INTERVIEW: Stacy Hardy

Stacy Hardy. Image courtesy the author.

INTERVIEW
Stacy Hardy

Bridge Journal Fiction Editor Meghan Lamb’s interview with author Stacy Hardy appears here in advance of Hardy’s story collection An Archaeology of Holes, publishing Nov. 3 with Bridge Books, and now available for preorder here.

By Meghan Lamb

To begin: An Archaeology of Holes was previously published by a French publisher Ròt-Bò-Krik. I’ve seen the Bridge Books collection described in a few places as the English translation of the book. It’s interesting to think of this book as a “translation” because it was originally written in English. But I’m curious to hear if—in some ways—it feels like a translation to you after it’s been through this whole strange journey that its been through.

I always think that there was something quite special in first coming out in translation, and I think there’s something in translation that challenges authorship in really interesting ways.

I’m a big believer that no book is written by one author. Books are always multiple, because your book is always in dialogue. One’s writing is always in dialogue with so many other writers who in some ways feed into it, and then there are the conversations and the back and forth processes with editors, with friends that go on to inform the writing. So, I always see writing by nature as a collective practice, and I rebel slightly against the idea of ownership, of a single author.

Certainly, this book was informed by multiple conversations, by the many, many writers I have read who have informed it, and I suppose also by the process of going into a French translation, going through a second editorial process where, of course, I was also informed by conversations via the translation. An Archaeology of Holes is also a translation in that it has now gone from a South African context into an American world. So, it’s a very global book, and I love that.

Aside from ownership, I also rebel against the idea of nationality. I’m a great believer in ideas of Pan-Africanism in the possibility of what Sun Ra said, that there are other worlds out there, and the belief that we can make another world. Dambudzo Marechera, a wonderful Zimbabwean writer, was once asked where he was from, and he said that he refused his Zimbabwean nationality, that he belongs to the country of writers. More than anything else, I also belong to the country of writers. So, this is a book displaced by nations, through multiple translations, in conversations of so many different writers.

I had a feeling you’d respond that way, because you’ve talked a lot about this book as an international book, one that gestures to South Africa while also gesturing to no specific world, or a variety of worlds.

For me, the world of this collection is unsettling and unsettled, from the standpoint of including several stories that fall into a kind of uncanny realism wherein shocking or psychologically unmooring events take place—like the transportation of a corpse, or a person being murdered…things that are narratively heightened, but definitely not impossible. And these uncanny but not impossible stories are blended with things like a person—or, at least, I assume it’s a person—narrating from the inside of a cow, or a skeleton going back to visit her partner and his current girlfriend: decidedly impossible things that feel very real and very possible within

the world of this book. So, I’m curious: How does this blending of the uncanny-possible and the possible-seeming-impossible fit into your sensation of the world? And—perhaps specifically—the world you alluded to earlier: The world that is both “South Africa” and :the country of writers,” something broader?

I think a lot of that is that is is very much my own embodied experience of living in South Africa. It’s a country where, under apartheid, I experienced the claustrophobia and the brutality of colonized streets and segregated neighborhoods, which was followed directly by years of transition, where you had this sense of a world where things were blowing open. The gaps in the mortars of oppression were giving way to new forms of freedom, a freedom that was very ecstatic, visceral, messy, and quite short lived. At the moment, South Africa is a country that’s very much scarred by its history, subjugated by global capitalism and marked by violence, poverty, and alienation.

But at the same time, South Africa is a country that’s very much alive with magic. It’s a country filled with ghosts and specters conjured by everyday daily spells, seething with natural wonder. It’s a dizzying motion of landscapes and joyous interactions, and I think that my writing is very much rooted both within and against this.

You know, I think that to some extent, all of our bodies are riddled by what they’ve encountered, what they’ve been exposed to. So, I suppose it takes me back to the worlds you’ve alluded to, which are bodily worlds. I’m always interested in the transformative potential of the body. We are all bodies with lungs that collapse, bones that break, knees that knot. Sudden folds of fists. Gapes of mouths. And so, I’m interested in writing that is itself fantastical, magical, writing that screams, tears, dances, leaps. And I’m always interested in the possibility of writing in a way that constructs hybrid spaces that are not determined solely by geography, or ancestry, or by even biological dispensation.

I think that there are bodies inside bodies inside bodies. Our own bodies are evidence of this. We host numerous diseases in us, bacteria and microbes. And—certainly in my case—I think, in all of our cases, our brains are wired to the internet. I have a metal shoulder made of titanium that’s probably mined in the Congo. So, that internationalism is very much rooted in a lived and a very bodily experience, and yet—at the same time—it’s very much a specific lived and bodily experience.

