Page 171 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015
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Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION
After-Word: Deranged, Nora Jamieson (Weeping Coyote Press, 2015)*
Patricia Reis
Deranged. The title grabs me. When I consult the dictionary I find definitions:
adj. mad, insane, disturbed crazed, demented, unhinged, certifiable, berserk, irrational;
verb. cause someone to become insane, throw something into confusion, or the more
archaic, intrude or interrupt. Suddenly the ghost of Mary Daly rises up from wherever
she is hopefully getting a well-deserved rest. Although it is not in her Webster’s First
New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, she would surely love this word,
turning its meaning inside out, pointing to the deep background where it belongs in “the
Realm of Wild Reality; the Homeland of Women’s Selves and of all other Others; the
Time/Space where auras of plants, planets, stars, animals and all other animate beings
i
connect.”
The stories in Deranged are often heartbreaking, poignant and harsh. The uncanny
events, the disconcerting connections between the human and other-than-human world
may, from one perspective, appear as demented, a bit mad, even, one could say,
deranged. When combined with Jamieson’s depiction of the crush of cultural
expectations, the visceral experience of gender, as well as the blood-and-bone parallel
between the treatment of animals and women, they work to reveal, redeem and restore
the true implicate order of things.
Wildish, slightly suspect, a bit undomesticated, Anna, Sophie, and Louise, the three
unforgettable women who feature in these short stories, prowl the outskirts. They are
prompted by impulses often outside the ken of their neighbors, and sometimes even
themselves. Each is in the business of recollecting, reckoning and remembering. They
travel the beaten paths of their personal past and keep going, picking their way through
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