Even over Zoom, Antoinette Cooper’s presence radiates harmony.
The poet, medical humanist, and spiritual practitioner is calling in from her home in New York City, where she says rodents have invaded the walls. She had filed a 311 complaint a few days earlier as part of a practice she calls “boundary school,” which takes the form of a weekly day dedicated to “learning to honor your needs” — one such need being a rodent-free home.
“If I don’t fortify my boundaries, I won’t have the capacity to hold what I’m growing,” she says.
What Cooper is growing is at once the liberation of her own Black female body and the collective honoring, convalescence, and joyful unburdening of Black trauma. Emerging from her own experience with illness, Cooper’s work explores a multifaceted approach to healing. At her Twenty Summers workshop on May 20, she will invite Outer Cape community members to join her in “writing the body”: an offering of nourishment grounded in Cooper’s mission to give voice to her pain within an anti-Black world and medical establishment.
“Everything I’m a part of is about sanctuary and freedom,” she says. Guided by these lodestars, Cooper has found her way to poetry and narrative medicine.
Born in Jamaica and raised in housing projects in Harlem and the Bronx, Cooper earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Cornell University in 1999. “As an immigrant, there are certain professions you’re supposed to have that sound impressive, like lawyer, doctor, architect, engineer,” she says. “I was always inquisitive. I always had language. So, it was deemed that I would be a lawyer.” But she dropped out of law school after one year and spent the following years traveling and working as a teacher in California.
“I never stayed at a school longer than two years,” she says. “I was good at teaching, but I wasn’t passionate about it. Passion was not a concept I lived by.” There came a point when Cooper was leaving yet another job at the two-year mark — and, while interviewing for a new role, found herself already thinking about an exit strategy. “My mother always said that if I was in the arts, I would be homeless,” she says. “But I said that if I’m going to be unstable anyway, I might as well do something that I want.” Cooper moved back to New York and entered the Columbia University M.F.A. program in 2016.
During her time there, Cooper had life-saving surgery for advanced endometriosis. The experience formed the basis for her TedX talk, “Death by Chocolate Cyst.” Cooper advocates naturopathic medicine and says that she had previously healed herself of fibroids by listening to her body’s needs. “I was always the one that was like, ‘Take colloidal silver and homeopathic medicines!’ ” she laughs, emphasizing the vowels of “homeopathic” with a deliciously didactic affect.
So, when she was diagnosed with a massive ovarian tumor, she says she was “really embarrassed. … This muscular Jamaican body had to be cut open and stapled back together, and it pissed me off that I failed my own body.”
Cooper says that, before and after the surgery, “all I had energy to do was blink and breathe.” After she described her ongoing health challenges, the director of her M.F.A. program invited Cooper to do an independent study project on writing about trauma — which led her to key texts of narrative medicine, such as Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. Scarry writes that “pain destroys language,” and Cooper felt this acutely.
“Poetry is the only form that can hold that level of fragmentation,” says Cooper. At first, she was wary of exposing others to the trauma her body had experienced: “I kept cloaking everything I was writing about in beautiful words,” she says. But through narrative medicine — an intersectional discipline that draws on theories of health-care justice to give voice to patients and train providers to listen accordingly — “that habit of withholding to protect people disappeared.” In this new arena, Cooper shifted her writing from third person to first. Writing had become something that she describes as “its own convalescence, a new way to be in relationship with my body.” She currently sits on the board of Narrative Medicine at the CUNY School of Medicine, where she is also an adjunct lecturer.
In addition to teaching and writing, Cooper runs a nonprofit called Black Exhale, which is about “how to heal the shadows left by the historical exploitation of the Black body.”
“For the collective Black body, we haven’t actually had a moment of convalescence,” she says. “As my individual body was healing, sanctuary had to be created for the healing to take place. But we don’t have Black sanctuary spaces.” The organization holds events and spiritual retreats for participants.
Wearing all these hats means that Cooper needs to pay careful attention to her schedule. Mondays are for the nonprofit; Tuesdays are for writing a forthcoming collection titled Unruly; Wednesdays are for “boundary school,” or practical life maintenance; and Thursdays and Fridays begin with a walking meditation that leads to meetings and other more expansive pursuits. Facing the tremendous heaviness of generational Black trauma in her work, Cooper meets it with lightness and humor. “Maybe that’s also part of how I survive,” she says.
For her Twenty Summers presentation, Cooper says she is excited to feel the contours of the Hawthorne Barn, which will dictate how the workshop will go. An avid participant in silent retreats (she once lived in a monastery for six months and was invited to become a monk but declined), Cooper is also thinking of having people sit in collective silence.
“It really is this opportunity for people to be with their bodies,” she says. “But if the body wants to express something in rambles, let it ramble.”
Writing the Body
[The event] Antoinette Cooper at Twenty Summers
[The time] Saturday, May 20, 6 p.m.
[The place] Hawthorne Barn, 29 Miller Hill Rd., Provincetown
[The cost] $20 suggested donation; see 20summers.org for information
