Gentle stranger, I hope this email finds you well is a collection of letters, written by artists around the world. Each artist explores care in some aspect of their work, and each letter is written in response to the previous one. These letters, which may take the form of (creative) writing, sound or visual essays, will be published weekly, from June 1st onwards. With these letters, we invite you to think with us about new ways of thinking about and through care, in these changing times.

This letter by Sophie Fetokaki, responds to Kelly Lloyd's, which you can read here.

Dear Friend,

I am starting to write the myth of our meeting. Like most myths it is deviant, anomalous. A joke gone too far. A story that spills out of forms that can’t contain it.

The myth begins with this image:

I have studied this image at length, have returned to it on each of the ten days since our meeting. I meditate on it diligently, noting each unfurling trace of what doesn’t yet exist.

The myth also begins with an M.

M for memory, M for muchness, M for mucus, M for mother, M for M–, and much more.

Let’s continue with M–.

My friend M– is writing the book of her life. She is down in the bowels of it. It is deep, and real, and is touching with healing life force all those tightly closed buds that emerged in her two decades or more ago but could never bloom, for lack of light and water and nourishment.

I have been, in M–’s words, ‘holding her hand’ through this process. Not because she can’t walk without me (she can), but because we both feel – in our hearts, in our abdomens, in our blood, in all those places that we feel – that the only antidote to our alienation from our own selves is our love for each other. 

M– and I found each other ten years ago in a crowd of new students and bonded over our mutual disdain for the puerile rituals of our conservatoire’s induction day. At the time we both had long, curly hair, and during subsequent years the canteen staff would occasionally mistake us for one another.

I’m fairly certain it was M–’s hair that drew me to her. And that part of that attraction must have had to do with seeing myself. But the sameness is treacherous, mischievous. It breeds deeply felt and long-lasting ambivalence.

It is also M–, a different M–, who sings the melody […] Cause it’s me, I made you in my image […].

Then there is M for Magic Mirror in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story: the gate that is ‘both open and closed,’ ‘neither closed nor open,’ bordered by a mysterious and permeable glassy membrane which reflects the traveller seeking to pass. The mirror reflects in negative, showing us not what we see of ourselves, but those parts that we shamefully, disdainfully, reject. Beyond the Magic Mirror Gate lies Uyulala, The Southern Oracle, and in order to take this step closer to reaching her, the traveller must confront their doppelgänger. In the words of Professor Engywook: ‘If you want to go through, you have to – in a manner of speaking – go into yourself.’

Once we pass through the mirror there is only melody, only fluid entry into and dwelling in one another, only constant passage into and through our biologically promiscuous ear canals and tympanic membranes, the always-open gateways of subjecthood.

[…] Cause it’s me, I made you in my image
and if I asked you to understand […]

M– has been my Magic Mirror, but I have had many others. Others I have entered and in doing so have seen myself as I did not want to be seen. The pain that is generated in that seeing is the same old pain that caused the blindness in the first place. It hurts and so we learn to turn away from it, away from that gnarled surface that began to form when a word propelled from a father’s mouth or a mother’s eyes lodged itself in our sapling bodies, to borrow M–’s metaphor.

But there are other forces that stunt the growth, forces far less palpable than blunt impact. M– and I speak of air, and of the absorption of shock waves emanating from violent changes in its pressure, its temperature, its density. The force you can never see, never point to, that silently rends the insides. We speak of our bodies as absorbers, as barriers, as shields for our siblings, metaphorically, literally. M– tells me how she stepped in to be mother, wife, sibling, carer, because her girlhood wisdom told her someone had to do it. What kind of knowledge grows from that situation? What kind of tough, sinewy, rind-coated knowledge of the violence of familial love?

[…] and if I asked you to understand
that I see what I see, I don’t see what I can’t […]

M is also for muchness. There is such a muchness about us, a muchness in all of us. You know this so much better than I. You who contains such hordes of creatures. You to whom the concept ‘other’ is nothing but a quaint conceit. You who gave me the augur of a hawk moth when I stroked your furrowed skin.

There is a muchness about all plants, but some more than others. There is something camp, something so inherently démesuré – to borrow Susan Sontag’s adjective – about the passion fruit flower, the pomegranate blossom, the pinecone. In her essay ‘Notes on Camp,’ Sontag describes camp sensitivity as ‘the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are-not.’ There is something flagrantly performative, a one-and-both-at-once about the reproductive structure of the flower. Function and abundance in one. It’s all too much.

