Shirley Geok-lin Lim, "Not an Academic Memoir"
(page 2 of 5)

So the memoir's author, that academic self you all thought you would be listening to this afternoon, is not here, is in fact a fake. However, when Stein says so memorably, "You are of course never yourself," of the autobiographical inscribed subject, I would also disagree to say that in writing Among the White Moon Faces I was not so postmodern as to interrogate the concept of self or to view it as partial or fragmented. On the contrary, in the memoir, I was struggling toward construction of a historically situated, formally narrated, living subjectivity, with claims to an authentic past, a relationship to real experience and exterior scenes and persons, that a postmodern consciousness might critique as rising from discursive modes of imagination that are naive, inadequate, antiquated, and inauthentic. The memoir's desire was in contradistinction to the intellectual deconstructive currents of postcolonial theories; a strong authorial motive, as I can vividly recall now, was to seize in prose those uncertain moments yet certainly surviving as embodied traces that up to 1994, when I first began writing the memoir, had continued to emerge, involuntarily and in spasmodic fashion, through the years. Those memories, a term that cannot fully connote the independent disrupting violence of these mental acts, I had understood for a long time, defined a subject, "me," that was as different as a thumbprint is from anyone else's. Yet, while the contents of these mental disturbances were fully private, freighted often with pain, shame, guilt, strange pleasures, mélanges of mixed, confused feelings, they were also subject, continuously and particularly at the moment of writing, to the pressure to understand, the public and social resources from reading, study, debate, the systemic apparatuses of exteriorized thought. I knew historical accuracy was important, that stories about others would be checked against other witnesses, and that lying was a different utterance from the inevitable slipperiness of restricted point of view, partial recall, self-interest, narrative omission, and any number of other strategic writerly decisions resulting in less than full reporting, total veracity and verisimilitude. Ah, but as the author, that was what I had set as my goal, veracity and verisimilitude, not as in reporting but as in poetry. In short, I saw my memoir not as a feminist memoir written by an academic but a feminist memoir written by a poet.

I apparently satisfied this goal so badly that at one point late in the writing, Howe called me in Santa Barbara to complain that nowhere in the memoir had I addressed how I came to be a poet, at which point I did then insert some material on the writing and reception of my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula. Still, I think now that Howe was mistaken. In retelling my life, a major thread from early childhood to motherhood was the ways in which the body was the conduit to imagination. The body: subjected to and subjecting others to violation and violence. The body: itself enraged and violent. This body formed an interior consciousness of self, literally interiority itself - the secretive, private, individualized, rankling sensibility - from which came the poems. Poetry had everything to do with the familial, public violence that shaped the content of those involuntary mental images we call memory.

This was how I described the very first of such memories:

(The following excerpt is reprinted from Among the White Moon Faces, page 10, with permission from The Feminist Press.)

Before there is memory of speech, there is memory of the senses. Cold water from a giant tap running down an open drain that is greenish slime under my naked feet. My mother's hands are soaping my straight brown body. I am three. My trunk is neither skinny nor chubby. It runs in a smooth curve to disappear in a small cleft between my two legs. I am laughing as her large palms slide over my soapy skin which offers her no resistance, which slips out of her hands even as she tries to grasp me. I do not see her face, only her square body seated on a short stool and a flowered samfoo that is soaked in patches.

The same open area, the same large green-brass tap above my head, only this time I am crying. My anus hurts me. My mother is whittling a sliver of soap. I watch the white Lifebuoy grow sharper and sharper, like a splinter, a thorn, a needle. She makes me squat down, bare-assed, pushes my body forward, and inserts the sliver up my anus. The soap is soft, it squishes, but it goes up and hurts. This is my mother's cure for constipation. I cry but do not resist her. I do not slide away but tense and take in the thorn. I have learned to obey my mother.

This learning to obey my mother, rising from the instruction of penetration, is clearly traumatic, and prepared me early to understand all deep learning as a form of trauma - what shakes the mind and body most, what penetrates deepest, what separates the subject most violently from another and splits her within. The lesson also initiated the girl-child to the act of submission, to obedience in compliance with powerful others, and to violence in the name of protection and love.