On daring to not seek validation

Exile Is a Hard Job, Nil Yalter, 2012-ongoing, Poster, Colour, 348 x 423 cm, on view at TAXISPALAIS as part of the exhibition Gurbette Kalmak/Bleiben in der Fremde. PIC/günter Kresser; Courtesy Gurbette Kalmak/Bleiben in der Fremde, Ausstellungsansicht, TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, 2023

I watched my father-in-law escort our child out of TAXISPALAIS in Innsbruck right around the beginning of my talk last Thursday. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. My father-in-law had driven from South Tyrol to Innsbruck so he could take care of our child while I delivered a lecture and participated in a beautiful seminar called ‘Stories of Time', part of a series of events held alongside an ongoing exhibition about migration. I'd originally travelled to review the exhibition, but while I was there, I got to talking to the director, whom I knew from when I was a resident at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck. I'd then shared with her my recently published essay, Milking Time, which she totally connected with. She then invited me to present alongside the anthropologist and philosopher Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

It felt like a moment of arrival for me. Because when I had moved to Tramin in June 2020, I was desperate for work that could also nurture my intellectual pursuits. I had reached out to many people and someone who was in the final stages of publishing a reader asked if I might proofread it. At the time it was my highest paying gig, and the most satisfying, because I was dealing directly with contemporary theory that encompassed various notions of time and interspecies relations and examined a vast slew of concepts from artificial intelligence to trans rights to bees. Elizabeth A Povinelli was one of the contributors to this reader that was published under the title ‘More-Than-Human'. Her essay spoke about her anthropological work. I was quite floored by it and I remember making extensive notes. To find myself suddenly invited to read alongside her and to participate in conversation with her about notions of time felt like a privilege.

Instead of reading the essay that I had already published, I read two ‘chapters' from the book it has resulted in, a work in progress. When I first wrote what turned into the essay that was published in Camera Austria, I had essentially made notations on scraps of paper over the span of a week, whenever our child was asleep. I was ‘milking time' metaphorically and literally… because a lot of my thinking was being done as I was breastfeeding. When I transcribed these notes, I found they amounted to almost 5,000 words. I decided to continue the strategy the next week and the week after, and now I have already crossed week 20. My goal is to continue to do it over 39 weeks, to mimic the duration that our child was inside my womb. I wrote here, in my column, about how refreshing it felt to begin a project that I was suddenly not afraid to fail at. The only aim was to persist and to be consistent. I had decided to relieve myself of the pressure of writing perfect sentences, or constructing poetic thoughts, or even quoting someone - all the things that take time away from actual writing and were not useful to me. Instead of citing the works I was engaging with, I would weave them in anecdotally, embracing, thus, the realm of gossip. What could a memoir be like if it was not invested in accuracy, literariness or even faithfulness to the events of the mundane? If all the writing was the consequence of found time?

I got lucky with my audience in Innsbruck. It so happened that many of them were people who I'd had the privilege of teaching last August in Innsbruck! What a luxury to have friendly faces to read something new to, to be able to be vulnerable amid those who once exposed their vulnerability to you. After the introductions, I was invited to the podium and as I watched my father-in-law take my child out for the next four hours, knowing they would enjoy each other's company and he wouldn't miss me at all, I focussed my attention on being present through the act of reading. I took care to make eye contact with my audience. I read the chapters that contained my reflections about the form and nature of this experiment I was undertaking. It was refreshing to go back to something I had written towards the end of February 2023. There was a passage about how I was trying to make pasta, but our child was going through a regression, and I was afraid about what might happen if he woke up before the timer went off since I was home alone with him. Would the pasta become too soggy? If I turned it off before, would it be too al dente? I talked about how motherhood was filled with these forms of suspense, and how immigrant maternal time was another trip altogether.

The feedback I received was so overwhelming. For the first time ever, I accepted it with grace, not feeling like it was undeserved. It has, after all, been the first time I have been truly writing something totally outside systems of validation. It almost doesn't matter to me if it gets rejected by a publisher. I would happily self-publish. By taking away from my writing the pressure to ‘perform' for anyone, asking of it only to be unabashedly honest, brutally truthful, I feel I have liberated it from all external, non-nutritive gazes. It exists first and foremost because it chose to exist and exercise its free will.

It's so exciting, dear reader, I cannot wait for it to find its way into your hands and your homes.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.