Excerpts/Notes from an essay by Elizabeth AndersonLiterature and Theology, Volume 27, Issue 3, September 2013, Pages 364–379, https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frt004

The
spatial metaphors of garden, flight, and sanctuary and their connection to the
larger concerns of place and movement in Cixous’ writing.

Garden suggests
stable locations, while flight indicates the movements in and between places
and sanctuary is the third term, which connects place and movement.

In
tracing the contours of the garden and the trajectories of flight, the article
moves from the imagined to the material and back again, arguing that material
places function within the writer’s imagination and that imagined places are
inflected with traces of materiality.

Considerations of sacred place often turn to pilgrimage, a practice of
traversing geographical places that allows an exploration of both place and
movement in religious terms. As a historical practice and a theological metaphor, pilgrimage demonstrates the folding together of material culture and
abstract discourse. Christian theologians frequently turn to pilgrimage as a
means of expressing the importance of the material world held in tension
with a continual displacement of identity for those whose lives are aimed
towards an eschatological beyond, a kingdom not of this earth.16

In much of Cixous’ writing, the garden is emphasised as the place of
encounter. We have seen how this encounter may be negative, but in many
instances it is intimate and generative. In ‘Writing Blind’ the garden is invoked
as the place of new beginnings that hold within them previous beginnings and
allow for intimacy between generations: ‘the walks in the garden with my
daughter and my mother remain unforgettable. Ten-years-ago grows back
today. My mother my daughter and I, in the garden we engender ourselves
reciprocally’.23 Here Cixous suggests that the child creates the mother as much
as the reverse, while the repeated beginnings indicate that this mutual formation is not a one-time occurrence but a continuous process.

As we have seen, place and movement in Cixous’ texts form an intimate
dialectic; each complicates and provokes the other. Flight forms a crucial
aspect of her spatial poetics, while gardens are portrayed as the source and provocation for flights that carry within them the fragrance of dust and fruit.
The meeting point of place and movement, garden and flight, can be seen in
Cixous’ deployment of the metaphor of sanctuary. If gardens are sanctuaries in
as much as they are locations of divine encounter, sanctuary is also the final
point of flight, its goal. However, she destabilises notions of origin and goal
and this deconstructive practice is evident in her deployment of sanctuary as a
third term that brings together place and movement.
In locating sanctuary in a language that escapes mastery, insisting on its
foreignness to the speaker or auditor, Cixous’ texts suggest that sanctuaries
are as much a matter of routes as roots. 

>Language becomes a sanctuary for Cixous and particular words become a
refuge that shelters creative activity and imagination. These refuges are not
closed places, but are open to the movements of writing towards the future.

However, Cixous understands her relationship to language differently;
she repeatedly returns to the numerous languages of her childhood as  indicative of a lack of a singular mother tongue. This becomes a trope for her
belief that she does not belong to or ‘have’ a point of origin. But Cixous
constructs this lack as plenitude—her lack of a singular origin yields a multiplicity of points of contact: