Agenesias of the Old World

by Louky Bersianik

(translated by Miranda Hay and Lise Weil)

Agenesia: 1) partial suspension in the development of the embryo triggering certain teratological atrophies, 2) infertility of products of cross-breeding (among themselves and with individuals of one or another mother race), 3) congenital absence of an organ. See also Ovarian agenesia.1

I. The Amnesia of Women

Something which should have happened did not happen. Something which should have been retained was forgotten. The attic of images was ransacked, the souvenir box pillaged, annihilated. Nothing remains but so-they-say, but whatever-will-they-say; nothing remains but tiny waves, shock waves, shimmerings of a single patch of memory, nothing but this patch, glittering without glory. Nothing remains but the monstrous amnesia of women, this congenital absence of the organ of remembrance, this agenesia of the old world.

Nothing remains but this old world, and also these piles of stone where cities are laid low in the nothingness of their form, cities where women would have had the rights of citizenship and speech, by virtue of being human, and the right to belong to themselves. These cities were neither hidden nor shown, nor constructed in space, stone upon stone. They do not exist, perhaps never existed in the past, except in the distant time when "God was a woman," a time intentionally erased from universal memory.

In memoriam.

Nothing remains in the storehouse of our trampled history but a few disparate fragments impossible to glue back together again.

One can say that the child is a memory of its ancestors and that it exists in memory of them. So the daughter ought to exist in memory of the woman, but this memory has been so falsified that it can no longer be recognized in her. Falsified, that is to say, mythicized and then interpreted, not as it is, but as myth.

Like sleepwalkers, we walked one behind the other through history without looking where we were putting our feet. Our memory ebbed and we lived at low tide without understanding the signals left by us on the beach, without attending to our crumbling footprints on the sand. The steps of one in the steps of the other, as if only one of us had passed through.

Our amnesia passed for mental health and when we remembered, we were interned. A tarnished existence for eternity or a dazzling funeral pyre which terminated our madness. It was better to protect ourselves from our memory.

Our amnesia thus was plural and pathological. It was articulated in the three modes of mortal and venial sins that had to be admitted in confession: my father I am guilty because I have sinned in words, actions and thoughts. (No possible complicity with the confessor: as priest of the male divinity he represented the highest and most severe figure of the patriarchy.) Each modality of our amnesia could have been described in its phases and processes as one of the three so-called neurological types of amnesia: aphasia, apraxia and agnosia.

We suffered from aphasia because, in the long run, in the course of centuries, we had lost, in part or altogether, the function of speech. What speech we are recovering now, for example as privileged women invited to speak at conferences, is only the tip of an iceberg whose mass would equal that of the ice-floe from which it broke off, whose mass in turn would equal half of all the underwater mountains, half the entire sea pulled back. To recover the speech of every woman who was born and who took root on this earth for an entire lifetime and who then disappeared, carrying her secret with her into the grave, would be to rediscover a memory lost forever.

We suffered from apraxia because, in the long run, during the long centuries of history, we had forgotten the meaning of action. Although our motor and sensory functions were normal, we believed, we were forced to believe, that we did not have the capacity to carry out movements directed toward a goal, unless that project had no personal value for us. What activity we are recovering today, for example as feminist women involved in political action, is an almost ridiculous particle of an enormous rock which would be the size of an entire hemisphere of our planet. To recover the capacity for these movements in the body and muscles of every woman who was born and who lived on this planet, and who then disappeared, carrying her aborted, repressed or unrecognized actions with her into the grave, would be to rediscover a memory lost forever.

Lastly, we suffered from agnosia because, even though our sensory organs remained intact, we had, as a result of empathetically putting ourselves in someone else's place, become unaware of our own capacities, among them that of recognizing our own thoughts and perceptions. So we no longer knew how to recognize each other; we did not know how to see and hear each other; we had eyes and ears only for the male species and his teachings. What visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile acuity we are recovering today, what personal taste we are rediscovering, is only the summit of a forest hundreds of thousands of years old which would cover half of five continents. To recognize the sensory perceptions of every woman who took root, for a lifetime, on this planet, and who then disappeared, carrying her own sensations which she herself did not recognize, with her into the grave, would be to rediscover a memory lost forever.

