The Body of Work - Dorothy Porter's Akhenaten
1 There are two names on the cover of Dorothy Porter's collection of poems, the poet's own name, and the name of her subject, the Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten. In this introductory space both identities and genders operate simultaneously but separately, while between the covers identities merge, gender distinctions dissolve, and history interplays with poetry in an unbound space made available by silence. Interpolated into this silence, Porter's poems speak of/for a long dead pharaoh in deliberately liminal and shifting ways, toying with palimpsests and challenging authenticity. In Porter's rendition of history, Akhenaten is an artist. She calls him "a visionary and a poet" (Akhenaten xiii) and reworks one of his hymns in her text, treating it as poetry and challenging authorial authenticity by casting his 'poem' in her collection. This shared vocation as poets is only one of the levels at which the distinction on the front cover between the two identities, one masculine, one feminine, begin to dissolve.
2 The starting point of this dissolution is the collection of sculptures that inspired Porter's poems. Akhenaten's strange physique, depicted in surviving limestone reliefs, has been understood by Egyptologists, and Porter, as artistic innovation. There are, however, alternative readings of the curvaceous, breasted man. Nicholas Reeve, in Akhenaten: Egypt's false prophet, maps the contentious research claiming that Akhenaten had a rare genetic disorder called Marfan's Syndrome. Some of the indicators of the disease include a raft of deformities applicable to the peculiar features visible in images of the pharaoh: tall stature and slender bones, long face, elongated limbs and skull, pigeon chest, wide pelvic girdle, localized distribution of subcutaneous fat, and misshapen outer ears. But Porter disregards this medicalized reading, seeing Akhenaten as deliberately rejecting established conventions both of artistic representation and of gender conformity. This version of events, this fascination with transgressive gender logics in the Akhenaten subject matter is, I am arguing, both canvassed and mirrored in Porter's own poetry. The poems decommission a range of binary categories in ways so interwoven that this article looks beyond the visual representation of Akhenaten's multi-gendered body in order to understand his hermaphroditic effect on a number of oppositional logics operating in the world of this text. The Akhenaten image of multiple gender creates a faceted mirror in which the poet unravels a multiplicity of agendas.
3 Porter begins her writing with a prose introduction for Akhenaten in which he is credited with initiating a "bold adventure in the arts" (Porter, Akhenaten xiii). Porter's poetry can be read as an equally bold adventure, especially in terms of revisioning the gendered poetic subject. Art historians point out how "severely Akhenaten led his artists to break with tradition and to experiment with what is the only genuinely new style during the many millennia of Egyptian art" (Terrace and Fisher 121). His endeavours are as transgressive as Porter's own disregard for binary logics. But this collection offers more than the mirror-space for a poet imagining the life of another poet. Many of the slippages between Porter and her subject are specifically the outcome of silence, a silence in which poetic gestures can exist without being curtailed by historical facts. This pervasive silence operates because after Akhenaten's death the Egyptians tried to erase him from their records. Porter is explicit about this facet of her project, incorporating into her prose introduction the spaces in which she intends to write. She describes the pharaoh's silence as enforced:
On his death he was execrated as a heretic, his name removed from the monuments, his city abandoned and used as a quarry…The Egyptians wanted to forget the heady Akhenaten years as quickly as possible. (xiii)
Akhenaten finds a new existence in Porter's poems, a textual existence which serves as a kind of survival. Porter takes his erasure as her starting point, reinscribing his name in direct challenge to the Egyptians' attempted annihilation. Her poems are, then, not exactly revisions of history (although they resemble them). Unlike her literary feminist forebears like Virginia Woolf, Gilbert and Gubar, and Adrienne Rich, Porter validates not only that which history has forgotten, but chronicles silences which are indelibly etched in the remains themselves. She traces a wilful act of erasure, a damnatio memoriae. This poetic practice is thus not precisely an attempt at retrieval because central to Porter's adoption of Akhenaten is the silence of the essentially irretrievable.
4 There is a freedom inherent in the open relationship between poetry and history. Dismantling these categories allows Porter to undergo a kind of transference with her protagonist in ways that undermine structures central to the dominant discourse, namely, individuality and authenticity. It is this loss of individuation that shapes Porter's conception of her relationship with Akhenaten. She says of the pharaoh:
I found out as much about him as I could and then I trusted my own intuition. And obviously I used myself. Any book like this is clearly masked autobiographical writing. (Digby 3)
From behind this mask Porter can imagine herself as the decadent Egyptian who redefined the art of his time and indulged in unbridled sexual exploits that crossed between hetero- and homosexuality, and traversed the incest taboo. The reversal of this mask gives the pharaoh the language and experience of the Australian suburbanite, saying to his baby "give Mummy/ a big hug" (106). The finished product is like a poem in translation. More than re-vision, this poetry requires an act of creation or invention, a convergence of the self with the lost voice to create an altogether new Akhenaten-self. Like the 'tombeau' which Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes in The Pink Guitar, this poetry is "the collaboration between two poets, the dead and the living, [whose] interests…do not necessarily coincide….The classical tombeau ends in a draw" (Blau DuPlessis 41). The dead and the living meet in like circumstances in Porter's collection. And it is arguably in crossing the boundary between life and death that Porter also transgresses both an/other personality, gender, and the other discourse (other to poetry) of history.
5 What Porter finds in Akhenaten's silence, then, is what she refers to in an interview as "hypothetical space"(Digby 2), a silence in which to hear better. Perhaps this interpolation of the personal into the historical partly serves to make this poetic and fictionalised revision a mockery of the long-sanctified discourse of history. Porter mimics the role of historians in producing a vision of the past, yet antagonizes historical discourse by writing herself into the gaps creatively, a gesture while not antithetical to the suppositions made in historical writing, is at least outside the traditional notion of history as non-fiction. Francis Hartog deliberates on the Histories by Herodotus, the first historian, in a way that brings much to bear on this discussion:
The Histories are a mirror into which the historian never ceased to peer as he pondered his own identity: he was the looker looked at, the questioner questioned, who always ended up by declaring his own status and credentials. Was he an historian or a liar? (Hartog xxiii)
Writers of history, whether they are poets or historians, must ponder their own identity in this mirror. The vacillating dividing line between truth and fiction which began the supposition that Herodotus was in fact two people (one an historian, the other a liar) also signals a collision beneath one name, especially given that naming and accurate identity are typically crucial to the function of history.