Conference Comments and Conversations
The following comments were recorded during the question and answer sessions at
"Writing a Feminist's Life: Academics and Their Memoirs," a conference in honor of
Carolyn G. Heilbrun, held on February 11, 2005 at Columbia University.
(Comments 1)
The reluctance to call this project a memoir has to do with the kind of
tacit understanding, at least in academia, that the personal and the
scholastic should be mutually exclusive. And that there is something
rather illegitimate and nakedly self-aggrandizing about the personal.
Who, especially an unknown person from an unknown backwater of Alabama,
presumes to write a personal story? And I must say that I share some of
that suspicion of this form. But what I later came to accept and
actually feel quite honored to be reading this work within the context
of the symposium devoted to Carolyn Heilbrun, is that - writing is
writing.
And that writing any project assumes its form. And I came to see, while
writing and while reading, that I was working out many things in the
course of this book, including ideas about memory. Ideas about narrating
aspects of a personal life that, within the context of . . . I'll be
quick here, because I've begun to ramble.
Lucky is a person who likes to write - and I do like to write - who has a
topic that basically seizes them, and this is what happened in this
book. This was a project that basically seized me and would not let me
go, until I began to write it. And I came to see that, while I was
reluctant because of the fear of the disregard with which the project
might be met, and indeed it was.
My suspicions were not unfounded because of my colleagues' insistence on
saying this - this book doesn't count. That in the ways the academy judges
scholarly production and legitimate scholarly production, this is
somehow jackleg.
Even though I think far more research - my eyes are still suffering the
effects of reel-to-reels of microfilm - even though far more research or
as much research went into the writing of this book, as ever did any
scholarly piece I had ever written.
But it was for fear of that disregard with which the academy holds
first-person narrative. Not so much in teaching it, because you can
teach it but it's somehow irrationally then, to write what you teach is
illegitimate.
So I've come to see that is completely wacky. And not justified. I've
come to see that all writing assumes its form. And that I have come not
to prize one over the other. And my decision to simply read from the
memoir at first was meant as no disrespect to the importance and the
challenge and the excitement of the questions that the organizers
pose.
But rather, to have myself, shall I say, demonstrate my sense that I
work from two modes, alternatively. That is, sometimes in the critical
mode; sometimes in the theoretical mode.
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(Comments 2)
What I found myself as wanting to do here, consciously, is intervene in
expectations about civil rights narrative that had become a kind of holy
writ.
And to try to get access to, and offer readers access to, those places
in that period that lay outside the cameras' gaze. Those places that
involve the kind of quotidian, intimate, day-to-day activities of
people's lives. Because what is often lost in the kind of grand
narrative way of doing civil rights history are these moments.
And what is often missed are the casualties of this period in narratives
that are predominantly triumphalist. Even when they account for
casualties, the casualties are in the margins, as we move on to the
victories of this period. And there were victories.
But what I wanted to get access to were those casualties and the
losses - to have access to the losses of that period, both as I
experienced them personally, but also as they played out
socio-historically.
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(Comments 1)
Those of us writing small narratives are finding our place the way we
might not have before. So I love the interference, in the positive
sense, of narration, fiction, memoir, history. What we know and what we
think we have forgotten - all those things together.
I think that through narrations like this - auto-fictions, as I think of
my memoir as being - we somehow grasp what we never could have grasped in
these master, big things that used to be our theoretical basis.
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(Comments 2)
I thought of writing my memoir for my friends and my children, and
that's really the way it comes out. It doesn't come out as something
which teachers would want to read. It comes out as something that a lot
of people have been through, a lot of what I've been through. They might
want to read it.
And somehow, when I wrote it I wasn't writing it for anybody except the
people I knew.
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(Comments 3)
I am not a morning person. But it was like this giant hand would just
push me out of bed and I'd go to the desk and around ten o'clock, when I
had to stop and go to class, I'd be looking at stuff that was spilling
out of my head onto the page.
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(Comments 4)
There's one passage from Writing a Woman's Life where Carolyn
Heilbrun writes, "I understood how privileged Victorian women must have
felt when they took off the stays and dresses that inhibited motion, and
flexed their bodies; moved their unbound muscles."
And then, in another passage, she writes, "Of all the rights we women
have sought, none is more difficult or more vital than the right to
change. I found that habit, even beautiful and generous habit, even
professional or marital habit, could become a killing monster and could
be defeated after careful analysis by the daring of abandonment." I
guess, in answer to your question I would say, we can [stand outside of
the academic] if we choose. Because some people may not choose, and
that's okay, too. But we may, in answer to your question, by the daring
of abandonment. [. . .]
So I guess that is my answer, through Heilbrun, by the daring of
abandonment and contrariness. I have never felt more blissful than when
writing this book. It was really one of the most wonderful writing
experiences of my career.
And it didn't matter to me if anyone would read it, and I say that
honestly. But luckily for me, it has found, in terms of audience - I feel
I should say, because I've been trashing the academy - it has really found
a very, very vigorous audience in the general culture.
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(Comments 1)
I think of myself as a writer. I've always thought of myself as a
writer. Not only a writer . . . and the notion that you turn off half of
your brain when you write anything, just seems . . . I feel as though I
need my whole brain, and then some.
And I started out as a poet and the poetry I was writing was full of
whatever kinds of intelligence I could get into it, and whatever kinds
of, whatever was helping me understand the world. [. . .]
For intellectuals . . . I mean, for people not to have to adjure one
kind of making sense, in order to use others. But I guess, I really do
have some impatience with even the question, which I'll try to conceal,
which I apparently didn't succeed in.
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(Comments 1)
I guess that what I'm finding out, writing this thing, is how much I
really liked to write my obscure and terrible things.
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(Comments 2)
I don't think [all Indian women] are really as oppressed by the system and
the prejudices as one would think. There is an extremely strong women's
movement in India. And it's not a single issue movement. I think that's one of
the things that I find very, very good.
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(Comments 3)
So I would say that when we want to talk about a country of a billion
people, we should talk more about the nature of the women's struggle
there, which is very strong.
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(Comments 2)
People you think, you imagine yourself writing for aren't necessarily at
all the people who will find something useful in what you do. And it's
not as though there's academia and then there's the lump of the real
world.
I mean, the real world - A, academia is real. It's as real as anything.
And B, the people in the real world are quite varied in their interests
and their reading habits, and their willingness to deal with what some
people find difficult writing.
It never occurred to me, when I started writing as a critic, to imagine
readers who weren't academics, which accounts for some bad writing. But
partly it was just a failure of imagination, a very serious one. Partly,
it was modesty. And partly it was realism.
Because who does read books on 18th-century gothic novels? But then,
what happened to me was that I discovered that, after I started writing
about queer stuff, that people who weren't academics were reading it.
Which quite surprised me. And then I found myself . . . I would go give
a reading at A Different Light, and two guys would say, "Can we have our
picture with you? We'll put it on our Christmas card." (laughter)
Or people who really weren't that educated would tell me that they had
struggled through books that I had assumed would presume a good deal of
education. And then when I looked back at the books, often I'm shocked
at my habit of using an esoteric word when a more accessible word would
do just fine.
Or, at the insider-ness of some of the jokes. So, I think my writing has
gotten, those quite arbitrary barriers that I'm much, much less apt to
put those up. On the other hand, for me it seems that there is a texture
of productive thinking in writing that doesn't go down that easy.
And I don't think of that as really a difference, necessarily a
difference between an academic and a non-academic audience. But more
it's a difference between people who like to or want to engage with that
in an active way, and others who don't.
I also know that I've done a really imperfect job of breaking myself of
some of those habits because I like long words. And even inside jokes
and stuff, sometimes. But that's the kind of idealized version of my
experience.
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(Comments 4)
Writing this, I am really - and I'm not joking or trying to be too kind of
mystical - I am really trying to write in the way that these women would
understand.
You know what I'm saying? They, of course, didn't understand English.
But this was the whole thing about, this is the whole thing about my
schools also. People who have no institutional education at all, ever,
for thousands of years. Right?
Are the ideas such that they will travel without my compromising them
too much? That doesn't mean I'm against education. I am educating. After
all, I believe, I don't even think academic is such a dirty word. I
mean, I did say once, when I was sitting in the subaltern studies party
in Hyderabad, I was sitting and there was a lot of noise going on.
I was speaking Bengali again; I hope someone can imagine what kind of
word I used for "motherfucker," but anyway [. . .] Everybody else was
milling around being very academic in the bad sense - a boys' club,
mostly. I said to a woman friend, I entered this profession because I like to read,
write and teach; and as a result, I'm thrown in with a bunch of
motherfuckers. This is what I said. (laughter)
So I know the problems, but nonetheless, I think, one should question
oneself, that one sticks at the job, takes in young people in the name
of teaching, makes a salary, makes a life, fights for tenure. And then,
at the end of the day, says, I don't want to be in the academy, I want
to write something, you can give it a nice psychoanalytic name.
