and sexuality. This kind of construction of sexuality together with academic questions about the body pushes readers to “rethink [our] prejudices” (“Foreword” xii). She writes about her shame for her desires and the reasons why she shouldn’t feel shame and the cultural codes that demanded her shame. Allison writes, “I felt the heat come up in my face and didn’t know for a moment if I was angry or ashamed. I watched the expression on the faces of the women who filed past us, then felt the skin at the back of my neck pull tight. We could have been animals in a cage from the way they looked at us…I wanted to be proud of Cass’s hands on my hips, to glare back coldly at the women who frowned at her” (“The Muscle of My Mind” 129). Allison writes about the dangers of complacency within the feminist community and the local women’s center where she worked. The hidden discourses of shame and complacency are dangerous and she writes of her

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own masking of the truth, of keeping it down, and the disastrous effects hiding her truth had on her life. She says, “I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth…the story can become a curtain drawn shut…a tool that changes every time it is used and somethings becomes something other than we intended. The story becomes the thing needed” (Two or Three Things 3). Allison, like Lorde, structured a narrative that demands readers’ attention to the violence of silence, not only of their sexual identities but also because of their identities as writers and the way they wrote. The poignant moments in the text are inextricably linked to the places where Allison narrates her desires together with the intellectual work she made herself do. As such, fragments are seen with simultaneity, bits of contradictory pieces exist together in one narrative, having desire and questioning that desire, wanting to write a certain way and questioning that way of writing at the same time. Writing the contradictions invites readers  to address their own contradictions and accept them. She encourages readers to be the lovers/writers they want to be. In “Muscles of the Mind” she says, “I do not have fantasies. Fantasy opens me up; I become fantasy. I am the dangerous daughter, thigh-­ stroking, soft-tongued lover, the pit, the well, the well of horniness, laughter rolling up out of me like gravy boiling over the edge of a pan. I become the romantic, the mystic, the one without shame, rocking myself on the top of a rock, a woman as sharp as coral. I make in my mind the muscle that endures, tame rage and hunger to spirit and blood. I become the rock, I become the knife. I am myself the mystery. The me that will be waits for me. If I cannot dream myself new, how will I find my true self?” (134). This combination of southern storytelling and poetry together with desire to make a self refuses the limiting discourses about women she is expected to reflect. Even in feminist discourses, where her sexuality was not accepted in her women’s center, she is refusing what does not represent her life and desires. Simultaneously, however, she writes of the vulnerability of the fear and shame she encounters while defining herself. The constant remaking of self within fear and shame, within the same text, highlights the ways that her life was a political response to the hegemonic and homophobic discourses surrounding her. In so doing, she creates a “loved version” of herself. In her poem, “The Women who Hate Me,” Allison again addresses how writing her story enacts a certain kind of editing of her life:

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What else can I get? Must I rewrite my life edit it down to a parable where everything turns out for the best? But then what would I do with the lovers too powerful to disappear.

As she struggles to find the forms that can best represent her life, she recognizes their limitations. If she engages in any form, she feels as though she must edit her life “down,” recast it so it must fit some mold, either in identity or in form. She concludes that she must find a form that can help her work toward “honestly honoring the women who stir my flesh to dream.” By re-representing her life and her desires, Allison engages in life writing that expresses what others would have her repress. This rewrite is a politically motivated action. By diluting her life somehow, she would diminish the women in it. She will not accept that diminishment, and she refuses to forget the women who have helped her “become” in her own life. As in her stories and poems, Allison also addresses the act of writing in her essays. In “Believing in Literature,” Allison tells readers directly what she wants to do when she writes her life: Bad characters, bad acts, bad thoughts—as well-written as I can make them because I want my people to be believable, my stories to haunt and obsess my readers. I want, in fact, to startle my readers, shock and terrify sometimes, to fascinate and surprise…I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable, to make my ideas live, my memories sing, and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer’s lust. (“Believing in Literature” 173)

As in her poetry, writing her life becomes a way to document the people in it and the ways that they haunt her. More significantly, though, Allison wants readers to engage with her characters and life so that her “ideas live,” so that the concerns of homophobia, incest, and violence toward women can be challenged and rectified. Through the act of writing the stories down and crafting them in a way to make her “own terrors real,” Allison challenges readers not only to know about them, but also to feel them in such a way as to have no choice but to act in some way. While Allison encourages storytelling as a way to control the trauma of one’s life, she also points out that, “story can become a curtain drawn

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shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended. The story becomes the thing needed” (Two or Three Things  3). Allison therefore invites readers to think about the generative nature of storytelling, the ways in which the act of writing itself can produce new versions of the same event, the ways that memories occur, and how re-remembering causes us to repeat and reshape the events of our lives. At the same time, not using stories as a way to hide from the truth is critical to any healing from trauma. She says, “I’m a storyteller. I’ll work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the certainty of outrage. I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth” (Two or Three Things 2). She sets up the complexities of truth and stories and suggests that her story will challenge representations and constructions of truth. As she moves in and out of memory narratives and traditional storytelling, Allison constructs an innovative form that challenges identity stereotypes. She subverts narrative by inserting explicit commentary on the constructed nature of “story.” In doing so, Allison forges an identity that out “performs” those constructed for her by the dominant culture. In Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Allison describes herself as a storyteller as a child: I walked and told myself stories, walked out of our subdivision and into another, walked all the way to the shopping center and then back. The flush my mama suspected hid an afternoon of shoplifting or vandalism was simple embarrassment, because when I walked, I talked—story-talked, out loud— assuming identities I made up. Sometimes I was myself, arguing loudly as I could never do at home. Sometimes I became people I had seen on television or read about it in books, went places I’d barely heard of, did things that no one I knew had ever done, particularly things that girls were not supposed to do. In the world as I remade it, nothing was forbidden; everything was possible. (Two or Three 3)

Allison’s storytelling, or performances, as a child, indicates a writer-in-­ development. She “assumes” identities, practicing them, trying them out, and “remade” the world into a place where she had control. Throughout the memoir, Allison repeats, “Two or three things I know for sure,” and “Let me tell you a story.” Her repetition of “two or three things” honors the women in her family who told her about life and how to live. Her repetition of “Let me tell you a story” reflects  oral storytelling devices

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and emphasizes the transformative power of stories when she says, “In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of magic inside myself, magic to use against the meanness in the world” (68). Allison’s repetition and explicit commentary on the nature of storytelling complicates her position within a Southern literary tradition. The memoir’s narrative structure calls into question the notions of history, the past, and storytelling, and their impact on the present. Allison overtly addresses the nature of storytelling by saying, “When I began there was only the suspicion that making up the story as you went along was the way to survive. And if I know anything, I know how to survive, how to remake the world in story” (4). Here Allison suggests that her survival is dependent on the ability to tell stories. While in the middle of telling the story, she leads readers to believe that she could be making it up, that in fact she has made a lot of it up, but that this version of her life is an attempt to get closer to the truth. As Henninger suggests, “even the photos might be made up, thus revealing that even photos (‘that never lie’) are constructions (and of course, constructors).” Allison recognizes, however, that despite her desire to tell the truth, she is still bound by the limitations of story. She says, “Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true” (51). Allison’s performance of story serves to critique the very nature of storytelling and its limitations in representation. She states, however, that “stories are the one sure way [she] know[s] to touch the heart and change the world” (72), yet she recognizes that it requires readers’ willingness to “believe” (94) in order for the representation to have any meaning. This agreement between writer and reader, and particularly Allison’s direct address to the reader to believe, is what makes her memoir performative: she assumes readers will suspend their expectations and in turn to respond. This self-consciousness in the narrative makes readers complicit as they image ways that children like Dorothy Allison might survive her childhood through story.

Performative Autobiography as Political Action For Dorothy Allison, as for many feminist autobiographers, writing a life is often a political act. As discussed earlier performative auto/biography occurs when part of the text critiques itself as inadequate to represent a

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life, while at the same time using narrative to write a life anyway. Not only does the text address the performance of gender and identity in the content of the autobiography, the writing itself is performative. That is, in the same ways that Allison’s representations subvert identities, her writing subverts generic form and questions its ability to represent life. Her interaction with readers suggests the generative nature of genre and “acknowledge[s] some kind of dialectical reflexivity between text and context, between genre and culture, between writing and subjectivity” (Luke ix). Allison’s engagement with autobiography, whether she is writing in poetry, fiction, or memoir, recognizes and uses this reflexivity as a way into the material and to dialogue with readers. In all of her work, Allison shows the way her identity does not fulfill what those in power would expect of her. As a girl she will not be quiet. As white trash she refuses to be beaten down. As an incest survivor she will not be a victim. As a lesbian she will not be silent about her desires. In each of these categories, there are certain pre-formed expectations about how those who identify themselves within those categories should behave or act or believe. For Allison, categories “such as pervert, hysteric, madman, homosexual, or, in the case of Allison’s novel, ‘white trash bastard’” (Baker 23) give her something to resist, both in terms of identity and in terms of the narrative representations of that identity.4 In Allison’s construction of multiple and resistant subjectivities, she “destablizes identity categories based on class, gender, and sexuality, categories that serve to normalize and control people’s activities” (Baker 23). Allison’s texts are constantly destabilizing the norm and she offers subjectivities that subvert traditional categories, using both narrative and character to do so. Allison’s knowledge of genre conventions and her awareness of representing public and private selves works as political activism as she directly asks her audiences to do the same. Her calls to political activism are clear during readings, such as the one I attended at Louisiana State University in 2004, where she read from her published work. In addition to this traditional reading, she also “preached” to the audience about writing and reading literature as social and political acts (in similar ways to Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury”). She told the audience of nearly 300 that reading her work required social participation. The politics of genre, therefore, involve engagement in accepted conventions of a genre then pushing those conventions and boundaries in ways that highlight the constructed nature of those conventions. Allison’s work as political activism, therefore, is two-fold: she resists the identities

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inscribed for her, and she resists the form (while at the same time using it) as capable of representing her life. In doing so, she asks readers to challenge their own identities and create new knowledge through genre, thereby enacting social change.

Notes 1. For discussions of lesbian identity see Cvetkovich, Holloway, Horvitz, Irving, Sandell, Thomas, and Wiles. Pippa Holloway speculates that region has a profound effect on lesbian history/identity but says that no conclusive studies have been done. She poses such questions as, “Did the efforts of the religious right make southern lesbians more of less likely to form political and social organization, or is there no discernible regional difference? How does lesbian history intersect with gay history in the South and how does this relationship compare to the rest of the country?” (“Searching for Southern Lesbian History” 268). For discussions of working class/white trash identity see Baker, Bouson, Campbell, Christopher, Donlon, Gaffney, McDonald, Wray and Newitz. For discussions of the adolescent narrator see Boudreau, Curry, Darlington, and Horeck. For discussions of incest survivor identity see Griffin, Gwin, Harkins, Henke, Patterson, Vint, and Woo. 2. In her brief introduction in Ana Ippledog’s book of photography, Allison further describes her obsession with photographs. See also Katherine Henninger’s work on visual representations in southern literature in Ordering the Façade. 3. Katrina Irving argues that Bastard’s narrative “devise[s] new strategies for representing a lesbian thematic” (95). Allison first defines Bone’s identity through a series of marginalized subject positions, then shows Bone’s defiance and resistance to those positions. As Irving states, “This mode of representing the construction of her protagonist’s subjectivity enables Allison to eschew essentialist versions of identity and to narrativize the preconditions for an affinity politics” (97). 4. The notion of expected discourses of identity is informed by Foucault’s notion of power. Relations of power include systematic categorizing, a way of placing individuals within certain contexts, as a way of knowing and distinguishing. However, this system is not merely repressive, for “where there is power, there is resistance” (Foucault “Power and Sex”). That is, a system of power and its categories gives us something to fight against. Allison’s resistance occurs precisely because of the dominant discourses of those categories.

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Works Cited Allison, Dorothy. “A Cure for Bitterness.” Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict and Memory in Everyday Life. Eds. Monica J. Casper and Eric Wertheimer. New York: University of New York Press, 2016. 244–256 Allison, Dorothy. “Deciding to Live.” Walk till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. Eds. Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray. Miami, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015. 65–72. Allison, Dorothy. “Foreword” to My Dangerous Desires by Amber Hollibaugh. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Allison, Dorothy. “Gender, Desire, and Feminism: A Conversation with Dorothy Allison and Carmen Vasquez, oral history by Kelly Anderson.” Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, eds. Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 130–148. Allison, Dorothy. “Place.” Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. New York: Tin House Books, 2009. 5–15. Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Plume-Penguin, 1992. Allison, Dorothy. Personal Interview. Louisville, Kentucky. May 1999. Allison, Dorothy. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1994. Allison, Dorothy. The Women Who Hate Me. New York: Long Haul Press, 1983. Allison, Dorothy. Trash. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988. Allison, Dorothy. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. New  York: Plume Books, 1995. Baker, Moira P. “Dorothy Allison’s Topography of Resistance.” The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 5.3 (Summer 1998): 23–26. Blouch, Christine and Laurie Vickroy. Critical Perspectives on Dorothy Allison. Forthcoming. Edwin Mellen Press, 2005 Boudreau, Brenda. “The Battleground of the Adolescent Girl’s Body.” The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women. Ed. Ruth O. Saxton. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 43–56. Bouson, J.  Brooks. “’You Nothing But Trash’: White Trash Same in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” Southern Literary Journal 34 (2001): 101–124. Buddendeck, Laura. The Accessibility and Relevance of Feminist Theory to Working Class Women: The Writing of Dorothy Allison. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993.

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Campbell, Jennifer. “Teaching Class” College Literature 23.2 (June 1996): 116–30. Christopher, Renny. “Cultural Borders: Working Class Literature’s Challenge to the Canon.” The Canon in the Classroom: The Pedagogical Implication of Canon Revision in American Literature. Ed. John Alberti. New  York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995. 45–56. Curry, Renee R. “‘I Ain’t No FRIGGIN LITTLE WIMP’: The Girl ‘I’ Narrator in Contemporary Fiction.” The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women. Ed. Ruth O.  Saxton. New  York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 95–106. Cvetkovich, Ann. “Sexual Trauma” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2.4 (1995): 351–77. Darlington, Sonja. “Challenging the Canon of Adolescent Literature: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” The ALAN Review 24.1 (1996): 24–27. DiFeliciantonio, Tina and Jane C.  Wagner, directors. Two or Three Things but Nothing for Sure. Documentary Film. 1997. Donlon, Jocelyn. “’Born on the Wrong Side of the Porch.’” Southern Folklore 55.2 (1998): 133–44. Duvall, John M. “Dorothy Allison, ‘Nigger Trash,’ and Miscegenated Identity.” Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction: From Faulkner to Morrison. 2008. 127–143. Ehrhardt, Julia C. “Meeting at a Barbeque: Dorothy Allison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Apocalyptic Literary Miscegenation.” Critical Perspectives on Dorothy Allison. Eds. Blouch and Vickroy. Ed. Christine Blouch and Laurie Vickroy. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Foucault, Michel. “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Giles, James. “The Myth of the Boatwright Men: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” The Spaces of Violence. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. 75–93. Gilmore, Leigh. “Bastard Testimony: Illegitimacy and Incest in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. in The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. 45–70. Griffin, Connie D. EX-Centricities: A Geo/Graphics of Self-Re/Presentation in the Autobiographics of Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Kim Chernin. Unpublished dissertation. University of Massachusetts, 1998. Guinn, Matthew. “Arcady Revisited: The Poor South of Harry Crews and Dorothy Allison. In After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South. Oxford: University Press, Mississippi, 2000. 1–34. Gwin, Minrose. Haunted Bodies. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, eds. 1997. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.

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Harkins, Gillian. “Surviving the Family Romance? Southern Realism and the Labor of Incest.” The Southern Literary Journal 40.1 (2008): 114–139. Harris, Geraldine. Staging Femininities. Performance and Performativity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Hart, Lynda. Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Henke, Suzette. “‘A Child is Being Beaten’: Dorothy Allison’s Testimony of Trauma and Abuse.” In Critical Perspectives on Dorothy Allison. Ed. Christine Blouch and Laurie Vickroy. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. 9–28. Henke, Suzette. “Dorothy Allison’s Autobiography of Abuse: ‘A Child is Being Beaten.’” Lecture presented at University of Manoa, Hawaii. March 2000. Henninger, Katherine. “Claiming Access: Controlling Images in Dorothy Allison.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 60.3 (2004): 83–108. Henninger, Katherine. Ordering the Façade:  Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Hollibaugh, Amber. “In the House of Childhood.” Women’s Review of Books 9 (July 1992): 15. Holloway, Pippa. “Searching for Southern Lesbian History.” Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader. Ed. Christie Anne Farnham. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 258–272. Horvitz, Deborah. “’Sadism Demands a Story’: Oedipus, feminism, and sexuality in Gayl Jone’s Corregidora and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” Contemporary Literature 39 (Summer 1998): 238–262. Huffer, Lynn. Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Irving, Katrina. “‘Writing it down so that it would be real’: Narrative strategies in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.” College Literature 25.2 (Spring 1998): 94–107. King, Vincent. “Hopeful Grief: The Prospect of a Postmodernist Feminism in Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” The Southern Literary Journal 33 (Fall 2000): 122–135. Langhorne, Emily. “Dorothy Allison: Revising the ‘White Trash’ Narrative.” Rough South, Rural South: Region and Class in Recent Southern Literature. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Luke, Allan. “Series Editor’s Preface.” Genre and the New Rhetoric. Eds. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway. London: Taylor and Francis, 1994. Malin, Jo. The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal Narratives in Twentieth-­ Century Women’s Autobiographies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. McDonald, Kathlene. “Talking Trash, Talking Back: Resistance to Stereotypes in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 1 (1998): 15–25.

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Megan, Carolyn E. “Moving Toward Truth: An Interview with Dorothy Allison.” Kenyon Review 16 (1994): 71–83. Moore, Lisa. “Dorothy Allison.” Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Sandra Pollack and Denise D. Knight, eds. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. 13–18. Phelan, Peggy and Jill Lane, eds. The Ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Pratt, Minnie Bruce. “Dorothy Allison [Interview].” Progressive 59:7 (1995): 30–34. Reynolds, David. “White Trash in Your Face: The Literary Descent of Dorothy Allison.” Appalachian Journal 20 (Summer 1993): 356–366. Rowe, Michael. “We’re as American as You Can Get.” The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 2.1 (Winter 1995): 5–10. Sandell, Jillian. “Telling Stories of ‘Queer White Trash’: Race, Class, and Sexuality in the Work of Dorothy Allison.” White Trash: Race and Class in America. Eds. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz. New York: Routledge, 1997. 211–231. Smith, Donna Jo. “Queering the South: Constructions of Southern/Queer Identity.” Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South. Ed. John Howard. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 370–386. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/ Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Sweeting-Trotter, Tarah. “The Price We Pay: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Struggle to Class Jump in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” In Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood. Ed. Catalina Florina-Florescu. New York: Lexington Books, 2013. 77 Taylor, Melanie R. Benson. “Contemporary Crises of Value: White Trash, Black Paralysis, and Elite Amnesia in Dorothy Allison, Alice Walker, and Walker Percy.”  Disturbing Calculations: The economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912–2002. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. 129–163. Tokarczyk, Michelle M. Class Definitions: On the Lives and Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison. Susquehanna University Press, 2008.

