Antimemoir, as in, Fuck You (as in, Fuck Me)

Often I think that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living.

—Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

What was the chief part of an orator? He answered, action: what next? action: what next again? action.

—Francis Bacon, ‘Of Boldness’

Stones underfoot: they’re slope-faced, many thousands of them, ancient as the moon. They crunch as she hobbles over them from the water’s edge towards the castle. She should have worn her runners. Up ahead, Kronborg Castle—Elsinore, for today—is as vast and regal as any castle. The scene is so familiar, though how could it be? It’s her first time in Denmark.

—You didn’t go to Kronborg that day.

—Let me do this. My way.

—This is fiction!

—A frame.

The performance of Hamlet begins under the great white banner of the sky; scene by scene, the actors work their way through the halls and chambers and grounds of the castle. At each scene change, she follows the audience-herd around to the next set—which is just the castle, the castle is the set is the castle.

Every year, a new season of Hamlet is staged at Kronborg.

Must be a great gig for the actors, she thinks.

—Rather, she imagines she’d have thought, had she been there…

‘One season,’ a Dane told her, ‘Jude Law played the role of Hamlet. It was like the biggest thing to happen in Denmark.’

No Jude Law this time. Just actors with dark eye make-up smeared, whose faces seem, as all the Danes do, vaguely familiar to her. White people of a certain variety, the planes of their faces suggestive of her own and her brothers’: broad foreheads, small, round noses. Invasions a millennia old alive in the angles of their jaws, the licks of pale hair at their temples. ‘Viking’, she later learns on Wikipedia, doesn’t describe an ethnic group. Not the red-headed. Not the burly fleshed. Viking is just another word for marauder. Genetic memories, arbitrarily, violently implanted.

Though ‘Viking Queen’ does have a ring more charming than ‘Pillaging Monarch’.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! (Hamlet, act 2, scene 2)

—And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

—Oh, Hamlet. Hamlet and the pillaging monarchs. The forms upon which ‘the human’, humanity, that concept, that ideology, is based. Just a pile of worthless dust.

She exits the castle early. Gets on a train back to the flat grey city. Enough Shakespeare for one day. Though she is in Copenhagen for a summer school on world literature—and Hamlet is the work of world literature, the work with multiple sources and endless articulations, adaptations—she hates the play: the wronged prince, the dead crazy girl, and in this instance—

—This imaginary instance—

the pompous black-cloaked production values.

And these days, all castles look like Trump Tower to her.

—Truth time.

—Okay.

—You didn’t go.

—I didn’t. But, let me—

—She didn’t really go to Kronborg Castle that day.

She was supposed to go on the Hamlet excursion, a voluntary activity organised by the summer school she was attending. She should have (could have) been a good sport and gone along. But castles aren’t all that, and neither is Hamlet. And besides, the summer school had caused her to reel in mild horror—for days at a time—at the institution, the roles and rules, of academia. So instead of attending the play, she, and he, took the train across the bridge to Malmö, sweet little Swedish city, to visit a friend.

—A true story.

—Why not?

In Malmö that day, while the poor summer-school students went out to see a sad play, the friends went to a green park and watched a band perform. The singer, a new Swede from old Iraq, told a true love story from the shores of Greece, where she had first arrived in Europe.

—How true?

—Stories of love are always true stories.

The tale was simple. Two strangers met at the littoral, on a ribbon of sand between two lives they hadn’t yet chosen. Something sparkled right away, something like love, but the two were splintered apart before love could fuse them together. A year later, their bodies met again and completed the act of it, the falling in love of it.

After the concert, they ate smoked eggplant with pomegranate seeds on top, scooped it up with hot round circles of bread. Drank a beer in a garden pub full of revellers who all knew their friend’s name and stopped to say hello. Went to sleep at their friend’s place, on his bed, with him on a mattress laid out beside them.

—Better than Hamlet.

—The best.

…

‘Memories, images,’ Italo Calvino once said, ‘once fixed in words, are erased.’

…

I met this Malmö friend in Lisbon, where I was writing a rupture from years before. He was there to see a friend of mine, A, his best friend from back home—a great dusty city, which had exiled them both several years before. A holiday. Both friends had been pushed from their homes, torn apart by catastrophe, split apart by lives they had not yet chosen. He to Sweden, A to Germany. They had arranged a room in the Lisbon hills, to fuse together again.