The sum of these memories lost forever could have constituted a precious element in our history, but our history itself is lost in the dark of time.

And what happens when human beings live in almost complete isolation from their own sensations? When they are cut off from the external world which they can neither see, hear, nor touch except through others' perceptions?

Tests of solitary confinement conducted as of 1951 at McGill, and then at Princeton, showed that "Sensory deprivation alters perception in a strange way: time, instead of seeming longer, passes more quickly; subjects become more sensitive to pain; hallucinations become more frequent the longer the isolation continues. After confinement, shapes and faces often seem distorted."2

It is not hard to recognize here the typical behavior of most women: who never have enough time to do what they would like, whose pain threshold is in general much lower than men's, and whose madness is one of their specialties. Women of the past and women of the present, aphasic, apraxic and agnosic.

Amnesiac women. By-passed, phased-out women.

How to remember something that is lost forever? Are there landmarks somewhere, if so, are they sufficient, if so, of what use is a deferred memory?

REMORA is the name of a little fish which is carried by a larger fish; it is suspected of slowing down the larger fish in its course, when in fact it may be its pilot.

The patient excavation of our archeological memory has already been accused of slowing down history. But it must do more: it must stop history in its course and turn it inside out like a glove.

II. Fragments of Memories

First let's explore what we are talking about. The word or the thing itself. The concept or its sign. Ability or its effects. Are we talking about a museum of the past, a switching-yard, a computer, a channel, oubliettes or patriarchal erasers?

Are we talking about the precious ability to remember or about remembering itself? Or about the narrative of this remembering?

Are we talking about tracks or prints? Meager tracks of our footsteps or (seemingly) indelible prints of our conquerors' language. The patriarchal needle that engraves the cortex and the body's tissues.

Are we talking about the memory of the future, about the skill of making plans, of projecting ahead?

We know that there is memory because there are the effects of memories. Which are the effects of a word which is feminine and masculine, plural and singular at the same time.

Abstract mystery-word: sometimes moiré, sometimes engraving and linotype or superimposed grids, fascinating to decode. Portmanteau-word: sometimes MOTHER (mine?) and sometimes ME, condensed word.3

"RE-ME-MOI" which marks the repetition of oneself4 in order to demarcate oneself from the Other, repetition which engraves the remembering of what I am: ME a woman and the initial MEM to indicate that this love should be the first memory.

Kaleidoscope-word for memory-trap or illusion: a look inside oneself through a trick apparatus allows one to identify colored and fragmented pieces of life whose reflection quadruples the cracks. Moment of superbly annihilated super-consciousness: one has only to shake oneself a little and the pieces reassemble in a seductive shape whose seductiveness depends on the repetition of the ensemble.

Fishing-net-and-trawling word, sometimes sea and traps where only rare birds are caught (which is why memory is always breaking down), sometimes burden, sometimes bundle of sticks.

Film-word for ancient or symbolic memory, phenomenon of retinal persistence in the imagination which brings to life characters who no longer exist or never existed.

Putting this word in the feminine plural is enough to make it appear singular to admirers of posthumous memoirs or anti-memoirs.5

But for us women, it is a close relative of the Furies6 who are the Greek goddesses of our fate, our common lot of having been born women. Like the Roman Fates, they are three women and one can imagine them as a continuum in which our particular lives are in play or in movement from the beginning to the end. This continuum is a looking-glass in three sections, two of which were also called dressers. The center mirror which is fixed symbolizes the memory on which certainties are based. One can see oneself face to face, here and now. But at the same time and without moving, just by slightly changing the position of the other two mirrors, one can look to the left where the past is in profile, and to the right where the future is reflected like a metaphor or metonymy of the past, or like an imaginary memory of the future, of a future where meanings would be completely different.

The mirror game can be played indefinitely and it would be interesting to play it with the Furies who are our memories of time. For example, interposing oneself between the two movable wings positioned in the same axis, one can see oneself infinitely into the past, as into the future of an historic time.