CHAPTER 6

Joyce Johnson’s Alternative Beat Narrative: Women Outside the Frame

In this book on women writers performing auto/biography, where intersectional issues of race, class, gender, and sexual identity are at the core of the discussion, a chapter on Joyce Johnson, a white, upper-middle class, straight woman, seems different. Yet Johnson’s chronicling of her search for “something else,” her keen sense that a revolution was taking place in the country generally and in New York specifically in the 1950s, and her engagement with several genres to write her story, make her work an interesting complement to Hurston, Lorde, Allison, and Lim. Because of her pacing and methodical articulation of several romantic relationships, her subject matter may seem less urgent. However, understanding her prose across her work points to a detailed deliberation of the ways that women writers in particular and women generally struggled to be part of counter cultural movements while also entering into romantic relationships that were mired in traditional gender roles. While Johnson’s memoir, Minor Characters (MC, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award), is about her life in the 1950s, it was published in 1983, after two novels, Come and Join the Dance (1961) and Bad Connections (BC) in 1978. Bad Connections is loosely based on her relationship with her second husband and her relationships after she left him. The prose in this novel, written in first person, is similar to the prose in Minor Characters. The main character, Molly, reflects on why she left one relationship and sought reasons for why she tended to tolerate bad behavior from men. Molly also wonders about the “weight of longings,” the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. M. Powell, Performing Autobiography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4_6

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ways that with men she had a difficult time expressing what she wanted. As Molly’s husband goes out until 5 in the morning, after she had worked all day (she’s the primary breadwinner supporting his art), gone grocery shopping, made dinner, and taken care of their small child, she lies in bed at the end of the day and “waits to become unconscious” (BC 17). This sense of waiting, of pulling angry drunk men out of bars to get them to go home is a constant refrain in Johnson’s work. Yet, Johnson’s use of a combination of first-, second-, and third-person narrative in her fiction and nonfiction asks readers to “look at it another way” (MC 5). Johnson’s deliberative approach may be because of her privilege—she was not facing the racial, class, or sexual identity discrimination that Hurston, Lorde, Allison, or Lim did. She was an observer—she “stood back.” The men of the Beat Generation were living fast and writing fast. Jack Kerouac in particular was perfecting his spontaneous prose. Johnson wanted very much to be a part of what was happening both in the literary and in the art worlds of 1950s New York. Before she ever met Kerouac, Johnson was writing; indeed, she had a contract for her first novel—Come and Join the Dance—at a much younger age (twenty-two) than many of her male friends, which included Allen Ginsberg, Lucian Carr, and other prominent Beat figures. Johnson’s writing about the 1950s in New York does not address racial tensions of the times at nearly the same level of detail as Lorde; however, she reports on these and other cultural issues by describing the lives of the bohemians she knew and her own life as part of the emerging counter culture. Her main focus, though, was on the misogyny of the time and the limits for women in the 1950s who may have wanted to go “on the road” but who were bound by the social expectations of “nice” girls. She says, “A girl was expected to stay under her parents’ roof until she married, even if she worked for a year or so as a secretary … Experience, adventure—these were not for young women. Everyone knew they would involve exposure to sex” (MC xiv). Johnson recognized her privileged position as a White girl growing up on the upper west side and resisted 1950s expectations of women by both moving out of her parents’ home at eighteen and by writing. As she says in her memoir, “we were the ones who had dared to leave home” (MC xv). She interrogated her position and showed the ways it stifled her but she also wrote about the complicated relationships that she and other women of the Beat Generation had with their male counterparts. The women were writers and artists too, but their male friends and lovers were afforded a different kind of access to freedom simply by being men (and White). And

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significantly, they were often able to move around, travel, and not keep steady living arrangements because their women friends and girlfriends had apartments and jobs that paid the rent on those apartments. As Johnson points out, men like Jack Kerouac would stay with her and her friends when they decided to pass through town. In the preface to the 1994 edition of Minor Characters, Johnson addresses the reader directly, “If you want to understand Beat women, call us transitional—a bridge to the next generation, who in the 1960s, when a young woman’s right to leave home was no longer an issue, would question every assumption that limitied [sic] women’s lives and begin the long, never-to-be-completed work of transforming relationships with men” (MC xv). The Beat Generation has historically been known by its male writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, among others. However, with recent critical attention to the women writing during the 1950s and 1960s, there have been challenges to the ways women were represented as ancillary to the men of the same time. Several anthologies have been published such as Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (1996) and Peabody’s A Different Beat: Writings of Women of the Beat Generation (1997), bringing the writing of wellknown Beat women writers like Diane DiPrima together with lesser known women of that time. Nancy Grace, in the introduction to the co-­edited Breaking the Rule of Cool, outlines the importance of the writing by women to fully understand the Beat Generation and dispelling the myth that they merely orbited the men. Additional important scholarship has emerged in the last ten to twenty years, reexamining the work of Beat women as critical to the moment in literary history, not only because of their poetry and prose but also because of their work as editors, publishers of literary magazines, and founders of new presses (Carden, Grace and Johnson, Freidman, Skerl, Russa, Damon, Trigilio, Falk, Hemmer). As Mary Paniccia Carden points out, women like Hettie Jones and Diane DiPrima and others conducted the work of literary production for many writers, including their own. Johnson, in addition to being a published author, was also a successful editor who was instrumental in the publishing of works by Black intellectuals such as LeRoi Jones (who later became Amiri Baraka), Harold Cruse, Anne Moody, and Abbie Hoffman. And significantly, many of the women of the Beat Generation held paying jobs while creating their art, making enough money to rent apartments—apartments at which the men crashed when they came into town from their adventures. The Beat

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women often also cared for children without much participation from her male partners, as Johnson discusses in several of her publications. Of this recent scholarship, Carden’s work specifically examines the autobiographical writing of Beat women writers and suggests that their life narratives speak back to the accepted narrative that the women who knew Ginsberg, Kerouac, and others were merely on the periphery. She says, “Beat-associated women’s life-writing can be understood as recursive auto/biographies: texts that circle back to revisit already-known Beat ‘biographies,’ often using intervening cultural, historical, and literary discourses to craft improvisational models of femaleness and Beatness. Encountering themselves from multiple perspectives, women writers affiliated with the Beat movement joining already-formed conversations about their roles, their lifestyle choices, their interpersonal associations, their literary work, and their places in history … [and] write their individual identities as sites of intertextual exchange” (Carden “Introduction”). About Johnson specifically, Carden suggests that in the autobiographical writing in both Minor Characters and Door Wide Open (a collection of letters between Kerouac and Johnson), Johnson “confronts herself as a character created by other writers, a cipher in the index of Beat history” (Carden “Acknowledgements”). This recent scholarship has been a defining moment in new understandings about what constitutes a Beat writer and the ways that women contributed to, and arguably defined, Beat writing. For Johnson, though, she constructs a writerly self as detached from the (male) Beat identity yet carefully situated in it. In doing so she creates a form that simultaneously embraces Kerouac and the Beats and indicts them for adhering to traditional social norms in their relationships with women. She represents herself as love-struck for Kerouac yet also as an independent bohemian writer. Her rhetorical strategy of representing multiple identities and a divided self within her “traditional” memoir that is, on the surface, focused on Kerouac, serves to illuminate her underlying purpose—as celebration of the women writers who were “minor” characters within the male-­ dominated scene of the Beat Generation. The subtitle of Johnson’s memoir, “A Young Woman’s Coming of Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac,” leads the reader to believe that the memoir is about her two-year romance with Kerouac. And it is—Johnson tells the story of their love affair between 1957 and 1959, during the time when On The Road was published and fame became a force with which Kerouac struggled for the rest of his life. Labeling Johnson’s memoir as a

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“coming of age” story (perhaps included by the publisher for marketing purposes) evokes the traditional bildungsroman. On the book jacket of the first edition is a photograph of Kerouac, looming large in the foreground and leading readers to expect the book will be a homage to the acclaimed Beat writer. In the photo, he is standing beneath the neon sign of an East Village bar, smirking at the camera, aloof and handsome. In the background of the photo is the author, then Joyce Glassman. As the neon light of the MacDougal Street bar pours over Kerouac, the sign’s shadows obscure Johnson and she is a bit out of focus. As she describes herself in the photograph, her “arms [are] folded, dressed in black of course, with a look on her face that suggests waiting” (MC xiii). As Johnson points out in her later memoir, Missing Men, the same photo appears in a 1993 Gap advertisement where Johnson is literally airbrushed out, suggesting that she was not a key part of the photo and by extension not a key part of the Beats. Including this photo on the cover of her book points to and deflects from what is contained in the memoir: a reclamation of her position in the Beat Generation with an observer’s keen sense of the moment and her place in it. Johnson’s work across two memoirs, interviews, a collection of correspondence with Kerouac, three novels, and most recently her biography of Kerouac, The Voice is All, reveal the complex ways that men and women writers were intertwined during the 1950s and yet experienced the moment in history very differently. The traditional gender roles imposed on women, even by the men who were at the center of counter culture, made for difficult terrain in navigating their work as artists and writers. Like Hurston, Lorde, Allison, and Lim, Johnson’s mother is also a central figure in teaching Johnson the performance of identity and ways to respond to the limitations imposed on women. In this chapter, I discuss the way Johnson (re)constructs women’s central place in the Beat Generation by writing about her family and her chosen community, counter culture’s resistance to societal expectations, and the ways women writers played significant roles in the literature of the time. She addresses these issues by scrutinizing her own conflicting identities as she struggled to become independent and a working writer.

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Observing Family and Community In Minor Characters, Johnson hints at the confining relationship with her parents, particularly her mother, but it is in her second memoir, Missing Men (MM), published in 2004, where she delves further into her relationship with her mother and her mother’s demands that impacted her later desires as a professional and as a partner in a romantic relationship. She says in the preface to her second memoir, “My life has shaped itself around absences” (MM “Preface”), alluding to both her mother’s and her experiences of professional and personal desires. Her mother, Rosalind, born in New York in 1903, was the daughter of Jewish immigrants. Johnson spends a good deal of time in her memoir writing her mother’s biography, describing a variety of photographs found in a trunk full of her mother’s things that she examined after her death. Like Allison, Lorde, and Lim, Johnson’s story reflects a need to understand how it was that her mother treated her daughter the way that she did. She does not try to absolve her mother of her mistakes, but she provides context for the ways that her mother was also limited by her family and society in the kinds of choices she could make as a woman in the early part of the twentieth century. Themes of absence and sadness recur throughout her mother’s story, especially with the suicide of her father (Johnson’s grandfather) when she was five. A writer who could only find factory work after immigrating to the United States, Johnson writes of her connection to him through their literary interests. It haunts Johnson that the family destroyed his writing after he died. His death impacted the family financially and while they were not destitute, they struggled to manage and relied on relatives for help. Johnson describes the lies and forgettings that her mother and her mother’s family told in order to create a truth they could live with. Through the old photographs, letters, and stories from her aunts, the girl Joyce understood that her mother was not satisfied with her life as wife and mother, particularly because of a stymied singing career and her early adventures on the road visiting relatives. Reconstructing the life of her grandfather through the scant family archives, Johnson imagines the impact of the loss of her grandfather on her mother. She says that she too was likely impacted by this family history in the ways she would “search for Samuel Rosenberg in exiles, in artists who could not find acceptance, in the rage and sadness of these men that would make me fall in love with them and ultimately leave me alone again with my freedom” (MM 11). Statements like this are typical throughout the memoir,

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as Johnson works to reconcile her feminist ideals with her traditional relationships with men. This subtle commentary on the generational impacts of displacement, immigration, and relatively little support for artists provides insights into the way Johnson sees her future self. Part of Johnson’s biography of her mother includes detailed accounts of her family sending her to well-connected relatives to make connections and to possibly find a husband. She too was “desperate to find some means of escape” (MM 22), not wanting to remain isolated like her sisters. Johnson writes, “one thing she had learned out in the world to her pain was how much depended on having the right appearance” (MM 22–23). Her mother felt “humiliated by the wardrobe that marked her as a poor relation” (MM 23). This humiliation, according to Johnson, explains her mother’s controlling approach to raising her daughter. Her domination over her daughter began early when Joyce was not allowed to wear play clothes or to climb trees or do any activity that would get her clothes dirty. She learned early that, “my mother’s exacting love depended upon my bodily functions being as perfect as the rest of my behaviour” (MM 58). Later, she recounts “shrieking with delight” during a rare moment of play with some other children. Her mother pulls her away and says, “‘If you ever do that again, I’ll spank you with a hammer.’ And I never did it again. In fact, I have tended to stand back and look on ever since” (MM 60). Eventually, Johnson says, “being the one who made Mother happy was becoming too much for me” (MM 102). Johnson suggests that her forceful discipline all stemmed from her mother’s concept of how her daughter should behave in order to be of a certain class, and to “make it” in a career. Johnson’s mother was determined that her daughter would be a performer, and Johnson details her time as a child actor. She enjoyed acting, but her mother was a typical “stage mother,” pulling her from school for auditions and teaching her early about creating personas. It was during this time that Johnson began to create her own life by going to places without her parents’ permission. Once, when trying to sneak onto the subway by herself, a woman from her building called out to her, to which Joyce replied, “‘I’m not Joyce … I know that girl Joyce, and I hate her. If she ever bothers me, I’m going to beat her up.’ … Still in my new persona, I marched to the end of the platform, winging my books by their strap, and waiting there alone for my train” (MM 103). She recounts several moments like this throughout her childhood, as her mother shifted to pressuring her to compose piano compositions after her acting career ended early. Johnson says, “until I was almost grown up, there was no

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escape from Mother’s strange determination to have me become a famous woman composer … with Mother sitting right there during my lessons, I never had the courage to raise such questions” about whether she actually had talent to her music teacher (MM 106). While Johnson’s Missing Men constructs a controlling mother, she also points to her mother’s insistence that Joyce be independent, juxtaposing her development as a writer with her mother’s development as a singer, and her mother’s disappointment at not having a singing career. Johnson’s father, represented as steady, reliable, and unambitious, worked the same job for thirty-five years. Johnson writes about never forgiving her mother for revealing her thoughts to her daughter about her life, about “being married and always knowing what to expect was boring … She never expected an ending that would take the form of a treadmill” (MM 44). This tension between her mother’s disappointment and her father’s steadfastness became the catalyst for a break in their relationship and her development as a writer.

From Observer to Writer Before Joyce Glassman Johnson ever met Jack Kerouac, she was a writer. Johnson’s early resistance to her mother manifested as writing (and later as more sneaking out of the house). About her first short story, which was about her mother, she says writing gave her a “feeling of an illicit but necessary act” (MM 108). The story was published in the Barnard literary magazine, but Johnson says she “could neither stop myself from writing about Mother nor stop from protecting her from the discovery of who I was and how I felt” (MM 109). Johnson includes lines from her short story in the memoir: “she and her mother were playing a game. They never mentioned it or set down rules for it, but it was a game nevertheless. The object was to watch for her father to make some foolish slip and to smile a furtive, knowing smile at each other, when he was caught” (MM 113). Johnson could not reconcile this betrayal and “By the end of that summer, my mother had lost me. I couldn’t forgive her for what she’d said about my father. I couldn’t forgive myself for betraying him by listening, and so I lost him too” (MM 114). Excited to be away from her parents, she took courses from Barnard College at sixteen and later says of her mother in her letters collection, “She did not know that I was already planning my escape. I wrote musical comedies for my mother and secret stories for myself about the tensions of my relationship with my family; when one was published in the Barnard

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literary magazine, I was afraid to bring a copy home. I came to think writing was like sex—an illicit and transgressive act” (DWO xvi). Her connections between sex and writing as acts of transgressive independence remain important themes throughout her work and life. Johnson also details taking the 5th avenue bus to Washington Square at thirteen as a transgression, leaving the security her parents strove for and created in Johnson a longing for “real life.” Beginning with her friend Maria in junior high school, she chronicles the ways that women were (are) constantly preyed upon, ignored, or killed. Maria couldn’t say no to the men because, “She says she’s afraid of hurting his feelings” (MC 34) or being called frigid. Johnson alludes to the danger of the men they met on the square—she doesn’t say it was dangerous, only that it felt “sinister.” The tension of finding sexual freedom while also avoiding predators was difficult. Johnson’s memoir then shifts from dangerous predators to men who used or ignored women. The tension between wanting to be independent and the traditional roles expected of women is a refrain throughout her work. When she meets her friend Elise Cowen in college, she realizes that having her own space was really her dream. She describes Elise’s brightly painted tenement apartment as completely opposite of the dark rooms of her parents’. Elise is a poet who would become central to the Beat scene, and she and Allen Ginsberg, whom she dates for a time, later introduce Johnson to Kerouac. But when they first meet at Barnard, Johnson says, “I resisted friendship with [Elise] for about a month” because Johnson was trying to create a “college” identity. But once they started talking they skipped a class, “unwilling to tear ourselves away from a conversation of such inexhaustible intimacy” (MC 52). Their common interests in poetry and resisting traditional life bring them together, and Johnson, though she had sneaked into the Village at thirteen, credits Elise for bringing her into the Beat scene. Johnson’s descriptions of Elise’s life as a poet and a lover are similar to the ways she portrays many of the women of the time, observing the ways that they navigated what was expected of them while they also yearned for independence and a sense of their own worth outside family and children. She describes the wife, Sally Greer, of one of the Barnard instructors, who tries to be “the faculty wife for a minute or two and force herself to ask you interested questions about your studies” (MC 60). Johnson presents the story as if it’s about Alex Greer, the husband and instructor teaching her and Elise about literature and sex, but when Sally leaves Alex, Johnson

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observes how none of Alex’s faculty (male) colleagues understand her decision. Johnson explains, “She wasn’t even leaving him for another man, but for something so crazy and inexplicable she was naturally going to analysis to get at the root of it: the need to be alone” (MC 60). As Johnson chronicles her education and sexual awakening, she also chronicles the variety of ways that women managed their relationships and their (in)ability to maintain their own space and time outside of their romantic relationships. Her descriptions of other women including Joan Vollmer Burroughs, Diane DiPrima, Cessa Carr, Helena Weaver, and Edie Parker are all counter texts to the ones either left out by critics or ignored by the men close to them. In her mini-biography of Edie Parker, she credits her for foreseeing the connection between Lucien Carr and Jack when she introduced them. Johnson furthermore says that Edie worked as a “longshoreman while Jack’s at sea, and as a cigarette girl on Forth-second Street” (MC 9). Edie Parker, before and without Jack, was an adventurer—a biography that expands what she is typically remembered for: as Kerouac’s ex-wife. Johnson reconstructs the well-worn story where Kerouac and Carr meet, emphasizing that it was Edie who put the who thing in motion. She reimagines the moment where a drunken Carr puts an even drunker Kerouac in a barrel, saying, “I see Edie Parker running after it a little off to the side. She’s telling herself she’s having a swell time as she looks out for cops over her shoulder” (MC 11). When Johnson’s narrative returns to Edie, quoting from the letter she wrote to Jack many years later, she reminds readers that Edie still exists. But she also demonstrates how Edie’s letter is key to her as Kerouac’s current girlfriend: “Edie’s letter was like a telescope through which I could glimpse some point in the future in which there would be no Jack but only me and some different life I could not imagine” (MC 189). Though Johnson does not say so directly, her auto/biographical writing is a direct counter to the mythic stories of the Beat Generation. Directly addressing readers to “look at it another way” (MC 5), she notes that the two years between 1957 and 1959 when she was Kerouac’s girlfriend was “approximately one twentieth of my life.” While it was a significant moment, her relationship with Jack must be seen in perspective, she contends. She spends the memoir, then, providing the background, a fuller back story of Joyce Glassman, for whom Kerouac was a brief moment in her life, a significant one, but brief nonetheless. This perspective is key to understanding why the Beat ethos needs to be revised. This revision includes stories of women like Johnson going to the Waldorf Cafeteria,

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famous as a bohemian gathering spot, in her youth: “I’d hang our around the edges of the crowded tables, listening, looking, not really participating” (MC 39), a foreshadowing of her role as an observer. She says, “The Waldorf was one of the places where I began to acquire the habit of hanging around and back at the same time … Invisibility had become my unsatisfying resolution of the outside/inside problem” (MC 41). When she sees a young woman singing with a troupe in Washington Square, she notes again how she observes: “I watch them intently, especially the blond girl, as if I could will myself into her. She can’t be that much older than I am, maybe sixteen, and yet she’s been accepted by these grownup-looking men” (MC 27). In both her memoirs, she constructs herself as an adventurer early in life but who was not allowed to have them. She says, “My outside doesn’t reflect my inside, so no one knows who I really am” (MC 28). Johnson constructs herself as a naive girl longing for the life she feels she never fully explores: “I long to turn myself into a Bohemian, but lack the proper clothes … Such a belt … is a badge, a sign of membership in the ranks of the unconventional” (MC 31). Johnson recognizes her naiveté that clothes could define her as a Bohemian. As she reflects on her desire to be part of the “unconventional” Bohemians, she is also amused at how she thought she could accomplish this, just by wearing particular clothes. While she wants desperately to fit into this scene as a teenager, in college she’s less romantic about the counter culture and keenly aware of herself watching from the outside. She quotes from her journal: “I do not want to become too entangled with ‘the community.’ The people attract me, but, in a way, they are all slowly dying, and I do not want to die. Yes, I will observe. Elise wants to belong, however. She has always needed to be part of something. Elise watches wistfully as they play their dangerous games, killing time between now and the final disaster. The role of observer has its advantages. You may play as much of a part in the group as you wish, but when you are drawn in a little too tightly, you can always say, ‘Well after all, I’m just an observer,’ and step back into safety again’” (MC 84). Early in the memoir Johnson’s authenticity as counter culture is established by sneaking to the Village with her friend and wearing Bohemian clothes. Her identity as a seeker of an alternative way to live from her parents provides the foundation for her later revolt against societal values and her place at the center of the city. At an age when most girls are trying desperately to fit in, Johnson seems ahead of her time in wanting such a different

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life. However, when she goes to college, her perception of Bohemian life changes. She says her identity consisted of “the world I was now renouncing with such determination but also with a feeling of incompletion” (MC 51). Johnson reveals her “regression” to traditional clothes and lifestyle in order to show a powerful break from society later. While she stops wearing black and starts wearing penny loafers and sweaters like all the other young college women, she never feels complete in this identity. She feels out of touch with the other “conforming” women in her college classes. Her identity is in conflict with itself as she tries to fit in, yet she is constantly re-evaluating her desire to live a fuller life, a more vibrant life than her seemingly insipid parents and college friends. Johnson eventually returns to the Bohemian life with more of a sense of why this life attracts her and how the 1950s oppressive value system has left her feeling incomplete. One of the central aspects of living a counter life that Johnson’s delineates is the freedom to have sex. She has an affair with a college professor and it is this affair that prompts her to find her own apartment at eighteen. Juxtaposed to her rendering of this dramatic moment in her own life is her imagining of Carolyn Cassady’s life at the same time. Framed within one of alternating chapters about Jack, Johnson describes how, while Jack is living with his friend Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, there are often lots of people around for parties. Johnson imagines this arrangement from Carolyn’s point of view, where the “Men are always disappearing on Carolyn into the attic, leaving her with the dishes” (MC 89). It’s well known that Neal slept with other women and when he suggests it, Carolyn enters into an affair with Jack. In order to provide Carolyn’s perspective of this time, Johnson includes a quote in her memoir from Carolyn’s published journal: “While I performed my household duties the men would read each other excerpts from their writing in progress or bring out Spengler, Proust or Shakespeare to read aloud, accompanied by energetic discussions and appraisals … I was happy just listening to them and filling their coffee cups” (qtd. in MC  90). This perspective is one that occurs several times throughout Johnson’s work. Her comments are about these moments are spare—she mostly describes the scene for readers to make their own assessments. But because this kind of scene occurs periodically  throughout her memoir, where women are doing domestic work while men write or discuss writing with their colleagues, it becomes clear that the men are complicit in seeing the women as responsible for the routine duties of living, including caring for children. Johnson’s descriptions of herself working as a writer, together with vignettes about

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obtaining birth control, abortions, and domesticity, make clear that the playing field was not even. And yet, as Johnson points out, women still conducted their artistic work. Because of the way she writes, where her life is recounted as if by a reporter, her views on these issues, at this point in the memoir, seem to be still emerging. Joyce and Jack do not meet until more than halfway through the memoir, a telling signal that her writerly self was well established before she met him.

Rebelling, Waiting, and Love Affairs Despite Johnson’s commitment to living a different kind of life than the one her parents’ generation seemed to be living, the descriptions of her relationship with Kerouac reveal a woman waiting—struggling between her identities as an independent writer and a woman in love with a man who represents to her counter culture ideals and yet who himself is steeped in stereotypical views of gender roles. While she is in the middle of rebelling against society’s oppressive values, she meets and falls in love with Kerouac. She already had a devastating love affair—the subject of her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, and for which she had a literary contract at the age of 20. She is careful to point out that she was not innocent when she met Jack, even if she was young (she was twenty-one and he was thirty-five). Despite her experience, however, Johnson quickly becomes Jack’s caretaker, recounting several times taking care of him when he is too drunk or too poor to pay for a place to stay. Her steady residence in New York, as opposed to the traveling and searching for new experiences as many of the Beats did, served as a constant for Jack returning from “on the road.” It is this caretaker role, one that seems at odds with her aspirations to be an independent, single woman living alone, that is part of the reason her romantic relationship with Kerouac lasts as long as it does. At the same time, Johnson’s narrative establishes her place within an inner circle of important writers before she meets Kerouac. While working for the MCA literary agency in 1956, she found a copy of Kerouac’s The Town and the City and had already read his first novel before they met. Near this time is when her friend Elise, now living with her girlfriend Sheila, shares their apartment with Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky. Elise and Allen had been lovers, but after meeting Peter in San Francisco, they asked to stay with Elise and Sheila for a few months until they left for a trip abroad. Elise invites Johnson to the first of many parties where Lucien Carr, Orlovsky, Ginsberg, and other writers and artists

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would also be. Hinting at her uncertainty about Elise’s living arrangements, especially knowing that Elise was still in love with Allen, Johnson says, “I remember feeling very shy. I lost my shyness after a few more visits. It all seemed strangely normal, like being with a new kind of family. I saw that what you learned to consider normal did not necessarily have to remain constant; ‘normalcy’ in fact might be an artificial idea” (MC 121). Characteristic of her prose, she alternates between first-, second-, and third-person perspectives as a way to show the young and naïve girl coming to these realizations in real time. In these moments, and in moments when she describes her relationship with Jack, she frames her thinking as uncertain. In juxtaposition to her reflections on herself as a writer, these tentative moments contrast in interesting ways. She is confident and firm as a writer and this confidence is well established long before she and Kerouac meet. Johnson’s description of Elise’s and Ginsberg’s living arrangements also point to the ways people were navigating ways to have relationships. Having Allen and his boyfriend live with her prompted Johnson to wonder, “If this pained Elise, it was something she couldn’t admit and I couldn’t bring myself to ask her. The question seemed to indicate a possible narrowness of spirit, something I’d have to work on in my own life” (MC 124). This “narrowness” or lack of imagination is what Johnson fears—she and her friends are working toward something different, something to represent their rejection of 1950s social order. Moments in her memoir like these, however, suggest that they were in the process of figuring it out, finding out what mattered to them in terms of commitment, friendship, love, and art. At several points, throughout her memoir and also in her interstitials in Door Wide Open (DWO), Johnson indicates that her work is a response to the way that she and other women during this time were written about (Carden). In Minor Characters she mentions that in Kerouac’s biography there is a “cryptic” entry: “1957: meets Joyce Glassman” (MC 126). As she constructs an identity of a confident writer, she indicates that the entry does not tell the story of her life. Indeed, it doesn’t really tell the full story of Kerouac’s life either. When they meet on a blind date set up by Ginsberg, he doesn’t have money to buy her coffee. She pays and says, “I’ve never bought a man dinner before. It makes me feel very competent and womanly” (MC 127). When they meet, Johnson is a young, independent woman living alone, working toward publication, and is very attracted to Kerouac. She says there is something about Jack and “Allen [Ginsberg] that I’m responsive

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to in men. Some pursuit of the heightened moment, intensity for its own sake, something they apparently find only when they’re with each other” (MC 171). This pursuit of the moment, a classic trait of the Beats, is part of what precludes Johnson and Kerouac from having a lasting relationship. While Kerouac continually leaves her to search for a place or experience, she stays to work on her novel and earn enough money to pay rent to live on her own. Because Johnson has provided a place for herself, despite the difficulty in doing so both financially and socially, Kerouac is also provided with that sense of place whenever he is in New York. Johnson allows him to stay “in keeping with my current philosophy of nothing-to-lose, try anything” (MC 129). While her “philosophy” is consistent with her desire not to be “narrow” minded, her reflective voice foreshadows the doomed nature of their relationship. During the two years they were together, she says that, “Very quickly it didn’t seem strange to have him with me, we were somehow like very old friends” (MC 131). She says that to Jack, “I was everdayness, bacon and eggs in the morning or the middle of the night, which I learned to cook just the way he liked” (MC 131). She loved him deeply and she says, “In my memories of Jack in the good times we had together, I’m lying with my head on his chest, his heart pulsing against my ear. His smooth hard powerful arms are around me and I’m burying my face into them because I like them so much, making him laugh … But then Jack leaves me” (MC 132). He left often, either to travel or to go home to his mother, but Johnson always says he could come back, responding to his request to stay with her in a telegram, “Door wide open.” Despite her attempts to be open to this kind of relationship, it is hard for her. Because of the memoir’s earlier details of Johnson working toward becoming an independent woman, it is difficult to imagine Johnson tolerating Kerouac’s indifference toward her, especially when he changes his mind so often about their travel plans together. She constantly battles with repeatedly taking Kerouac in and her feelings of “it’s never going to change” (MC 253). After finding a letter written by Kerouac’s former wife, Edie Parker, in which she dreams of being able to rescue Kerouac from the fame that drowns him, Johnson says, “I didn’t want Jack or anyone ever to make me feel that way. I wanted always to feel alive and never become old like my parents had or like Edie sounded at thirty-five” (189). As introspective narrator, she is saddened by her youthful self continually allowing herself to be treated this way. Johnson’s memoir carefully includes commentary about the dilemma of caring about Jack. She says, “He could somehow cancel you out and make you feel sad for him at the same time”

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(MC 128). Johnson’s insight into Kerouac is interesting because while she does not absolve his behavior, especially when gets drunk and flirts with other women in front of her, she does have empathy for him. While she tolerates his behavior and takes him back several times, she also assesses Jack as “dreaming the whole thing before he ever got there. It was as if the power of Jack’s imagination always left him defenseless … but somehow I knew I couldn’t say any of this—even though he always told me how practical I was and treated me like a worldly person, an authority on publishing, for example” (MC 154). Her professional experience is a significant part of the story of their relationship. Johnson finds herself wishing she could rescue Kerouac, especially when On The Road was reviewed and he became famous overnight. She says, “I often wished I could just swoop down like Edie Parker and bail him out of his awful success. Mostly I found myself waiting around to get him out of places where he’d stayed too long and drunk too much” (MC 190). The reflective narrator recognizes the naive young woman’s idealistic dream of saving Kerouac from his own destruction. Within the same utterance, she castigates herself for waiting. She seems slightly amused that she would allow a man to take over her sensibilities. Johnson says, “now I insist in tones of outrage that it is time to go home even though I do not really want to go there and will probably not be able to sleep—but have only chosen sounds to make, which mean, ‘Look at me. Let me know that you know that I’m here’” (193). Again, the narrator is aware of the position in which she as young woman has placed herself. As the memoir progresses, Johnson slowly comes to terms with this clash and it is through the juxtaposition of herself as a competent writer and editor together with her desires for Jack that create a deeper understanding of their relationship—one that is significantly based on their identities as writers. While including moments of helping him home when he was drunk, Johnson also provides many examples of the ways that she and Kerouac were compatible as writers. She says, “He asked me if I rewrote alot, and said you should never revise, never change anything, not even a word … He was going to look at my work and show me that what you wrote first was always best. I said okay, feeling guilty for all that I’d rewritten, but I still loved Henry James” (MC 129). This moment is similar to others where Kerouac provides advice about writing but she doesn’t follow it. She is deferent to Jack in their relationship but not in her writing. Her deliberate construction of herself as a writer and of Kerouac’s discussions

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with her about her writing suggests her confidence in her role as a writer, even if her role as a lover is compromised. Johnson’s descriptions of both her first husband (In the Night Café and Missing Men) and her second husband (Bad Connections and Missing Men) also highlight the ways that she would take them back, wait for them, bring them home after they’d gotten drunk in a bar. And while it is clear it was not acceptable to her, she also describes how she worked toward understanding how the literary and art scenes were full of men and women like them, navigating how to live a life creating art while also navigating the responsibilities of a relationship and family. In Missing Men, for instance, she interrogates this dilemma from the perspective of her childhood. As a girl not allowed to have friends or play outside she is “blissful” when she’s able to play with Alex, a boy down the street (MM 65). She is introduced to the intricacies of navigating masculinity and femininity and the expectations of boys and girls physically and socially. Both her memoirs interweave her struggle against those expectations yet her adherence to them. Significantly, her relationship with a childhood friend, Alex, is a “secret” from her parents and “more powerful and real than the [life] I had with them” (MM 67). She says that, “I knew I was very lucky he still liked me” (MM 67). Similarly, she felt glad to be part of Jack’s life. She says, “I considered myself extremely lucky to be living so much at the center of things— the full flowering of Beat writing and abstract expressionist painting—a remarkable period that had lasted five years” (MM 121). Johnson describes the complex tensions between her growing independence as a writer, her commitment to a life outside of 1950s norms, and her struggles in relationships where she simultaneously desires commitment and independence, revealing multiple conflicting voices in her Bohemian life.

Conflicting Voices: Performing Writing Throughout her memoir, Johnson represents conflicting voices, most notably in her descriptions of her relationship with Kerouac. It is because of her confidence as a writer that revisiting her descriptions of other women is essential—on the surface they may seem relationship based but they function to reclaim the Beat Generation for the women like her who did it differently. They wrote and created while rearing children and paying the rent and enduring sexism not only from their romantic partners but from their jobs as well.

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While still at Barnard, she describes skipping class “for the sake of art. It was as if a muffled orchestra played inside my head at such a distance I couldn’t quite get all of what it was playing. There were all these tones and rhythms not yet imbued with sense, but suggesting it, calling it into being. I’d write sentences in my notebook and sometimes get very close to this orchestra … Nothing similar to this orchestra of language had ever accompanied my writing of music” (MC 95). As a young writer experiencing these moments of creativity are significant, and they occur well before she meets Jack. She shows us is that her writing is real and sustainable. Through the course of the memoir, she steadily writes. Jack is constantly searching for a place to write his spontaneous prose, but the perfect place proves difficult to replicate. Johnson’ steady writing, after moving multiple times throughout the city and while also holding jobs, suggests a sustainability that is much different than the frenetic life Jack lived in between escapes to his mother’s house, drinking heavily in the end. As she notes in her memoir, Johnson moved out of her parents’ house in 1955 at eighteen, securing her own place to live. She did this, she says, in part to have sexual freedom. But it is also clear that it was equally important to have freedom to write. When her parents read a letter she’d written to her friend Maria that was fictionalized and salacious, their reaction was fierce. Before she had desired privacy for sex, she had the need for privacy to write. Where Johnson places these details in the narrative is important, so that by the time readers see Johnson struggling over her relationship with Jack, we know her worth as a writer. We know early that her first boss, a woman, named Naomi Burton, asks famed editor Hiram Hadyn to let Johnson into his workshop on the novel. He eventually becomes Johnson’s editor, offering a contract on her first novel. This moment in her life is juxtaposed with Kerouac’s sexual exploits. Johnson’s representation of their parallel lives before they meet highlights her as a writer. This deliberate comparison of the way they wrote is significant, particularly in the way she worked to earn money. In her office jobs, she hid her “unacceptable self,” would dress in “office” clothes, talk to other women, not “revealing I was living with a man. It reminded me of acting, and I’d always been able to act” (MC 141). She is clear, however, that these jobs were a means to her desire to be a writer: “I was waiting for much more … As a writer, I would live life to the hilt as my unacceptable self, just as Jack and Allen had done. I would make it my business to write about young women quite different from the ones

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portrayed weekly in the pages of The New  Yorker. I would write about furnished rooms and sex … I’d call Elise late at night at her job and read her the new pages of my novel, or bring them with me to Hiram Hadyn’s class, where people actually seemed to like them as much as Elise did. Intoxicated by these bits of approval I’d stay up several nights in a row and write more” (MC 148), “sneak[ing] bits of my novel into the typewriter [at work] on slow afternoons in the office” (MC 150). When Kerouac discourages Johnson from revising in order to maintain the integrity of “the moment,” Johnson rebels: “Despite Jack’s advice, I still wrote each paragraph over and over, the sheets of paper I kept in the green typewriter-paper box swelled to fifty. No longer could anyone mistake my novel in progress for a mere short story” (MC 148). She states first that she defied Kerouac, by then a famous writer, rhetorically placing herself in a position of authority over her own writing. As she described writing her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, “By making Alex a character, I took away his power to hurt me. Just like me, my heroine would have an affair with the Alex character and end up alone. But in my fictional rearrangement of life, it was she who was going to leave him after their one and only night together. I rewarded her with a trip to Paris” (MC 117). Johnson sees herself as an independent writer even if she does not see herself as an independent lover. Johnson is simultaneously a lovesick young woman while also a savvy writer who knows how to live on her own and produce art in a society where few women can or do. She is shrewd about the publishing business, she worked as a secretary or publishing assistant since she was nineteen or twenty. Finally, the pacing of Johnson’s prose is slow, especially compared to other writers of the Beat Generation. While Kerouac tried to make his writing style mimic skat and bebop music, Johnson’s prose reads more like the soundtrack of a film noir, where the prose is subtle, muted, and steady. When Johnson is promoted from secretary to editorial assistant at a publishing company, she says, “I knew it was possible to remain a secretary your entire working life. Perhaps someday I could even be an editor myself, although very few women got that far and the ones who had were all ladies of at least forty. You didn’t turn down luck like this unless you were crazy or rich or engaged to be married. I accepted the job in a daze, realizing afterward it meant I’d given up on California” (MC 173). Addressing the reader to emphasize her point, to leave a position like this would not be wise. Readers understand her disappointment about not moving to San Francisco with Jack  and also her desire to work her way up in the

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publishing industry. But soon thereafter, Kerouac changes his mind again and asks her to move to Mexico. She accepts and when he gets ill, they do not go. In her typical style, Johnson “reports” on Kerouac’s letter telling her of their once again canceled plans. In her memoir she provides no commentary about the disappointment she must have felt, a distancing that is unsettling. In her letters volume, Door Wide Open, however, she does provide some insight to that moment: “I wish I could’ve move faster than Jack changed his mind” (DWO). Though she is silent in the memoir about her disappointment, it is clear she is heartbroken. She imagined a life where she could care for him and they could write together. In part, she was convinced she could take care of him because she knew the publishing world. She played a significant role in managing his affairs after he became famous and in his letters he referred to her as “my little secretary.” She fielded phone calls from the media and mailed him clippings. She knew how to play the media game and she believed that Jack gave too much of himself away in interviews with reporters. She saw him as able to be hurt by the media and she believed she could protect him. At the same time, she wonders, “How Beat could I actually be, holding down a steady office job and writing a novel about an ivy-league college girl on the verge of parting with her virginity? ‘If I had to go and apply for jobs like you, they’d have to drag me into Bellevue in two days,’ [Jack] wrote” (MC 205). A writer’s life, a true bohemian’s life, according to Jack, was to not work, to not succumb to the pressure to do so. While she does not criticize him directly, she does comment that, “it was all right for women to go out and earn wages, since they had no important creative endeavors to be distracted from. The women didn’t mind, or, if they did, they never said—not until years later” (MC 207). Like much of her commentary, she writes in the third person here, deflecting critique away from Kerouac while at the same time providing a shrewd critique of the gender inequities of the moment, despite the general counter culture movement at the time. For Kerouac, the Beat ethic did not include an office job. But what he failed to recognize was that Johnson’s Beat scene was New York City and in some ways, her ability to move around in the city presented her with experiences critical to the bohemian lifestyle. As she recounts throughout the memoir, she had been traveling since she was thirteen to the cafeterias, parks, bars, and restaurants frequented by artists and painters and jazz musicians—her knowledge of the scene was vast. Even during the time that she and Jack are together but when he is away at his mother’s, Johnson would run home, change out of her secretarial “outfit,” and

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go back out to attend gallery openings or jazz shows. “I didn’t want to miss anything” (MC 210), she says, recognizing the moment she’s in. While writing about her contradictions, she is steadfast in her appreciation of Kerouac, even if it was a disappointing romantic relationship. She emphasizes their discussions as writers: “It would be a mistake for the reader to put too much emphasis upon what Jack Kerouac withheld from me and to forget what he had to give. He’d written to a very young woman as an equal, someone strong enough to take the truth. He’d generously recognized the writer in her. And he never boxed her in. This was rare for the sexist 1950s, even in Bohemian circles” (DWO xxv). The excitement and culture shifting moments of the art and music scenes outpaced what she experienced in the work world. She says, “I’d recently come to realize that in the world of work, gentility strangely counted more than brilliance, and young women were judged by prospective employers the way they’d be judged as candidates for marriage to the kinds of young men who didn’t interest me one bit” (MC 147). When disqualified for a job, she concludes it might have been because she is Jewish. Looking back, she says “as for the pursuit of gentility, all that seemed quite ridiculous now, and even pitiable. I saw it only as a necessary mask” (MC 148). The mask she wore at work afforded her a way to live among the people with whom she shared similar values about art and literature. Kerouac and others were part of that change and while, “I hate Jack’s woman-hatred, hate it, mourn it, understand it, and finally forgive” (MC 133). As she recounts the changing scene and the writers and artists she encountered, she notes the excitement of sharing their work: “But did you understand? must always be the question. To like and admire is not enough: did you understand? And will you understand the next thing I do” (MC 160). The urgency of change within the Beat scene was reflected in her artist friends, and, “Major or minor, they all seemed possessed by the same impulse—to break out into forms that were unrestricted and new” (MC 162). The language within these chapters, however, is not consistent. In the beginning chapters of the memoir where she describes Kerouac before she meets him, Johnson uses a voice that is detached, journalistic: “Four young men on the Columbia campus on a day in 1945. Early spring, maybe, because the coats of the three of them are open at the collar and the tree in the background in bare. They’re boys, really” (MC 1). Like the opening of a feature story in a newspaper, her description of Kerouac and his friends is detached. However, in the chapter describing her growing up

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in New  York, Johnson is dreamy and idealistic as she longs for the Bohemian life. As she sneaked to the Village with her friend Maria, she knew she was experiencing “real life.” She considered real life as “not the life my parents lived but one that was dramatic, unpredictable, possibly dangerous. Therefore real, infinitely more worth having” (MC 29–30). She begins to understand the identity she wants to have. When she finally is living the identity she dreamed of as a girl, she decides to finally move to a cheap tenement so that she can quit her job and finish her novel. Johnson says, “High on my moral victory, I looked in my purse and I saw I had enough money for exactly one more week of freedom from offices. At last I’d joined the ranks of the scufflers” (MC 206). Likewise, the majority of the chapters describing her relationship with Kerouac are written in the style of the older narrator amused at the voice of the naive young woman. When Johnson writes about her friends, however, she uses the same reporter-like style used in the beginning chapters to describe Kerouac’s life before he met her. One of her close friends was Hettie Cohen Jones, wife of LeRoi Jones (who later becomes Amiri Baraka). Johnson does not include much commentary on their friendship, not in the same emotional way that she describes her relationship with Kerouac. She does, however, note Hettie’s significance as a White woman who marries a Black man in the fifties: “A few months before I met her, the former Hettie Cohen had been pronounced dead in Laurelton, Long Island. That day she’d announced to her parents her intention to marry Roi, and driven off weeping, in a car full of boxes from the room she’d grown up in, never to spend a night under the roof of that house again, or be invited to dinners on the Jewish holidays, not even to speak with her own sister for years” (MC 213). When Hettie meets LeRoi, Johnson describes their connection: “Some rare, deep understanding drew them inexorably together. One lonely Saturday afternoon they ran into each other on Greenwich Avenue, and became lovers. The next day, alone in her apartment after he left, Hettie foresaw that they would marry—and knew the risks, the costs” (MC 215–216). Johnson’s choice of detail in this passage is interesting. As she describes the scene, Johnson is highlighting the great sacrifice made by Hettie for LeRoi. Then, without presenting emotion, Johnson reports the birth of Hettie’s baby: “When Hettie went into labor, LeRoi was out of town doing a poetry reading … and I took Hettie to the hospital. ‘Good-by!’ she waved to us, smiling with amazing serenity. ‘See you later …’ She blew us a kiss as she went off alone to have Roi’s child” (MC 259). The vignette ends there, leaving the reader to