Yes, absolutely.

I have thought that seethes with ancestral conflicts, haunted by the voices of my dead comrades.

That collapsing of the international and the specific—and all these bodies within bodies we harbor inside of us—resonates so much with my experience of the pandemic, and with a lot of dialogues around the pandemic. I know this collection has evolved so much over a broad swath of time. You’ve lived in a variety of different places and in a variety of different situations throughout the composition of this collection. When did this collection begin, and where did it begin from, if that’s even something that you can trace back to?

Cover of the Ròt-Bò-Krik French translation edition.

I do have a set point. I suffered for 8 years with undiagnosed tuberculosis, and if I were to say that they were a birth point of this collection, it's in that. It was when I first started to get ill and when I was not able to get a diagnosis by going to doctors. I had atypical tuberculosis; I didn’t have pulmonary tuberculosis, but what they call miliary tuberculosis, which spreads throughout the body in small lesions and is much harder to detect. It went undetected for many, many years, and that experience was very much the start of this collection.

There are a few stories in the collection that stem directly from that period, and it was very much the start of an investigation into something. I had this vivid sense of my body being inhabited by something, not knowing what it was, and being told that there was nothing wrong with me. I started to think of this illness as an alien that lived in my body. My normal sense of health and well-being, and the reliability of my body started to break down. My body really started to fail and became estranged, yet somehow closer to me. I had a very deep sense of being occupied by something, even if that occupant had no name. It was my little ghost, my little alien.

And then, I was finally diagnosed. I think the best way I can describe tuberculosis is a disease that eats holes in your body. It eats holes into your organs, and I'm still left with a lot of scar tissue from that. But I started to follow the holes in my body from tuberculosis, and started to research it more. I went down the holes in my body and I came out inside a mine in South Africa, because the history of tuberculosis is so vividly linked to the history of extraction economies and mines in South Africa. So, it was a process of traveling through the holes in my own body and arriving in the holes in the earth.

I started investigating those kinds of relationships between the body and the environment it occupies, and I suppose this is the heart was what I referred to as the archaeology of holes. Holes are both a lived and embodied experience in that sense of global capitalism and extraction economies, what these different systems of mining do to bodies, the holes they eat in bodies. But then, holes can also be escape routes: Black holes as portals where we can travel to other worlds and throughout the world. The collection was built largely out of those experiences, considering how holes can be things that contain us and trap us, but have the potential to be escape routes.

The collection also has origins in the pandemic, as you mentioned. Some of the work was written then. During the pandemic, I got stuck in Cairo, Egypt. This was during lockdown. I hadn’t expected to stay very long, but I ended up spending a year in Cairo. So, that also ended up feeding into the collection. And, of course I’ve spent time in America as well, so I think always living in multiple spaces, traveling a lot as I have in my life, has also kind of informed this book.

Do you feel closer to the alien in your body after all that? Do you feel like you’ve reached a kind of communion with that alien inside of you?

Oh, absolutely! I mean, we’ve had a love affair. [laughs] I could only describe it as a love affair with the alien inside my body, to the point that when I was told that I had tuberculosis—and my alien finally got its real name—and I was given my medication and told, “Take these pills and you will kill it,” I was like, “I don’t want to kill my alien!” So, you know, it was a very hard decision to kill it, and there was a part of me that didn’t want to be cured, just because I had developed such an intense relationship. I lived with something for eight years, and that’s a long time to share a body. Anybody who’s shared a house or a room or a life with another body—in a normal love affair—for eight years will know what that is. It’s a great giving of oneself, and when it ended after eight years, I felt an enormous sense of loss.

So certainly, this connection is also a celebration of those strange love affairs that we have, love affairs with the things that inhabit our bodies.

Yeah, I was going to say, my last marriage—that ended in divorce—was eight years. It was hard to end it even if it was eating away at me in all kinds of ways. A lot of this resonates with me.

It’s like the experience of reading and falling in love with a book, when you get to the last few pages and you’re like, “This book can’t end!” Because you’ve so deeply inhabited that book. You almost feel like something is dying because you develop such a deep love affair with that world and its characters and its people.

I want to talk about the different layers of violence in this collection. A lot of the work deals with gender-based violence, both external and internal, from physical violence being enacted on people to the more internalized, perhaps self-perpetuating violence of colonialism. But the collection is never polemic, It never spoon feeds you messages about violence. Rather, it deals with the complicated layers of culpability, without judgment (or at least, without overt judgment). As someone who’s not only written within these territories, but curated the Ukuthula project (which develops new writing from and against gender-based violence), I’m curious to hear more about your feelings around violence and this book’s ethos relating to violence.