‘Camp is the triumph of the epicene style,’ writes Sontag. I like the word ‘epicene’. In linguistic contexts it refers to nouns that either [a] have only one gender class, regardless of the sex of the creature in question, or [b] can be gendered, but are invariant, i.e. do not change form according to sex. Examples are unavailable in English, since it does not gender nouns, but can be found in Spanish and French: la persona, a feminine noun referring to a person of any gender, epicene in sense [a]; and l’enfant, the child, epicene in sense [b], in that whether the article is un or une, the noun is still enfant. ‘Epicene’ also has a range of other meanings, including ‘gynandrous’, ‘unisex’, ‘asexual’, ‘of indeterminate sex’, etc. 

While the definitions are always rooted in gender, the etymology is not. The word is derived from Ancient Greek ἐπίκοινος: epi (‘on’) + koinos (‘common’). The etymology digs down under gender and comes up the other side, recognising that there is simply a lot of muchness and often it isn’t possible to hold it all down in this or that category. That there are certain things that are common, and what is common can be exchanged. Sontag calls it ‘convertibility,’ ‘Being-as-Playing-a-Role’. Camp is the elevation of this convertibility to the level of an entire system of meaning; the expansion of the quotation marks from a feature of punctuation to a mode of being. What else is there to do, when you are simply too much for the world around you?

Camp knowledge is seriously savvy. It gets at a fundamental insight, which Sontag phrases as follows: ‘All style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene.’ She goes on to say that neither life nor nature are stylish (and perhaps by extension cannot be camp), but I would beg to differ. I see a profusion of performances in the blossoms of apple trees, lemon trees, courgette and aubergine plants, performances of extravagance and surplus that would put even Jayne Mansfield to shame, as she twists and swirls around a male chorus who chant much too much too much too much too much…

Not only are plants camp, but they are also profoundly queer. In her ‘Queer Nature Project,’ French landscape architect and spatial designer Céline Baumann explores the ‘intimate behaviour of the botanical world.’ She writes:

[Plants’] reproducing organ – commonly the flower – is often their most distinguishing feature, and responds to a great diversity of gender form variations, accompanied by various attention-seeking behaviours. Some are unisexual and own separate male and female attributes, either on a separate specimen, or with separate male and female flowers on the same plant. Some species are bisexual, also known as simultaneous hermaphroditism, and poses both male and female parts within the same flower. Others are transitionally transgender, also described as sequential hermaphroditism. Such species change their morphological expression from male to female to hermaphrodite, depending on a number of factors like age, time of day, or environmental conditions.

Anyone who has ever grown a courgette plant knows something of these phenomena. Each individual plant produces a profusion of flowers that would appear to be identical but are in fact of either male or female sex, enabling the plant to pollenate itself. Their queerness suits them very well and they grow in such abundance through the long southern summers that they are renown for the problem of glut. My mother frequently tells me she has given a bag of them away. ‘I just can’t eat that many courgettes,’ she sighs.

Much too much. There is always too much to hold. Too much to contain in a mouth, in a flower, in a word. So we spill over, as I spilled into you, coming so close that our tendrils interlace and grow on, with, against, around each other’s bodies.

M– and I have grown together, but we were growing together long before our tendrils touched. The knowledge that is common to us brings us so close that in accessing it, we become what is common to our bodies. We become our fluids, our inside spaces, our psychic drifts.

But it is not a blissful union. Every time I accidentally go scavenging in M–, or in anyone else, for a piece of myself, I feel pain, and shame. I feel that I have violated the sanctity of what is common to us. But there is no other way to know how to proceed; the practice of being in and with our common substance is a practice of divination – a practice of telling a future way of being together, in which we will often botch the readings, confuse the signs.

It’s not that we shouldn’t enter; we just have to keep remembering that entering is a contract. In entering, we also commit to passing through our own reflection and coming out the other side. That commitment is how we care. Care is what happens at the interlaces, it is what we do when we attend to the overlap.

[…] that I see what I see, I don’t see what I can’t
you’d know I’m nothing […]

It is a commitment to meet ‘eye to eye,’ in the words of the formidable Audre Lorde, of whom I have lately become an ardent and steadfast disciple. It is deep and humbling to read the magnificence that issued from her, and to begin to feel around the edges of the illustrious tradition of Black feminisms, often stopping to weep with both joy – that I have encountered it – and grief – that I have lived so long without it. But as with M–, it is not a blissful union (there are, of course, no blissful unions). Reading Lorde is a powerful lesson in what Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge termed, in relation to her work, ‘difference-infused relationality.’ I ask myself, over and over, Who am I, reading this? What is my relation to these words? What am I doing when I cite them?

