Dr. Kathleen Venema: “‘I am not the woman I used to be’: Narrating the Dis/connections of Alzheimer’s Disease”

Wed. Nov. 30 12:30 PM - Wed. Nov. 30 01:30 PM
Contact: j.wills@uwinnipeg.ca
Location: 2C13

English Dept. Faculty Lecture Series

This paper examines what it means to be a self dis/connected, fractured, transformed, and metamorphosed by Alzheimer’s disease.  My mother and I have been profoundly interconnected all my life, and when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in July 2005, I knew that the 200+ letters we exchanged and saved in the mid-1980s – when I worked in Uganda in the wake of a devastating civil war – would offer a unique account of our interwoven lives.  Indeed, in a recently-completed memoir, I tell, simultaneously:  stories about my mother’s life; stories about our 30-year-old letters; and stories about the ways that I, my mother, and our family have been fractured and transformed as Alzheimer’s perforations redistribute the boundaries of my mother’s identity.

The project as a whole interrogates notions of connection and disconnection.  The letters my mother and I exchanged in the 1980s assuaged the crisis I experienced – vastly far from family and friends, in a grim, post-war environment – believing that I might not be real.  The paper specifically examines how those letters; the 100+ digital recordings of my mother and me reading and recalling those letters; and the memories that the recordings prompt in their turn, work together to narrate the metamorphosed person I call my “posthuman m/other.”  A supplement to the mother of biology, genetics, and chronological time and the other of fracturing disease, my m/other’s dispersed and distributed subjectivity challenges both dominant-culture models of Alzheimer’s sufferers as deviant and near-dead, and persistent post-Enlightenment notions of autonomous, objective, and rationally-bounded selves. 

Coffee and light refreshments shall be served. All are welcome.

For more info contact: j.wills@uwinnipeg.ca