Tyneham: Diplacement, Collection; Feminist/Otherby Clare Jones

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from whichthey have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the samelaw, with the same fatal goal ... Those who have turned their tongues 10,000 times seventimes before not speaking are either dead from it or more familiar with their tongues and theirmouths than anyone else. Now, I-woman am going to blow up the Law: an explosionhenceforth possible and ineluctable let it be done, right now, in language

Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Although apparently nonautobiographical, this novels form was determined by entirelyegocentric motivations: the form expressed what the content believed it was disguising.

Raymond Queneau, on his book The Bark Tree

Presented here is an extract from Tyneham, an extended piece that explores collection,appropriation and reworking of text. The narrative of the poem centres on displacement,worked through a feminist personal-political lens, and it is an experiment in form. Although itis primarily a feminist text, the focus in this discussion is on form that is constrained andtriggered by a collection of source texts.

Tyneham was a village commandeered by the War Office in 1943. Its refugees left their homes,which were then shelled and later confiscated permanently by the state. Tynehams story is one ofcrossing borders, and of things that are taken away. It is also a personal narrative for me mygreat-grandfather worked for the Home Guard and it was his job to tell people they must leave theirhomes for the greater good. He spent the rest of his life fighting to get these people returned, and itis his huge archive of papers that is used as a source for the frames and writing through in the piece.

The papers he collected papers from Tyneham, newspaper clippings, letters to and from thegovernment, legal proceedings create frames for the form and content of the poem. The frames arecreated by writing through sections of the source text, with the political narrative arounddisplacement overlaid with a personal-political feminist narrative.

The piece explores displacement of people and displacement of words how does a sentence changewhen ripped from its place in a government document? How does it change when it is broken intosound blocks only, or a string of grammar terms (subject-object, noun-verb-adverb), and thenbecomes a refrain throughout the piece?

I include an extract of the piece, followed by a methodology outlining how constraints were used todevelop form.

Tyneham: Extract

It is regretted that it is necessaryto pull you out of bed in the morningsbefore it is warmand take you East, where the mild things are.Any letters regarding the presentshould be sent to that address alsoit might be an increase in benefitsor a coffee loyalty card with three extra stamps.Its not a piece that you keepthe rippled plasterthe jagged leg of the panthertorn from tooth to teeth coatedagainst possessivesand a really big periscope

The most careful search has been made to findthe burn mark on your cheekbut actually its a shadow /it means barren and spinsa thing that is not a cat but purrs

the air bubbles in the sunthats eton stylethe smell of cider vinegarchlorophyll or formthe meter that runs back /wealthy ladiesif you stretch out the sun from roofto skin to findthe baby is so blue coloured on the seatthat she isnt therea child shaped hole cut from a ladys breastI dont put the dot to dot to motherround of applause for my personal progression empireI meant to write obelisk wrote to you insteadOr St. Johns Wood/who wouldntI like the way your hair is not in curlsthough later she told me they used to iron that too

Statutory cakethe kind of cuts were all behindflouring into notes and spokesand blades as scarves or the b worda foot tied to a trackyellow brick all the way from Abu Ghraiband the fig leaves on the tube

dont quite cover the fact that he is touching her legunderneath the newspaper and she is goingredderand a princess is having a baby /snapso is the girl on the hill and theres a birth alert outon that one too

there was a man whose house disappearedit fell into a sinkholeanother word I think for a housewifemaking sandwiches with washing up liquidinstead of butter

the letter, pen and typewriter who grew uptubes and buses to crack the five-year-old codeon too-late palms /cannot go back to their homesThe night shift on the hillmakes me angry for something other than being vegetarianthe syphilitic black cars curdle semanticsand spit them back something else redderprone to overflow/spills

and the press is on high alertthe bishops and the pope and savilliansthe third page got a mention or a hashtag or twothe sound of north americaand the guttering of pumpkinsbut the girl who won best actresslooks lovely in her dress/we had sweet potato pancakes and butternutsquashed into the pan

in fact there is a bone hut as well as anorder to say the accent properly, like his nameto move the mouth strangely around an umlautgive it up she said I just wasnt made that wayour hands pressed against the other hipbonetroops in a storm,the cowardly colour of thefullest moon the word that means something likeopportunity and that I crossed out and have tried sinceto undoperfect your pronunciation and break bad news lightlytheir emptiness of sounds or hurting girls perfecting theirtraining in the use of modern weapons of warin other wordsthe only tridents we know Iuse as chopsticks, but Daves on it again a slow streak