Compass-word for the memory of space, open to the four winds of our fantasy and to the thirty-two directions of the cardinal and auxiliary points where the hot points of our desires are located. It combines with all the species and all the numbers, with all the winds that shake us, that give us breath and can get us moving, with the Nor'easter, the Sou'wester, the monsoon and the sea wind and that mad wind called liberty. Compass card of all the latitudes and longitudes of the imaginary female space to be made real this memory indicates to us the direction to take. By nothing more than the oxygen it puts into our lungs, it gives us the spring to advance without fear because it is also a rear-view-mirror memory: it allows us to see things coming, as soon as we occupy the place that is restored to us by right, as soon as we become conductors of our own lives.

We know that memory never comes alone and that one memory attracts another, whether it is sensory or conceptual. We know that our body is a perfected memory, an ambulatory or sleeping memory. We know that the sea retains the arithmetic of water and its chemistry, that it restores that water in incessant waves and clouds and salty tears or in the sweat of orgasm. We know that the tree testifies to a past of seed and shrub, that the butterfly remembers the hairy rings of the caterpillar, we know that everything which is living, that everything which exists is memory. Shall we make an inventory and analysis of everything that exists in order to try to sort out what belongs to us, to find in it what is us?

Here I will borrow a phrase from Nicole: "I imagined nothing more than a memory mounted on a pin."7

III. Offensive Against the "Kleptomnesiacs"

What, then, should be brought to light of this science and consciousness of the past, this sum of experiences which is the warning for the future, this motor which projects us forward and gives materiality to our project? Bearing in mind the entire sheaf of our memories: habitual memory, collective memory, organic memory (in the end, our cells know a lot more than we do about our condition and our conditioning), individual and affective memory, the memory of our little existences which is a solitary memory because a unique memory of a unique existence, those "floating memories," as they are called by Yourcenar who has just written the "MEMOIRS" -- in the masculine plural -- of a masculine and singular character:

"Everything escapes us," she writes, "both everyone and ourselves. I know more about Hadrian's life than I do about my father's. My own existence, if I had to write about it, would be reconstructed by me from the outside, painfully, as if it were someone else's. I would have to turn to letters, to what other people remembered, in order to fix those floating memories -- which are never more than crumbled walls, patches of shadow. We must arrange things so that the gaps in our texts about Hadrian's life coincide with what would have been his own memory lapses."8

We will have to put posterity's memory lapses in relief, so that the coincidence between them and the gaps in the so-called historical texts becomes evident.

If we take our cue from cybernetics, from computers' magnetic disks -- then we will take care to provide them with information about us so that our future memory will be accurate and precise.

Until then, will women adorn themselves with their hypothetical memory "mounted on a pin" -- like an ornament which can be transformed into a defensive albeit inoffensive weapon?

A pin is a little spine which can be transformed during a stinging episode: whoever rubs there is pricked.

There is the danger that our memory will become episodic like an occasional weapon ...the time it takes for us to redo our faces, that is to say, a memory neat as a pin and stretched to the breaking point ...whereas it is the world which needs to be redone.

Whereas what we will have to imagine is an offensive memory having the explosive and projectile force of a nuclear weapon capable of smashing the prejudices of thousands of years, prejudices which are of a male nature but which are also solidified in women, a memory capable of putting the world back to the zero degree of its writing. Let's keep in mind Einstein's words: it is easier to smash the atom than to smash prejudice! Delicate work and/or dynamiting ... contrasting effects in the efforts required. Before we can get off scot-free, our memory will have been fabricated, pinned together like a piece of cloth. A piece of cloth which will perhaps only suit some of us and not the majority. And which fabrics, which tissues, which chosen episodes will that pin serve to connect, to attach together, to fix for posterity? Will these episodes be systematically crushed in the calendar or cylinder, smoothed, polished, glazed, prepared to become memory's moiré paper which the ladies' calendar will be inscribed -- one day dull, one day lucky, one day damp, one day public, one day belly, brain or skin? Will these fabrics have that variable look of the "fickle woman"9 type, that old-fashioned moiré with big optical waves which has not stopped haunting masculine and even feminine memories, that distant collection of times, not so long ago, when women were concrete objects used without discretion and then put on the shelf like knick-knacks, souvenirs, testimony of a past ... or of a passage ... more or less happy....

