Pieces of Daughter

this is a work of fiction. pure fabrication. this is about SLA stuff and parents and like I said, all utterly untrue. and allot of Helene Cixous, I like her very much.

I would like to begin by disregarding daughter. I would no longer like to be daughter. I would like to renounce the family scene the menace, transference, projection, dependence, authority and cruel attachment. I have borrowed these words from Helene Cixous discussing how Rembrandt’s Bathsheba escapes Freud’s analysis¹ as this Bathsheba is, inspiring to Cixous by reason of avoiding said cruel attachments. Mother is David. Insofar as woman/daughter is the object of trade and repudiation and vindication. Mother is the patriarch, and she leaves my life erect - carved out - used - forgotten.

Cixous makes aim of being de-nominated. Nomination is crucial, nomination is privilege, and yet I don’t want to be daughter. De-nomination can be liberation. Daughter exists only because of Mother. Mother is the chicken and daughter is the egg. I would like to be a chicken, but not mother. Daughter depends on mother. I am however, un-daughtered as to have a hole that needs filling, (in the most obvious fashion.) Daughter is carried only by Mother’s sublunary obligation. Those obligations are not necessarily fulfilled and neither provide tether to this world or another.

“between vengeance and patience, between the insatiable and the nourisher… I am inclined to use mother as a metaphor, yet at the same time it is not a metaphor. This is the secret and decisive figure that one feels living and writing in those who write.”²

Cixous writes in a certain, inimitable way about her mother.

I have a longing for mine that has landed me in disempowered sexual relations, all too frequent and beyond my years. I have looked for this love in avoidant and unwilling bodies. I am trying to learn the difference between sex as a drug and sex as primal appurtenance.

“A possible triumph over sadness is the ability of the self to no longer identify with the lost object.”³

The lost object, maternal. I over identify with mother, I try and try to imitate her, but: I am an imposter in heels and dresses, earrings and necklaces. An imposter to my profession, to any heterosexuality, to any beauty or intelligence. I am both her and an imposter to her. I am from her. I am made in her likeness.

I seek out pieces of her: to own, wear, smell, touch, hold or be held by. I imagine her at my age on the cusp of, or just beyond the cusp of great success. For better or worse my mother is a very formidable person and there is both immense grief associated with our disconnect and a perverse satisfaction in rebelling against her, in throwing my hate at her. Like throwing eggs at a wall - or not eggs - just imagine something that is small and fragile and full of possibility being hurled toward a determined surface.

I am not confident in my body in the way I observe my mother being.

My mother never appeared ashamed or afraid of her nakedness. Doors were always open and I would peep and stare, fascinated by her skin and folds. Her body is not a body that has tried to erase the stories it tells: her breasts remain large and burdening, her nipples, fed three of us, are also large and very red. Her body tells pain stories… A thrice frequented scar that canyons heavy across her stomach, the flesh of which reminds me of the sand underneath a wave as it pulls away. The pearling sheen of stretch marks. Another bold scar on her knee underneath which all is very fragile.

My mother has an unapologetic, unaltered body and face. A very feminine shape and structure: the body of a mother. A body birthed in the act of giving birth. A body made body by babies and drink and food and of not holding oneself back, of not denying oneself. To give her credit where credit is due: of taking up space. This sounds arrogant, but I think I might be one of the only people who can intimidate her. Not because of some talent, but because I am something that came from her that she cannot keep.

It occurs to me perhaps I know nothing about love. I don’t know what it is I feel towards my mother. I don’t know if it is love beyond something requisite. Toward my mother I feel a certain reverence and protection. Toward my mother I feel a certain pity and shame. Toward my mother I feel a certain anger and grief. Toward my mother I carry a pinching hope.

Perhaps I only know about loss and desire and the fear of losing and that, between me and love, lies is a vast desert of misunderstanding. I suppose, love lives fickle in me.

We both try to get close and to understand each-other. I sense we want each-other’s closeness desperately but something is remarkably in the way. I find it hard to trust her or to anticipate her reactions, she leaves me on edge, and encourages a self-doubt: we force a performance of each-other. I leave our interactions with shame.

Mother is a signifier as much or more than mother is mother.

This mother is distinct from actual maternity.

I am interested by our rather fixed interpretation of mother, one without fallibility. An odd patriarchal reverence and minimising by some relentless superlative of maternal form and function.

What happens when the act of motherhood lands in fallible human hands, or hurt injured hands.

Woman under the influence, Mother under the influence. Children exposed to madness. Fallible mother-home.

