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 window. It’s February 2026 and half the globe away, on Tarntanya, the city centre of Adelaide, South Australia. I’m riding a rumbling bus, a highlighter-streaked copy of Derrida’s lectures balancing on my knee as I try to recall all those blurred-together bus rides of 1999-2000—the summer you and I met each Saturday at the city mall’s western end to wander, buying nothing, ‘til the shops closed and shadows stretched, the electricity of our conversations belying the aimless tracings of those black boots we both wore, no matter the heat. You were nineteen, an undergraduate in political sciences. I was sixteen, a scholarship student at an all-girls school. Your long hair and punk t-shirts shocked the other girls, whose boyfriends had neat cuts, polo shirts, and boat shoes.

I have never known how to tell a story is an English translation of the words Derrida uttered in French: “Je n’ai jamais su raconter une histoire” (in Krzykawski 81). That histoire can mean both story and history[i] seems pertinent to the tale he was struggling to tell—one of personal experiences that intersect with bigger socio-political turns, recollected with faithfulness to an o/Other no longer able to verify or amend facts and details, an o/Other now distant, impossible to reach, yet equally impossible to disentangle from, a ghostly, haunting o/Other whose un/tellable story remains utterly inextricable from one’s own, from self (Walker 2).

That’s one similarity between Derrida and de Man’s story and the one I’m wondering how to tell about you, about us.

I wish it were the only similarity.

I have never known how to tell a story… The irony rings dull as lead. In 1984, Derrida doesn’t yet know how troublesome de Man’s (hi)story truly is. It’s 1987 when the scandal breaks: a PhD candidate researching de Man discovers old articles revealing that from 1940-1942, between ages twenty-one-and-twenty-three, de Man—who was born in Belgium and emigrated to America at World War Two’s end—wrote literary reviews for newspapers that supported the German nazi[ii] regime then occupying Belgium (Derrida xii). This included several reviews with antisemitic content (172).

Therein lies the second similarity between Derrida’s story of de Man and the one I’m coming to think of as y/ours. I call it this not only because it’s yours and mine, but because, like Derrida’s and de Man’s, it intersects with social, political, and historical currents of which our personal unfoldings might say something—namely, the ongoing resurgence of right-wing political movements and xenophobic violence in Australia as in so many parts of this word (Peucker). The “our” in “y/ours” is you, me, and everyone else in any way affected by or concerned about these turns. It’s anyone else with a story to tell similar to y/ours. And we surely must be many. In 2000, you seemed an outlier. Perhaps that’s part of why I couldn’t write about this then: your sudden fascism was too random, too wild. Now it’s becoming alarmingly common. So, as I plumb the dilemmas of telling y/our story, I’m also wondering about all the other similar-but-different, un/tellable tales that must be told.

But how? To start, here’s three bald events:

1. You were a leftist when we met—the first serious leftist I’d encountered. I was just starting to question capitalism. Pondering possible alternatives was to our us as sap is to a tree.
2. Unexpectedly fast, we fell apart, as young people of sudden passions often do.
3. Within months, you joined the neo nazis.

If “the king died and then the queen died” is a story, as E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel claims (130), then that’s y/our story, at long last. But what of plot? And grief? In Forster’s schema, adding “of grief” after “the queen died”—adding motivation to link cause with effect—transforms bare story into plot.

Why did you take the turn you did? There’s countless possible reasons, but I’ll never know for certain. Were I writing a novel, I could insert tonnes of explanations. But it wouldn’t be y/our story and it wouldn’t be the point. The point is this not-knowing: a space of questions I’m opening again, again, not to solve the past, but to consider its resonances here and now.

For that, the best way to tell y/our story might be through its un/telling—through constant, unravelling refusal to resolve. This is how I shall continue.

 

[i] (Cambridge Dictionary a)

[ii] I refuse to capitalise this heinous word.

 

Works Cited

Cambridge Dictionary. “Histoire.” @CambridgeWords, 18 Feb. 2026, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/french-english/histoire. Accessed 23 Feb. 2026.

Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man. 2^nd edn., translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf. New York, Columbia University Press, 1989.

Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel. New York, Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1927.

Krzykawski, Michał. “Derrida à l’oeuvre. Autour de Circonfession et au-delà” Cahiers ERTA, vol. 2017, no. Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, pp. 81-103, Jun 2017. https://ejournals.eu/fr/journal/cahiers-erta/article/derrida-a-loeuvre-autour-de-circonfession-et-au-dela. Accessed 9 April 2026.

Peucker, Mario. “If We’re Serious about Counteracting the Rise of Far-Right Extremism, We Need to Understand What Makes It Appealing.” ABC Religion & Ethics, 23 Feb. 2025, www.abc.net.au/religion/mario-peucker-understanding-the-appeal-of-far-right-extremism/104939500.

Walker, Amelia. ““I” Has to Give: Rethinking Bloom’s Apophrades And/as Ghostly Derridean Gifts.” The Writing the Ghost Train: Rewriting, Remaking, Rediscovering Papers – the Refereed Proceedings of the 20th Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, edited by Eugen Bacon, Dominique Hecq, and Amelia Walker. Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2015, pp. 1–13, aawp.org.au/publications/writing-the-ghost-train-rewriting-remaking-rediscovering/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2026.

 

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.