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judge LeRoi Jones for leaving his wife to give birth after her enormous sacrifice. Johnson also points to his political reasons for later leaving Hettie, mentioning his essay “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite.” Johnson’s assessment of it is as, “an oddly reasoned apologia for … the bad faith he demonstrated in public denunciations of his wife Hettie” (MC 216). Like others critiqued during the Black Arts movement, also male dominated, “Baraka’s rhetoric privileges domesticity for black women and distorts their condition, whereas house not only signifies her body to which the black man can retreat, but it also symbolizes mother, lover, and helpmate, identities to which far too many black women had been saddled with, and that are reified by both black men and women poets of this period” (Simms-Burton 84–85). Johnson’s critique of LeRoi is similar to that of the white Beats—pointing to the simultaneous importance of their work and their misogynistic attitudes toward women. Johnson’s inclusion of Hettie’s experience reinforces the anticipation of significant social and racial change in 1950s New York. She explains there was a “newness and openness expressed in the poems, the paintings, the music … swamping the old barriers of class and race, healing the tragic divisions in the American soul. Children of the late and silent fifties, we knew little of the political realities. We had the illusion our own passions were enough. We felt, as Hettie Cohen Jones once put it, that you could change everything just by being loud enough” (MC 216). When Jack and Joyce are breaking up, Hettie is her friend who advises her to “Harden your heart,” knowing that not seeing Jack would be difficult for her (MC 221). While the difficult living conditions of the tenement unmoored her, it was one of the “periods when I’ve been happiest—a sense of being part of an endless family whose individual members only needed to be discovered one by one” (MC 243). During this time, Johnson’s oldest friend Elise Cowen remained central to the scene. While she and Ginsberg were no longer lovers, they remained close friends. As she describes Elise and Sheila, who at the time lived with their friend Leo, they were all “more like relatives than friends” (MC 91). Johnson was keenly aware of her own outsiderness, in part because of Elise’s centrality to the scene. Elise cut her hair short which “she wears still, ill-fitting Levi’s with those girlish blouses her mother bought her in high school” (MC 91). As she describes Elise’s look, she’s aware that her own “uniform,” all black, is boring in comparison. From early in the memoir readers understand Elise as central to Johnson’s development as a writer and a person. She says, “Most of our conversations were like that

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during the ten years we knew each other, so that even now it’s sometimes a shock to remember Elise is dead and I can’t pick up a phone and speak to her” (MC 52–53). She includes moments of Elise’s sadness and depression throughout the memoir, together with her impact as a poet. When Elise attempts suicide in college, Johnson writes about her own naiviete— she could not fathom the depths of Elise’s depression. When Elise leaves Barnard to go into analysis, Johnson recounts her younger self’s perspective that she is sure that Elise’s psychotherapy is yet another way that her membership in the bohemian community is more valid than hers. While at Barnard in 1952, John Clellon Holmes New York Times Magazine article, “This is The Beat Generation” was published. Johnson’s response to the article was excitement. She was excited to read the recognition of the ways that she and Elise were feeling about cultural shifts. She points out, however, that, “all of [the writers], besides were men. But wasn’t this ‘bottled eagerness’ exactly what we felt? Could we be somehow more a part of the Beat Generation than of the Silent one we’d been born into chronologically?” (MC 71). Rather than stating emphatically that she and Elise were a part of the movement, she poses it as a question, providing readers with the immediacy of the moment she was in: she was in college, reading an article that basically describes herself. It was just a year later that Elise meets Allen Ginsberg and goes on a date with him. Johnson’s reflection on Elise’s 1963 date with Ginsberg emphasizes the significance of the moment for them both: “I recall even what she wore for this occasion: a red cotton dress, sleeveless and full-skirted, primly tight at the waist. It was her favorite dress” (MC 73). Elise meets Ginsberg in the Village and they go to several bars. Johnson, in her journalist’s voice, reports, “The women here, Elise notices, are all beautiful and have such a remarkable cool that they never, never, say a word; they are presences merely” (MC 74). Although Ginsberg is on the verge of writing Howl and traveling to San Francisco where he will meet his long-time partner, Peter Orlovsky, “there’s something between Allen and my friend Elise,” says Johnson, “that instant knowing which can exist like a mysterious current between two people. He accepts her in her Crazy Jane-ness, somehow encompasses her, whereas Alex had simply observed. ‘He seems to think I am very deep,’ Elise remarked wryly afterward” (MC 75). In her memoir Johnson includes what Ginsberg wrote in his journal about Elise: “I’ve always been attracted to intellectual madwomen,’ he confesses in his journal six years later, including Elise in that category”

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(MC 76). Johnson’s details about their brief romantic relationship and eventual friendship highlight the centrality of Elise to the Beat movement. She was clearly not on the periphery. Through Elise’s experience Johnson can report on the ways that women were also deeply impacted by what they were reading as the United States prepared for a societal shift. Johnson describes Elise in her room, reading Holmes’s novel Go: “For Elise in her own dread of lovelessness, her fear that she will never be found acceptable, never never fit, be outcast even among outcasts; for Elise who feels herself to be a shadow, Nada, voiceless—coming upon this passage as she turns a page in some midnight solitude is like having a window open up inside her, an illumination of hope. If a Strofsky exists, then there are counterparts for herself. Counterparts even in the self-loathing and despair that strangely seem the source of such visions” (MC 77). Holmes had based Strofsky on Ginsberg and Johnson suspects her love for him is tied up in his visions for the future. Johnson’s reaction to Kerouac’s The Town and the City is similar. However, Johnson is careful to point out that it is not Ginsberg and Kerouac’s celebrity that they are attracted to. Rather, it is their writing and their visions—visions that Elise and Joyce too, as young college students, had been searching for. A little later in the memoir, Johnson notes that in Holmes’s preface to a more recent edition of Go, his description of women, “were of a ‘type rather than an individual.’ He can’t quite remember them—they were mere anonymous passengers on the big Greyhound bus of experience. Lacking centers, how could they burn with the fever that infected his young men? What they did, I guess, was fill up the seats” (MC 79). Johnson again poses a question really meant to point out, sardonically, that the men were so involved with their own experiences and so ingrained in their thinking that women were not part of intellectual pursuits, that they could not see what was right in front of them. By recounting Professor X at Barnard telling his students, “first of all, if you were going to be writers, you wouldn’t be enrolled in this class. You couldn’t even be enrolled in school. You’d be hopping freight trains, riding through America” (MC 81), she is highlighting that it was the masculine that was considered Beat. In the construction of her argument, she does not explicitly disagree. Instead, she documents all the writing that she and the women around her are doing at the same time—without hopping on trains—and subsequently reveals how that kind of thinking, a male-centered way of thinking about what counts as creative, is at the heart of what counts as good writing and makes its way into publishing houses and creative writing courses. Both as

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a writer and as an editor Joyce Johnson resists this way of thinking. While “on the road” was the metaphor for good writing by men, Johnson quietly suggests that in fact “in my apartment” is where the actual writing happened. Her own room, as writers like Virginia Woolf have argued before her, is the key for Johnson to write. Her description of Elise’s tenement apartment in college highlights its almost spiritual quality. Elise had painted everything white  and her apartment had, “amazing light in that place, how it flooded in as if there was no real separation between inside and outside, and everything—what little there was—seemed to be set afloat in it … The defiant absence of anything over the windows, I guess. Maybe it was just as simple as that” (MC 14). Elise’s apartment is in stark contrast to Johnson’s description of her mother’s home which was dark with the heavy drapes drawn shut and the furniture “hostages to aspiration.” For Johnson, Elise’s move out of her parents and into her own place was bold. She “envied the courage [Elise’s apartment on 108th Street] represented. Nineteen year-old girls did not leave home except for dormitories or marriage” (MC 63). Johnson’s endurances of sexism at her office jobs contrast with Elise’s. When Elise knew she was going to be fired at one job, she protested by refusing to leave. Johnson explains, “She stopped and put her arms around the machine, feeling anchored by its heaviness. Speaking out clearly, she said, ‘I want a reason or explanation’” (MC 164). Johnson’s depiction of her protest, especially in light of the variety of injustices toward women in the workplace, provides Elise and women like her a chance to voice her protest. Her actions, too, signal a heightening of her depression. But Johnson’s rendering of the scene asks readers to consider the possible source of Elise’s depression, though not directly. As Jack had indicated, an office job would send him to the “madhouse.” The conditions for women in the workplace were intolerable, and yet they kept going, committed to earning enough to live on their own. Elise’s insistence on a reason for her dismissal is a reasonable request. In the 1950s, it was not. After Elise’s death, Johnson notes that Ginsberg prints some of Elise’s poems and writes a eulogistic note about her with Lucien Carr in City Lights Journal. Johnson describes their joint writing: “Their voices alternate—unidentified—from line to line … Either Lucien or Allen said, ‘She has that quality of alert solitude.’ I want to think it was Allen Ginsberg” (258–259). Like several of her passages that are emotional in the memoir, this one ends abruptly, with no further commentary from Johnson about

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her feelings on Elise’s death. Johnson’s silence subtly chides Ginsberg for his treatment of Elise—her hope that it was Allen who wrote the words indicates her wish that deep down, for Elise, he returned some level of admiration toward her. Johnson also notes that “Elise is a bit player in Jack’s fiction,” again pointing the ways their men friends wrote about their women friends as props, as peripheral to their “real” experiences. Johnson’s auto/biographical writing, however, is a redress of their mistreatment both in life and in poetry. By including the line from Ginsberg and Carr, recognized voices in the Beat Generation, Johnson creates an additional space where Elise’s voice could also be heard. After her terse description of Elise’s suicide, in less than a page, Johnson states that her own first novel was published when she was twenty-six and she traveled to Paris after all, after the death of her first husband. These significant, emotional events are recounted as if by a reporter. All she says about her husband, James Johnson, is that, “It was the happiest summer of my life … He seemed to understand, better than I did, why I’d loved Jack, what I’d been looking for—which I had now, didn’t I? And I’d say yes, I had it now, finally” (MC 262). Later, Johnson goes to see Kerouac’s film, Pull My Daisy, which he had worked on while they were together and for which she had helped secure its director, Robert Frank. Her comments on the film after seeing it are familiar this late in the memoir: “It’s too bad the women are all portrayed as spoilsports” (MC 260). Johnson’s mini-­ biographies of her friends and other women connected to the Beat Generation challenges the representation of the women as spoil sports and suggests to readers that the male Beat writers, though inspiring thinkers and writers and artists, whom she admired and loved, might have behaved like “children” (MC 261). While Johnson writes emotionally about herself as a young woman hopelessly in love with Kerouac and is honest about her regret for tolerating his behavior for too long, her detached narration of the women in the text suggests a different purpose for writing about them. With clear and direct prose, the memoir is a story about being a Beat writer and a central figure within the literary scene of the 1950s. That these passages are often written in an investigative or journalistic voice is key to understanding Johnson as a writer. One of her books, What Lisa Knew: The Truth and Lies of the Steinberg Case, is a work of investigative reporting, weaving the trial of Joel Steinberg with narratives about an abused child’s life. As in her other work, the third-person narrator is detached and descriptive, while at the same time passionate, spare, and devastating in its reporting. As a

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reviewer said of the book, Johnson “has a way of characterizing people with a single stroke, allowing us to color in the rest—and therefore to invest ourselves more deeply” (Anne Tyler, Chicago Tribune review). Likewise, Johnson uses this same reporter’s style, together with a weaving of first-, second-, and third-person perspectives in her auto/biographical writing. It has the effect of putting readers in the immediate scene while also allowing them to draw conclusions on their own. Johnson does write about how she feels, but the moments where she “reports” Elise’s death, or Kerouac’s rude, insensitive, and misogynist behavior, are devastating, in part because it is tangled up with her sentimental descriptions of how much she loved him, what she did for him, that she wanted to protect him, and that he respected her as a writer. However, in the last chapter of the memoir, Johnson’s narrative voice regarding her younger self changes. She cryptically sums up the rest of her life after her affair with Kerouac has ended: by saying, I see the girl Joyce Glassman, twenty-two, with her hair hanging down below her shoulders, all in black … with her seat at the table in the exact center of the universe, that midnight place where so much is converging, the only place in American that’s alive? As a female, she’s not quite part of this convergence. A fact she ignores, sitting by in her excitement as the voices of the men, always the men, passionately rise and fall and their beer glasses collect and the smoke of their cigarettes rises toward the ceiling and the dead culture is surely being awakened. Merely being here, she tells herself is enough. What I refuse to relinquish is her expectancy. It’s only her silence that I wish finally to give up—and Elise’s silence … posthumously attending to the lessons of Pound in stolen books, and the poems Hettie kept mute in boxes for too many years. (MC 261–262)

Johnson’s switch to the third person in the final paragraphs of the memoir reiterates her performative use of language. In these closing remarks, Johnson highlights that while the Beat scene was the only place she wanted to be, she learned, through women like Hettie and Elise, that in fact the center of the scene was located with them, the women who provided reliable spaces to create for their friends, their lovers, and themselves. In the closing lines of her collection  of correspondence with Jack, Johnson seemingly gives Jack the last word. Quoting from Desolation Angels, where Kerouac uses the name Alyce Newman for Joyce, he describes her as “‘an interesting young person, a Jewess, elegant, middleclass sad and looking for something.’ He surprised and touched me by

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saying it was, ‘Perhaps the best love affair I had’” (DWO). Indicating that she was touched suggests that she may still be wistful about their affair. However, the very last line of Door Wide Open is from Desolation Angels, where Kerouac says of Alyce: “In fact she sort of fell in love with me. But that was only because I didn’t impose on her” (qtd. in DWO). After reading the entire correspondence, including her additional auto/biographical commentaries, it is clear that Jack did indeed impose on Joyce. She loaned him money, she served as his secretary for free, and she repeatedly forgave him for retracting invitations to live with him in San Francisco and Mexico. However, Johnson, characteristic of her style, will not say this directly. It is clear she loved him. She says she would have married him if he’d asked and Alyce says to him in Desolation Angels, “you should let me protect you.’” With the recent publication of The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac Viking, it is clear that Kerouac remains significant to Johnson. In fact, the entire biography could be read as a way to protect the assessment of him as a writer. The focus of Johnson’s biography is on Kerouac as a researcher, reader, and intellectual and how much preparation he did as a writer. Based on papers now available at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, Johnson’s skill as an archival researcher and literary editor is evident. She points out that in fact Jack revised heavily and that his editors made significant changes to his writing, dispelling the myth that what was published came from long bouts of writing a novel in one sitting. Her emphasis in this writer’s biography is to show the vast research and literary reading that he did, stating that it was his distillation, writing, and revision of this research that made for “spontaneous prose.” It was “The alchemy [that] turned his memories into art, shaping, altering, and refining the raw material” (The Voice is All). She is tender still toward him, providing insight into his constant moving around: “Instead there was a permanent sense of homesickness, all the more painful for not being attached to any one dwelling” (The Voice is All). Finally, despite Johnson’s project to redress the story of the women of the Beat Generation and the men’s complicity in their relegation as peripheral characters, she is also clear about her admiration of the moment that Kerouac and others were forging. She says, “to be a college-educated hitchhiker was to be anachronistic. The Depression decade, when millions of the hungry, homeless, and unemployed had roamed the US landscape, hopped freights, slept in open fields, was still grimly, unnostalgically alive in people’s memories. Status and security had been so recently won and

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still seemed tenuously held” (MC 24). Kerouac’s counter way of life was important, Johnson asserts, but so too was the resistance that she and the other women of the Beats staged. Often separate from the protests of African Americans who were galvanizing the Civil Rights movement, Johnson’s treatment of the resistances of the Beat women reveals how unsettling aspects of White society was tomany in the country. Though privileged by race and class, women like Johnson were searching for something different—they were dissatisfied with societal order. Johnson’s social justice project is different than what Hurston, Lorde, Allison, and Lim write about, her reclaimation of the place of women in the Beat Generation reveals the sweeping inequities and their impacts on the country. For Johnson, it was the painters, artists, musicians, and writers who helped lay the groundwork for what would come later in the Civil Rights, Gay Rights, and Feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, her critical lens on her “sheltered” upbringing illustrates how censorship, expected or enforced domestic roles, access to reproductive rights, and safe housing were issues that crossed race and class lines. However, she suggests, expecting “good girls” to behave a certain way kept them invisible to each other and to joining with others to resist inequity. Johnson’s work, including her editorial work and her memoir, Minor Characters, does much more than tell a love story.

Works Cited Aloff, Mindy. “The Kerouac Voice.” VQR: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion. (2012): https://www.vqronline.org/kerouac-­voice. Carden, Mary Paniccia. Women Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and Intertextuality. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Grace, Nancy and Jennie Skerl, eds. The Transnational Beat Generation, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Grace, Nancy M. and Ronna C. Johnson. Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Johnson, Joyce. Come and Join the Dance. New York: Open Road Media, 1961. Johnson, Joyce. Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957–1958. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Johnson, Joyce. In the Night Café. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989. Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. New York: Doubleday, 1983. Johnson, Joyce. Missing Men. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Johnson, Joyce. The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. New  York: Viking, 2012.

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Johnson, Joyce. What Lisa Knew: The Truth and Lies of the Steinberg Case. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1990. Johnson, Ronna and Nancy McCampbell Grace. Girls who wore black : women writing the beat generation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Johnson, Ronna C. “‘And then she went’: Beat departures and feminine transgressions in Joyce Johnson’s Come and Join the Dance.” Ronna Johnson and Nancy McCampbell Grace, eds. Girls who wore black: women writing the beat generation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 69–95. Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, 1996. Peadbody, Richard. A Different Beat: Writings of Women of the Beat Generation. Serpent’s Tail, 1997. Simms-Burton, Michele. “Writing Nation: Giovanni, Sanchez, and Lorde and the Black Arts Movement.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 29 (2009): 79–98. Skerl, Jennie, ed. Reconstructing the Beats. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Trigilio, Tony, ed. Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments. Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 2014.

CHAPTER 7

Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Embodied Memories: Academic Autobiography, Genre, and Mentorship

In Among the White Moon Faces, Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s 1996 memoir, she asks, “Do wild feminists live in universities? Can they?” (226). Her direct address, her suggestion that feminists might have a difficult existence within academic settings, is a rhetorical framing around disrupting the status quo of the academy and of inventing themselves as wild feminists. Like Hurston, Lorde, and Allison, Lim invites readers to interact with her texts by challenging their own identities as feminists, feminists of change, and wild feminists. What constitutes a wild feminist? By Lim’s example, wild feminists speak their minds, share their stories, stand up, are not quiet, and write to offer a possible map toward recovery and healing. In the age of twitter and the #MeToo movement, technology has catapulted stories of recovery into the mainstream. #MeToo tweets are mini-memoirs, and memoirs like Lim’s were the early technologies of constructing stories where one’s experience could serve as wild activism. Lim’s process of recovering and healing is marked by her rhetorical strategies of constructing multiple yet contradicting identities. To examine these rhetorical strategies in this chapter, I combine autobiography and rhetorical studies perspectives to explore Lim’s multiple identity constructions. As I discuss in more detail in Chap. 1, I examine rhetorical constructions of moving and fluid identities through understandings of performance, place, space, culture, and gender. As Debra Hawhee suggests, “Bodies and language, then, are irreducibly distinct and yet parallel and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. M. Powell, Performing Autobiography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4_7

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complementary, mediated by sensation and attitude—at times undermining, at others duplicating each other, but often, if not always, in effect moving together” (Hawhee 166). Linking bodies and language together with location and constructions of identity (Bammer) helps us focus on the ways that “place-based identities are constructed and temporal” (Powell 2005, 13). Autobiography scholars Smith and Watson assert that, “Autobiographical acts are inescapably material and embodied” (Smith and Watson “Introduction” 11). In this way, autobiography can be seen as a disruption, where representing multiple and contradicting identities disrupt dominant perceptions of particular identity categories. Scattered identities privilege the metonymic character of self (Gilmore “Technologies of Autobiography”) and focus our attention to contingent, liminal, and always already moving aspects of identity. Resisting imposed identities, writers like Lim create identities that subvert what is expected. With these rhetorical understandings of identity construction, we can turn to Lim’s texts to examine the ways that she uses multiple genres to draw attention to the contradictory nature of identity. In 1980, Shirley Geok-lin Lim won the Commonwealth Prize for Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems. Like Dorothy Allison, Zora Neale Hurston, Joyce Johnson, and Audre Lorde, she has published in several genres. In addition to collections of poetry, short stories, and novels, she also has two books of literary criticism and has edited several special volumes and journals. She earned the American Book Award for the co-­ edited collection The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology in 1989, and again for her memoir, Among The White Moon Faces (ATWMF) in 1996. Joss and Gold, her (2001) semi-autobiographical novel, addresses the politically charged atmosphere of Kuala Lumpur in 1969. Born in Malaysia, much of Lim’s poetry, literary criticism, essays, and stories reflect her Chinese Malaysian heritage and the social and literary landscape of the United States. While she is well known for her poetry and her feminist commitment to Asian American literature, it is her memoir, through its self-reflexivity and calls to action, that uniquely contributes to Lim’s activist agenda. Labeled as a “scholarly memoir” by literary and rhetorical critic Margaret Willard-­ Traub, Lim establishes “relationships between writers and readers” where there is a “forging of material connections…[and] consequences” (511–512; emphasis in original). The material in Lim’s work generally and her memoir in particular is examined in this chapter as Lim’s contribution to feminist and performative autobiography and the ways that Lim’s

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embodied memories question notions of intellect, immigrants, and women of color. Lim’s work serves as resistance to cultural definitions prescribed for her, creating a definition of immigrant woman that is multi-layered and complex. In her essays, for example, she merges academic scholarship and personal writing to dispel the notion that the two are mutually exclusive. In addition, she encourages women writers to “write out of turn” (MLA’s Profession 1999), resisting the colonizing forces that seek to define them. Throughout her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, Lim poses questions to the audience about the strictures of colonialism, higher education institutions, and definitions of immigrants and women. She uses the example of her life to illustrate the “tensions within her identity” to construct a self-conscious and interactive performance space, encouraging readers to experience, with her, her reflexivity about herself and about education. Lim’s narrative construction is self-consciously interactive and engages readers’ senses of civic, academic, and intellectual justice, while simultaneously examining traditional education. With the 2011 publication of The Shirley Lim Collection: Passports and Other Lives, it is now more apparent than ever the range of Lim’s creative and scholarly pursuits. As she writes in multiple genres including poetry, short stories, flash fiction, memoir, novels, and academic scholarship, Lim’s work captures many dimensions not only of layered identities but also of layered genres. Within literary studies, several scholars have written about her universal themes of shifting ethnic identities, loss, displacement, belonging, and borders (Buss, Davis, Feng,  Miller, Tay, Willard-Traub, Zeng), attesting to the profound influence she has had as a writer, scholar, and editor of Asian  American literature. Like the geographical border crossings that Lim addresses in her work, she also crosses generic borders, examining these issues in many different forms. About the many identities she occupies, she comments on reconciling the conflicting identities within herself. By writing in multiple genres, Lim addresses the following question posed in her memoir, “How can I prove that I am not who I am?” (ATWMF 25). Suggesting that who she is as an Asian American women is imposed on her, she asks readers how she might resist those inscribed identities, yet recognizes the difficulty in doing so as there are few before her that answer that challenge. She answers this question in multiple ways: as a poet, a novelist, a literary critic and scholar, a teacher, and a mentor. No matter what the reader brings to a definition to any of those genres or to the meanings of Asian American, Malaysian American, feminist, mother, or migrant, Lim’s engagement with many textual forms, and all the

