Small Pleasures: Tracings of the Endotic in Everyday Spaces, Acts and Bodies

ABSTRACT

Small Pleasures is an extract from a work of critical autobiography in progress. It explores the theme of ‘animating interior worlds’ through the body, gender, genealogy and culture. This work pulls focus to smallness and interiority in everyday acts of living, remembering and relating in contemporary Sydney and Kuala Lumpur delimited by trajectories of work, health and pleasure, or their obverse. Using, as a meditation, George Perec’s notions of the infra-ordinary—‘that which we generally don’t notice, which doesn’t call attention to itself, which is of no importance’—and the endotic, described as a tool to ‘rescue astonishment from the forgotten obvious’ (Lorenzo Sandoval, The Endotic Institute), this work endeavours to ‘read and listen to immanent local traces’ as an approach to understanding larger global complexities that may impact upon a narrating body: experiences of race, migration, ‘women’s business’, illness, speaking and writing. In this essay, I attempt to demonstrate the use of critical autobiography, pathography and autoethnographic processes as a hybrid methodology that may prove fruitful for interrogating contested relationships between a narrator and their own body, the body's history (and memory) of place/displacement/emplacement, and the fluid and ambiguous relationships of that body with surrounding cultural landscapes.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical autobiography
• memoir
• endotic
• autoethnographic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Beth Yahp’s fiction and creative non-fiction include: The Red Pearl and Other Stories (Vagabond Press, 2017); a memoir Eat First, Talk Later (Penguin Random House, 2015), which was shortlisted for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Award for Literature (Non-Fiction); and a prize-winning novel The Crocodile Fury (HarperCollins, 1992; Vagabond Press 2017), which was translated into several languages. Beth wrote the libretto for composer Liza Lim’s opera Moon Spirit Feasting, which won the APRA Award for Best Classical Composition in 2003. Her current projects include a collection of creative non-fiction essays on women, politics and activism in Malaysia over the Reformasi period and a series of Small Pleasures set in Sydney and Kuala Lumpur, from which the essay in this issue is an extract. Beth lives in Sydney and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.