I think that all our relationships around violence are very complex, and I that there’s a big danger in simplifying violence. I’m glad you used the word culpability, because I think we are always perpetuating violence against others while being subject to violence. As a white woman, I’m very aware of the complexity of my own history and my own culpability within forms of violence that are inherited, but nonetheless embodied. While I can say, “I don’t act like that” or “I don’t operate like that,” much of my life—opportunities I’ve had in my life, the fact that I grew up with clothes on my back when many other people didn’t, that I got an education when many other people didn’t—has been a direct result of the the labour of others, and the deaths of others. So, I’m very aware of the debt that I carry as a body, and the ways violence—the violence of my history—inhabits me. So, it’s necessary that I take on that culpability through projects like Ukuthula which attempt to birth new ways of writing about about gender- based violence.

This work is part of a long history of writing around gender-based violence. I look at the incredible writing of contemporary feminist writers in Mexico like Dolores Dorantes and Cristina Rivera Garza are doing against gender-based violence. South Africa is a very young country and a very new country, and we have a lot to learn from how women have operated elsewhere.

We also have a lot to learn about collectivity—to try and start projects around collectivity—because I believe if we are going to answer to or deal with forms of violence, we’re never going to do it alone. It needs to be done in conversation, and it needs to be done intergenerationally, and across genders as well. Writing serves a really important role in dealing with violence, giving us new language and ways to understand violence, offering strategies of resistance.

In my own reading, so many writers have given me tools for imagining work against violence. I’m a great believer that writing gives us the ability to imagine things differently. And I think the worst forms of violence attack the imagination, because I believe it’s the imagination that keeps possibility alive: The ability to imagine other worlds, the ability to imagine other futures, the ability to imagine things differently.

So, I always believe one should take on violence. I’m not somebody who believes that writing should shy away from violence. In the words of Cecilia Vicuna: the writing does not heal because it does not hurt. If we want to heal the wounds, we have to first confront, acknowledge, and live with it inside us, and find new language to write that pain. I believe we have an obligation to write the violence that we experience and to generate new language that allows us to think about these experiences differently. An Archaeology of Holes is a book that requires trigger warnings, but I believe that it’s important to write into those spaces.

Absolutely. I think it’s easy for people to take for granted that so much of the silencing within violence is not just based in people feeling threatened or afraid to speak out. Violence is when something happens beyond language, when you feel like you don't have the language communicate that experience.

I think that’s beautifully put. I do think that that is where forms like the poetic serve us, and certainly this is a collection that’s informed by the poetic, because in the poetic, one is trying to write what cannot be spoken, to write the unsayable. And I think that’s what makes writing so incredibly difficult, but also so incredibly wonderful.

Writing is both the greatest joy and the greatest terror, the greatest gift and the greatest curse. [smiles] I never take it for granted. I’m always so grateful to be able to write, to be able to bring books into the world, and to be able to work with so many amazing writers through this journey. I wake up every day and say, “How did I get so blessed that I get to write?” To do what I love, but also to converse with so many amazing writers. I cannot take sole ownership for this book. I have so many people to thank. [laughs] My thank you list is like a book in itself. Those other people have strengthened me as a writer. I’m deeply grateful to every book I’ve read, and I’m deeply grateful to all the writers who’ve been for me on me on my journey, who have changed my life. In so many ways, books have saved my life.

I’m really a grateful for your book! In turn, your work has informed a lot of my own writing, and a lot of my students’ writing by proxy. I’ve shown a lot of my students at the University of Chicago stories from this collection as examples of what’s possible in writing, and your work has been tremendously illuminating to them.

I’m currently working on a weird fiction collection that I’ve tried to write several times as a non-fiction book…and failed. I think the greatest writing comes from failed attempts to do something else, that through those failures you figure out what you really need to be doing.

I love that!

Through successive attempts to write this collection—that’s re-examining and re-inhabiting strange experiences I had living in Eastern Europe—I recognized, oh, these are all horror stories. This needs to be a collection of horror stories.

In any event, writing this collection has raised a lot of questions for me about the most personally exposing story in a collection and the ways a writer builds up—and builds tension—toward the heart of the collection, the most personally exposing story.

So, without necessarily revealing which story that is (or might be) for you, I’d love to hear a bit about how you’ve endeavored to build tension in this collection, to build up to the most tender or exposing point of the collection.

