What right did a "Jewwoman" with a German mother(tongue), growing up in Algeria without a father, desire to enter the sacred Garden of French Literature. No right at all, it seemed. But desire, like a breath struggling to get out after you have been held breathless, is precisely what does not ask whether it has a 'right' to exist. The passion to write can even get past triple walls of interdiction, triple walls of different: foreignness, Jewishness, femininity. (pp. ix).
What right did I, as a white middle class, university educated Canadian woman have to speak about porosity, animism, or shamanism? To talk of speaking with animals, or spirit(s)? Yet, Cixous continues:
"'As soon as you let yourself be led beyond codes, your body filled with fear and with joy, the words diverge, you are no longer enclosed in the maps of social constructions, you no longer walk between walls, meanings flow.'" (p. x)
Yet the codes are powerful, and where particularly powerful, (or where I am particularly vulnerable), reinscribe themselves continuously. Creating this dissertation was, in many instances, the result of a desire to get much closer to that part of myself that had been silenced by codes. This meant, in many instances, moving beyond performing appropriate white female academic and listening/writing/creating from a place much closer to who I am, and can be. That includes writing from an ontological position that assumes porosity(see Dillard, 2006b)
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