Joyce Mansour and Egyptian Mythology

Maryann De Julio

In 1953, Joyce Mansour`s first collection of poetry, Cris, was published in

Paris, the city that Mansour, an Egyptian born in England, had adopted as her
quasi-permanent place of residence. Mdium, the surrealist magazine that
had a short run in Paris from 1952 to 1955, praised Mansour`s Cris in
particular. From it`s inception in 1956, Mansour contributed regularly to Le
Surralisme meme, the journal that replaced Mdium. Despite Mansour`s
apparent succes, it is nonetheless notable that her avant-garde activitz as a
writer can be described as doubly marginal in the sence that Susan
Suleiman uses the expression in her excellent article A Double Margin:
Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-garde in France. According to
Suleiman, women are excluded by men from the centers of avant-garde
activity, and they are perceived by critics chiefly male as marginal to any
such literary movement which is itself, by definition, inherently marginal.
Althought Mansour`s writing can be shown to conform generally to the broad
sense of the term Surrealism as it was understood in the late forties, that
is, as a materio-mystical vision of the universe, her writing is of special
interest for the double center of marginality that the work by a woman
surrealist poet inevitably inscribes. My analysis of her oeuvre, especially the
first collection, Cris, and, to some extent, the second, Dechirures, both
recollected in Rapaces, will examine the poet`s use of Egyptian mythology to
put `woman` into discourse, as Alice Jardine describes it, and to explore
the female body. It can be argued that Mansour`s poems particularize a
longstanding tradition of eros and thanatos, and that they draw heavily upon
the Egyptian cult of the dead to explore and express an inner psychic reality.
In short, to read Mansour in the context of a universal view of culture,
thereby shedding light on a surrealist aesthetic committed to the incarnation
of contradictory realities which does, indeed, reinscribe the female as a
speaking subject.
To a great extent, the meaning of the title of Mansour`s first collection, Cris,
announces the position that she takes throughout her career as a surrealist
writer. Cris can be understood as the expression of the pain inherent in the
creative act reminiscent of birthing. Indeed, the first page of text in the
collection vividly illustrates the title, recalling the tradition of the white
goddess in Egypt, even though the deity Hathor, the most attractive form of

this tradition, symbolized by the flattened form of female face with cow`s
ears, is not named explicitly:
Le Clou plant dans ma joue cleste
Les cornes qui poussent derri mes oreilles
Mes plaies saignantes qui ne gurissent jamais
Mon sang qui devient eau qui se dissout qui embaume
Mes enfants que j`trangle en exaucant leurs voeux
Tout ceci fait de moi votre Seigneur et votre Dieu.

(The nail planted in my celestial cheek

The horns that grow behind my ears
My bleeding wounds that never heal
My blood that becomes water that dissolves that embalms
My children that I strangle while granting their wishes
All this made by me your Lord and your God.)

The emblematic text in Cris foretells Mansour`s use of female body imagery
to articulate a problematic attitude toward the creative act. Mansour is as
ambivalent as the male Surrealists about the whole issue of the female as
the source and mechanism by which artistic creation is made possible.
However, Mansour`s ambivalence does not exclude woman as subject in
what can be read as conflicting views of her role in the creative act under the
aegis of a pantheistic culture. In fact, the incantatory quality of the anaphoral
structure of many of her poems seems to conjure up a female presence:

Femme debout dans un paysage nu

La lumire crue sur son ventre bomb
Femme seule femme riche sans vice ni poitrine
Femme qui hurle son mpris dans des rves sans repos
Le lit sera son enfer.

(Woman standing in a bare landscape

The garish light on her bulging belly
Woman alone woman rich without vice ir bosom
Woman who howls her scorn in dreams without sleep
Bed will be her hell.)

The poet tends to express the anguish experienced by the individual female
precisely when her creative power is most apparent. The Hathor emblem
employed by Mansour in Cris recalls Hathor-as-fertility-goddess as well as
Hathor-as-destructive-Eye sent in the form of fierce lioness by Re, the Great
Spirit or Sun God, to devour the evil ones in the desert. Mansour`s use of the
Hathor emblem conflates the two different Egyptian myths so that their
separate outcomes are perceived in a single context, whereby the individual
female is both the agent and the victim of her own creative power.