Both my parents have complicated if not devastating relationships to their own mothers. My father grew up with a single mother, mentally unwell and often abusive. My mother was raised by the care system. Both my parents have known success in their fields that has afforded me a life of unbound privilege. Both of my parents have struggled against unimaginable odds to provide care, be it inconsistent, for myself and my siblings. However this knowledge, repeated at me during times of my persistent, juvenile retaliation - does little by the way of indemnification.

Sort of About Love

Cixous’ essay What is it O’clock is an essay about time which becomes an essay about love. Time, grief and love. The three abstract agents of our being and experiencing as human.

The moments we cannot live or know, the crucial and important lives we cannot live during our own, “Our death, ours, the instant of our life we cannot appropriate. Our death which strips us of our death… The Thing that will come from us to us so as to escape us. Like blood.”⁴ Things that will come from us to escape us, like our children. Like our birth. These are secrets our mother holds and knows exclusively.

There are secrets my mother holds that I can never know. Secrets she couldn’t tell even if she wanted to because they can’t be put into words. Secrets like what her body felt like when mine was leaving hers. Secrets like what I smelt like when she held me, what my eyes said before my mouth couldn’t. Secrets like the extent of her envy. Envy of a life that comes from her and passes her. Or fear rather, of an encompassing love and attachment which can leave - people leaving, people not there, people abandoning. To hold the loved one down is to keep them close and also slowly kill them. It feels sometimes like they are slowly killing me, my parents.

In Without End Cixous writes, “we don’t have the last word, truth always has the last word and we run out of breath at its heels.”⁵ In What is it O’clock we meet those reaching toward unreachable truths, the writers who “knows in advance they are moving toward their perdition, magnificent. And into the bargain they are begrudged their confession, and this too they know, in advance, moving toward the zones where truth’s lustre turns, sparkling. (Knowing as the Portuguese say, that God writes straight with crooked lines.)”⁶

The word sparkling is special here. Sparkle.

Reflective particles of crystal/ice/glass/water move at random and are met in the instant by a single ray of light and then returned to our eye in brief illustrious gifts. Tiny triangulations. All occurring ahead and in advance of our witnessing, gone before we can register, capture or keep them. Sparkle. Sparkling truths beguile wordsmiths in their chase. We are too little too late. In the experience of it the origin of it is gone. Trying to live where nothing remains, trying to write where nothing remains.

My personal sparkle (I run out of breath at the heels of this one) : is the child who surfaces in my mother’s smile. I feel like I can only truly meet my mother in her wild inebriation. Her army of selves are quieted and I am now properly introduced. I am deeply protective of her here. She smiles, she laughs - no - giggles. She giggles. Her cheeks apple, they press the skin around her eyes to crease. Her nose wrinkles recalling a friendly mouse creature, and, if it hits her right … Her loud and liberated laugh. Something mischievous. A face that moves freely and unawares in humour. Gossamer lips curl around minutely crooked teeth, in no way offensive or detracting from the charm of this mouth or face.

What passes through the teeth of her come-hither imperfection? Teeth that in their independent directions speak to small rebellions. The substance of living is what passes through unchecked. The doors to the warm pink cave of words and laughter and breath and drink and food are always open. A woman who eats bread and spirits. A woman who eats her drinks. She will lean back in this laughter, like a puppy on its back. Her eyes might water.

Sometimes I feel I can only meet my mother here. Who meets me here? A girl at large, hiding in a lived women’s body is who meets me here. She is my sister, she is my phantom sibling. It’s Christmas, I help her into bed. She apologies, she cries and apologises. Something genuine arrives in her body and eyes and voice and I forgive her. And we love each other. So this is love.

Cixous reaches for the inexpressible sentiments so as to bring us closer to the sparkles of what we feel but cannot say or sometimes fathom. She does so with a wild abstractedness one must trust in and follow until the satisfaction of recognising oneself begins. The tension of her narrative is time, insofar as the hour passes before we can live it, or know it. “I miss your death. The blow falls next to me. I want to suffer I don’t manage.”⁷ Cixous’ narrative tension is time, and love is borne of it.

