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27 July 2013

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2021

Hélène Cixous
Affiliation:
Université Paris VIII, Emerita
Peggy Kamuf
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

Then little by little her bedroom will fade. She will no longer greet with the words of Maman and her voice that age has rusted when I enter in the early morning hours bonjour! is it time for café au lait? No, it's too early it's 5 o’clock sleepy time, thank you, and she will no longer docilely close her large eyelids, to obey the ritual. I will have to repel the rapid sprout of nothingness with the help of prostheses, to stop up the walls overtaken by the void with patches of photographs, but which ones, who is going to pass through this room, which Ève, who is going to deposit on the wicker chair that has followed my mother since 1934 in all her exiles its confused heap of jackets sweaters bathrobes, I do not know which one will detach itself from the hundred shadows, which one will be exchanged for which other, the time of a vision, I have had so many and loved so many, and each one arrives with its rapid, firm, wobbling, decomposed step to present its love services, is it I who will smooth out your heart, the one who would go to the market as if into battle, is it I the goddess who saved you from fiery exile, the beautiful and beneficent star who appeared on that Sunday when you were nine years old and you were crouching in a jail of solitude, is it the one who struggled without conviction against mad violinist lovers and whom I had to get out of trouble, is it the sixth Ève, the one who expelled from Algiers one Tuesday night began to reconstruct a shelter on Wednesday with Omi on her back, having carried with her only a backpack and her midwife notebooks in which were sleeping unleavened the two hundred and forty newborns by Easter, is it the rebeginner on the ruins, is it the one who brought death down with bludgeon blows, because she had the strength of a demi-god in her arms, is it the one with whom I brought out without pain and without doctor my three children from my interior pocket?

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Mother Homer is Dead , pp. 71 - 123
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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