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 I scour the ravaged pages for passages worth transcribing into the word document glowing blank white within my laptop’s grey-edged screen.
And now, the same desk, except dressed differently, without the notebook, the screen lined with cyphers I scrutinise, re-order, delete, rewrite, undo, repeat, undo, undo. This last scene recurs repeatedly, mostly at the desk but also at a kitchen table and the couch once more, laptop in place of notebook.
Does this matter? That writing entails multiple acts of rewriting is reiterated prolifically, maybe even cliché (Cook 103). My sentence I’m still on the bus uses present tense to recreate the moment, to craft intimacy. If readers know this, there’s no dishonesty—is there? In truth, there was a recent bus ride on which I recalled many earlier bus rides. But was it hot or cold? I shivered, I think, because the air-conditioning was on full to combat a heatwave…
Or was that another day? How many details can I strategically fudge or omit before shaky recreation slides into plain deception?
The challenge of memory, Derrida muses, is that it’s no wax tablet engraved with clear, unchanging marks (3). Instead of orienting itself straightforwardly towards “a past whose essence one would learn through some narrative”, memory twists and turns through the present towards things still to come, towards “a thinking of ‘the future’” (3) —a future that right now drives me back to the opening of Derrida’s first lecture for de Man:
“I have never known how to tell a story” (Derrida 3).
In French: “Je n’ai jamais su raconter” (Derrida in Krzykawski 81)…
Raconter sounds like recount, reminding me that telling, too, can mean counting and accounting, indeed reckoning.[i] Does it also echo encounter? (In French, rencontre).[ii] I recall Judith Butler’s claim that accounts of selfhood are inevitably given to an o/Other, making o/Otherness a condition for self—always-already part of the self—which renders accounting always bound in moral questions of accountability: recognition, reciprocity, responsibility… failure (Butler 31; see also Walker 2). Did Derrida mean something similar when, re-reading de Man’s “Autobiography as de-facement”, he emphasised “the undecidable distinction between fiction and autobiography”, musing that in contexts of mourning, “the other so marks the self of the relationship to self” as to be “‘in us’”, a ghostly presence it is possible neither to exorcise nor revive (Derrida 22)?
Or does that say more about me and the parts of y/our story I still can’t tell?
So far, I have relayed the following: I was sixteen when y/our story unfolded, some twenty-six years ago; you were a leftist and this was core to our connection; we fell apart; months later, you joined the neo nazis.
I could well have included more—or less. As with the bus ride on which I may or may not have shivered, this version of y/our story emerges through strategic selection—and omission. Like the aesthetic gloss of present tense, selectivity itself doesn’t automatically equal dishonesty. It might even be among storytelling’s preconditions: to include everything is, if not impossible, absurdly tedious (Seargeant and Greenwell 112).
Still, it’s worth asking whose interests the selections and omissions serve.
By emphasising youth and that our friendship ended before your nazi turn, I plead naive innocence—a tad too insistently, perhaps. Now I re-open the notebook of barely-legible drafts from which I harvested and refined the plain font sentences that striate my laptop screen. Beneath thick scribbles and smudging, the following question remains painfully legible:
What does it mean to have once loved someone who later loved fascism?
My thoughts turn suddenly towards Michel Foucault’s preface to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari), a passage of which, on first read, years ago, struck me so hard I pinned it to my toilet wall where it stayed for months, confronting me each time I sat in that so-vulnerable place. Foucault compels readers to “ferret out” fascism in all its forms—not only the obvious “historical fascism” of figures such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, but most crucially the fascism “in our heads and in our everyday behavior … our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures … the flesh … the body” (Foucault xiii).
I close my notebook, press its front cover firmly down towards the back one, as if trying to squash and destroy what they hold. But like a fast-spreading virus, the question I don’t want to ask has already sprung from its page into my mind where it lodges front of thought, refusing to budge:
What does it mean to have once loved someone who later loved fascism?
Fear of this question—its brimming answers and unanswerables—is among the reasons why I have spent so long avoiding un/telling y/our story.
And also why I can avoid it no longer.
The bus rounds a corner.
[i] (Cambridge Dictionary a; Etymoline)
[ii] (Cambridge Dictionary b)
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics, vol. 31, no. 4, 2001, pp. 22–40, https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2004.0002. Accessed 3 Apr. 2019.
Cambridge Dictionary a. “Raconter.” @CambridgeWords, 18 Feb. 2026, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/french-english/raconter. Accessed 23 Feb. 2026.
Cambridge Dictionary b. “Rencontre”. @CambridgeWords, 18 Feb. 2026, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/french-english/rencontre. Accessed 23 Feb. 2026.
Cook, Jon. “Creative Writing and PhD Research.” Teaching Creative Writing, edited by Heather Beck, Hampshire and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 99–103.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley et al., Minneapolis, University Of Minnesota Press, 1983.
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.
“Etymonline.” Etymonline, 2026, www.etymonline.com/word/tell. Accessed 23 Feb. 2026.
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.
Krzykawski, Michał. “Derrida à l’oeuvre. Autour de Circonfession et au-delà” Cahiers ERTA, vol. 2017, no. Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, Jun 2017, 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.
Seargeant, Philip, and Bill Greenwell. From Language to Creative Writing: An Introduction. 1st ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
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.