The Day I Wasn't There

by Cixous, Helene; Brahic, Beverley Bie

• ISBN13: 9780810119376
• ISBN10: 0810119374
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-07-30
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

The feminist writer explores the extreme borders of motherhood and humanity In this memoir-novel, a narrator who resembles Heacute;legrave;ne Cixous obsessively recounts an incident-the premature death of her first born child, a Down's Syndrome baby left in the care of the clinic in Algeria where her midwife mother works. She uses this event to probe her family history and her relationship with her mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany; her dead father, after whom the baby is named; and her medical-student brother, who takes on some of the duties of a father figure. Cixous's elusive writing bears all the trademarks of her poetic, provocative style, vivid with word play, intense feeling and a stream-of-consciousness that moves freely over time and place. The narrator's mother claims not to remember what happened, and the brother tries to fill in some gaps in the story. By the end of the book we understand the significance of the title: one day Cixous's mother returned to the clinic to find the baby on the brink of death. Rather than attempt to save him she chose to end his suffering. By closing the door to the imaginary clinic at the end, the narrator at last resolves the feelings of guilt and realizes that each human being has a fate they must endure. Informed by psychoanalytical theory, and always brutally honest,The Day I Wasn't Thereis above all an intimate study of a woman's inner landscape.

Author Biography

Hélène Cixous is a French writer, feminist philosopher, writer, playwright, critic, and activist who has influenced writers, scholars and feminists around the world. Her recent works include Reveries of the Wild Woman (Northwestern, forthcoming), The Third Body (Northwestern, 1999), Veils (with Jacques Derrida) (Stanford, 2001), The Hélène Cixous Reader (Routledge, 1994), and Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (Columbia, 2003).

Beverley Bie Brahic is also the translator of Hélène Cixous's Reveries of the Wild Woman (Northwestern, forthcoming).

Excerpts

I have just understood I was thinking.
I thought: I have just understood.
I could have told myself: I have just understood!
But because of the presence of the book which is awake even when it dozes off, even when it allows itself to forget, instead of: I understood! right away I summoned myself back to the punctilious reality of the reality: no, I had not just understood, that sensation of light was nothing but one of my numerous thoughts, intense, contradictory, and I could have thought and believed the contrary. All this going on in my head as in a book. And it's the vigilance of the Book forever in the background which never stopped plaguing me with fresh doubt.
My legs were about to buckle. Oh if I could have thrown myself at my mother's feet. Tell her: I know.
She made herself keep me at arm's length I thought, to keep me at the distance at which I had lived for thirty years, she didn't allow herself to kick me, to chase me away, not out of tender love but as a mother's ruse so as not even to draw my attention. And now the veil I was used to take for my luminous understanding was ripping. Now I understood that I had never understood. Now a dark red sun was rising. It was pouring rain. But that didn't help anything. Except the book.

A little later in the day I found myself in Algiers in a garden of lush green grass it was a big rectangular carpet. I recognized the dream cemetery where I have never been. In this vegetable patch, at the bottom of the picture on the right stood a tall piece of furniture with little cubbies in dark wood. I looked it over. The cubby holes had names. I understood that they corresponded to presences in the garden. Suddenly my glance fell on the last little cubby hole right down at the bottom on which I saw inscribed the letter G and next to the G in white letters the word Tomb. I bent down. I saw two little buttons next to the letters. I pressed, a spring clicked and behind the word Tomb a little cavity appeared. Inside a tiny chest about the size of my hand. Inside the chest a minuscule clump of earth. Furtively I took the fragment of my dead son. I broke off a fingernail-sized crumb which I wrapped in a handkerchief. My robbery accomplished I put the rest back in the little chest and closed it all up. I looked innocent. I buried the crumb of my dead son in the bottom of my pocket. What hadn't been given me, I had taken.
Now seated on the stump of a tree, I spoke to him. "I wasn't with you," I murmured, I needed to hear my voice through the choking sensation that filled my chest, "I wasn't with you the last day but you, you didn't desert me," clutching my sticky thigh my hip palms without palmar lines glued to my skirt.
I'd always thought that my mother having had two possibilities when she arrived in Algiers with the child, one to kill it, the other to adopt it, had resolutely chosen the second (adopt). Had resolutely set aside the first (kill). After having examined them.
Now she had never heard of these possibilities.
I understood that I could have invented this idea of my mother's. As for her she
reinvented the memories as time and events went by. Only the dates and the addresses resisted the multiplication of our stories. Only the incertitude and only the confusion remained constant. Where was I the day I wasn't there?

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Excerpted from The Day I Wasn't There by Hélène Cixous
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