****
I have no photographs of myself as a baby. So 1 have to rely on piecing together family memories to see my baby self. Later 1 will stare into my daughter’s face looking for the baby I was. I’m told that I slept long and hard for most of my first two years. 1 careered toward toddler-hood in a cocoon of milky sleep. I might remember a white barred cot with a green checked coverlet. I might remember lying on my back and staring up as the bars went on forever. 1 think I might be able to feel the slight roughness of the sheet, and smell the cleanness of everything. 1 might be able to make these memories for myself. 1 cannot be sure how close they are to what actually happened. Sometimes I don’t believe anything actually happened ever. Sometimes I believe that 1 have just been made two seconds ago. Sometimes I believe that my mind has created this story of a past to deal with the shock of a sudden creation.
****
I have small faded photographs of the young child 1 used to be. At first chubby, curly haired and smiling. Later more surly, frowning with distrusting eyes at my mother behind the Box Brownie camera. The muscles of my face grow tenser in succeeding pictures. My features fold in on themselves. My face snaps shut and refuses to open again until 1 am over twenty. The camera's evidence becomes increasingly sparse. Who knows what others might see?
* * * * I
I enjoyed mud. 1 have authentic, photo-told and family-taled memories of mud. Sweltering mud, too good to waste. Mixing puddle and soil, then working slippery toy spaded chunks into careful piles. In one picture 1 am still chubby, curly haired and smiling, 1 have a large mark of dark mud across my forehead. 1 lean toward a toy pram. Unseen by the camera, but failing to escape from family legend, lies my doll, impeccably dressed, her head smothered in a thick layer of suffocating mud.
Dreaming
My mother resents my nightmares. She blames them on a nearby dusk-barking dogfox. The fox moves on; the dreams continue. My mother sees the world from one small place, and marvels at the persistence o f these fox-induced
dreams.
* * * *
I had a form o f glandular fever very unusual in such a small child. It is often contracted by teenagers. Some people call it the kissing disease. When it was eventually diagnosed (which took a long time - because who would look for such a disease in such a small child?) 1 went to hospital. I refused to take any medicine by mouth, 1 had injections. The hospital was like a giant's palace. High rooms full o f metal furniture too broad and tall for child-sized people. Even the toys were too large. An ogre’s play chest packed with over-sized soft toys of the type used to attract attention to fairground stalls and school raffles.
* * * *
Dreaming
My mother explains mv nightmares. She is tenacious in her co-option of the barking dogfox as dream intruder, causer, shaper.
Repeated telling persuades me to include the fox. Over time it transforms to a wolf.
/ run with heavy legs from a wolf with a man's shadow. The w olfs breath swells against my back and weaves into my hair.
/ move with resignation through this constant dream for fifteen years. Some mornings I must wash its stink away before / can breakfast.
****
I clung to my mother’s hands, her skirts, her coats. I screamed when she left for even a few minutes. I slung myself around my mother’s body pleading with her to notice me. At night I was inconsolable. The hospital staff decided that 1 would be better off at home.
****
I know how to listen. I know how to notice the re-working of people's lives around the silences o f the past. I sit and listen to a friend tell me of her idyllic childhood. I wait. Two years later she tells me of how her father sexually abused her until she was fifteen.
****
Dreaming
The moon shines slowly through the window. It hazes the dust motes and lazily grazes against my eyes. The man-wolf's shadow creeps through the folds of the curtain slipping between tlieir thick darkness to shine blackness into my eyes.
'Jean', she places my name in the room.
‘Jean, try breathing into your pain. Find the place that hurts and take your breath to it’.
I forget how to inhale. But that isn’t important. 1 must remember how to exhale. If I can, then my body will inhale for me.
1 force my breath out, then watch as it comes in. My lungs gather the air. 1 feel air moving into me, past me, through the revolving doors of myself. I become transparent. Therapy I **** Therapy 2 My therapist sighs. I sigh. She sighs.
I hand over my cheque and leave.
I have a privileged life. 1 have opportunities to reflect and theorise about women and feminism. I see who I am as a feminist as linked with what I do as a feminist. 1 can afford to use my personal resources to address inequalities, not just for myself but for others. 1 can afford to take time in my life to work with other women and to celebrate our achievements together. 1 am privileged to have worked as a paid and unpaid worker within the Rape Crisis movement, and to have been involved with various women centred activities. All of these can be undertaken because of my relative privilege as a white, now middle class, well-educated woman. The greatest privilege is to have time to reflect on my activism, and to be able to devote time clarifying my position as feminist activist concerned with academic endeavour.
****
Is even this con/text, a con? This context shuttles between so many different places. I am left breathless. I have succumbed to Michelle Fine’s (1992, 1994a & b) charge o f ’ventriloquising’ 1 have choreographed all my significant selves from the text. Yet even as 1 choreograph them in am 1 in process of othering my past selves? Can 1 ventriloquise myself?
Jean Ida Jean Ida Jean Ida
researchers . . . must team to look at themselves from both sides of the voyeur’s keyhole, seeing themselves looking at themselves through the eyes o f the modernist gaze. Reversing the logic o f the traditional, masculine, investigative project, this new female look will shift and take on multiple forms, making it impossible to clearly define who is subject and who is object.
Norman Denzin (1997, p.47)
***
. . . Well it was a group [the one from which the individual interviewees were drawn] that made me think very acutely about the difference between being a volunteer and being a paid worker. And there was a certain kind of historical environment.
Right.
There was a lot of stuff going on for me about how maybe I had to behave differently because I was at the Centre as a paid worker as opposed to a volunteer.
How long had you been a paid worker by that tim e?
I started in June and this group started in September.
Right so a few months.
Researchers need to study:
the personal experience and self stories people tell one another about the important events in their lives . . . These narratives will work outward from the researcher’s biography, entangling his or her tales of the self with the stories told by others. As lived textualities, these personal experience narratives and 'mystories’ recover the dialogical context of meaning, placing the observer on both sides of the ‘keyhole’. As an emergent cultural form, these fragmented, moral texts mediate and connect persons to culture, history, and ongoing group life.
D A T E 1996: W h y This G ro u p Then?
1 sit in a friend’s study. A fellow PhD candidate and Rape Crisis counsellor. She interviews me about my research:
Norman Denzin (1997, p.47)