Writing against the abyss: An exergue

“Archive”, from the Greek word arkheion, signals a place of commencement and commandment (Derrida, 1995a). Dig deep enough into the etymology of “archive” and there is water (Crowcroft, 2022). This creative-critical essay takes a speculative approach to understanding my late mother’s literary archives, which are locked in storage overseas. Derrida would say that as guardian of the archive, my purpose is curation. This essay serves as an exergue to that exercise, by setting the stage and establishing a prearchival lexicon through citation (Derrida, 1995a). Through writing memory, speculation and theory, scaffolded by narrative threads of bodies and loss, this essay languages the relationship between mother and daughter and archive. It adopts the form of a braided essay (Miller, 2013; Miller & Paola, 2004; Walker, 2017) titrating between narrative threads and critical theory to “see what is displaced” (Eades, 2015, p. 31), allowing for fragmentation that reflects broken bodies in a broken world (Walker, 2017), abjection (Kristeva, 1982) and ugliness (Ellis, 2018), the formation of cellular writing or écriture cellulaire (an extension of Eades’s écriture matière), and prepositioning trauma (Rendle-Short, 2021). Hope becomes a matter of survival, of writing around, against and through, in wave after wave, in order to leave no space for the abyss (Cixous, 1991).