liz.stanley@man.ac.uk

This photograph has two captions, either ‘an aspect of the work of mourning’, or ‘concerning a metaphor for feminist auto/biography’. I start by asking some questions about who and what lies within its literal and figurative frame.

The foreground of my discussion deals with the complexities of the work of mourning, the shimmering boundaries of the ‘one thing becomes another’ quality of the ‘life into death’ ontological status of the newly dead person and the emotional and intellectual response to this of those that remain. Its background is a concern, not with debates around the representation of lives and the largely predicatable positions taken up by the armies of feminism about these, but rather some ideas about justice and honour, about respect for the dead and honour for their lives lived and their deaths died, and the resonance of this for feminist auto/biography. The work of mourning - the phrase as I use it here is Derrida’s - has a resounding impact on the lives of those who experience the loss of people loved who die; mourning raises fundamental issues about ontological matters, of the very meaning of death and loss and their relationship to and the very meaning of life; mourning brings home with immediacy the complex ways that the past and its remembrance invade, pervade, the present; but also mourning, I shall suggest, refuses the divide between the material and the immaterial, the past and the present, and acts as a powerful means of thinking about writing lives as well as living them.

Taking off from Gillian Rose’s ideas about mourning and my appreciative disagreement with them, I ‘follow the name’ of someone who died, a baby who died soon after her birth and who was actually not named. I do this in part as a means of thinking about how and in what ways and with what kinds of consequences ‘lives’ are written, and the complex and ultimately unknowable relation written lives have to ‘lives lived’. But I also do so in larger part to honour the dead, to honour this particular unnamed dead person, and through her many others as well. I shall ‘tell the tale’, as it were, of this particular life and death and its resonance for those who were involved and those who think about this now.

The tale that I wish to tell concerns the birth on 30 April and death on the early morning of 1 May 1895 of the daughter of the feminist writer and theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920). After an appalling forceps delivery and the use of chloroform, as soon as she woke the next day Olive Schreiner asked her husband Cron to bring the baby to her. Entering the nurse’s room, he found her weeping and the child dead on the bed. Later that morning, the baby was photographed, held in the arms of a grim-faced Cron. Later that day, a decision was reached that ultimately the baby would be interred on Buffels Kop with them. The baby was then buried in their garden in Kimberley. At some point later, her body in its coffin was placed inside an outer lead coffin. Therreafter, wherever their main home was, initially in Kimberley, then Johannesburg, then Hanover, then De Aar, the baby’s body in her coffin went with them

For Olive Schreiner, as I read her unpublished letters and papers, the work of mourning and the ‘joy and rest’ of remembrance were thereafter symbiotically related to each other. As a May 1895 letter to her sister Ettie phrased it, "People say ‘forget’. They don’t know the one joy is that one can never forget: that as long as I live I shall feel that little dead body lying in my breast to comfort me…". And while this was written soon after her baby’s death, Olive Schreiner continued in a very powerfully immediate way to refuse a binary between the immateriality of grief and mourning, and the materiality of life that lies at the root of remembrance. Schreiner did not accept the law insisted upon by Gillian Rose, ‘the other’ was not allowed fully to depart, she confounds Rose’s ideas about ‘proper mourning’ and its proper ending; but at the same time she strove to reinvent the political life of the community, and she returned to that perennial anxiety of justice and injustice in the existing city that Rose is so concerned with.

Injunctions to feminist auto/biographers: Never forget the importance of remembrance, of the joys as well as the pains of memory, and that the past is never over and done with. Never forget, either, that lives lived are not so simple and obliging as lives written, and have a recalcitrance that intrigues and provokes.

Returning to the photograph, I explore the reverberations of its two captions, either ‘an aspect of the work of mourning’, or ‘concerning a metaphor for feminist auto/biography’.

I end with a brief comment about justice in feminist scholarship, in feminist auto/biography in particular. What does doing justice to the dead involve? For me, it involves honouring those who have died; and this in turn requires both mourning and remembrance, requires recognising that mourning and remembrance are symbiotically linked, that the one does not stir in the mind without the other also stirring. Mourning invokes the traces of the name of those who no longer answer or who have never answered; the name occasions remembrance; remembrance brings with it mourning for someone loved who has died. Mourning becomes us, for it is to render justice to those who have lived and then died.

/ends