The Fatal Blow: “Who Are I?” A Feminist Autoethnographer’s Encounter with Cixous

My eyes were drawn immediately and only to the following words by Cixous (The Hélène Cixous Reade 1994, 01): “What we hope for at the School of Dreams is the strength both to deal and to receive the axe’s blow, to look straight at the face of God, which is none other than my own face, but seen naked, the face of my soul,” and in that moment, the fatal blow was struck. In this chapter, I explore my Cixousian arrivance as a doctoral student at the Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing workshop and descent into the School of Dreams as “by surprise, by accident, and with a brutality that shatters: under the blow of truth” my feminist identities began unveiling and unravelling “right in the middle of life’s path” (Cixous 1993, 201). These words struck at me with force. The axe of my words sliced straight through my ribs and pierced deep into my heart. I looked around in panic. “I have just been struck; oh my god, am I bleeding?” I screamed in shock, but without a sound and without movement. Desperate not to be exposed, I pasted a smile on my face and nodded occasionally in a show of obedient attention to the speakers, hoping I was masking the terror raging within. “Only writing”, Cixous further suggests, “can…convey the truth about identity” (1993, 199) and in this piece I respond to the provocation “Who are I?” now and in this place of writing, struck as I am by a feminist autoethnographer.