They themselves mementos but without any memory of themselves, because their memories had been stolen from them long ago, by what I call kleptomnesiacs (an essentially masculine name, literally, "memory thieves"), against whom, in the course of the last few decades, a moratorium of history had at last to be declared, a stop on the road of the rote, in the very root of our faked memories.

IV. Living by Rote or Rooted: History vs. Memories

This moratorium is feminist. It is the fact of what I call gynility, a word to replace the word femininity and which would be the equivalent of virility if it were not so often its antithesis in a feminine practice, if not in its qualitative content.10

If one can imagine a future memory by way of science fiction, can one imagine a memory of the future, i.e., a memory of a time to come which is not entirely secreted by the past, a part of which has not yet happened? Can one memorize the future and use it to think and act in the present? It is possible, but not without a difficult transition in the course of which human energy would be spent manufacturing a memory exempt from prejudice and interpretation and, in the process, recovering a substantial part of women's memory. It is this transition, this moratorium, this death, the mourning, which we are now experiencing. Gynile writing participates in all this with long strokes and long strides, persistently imprinting itself on memory so as to later inscribe itself in action.

If, in order to integrate our memories into history, we have to suspend its course, then we must present it with a heavy bill of interest. For, as Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in 1792, "The rights of humanity have (thus) been reduced to the rights of men from Adam to our time."11 If this is true, it would be interesting to know what our rights have been since the French Revolution. In 1860, Susan B. Anthony could write that as far as she was concerned, "By law, public sentiment and religion, from the time of Moses down to the present day, woman has never been thought of as other than a piece of property to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man."12 Moreover, it is because of this right of life-interest that Napoleon declared in his Code that the child belongs to the father "as apples belong to the owner of the apple tree."13

As for obtaining our rights in the last hundred years, we do not need a long diatribe on this subject to know that, in spite of appearances, recorded progress has been minimal -- and extracted through exhausting struggles.

Since history presents itself as the account of facts worth remembering, it should have seemed peculiar to any naturally virile scientific mind ... that, up to now, memorable memory has, without exception, been concerned only with the male of the species.

One notes, however, that the naturally objective scientific mind ... does not hesitate to assert that, if this is so, it is because, of the two sexes, the masculine is the more remarkable!

Seen from this angle, history seems like a bad joke, or like a manifestation of masculine hysteria, unfortunate consequence for us of the womb envy that all males have in common.

We must install the ME of our memories upon the HEad of history in order to bring it down. My mory instead of his story.

"History is the science of things which don't repeat themselves," said Valéry. It hardly seems so when one reads the fabulous chronicles of wars, conquests, and the shedding of human blood, great masculine deed judged worthy of memory, even though repeated ad nauseum and ratified by all historical societies: legal sanction of primitive, bloodthirsty behavior.

However, the essential feminine act, repeated ad nauseum -- the transfusion of human blood and mediatory energy which created culture -- has never seemed worthy of interest in the eyes of those same, boring chroniclers.

From this moratorium of history, we could deduce a memoric rather than historic truth, we could survey the acceleration of our memories and count as negligible the so-called acceleration of history.

Historians would give way to memoriennes and memorians, historiographers to memoriographers, and the authenticity of their work would no longer be historicity, but memoricity.

An example of memoricity: returning to women what belongs to women in the history of inventions: agriculture, writing, medicine, etc.; in the history of revolutions and exploits, works of art, literature, science, cooking, sewing, etc. Memoricity of the creative works of those so-called Egerias, works to which men have shamelessly signed their names, as they have to children born of women. Besides, nothing is more ridiculous than hearing a man say that he has given a woman babies... when he has only put a genetic chip into a thinking machine of blood and bone, flesh and female hormones. Even if all male ideology maintains the opposite, the belly is the first memory of all women and men. In fact, the maternal womb has not yet disappeared from this world, it is still very much alive as the first inscription of things that exist, for women as well as for men, i.e., as the first object in the universe perceptible through the senses of touch, hearing, smell, and perhaps even taste, the first sign that makes sense and that can be articulated in the unconscious. And this is true in spite of the masculine claim to male maternity (cf. the Socratic maieutic, the gestation of creators, the biblical pregnancy of Adam, the Catholic Holy Trinity, the patriarchal creator God in all the patriarchal religions, the Phallus as emblem of fecundity and Fundamental Signifier, etc.)

