Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Interpretation
Writing enables individuals to express thoughts and feelings that are often hard to admit.
In this quote, Helene Cixous emphasizes the complexity of writing as an art form that serves as a crucial tool for articulating inner truths and hidden emotions that might otherwise remain unspoken. The act of writing is portrayed as a multifaceted task that requires both skill and courage, suggesting that the process can be fraught with challenges as it navigates through the 'unavowable' experiences that individuals may struggle to express.
In practice
In a workshop on creative writing, to inspire participants to dig deeper into their personal stories.
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. _x000D_ Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
My only job is to write in such a way that the reader gets a new handle on humanity.
I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.
...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
Photography can light-up darkness and expose ignorance.
I was the female Marlon Brando of my generation.
Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.
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