Elsewhere in Cris, we continue to perceive the eros/thanatos opposition on a

performative level. Mansour puts eros in the service of thanatos when she
uses it to represent the materiality of a preference for death:

Hier soir j`ai vu ton cadavre.

Tu tais moite et nue dans mes bras.

J`ai vu ton crane luisant
J`ai vu tes os pousss par la mer du matin.
Sur le sable blanc sous un soleil hsitant
Les crabes se disputaient ta chair.
Rien ne restait de tes seins potels
Et pourtant c`est ainsi que je t`ai prfre
Ma fleur.

(Yesterday evening I saw your corpse.

You were moist and naked in my arms.

I saw your shining skull
I saw your bones thrust up by the morning sea.
On the white sand under a reluctant sun
Crabs quarreled over your flesh.
Nothing remained of your plump and dimpled breasts
And yet it is this way that I preferred you
My flower.)
The paradoxical status of the je in the above poem problematizes its erotic
discourse: is it Mansour`s poetic voice or the je as the other? What exactly is the
subject`s relation to the body in this text? Is it the poet`s own reflection that she
sees in a dream or is the je the universal subject, and the body the generic beloved?
Even though the eros/thanatos opposition in the text is typical of the materio-

mystical vision of Surrealism, our understanding of the text is enriched

when we compare its 1953 literary context to an original Egyptian culture
where there was no dichotomy of spheres of activity and bisexuality was a
commonplace in the creation myths. From this perspective, the status of the
je expressed by Mansour is disturbing insofar as the text must necessarily
produce a split self in its contemporary inscription of a female subjectivity
that reflects upon it objectification in a display of body parts. The ironic
stance implicit in such a position may well be characteristic of the postwar
poets in France, but it is not exemplary of the surrealist project: to atain the
marvelous, that point at which contradictions play themselves out.
Other examples of the eros/thanatos opposition in Cris recall the Egyptian
cult of the dead and the two distinct beliefs about the fate of the deceased.

According to one belief, the deceased joined his ancestors who were already
lodged in the cemetery on the edge of the desert and with them lived in a
carefree existence on the model of that on earth or would do so if his tomb
was properly attended to. The other belief was that the soul soared up to join
the stars and the sun and moon in their eternal round (Clark 31). The
mythology had to serve two purposes: to give the order whereby the
universe was arranged, and to provide a series of symbols to describe the
origin and the development of consciousness (Clark 32-33).
The persuasive presence of the dead in Mansour`s writing can be shown to
serve ends similar to the original need for an Egyptian mythology even if the
means by which these ends are achieved represent a deconstruction of the
myth itself. For the most part, the Mansour texts collected in Cris do not
present tombs that are properly attended to, nor do they present the soul on
its journey heavenward. Instead, the texts alter the fate of the soul in a way
that underscores the actuve role of the subject, je, in an erotic relationship
with the object of its desire, ton ame:
Je pecherai ton ame vide
Dans le cercueil ou moisit ton corps.
Je tiendrai ton ame vide.
I`arracherai ses ailes battantes
Ses reves coaguls
Et je l`avalerai.
(I will fish up your empty soul
In the coffin where your body mildews.
I will hold your empty soul.
I will tear off its beating wings
Its clotted dreams
And I will devour it.)
It is known that the Egyptians believed that the soul assumed the form of a
bird in order to ascend from the darkness of the tomb to see the daylight and
then returned to comfort its body. (Clark 141). By tearing off the wings of
the soul (J`arracherai ses ailes battantes), the je of the abovelines
therefore denies the soul that ancient comfort and, furthermore, repudiates
the more contemporary role of the surrealist poet as a medium who
facilitates passage to the marvelous.
It can be argued that Mansour`s use of Egyptian mythology strives to reclaim
the power of the female subject as creator by reminding the reader of a
former arrangement of the universe out of which Mansour then invents her
own. In 1964, J.H.Matthews observed that the inspiration of Mansour`s
poetry is not just erotic but sadique. And in 1958, Rene Riese Hubert stated in
refernece to Mansour`s long prose poem Jules Csar that God becomes a woman, but

to no avail, because the rising Flood imprisons all alike. I would submit that
the sadism and impotence that can be found in Mansour`s writing is the
result of the conflict that she experiences as a woman poet in a surrealist
tradition. For Henri Peyre, Surrealism rehabilitated woman and love poetry
in our midst because the Surrealists had ceased to exile woman from
poetry, as Rimbaud and his followers had attempted to do, or to worship and
abuse her alternately as a vessel for all the treacheries of Satan, in
Baudelairian fashion.
(...)