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fluidity they offer and that she demands of them, proves she is not who readers think she should be. While Lim is an accomplished and award-winning poet, much has been made of her (academic) memoir, Among the White Moon Faces. Like those of her fellow academics, Audre Lorde and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (among others), Lim’s memoir in part documents women’s experiences of intellectual life in the academy. However, as Lim has stated, “I prefaced my reading then by denying vehemently and entirely that my memoir was an academic autobiography, and defended it instead as the autobiography of a poet, a position which I seem to have lost to the academics” (“The Troubled” 302). While Lim resists the boundaries of the “troubled” genre of autobiography, Rocio Davis concludes that Lim’s memoir is an academic autobiography because it is a “map through which to reconsider her scholarly work” (441–442). Davis points to the “autobiographical character of [Lim’s] critical work” (445) and in doing so suggests that, “‘Lim’s recurring intellectual concerns’” (447) about gender, genre, ethnicity, and boundaries in her memoir become “the ultimate act of unifying, not only the personal and the public, but also her thematic and generic intellectual interests” (447). I would add to this argument that Lim’s memoir serves as a map toward navigating multiple, contentious, and contradictory identities, thereby offering to readers a guide for constructing their own identities as they navigate academic spaces. In addition to unifying her various themes (Davis), and providing lessons learned for future women academics (Miller), however, memoirs like Lim’s construct a self-conscious and interactive performance space, encouraging readers to experience the author’s reflexivity. Under Della Pollock’s formulation, Lim’s memoir functions as performative autobiography, “tend[ing] to subject the reader to the writer’s reflexivity, drawing [her] respective subject-selves reciprocally and simultaneously into critical ‘intimacy’” (Pollock 86). Lim writes about the “tensions” in her multiple identities, proving that she is something other than what the academy imagines she should be. During this process, she reflects on her role as an educator and feminist. So when she addresses readers directly, asking, “Do wild feminists live in universities? Can they?” (226), she is self-consciously constructing an interactive text and revealing a call to action, an engagement with readers’ identities as well. Lim’s text demonstrates for women the ways that they can write “out of turn” (Profession 1999), write against the grain of what is expected, and dismantle the power structures that reify dominant narratives about women in the academy. As I have argued

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elsewhere, Lim’s “text, with this direct address to the reader, calls for a response. This memoir is not just to be consumed, but it is also to be responded to, with our own identity challenges” (“Memory’s Body” 285). As a result, Lim’s memoir functions as a performative autobiography, one that does something rather than merely recounting a story. Taken together with all her work, Among the White Moon functions as mentorship, guiding women in their struggles with identity, the academy, and society. Lim tells readers in interviews and essays that she is interested in the ways that genres work and the ways writers interrogate genres. About autobiography in particular she says, It is difficult to reconcile such a nimble, flexible, enterprising, entrepreneurial, ethically challenged, un-law-abiding genre with the rigors, circumscriptions, demands and regulations that rule in academia. The autobiography, as it has been produced in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, despite Lejeune’s attempt to legitimize it, has proven very much an illegitimate form, often openly defiant to the strictures he had set down, slyly disobeying as much as seeming to be observant of the laws of genre. (“The Troubled” 303)

This open defiance of autobiography in particular (and genre more generally), one that challenges literary structures, is part of what can make an autobiography, including Lim’s, performative. However, it is not only her autobiography that challenges the “laws” of form and content. Not only is Lim’s memoir performative, much of her creative and academic writing is also performative. Collectively her oeuvre uses a “very self conscious approach to accepted forms and narratives, examining how that very form is limited in adequately representing a life” and critiquing “hegemonic discourse through its self-conscious treatment of the genre[s]” (Powell, “The Embodiment of Memory” 457). In her work, Lim not only asks if wild feminists can reside in the academy, she is also asking if wild writers can exist more generally. She moves from genre to genre, pushing and blurring their boundaries, confounding readers and critics alike. In much the same way that the memoir “is an act of rebellion against the strictures and structures of academe” (Davis 448), her engagement in multiple genres is a rebellion against any one genre and its limits in adequately providing space for an identity(s) such as hers. While Eddie Tay argues that she is “bereft of a cultural identity from which

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to write” (Tay 302), I argue that her cultural identity is indeed the very occupation of multiple identities and thus multiple genres, disobeying multiple laws of the academy and culture(s) alike. Across genres, then, Lim’s texts do things as much as they say something. She has long been interested in the ways issues of ethnic identity and immigrant women intersect, and, as Davis and others have noted, she has been at the forefront as a scholar in multiple fields, publishing “groundbreaking scholarship in three major fields: first, critical studies of Southeast Asian literature in English; second, women-of-color feminism; and, third, Asian American literature” (Davis 447). Lim herself has said that part of her project is to “unpack how textual instances and ethnic and feminist issues have intersected, to analyze how their diverging emphases necessitate an ethnic-cultural nuancing of conventional Euro-American feminist positions on gender/power relations and a feminist critique of ethnic-­ specific identity” (“Feminist and Ethnic” 572). The multiple intersections of ethnic and feminist projects in literature in turn mirror Lim’s creative writing projects: as she crosses multiple traditions and breaks down their barriers, she crosses multiple genres to do so. That she writes in multiple genres makes perfect sense. Traditional genres do not on their own provide adequate performative space for the work of Lim. According to Yu-te (Tom) Kuo, “[Lim] is always on an itinerary” (2). However, Kuo implies that Lim’s agenda is a negative way to write, indeed a negative way to be, suggesting that her inability to locate a particular place or identity is “smoke” (2). In contrast, however, I suggest it is the transitions in genre (and identity) that allow her to reside in multiple liminal spaces at once, creating spaces for others to also reside, making it possible to reconcile multiple, conflicting, and liminal identities. It therefore follows that the issues that haunt her must also reside in multiple generic spaces, each overlapping, blurring, turning, leading to the others, back and forth, in between, always in transition, and always with an itinerary, in the nomadic sense, of a definite sense of purpose. She pushes boundaries, not accepting exclusion. Genres, like identities, are fluid and dynamic, always on the verge of change (Devitt 699). In this way, Lim’s grappling with multiple genres mirrors her grappling with identities. However, rather than a negative connotation where identity fluidity and change have been denigrated, Lim suggests these are valid and legitimate spaces to occupy, at the same time. Those familiar with Lim’s work know how her work confounds boundaries of ethnicity and gender: there are constant overlaps difficult to

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separate. In addition, often when she is confronting inequality or exclusion in one identity, she worries about compromising another. This worry does not paralyze her, however. She ultimately asks readers to recognize these contradictions and compromises within themselves, leading to an understanding of identity as occupying multiple subjectivities at once. Many of Lim’s poems address issues of dislocation, where the body of the immigrant and ethnic identity intersect in ways to highlight feeling “out of place.” Poems such as “Lament,” “Identity No Longer,” “Cross Cultural Exchange,” and “Christmas in Exile,” to name a few, include moments where she seeks to reconcile a body out of place and searches for physical and linguistic belonging. In Asian American literature generally, there is an expectation that the immigrant will long for home. Lim’s poetry contains moments of longing, but she often also complicates that sentiment by interrogating the postcolonial subject while critiquing “landscapes of exile” like the United States. Yet at the same time, she highlights her love of the English language. In “Visiting Malaaca,” for instance, she says, I dream of the old house. The dreams leak slowly like sap Welling from a wound: I am losing Ability to make myself at home. Awake, hunting for lost cousins, I have dreamed of ruined meaning, And am glad to find none. (Crossing the Peninsula 93)

The home she came from represents complicated and difficult memories of poverty and patriarchy. And while she still longs for home and the ability to find a meaning there, her sense of what constitutes being “at home” has shifted, moving her away from the dominant themes in immigrant literature where the homeland represents the penultimate place. Lim takes risks by saying she finds no (ruined) meaning in the old house. The narrator not only muses over the gladness of not finding what she had dreamt of, but also realizes the consequences. These contradictions contained in “Visiting Malaaca” and other poems point to Lim’s rhetorical grappling with the ways that language functions for an immigrant like her: “Lim writes of a colonized subject not merely acted upon by language…. Her diasporic experience, that is, a dislocated body, though subject to commodification, highlights her body learning

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language with agency, with a sense of power” (“Memory’s Body” 283). She continues this struggle in “Modern Secrets,” where The dream shrank to its fiction. I had understood its end Many years ago. The sallow child Ate rice from its ricebowl And hides still in the cupboard With the china and tea-leaves. (Crossing the Peninsula 50)

The dream of home, though powerful and luring, still represents the poverty and suffering of a childhood of fear and ill-health. However, her heritage and longing, despite realizing the fiction of the dream, continue to haunt her. “Passport” is another poem in which Lim laments foreignness in a place where her kinfolk live(d). The sensation of going to China as an American citizen is like “walking backwards,” “where everyone looks like me” (Walking Backwards: New Poems 35). Yet she is foreign and “Without a tongue of China.” These constant tensions of the body, identity, and language, belonging and not belonging, are also addressed in an earlier poem, “Pensée.” She ponders her purpose, the meaning of her poetry, saying, “We want so hard to believe things matter./ Will someone read these words in another world?/ In our world will we read them again without disillusion?” (What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say 44). She considers the role of poetry in understanding death, writing, and complexities of place. After “Reading book after book of poetry,” and examining places and spaces, the narrator surmises that “Something matters world after world:/ terra, land, earth, place/ un/tongued, un/wounded, blooded” (What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say 44–45). Simultaneously, China, named the source presumably of her identity, is the place she seeks to understand, connect with, and find some sense of belonging. She returns to China as a place and a language, “not studied,” though they are a “constant” in her consciousness. China serves as a place where her ethnic cousins and brothers and sisters live, yet simultaneously is also “too heavy,” like “Vomit” (“The Source” Walking Backwards 36). Just as she writes of her father’s strict patriarchal values in many poems like “My Father,” “My Father’s Sadness,” “Father from Asia,” and “Father in China,” she also notes in “The Source,” the women of China who “taught other women what/ Was right and wrong,/ and they were almost/ Always

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wrong” (36). Lim then asks, “Was China in Malacca, a misfit, dumb/ Country; and I its misfit child,/ Bastard and deaf, handicapped and wild” (Walking Backwards 36, emphasis mine). As the misfit child and with an illegitimate identity, Lim returns to an empathetic relationship to the patriarchal China, excluded in Malaaca and disappeared through various laws and restrictions. She also constructs her out-of-placeness as “wild,” not quite belonging, always against the grain of what’s expected of a girl. Her construction of identity as wild, here and in her memoir, suggests a longing for a place where her wildness is accepted, which is seen as a strength rather than a detriment. Can wild feminists exist in the academy? Can the wild girl Shirley find a place in academia? Intercultural marriage, mixed ethnic identity, a girl who wants education, all are aspects of Lim’s identity that defy categories and written laws in multiple spaces. “The Source” and other poems address the both/and subject positions that Lim occupies. Revered across continents as evidenced by her many awards, her complicated and overlapping subject positions have been subjects of her poetry since her early work. In “Thoughts from Abroad,” for instance, she says, “Imagine this world invisible/ As instinct on the flood for home/ From which all exiled landscapes come” (Crossing the Peninsula 34). The instinct, or the flood of emotions, is a visceral reaction to dislocation. However, she recognizes that her corporeal instinct is problematic in postmodernity and consequently subject to deconstruction. Lim does not let that kind of reading of her work be the only interpretation, however. As she says, instinct is an “overwhelming homesickness […] a kind of primordial sentiment.” So while on the one hand we can deconstruct the body’s location and the primordial ways of being as located and situated in contexts, the “overwhelming” visceral responses to landscapes are always connected to the language, she argues. Instincts are always already a part of the language, whether we can deconstruct them or not. The so-called normalcy of experience is called into question and the “flood” which might be interpreted as emotion, a tsunami, or the place of immigration is seen as a place or event to survive. That is, one survives it, rides it out, writes it in whatever form is necessary. For Lim, the notion of landscape is not innocent. The physical landscape of America is an obvious setting, where her exiled-ness puts into sharp relief her longing for home. But the landscape of the English language has also caused her exile. Separated from Chinese and Hokkien, the narrator’s longing, expressed in English, comes after the “rural land” of

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Massachusetts, that is Brandeis University, and her education there reflects her “sensible” immigration. But the promise of education, the promise that the English language has provided her since the nuns taught her in elementary school in Malaysia, cannot overshadow the flood for home, creating the ongoing tensions of desire for the benefits of exile and longing for home. Regarding the contradictions in her subjectivity, Lim recognizes in poems like “Lament” and “Immigrant” that she has been labeled a fool. She says in “Lament,” for instance, that “Although everyone knows/ You [English] are not mine./ They wink knowingly/ At my stupidity–/ I, stranger, foreigner,/ Claiming rights to/ What I have no right–/ Sacrifice, tongue/ Broken by fear” (Listening to the Singer 26). Lim is acutely aware of her simultaneous attachment to the English language and its lack of innocence as a language of power. Similarly, she says in Among the White Moon Faces, To confess to an attachment to the English language and its literature as the motivation for professional study is to open oneself today to the scrutiny of the tough-minded and the incredulity of materialist philosophers. A blind attachment to English and its colonial past reveals vulgarly the colonialist formation of the colonized subject. The very integrity of the decolonizing intellectual must drive her to critique her own ideological formation and so to jilt her first loves. The dominant narrative today stages a culturally free subject who, in the moment of nationalist independence, must disavow the music of the colonizer. (183)

Recognizing this duality (indeed, multiplicity) of language, Lim cautions against absolutism on either side. The complexity of her experience with her first language, particularly the violent words of her Chinese aunts, asks readers to reconsider the forgone conclusion of English as only constraining. In this way, she troubles several positions about the constraints of language, just as she similarly troubles the notion of genre. Of readers she seeks wild feminists and wild writers, those who do not sit silently within borders of identity, ethnicity, gender, space, or genre.

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Patriarchy, Colonial Education, and a Daughter’s Desire for Education Patriarchy and women’s sexuality are dominant themes in Lim’s work, in addition to space, place, and the immigrant body. Lim’s search for wild feminists began long before she entered the academy, as she was disciplined by her father for resisting gender norms as a child, particularly her desire for education. In “Women’s Dreams” and in other poems in Crossing the Peninsula, she says, “Delight in the effort to fit./ Being Mother Nature and our own creation. / Puzzles, tricks, strategems: we match wits/ Because we have not known dominion” (70). Lim juxtaposes women’s bodies and the objectification of their bodies by others and by themselves with the “stratagems” used to overcome “dominion.” She not only speaks to the intelligence or “wits” of women but also the recognition of the use of the body to “lord” over and control. In her use of words like “tricks,” “wits,” “arm-pits,” “crones,” “clumsy,” and “cock,” Lim confronts patriarchy and feminists alike. In poems such as “My Father,” “My Father’s Sadness,” “Father in China,” and “Ballad of the Father,” we see poignant moments of a daughter’s struggle with her father’s dominance and guilt over leaving him. She also describes the tensions between appreciating his circumstances and that he indeed did send his daughter to school. In “My Father,” for instance, we see a moment of a daughter’s regret: When younger, my father had wanted Everything, if he could afford it, To make me happy. I am sorry Then I had not learned enough to lie. (39 Crossing the Peninsula)

In these and other poems, these brief images hold poignant moments of a daughter’s love and a daughter’s desire for more than the patriarchy can provide. She says in an article in Feminist Studies that these brief images are like photographs emerging: The commentator observes the coloration of the text as it appears for the first time with a postmodern consciousness of the text’s belatedness, an awareness that the images are to be understood in the contexts of a lapidary of discourses on and from the past; memoir, myth, family and community history, folk tales, talk-story. (“Feminist and Ethnic” 573)

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Her notion of a “lapidary of discourses” suggests a determined and purposeful cutting and re-cutting of a particular story, one to be retold in multiple ways. Lim also explores these moments in her short stories and novels, where she has more space to explore these moments with depth. In Sister Swing, for example, Lim highlights regret and guilt, but together with the patriarchal attitudes of the father and community that impacted the three sisters. Originally written as her award-winning short story, “Mr. Tang’s Girls,” Lim’s most recent novel refigures the plot of the father’s death. However, the novel’s form affords Lim the space to re-imagine the plot and more fully develop the characters. In addition, the novel is the place where Lim explores the hilarity of the girls’ interpretation of the circumstance: that the father dies of shock at his daughters’ budding sexuality. Lim builds tension in the chapter, including her older sister’s impending arranged marriage. Ah Kong’s family members’ discussions of the wedding reveal culture and race clashes through humorous dialogue but also with an underlying insidious racism. The string of patriarchal situations, though serious and oppressive, is rendered with humor. Then suddenly, late in the chapter, the narrator says, “What I wanted was to get away quick from Ah Kong’s ghost, I was afraid it would do me harm because Yen and I had killed him” (12). The timing of the statement sets the reader up, building the tension. The narrator says, “Ah Kong had been prowling around the house on Saturday night when we gave him his heart attack” (12). After explaining how her teacher had given her a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the feminist book encouraging women to know their bodies and understand their sexuality, Swee Yin recounts how late at night while reading the book, the girls mimic the women in the book by examining their private parts with a compact mirror. Her sister says, “‘Let me see, let me see,’ Yen urged, craning her head down, and that was when I looked up and saw Ah Kong at the door” (14). After a litany of misogynist insults, Ah Kong soon after dies of a massive heart attack. Swee Yin concludes they are the cause of his death and says, “Mama never even suspected, and how were we to tell her Ah Kong died because he had seen Yen and me looking at ourselves in a mirror?” (15). The remainder of the novel, in the sisters’ varying voices, examines the intensity of the daughters’ guilt. Lim simultaneously makes the reader aware of the ridiculous correlation of the girls’ actions and their father’s death, while also taking very seriously their sense of responsibility and the difficulty they each have in reconciling the father’s death. This

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juxtaposition serves to show how difficult it is for girls raised in a patriarchal society, where they are called “slut” by their father, is so difficult to shake. Lim explores throughout the novel this long-lasting struggle with attitudes toward women. Swee Yin is driven to leave ostensibly to escape her actual father’s ghost, but Lim uses the ghost to show how a young Asian woman like Swee Yin continues to be haunted by the ghost of patriarchal society. The lengthy treatment of the movement between home and the West provides time for Lim to more fully delineate the complexities of the ways that women immigrants hold a complicated relationship with the “freedoms” of the West that many postcolonial scholars critique. This novel, together with her poetry and scholarly writing, show us those complexities in sharp relief, countering typical narratives of assimilation and nostalgia for the homeland. While the novel is not necessarily autobiographical, it is clear that Lim extends the themes of her autobiographical poetry and memoir, using the space of the novel to examine constructions of identity further.

Race, Assimilation, and Immigrant Identity As in Sister Swing, Lim’s earlier novel, Joss and Gold, examines themes of assimilation, nostalgia, and racism. Similarly she addresses these themes in her poetry, but in her novel she can extend rhetorical constructions of identity and more fully address their contradictions. In Joss and Gold, Lim explores interracial relationships, patriarchy and ethnic traditions and racism, but from a space not typical of Asian American literature. Lim has said, “I am quite cognizant of what Asian American writers have been writing and not writing. And I know that there’s a huge gap in the representation of race issues other than white and Asian” (Nge, “Interview”). Lim not only tackles assimilation and whites’ assumptions about who an Asian is supposed to be, but she further complicates race issues by examining the precipitating and subsequent racial tensions within Malaysia and in particular the events of the May 13 riots in 1969. According to feminist scholar Pin-chia Feng, “the racial riots constitute a traumatic memory to which Lim has to return in her writings in order to reconfigure her Malaysian identity” (112). Poems such as “Song of an Old Malayan” signal the riots as violent events exposing racial tensions among ethnic Chinese and Malays and the complexities of nationalist discourses together with postmodern conceptions of multi-layered identities.

