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Writing that Chews Itself: Roots and the Ragged Vitality of Teeth
Book chapter

Writing that Chews Itself: Roots and the Ragged Vitality of Teeth

Elizabeth Mackinlay
Critical Autoethnography and Écriture Feminine: Writing with Hélène Cixous, pp.91-101
Springer Nature Switzerland, First edition
01/01/2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40051-3_8

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Abstract

Critical Autoethnography Feminism French Philosophy Cixous Women's Writing
The onset of my mother’s memory loss illness in 2015 brought into sharp focus the everyday cruelty of dementia and set in motion a desire to write my mother’s life before she could no longer remember it. Inspired by Hélène Cixous’ Rootprints (1997), the School of Dreams in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993) and Hemlock (2011), this chapter recalls a moment in time when my mother lost her teeth. Already in the jaws of this disease, this writing gives in and chews on it to explore the embodied, affective and relational experience of Mum’s dementia as a ragged vitality existing otherwise between suffering and joy. Alongside the words of Cixous, I think and wonder about this moment with Donna Haraway (Staying with the Trouble, Duke University Press, Durham, 2016, Auto/biography Studies 34:565–575, 2019), who reminds me that we need to write “symstories” (together/with-stories) of and with love by paying attention to “roots” across time and place, and Simone Weil, who insists that “roots” and “rootedness” are the philosophical, ethical and spiritual groundings that situate and sustain us. Roots, love and writing as socially, materially, ontologically, epistemologically and temporally located; and in this Cixousian rootprint, I pay attention to the ethical necessity of roots and memory in critical autoethnography as the work of love.

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