Scripture of the Heaviest Kind single work   autobiography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Scripture of the Heaviest Kind
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'History begins with someone else's memory of you.' This is how Julia Cohen opens her essay on abortion for the New England Review, and I know this because I have been relentlessly scouring the internet for essays on abortion and for poems, song lyrics and admissions of any kind. History begins with someone else's memory of you, and my mother tells me that, as I pressed steadily on the fleshy walls of her womb 28 years ago while she lay in the rickety restored cubbyhouse she shared with my father, a home brief and unassuming, she knew me. She couldn't possibly have known me, which seems a cruel but necessary diagnosis. I tell myself this because, if history begins with someone else's memory of you, if my mother knew me then, my own child's history began at my kitchen basin as I heaved bile and worry, the smell of my cat's litter fixed in my nostrils like some kind of malignant aura or rotten eggs. The air carrying a thick decay around me, never leaving. Until, of course, it did. Three weeks later, my queasiness departing my body with the same fervour, the same immediacy that my pregnancy did. A moment. A womb the shape of a could-be home. A sort-of child, as in something, someone, brief and unassuming.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Meanjin Online 2022 23920292 2022 periodical issue 2022
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Meanjin vol. 81 no. 2 June 2022 24904002 2022 periodical issue 'Things move in waves, rhythms of action and response. We thought, not so long ago, that we’d entered a new age of freely flowing facts and ideas, one in which the power of gatekeepers had been diminished, bringing ready access to new informational tools that would empower us all.' (Jonathan Green, Editorial introduction) 2022 pg. 41-44
Last amended 4 Aug 2022 10:30:34
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