of anger at scroungers ormodern day skivers although what other kind is thereweapons are what I call weaponsof a newfangled business marriage equality but feminist hulkwar -ring a different kind, reserves the right to contain multitudes:

red tape is harder to smashbut if you paint yourself green Id have a go

maggie thatcher is dead from a strikeAnd that night I'm out in BrixtonBut not at the party / ding dongBy the middle clases who are drunk and throw bottlesAt our van / we look like police but aren'tOutreach hurts a little less when drunk white boys kick the white of the doorNot so far from kerb crawling after all

The most careful search has been madewe found a property just off Blenheim gardensand though latex is slippery underfoottheres space for a sofaand the overflow of walls

read the first wordsshe saida long verse is coming

The graph predicts themost unrealistic measurecareful and more concise than I am used tosearch and rescue / white women making jobs for themselveshas been quiet in vogue recentlybeen easier to find a camel in the eye of a needlemade to walk through the pupilto break the straws backfind the passage and break it open into doll shapesan easier task because in thisarea we only like pink at weekendssuitable for toysfor the armys swellingthe swell of a forked trident thearmy's trousers are always suitable for boys thepurpose of which was to tell you this:and yes I know I did it wrong but I ask youwhich, knowing and how very very far apartat least not close togetherthe lines are, how am I to make thesame mistake and not tell you that loving you all of the

time, tiring and wearingwill mean I never fit into your jeans it wouldinvolve a long stretching outthe smallest number of personssmallest innumber but the biggestof the lot in stature and/or hairpersons and properlyand the way estate agents dont always clean the floorsproperty which is to say you/his rather than hersThe arcade game of your life anarea as yet undiscovered butdecided on last Tuesdayon, last Tuesdayafter you cancelled and I didnt eat lunch which isthe most unusual thing sincemost days I am terriblycareful to wear out the self-control muscle on other thingsstudy and consultation with a planning committeeand when the doctor asked me out I told her aconsultation was unnecessary but we were in a barbetween the barrow boy and bankerall the government did was break your safe, take out the startthe word was on a line that was never dotted aGovernment of the People theAuthorities and were not patriarchy or privilege justconcerned more usually about why people dont put(apostrophes around their)lies or when they write ten weeks experienceroughly you said thats nearly rightinside your hand was a tiny holeof thorns like a crown / women dont wear thosethe circle is reserved but you can sit in thesquare if you like its market day

hes somewhat taxing in the bedroombut there againsingle mothers/a young man like thatand the girls on the hill who arent girls any more than mebut I find myself using it and drinking lucozadethe crack dealer tells me its bad for my teeth

I shift gears and though misfired nuerons meandriving up the hill can only be in an invisibleflesh-coloured person-shaped carit is purely academicthe way she spits redder on Mondaysthe flow over of you on dates with other girls

they said if she goes home with food he might let her offare yousure I said but we knew it was probably truethat its ethically dubious to write things down that happenedyou dont have the story though you were there presentingwill you listen or give her a pound of KFCgive him the keys they cost three pounds fiftythis time a lot less but then againfurther conversation is stilted and I canthelp it if I dont like blue cheese the veinstowards your lips likewinning isnt something you were born withthe thing thats written in your DNA or is itwar that wears it out of youwith bad science something I hear is essential that is to saya compulsion to begood to have a strongheart

Methodology: Constraints Generating Form

The extended piece contains various methods through which the source texts are used to create theform or the frame. Here I will illustrate three key methods relating to the included extract. One is anOulipean technique with a strict condition, while the others are more fluid and use the source textas a base from which to write, rather than a constraint that defines its entire form.

The first is a technique developed from the Oulipo methods. A line is chosen from the source textand the first word of every line must be drawn from this phrase. There must also be an element ofreflexivity there must be a reference or a marker that draws attention to the method. In the extractabove, this is done by read the first words / she said / a long verse is coming an instruction toliterally read the first words. It is also done later in the stanza that follows, where a line that misusesthe constraint is bracketed to mark out its difference from the rest (apostrophes around their),where this break of flow comes with the break of the constraint. The constraint-rule is resumedeither side, as a sentence is around the brackets.