A few days after I visited you, I began to read Lorde’s ‘Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger’ (1983). It is an essay I can’t and won’t try to summarise. I will only point to certain passages, first the one that ignited this letter, a passage which is itself contained in a letter, from Lorde to Leora, her prospective (Black, female) therapist. In this letter, she writes:

This territory between us feels new and frightening as well as urgent, rigged with detonating pieces of our own individual racial histories which neither of us chose but which each of us bears the scars from. And those are particular to each of us. But there is a history which we share because we are Black women in a racist sexist cauldron, and that means some part of this journey is yours, also.

The words ‘rigged with detonating pieces’ sent me running for my writing tools. That’s it, I thought. The space is already rigged with explosives before we enter. Hidden in M– are the parts of myself I am terrified of seeing (that’s why I’ve put them in her) and the same is true for M–. And that shame I feel when I trip the wires is the pain of my own exposure and my own treachery.

Every word of Lorde’s is worth quoting, even as I recognise that so much of it I don’t and won’t ever understand in an embodied or situated way. When I come to her, I feel the latches lifting in my mind, in my body, I feel a word-hoard at the bottom of the sea being pried open and all the beautiful syllables rising lithely to the surface.

The road to anger is paved with our unexpressed fear of each other’s judgment.
Lorde.

We can learn to mother ourselves.
Lorde.

Mothering ourselves means learning to love what we have given birth to by giving definition to.
Lorde.

As we fear each other less and value each other more, we will come to value recognition within each other’s eyes as well as within our own, and seek a balance between these visions.
Lorde.

Mothering means the laying to rest of what is weak, timid and damaged – without despisal – the protection and support of what is useful for survival and change, and our joint explorations of the difference.
Lorde.  

M is for mother. M is for mothering. M is for you, the matriarch. I brought this grief to you, this grief over the explosive territories of intimacy […] you’d know I’m nothing […] this guilt over tripping the wires. I kneeled down at your gateway and breathed the grief out of my palms and into your rich resin [...] other than human […] and you took me in all your hundreds of arms and breathed back into me, and when I was full of your breath I pressed my palms together, and in prayer brought them to my forehead (my thoughts), and to my lips (my words), and my chest (my actions), and as my parallel thumbs touched my chest I felt your song flow into me, and from my sternum to my toes and my cranium my bones filled with the deepest tenderness and the softest mercy, my ears ringing with your song […] you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human you are only human […]

M is for the mothers we find. M is for the membranes we pass through. M is for mucus, the gatekeeper of the inside. M is for the microscopic ovulatory forest, the watery forest of endlessly unfurling ferns.

The myth of our meeting ends, insofar as it can have an end, with writing. And as I write to you, I think about how writing is something I participate in much more than it is something I do myself. I think about writing as, in Sophie Lewis’ words, ‘an archetypal example of distributed, omni-surrogated creative labor’. Writing as collective propagation, as a practice to which I owe my continued survival and flourishing, and to which I offer my body and its knowledge.

Thank you for dematerialising yourself into me.

Your devoted child,

S.F.

P.S. Molly Sarlé’s song ‘Human’ can be seen and heard here – Jayne Mansfield’s plenteous faces are from a scene in Too Hot to Handle (1960) – Céline Baumann’s Queer Nature Project can be accessed here – all Audre Lorde text is from ‘Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger,’ which is in the collection Sister Outsider and is widely available, but here is an annotated copy from Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ ‘intergenerational multi-locational multi-media educational initiative’ School of Our Lorde – the phrase ‘difference-infused relationality’ is from Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge’s Intersectionality (2016) – the Sophie Lewis quotation is from the introduction to Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019) – the Alexis Pauline Gumbs quote is from her doctoral dissertation "We Can Learn To Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism (2010), which is available on DukeSpace – the first ‘ferning’ image is in Wikimedia Commons, and the second is a slightly edited version of an image in this article.

Sophie Fetokaki is from Cyprus and has journeyed thirty-four rounds of the sun. She is currently located on an island in the Thracian sea, where she is forming a doctoral dissertation about practice and its liberation from work. You can find more of Sophie’s work here.

Click here for Kelly Lloyd’s letter, which came before, and here for Ada Maricia Patterson’s letter (which will be published on June 15th).

Many thanks to Manon Beury, Tudor Etchells, Emily Medd, James Medd and Melanie Healy, Rapolas Rucinskas and all those who preferred to remain anonymous, whose contributions helped make this project possible.