Lupa and Lamb (2014)

Susan Hawthorne. Lupa and Lamb. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2014. 172 pp. $AUD 26.95 ISBN: 9781742199245 (Pbk) http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/Bookstore/book/id=268/Lupa and Lamb: a review, in fragments'Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.'Wittig, Les Guerilleres (quoted in Hawthorne)Susan Hawthorne begins her mythological poetry collection Lupa and Lamb, with a quote from Monique Wittig's 1969 novel Les Guerilleres. Wittig's novel is '. . . a series of fragments depicting life in an Amazonian society involved in a war against men' (Moi 79), it was the beginning of a feminist reimagining, or reinscription, of patriarchal narrative and linguistic structures. A contemporary of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, Wittig is often cited alongside these philosophers and psychoanalytic theoreticians as a proponent of ecriture feminine ( 'feminine,' or 'women's' writing), but this is a position that she strongly rejects:What is this 'feminine' in 'feminine writing'? It stands for Woman, thus merging a practice with a myth, the myth of a Woman. 'Woman' cannot be associated with writing because 'Woman' is an imaginary formation and not a concrete reality...Thus, 'feminine writing' amounts to saying that women do not belong to history, and that writing is not a material production. (Straight Mind 59-60)In Lupa and Lamb, women most certainly do belong to history, because they are written back into it. In some ways, this collection is a continuation of Wittig's work. Wittig is a writer who collects fragments, and lays them alongside each other to allow new meanings to be made. She asks us to read differently, to discover, to unearth, to dip in and out of her text, to take an aleatory path. If The Lesbian Body (Wittig 1973) is a 'corpus' (Nancy 53), then so is Lupa and Lamb. French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy says that to convincingly write the body,[w]e'd need a corpus: a writing of the dead having nothing to do with the discourse of Death-only with this fact, that the space of bodies knows no Death (the fantasy of abolished space), but knows each body as a dead one, as this dead one, sharing with us the extension of its here lies. (55)The women in Lupa and Lamb are the dead unearthed. They are here lies. Their stories are collected by the Curatrix:my job as Curatrix of the Musaeum Matricumis to excavate our historyto find the unfound and the unfindable (10)The Curatrix provides occasional commentary and side notes for her Musaeum Matricum: a place where fragments, pieces of stone, crumbling papers and poems, are held lovingly and with respect. The Musaeum is where lost texts assemble, and become found; it is where what is missing can at last be described; it is the poet in rapture; it is assembled around the reader in air, out of nothing, but contains all things. The Musaeum stands on a ley line, and leads us to it. It gathers words from Italy and Australia, from then and now, and when we read, it takes our stories too.Here now is my aleatory path. Here is my here lies. These are the fragments that called to me as I read, my own Musaeum Matricum assembled from the pages of Lupa and Lamb.your hundred mouthsshouting (3)I carry the stain (4)wolf-bellied desire showing (5)and this knee-capping lust (6)the known world'sfulcrum (8)along my coat I curl into her bellyseeking warmth (13)we visit the rock wombsbig enough to birth us both (14)stories buried by rockfallby the passage of windand time (16)when you've tossed them outwalk away do not look back (18)night's death hour I wake (19)I do not know up from downearth sways at my every step (20)arrows and ravens who bringmorsels of food augur well (22)history is being rewrittenit's not rape it's abduction (24)even a look from me will save (28)a crowd appears from nowhere (29)she wrote it but she had helpshe wrote it but she's an anomalyshe wrote it BUT . …