"It appears that the Uterus no longer exists (says Avertine). It was erased from the surface of the earth. Because it is invisible, it is not normal to think that it exists. Childbirth today as yesterday is attributed to the Phallus. But who will deliver the Uterus? We need a midwife as wise and expert as Socrates' mother to bring it into the world."14

However, we can "kill the belly," as Nicole says.15 We can kill it for ourselves and refuse to conceive the human; we can go so far as to deny this appurtenance. "Nothing is more human than being inhuman,' and "I am a woman, but I am not human," says the Euguélionne on the planet where there are not two sexes, but two species, one of which reproduces the other.

I think it would be a mistake to "kill the historical belly," to erase the original, primitive manuscript. For it is only through the bias of history, corrected by our memory, recovered even partially, even in fragments, that we can elaborate this famous memory of the future -- a veritable ferment of projected life which will help women today and in the future to become visible and to live their recognized existence. Otherwise, if women cannot draw substance and model from a memory which is their own and is owned by them, it is the macho model which they will be tempted to reproduce to make themselves a place in the sun.

V. Mnemosyne and Her Descendants

From this perspective of return to primitive memories and memoricity, we can likewise speak of prememories instead of prehistory, and patriarchy should appear to us as the megalithic civilization of humanity's protomemories, an era which has not yet run its course, characterized by the obelisk -- monument of rough stone which never rises up or ejaculates, but which is always erect, prototype of our virile civilization.

But I ask once more: how can we remember what is lost forever?

Lacking our own history, we must question mythological memory, we must interrogate the female characters found there, not to deify woman, not to place her again on the monotheistic throne of the Great Goddess who was the Queen of Heaven, but to give her the chance to capture a certain memory that is very ancient, a memory still unused and charged throughout with potential energy -- like the Wonder battery which only wears out if you use it....

Even if, like the Muses, they were conceived by men for the sole purpose of exalting their own merits and singing their own praises, some of these figures have easily recognizable traits of gynility, which can teach us about the women of Homeric times.

It is not without significance that the mythological personification of Memory is a woman. This listening goddess who holds one of her ears in her right hand is named Mnemosyne and she is the mother of the nine Muses and the grandmother of the Sirens.

Mnemosyne gave ear to her daughters and to her granddaughters. She knew their secrets, and if she had not been turned into a statue like Lot's wife, she would have transmitted these secrets to posterity.

One of her daughters, Clio, is the patroness of history! By this right, she should have been repatriated into the clan of our memories. She then would have devoted her efforts to supporting by her songs the exploits of women and would not have tolerated the systemic exclusion from a people's reputation of half of those who actively helped to gain it. So much the more since her name is derived from a Greek word meaning "to feast, to celebrate." We should reclaim Clio's songs for our own celebrations.

It is also interesting to note that the Muses have their Latin equivalent in the Camenae, one of whom is named Egeria. Which means that it is these women, the daughters of Mnemosyne, who cast their creative energy into the spirit of the man who is designated the creator of a work.

Mythological memory also teaches us that it is in groups or in couples that women are efficacious, as witness the Sirens, the Muses, the Maenads, the Gorgons (one of whom is Medusa), the Graces, the Furies, the Fates, the Camenae, the Erinyes, the Eumenides, the Amazons, the Lamiae, Charybdis and Scylla, Artemis and Atalanta or Diana in the company of her hunter-nymphs, Demeter and Persephone.

With a few exceptions, such a phenomenon exists nowhere among the male characters of mythology. Furthermore, one finds that everything which is important, everything which is essential, serious or terrible, everything which is extremely beautiful or extremely horrible, all of this in mythology is universally symbolized by women.

We would do well to review all the images of gynility in the women of Homeric times. I would like to underline another phenomenon which I have already questioned in Pique-Nique sur l'Acropole [Picnic on the Acropolis]: that is, the metamorphosis -- mostly voluntary -- of goddesses, nymphs and mortals into animals, birds, plants or fountains, with the avowed goal of escaping the gods' rape.

This is a characteristic trait of gynility from that time which has lasted through to our day. Women must have respected nature and animals enough not to fear taking on their appearance, or rather their behavior, so as to avoid the promiscuity which males want to impose on them. But it was in vain. The gods and men changed in turn into males of the appropriate species and the female was raped, that is to say, killed and gobbled up.

That is why I imagined Plato's Symposium as an anthropophagous banquet where the male philosophers devoured the female of their species transformed into venison. That is also why so many of the fables told in this book in the form of farces -- the patriarchal farce of transubstantiation of which Mary16 speaks, farce which I baptize Pantagruelic -- have a symbolic anthropophagic content.

MAN KILLS WOMAN TO DEVOUR HER. That is what the Homeric tradition restores to us. In our day, the y17 undertake this great work for the good of the community and for its maintenance.

It is in the triangle of the nuclear family that Agamemnon's infanticide and Orestes' matricide are perpetuated.

THE FATHER KILLS HIS DAUGHTER.

THE SON KILLS HIS MOTHER.

The story of Agamemnon is exemplary, and if society were not so patriarchal, it is this story and not that of Oedipus which would have seized Freud's imagination.

It is perhaps in this memory of dazzling murder which has repeated itself symbolically on the individual level for centuries, that we should seek the source of the blindness and inconsolability of so many women living new memories upon an ancient canvas of indestructible suffering.

To end this report, I would say that our present power paradoxically comes from the gigantic memory-gap of history which made us invisible for a long time and makes us terribly alive today. Which means that our emergence at the very site of our invisibility is frightening. WHICH MEANS THAT HAVING BEEN SO INVISIBLE FOR SO LONG GIVES US AN IMMODERATE SIZE. Which means that to see giant statues stir, to see caryatids begin to move, leaving patriarchy's temples to collapse behind them, is to see more LIFE than has ever been seen IN THE MEMORY OF MAN.

And that's terrifying!

notes

Petit Robert
In Le Cerveau et la Pensée (The Brain and Thought), Time Life, Le Monde des Sciences (The World of Science).
Mère, the French word for "mother," and moi, the French word for "me," are both found in mémoire, or memory (translators' note).
Re-me-moi is an anagram of mémoire; me and moi are two pronoun forms of "me" (translators' note).
Mémoire can mean "memoir" as well as "memory" (translators' note).
In French, the Furies are called the Moires, part of the word mémoires (translators' note).
Nicole Brossard, Le Sens Apparent, Flammarion, 1980. Montée en épingle also connotes "thrown into relief" (translators' note).
Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien, Folio, Texte intégrale, Gallimard 1974, Plon, 1958.
Souvent femme varie, from the popular saying Souvent femme varie, bien fol qui s'y fie, meaning "Women are so fickle, you're a fool to trust them" (translators' note).
Because "this tendentious word (femininity), charged as it is with true or false mystery, does not have the weight of its masculine homologue because it does not at all include women’s sexual power, their energy, their force, their courage, their vigor, their boldness, their audacity, their nobility, etc., as the word virility so thoroughly does for men. This is why (...) one must keep the GYNILITY of women in memory, their rediscovered feminine identity, their femininity observed from the inside and not imposed by men from the outside, their feminine and human specificity without reference to masculinity." Louky Bersianik, Préface au Calendrier, Editions Remue-Ménage, 1979.
From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Cited in Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
Cited in Françoise d'Eaubonne, Histoire et actualité du feminisme, Alain Moreau, 1972, p. 109.
Louky Bersianik, Pique-Nique sur l'Acropole (Picnic on the Acropolis), VLB Editeur, 1979, p. 215.
Nicole Brossard, L'Amer (These Our Mothers, available in English from The Coach House Press), Quinze, 1977.
Mary Daly.
Y, the Greek letter Psi, is used in The Euguélionne, as here, to refer to the company of psychologists, psychiatrists, psychobiologists, etc.

about the author

Louky Bersianik is the author of L ‘Euguélionne (1976) considered the first great feminist novel of Quebec. An English translation, The Eugelionne, appeared in 1982. In 1979, she spent a year in Crete to write Le Pique-nique sur l'Acropole (Picnic on the Acropolis). Her latest novel, Permafrost, appeared in 1997. She has written several books of poetry. “Les Agénésies du vieux monde” is collected in La Main tranchante du Symbole (1990).