Les vices des hommes

Sont mon domaine
Leurs plaies mes doux gateaux
J`aime macher leurs viles penses
Car leur laideur fait ma beaut.
(The vices of men
Are my domain
Their wounds my sweet cakes
I like to chew their thoughts
For their ugliness makes my beauty.)
In a sense, Mansour`s text inverts the surrealist belief that woman`s beauty is one of the keys to
man`s salvation. By making the ugliness of man`s condition subject to her own discourse,
Mansour`s creative power assures her own beauty.
Originally, I stated that Mansour uses Egyptian myhology to put woman into discourse and to
explore the female body. By means of the Hathor myth, the poet is able topresent the double
center of her version of Surrealism. On the one hand, her choice of Hathor the goddess of
fertility and the destructive Eye confirms the Surrealist`s ambivalent attitude toward the
creative act. On the other, the Hathor myth displaces the surrealist myth of the femme-enfant.
Mansour continues to use Egyptian mythology and female creation myth to reinscribe woman as
subject in her second collection, Dchirures for the expression of the specifically female trauma
of the creative act. Dchirures signifies a rupture or an opening, a lacerated

wound as it were, that the reader is again asked to relate to the birthing
process. Althought the wound connoted by Mansour`s writing is female in
nature, it can be seen as reminiscent of the wound in French poetry since
Mallarm, found at the center of the text, within the I, as Mary Ann Caws
puts it in her provocative study on reflection, The Eye in the Text, that is, the

wounded `eye` in the mirror that furnishes a double vision of both

passage and threshold:
Je me souviens de la matrice de ma mre
Elle tait tendrement rose
Et ses parois sentaient la peur.
(I remember my mother`s womb
It was delicately rosy
And its lining smelled of fear.)
Mansour thus succeeds in placing the female as speaking subject at the
center of her own literary project by articulating the anxiety inherent in such
a position. In Surrealist Archives of Anxiety, Jeanine Plottel describes a
similar anxiety in the strong poet, as defined by Harold Bloom. Plottel
displaces Bloom`s reasoning whereby the strong poet`s anxiety is a question
of influence, that is, who sired his own creation, in both senses of the term.
Instead, Plottel contends that the strong poet`s anxiety over influence
concerns whether he is a woman or a man. For Plottel, the weak poet is
simply the poet who doesn`t have any anxiety as to whether he is a woman
or man. In Mansour, it is clear that her anxiety does not arise from an
uncertainty regarding her sex, but rather from the marginal status accorded
her gender. Reminiscent of the surrealist game of the fifties, L`Un dans
l`autre, whose main idea was that any object can be contained in any other,
Mansour gives literary expression to the history of women by means of a
maternal metaphor:
Mon enfant est n dans le ventre de ma mre
Ses yeux bleus refltent mon nom.
(My child is born in the belly of my mother
Her blue eyes reflect my name.)
The image ses yeux bleus condenses the identities of the grandmother and
th grandchild by creating a new relation between the two imagined subjects
now defined by the woman writer as mother. What is most striking in the
above lines is the way in which Mansour uses language to set up a
reciprocity between naming and birthing, making both autonomously female
activities that reclaim her past and her future.
In this way, Manosur succeeds in reinscribin herself as subject in the tradition
of the grat goddess, as well as modernizing Egyptian mythology, which was
not a collection of texts but a language whose protagonists could be altered
and whose connecting links between events in the mythical texts were
generally a play on words (Clark 263-66). Mansour`s adaptation of Egyptian
myth to develop a new and personal mythology is thus in keeping with the

surrealist exploration of myth during the immediate postwar years when the
question of individual liberty emerges as a major surrealist preoccupation
(Chadwick 99).