While I was there, at the residency, I met an American artist, B, who was tracing her own ruptured lines, too. In beautiful, yellow Lisbon, city of faded opulence, whose grandeur is due, in part, in large part, to the bones that rest at the bottom of the Atlantic. Where it is impossible to look at the shimmering water without seeing the Middle Passage. (The Middle Passage, the first and greatest trauma on which the era of humanism, of Hamlet’s angst, of the ascendance of white skin to the top of the labour chain, is built.) The American artist’s lines were drawn from Goa, which had been taken, raided and used by the Portuguese empire for three centuries. When she looked at the glittering ocean, she, too, saw the ships. The American artist listened to me talk about my project, and offered me her copy of the poet Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. This book is Kapil’s first, and is as far as I know out of print. She gave it to me anyway. In it, I found answers to my questions—and the answer wasn’t me. The answer wasn’t single, nor was it what I longed for. In Vertical Interrogation, Kapil asks twelve questions. The worst of them: ‘Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?’ (A trick question: she’s only my mother to me. But the responsible I is too much to answer to.)

—Right book at the right time.

—Is like the right friend inviting you to stay with them a night.

—Is like the true story of letting love in, despite the distance.

I became obsessed with Kapil. Bought and read her books, read her blog and the anthologies she had contributed to, among them an edition of Chain from 2000 titled Memoir/Antimemoir. Saw that she had scheduled a free ‘Antimemoir and Charcoal’ workshop at a gallery in London. Looked up flights—forty-euro tickets there, twenty-seven back. So. A couple of months later in Spitalfields, I met Kapil in her flesh. She wore a cotton dress with a full skirt. Cuban-heeled boots. Leather jacket. Big hair and laughter, too.

For the next three hours, she said once we’d sat down, I am yours. I am devoted. To you.

This woman, I thought. And then she led a guided meditation.

She sent us off with reams of white paper and sticks of charcoal to ‘free draw’ sprawled out on the floor of the gallery. This process, she said, might help us unblock a pattern, a repressed emotion, a shape, for a project that might otherwise be going nowhere.

On the floor of the sunlit gallery, I rocked the base of the charcoal cylinder along the paper’s surface, rolled its edge to make a long coil of crescent moons. Formed a couple of mounds to one side. And dots surrounding the structure, like pollen in still air, gently spilling outwards, upwards.

—Like spring snow.

As each student taped their creation to the gallery’s walls for crits, I realised I had drawn a great throbbing cock. When it was my turn to have the drawing analysed, the other students said words like:

—fertile

—fecund

—pollinate.

Some bodies don’t somatise, Kapil said.

And others are purely somatic, I thought, looking at my cock.

…

When I returned to the apartment where I lived, I realised I had a few weeks of spare afternoons coming up, so I decided to use them to organise some of my work, small essayistic things, into a hypothetical book proposal.

—But. Why?

—To somatise?

—To let the pollen fertilise. To insist on the structure of my world.

Hey, said the swinging, smiling, author me of the book proposal. You can bet on me to write a thought-provoking commercially successful essay collection!

—Inwardly, of course, my shame.

—Dickhead.

I tried to think intentionally about the whole of them, these essays, collected, and the why. Were they essays? Were they memoirs? Was there a difference between the two?

The things were referential, pointed to my real, fleshy time on earth, from the arc of the existence bestowed on me by my ancestors, filtered through the imperfect cadence of language. But was my life a complete one, with a story to tell? Was I a serious enough person to call my work autotheory? (No.) Should anyone care about the small line of vision that I am entitled to narrate?

…

‘All the images will disappear,’ writes Annie Ernaux.

…

In selecting what to write down, what to include, one makes silence of all else. A shadow, or an outline.

—You consecrate silence.

Of all the lies told by and about writers, the biggest of them is that the truth is articulable; that it is the writer’s hallowed vocation to ‘name the world’ and in naming it, to remake it.

—Instead, the writer makes the world silent.

I only know spots and silence about my ancestors. Except for the gossip, which is the same as myth. When the last of my grandparents died, not so long ago, I felt history foreclose on me. My link to the living past was gone, and I had done nothing to salvage it while it was still possible.

The grandfathers were not there to begin with—one dead for many years, the other, living, but not for long, on the other side of the world. It was the grandmothers I lost. They had been there; had been somewhat there. But I didn’t know them. Not at all. What were these old women like? Who had they been? Who were the girls and young women and middle-aged women that lived inside them? These carriers of all my potential and all my foibles, too.

—Damaged people, traumatised, if you believe their children.

—I do.

What was their world?

—Bad things. Terrible things. Things worse than Trump.

—Every unhappy history is unhappy in its own way.

Some of the things that are remembered, mythologised. These women I didn’t know.

She remembers feeling jealous of the Italian women in the maternity ward who, unlike her, were permitted to make noise while they gave birth. They raged. They screamed. She kept it to herself.

She could have been a pianist, she had said, she had said. But the piano, her lifeline, was gambled away by her father when she was still a girl.

A baby at twenty, twenty-one. An unhappy marriage. Too young. Too much life yet to live.

Her beloved cousin’s suicide, which no one told her about until after the funeral. So that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, make a scene.

The six—or was it seven—miscarriages.

Her great rebellion, going to art school, away from home, five years of drawing life, and breasts and cocks and legs and eyes, of falling in love with the young art teacher. Their long walks around the harbour. When she graduated, her mother burnt all her artwork.

