Page 134 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

128 CULTURAL STUDIES

clothes of a loved one or a friend, in which their smells come forth, in which
their body has worn the cloth smooth or through, is akin to carrying a
photographic image with me. Their body caresses me. I like to wear lockets with
photographic images tucked inside. The locket (say, with a picture of my
youngest son inside) or a friend’s old dress, or a grandfather’s retired jacket, or
an aunt’s abandoned hat—all carry spectres of my loved ones: I sense them skin
to skin.
I guess that is why we have to keep so much in our dresser drawers (which
function as miniature museums of our archived selves): ‘the function of any
drawer is to ease, to acclimate the death of objects by causing them to pass
through a sort of pious site, a dusty chapel, where, in the guise of keeping them
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alive, we allow them a decent interval of dim agony.’ Like a photograph, the
drawer of saved objects functions as a space between life and death. For not only
do our photographs, our objects, signify death, they also (in the spirit of the
fetish) keep death away. Collecting these objects in the nooks and crannies of
our homes keeps them and our memories and ourselves alive. Objects keep death
away by helping us to remember. Milan Kundera writes on memory’s close link
to death: ‘Forgetting…is the great private problem of man; death as the loss of
self. But what of this self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus, what
terrifies us about death is not the loss of future but the loss of past. Forgetting is a
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form of death ever present within life.’ I am so afraid of forgetting.
Elin O’Hara Slavick’s mother never wanted to forget the childhoods of her
five daughters. She feared the loss of the past. And, she must, I imagine, have
feared a loss of herself. I know that, as a child, my own mother imagined me as a
miniature copy of herself and I have always felt in turn that I was her mirror. Our
connected identities register my birth as never complete. For the birth of a girl
can be an everlasting process of cutting and stitching between mother and child,
between stereoscopic images. (One of my students recognized this complex
imaging and re-imaging in an old high school photograph of her mother, and wrote:
‘Not only does it have a sense of aura because it is old, but because it is my
mother/me. Like the multiple photographic copies of this image, I am a copy of
my mother.’ ) In addition to the family photographs and the Super 8 home
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movies, Slavick’s mother saved most of their dresses. The dresses were worn by
Elin O’Hara Slavick and her sisters to Mass, to school, to birthday parties and to
family gatherings. As a result, the girls were often photographed in these dresses.
Not long ago, Slavick told her mother that she wanted to use the worn and
mended dresses in an art work—she wanted to embroider her own text on to
them. Slavick’s mother, a female fetishist in her own right, agreed to send the
material of her maternal collectomania to her youngest daughter—the one who
used to get mad and kick people’s shins. (I am still surprised that the mother
agreed to give them up.) The dresses, like my father’s family album, came to
Slavick in the mail. Like my father’s family album they contained the histories
of a family. Like my father’s album, they prompted memories.