This is a simple method of constraint that is a trigger for a stanza or section. It is repeated in longand short sections, with length varying usually a line chosen as a lead in this is echoed throughoutthe poem as a refrain (the most careful search has been made or winning the war with a goodheart). Refrains are used throughout and they always come from the source text to disrupt thelinear flow of a narrative. Any constraint of form, whether in the use of rhyme, meter, refrain,always, in this piece, has its beginnings in the source text, the papers from Tyneham.

Tynehams story, of masculinity shot onto a landscape the village now is littered with shell-holes,

bullets and huge plastic targets is played out here behind the foregrounded personal feministnarrative. This is drawn from work with vulnerable women, particularly women who have beendisplaced. The devastation caused by the loss of home, identity, place, felt by Tynehamscommunity is written through into the violent everyday of many women now. The act ofletter-writing to complain, here referenced in the first stanza, is a nod to the juxtaposition of a veryEnglish refugee with the realities of women experiencing male violence.

The source text, in this case, provides the anchor. It roots the poem in the Tyneham displacementstory, and then is drawn out into the narrative around women and displacement. In the first stanzaof this poem, phrases from the letter sent to Tyneham residents, and words dragged from WWII (theJagdpanther, a German war tank) then develop in the next stanzas into a firmly rooted patriarchalpresent (thats Eton style and wealthy ladies both extracts from viral videos parodying aparticular K-pop hit from 2012). The source text is less of a constraint here, and more of a frame onwhich the words are hung. It provides the impetus or the trigger for the next narrative stage ratherthan the conditions under which it must work, unlike the first method.

The third method is one used in every major section of the extended poem. It takes a phrase or asentence from a source text, and breaks it into a string of pure grammar before reassembling. Forexample: the men, women and children who gave up houses (see Fig. 2 for the source) becomes:article noun, noun conjunction noun pronoun past-tense-phrasal-verb, plural noun. This is thenreassembled in the exact same grammatical form to become: the letter, pen and typewriter whogrew up tubes. This continues until the end of the stanza, which then returns to the original cannotgo back to their homes, the point at which the Tyneham narrative and the political displacementnarrative meet. In each case, the poem begins with the constraints and then moves from there. Insome cases, the constraint is a restraint, as in this third method, and in other cases it is more of aplatform across which the poem plays out.

A note on Form and criture feminine

Although the focus here has been on the method itself and how this is used to create form andmeaning, it is an experiment that springs from exploration of Cixous criture feminine (Cixous 1976),and the piece is designed to reflect that in process as well as in its finished state.

The form itself, drawing on these source texts, is designed to impact not only the process of writing,but also the process of reading. Where the text reflects back on itself where the refrain jars intosomething else, or where the instruction is there for the reader to discover the process of writing inthe act of reading (read the first words), the displacement jolts the act of reading away from thepassive role assigned to the Woman side of Cixous binary.Where words are displaced from source texts, the poem is layered with both what we know it shouldsay (where the wild things are) and what it does say. A word that refers to itself and outwards too the meter that runs back (in iambic trimeter) or a refrain circles back to itself is non-linear,exploring Cixous idea of female writing as cyclical.

Where Cixous sets female writing away from masculine linear-narrative discourse, this pieceexperiments with how form that springs from infinitely masculine (patriarchal) discourse acollection of letters, government papers and articles, every one of which was written by a man canwork through the kind of criture feminine that interrogates the subject/signifier Woman.

Scanned Extracts from the Collected Papers

Fig. 1

The letter sent to Tyneham inhabitants in 1943.

Fig 2.

A newspaper article regarding Tyneham confirming the promise of return has been broken withmy great-grandfathers annotation.

About Clare Jones

After studying as an undergraduate in English at Royal Holloway and then doing an MPhil inGender Studies at Cambridge, Clare moved into the NGO sector, where she works particularly onwomen's rights issues. This includes outreach with women in street-based sex work, while herprevious work has included supporting women who had been trafficked for prostitution. Her writingexplores frames and writing through source texts, with a focus on women's rights, particularlythrough the lens of migration.

References

Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1976: 875-893.

Queneau, Raymond. Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, 1928-70. Illinois: University of Illinois Press,2007.