I am a researcher, maker and writer. I work within the monstrous, the unsaid and the said in womenās voice and language frames.
As I research, write, stitch, read, research some more and ruminate, I move between genres, borders and mediums. I write (ooze) hybrid, speculative, experimental, sound-based, ficto-critical texts that firmly cross genres and disciplines. I feel most at home in the feminist avant-garde poetics writers and theory mob, but also in mystics, shapeshifters and alchemical lares. I have a transgressive impulse; I use surrealist frames of thinking. I am interested in unnatural narratives. And what they spell out.
Along with my love and championing of women's lost voices and unacknowledged knowledge. I champion the wyrd.
I have done extensive research into prehistory, ⦠ritual, womenās herstory, womenās monologues, testimony, love language, and love; mystics, and ecstatic utterances, the writer Gertrude Stein, and matriarchal underpinnings in language (MFA, MPhil and PhD). I write odd little things and even odder very long things. I have a novel in my bottom drawer thatās titled A Biography of Light, narrated by two women who discuss it in its various guises. I am presently working on a text featuring a mouthless woman detective, a detector, and her sassy speech device, who go out searching and listening and looking for something quite peculiar.
I EMBROIDER EVERYTHING ⦠WORDS, IMAGES, IDEAS, ESSAYS and Other written works, ANIMATION films and drawingS
I stitch works together that relate to voice. And I champion stitchery as āan-other,ā OTHER, oracular - to sit equally alongside language and the canon of order. I work in series, which often reflect on past series. All my workings have equal value to me. But I am especially interested in pairing the MONSTROUS within words and stitchery.
In this I am interested in and read widely into feminist theory, listening for the sound of it (Ruth Salvaggio), and follow the rhizomic threads (Deluze) ... I like undoing and rewinding the threads of women's speech as it was depicted or silenced in early-early, in Greek and before (Gimbutas mythology, folklore, linguistics, and archaeology), and in other 'early' myths, and reimagining ⦠and in reanimating these earlier forms and sources. And where I canāt find them, I invent (Wittig - "Or, Failing That, Invent"). I'm interested in the lost, the unsaid, the unutterable, the refused, the jammed cacophony, the denied voice at the margins ā¦
and as I said, the MONSTROUS ā¦
Think ⦠Medusa, Grendelās mother, the Harpies, Sybils, etc.
*PRESENTLY I am writing essays on Placental Language on my Substack here. This is part of a project for a Placental Language Theory and Glossary.
Other publications are The Oracular Other, also on Substack here ā¦
WOMEN AND VOICE
"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words"
ā - HĆ©lĆØne Cixous, feminist theorist
"Words are a form of action, capable of transforming reality"
ā Angela Davis, feminist philosopher
"The act of speaking is itself a feminist gesture"
ā bell hooks, feminist scholar
"Your silence will not protect you"
ā Audre Lorde, feminist writer and activist
contact
Iām very open to collaborations, conversations and convergences ā¦
majenamafe-at-gmail-dot-com