Tag: amelia walker

Un/telling y/our story, part four

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. The seminar room is filling up, colleagues and students ambling in, finding seats. I nod silent greetings to those I know, grinning as though everything is normal, as though I haven’t just recognised an uncomfortable parallel between myself and one of western thought’s most reviled figures. Surely that’s overblown. Heidegger was a card-carrying nazi (Ettinger 10). I’ve simply failed…

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Un/telling y/our story, part three

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. What does it mean to have loved someone who later loved fascism? The question consuming me as I gaze through the bus window at streets you and I once walked together mirrors one Derrida might have pondered after learning of de Man’s past writings. With them, fascism came before the friendship, so “later” would have been “earlier”. Still, the…

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Un/telling y/our story, part two

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. I’m still on the bus. That’s a lie. Or is it? As I commit these words, it is later, many laters. I’m curled on a couch, notebook on knees, its pages filling with blue scrawlings I cross out, rewrite, cross out, rewrite, letters smudging as my frantic hand drags across not-yet-dry ink. Now I’m at a desk, squinting as…

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Un/telling y/our story, part one

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. “I have never known how to tell a story” (Derrida 3). So Jacques Derrida declares in March 1984 as he fronts the crowd gathered at Yale University for his first of three lectures honouring the recently deceased Paul de Man, Derrida’s colleague and close friend. Least I’m not the only one, I think, my gaze floating from page to…

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