I don't even know what kind of name I would give it. It just seems too
obvious to me. So, I'm not against education. We shouldn't burn the
universities. But nonetheless, my desire in this thing has been to write
in such a way that they would find the questions something that . . . I
want to be haunted. Some people will know what I'm talking about. I want
to be haunted by them. So it's a hauntological autobiography.
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(Comments 1)
And the idea of speaking about a memoir or speaking personally is
breaking - you really are letting yourself down and you're just not a
serious person at all if you do that.
And I think, as I thought about it, I don't think really it's that we
want to impress people. I think, as social beings, we react to our
environment and we have an environment which devalues this; and it's
very hard to resist it.
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(Comments 2)
I do think that writing which is not academic, can be just as
intellectually radical and important as writing that is. So I don't see
myself as breaking my contract at all.
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(Comments 3)
Writing is a form of conversation, so we are always writing back. We
come into being in the midst of other people's conversations. And any
writing is an engagement with that conversation that's already there. So
in that sense, I would say we are writing back. But this issue of
compromise, that's an impossibly complicated question because every
moment . . . I don't know, somebody was saying when I was writing, was
it for this audience or that audience? I'm writing for at least 16 dozen
audiences. And whatever process it is, one moment it's this person, this
sort of audience, and then another. And as to honesty, I have no idea,
to be quite honest, I don't know what honesty is - in writing. Well I both
know it and don't know it - because there is an endless process of
rethinking, and of course, I have no doubt that I was, when I was
writing Border Passage. When I write anything, and certainly when
I was writing Border Passage, I was out to be as truthful, in
some important way, as I could be.
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(Comments 1)
I think it is the case that, as Deborah McDowell was saying, writing
finds its forms. Writing finds its forms and finds it differently in
different historical moments. We have seen this tremendous proliferation
of memoirs since the '90s. And it's going on, even though every other
month someone feels the need to publish an article saying "no more
memoirs; publishers are sick of memoirs."
I think there are certain subjects that, when they say people are sick
of, it means that it's still alive. Feminism is over - where is feminism?
Deconstruction is over, Freud is over, memoirs are over. That means that
they are still alive. But it's just that the media is looking for
something to say.
But historically oppressed peoples have written memoirs. And if you look
at American literature, you have some of the greatest writing of the
nineteenth century in slave narratives, which really give the form,
after St. Augustine we have the slave narratives, in terms of providing
the clearest arc to the shape of what autobiography can be.
It's not at all surprising that feminists turn to memoir, just as many
ethnic groups have turned. It's a form that allows writers . . . and
these were some of the issues that came up this morning . . . to talk
about themselves individually, but also feeling responsible to their
community.
Memoir has actually done a lot of kinds of cultural work in the last 25
years or so. And maybe that's why it's still an intense form.
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(Comments 1)
I wrote my memoir for a non-American audience. I felt very keenly the
political precariousness of the community in which I was raised, which
is a Chinese Malaysian community known as the Peranakans. And after
independence in Malaysia in 1957, politically there was an enormous
shift and the Constitution changed to put in place a quota system, where
selected indigenous groups were assured of seats in the universities, of
business licenses and so forth - so that the Chinese Malaysians have
gradually lost a great deal of economic and political and social
power.
I wanted to write the history of that community, so the first half of
the memoir is about British colonial Malaysia and post-colonial
Malaysia. And that was a great drive for my path. But of course, now I
am an American citizen. I keep telling my students to vote and vote
often.
I have gone through the process of transformation, so when I write now,
I am aware that I'm shuttling back and forth. It's a very strange
location to be in. I spend a lot of time back in Asia. I was just
telling Nancy that I am going back again to Hong Kong for four months
this coming year, and so on and so forth.
And maybe that does not speak to many people in U.S. academia yet, but
more and more I think that the United States is part of a huge
globalizing community; that a lot of U.S. identities are really
transnational.
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(Comments 2)
In Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography, when she talks about coming to
writing, she says that she wants to be loved, basically, like a heroine
in a George Eliot novel. When you write as an academic you write to be
footnoted. You don't write to be loved. (laughter) And you're going to
look for yourself in the index or whatever. But when you write more
personally, in whatever form, it is, in a way, to be loved. It's to
expose yourself to people who you think will - to some extent - share in
whatever you are exposing.
When you write autobiographically, it's because you want a reader to be
in conversation with. Rousseau has this incredible line in the
Confessions where he says, I know the reader doesn't need to hear
this, but I need to tell him.
And there really is that. There is this kind of need to share your story
and to feel that the story has been received.
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