AustLit

'There is a dearth of recorded lived experiences and reflections of scholars and healers grappling with the loss of their communication senses. I am assaulted by deafblindness as a result of a degenerative disease and find my world is unmade. With the loss of sight and the disappearance of hearing come dependence and despair. This personal essay looks at my poor experience at ground zero for research, writing and advocacy—combining personal memoir with other illness and disability narratives to elucidate the universality of human experience (particularly of suffering) while focussing on how carers can do better. I write of the wreckage of, repair to and transformation of my experience and tell of brief formative episodes in my history to give relatable examples of both devastation and resilience in the face of dual sensory loss. In addition, I detail how through my reading and writing I espouse the role of the deafblind researcher—pathfinding so the way can be easier for future students. This writing offers insights into the ways narrative medicine can help repair the self. We share stories, and then others can go on too.' (Publication abstract)

'This article reads Kristina Olsson’s Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir (2013, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.) as a postmemorial text. The memoir centres on the moment, six years before Olsson was born, when a thirteen-month-old baby was abducted from Olsson’s mother’s arms. The article relies on Marianne Hirsch’s (2012, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. ProQuest.) theory of postmemory to examine the way the memoir is motivated both by the confusion Olsson feels about the way her own life was shaped by this hidden, traumatic past and by the responsibility she feels to write towards a sense of justice for her mother. The article dwells on the ethical concerns that arise at the point of tension between the writer’s desire for recovery and the mother’s silences, and it examines the aesthetic strategies Olsson employs to negotiate this tension. The article also draws on Meera Atkinson’s (2017, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Bloomsbury. ProQuest.) work to discuss the way Olsson situates her family’s trauma within the context of the cultural and social factors that precipitated it. The article argues that Boy, Lost offers a methodology for an ethical postmemorial project through the way it balances Olsson’s story with her mother’s and with the country’s.' (Publication abstract)

'Traumata, by Meera Atkinson, is an informed and passionate critique of patriarchy in a braided narrative, where the author’s life story is the weft woven through the warp (the formative structure) of patriarchal society. Atkinson’s weaving of her life story with theory that interprets patriarchy and its forms and deformities is powerful, for every experience and incident she relates is material for illuminating the traumatising influence of patriarchy; hence the plural title. Her self-exposure is searching, nakedly honest and compelling, but it is always in service of her intent, which is to create a three-dimensional picture of the society we are born into, deeply and generationally wounded by the institutionalised, polyphonic, medusa-headed curse of patriarchy. Atkinson has achieved this searching picture of the wounded culture into which we are born with great skill and a remarkable command of the many discourses that inform this deconstruction of ‘traumarchy,’ her word for the traumata caused by patriarchy.' (Introduction)