![]() This is to observe the constancy with which St. Germain or the cultures she has inhabited and known. The memoir's subtitle-"The Making of an Unruly Woman"-insists that sexuality occupies no small part in this "making" of either St. Germain accords Louisiana in her memoir suggests an environmentalist spirit underlying Swamp Songs: she equates the lines defining psychic health and illness with the uncertain fate of Louisiana's lands and waters. Germain and Louisiana constitute a doubly remembered self. ![]() Taken together, these gestures perform Swamp Songs' version of the memoir, where St. "Disappearing Bodies" takes her brother Jules' turn to religion as a catalyst for her questions about what "forms of healing" a rapidly deteriorating Louisiana coast needs (126). Germain's family stories also enable her to address broader cultural concerns. Germain notes, "I feel like that girl who descended those stairs to walk into the eye in search of her father" (9). ![]() each time I pick up a pen to write about my family," St. Germain associates with her mother's stories as they wait out the passage of storms and the eye of the hurricane becomes an image for the writing of her family: ". Hurricanes in "Eye of the Storm" figure in the tempestuous lives of her parents and siblings as well as the expectant quiet St. This shift provides the memoir both structure and rhythm as it alternates autobiographical incidents-frank examples of the family "bad luck"-with metaphorical meditations on a Louisiana that is both home and the site of her self-imposed exile. Germain covers ground with this ink, taking advantage of and pleasure in its fullness.Įmily Toth has observed in The Women's Review of Books that the 14 essays of Swamp Songs move frequently between the autobiographical and the cultural. From the land-and-waterscapes that give Louisiana its amphibious form, to the state's equally diverse cultural terrains, from a family history replete with intimacy and trauma to the frank sexualization of all things "Louisiana": St. "I've come to understand Louisiana waters," she writes, "as the ink that gives my words body" (34). Germain-the author of four previous collections of poetry, and currently associate professor of English at Iowa State University-wields prose that reminds one of the sinuousness of ecriture feminine. Her figure of a laughing, snake-haired Medusa would have good company in the pages of Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman, a memoir by poet and native New Orleanian Sheryl St. Helene Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" ends with not so much a bang than with raucous glee.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |