Panel: Ethical Considerations: Collaboration, Life Writing Texts, and
Translation
Copanelists: Marjorie Dryburgh and Marlene Kadar
This paper explores parental memoirs about children with autism as acts of translation. I suggest that parents writing memoirs abut their autistic children can be compared with ethnographers in the sense that they are attempting to interpret, perhaps even recuperate, aspects of their child’s existence, and in particular those aspects which are viewed as alien. The results of this process of translation will be the life writing text, the parent completing translation as both process and product. Given the developing autistic culture movement, I suggest that a parent writing about an autistic child may be considered to be writing a cross-cultural memoir. My paper explores two parental memoirs about autistic children and how the parents’ interpretation of their children’s autism is represented.
I draw upon the anthropological concept of liminality used by G. Thomas Couser, Robert Murphy, and others to describe the place of people with disabilities in western culture. I argue that parents of disabled children join their children in that liminal space, and that the writing of a parental memoir may be an attempt to reincorporate both child and parent into society, translating across space as well as culture. I show how, in their attempt to give value to the lives of their children through writing a life narrative, parents may attempt to domesticate their child’s autism, or may mediate between two cultures, thus creating a text which is a source of potential cultural change.
Rachel Robertson is a doctoral candidate at Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia, working under the supervision of Dr Mary Besemeres. Her thesis title is “The unnarratable self: parenting, autism, identity.” For her thesis, Rachel will be writing a series of personal essays on parenting her son, as well as an analysis of six life writing texts. Her essay “Reaching One Thousand” was a joint winner of the Australian Calibre Award for Outstanding Essay in 2008.