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 to challenge some institutional practices I find troublesome—a failure mostly due to overwork, fatigue, and genuine uncertainty as to what would be an effective channel for speaking up were I to broach some attempt after all. Furthermore, I’ve taken other actions. I’ve always voted on the left, preferencing candidates committed to environmental sustainability and social justice; I eat vegan, ride a bike, boycott unethical brands; I’ve signed petitions and attended rallies for climate action, peace, racial justice, and, and, and…
I stack the defences inside my head, like a lawyer pleading innocence for myself against myself. But, I remember, the point of un/telling y/our story isn’t to finally condemn or redeem my actions. My internal warrings reflect necessary discomforts of the task Foucault compels: to recognise and contest the insidious micro-fascisms that can, if unchecked, infect any and all of us, even—or especially—if we imagine ourselves antifascists striving for equity and an end to oppression (Foucault xiii).
That’s how I imagine myself. Yet it’s also who I thought you were before you shaved your long hair, strung white laces through your army surplus boots, and swapped Rage Against the Machine T-shirts for Prussian Blue.[i] The swiftness of your transition—they were the same boots—could make you a poster child for the horseshoe theory: the idea that the far-left and far-right are “closer to each other than to the political centre” (Brincat n.p.).
This is what worries me most. Instances where I failed to act as I know I should have are one thing: having called myself out, I can change, can reprioritise towards what really matters. But what about problems I mightn’t recognise and thus can’t address? What if the very practices via which I believe I am taking action—namely writing and teaching writing as a politically-oriented practice of questioning injustice and promoting kinder ways of being—what if these are similarly fraught?
Writing, for me, began with you. Poetry’s flexible grammars gave ways of unpacking the wild ideas we were exploring together, let me think thoughts standard language with its logical structures won’t admit (Webb 4-5). Later, writing helped me process the trauma of who you became, the shattering twist in y/our story’s unresolvable end. With some things, no words can. But metaphor may sometimes brush the thresholds where those unspeakables brim (Walker a n.p.).
So, my writing irreversibly flows back to you… Does that negate everything?
Or, recalling Derrida on de Man (Derrida 222-223), could my writing bear lessons learned from your mistakes? Might these bolster the left-oriented agendas I pursue?
That’s a nice thought.
Air-conditioning is also nice. As are silk shirts sewn in sweatshops.
A coughing followed by descending silence summons my consciousness back into the seminar room. The series convener is acknowledging Country, and now reading the guest speaker’s bio. The speaker is here to promote her new book on Gertrude Stein. I’m hoping I’ll learn something to help navigate the anxieties I’ve been feeling around the poetic techniques I use and teach. I’m strongly influenced by two living poets: ϖo and John Kinsella, both of whom engage differing modes of “linguistic disobedience” (Kinsella 85)—experimental reworkings of traditions that unsettle authority as much through form as content, maybe more so.
The problem: as with punk fashions, right-wing poets often use avant-garde techniques eerily similar to those of leftist poetry (Walker b 134). Italian futurism[ii] is one example, Gertrude Stein another—an especially perplexing case, as she was a lesbian of Jewish descent (Wade 109). Yet during World War Two, Stein expressed support for the nazi-collaborationist Vichy government (108-109).
The talk begins. The speaker relays Stein’s family background and younger years; her studies in medicine; how she quit and moved to Paris to write; her art collecting; volatile friendships and fallings out; her marriage with Alice B. Toklas; her struggles with critics.
Breath held, I await the speaker’s take on Stein’s fascist sympathies.
She ends without mentioning it. My hands follow the lead of those around me, contribute to the polite applause.
Now the convenor is thanking the speaker, inviting questions from the floor. Do I dare…?
I don’t have to. Someone else asks first.
The speaker gives an “aah”, then replies in a fashion similar to the defences of Heidegger and de Man: Stein’s place in Vichy France was incredibly precarious given her sexuality and heritage; expressing support for the regime likely helped secure her survival; whether she genuinely believed in it is a question beyond answering (see Wade 108-109).
On the bus home, I find myself tooth-grinding. I wanted a different response. But what else could the speaker have said? The talk was excellent. I can fault nothing.
It strikes me, the question of whether Stein’s fascism was genuine or strategic wasn’t the one burning my stuck throat. If I could travel time, I’d go back and ask, was there any possible relationship between Stein’s experimental poetics and her fraught politics?
Yet that would have been equally unanswerable. And no attempted answering could have redressed my real uncertainties—about my own writing practice, about what having once loved someone who later loved fascism means twenty-six years on. Nothing can. Nor should.
Un/telling y/our story is about keeping on living within-and-in irresolution: raising questions I must keep asking, keep rephrasing, in each new moment as y/our past lingers ever-present.
[i] White shoelaces in Doc Martens or army boots are a signifier of white supremacist beliefs. Prussian Blue were a late 1990s neo nazi band.
[ii] In consistency with my decision not to capitalise “nazi”, I am leaving the “f” of “futurism” in lower-case, though I recognise it is usually capitalised.
Works Cited
Brincat, Shannon. “Are the Far-Left and Far-Right Merging Together? That’s What the ‘Horseshoe Theory’ of Politics Says, but It’s Wrong.” The Conversation, 5 Sept. 2024, theconversation.com/are-the-far-left-and-far-right-merging-together-thats-what-the-horseshoe-theory-of-politics-says-but-its-wrong-234079. Accessed 2 April 2026.
Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man. 2nd edn., Translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf. New York, Columbia University Press, 1989.
Ettinger, Elżbieta. Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. “Preface.” Anti-Oediups: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Translated by Robert Hurley et al., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1983, pp. xi–xiv. Originally published 1972.
Kinsella, John. “A NEW LYRICISM: Some Early Thoughts on Linguistic Disobedience.” Angelaki, vol. 6, no. 3, Dec. 2001, pp. 85–100, https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087969. Accessed 9 Apr. 2021.
Wade, Francesca. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. London, Faber and Faber, 2025.
Walker, Amelia, a. “beyond words / when ‘nothing’ makes poetry happen: Visual writing, negative capability, and the un/thinkable.” Axon: Creative Explorations, vol. 11, no. 1, 2021. https://axonjournal.com.au/issues/11-1/beyond-words-when-nothing-makes-poetry-happen/. Accessed 10 April 2026.
Walker, Amelia, b. Reading and Writing for Change. London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.
Webb, Jen. “Poetry and Knowing.” The Margins and Mainstreams Papers: The Refereed Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, edited by Donna Lee Brien and Marcelle Freiman, Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2009, aawp.org.au/publications/the-margins-mainstreams-papers/. Accessed 10 April 2026.
The series
Part 1: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/un-telling-y-our-story-part-one/
Part 2: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/un-telling-y-our-story-part-two/
Part 3: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/un-telling-y-our-story-part-three/
Part 4: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/un-telling-y-our-story-part-four/
About the author
Amelia Walker lives and writes on the unceded lands of the Kaurna people (also known as Adelaide, South Australia). She has published five poetry collections, most recently Alogopoiesis (Gazebo Books, 2023). Her sixth is forthcoming in the new Gazebo Books short poems series curated by Phil Day. Amelia is also the author of Reading and Writing for Change: Theories and Tools for Confronting Power (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) and co-editor of Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy: How Games Play Us (Eds Walker, Grimmett & Black, Routledge, 2024). She lectures in creative writing at Tirkangkaku / Adelaide University.