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In Joss and Gold, Lim includes first-person narrative from the journal entries of Li An, the novel’s protagonist, together with third-person narrative, a genre within a genre that not only chronicles her daily life, which Li An says is “boring,” but also comments on her life as a writer: Chester’s suggestion to read American poetry. Doesn’t sound like me. But nothing I’ve written sounds like me—whiny, petty, dissatisfied. Poetry already too grand, fine attitudes. How to write a good whiny poem? Maybe I should be a journalist like Abdullah. Poetry is for people who know something. No wonder I’m depressed. (Joss and Gold 73)

These personal entries about Li An’s daily life, musings on a potential affair with Chester and the weather in Kuala Lumpur, are mixed with the growing ethnic tensions within the city: “All this talk about Chinese rights makes me sick too. Malay rights, Chinese rights. No one talks about Malaysian rights. I am Malaysian. I don’t exist” (75). Li An experiences several moments of dissatisfaction—as a writer and as a definable identity. Clearly then, Lim’s deft mix of the ordinariness of life (education, work, friends, the weather), together with the geopolitics of the time, emphasizes the larger project in all her work. It seems that genres within genres, identity issues across genres, images of identity, and long plot lines of identity and the border crossings are who she is. Writing in multiple genres makes someone like Li An “exist.” As Lim says in Among the White Moon Faces, “I needed to find another, more welcoming America in which poetry, Asia, and woman could be accepted in the same body” (Among the White Moon Faces 225). In this way, Lim finds what she needs by creating multiple genres/identities/spaces herself to fulfill her imaginings. As we’ve seen in the previous chapters on Hurston, Lorde, Allison, and Johnson, border crossings become part of identity itself, shaping and defining the sense of the writer and the decisions of genre they make in the variety of their work. In Lim’s case, she takes up residence in all these spaces at once and is not apologetic about the contradictions. Indeed, as Lim teaches readers to engage with her texts, she asks them to confront her contradictions and their own, arguing that it is those very contradictions that constitute an identity. With the composition of multiple identities, Lim makes it a foregone conclusion that she would engage in multiple genres. Her scholarly work, as Davis notes and as Lim notes herself, is preoccupied with these questions. Her scholarship provides a pedagogical model for exploring

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“how representation of the subject is negotiated between ethnic and feminist thematics” (“Feminist and Ethnic” 573). Davis points out that by occupying the positions of scholar, poet, and memoirist, Lim exemplifies literary criticism enacted. Understanding the history of a writer in relation to the spaces that writer inhabits brings Asian American and other diasporic writing to the fore of American literature. In addition, Lim’s scholarly work points to the limiting description of immigrant identity as a “dual identity” and suggests instead a “tripartite construction of Asian American identity, affirmatively propositional” as a result of “feminist intervention” and “a reclamation of mother/other origin, an affirmation of continuity or relation between origin and present tense, and a new foregrounding of gender identity” (“Feminist and Ethnic” 578). In this essay and others during this time, as Davis points out, Lim provides us with a detailed history of Asian American literature and clearly points out the tensions, contradictions, and fluidity of Asian American literature. She says, “For the Asian-born woman, moving away from a relatively closed patriarchal world into a relatively democratized, egalitarian, interrogative America, immigration can be a liberalizing and freeing experience” (“Feminist and Ethnic” 579). This implication of fully understanding immigrant experience through an inclusion of gender as a critical point is key to full understanding of Asian American literature and the so-called immigrant experience generally. Lim concludes that, “For the woman writer whose ethnic community is patriarchal, ethnic and feminist values and identities must inevitably intersect in potentially uneasy, conflicting, or violent ways” (579). She also states in her memoir that she is “always conscious of speaking as an immigrant, from a short hopeful personal past, and of the voices of others whose lives still bear the consequences of a U.S. history of genocide, war, racism, and other violences, who speak to less sanguine emotions” of hope of the ideology in the US Constitution (ATWMF 230). Lim’s examination of these issues highlights the simultaneously racist and liberating aspects of US culture as compared to her experience of Chinese culture. The contradictions and simultaneity arise at various points within all her work. As in her creative and scholarly work, Lim’s memoir complicates a traditional feminist reading of a girl leaving her homeland in search of education. And her ethnicity complicates her response to her family’s patriarchal limitations. She challenges readers to see that leaving behind a homeland, no matter how limiting that homeland had been for girls and women, remains the homeland nonetheless. It is not automatic that she would

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abandon it in her memories, thoughts and present identity—no matter how feminist readers might think that she should. She creates a careful balance of affirming culture while also addressing the need to make progressive changes from within that culture. She says, “ethnic and gender identities are continuously negotiated in tension against each other, the very act of naming and re-presenting, that is, of writing, composed of strategies of identity that challenge each other in a dialogical mode within the texts themselves” (591). Lim’s assessment of Asian American literature, particularly literature that addresses ethnic and gendered themes in tandem, is also reflected in her essays, poems, and longer fictional works as she responds across genres, carefully constructing multiple identities to help solidify her arguments.

Performing Identity, Performing Genre While Lim’s poetry provides images in one shot or one moment on which to reflect, her prose reflects the moments where the images, like photographs developing, come into relief. Each stands on its own, but alongside each other readers can see the prose contains the lyricism of the poems. Even so, they are not complete, not necessarily sufficient to represent the whole. It is as if to say, by writing in all these genres, that Lim is instructing us that just as we cannot confine her to one identity, we cannot confine her to one genre—with multiple migrations come multiple identities and multiple genres. In her memoir Lim asks, “How do I reconcile these two different yet simultaneous images…. We tell stories” (Among the White Moon Faces 231). She speaks directly to readers, implicating readers in her story (Miller, “Getting Transpersonal” 171). According to Miller, it is the affective quality of the memoir that draws us in as readers. I agree with Miller’s assessment and I also suggest that Lim’s crafting of her life, the performative nature of the text, and the lyrical quality of the prose that makes her life and consequently the life of others matter through writing. She has proved that she is “not who I am” by writing in multiple genres, deftly, honestly, and esthetically masterful while playfully and wickedly resistant. A poignant yet subtle example of this resistance, then, is Lim’s memoir. Among the White Moon Faces (ATWMF) has been labeled academic autobiography and as such can be read as a standard migrant story of seeking education. In her memoir, Lim recounts her Catholic elementary school experiences in Malaysia to earning a PhD at Brandeis, relaying the trials

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and tribulations of her migrant journey. Her stories of becoming a graduate student and earning a graduate degree, teaching, and writing scholarship resonate with many of academics, including Maragaret Willard-Traub and Nancy K. Miller who have both ascribed to Lim’s text its ability to speak to readers. Willard-Traub states that the “relationships between writers and readers” like the one Lim establishes in her memoir results in what  is a “forging of material connections…[and] consequences” (Willard-Traub 511–512). Academics respond to texts like Lim’s because she speaks to our experiences, even if the details are different. Miller’s notion that memoirs like Lim’s speak to her and recount the story of her (Miller’s) life illustrates the complexities and layered functionality of the academic memoir. Lim’s memoir does these things, but I would also like to complicate the notion of academic autobiography and to designate Lim’s text as performative autobiography, a genre that not only tells the story of women in the academy, but is also self-conscious in the way the narratives of gender, genre, immigrant, and intellectual are told. This self-­ consciousness includes the embodiment of identity, a figuring of identity through the movement of her body within and among these various spaces and hence discourses. In this way, her bodily representations function performatively. In addition to addressing identity through discourses of ethnicity, immigration, and gender, Lim also addresses identity through corporeality. Through writing her body, she both documents identity and refuses inscription. For Lim, the body and corporal experience are inextricably linked to the act of writing autobiography. She says of finishing her memoir, “I felt as if a water blister had been pricked, and the fluid of that life leaked out” (“Embodied Memory” 442). As she suggests here and in other essays such as “Not an Academic Memoir” and “Introduction: The Postmodern Dilemma of Life Writing,” the act of writing multiple identities, in all their contradictions, is precipitated by the experiences of those identities within the actual body. The life story and the telling of a life is marked by the material body and its movement through space and for Lim, the body and writing are linked in such a way that neither comes first. As Lim also explains, the act of writing her memories of the past created visceral experiences in the present. Composing her memories, she says, changed them yet forever bound them to her “newly shaped self” (Olney 20). She describes several painful memories of childhood and concludes, “Before there is a memory of speech, there is memory of the senses” (ATWMF 10). In recounting the painful past, she states how the

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re-remembering and the rewriting are themselves painful. Fusing her body and memory through writing, Lim’s memoir suggests that the recognition of memories as corporeal is crucial to their telling. Lim further explores this notion of embodied memory in her essay, “The Im/Possibly”: The relation between living and writing has never been clear to me. Having written a memoir, autobiographical poems, and personal essays, critical and reflective, I do not dismiss the notion that I have often turned my lived experiences, the people I have met and the what of these encounters, into writing; made stories out of the inchoate, confused, contingent, painted, provisional, temporal, and shifting; the unfaithful and faintly visible; the unsaid, said, unheard, heard, overheard, and uncertainly heard presences, hauntings, absences, and poverties; the regimes and revolutions witnessed, turned to or away from, as a lurker, a bit player, or a willfully placed central figure. (39)

Lim recognizes her experiences, that is, the moments her body encounters, as lived and therefore subject to the imperfections of memory. As a writing strategy, then, Lim places her body and her memories in a tenuous yet central relationship, one that is divulged in the telling of those memories. She notes that memories are “prickly,” evoking a bodily re-­ remembering that requires a multiplicity of genres to express. Part of Lim’s treatment of body and memory occurs in the form of the colonized body, where she comments in her memoir on the ways that Malaysians were colonized by the British. Her body, therefore, is written as one that has been subject to the colonizer’s definitions and expectations of a native body, under colonial rule. Though she resists particular definitions of her body, she recognizes the effects on her body (and the way it is seen by others of British colonial rule, the patriarchy, and aspects of Chinese culture). She discusses the colonized body at home in Malaysia and in the United States once she moves to pursue graduate study. The body and her intellectual pursuits are intertwined, as she reveals tensions between the language of the oppressor and her language of freedom. Her first connection between intellect and the body is in her descriptions of her early British colonial education with nuns. She says of her first teacher, “I have no memory as a child of the kind of warm physical affection with my mother that I felt with my Primary One teacher, Sister Josie” (30). She connects physical affection with learning and while her mother did not offer her physical affection, her first teacher did, which linked her first

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learning experiences with the pleasure of physical closeness. As a girl, Shirley was fiercely aware of the privileges of boys, and when her older brothers went to school, she says, “I felt my chest tighten with the desire to possess what was in their mouths and heads” (32). Lim physically ached for knowledge, and when she gained some of it in Primary School, she was intellectually and physically delighted. Throughout her descriptions of her education—whether studying for exams or writing poetry—Lim connects pleasure with learning. Lim’s love of learning, however, often conflicted with her position as a girl and as a British subject so that she was often in trouble at school. As a result, she is constantly in opposition to the expectations of her both as a daughter and as a colonized subject. Lim becomes “voluntarily displaced” (169) so as to pursue her intellectual desires in advanced literary study in the United States. But while in graduate school at Brandeis, she becomes physically ill in her isolation and loneliness. While she had escaped the oppressions she faced in Malacca, she faced new ones in the Unites States as her brown figure navigated the higher educational system in a sea of White bodies. Lim felt she must leave “home” in part because of the limits of British colonial education. She says, “the elite [colonial education] training was irrelevant to the new and contingent circumstances of independence, in which race, religion, language, and gender—four glaring sites totally ignored in British colonial education—shaped the emergence of the Malaysian nation-state” (88). She saw herself aspiring to knowledge, yet recognized the ways that her education had prepared her for a limited role in a British controlled nation. While she was learning to critique her colonial education, at the same time she had a “love of the English language” (121). She ached for learning, for memorizing British poetry, and for excelling at exams. In her memoir, then, she addresses the body in resistance to colonialization, yet she also stresses its importance to her intellectual freedom, especially as a girl in a traditional Malaysian society where girls are expected to behave and think in certain ways. In this way, Lim contrasts Sneja Gunew, whose essay, “Technologies of the Self: Corporeal Affects of English,” discusses how forced English education resides in the body of the colonized individual like a “virus.” Lim complicates this notion of English as a virus by presenting her love of the language and the opportunities that her education brought her.

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This seeming contradiction in Lim’s identity—that of critic of colonial rule and lover of the English language—is part of what leads her to immigrate to the United States. As argued earlier, much of Lim’s creative work addresses the immigrant experience in America and the ways in which she strives to reconcile her criticism of American politics with her nascent American identity—themes she develops further in her memoir. When Lim immigrated to the United States in 1969 to study literature at Brandeis, she thought she was running away from the aspects of Chinese culture that stifled her, yet she faced further tensions within the American educational system, particularly as she began her teaching career. While searching for an identity in America, Lim continued to experience extreme “tensions of my identity” (180). On the one hand, she was an expert in English literature and grammar, with credentials she fought hard for. On the other hand, she says, “Over and over again I wondered if my hours of intense teaching were helping or actively harming my students…Were we setting up obstacles to lengthen their social dependency and lowly economic status and to justify our salaries and professional rank? […] Why were we counting errors […] Why five errors and not ten?” (180). In this series of questions to the readers, Lim challenges the ways that traditional education could help any student not from the White middle classes. Lim describes her experience teaching at Hofstra Community College in the Bronx, saying: “Campuses promise verdant spaces in which the tranquil spirit may track paths of inquiry, to produce social beings calibrated to degrees of civilized society. How to satisfy the demand from black and brown Americans for a share of this promise?” (Among 170). Lim simultaneously recognizes the potential and promise of the academy while also questioning the barriers faced by those at the margins. These questions mirror her critique of her British education where she simultaneously appreciates what it provided her while also critically analyzing its traditional strictures. She says, “I have seen myself not so much sucking at the teat of British colonial culture as actively appropriating those aspects of it that I needed to escape that other familial/gender/native culture that violently hammered out only one shape for self. I actively sought corruption to break out of the pomegranate shell of being Chinese and girl” (65). This sense of “actively” understanding her history and in turn writing it down for others is where readers are entangled in Lim’s story—we are “implicated” as she calls for readers’ active critique of their education and their positions within the academy.

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Her teaching experiences in the United States continued to reveal tensions between her British-ness (insomuch as she was a colonial subject) and the simultaneously liberating and constraining qualities of the English language. Indeed, it is her bodily experience among her teachers, peers, and family that cause her to turn to the English language to understand (or escape) her material experience. She continued to struggle with her sense of loving the English language yet understanding herself as a “colonized subject” (183) and its consequent effects on her teaching. In fact, her multiple identities positioned her to critique the US higher education system as well. As she describes leaving one of her first teaching positions she says: The very integrity of the decolonizing intellectual must drive her to critique her own ideological formation and so to jilt her first loves [of English literature]….I left [Hofstra] because I could not reconcile English literature and the deprivations of black and brown students. I believe that Hofstra students deserved better and more, and I did not believe that teaching them English grammar was what they deserved. (183)

As a new teacher teaching rules of language and literary analysis, she failed to see their usefulness for the material, bodily struggles that her students faced daily as minority students in the American education system. Her resistance to curriculum echoed her experience in grammar school in Malaysia when she questioned authority: “My badness, evident at every turn, seem to be produced by my intelligence” (73). Evoking her constructed identity as a “wild” feminist, Lim recounts how she faced resentment because of her “badness,” that is, her proclivity to speak her mind, when she questioned the very curriculum she was teaching her students at Hofstra. Her White colleagues resented her questioning, further alienating Lim from the language and profession she loved. Her body, as it encountered education, profoundly impacted her negotiation of traditional curricula. Therefore, her resistance was met with racialized resentment, by colleagues unaware of the race and class implications of their particular curriculum and pedagogy. Lim’s examination of the tensions within her identity of the English language as oppressive yet liberating has continued since the publication of her memoir. She explores where these tensions might have originated in the essay, “Im/Possibility of Life Writing.” Her early childhood, especially when her mother left the family, set up the tensions between cultures,

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languages, and maternal/paternal family dynamics and consequently how she saw her notion of self in relation to those tensions. She says of that time: My mother’s abandonment has shut the doors to Malay everyday speech on us; it has also shut me away from Hokkien, the home language in which her story is narrated repeatedly and which I am not permitted to hear […] no wonder I choose the one that does not refuse me: those sentences, the words and babbling in the pages of English-language books that open compliantly hour after hour to my lonely forays […] My life between languages cannot be reified as between colonized and indigenous elements or reduced to collusion and complicity with global power. (45)

Lim refuses the victim narrative in relation to the reductive colonizer’s language and instead constructs a colonized subject not merely acted upon by language. Rather, she loves the English language and how it excludes her differently than the language of the patriarchy (Chinese in her case). In this complicated way, English becomes the language of her freedom. This tension is not lost on Lim; indeed, she complicates her relation to the English language, drawing attention to its liberating qualities, despite what has been “commodified” as diaspora stories. Her diasporic experience, that is, a dislocated body, though subject to commodification, highlights her body taking on the colonizer’s language with agency and with a sense of power. As she negotiates American higher education, she writes of her small, quiet, brown figure moving among white Americans in her courses as a student and then later as a teacher among Puerto Rican and African American students at Hofstra. Her brownness is doubly problematic among her minority students as she negotiates issues of class and race. The multiple dimensions of her physical self, in conjunction with her intellectual self, resist cultural definitions of immigrant women and Asian literature scholars, especially as her body signifies the other in the American academy. For instance, Lim’s semi-autobiographical novel Joss and Gold and her memoir have been criticized by Tamara S. Wagner as narratives that “tremble on self-exoticisation.” This critique, based on theories of commodification of linguistic multiplicity, suggests that Lim engenders a “consumable spectacle” through her use of food and fashion of the Nyonya culture in her work. I would argue, however, that locating experience in the material, Lim highlights the embodiment of experience, which therefore leads to the recognition and critique of the consumerizing of the body and its narratives. As she puts it, “The irony about a certain kind of

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immigrant is how little she can enjoy of the very things she chases. Even as she runs away from her first life, this other life that begins to accrue around her remains oddly secondary, unrooted in the sensuality of infancy and the intensities of first memory” (10).

Performativity and Feminist Consciousness On the surface, Among the White Moon Faces’s prose and linear construction is relatively straightforward compared to Lorde, Hurston, and Allison’s more dynamic writing. Like Johnson’s, Lim’s timeline follows the story of a girl, then woman, struggling to define herself but in the process finding that self in opposition with so much that is expected of her. Lim’s memoir seemingly reads like a traditional immigrant narrative where the protagonist overcomes hardships and makes it in the end. She enjoys learning English, wins awards, moves abroad to seek higher education, and returns to Malaysia for readings and scholarly activities. Yet while Lim’s life as a graduate student and English professor seemingly tells a success story of immigration, a daughter who made good on educational promise, the stories she tells reveal a complex relation of body to intellect. While describing her experiences at Brandeis, she contrasts her body to the White middle-class bodies of her classmates and roommates, a contrast that contributes to her isolation, depression, and extreme loneliness. During times of despair she emphasizes that the affectionate friendships of women helped her survive. As she does throughout her memoir, Lim connects her body to the emotional and intellectual ties that see her through difficult moments as a student and professor: I felt how sweet it was to be in a community of women, where one’s laughter was laughter and not flirtation, where someone combed your hair to adorn you, not to penetrate, where a palpable affection in the moment, requiring no commitment, possession, or competition, was good enough for the moment…The felt insight that there were others who would help, so contrary to my childhood experience of society as indifferent if not actually hostile, came to me through the affectionate companionship of women friends. (156)

The embodiment of feminist friendship, during the jarring experiences of graduate school, is reminiscent of the physical comfort that school and her teachers brought her as a child. Affection again helped her navigate the

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system that sought to exclude her. The exclusion was a jolt, as it had been education that was her solace. In her memoir and in subsequent essays, she suggests that it was the intertwining of affection and education that contributed to her feminist consciousness. Lim’s growing feminist consciousness is intricately tied to her identity formation as an American intellectual within US education, a complex interrelation further deepened when she becomes a mother. Her responsibilities and role as a mother are sometimes at odds with her growing success as an academic and poet. As her work earns more and more critical attention, she finds herself facing the tension of being a mother based on societal expectations and being a sought after poet. This tension is acute when she decides to miss the ceremony in London where she was awarded the Commonwealth Prize. She says, “At the back of my mind I felt a faint pressure of regret. Fame, if only for a day, was passing me by, and also the possibility of another audience […] There was no choosing” (ATWMF 187). While Lim says that she could only choose her young son, she expresses the gendered conflict of many women who feel they are forced to choose between their children and professional success or advancement. These conflicting identities, specifically the cultural expectations and her own history of being mothered by a severe and troubled woman, continue to be addressed in her writing. Her experience of motherhood as an academic, as a colonized body, and a public figure furthers her commitment to reconciling her conflicting identities. In her poem, “Learning to Love America,” for instance, she says, “because I have nursed my son at my breast/because he is a strong American boy/because I have seen his eyes redden when he is asked who he is/because he answers I don’t know” (What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say). Here Lim stresses the importance of reconciling her body to her emerging identities. Her role as a mother, specifically her physical connectedness to her son as she nurses him and cares for his bodily needs, urges her to understand her conflicted identities for his sake, as well as her own. He is at once the child impacting her professional life while also the bi-racial child whom she must help navigate as he grows into his own identity and American-ness. As she says, the birth of her son further exacerbated the contradictions of her identity: “I wanted for him to have a pride of belonging, the sense of identity with a homeland, that which I had possessed as a Chinese Malaysian for a brief time in my youth” (ATWMF 197). After he is born and she interacts with other parents, she says, “A grievance gnawed in me, perhaps the displaced desire for

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assimilation, a growing anger that, despite his birth here in the United States, his childhood was still marked by the perception of my foreignness” (199). Again, Lim places conflicting identities alongside one another and leaves them for inspection, mulling, and ultimately change as she struggles with specific ways to break the cycle of her own childhood. In particular, Lim is conscious of the physical and emotional abuse of her childhood that has impacted her own anger in adulthood. As she grows as a writer and mother, she says that she: could only unravel the repetitions of fear and rage by understanding myself as a woman: a girl-child seizing autonomy rather than suffering damage, but damaged still by that premature forced growth, a young woman fearing independence but fearing dependency more. For women breaking out of closed societies, the break itself is traumatic. Liberation hurts. Feminism must prepare women for struggle, not comfort. (203)

In terms of feminist coming-to-consciousness, we see Lim taking on a feminist identity to understand her own life. But the statement, “Feminism must prepare women,” shows how she is shifting from seeker to instructor. She is becoming a mentor for others. Lim’s text does not make it easier for women academics; rather, reading her memoir makes it more complex because feminists are instructed to do something, to make a change. In this pivotal moment two-thirds through the text, Lim’s life becomes an example and therefore she offers her instruction. Her life as mentorship, writing autobiography as mentorship, challenges women to break out of the various institutional barriers blocking their way. Lim’s life serves as a metaphorical mentor as those challenges are met and faced.

Life Writing as Mentoring Lim’s struggle as a mother, the violence of her past, and her intellectual and American identities are all undertaken through her feminist consciousness. When Lim’s colleagues at Hofstra “see” her as weird and strange, it is because she questions the status quo—something she could not do as a girl in Malaysia and something she thought she would be able to do in the United States. This is important to note, as her sentiment is not unlike many immigrant narratives where the United States does not live up to promises of the American dream. She describes the “violence of the dialogue” where her department chair was furious that she questioned being

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passed over for a promotion. Lim had hoped to “pass as an ordinary citizen” to be part of the academy as it was, through her work, and through her worth as a scholar and teacher and colleague (224–225). When she describes the exchange with her department chair and the discrimination she faced, all the explorations of her memoir culminate in her question to the reader, “Do wild feminists live in universities? Can they?” (226), using direct address to readers and breaking the narrative wall to demand a response to the injustices she faced. Lim’s text, with this direct address to the reader, calls for a response. This memoir is not just to be consumed, but it is also to be responded to, and where Lim instructs readers to reconcile their own multiple identities (Pollock). In this way, Lim’s memoir functions as performative autobiography, self-consciousness in its form, explicit in its dialogue, and calling for action from the readership. As discussed in Chap. 1, performative autobiography includes explicit calls to readers. Lim’s explicit questions posed to readers with their consequential calls to change set Lim’s memoir apart from the typical academic memoir. Not only does she address this question to herself but she also asks the reader to examine the question as well, engaging in a dialogue with the reader and making readers complicit not only in their reflexivity but also in the ways they provide support for other underrepresented groups struggling in the academy. In this way, her memoir performs “Writing as doing [where it] displaces writing as meaning; writing becomes meaningful in the material, dis/continuous act of writing. Effacing itself twice over—once as meaning and reference, twice as deferral and erasure—writing becomes itself, becomes its own means and ends, recovering to itself the force of action” (Pollock 75). Lim’s memoir asks readers to consider their own place, in particular their corporal experience in the academy, to question the validity of certain approaches to education in relation to race, class, and gender issues and the ways that actual bodies come in contact with each other, not just the abstract ideas that constitute a Malaysian, an American. She positions readers as “in a position to” do something, that is, become mentors and change agents themselves. In her series of questions to the reader she engages in “a performative perspective [which] tends to favor the generative and the ludic capacities of language and language encounters—the interplay of reader and writer in the joint

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production of meaning…[it] uses language like paint to create what is selfevidently a version of what was, what is, and/or what might be” (Pollock 80). Throughout the memoir, Lim poses questions to the audience about the strictures of colonialism, higher education institutions, and definitions of immigrants and women. She uses the example of her life to illustrate the “tensions within her identity” to construct a self-conscious and interactive performance space, encouraging readers to experience her reflexivity about herself and about education. By doing so, Lim’s memoir serves as “performative autobiography,” where she uses a “very self-conscious approach to accepted forms and narratives, examining how that very form is limited in adequately representing a life” critiquing “hegemonic discourse through its self-conscious treatment of the genre” (Powell 457). Lim’s narrative construction is self-consciously interactive and engages readers’ senses of civic, academic, and intellectual justice, while simultaneously examining traditional education and reflecting on her identity. In America, as she is signified as the other, she is made to confront the ways her education and her opportunities in the US educational system are also necessarily fraught with conflict. On becoming a citizen in 1980, she reflects, “I felt alien in a different way, as if my ambivalence toward the United States must now extend inward to an ambivalence toward myself. No longer a traveler, I was included in my accusations of America” (196). Her accusations centered on how US education was not adequately helping immigrants or people of color in general. At the same time, her desire to be American, to fit in, and to make a space for her body and her sense of self as an intellect tugged at her sensibilities. This absence, according to Willard-Traub, is challenged through “language—the stories of her self and the stories of others whom she holds close—that bond, cause pain, pass on history, and convey one ‘home’” (525). We can examine Lim’s notion of home in light of cultural theorist Homi Bhabha’s concept of nation. He says: As an apparatus of symbolic power, [nation] produces a continual slippage of categories, like sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or ‘cultural difference’ in the act of writing the nation. What is displayed in this displacement and repetition of terms is the nation as the measure of the liminality of cultural modernity. (140)

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A sense of belonging, her mastery of the English language, forming professional and personal relationships with women, all these are written by Lim to find some semblance of home in the United States where there is a fraught history of racism and a continuance of discrimination both explicit and subtle. Miller provides insight with her explanation of the French etymology of memoir as an aid to memory, as a way to “keep cultural memory alive” (432). Miller specifically refers to recording the cultural moment, but I suggest Lim’s text provides a call to those moments in the future as well, not only as a record but also as a call. In this way, Lim’s text actively evokes an (r)evolution. This of course suggests the temporality of the memoir yet also the permanent record—the complexity that it can be both/and, particularly as it is constructed by Lim in Among the White Moon Faces, Audre Lorde in The Cancer Journals, Cherríe Moraga in Loving in the War Years, and Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands. Each of these writers speaks to her readers directly, calling for connection and action. In this connection, women can find a place with each other, safe spaces to live and write. Lim also highlights the liminality of home when she says in her memoir, “home is the place where our stories are told” (232). That is, the body’s placement in a home, space, or nation may be temporary or changing, but the act of storytelling, of placing the body from the memory to the page, is what defines home. In this way, her “narrative and performative production of ‘home’ as a work of collective memory and as a safe place, focus[es] on the discursive creative of home in the text” (Kondo 98). Lim asks the reader during the height of her depression in graduate school, “How does one make oneself at home?” (155). Lim’s autobiography, in addition to her poetry, literary criticism, and essays, depicts the “necessity to create ‘homes’ for ourselves, however problematic and provisional, figuring home not as an essentialized space of identity but as a historically and culturally specific construct inseparable from power relations” (Kondo 115). Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces, as a story of multiple physical and linguistic dislocations, refigures the story of immigrant, mother, and academic and draws attention to the constructed nature of identity. She highlights the connection of the body to life writing and, furthermore, challenges readers to act on their own identity conflicts. She describes the life of a writer, in particular, the intellectual pursuit of ideas and poetry as that which gives her pleasure. When she wrote her first short story as a child, she said that the “pleasure in writing the story, which flowed

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unforced, confirmed my belief in the vital connections between the English language and the breathing emotions that ran through my body” (121). This can be taken as intellectual pleasure as Barthes describes it, but in the same sentence Lim associates that pleasure with the body. Her “closeted” love of English as a language brought her close both in terms of corporeal experience and in terms of intellectual freedom to her desires, poetry, and living the life of the woman she wanted to be. Lim’s intertwining of her thoughts about identity formation and the role of that identity within a broader institutional system serves to challenge readers’ knowledge of race and class issues in American education. Her call to readers in these instances invites them to reconcile conflicting identities in themselves, as they are experienced by the body, for the express purpose of reconciling the various tensions in America. She says further in her memoir, “I needed to find another, more welcoming America in which poetry, Asia, and woman could be accepted in the same body” (225, emphasis mine). In these final pages, her memoir serves as this rewriting, asking her readers to continue to create this kind of space for women of color and immigrant women and to value those spaces within the institutional structures of the academy. Her own activist work as an Asian American literary and feminist scholar is an example of this kind of space making and mentorship. By using her own life as an example, specifically in the way she writes about that life, she illustrates how that space making can occur, by scrutinizing and articulating our relationship to language and literature. Lim’s strategies of memory narration ultimately dismantle the power structures that serve to reify dominant narratives of self and the body in the academy. Her project is pedagogical, therefore, by asking us to examine these conflicts within ourselves. Lim writes her life to show the ways that body, memory, identity, and story are inextricably linked, and furthermore call on others to write their own stories so that change might occur. She says: Everywhere I have lived in the United States—Boston, Brooklyn, Westchester—I felt an absence of place, myself absent in America […] In California, I am beginning to write stories about America, as well as about Malaysia. Listening, and telling my own stories, I am moving home. (231–232)

When Miller describes reading Lim’s memoir she says, “That’s my story you’re telling” (“Public Statements” 982). Even though Miller and Lim’s stories are different, as a source of mentorship, Lim’s text tells others’

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stories through her story. In this way, she asks readers to consider their stories in relation to hers and to do something to make the lives of women, particularly women in the academy, better. In The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde asks, “I’m here doing my work asking you are you doing yours?” (21). Similarly, Lim’s “wild feminists” question addresses readers the way Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa do. These questions are not rhetorical—they are meant to evoke response, for us to write our own stories, if not in the form of memoir, then in the form of demanding a kind of life in the academy these women have been fighting for. Lim’s multiple resistances in her poetry, fiction, and memoir suggest that form can impact the ways that identities are told, represented, and (mis)understood. For these reasons, I do not think one can suggest all memoirs are “nouveau solipsism” any more than one can suggest a poem is self-indulgent. However, this analysis suggests that it is how the memoir is written, in relation to her poetry and prose, that relegates Lim’s memoir to something more than a listing of life events. Davis argues that academic autobiographies like Lim’s are “complex cultural products that invite multiple critical approaches” and that “function as institutional or professional critique” (Davis, “Introduction” 160). In addition, I suggest that Lim’s writing across genres reveals the performative nature of autobiography generally and of academic autobiography in particular. Lim’s crafting moves her work beyond the surface of historical fact telling. Indeed, because Lim’s memoir contains some of the same lyricism and imagery as her poems, readers see the writer moving through live events, rendering them similar to literary writing. Lim’s ongoing, “processural” (Davis) writing, across genres, weaves experience into representations that challenge gender and ethnic identity and notions of genre. In her memoir, Lim says that for years she searched for “what to do with my life as a woman: not simply what kind of work I wanted, but how to grow up as a woman” (Among 101). Her poems, essays, novel, and memoir serve as the exploratory vessels for discovering what kind of woman she might be. Ever instructional and conversational, Lim is a teacher and mentor, exploring her own life in several forms. In this way she models the ways women and any writer can reconcile multiple and conflicting identities, with a broad definition of reconciliation that makes a space for contradiction. In her essay about the genre of life writing, Lim recounts her Taiwanese colleagues and fans wishing for another autobiography. She explains that

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at first she could not understand why—she says she wrote the book as a “book of memories” (306) and as noted earlier, refused that her book was academic autobiography and instead insisted it was the autobiography of a poet. However, even if Lim’s notion of her memoir was that it would be recognizable as the genre of autobiography, she is a poet. It is consequently written against the grain, confounds generic expectation, performs identity, and resists both generic and identity constrictions. In this way it is the autobiography of a poet and an academic autobiography as Buss, Davis, Miller,  and others suggests. This both/tri/multiple/and location functions as Lim’s identity. But Lim is careful to question, in her own cross-genre analysis between a memory of her father in Among the White Moon Faces and her poem “Father in China,” whether and how either a poem or an autobiography may or may not be more truthful or authentic. She places it in the hands of the reader, the scholar, the teacher, and the student to examine autobiography’s “troubles in order not only to underline its inherent fictivity but to undermine it, if we are to do our work as academics” (312). While Lim’s prose is not performative in the same ways as Hurston, Allison, Johnson,  and Lorde, her direct address and engagement with multiple genres indicates her treatment of identity in performative ways. Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces, as a story of multiple physical and linguistic dislocations, refigures the story of immigrant, mother, and academic and draws attention to the constructed nature of identity. Like Hurston, Lorde, Allison, and Johnson, Lim’s attention to the embodiment of discourse is observed through writings across generic form. All the authors discussed in this book are concerned with multiple identities, the body, and the ways that language and writing create performative spaces to reconcile resulting tensions. In the final chapter, I discuss the ways that these writers’ constructions of multiple identities across genres anticipate the innovative forms in contemporary feminist life writing.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 291–322. Buss, Helen. Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women. Toronto: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002.

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Davis, Rocio G. “Academic Autobiography and Transdisciplinary Crossings in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces.” Journal of American Studies 43.3 (December 2009a): 441–457. Davis, Rocio G. “Introduction: Out of the University: Reading academic autobiographies.” Prose Studies 31.3 (December 2009b): 159–165. Devitt, Amy. “Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre.” College English 62.9 (2000): 696–718. Feng, Pin-chia. “National History and Transnational Narration: Feminist Body Politics in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Joss and Gold.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 1.1–2 (2007): 135–150. Feng, Pin-chia. Diasporic Representations: Reading Chinese American Women’s Fiction. Berlin: LIT Verlag Muster, 2010. Gilmore, Leigh. “Technologies of Autobiography.” Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. 65–105. Print. Gunew, Sneja. “Technologies of the Self: Corporeal Affects of English.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (September 2001a): 729–747. Hawhee, Debra. Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language. Columbia University Press, 2009. Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth Century American Literature. Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 2002. Kondo, Dorinne. “The Narrative Production of ‘Home,’ Community, and Political Identity in Asian American Theater.” Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Eds. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. 97–117. Kuo, Yu-te (Tom). “Peranakan Self as a Diasporic Palimpsest: Shirley Geok-lin Lim Torn between Diaspora and Nostalgia.” Colloquium on Diaspora and Asian Fiction, Diaspora in Literature. National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, January 14, 2008. http://zephyr.nsysu.edu.tw/researchcenter2/080114_diaspora_and_asian_fiction.htm. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Cassandra Days.” Feminist Studies, 44. 3 (2018): 776–779. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Embodied Memory and Memoir.” Biography 26.3 (Summer 2003a): 442–443. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature.” Feminist Studies 19.3 (1993): 571–95. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Learning to love America.” What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say. Albuquerque, New Mexico: West End Press, 1998a. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Not an Academic Memoir.” The Scholar and Feminist Online. 4.2 (Spring 2006a). www.barnard.edu/sfonline. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “The Im/Possibility of Life-Writing in Two Languages.” Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity. Ed. Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003b. 39–47.

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Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “The Troubled and Troubling Genre: Life On-Going Writing or On-Going Life Writing.” Prose Studies 31.3 (December 2009): 300–315. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Writing Out of Turn.” Modern Language Association Profession (1999): 214–224. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Among the White Moon Faces. New  York: The Feminist Press, 1996b. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. New York: The Feminist Press, 1996a. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Crossing the Peninsula & Other Poems. Singapore: Heinemann Educational Books (Asia) LTD, 1980. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Joss and Gold. Singapore: Times Books International, 2001. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Listening to the Singer. Petaling Jaya: Maya Press, 2007. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Sister Swing. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2006b. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. The Shirley Lim Collection: Passports and other lives. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2013. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Walking backwards: New Poems. Albuquerque, NM: West End Press, 2010. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say. Albuquerque, NM: West End Press, 1998b. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin and Caroline Kyungah Hong. “Introduction: The Postmodern Dilemma for Life Writing.” Life Writing 4.1 (2007): 1751–2964. Miller, Nancy K. “Getting Transpersonal: The Cost of an Academic Life.” Prose Studies 31.3 (December 2009): 166–180. Miller, Nancy K. “Public Statements, Private Lives: Academic Memoirs for the Nineties.” Signs 22.4 (1997): 981–1015. Miller, Nancy K. “Reading Spaces: ‘But Enough About Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?’” The Yale Journal of Criticism: 13.2 (2000): 421–436. Moraga, Cherríe. Loving in the War Years. Cambridge: South End Press, 1983. Nge, Carmen. “Shirley Lim: Interview.” Small Acts. 19 May 2006. 10 Jan 2014. http://smallacts.blogspot.com/2006/05/shirley-­lim-­interview.html. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980. Olney, James. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pollock, Della. “Performing Writing.” The Ends of Performance. Eds. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 73–103. Powell, Katrina M. “Memory’s Body: Autobiography as Mentorship and Performance in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces.” Prose Studies 31.3 (December 2009a): 280–290. Powell, Katrina M. “Performative Autobiography.” Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography. Eds. Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007. 456–458. Powell, Katrina M. “The Embodiment of Memory: The Intellectual Body in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces.” New Essays on

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Autobiography and the Body. Eds. Christopher Stuart and Stephanie Todd. London: Cambridge College Press, 2009. 154–167. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/ Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Tay, Eddie. “Hegemony, National Allegory, Exile: The Poetry of Shirley Lim.” Textual Poetics 19.3 (2005): 289–308. Wagner, Tamara S. “Victims of Boutique Multiculturalism: Malaysian Chinese and Peranakan Women Writers and the Dangers of Self-Exoticisation.” School of Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU, Singapore. http://www.inst.at/ trans/16Nr/02_02/Wagner16.htm. February 2007. Willard-Traub, Margaret K. “Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir: Notes on a Material Genre.” College English 65.5 (May 2003a): 511–525. Zeng, Minhao. “The Intricacies of Cosmopolitanism: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces.” Mosaic 46.1 (March 2013): 77–93.

CHAPTER 8

Performative Auto/biography as Transgressive Archives

In her foreword to the 2020 edition of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider from Penguin Classics, writer Mahogany L. Browne says, “I believe Lorde penned these essays to explain the world to our children.” As I suggested in each of the chapters about Hurston, Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim, the autobiographical work in which each engaged, though different, functions not only as social acts, through the lens of rhetorical genre studies, but also functions as acts of mentorship. By sharing their experiences, they provide ways to think about their individual lives as part of broader social, political, and racial issues. This in turn helps readers see how their own lives might be examined through a similar lens. In addition to producing texts that evoke social action, they serve as mentorship because they are invitational. The goal of “invitational rhetoric” is understanding instead of persuasion, and this is achieved through listening in order to “create an environment that facilitates understanding, accords value and respect to others’ perspectives, and contributes to the development of relationships of equality” (Foss and Griffin 17). As discussed in Chap. 2, a key component to this analysis has been rhetorical genre studies, which provides a way for us to explore what these autobiographical texts do: they necessitate social action, not merely in the content they contain but also in the ways that the writers implore readers to respond, even if there is not an explicit call to action. As these writers point out, writing a life, particularly a life that is outside mainstream norms, is an act of courage. As acts of courage, then, their © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. M. Powell, Performing Autobiography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4_8

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autobiographical writing become transgressive archives. As I have argued elsewhere, “innovative renderings can be seen as ‘alternative ledgers,’ transgressive ways of reporting information about history that upturn our understanding of a particular event and highlight the individual in doing so. In this way, the decision-making power of what gets archived is questioned, and new ways of seeing an event are exposed” (“Hidden Archives” 41). The arguments that traditional archives make can have devastating effects, as particular groups can be made invisible. A rhetorical approach to auto/biography provides an intervention into subverting traditional archives. Cynthia Haynes’s exploration The Homesick Phonebook is an example of this kind of alternative rendering of historical events. For Haynes, “rhetoric as refuge re-articulates the paths of the poets and illuminates their abstract trajectories. Displacing argument is rhetoric’s supreme task; disinventing logos is rhetoric’s sacred duty” (99). In this way, narrating a life becomes a way to challenge what we think we know about identity and genre and in turn invite others into the refuge and redress of writing. Jean Arasanayagam’s more than thirty books of poetry are also examples of transgressive archives that redress the record of violence during the civil war in Sri Lanka. Her poems illustrate her argument for reconciling questionable or incomplete historical records. Her poetry expands the history behind each governmental  ledger account.  Like expanded entries behind the front entry in an excel spreadsheet, she questions  identities inscribed on the page (and the assumptions that might come with them) and the person behind that entry. Her volumes of poetry become categorizing of a different order than the refugee intake ledgers recording the “bare facts” of her life. Her poetry, then, becomes a public counter-tabulation to the intake ledgers that reduced her family to identity markers and served as documentation to force them into a refugee camp. Performative auto/biography is also a redress genre, one that interacts with audiences and asks audiences to consider their role in mediating the text. In Genre and the Performance of Publics, several of the chapters address writing that could be considered autobiographical, such as jury deliberations, twitter feeds, and public petitions. The public nature of the autobiographical genre, particularly when writers directly address readers, lends itself to this interdisciplinary approach. Indeed, in my earlier work on displacement narratives, particularly the letters written by families displaced from Shenandoah National Park, I combined autobiography theory

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and rhetorical genre studies (and literacy studies) to examine the rhetorical constructions of identity of the letter writers. As business letters they were technical communication, but they also contained autobiographical information to persuade their audience (government officials) to honor their requests. The mixed genre necessitated a nuanced analytical  approach, pulling from several theories to help us recognize the complex literacy contained in the letters, particularly when their sentence construction, syntax, and grammar were not standard usage and therefore caused most readers to dismiss them. Those letters, not unlike the auto/biographical writing of the writers in this book, redress the historical record, using constructions of identity to counter what was assumed about them. Many other writers have also engaged in multiple genres and challenged traditional auto/biographical narratives. The work of native and indigenous people who were on the North American continent first, including Mexican American and American Indian women, engaged in writing to challenge and document the colonialist impacts of displacement and the westward expansion of the United States. Writers  such as include Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Hertha Sweet D. Wong, Leslie Marman Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Joy Harjo, and many others wrote or write in multiple genres. These writers’ works are also  regularly used in writing classrooms and anthologized for their contributions to literary theory, ethnic studies, and autobiography (Suzack et al. 2011), highlighting their critical importance to a more complex understanding of the history of the United States and literature. In a recent collection, Teaching Gloria E.  Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities, the editors highlight Anzaldúa’s emphasis on survival necessitating collective action. For writers like Anzaldúa, the country’s history of displacement, land use rights, and racism deeply inform her sense of identity and genre. She says, “And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my own space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own brick and mortar and my own feminist architecture” (Borderlands 22). About collective activism she says, “I think we need to allow whites to be our allies. Through literature, art, corridors, and folktales we must share our history with them so when they set up committees to help Big Mountain Navajos or the Chicano farmworkers or los Nicaragüenses they won’t turn people away because of their racial fears and ignorances. They will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead” (Anzaldúa 107). Anzaldúa’s work, like the authors discussed in this book, is used in a variety of classrooms, from first-year composition, women’s

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and gender studies, autobiography, and critical ethnic/Latinx studies. That Borderlands is so widely read and taught in a variety of classes highlights that the innovative genre in which she wrote has had real, material impact on the lives of its readers and on setting the historical records straight. Fiction and autobiography by several transgender writers have also challenged auto/biographical writing. Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of a Fox, for instance, has been described as “genre mashing,” and they pay particular attention to the archival process as well, providing detailed footnotes to remind readers of what’s often left out in a narrative. Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl confounds genre as well, by including fables, pastiche, and archival-like footnotes, again emphasizing the layers of story that can be hidden by narratives. Additional contemporary authors such as Suzanne Scanlon (Index of her 37th Year), Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts, Bluets), Zadie Smith (Intimations), Roxane Gay (Hunger), Carmen Giménez Smith (Be Recorder), Eve Ewing (1919, Electric Archives), and Juliette Singh (No Archive Will Restore You) are among the contemporary  authors whose innovative use of the autobiographical across forms attests to the continued interest in and relevance of life narratives. Much work is being done to further understand their innovative forms and calls to social justice.

