ABSTRACT
A reading of Hélène Cixous’s experimental novel Manna for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas explores her fluid understanding of gender and her reading practice of allowing understanding to unfold organically from the text itself, a practice influenced by her reading of Heidegger’s later poetic reading of poets, particularly Hölderlin. The novel’s fictionalised historical characters are forced by oppressive regimes to leave home and move into the desert, whether one inside or outside themselves. The novel’s metaphorical language constantly shifts meanings and opens the text and potentially its reader to deeper depths of understanding. This movement of characters and meaning acknowledges a space of textuality in which to move into identities and lives that are exilic, as in unfixed and liberated, at home when never at home.