“Grief and mourning begin long before the event, begin on the first day of love … I’m too afraid of loosing you and of your losing me … Our immortality: not believing in death … And as we are never prepared enough, behold how we are caught unawares. What is worse, in truth, is not that this hour comes, but that we miss it - it’s a unique chance, and almost always, it must be said, we botch it - but not always. Tearless I cry for all those scenes, our dearest scenes, which come to pass outside of us, where we pass outside ourselves, which we can’t share with ourselves, tearless I cry for the tearless scenes, the scenes so violently cruel they take our tears away and blow dry us out and deprive us of beverage and liberation … My voice is cut short in my throat because she is no more, the person to whom I was addressing it … Your death I could not live… The terrible hour that I cannot live is the hour of your death. The hour that cannot come to pass, not with me, that comes to pass beside me.”⁸

I am talking about grief, grief of a parent, who unlike Cixous, I have not lost. I wish to have lived with you mother the moments of your life that have made you so hard to love. To be chasing the hour of loving you.

There is this endless grasping, an infinite reach for the ties implied by motherhood and so my roots grow unawares, directionless.

But to repeat: love lives fickle in me. Or if anything it does not live at all.

An anecdote:

If the consequence of awards is to make us all myopic, I felt microscopic.

As the dinner proceedings begin there is the initial craze, the bustling masses exit the hall, flood the stairs and elevators, inspect their colour coded tickets to find their table - all with palpable anticipation and gross eagerness. Once the meal is in full swing the dinner guests, some standing, some now seated, keep themselves vigilant. Each of them perched on their white bamboo chairs like flighty birds with avid magpie eyes. They attempt to mask this vigil with poorly feigned interest in conversation.

Boy I wish I wasn’t one of them. Who the fuck was that? Ugh. Burning shame at my endowing every exchange and glance with existential importance. None of us are immune to the anxious and coveting curiosity of the masses.

Then there were those who seemed to care a little less.

They were industry veterans. Pruned producers in 30 year old tuxedos, chewing their food to a pulp, their wisened babble obsolete before our modern hellfire media landscape. Doyenne agents opting for comfortable shoes and who’s complete, passionless attempt at glamour consisted of a moiling layer of clumpy mascara no doubt applied perfunctorily in their North West London home vestibule.

There were those special people, who nurture an air of polite, protective distance. They feel safe to enjoy themselves in the company of equally admired and coveted colleagues. Knowing only then, nothing is wanted of them, (nothing outside of ordinary human exchange) where they don’t have to entertain starved legions of devotees.

You just don’t like me, you have never liked me my mother has said countless times over the years. How to tell her she is so wrong and also so right.

I should always remember to keep my cards close to my chest. I had barely eaten, my stomach sounded like a whining dog.

In a quiet moment I reached for her hand and moved my eyes to meet hers.

“I want to tell you something, which I hate do do as it’s in conflict with my campaign of rebellion against you,” I laughed nervously “but I had a very a proper moment this evening. I saw you on the red carpet looking so confident and beautiful, and I watched the room receive you in awe and admiration and something really began to make sense. It melted away a specific resentment, that you weren’t always available to me as a working mother. That the need for some stay at home mum has been okay in the end, because all this sacrifice was for something, was worth something. It’s for others I guess, your career and art means allot to people. You’re a gift for everyone else…” I paused, searching for something in my mothers eyes, “I guess I’m saying it’s okay I had to share you, I forgive you for that.”

I know why I say what I don’t always mean. It’s what I think she might want to hear. It was all currency. It was an easy out for her, if she wanted to take it, my pain was disguised in praise. It sounded like something someone would say in a film. We dance I guess. My shameful obeisance was not what left me reeling, nor my shameful bargaining - for not just love - but for what she - in her success might allow me - what hurt, was the way my mother received it all, in equal performance. (How could I blame her, when I had done the same?) It wasn’t the union I wanted, a moment where swords put back in their sheaths and peace begins… because… it was her victory only. I had swallowed my pride and was malleable. You mother, were grateful, not that I was expressing love and admiration, that I had prepared the bed for our reconciliation, you were grateful, simply, that you had won, and moments after my speech was over, you had moved on to something else.

In the veneration of an artist we forget their humanity, as in: “we who are guilty of all the fault in the world.”⁹ We separate them from the perennial we, and consign their faults to oblivion. One’s art is not undeserving, but it’s not one’s art we celebrate, it’s the one (them). I was looking for authentic connection, I was bartering for it. I found sparkle instead.

1. Helene Cixous: Bathsheba or the Interior Bible

2. Helene Cixous: Bathsheba or the Interior Bible

3. Julia Kristeva: Depression and Melancholia

4. Helene Cixous: What is it O’Clock

5. Helene Cixous: Without End

6. Helene Cixous: What is it O’Clock

7. Helene Cixous: What is it O’Clock

8. Helene Cixous: What is it O’Clock

9. Helene Cixous: In October 1991…