Performing Witness, Archival Redress Performing Auto/Biography seeks to challenge what it means to archive a life. The writers discussed here ask us to challenge our archiving practices. Lists, scrapbooks, everyday emails, phone messages, and tweets are all part of the auto/biography narrative  (Yancey). The women writers discussed in this book, as rhetoricians, were aware of how the private self and the public self must be represented, or archived, in ways that transgress not only identity but also genre, form, subject, and action. By examining these five authors together, we can engage with the complexity, multiplicity, and fluidity of identity, no matter the background or experience of the rhetor, and examine the opportune times and genres in which each woman wrote. More contemporary writers are also re-­ imagining these questions, working in experimental forms, taking it as a given that poems and essays and historical archives can exist within the same text. By creating spaces for expression and dialogue, writers create transgressive archives. Scholars in auto/biography, rhetorical studies, and communication studies are creating these spaces, including scholars

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like K.J. Rawson whose Digital Transgender Archive (https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net) creates a digital space where autobiographical writing and composing is linked with public archiving for social change. In addition, scholars like Karma Chávez are highlighting how works “behind the scenes” are critical to social movements, especially when those movements present dangers for the counter-public work of their participants (Chávez 2011). The forthcoming special issue of Across the Disciplines, “Unsettling Archival Research Across the Disciplines: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives,” suggests that more is left to do to “counteract and resist racist, colonial histories, and to explore alternatives, perhaps through decolonial, engaged, reciprocal, or collaborative archival practices” (Kirsch, Burns, and Smith). The archiving of hidden work is politically fraught as movements face the very real violences of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. And yet, this work is critical to understand how counter-­publics conduct the work of social change—how we do this remains our project as rhetoricians and auto/biography scholars. The purpose of the book has been to illustrate how reading and rereading and rewriting  autobiography can continue to mentor and perform, in different ways and across contexts. Each of these writers engages in multiple genres to write and rewrite, tell and retell the stories of their lives again and again in multiple forms. One case I made for these retellings was that just as a particular identity could be limiting or reductive, genre could also be reductive, not adequate to “get the story right,” and so the authors engaged in multiple genres to do so. Perhaps the rewriting and retelling across genres and in different ways is a way to say, “No.” For many people, including writers, when trauma, racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and other forms of violence are experienced, speaking back or being listened to does not happen. Perhaps refashioning a self, rewriting the story is simply, “No,” to the literal violence of these traumatic happenings and also to the figurative violence of being discursively presented in ways that are damaging and untrue. Engaging in layers of storytelling, speaking to the audience about storytelling, and use of repetition provide readers ways to see their worlds interacting with the worlds of the writer. This metanarrative of repetition is often discussed in theater and performance studies. In discussing Michael Redhill’s Goodness, for instance, Jenn Stephensen says, “In repetition, the question turns the object of interrogation from a direct experience ‘How does it feel?’ to a metaexperience of the experience: ‘What does feeling feel like?’ and ‘What does it feel like

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to be asked the question how does it feel?’” (97). Stephensen’s analysis of Goodness highlights the text as fostering an “engaged moral responsibility for that story taken up by a listening witness. As Kelly Oliver writes, ‘Just as the various parts of the body cannot function without the circulation of blood and oxygen, the psyche cannot function without the circulation of affective energy…We have an ethical and social responsibility to be vigilant in our attempts to open up the circulation and flow of affective energy in all of our relationships’ (20)…[Goodness] advocates for an active and ethically responsible audience witness—what I am calling a performative witness—generating a hopeful witnessing strategy arising directly out of the play’s looped metatheatrical structure of stories within stories” (Stephenson 97–98). Stephenson’s notion of “performative witness” is critical to reading and studying auto/biographical texts and to the ethical dimensions of equitable access to and representation in archives. When governments and other institutions restrict access to archives, citing lack of funds or privacy concerns, auto/biography scholars can point to the ways that restrictive access to individual stories can result in skewed histories. The state hospitals where men and women were forcibly sterilized in this country have restrictions for releasing records based on the “protection of privacy” of patients. The individual stories of historical forced sterilization therefore remain hidden. The consequence is the historical and routinized quelling of life narratives which results in the increased chances that the violence will continue, such as the recent reporting of immigrant women forcibly sterilized in US detention centers. Their stories are often concealed, and indeed, the women themselves physically removed (i.e., deported) so that access to the stories is even more difficult. As we continue to navigate issues of appropriation, retraumatizing, and reduction of people to their traumas, auto/biography scholars have an important role in making the case for the rhetorical power of these narratives. These human rights concerns as related to life narrative and testimony, taken on by scholars like Smith and Watson, Gilmore, Whitlock, Kennedy, and Hesford, among others, will be critical in the coming years as issues of archival access, permissions, and decision-making are contested. Immigration, reproductive rights, and gender-based violence laws are in danger of becoming more restrictive. The women in this book had the courage for their stories to become part of the records of injustice. If laws like Roe v. Wade get overturned, I hope there is an archive of evidence to reflect that there were some of us out here refusing those moments, refusing to accept going backward.

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Ann Cvetkovich’s work in An Archive of Feelings challenges what counts as trauma and argues for the cataloguing of the everyday, an approach that encourages us to consider the daily and routinized injustices that impact our individual and collective psyches. In K.J. Rawson’s, “Archive This! Queering the Archive,” he challenges what it means to archive institutional and individual histories, particularly when some information is purposefully erased or withheld. As he argues, institutional archives often “privilege some while oppressing others” and suggests queering the archives as a way to resist such privileging. For Rawson, queer archives account “for the past that confronts historical erasure and omission, incorporates affects and trauma, and undermines an unequivocal embrace of longevity” (Rawson 238). Similarly, Rosanne Kennedy’s work on Sorry Books, a campaign in Australia to redress the forced removal of indigenous children, highlights the role of creating alternative archives where none exists. Since there has been no formal apology for this historical moment in Australia, Kennedy argues that Sorry Books become a “cultural memory that allows public expression of historical injustice” (Kennedy and Whitlock 252). Challenging and disrupting through the act of archiving a life are exercises in questioning how our experiences are catalogued and interpreted. There is a difference between creating archival spaces for one’s life and being told where and how one’s life story is allowed to be. Archiving is relational, active, and subversive. In auto/biography studies, “tracing the auto/biographical fragment,” as scholars such as Marlene Kadar, Patrick Taylor; Mark Celinscak, and Julie Rak have shown, requires “innovative methodologies” (Karpinski and Chansky 505). The interdisciplinary approach in this book  to Hurston, Lorde, Allison, Johnson, and Lim expands current conversations on the works on identity by examining the rhetorical nature of their autobiographical works together with their creative use of the form. The rhetorical strategies these texts use simultaneously tell stories that have universal appeal and challenge the norms and traditions upheld by the very audiences they address. In doing so, to varying degrees, these texts ask audiences to consider their own political positionality. From Johnson’s castigation of the treatment of women by the so-called avante garde male Beats to the unapologetic call to activism by Lorde, these texts represent the ways that diverse uses of language work to call attention to our existing power structures, and ways we might work to subvert them. Each author’s agenda involves a more personal coming to know the self while at the same time translating that self to a public

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sphere—a profoundly political act. Crafting the self into a story, performing the self, and thus engaging in performative auto/biography, make the invisible visible and create inviting spaces for others to share their stories as well. Even when universities and institutions fail us or oppress us, we can be wild feminists and create spaces within those institutions, resisting them little by little, archive by archive.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Browne, Mahogany, ed. “Introduction.” Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. New York, Penguin Classics. 2020. Cantú-Sánchez, Candace de León-Zepeda, and Norma Elia Cantú, eds. Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. Chávez, Karma R. “Counter-Public Enclaves and Understanding the Function of Rhetoric in Social Movement Coalition-Building” Communication Quarterly 59.1 (2011): 1–18. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Ewing, Eve. 1919. New York: Haymarket Books, 2019. Ewing, Eve. Electric Archives. New York: Haymarket Books, 2017. Foss Sonja K. and Cindy L.  Griffin. “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric.” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2–18. Frank, Arthur W. “Narrative Witness to Bodies: A Response to Alan Radley.” Body and Society 3.3 (1997): 103–109. Gay, Roxanne. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. New York: Harper Collins, 2017. Gilmore, Leigh. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Giménez Smith, Carmen. Be Recorder. Graywolf Press, 2019. Gunn, Paula Allen. Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting Border-­ Crossing Loose Canons. Beacon Press, 1998. Halse, Christine. “Writing/reading a life: The rhetorical practice of autobiography.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14.2 (2006): 95–115. Harjo, Joy. Crazy Brave: A Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Haynes, Cynthia. The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetorics in the Age of Perpetual Conflict. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. Hesford, Wendy. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

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Karpinski, Eva C. and Ricia Anne Chansky. “Finding Fragments: The Intersections of Gender and Genre in Life Narratives,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33:3 (2018): 505–515. Karpinski, Eva C. and Ricia Anne Chansky, eds. Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas. London: Routledge, 2020. Kathleen Blake Yancey and Stephen J.  McElroy. Assembling Composition. NCTE, 2017. Kirsch, Gesa, Caitlin Burns, and Dakota P.  Smith. Special issue of Across the Disciplines, “Unsettling Archival Research Across the Disciplines: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives,” Forthcoming 2021. https://wac. colostate.edu/atd/calls/unsettling-­archival-­research-­across-­the-­disciplines-­ engaging-­critical-­communal-­and-­digital-­archives/ Kennedy, Rosanne. “An Australian Archive of Feelings.” Australian Feminist Studies 69 (2011): 257–279. Kohlert, Frederik Byrn. Serial Selves: Identity and Representation In Autobiographical Comics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. Lawlor, Andrea. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. Rescue Press, 2017. Moraga, Cherríe. Loving in the War Years. Troy, NY: South End Press, 1992. Morra, Linda. Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship. University of Toronto Press, 2015. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle: Wave Books, 2009. Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. Powell, Katrina M. “Archives in Motion: Transitional Sites of Identity in Narratives of Displacement.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, in press, forthcoming 2021. Powell, Katrina M. “Hidden Archives: Revealing Untold Stories.”  Journal of American Studies 52.1 (2018): 26–44. Powell, Katrina M. and Sue Ott Rowlands. “Disturbing the Archive of Performance: The Embodiment of Testimony and Memory.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 9.3 (2013). Rawson, K.J. “Archive This: Queer(ing) Archival Practices.” In Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflections on Ethically Responsible Research. Eds. Katrina M.  Powell and Pamela Takayoshi. New  York: Hampton Press, Inc, 2012. 237–250. Reiff, Mary Jo and Anis Bawarshi, eds. Genre and the Performance of Publics. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016. Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Rosenberg, Jordy. Confessions of a Fox. New York: One World, 2018. Scanlon, Suzanne. Her 37th Year: An Index. Noemi Press, 2015. Silko, Leslie Marmon. The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir. New York: Viking, 2010. Singh, Juliette. No Archive will Restore You. Goleta, CA: 3Ecologies Books, 2018. Smith, Zadie. Intimations. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.

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Suzack, Cheryl, Huhndorf, Shari, Perreault, Jeanne, Barman, Jean. Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. Tamboukou, Maria. “Archival Methods in Auto/Biographical Research.” Douglas, Kate and Asley Barnwell. Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies London: Routledge, 2019. 19–25. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, ed. Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction. Berlin/ Boston: de Gruyter, 2019. Whitlock, Gillian. Postcolonial Life Narrative: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Author Index1

A Allen, Paula Gunn, 195 Andrews, William, 26, 27 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 11, 25, 28, 29, 73, 188, 195 Arasanayagam, Jean, 17, 194 B Baldwin, Andrea, 89 Barnwell, Ashley, 30 Barry, Lynda, 12 Bawarshi, Anis, 23, 24 Beard, Laura, 21 Bechdel, Allison, 12 Berlant, Lauren, 12 Bridwell-Bowles, Lillian, 2, 4, 21 Browne, Mahogony L., 72, 193 Butler, Judith, 3, 5, 25, 35

1

C Carson, Anne, 4, 8, 25, 34 Celinscak, Mark, 199 Chansky, Ricia, 199 Chávez, Karma, 21, 22, 25, 197 Couser, Thomas, 85 Cowen, Elise, 135, 149 D Davis, Rocio, 13, 162–164, 172, 173, 188, 189 DeVeaux, Alexis, 90, 92n2, 92n6 DiPrima, Diane, 77, 129, 136 Dixon, Morgan, 44 Douglas, Kate, 30 E Eakin, Paul John, 3, 26, 30 Ewing, Eve, 8, 11, 196

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AUTHOR INDEX

F Fahnestock, Jeanne, 15 Fiandt, Julie, 7 Foss, Sonja, 193 Freadman, Anne, 24 G Garrison, Vanessa, 44 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 45, 48–51, 63 Gay, Roxanne, 71, 72, 89, 92, 196 Gilmore, Leigh, 2–4, 6, 8, 25, 26, 30, 32, 33, 36, 160, 198 Gimenez Smith, Carmen, 196 Ginsberg, Allen, 128–130, 135, 139, 140, 149–153 Giovanni, Nikki, 72 Glenn, Cheryl, 3, 4 Grealy, Lucy, 15, 17 Green, Barabara, 29 Griffin, Cindy, 193 H Halse, Christine, 24 Harjo, Joy, 195 Hawhee, Debra, 159, 160 Haynes, Cynthia, 36, 37, 194 Henke, Suzette, 16, 26, 80–82, 85, 86 Henry, Jim, 15 Hesford, Wendy, 2, 3, 198 Hlakdi, Janice, 28 Huffer, Lynne, 99 J Jensen, Meg, 6, 30 Johnson, Nan, 6 Jolly, Margaretta, 30 Jones, LeRoi, 129, 148, 149 See also Baraka, Amiri Journet, Debra, 16

K Kadar, Marlene, 199 Kaplan, Caren, 11, 21 Karpinski, Eva, 25, 30, 199 Kay, Jackie, 91 Kennedy, Roseanne, 198, 199 Kerouac, Jack, 10, 128–131, 134–136, 139–148, 151, 153–156 Kirsch, Gesa, 4, 8, 13, 23, 24, 197 L Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan, 3 Langellier, Kristin M., 34, 35 Lawlor, Andrea, 196 Li, Stephanie, 47 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 1, 2, 5, 8, 10–12, 16, 17, 21, 25, 37, 127, 128, 131, 132, 156, 159–189, 193, 199 Logan, Shirley, 15, 22, 23 M Mairs, Nancy, 85 Malhotra, Anshu, 3 Mason, Mary G., 25, 27 Miller, Carolyn, 23, 24 Miller, Nancy K., 175, 186, 187 Moraga, Cherrie, 11, 28, 29, 33, 35, 186, 188, 195 N Nelson, Maggie, 11, 196 Norman, Howard, 15 Nussbaum, Felicity, 3, 26 O Olayiwola, Porsha, 72 Olney, James, 16, 26, 27, 175

  AUTHOR INDEX 

P Perkins, Margo V., 7, 29 Pollock, Della, 6, 21, 35, 162, 184, 185 R Rak, Julie, 5, 199 Ratcliffe, Krista, 6 Rawson, K.J., 8, 33, 197, 199 Reiff, Mary Jo, 23, 24 Reynolds, Nedra, 2, 21 Rich, Adrienne, 28 Ritchie, Joy, 3 Ronald, Kate, 3 Rosenberg, Jordy, 132, 196 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 4, 8, 13, 22–24 S Sanchez, Sonia, 72 Sappho, 8, 34 Satrapi, Marjane, 12 Scanlon, Suzanne, 11, 196 Shore, Jane, 15

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Silko, Leslie, 195 Singh, Juliette, 196 Smith, Barbara, 4, 8, 25, 74, 92n5 Smith, Sidonie, 2–4, 8, 12, 15, 25–27, 30–32, 35, 160, 198 Smith, Zadie, 11, 196 Smitherman, Genieva, 64 Sparks, Holloway, 7 Stephenson, Jenn, 198 Stover, Johnnie, 2, 4, 8, 21, 23, 29, 56 T Taylor, Patrick, 199 W Walker, Alice, 22, 46 Watson, Julia, 2, 4, 12, 25–27, 32, 160, 198 Watson, Martha Solomon, 15, 22 Whitlock, Gillian, 31, 198, 199 Willard-Traub, Margaret, 160, 161, 175, 185 Williams, Kimberly, 89 Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, 11, 27, 195

Subject Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 31, 159 A Academic autobiography, 159–189 Activism/activist, 4–9, 29, 36, 45, 71–92, 121, 159, 160, 187, 195, 199 Activist poetics, 9 Anger, 81, 83, 104, 109, 112, 183 Archive, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13–18, 36, 51, 132, 193–200 Auto/biography studies, 2, 6, 11, 13, 23, 25–28, 31, 199 B Beat Generation, 128–131, 136, 143, 145, 150, 153, 155, 156 Belonging, 16, 22, 161, 165–167, 182, 186

1

Biomythography, 72, 73, 80, 82 Black Arts Movement, 72, 92n2, 149 Black feminist criticism, 74 Bohemian, 128, 130, 137, 138, 146–148, 150 Border crossing, 161, 172 C Colonialism/colonial/colonizing/ colonized/, 10, 11, 27, 50, 161, 165, 168–171, 176–180, 182, 185, 197 Convention, 3, 6, 7, 9, 36, 47, 60, 64, 98, 115, 121 Critical auto/biography studies, 8, 25–31 D Decolonial, 89, 197 Decreation, 4, 34

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SUBJECT INDEX

Diaspora, 180 Displacement, 52, 86, 133, 161, 185, 194, 195

L Land use rights, 195 Liminality, 185, 186

E Embodied/embodiment, 3–6, 9, 10, 22–25, 28, 33, 34, 71–92, 159–189 Ethnography, 43, 48, 50, 51, 63, 64

M Mentor/mentoring/mentorship, 1, 7, 12–18, 51, 55, 59, 60, 80, 88–92, 159–189, 193, 197 Mestiza, 25, 28 Metonym, 32 Motherhood, 10, 46, 52, 56, 99–103, 111–114, 182

F Feminist rhetorics, 3 Fragment, 3, 8, 25, 34, 117, 199 G Gender, 1–18, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 47, 63, 72, 74, 75, 84, 90, 111, 121, 127, 131, 139, 146, 159, 162, 164, 168, 169, 173–175, 177, 178, 184, 188, 196 Genre, 1–18, 21–36, 43, 45, 47, 50, 53, 55, 63, 79, 83, 87, 97–122, 127, 159–189, 193–197 Genre mashing, 196 Gesture, 50, 87, 98, 102, 112 Girltrek, 18, 44 Griot, 9, 43–65 H Harlem Renaissance, 9, 44, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54 Hidden narratives, 196 I Identity, rhetorical constructions of, 171, 195 Identity, rhetorics of, 8, 21–37 Invitational rhetoric, 22, 193

N Narrative, 2–4, 6–12, 16, 21, 22, 25–31, 34–36, 45–52, 54, 55, 58–60, 63, 64, 72, 79, 80, 82, 84–86, 98–100, 102, 104, 106, 110, 111, 113–115, 117, 119–121, 122n3, 127–156, 161–163, 168, 171, 172, 175, 180, 181, 183–187, 194–196, 198 New York City, 146 O Outlaw genre, 11, 21, 33 P Performative/performance/ performativity, 1–18, 21–37, 44, 47, 51, 53, 55–57, 64, 78, 97–122, 131, 154, 159–164, 174, 175, 184–186, 188, 189, 193–200 Performative witness, 198 Personal as political, 12 Postcolonial, 26, 165, 171

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Q Queer, 22, 25, 33, 58, 65, 99, 199 Queer archives, 199 Queer theory, 25 R Racism, anti-racism, 7, 14, 17, 31, 44, 46, 58, 59, 61, 71–76, 78, 81–84, 87, 88, 99, 170, 171, 173, 186, 195, 197 Rhetorical genre studies, 3, 6, 21, 23, 193, 195 Rhetorical theory, 8, 15, 22, 23 S Scriptotherapy, 85, 86 Self-representation, 8, 9, 21, 25, 30, 32, 83, 97–122 Sexuality, 13, 26, 28, 34, 72, 79, 82, 85, 116, 117, 121, 169, 170, 185 Signifyin, 45, 48–55 Slave narratives, 29, 54, 56, 63, 64 Sorry books, 199

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Subjectivity, 3, 9, 11, 24, 28, 33, 98, 121, 122n3, 165, 168 Suicide, 73, 81, 132, 150, 153 T Testimony, 7, 26, 30, 31, 48, 53, 54, 73, 79, 84, 198 Transgender, 30, 33, 196 Transgressive archives, 5, 11, 193–200 genre transgressions, 3 Transgressive/transgressions archiving, 5 genre, 3, 36 of identity, 36 texts, 33 V Violence, 14, 17, 30, 37, 59, 60, 71–73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 101, 112, 117, 118, 173, 183, 194, 197, 198 W Wild feminism, 1–2