Finding a Language of My Own: Journeying to the School of the Dead with Cixous

What is it like to write creatively in a language which is not your own? How do I write as a doctoral student within and against the pre-established rules of academic writing? In this chapter, I explore the tensions and struggles alongside the joys and pleasures of writing myself and my body autoethnographically, as a non-Western woman, with Cixous’ work Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I travel to the School of the Dead in this writing process. The school taught me to think the unthinkable. She showed me a new perspective on writing by ascending towards the deepest, lowest bottom, and led me to the desire to die as the desire to know and to enjoy, not the desire to disappear. It is a part of a learning journey that I should not be afraid of. I had the courage to close the door of rigid academic writing and Cixous showed another book to open and she said, “as soon as you open the book as a door, you enter another world” (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Columbia University Press, Columbia, 20, 1993). Her book is the way to experimental writing as Cixous gives me hope that “writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought” (Signs 1:879, 1976). I silently opened the gates of the new school and continued my writing journey through self-reflections and embodiment. For me, English is a foreign language, and Cixous’ language is more foreign, but it promised to give a possibility of the impossibility. My creative writing journey has just started, and it is still becoming.