Poiesis and Death/I See All the Girls Who Could Have Been You :: You Could Have Been All the Girls I See

I hope your week was packed tight with change. We will meet again at our usual time of 7:30pm EST on June 30 via Zoom. Zoom link: https://duke.zoom.us/j/399446444. Next week, we will discuss a selection from the undergraduate honors thesis of Alexa Cucopulos, titled Poiesis and Death: Foucault's Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Part 1. Let's focus on the Preface, the Introduction ("A note on poem-lives"), and all of Chapter III ("Poetics and mourning," "Poesis as keeping vigil," "Poetic reading and the gesture of mourning in Eve Sedgwick," and the Conclusion), though I encourage you to take a look at the text in its entirety. Cucopulos published the thesis in 2016, when she was only 21 years old. You can find it online here: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/pg15bf06h?locale=en. I'm choosing to pair it with a poem I wrote after reading her thesis, titled "I See All the Girls Who Could Have Been You :: You Could Have Been All the Girls I See." 

Cucopulos died in her Durham, NC home in April of this year under officially undetermined circumstances--ruled neither a homicide nor a suicide, her obituary describes her death as a result of "natural causes." Together, Cucopulos and I's writing performs an unofficial investigation into the body of language itself, as well as how language's self-protective conventions determine the limits of how we envision sexuality, gender, identity, race, friendship, solidarity, love, life, and death. Both of our work is marked by an Irigarayan commitment to mimesis, through which we are able to identify the contours of our restraints only by brushing up against them and speaking the details of the strange encounter. It is through these series of strange encounters that we are able to recognize that the reality we have been assigned through language is not only not the only one, but also that the grammar of that dominant reality is the cause of our premature destruction. 

It is equally important though to interrogate the differences between us, both as writers and as people. Alexa was raised white (of Greek and Italian heritage), upper-middle class, and Northern (from New Jersey), and I was raised Black American (descended from enslaved people), middle-class, and Southern (from Georgia). Externally, we could have assumed that our differences were obstacles too great to overcome. We often joked that our friendship formed an extended script for a sequel of Mean Girls, in which Regina George and the leader of the Unfriendly Black Hotties (who didn't even have names...) went to college and took an intersectional gender studies class. However, as we talked, laughed, shouted, cried, and danced, something remarkably similar to Alexa's interpretation of chiasmus in her thesis happened between us. 

Here is her framing of chiasmus in her thesis: "The word 'chiasmus' stems from the Greek word for “crossing,” and the Greek letter “chi,” written as “X.” It is the literal image of a criss-cross. Significantly, the crossing over that occurs in a chiasmus is self-contained insofar as the structure is self-referential. Its latter terms mirror its initial terms through a process of inverted parallelism: AB,’B’A’. When the first clause of the chiasmus is placed above its second clause, the terms visibly connect in the form of an X, at once interlacing them and canceling them out. The chiasmus creates an impossible effect of both separation and inextricability. Its parts at once depend upon and negate one another, where the latter half of the structure uses the terms of the former in order to reverse and invert itself" (Cucopulos 38). Unlike the structure of the interstices, in which the figure of the Black woman is located at the unspeakable intersection of the general categories of race and gender, the chiastic foundation of our friendship required each of us to view our individual lives as moving vectors that crossed at multiple points. How was the intersection of Amanda's version of Alexa and Alexa's version of Amanda different from or similar to the other versions of ourselves that we presented in other relationships? How did our lives change as a result of our interactions? I was only able to appreciate and hear the remarkableness of our similarities once we recognized that there would always be differences between us that constantly had to be addressed and negotiated. I will never have full access to Alexa's consciousness and memories, nor could she say the same about me (though maybe now because she lives in my head..). We would never be the same person, but we could come to uncannily similar conclusions using different tools, which was the joy of our friendship. 

Talking with her felt like dancing--there were no words too improper or impossible to string together and speak aloud with unfamiliar giddiness and confidence. Thinking was poetry. Is poetry. Near the end of her life, we were engrossed in an ongoing dialogue about how to expand the limits of Foucault's notion of biopower. We decided that traumatic experiences like rape, domestic violence, and eating disorders operate as insidious forms of biopower, causing people (and particularly people who are socialized as women) to discipline their own bodies accoridng to the algorithm of that trauma for the rest of their lives. I bombastically exclaimed a few times that women are "raped into Being." The trauma becomes a lens through which one views themself and others around them. This is similar to Denver's loss of hearing in Beloved, when she learned to anticipate what she thought people were saying to her as a defense maneuver and survival mechanism. However, Denver ultimately realized that she had to leave 124 and ask for help in her community in order to prevent her entire family from succumbing to the weight of an unthinkable, unspeakable, and yet seemingly-inevitable trauma. 

The pain, humiliation, and shame of trauma--in conjunction with a society that depends upon the self-regulatory power of trauma within the body/mind--begets tragedy. I'm specifically referring to a "tragedy of circumstance," in which the protagonist of a narrative is a victim of the conditions in which they live and cannot see any alternative fate; it feels as if their particular end was decreed by the gods. Sethe's act of infanticide in Beloved is tragic not only because a bright little Black girl died so young, but also because Sethe's past traumas during slavery (alienation from her mother, rape, beatings, dehumanization) confirmed to her that a country governed by the logic of slavery would have no mercy for her or her children. Her "choice" to kill Beloved was really not a choice at all. As far as Sethe knew, saw, and heard, there was no other way to claim ownership over her and her children's bodies. 

However, I believe that Alexa is offering another way in her thesis, a "light from elsewhere" as she calls it, which stems from listening, living, and reading poetically. Her claim stems from the origin of the word "poetry," which is "poiesis," meaning "to make." Alexa is very much invested in her thesis in the power of witnessing as an alternative to surveillance. The act of witnessing someone--either through mourning, holding vigil, or physically embracing the living while they speak the unspeakable--is a powerful source of change. However, this process of internal transformation is only possible if one allows oneself to lean into the intensity of the feelings that loss, friendship, love, pain, trauma, and art can evoke. She argues that as of now, we can only learn to listen, live, and read poetically through the physical absence of what she calls "the beloved." But as her friend and interlocutor for many years to come, I want to develop methods of communicating, reading, writing, and making that would allow us to feel the intensity of the absence of a beloved without actually experiencing their loss. It shouldn't take the tragic loss of a loved one to learn how to be more vulnerable, honest, vocal, caring, and compassionate. My hope is that my attempt to witness, mourn, and hold vigil for Alexa through the form, content, rhythm, rhyme, and allusions in my poem provides a complimentary model for the ideas that Alexa presents in her thesis. 

Like Beloved, I don't want Alexa to be forgotten. In the few years that I knew her, she had a profound impact on me as a scholar, an artist, a feminist, and a person. She moved me and moves me still. There will never be anyone else quite like her, but my memory of her spirit is a lens through which I can compassionately and critically view the world. As Sixo said of the Thirty-Mile Woman, Alexa was and is "a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order." (Morrison 321).