Their cotton dresses. Homemade. Before factory clothing.

The era of pants for women to wear to work.

A migration. A cut-off everything from before. For the sun. For Australia.

Her sun-damaged skin. Caramel wrapping.

Three marriages.

A single marriage. Smashed-vases obstinacy.

Anorexia nervosa. Amid severe rations. Bombs.

A legacy awoken two generations later.

School friends who went to France to their slaughter. A fiancé who never came back.

The Great Fog poisoning her baby’s lungs.

Work. Telephone work. Office work. Factory work.

Her triple bypass. Her son’s quadruple bypass. Her granddaughter, clutching her heart, eating tomatoes for their lycopene.

Religious conversions. More than one. Less than three.

Fatty mincemeat shepherd’s pie. Peck’s paste. Tuna boats. Corn relish on ham sandwiches. Rice salad. Canned asparagus. Bags of mixed nuts.

And grandfather. All I know of him was that he was poor, but not the poorest. The poorest didn’t wear shoes to school. Before he died, Grandpa painted a self-portrait of his life, three metres long. A grand oil painting. Mum said that the image of his face as a dead man, at the bottom right corner, looked exactly as it did in the flesh, in his coffin. Waxy.

The other grandfather I know even less about.

She was gone, he said. She took him. And we were so young.

—Surely there were funny things too. Surely their lives were not pure sorrow.

—But—the narrative convenience of a sad story! Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel sorry for the dead and all they endured?

—More compelling, right? The misery?

—The terrible things are the things she remembers being told. Behind the elders’ backs.

—Makes the past seem worth leaving behind. Worth forgetting.

—Or worth writing about, silencing the slices of beauty and the slices of in-between.

She had animals, too. The cats, the rabbits. A rooster who liked to sit at the table when she hosted lunch parties. She was, after all, a fabulous hostess. Cooked elaborate dinner parties set in the dining room; lunches in the backyard. Everyone got drunk and screamed at each other.

Their friends were single people, gay people. Not family people. Theirs was not a house for children. An adult house with adult problems. Pieces of fine art and craft, porcelain, a French polish on the formal dining table. Every inch of the house stood frozen in terror of an invasion by children.

And she, far too austere for bacchanalian lunch parties. But she loved men. At least that was the phrase I heard. That was her pleasure.

She was thin and well-dressed even though there was no money to spare. An op-shop master. When someone asked her where her outfit came from, which was often, she’d say, ‘Just a little boutique I know.’ Each new man, each of her husbands, my mother once said, was a way of running from the last one—starting with her father.

She had her church, and later, her mosque. That part of her life is mysterious to me.

The third death. When the last person speaks your name.

All voted Labor.

The generation back are more fun. The words that are remembered. The twelve sisters. Half were beautiful. Half, heavy-set and stern. One was named Daisy. Or was it Eloise? All played the piano. Drank and gambled. Caused their husbands decadent grief. I love this gang of loose women whose genes I share a little in. The words I use to remember them are to me brilliant and pulsing with life, though they might describe a certain misery.

…

Writing in the first person is writing that admits that experience is always truncated. That perspective is necessarily incomplete. That it is not possible, not honest, to pretend otherwise. ‘Point of view offers two possibilities: partial and complete,’ writes Susan Stewart. Though the ‘complete’ view, the omnipotent view, the view that insists it knows everything, strikes me as a fearful perspective. A fear of what silence might reveal.

‘What remains silent is the third and anonymous possibility,’ Stewart says, is ‘blindness, the end of writing’.

During the afternoons that I began to think about the book I was making from my life, I lay on my bed and read Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue. Though reading it made me want to drown my book proposal and dissolve myself. In Ban, Kapil splices the lyric ‘I’, multiplies it, buries key fragments, and then undermines the composition of the very book in its own pages. She writes of:

the limits of the poetic project—its capacity: for embodiment, for figuration, for what happens to bodies when we link them to the time of the event…

These limitations ask, in turn, what kind of body constitutes an ‘I’. It is a good question—what kind of body makes a memoir?

Certainly not the bodies of my grandmothers.

—So what gives you the right?

—Because she wanted to.

—Because I wanted to?

—Because she doesn’t fear dying. Doesn’t fear disappearing in time.

But the sadness the great sadness of everything being forgotten. Not only her moments. Not only her vision. But every image every pop song every name uttered every dense night and every morning the warm skin beside you before the day collapses inward. All of it, every shade of the light, gone. All at once.

—She wanted to expunge herself.

—What kind of body makes a memoir?

—‘Hey! I am going to make up an I that will stick to the pages of a book.’ (Kerry Sherin)

The one who does her homework. The one who cleans her plate. The one who drinks her soymilk. The one who falls face downwards. The one who high and mighty. The one of unspent honour.

The she of what next: action.