Spotlight series #68 : Aja Couchois Duncan

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

STATEMENT

I am interested in the relationships between all sentience — crow, river, rock — and the two- legged ones, many of whom inhabit aki, earth, with little regard for our inherent interdependence. We are of and from. We are water, mineral, air. What we exhale the trees inhale and together we breathe as one.

My work is an exploration of this separation of human from everything else, the legacy of violence that results, and too the ligature of language which casts possibilities for balance and connection. My writing bears the weight of “American” history, slavery, genocide, subjugation, extraction. And too it is enlivened by other forms of sentience calling us home. The mountains speak. The ravens cry. Water rises, floods the banks, tears everything loose so that something else might grow in its place.

excerpt from Anaamaki / What Came from Beneath Ground

Seismic

What wooden instrument would string her life into a semblance of song? Here at the crossroads of then and what came later. Halfway through the years and limbs of it. She shimmied and shook something like an earthquake, grumbling, complaining, threatening to cleave the earth, break it all apart.

She put some worlds in a pot and turned the flame on to boil. Bastard, unsure mind, shaky morals. She reckoned that the worlds themselves had to simmer and rub up against one another, had to take some fucking responsibility.

Perhaps she should have planted and watered them. Given them to loam and sky. She played for it, strummed something almost song and waited for the soil to rise, for the first seedling to unfurl. When it did, there wasn’t a single letter or syntactical arrangement; it was only sound. The sound she heard the first moment she was born, tearing through the vaginal wall. This eruption of life that begins off key, abrupt, reeking of blood and bacteria. Wrecking everything.

Wolverine

I touched joy once. She was feral. Don’t stroke too hard, she said. Hold your hand lightly, someplace between fur and air. Dance with me if you like. Or wrap yourself in a blanket and call it protection. Either way I am with you, she said, in the skin and in the ethers. Bath yourself in it. Surrender to it. Joy stepped out of the bathtub and shook herself off. There is no room for you here, I told her. No bed or manger in which to sleep. I need nothing, she said and walked out the door into the twilight. Wait, I said, how will I find you? She laughed, joy is like that. You can find me in all the things you so easily discard. You can find me in your own laughter, in the music your body moves to even when you can’t hear it. Joy never apologizes for her arrival or departure. This moment. Not the next. Joy is what holds your bones in place. Joy is what makes all that is cellular solid. And then joy exhales. Everything, disperse.

Gashkendam

Everyone had a name.
It was a time when names
were private, sacred, not
something branded
scalded, commodified
by flesh.

Gashkendam
lonesome, lonely, sad
she is grieving but the grief
is not hers. To
grieve is not to
be grief. But to
grieve as an offering
a medicine.

She was called
Gashkendam
to remind her
and the others
that the grief was
being attended to
that she was paying
attention.

Other members of
her clade could attend
to other things like minawaanigo’
making happiness, making
others happy.

There is no noun
no object, no emotion
no other, only what we
create, what we give
in the form of
ourselves.

Everyone had a name
but those names were
subjects and verbs, they are
practices, ways of paying
attention.

Grief fell around her.
Grief held her until
the light became her
and grief herself.

Aja Couchois Duncan is a social justice coach and capacity builder of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent who lives on the ancestral and stolen land of the Coastal Miwok people. Her debut collection, Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016) was selected by Entropy Magazine as one of the best poetry collections of 2016 and awarded the California Book Award for Poetry in 2017. In 2020, Sweet Land — a collaborative opera project which brought together composers Raven Chacon and Du Yun, librettists Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney, and co-directors Cannupa Hanska Luger and Yuval Sharon — was produced in the Los Angeles State Historic Park to critical acclaim and named the Best Opera of 2020 by the Music Critics Association of North America. Her newest book, Vestigial is just out from Litmus Press. When not writing or working, Aja can be found running the west Marin hills with her Australian Cattle Dog Dublin, training with horses, or weaving small pine needle baskets. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as human. Great Spirit knew it all along.