Page 171 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

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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