The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781459612730
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Published: 2011-03-31T07:20:12+00:00

My Mother Demonology

IN THE END, THE BOOKS I LOVED THE MOST IN GRADUATE school were the deviant ones. The underbelly of literature. George Bataille and the Marquis de Sade and Dennis Cooper and William Burroughs. Which makes it easier to understand how I found a literary foremother in Kathy Acker.

So if you’ve never read Kathy Acker’s books, then you don’t know how often fathers rape their daughters. Without artifice or affect. Without any literary strategy to lyricise or symbolize or otherwise disguise. A father will show up on a page and rape his daughter, and the daughter will be the one narrating, and she will not be in any kind of victim position you’ve ever imagined. You’ll be reading going, mother of god, that’s some horrific shit, but the daughter won’t be. The daughter narrating the rape by her father will be extremely articulate even if coarse, and the narration will be the jumping off point for radical adventures of a girl child or robot woman or she-pirate. Her rage will drive her. The transgression will write her very body.

When other people I knew in grad school read Kathy Acker’s books they were shocked. Appalled. Particularly most of the budding young feminists. I actually began weeding out women friends by their reactions to her books. The ones that smiled and lowered their eyes with sly understanding and touched themselves, I kept. The ones that freaked out, well, they were idiots. Once I read a paragraph from Empire of the Senseless in my theory of gender class and one of the women began to cry and ran out and barfed. No shit. Pussy, I thought.

When I read Kathy Acker’s books, and particularly any section in which fathers sexually molested or raped or dominated or humiliated or shamed or abused daughters, all I went was yes.

I did not feel shocked. I did not feel appalled. I felt … present.

So it did not take me any time at all to understand that what she was deconstructing was the law of the father. Patriarchy and capitalism. More precisely, the effects of patriarchy and capitalism on the bodies of women and girls. Actually, you know what? I just cracked myself up writing this. If you’ve never read Blood and Guts in High School, you are in for a treat. Every year I teach it I expect to be fired.

You can count the books written by women that precisely articulate these themes on one hand; one hand that has four of its fingers shot off with William Burroughs’ pistol.

But underneath that, what she was also writing was literal. A literal father and a literal daughter and the plainspeak necessary to name it. I’d read sections and stop and look around expecting to get caught or smacked a red blotchy one. You can say this shit? And it can be published?

In this way, her books saved me.

So you can imagine how large it was to meet her and hang out with her. Feminae a feminae.

Many many many people “knew” her better than I.

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