The School of the Dead and My Mother: A Story of Hunger

Critical autoethnography is a methodology that is informed by what is lived, rather than what is taught. Its evocative and academically unorthodox form can engage and transform, but most significantly, its power lies in death. Hélène Cixous (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Columbia University Press, New York, 10, 1993) introduces this point through the “School of the Dead”, in which living or writing requires dying to the known and passing onto a new realm that sits “at the extremity of life”. Critical autoethnography embodies the intensity and death that intersects between writing, life and femininity. In this chapter, I seek to trace these intersections through depicting the spaces of my mother. “I will live until I am fifty”, my mother had declared as a young girl. As the third daughter in a patriarchal family, my mother’s birth was a time of mourning, rather than joy. She could not carry down my grandfather’s family name and would join her husband’s family when she married. For six years of her schooling, her bag carried no food, and so a full day of learning passed by with nothing to sustain her. I write my mother now to explore the hunger born from an oppression that has allowed her to walk in the “direction of truth” (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Columbia University Press, New York, 37, 1993). As I inhabit the spaces of my mother, I seek to recount how the deaths women may encounter can help them to sit on a knife’s edge and to fearlessly capture the immensity of what it means to live and write.