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.
Deborah McDowell
(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.
Deborah McDowell
(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.
Mary Ann Caws
(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.
Mary Ann Caws
(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.
Deborah McDowell
(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.
Deborah McDowell
(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.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(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.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(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.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(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.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(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.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(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.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(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.
Leila Ahmed
(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.
Leila Ahmed
(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.
Leila Ahmed
(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.
Nancy K. Miller
(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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
(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.
Nancy K. Miller
(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.