That’s quite a difficult question to answer, because I don’t know if one sets out to do that so much as it maybe just happens. I do always try to write what is uncomfortable to me, to write toward that point of exposure, in part because there’s always something about that vulnerability and exposure that thrills me. When I’m working on a project, I’m always surprised by the writing. I don’t sit down and think to write that story. It writes itself to some extent. And then, I often have that strange experience where I look at what I’ve created and it gives me a fright, or a thrill, or makes me gleefully laugh at what I’ve put on the page. At times, I’ve felt the fear of, “Oh my god, can you put this out there?”

I think that many of the stories that are the most exposing are also very funny.

Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me!

Stories like “The Little Skeleton,” which was such a joy to write because it was so very funny and I was laughing.

I certainly laughed while I was reading it. I thought that story was hilarious!

Stacy Hardy, chasing ghosts and shadows in the Moçâmedes Desert in Angola. Image courtesy the author.

But in some ways, it’s also a deeply personal and exposing story. “An Aesthetic of Rat Bites” is also a deeply personal and exposing story. I found it very difficult to write, to find the right texture where you’re dealing with that horror of one’s own exposing of violence across different classes and racial dominions, and one’s own bodies and one’s own culpability. It’s a very difficult and complex thing, to write those kinds of spaces. Stories like that were very difficult, and I went through multiple drafts trying to not be predatory about it. When you are writing about the violence of others, exposing the violence of others, one’s own culpability in those forms of violence.

I don’t ever think one can ever get that right. I think when one is trying to write one’s own capability, it’s always a horror story to some extent. That discomfort that I as a writer feel—and that I hope the reader also feels—is important for me.

And then there are other stories like the title story, “An Archaeology of Holes.” That’s a very personal story on another level. All these stories are very much rooted in lived experiences, even more so than some of the more realist stories that are already dealing with personal heart breaks and lived experiences in more straightforward autobiographical ways. These stories expose oneself in other ways. I know there are people who are mentioned in the stories who will be recognizable, and that’s part of the complexity of bringing other people to the page. It’s one thing to bring yourself, but when you start to bring other people to the page, what are the ethics of that?

I’d love to trace back to something you were saying about the deepest personal exposures often coming from the moments that you laugh at, or that seem laughable. I’m trying to write this essay about Suicide by Vi Khi Nao…

Oh wow, I love that book!

I found that book hilarious, and Vi wants people to find the book hilarious, but she says most people have been responding to it like it’s a very serious book…or that they just don’t know how to engage with a book that asks you to laugh about suicide.

Well, I always think that laughter stems—to some extent—from a kind of confusion. When they talk about like why babies laugh, it’s both shock and then familiarity. Laughter is always surprised—to some extent—and then, familiarity. Certainly, within Africa and within South Africa, laughter is also a wonderful rebellion against forms of violence. Fela Kuti talks about this, “suffering and smiling,” as he calls it. It’s how we take things back. But then, you know, the awkwardness in those most deeply personal moments are the things that we also should be laughing at.

[laughing] Yes!

The most hilarious things, the ludicrousness of ourselves! Moments of pain are often the very most funny funny.

I still have a lot of health issues left over from tuberculosis. I got very sick when I was in Cairo during the pandemic. I think it was the incredible violence of the moment and then finding myself in an unfamiliar space. And things were very rough in South Africa. There was so much death, and it was a very, very hard time, so I got very ill, very weak, and I struggled to lift myself up, to be able to stand from a crouching position. My little legs were so weak; I have always had skinny little legs, which are vividly portrayed in “The Little Skeleton.” But, I couldn’t get myself up from the floor without using something to push myself, or to pull myself up.

So, I was on the street, and I dropped my keys, and I went down to get them, and then I had nothing to pull myself up, so I could not get off the ground. So, there I was, on the streets of Cairo, this little white girl in the middle of Cairo, and Cairo streets are always teeming with people. I had nothing to pull myself up, so I had to crawl to the nearest thing I could grab onto. Nobody had ever seen anything like this, so everyone was just staring with absolute horror. But it was also really funny! You know, it’s terrible. It’s awful. But it’s also incredibly funny!

That’s the kind of comedy I was trying to bring into the light: The shock of the wrong body in the wrong place doing the wrong things, and the ways our bodies let us down, our unruly bodies that are always doing terrible things that you don’t want the body to be doing in that moment.

That strikes me as such an apt expression of the writing process itself. Like, “Oh, I’m on the ground, and my legs are not going to get me up. I have to look for something I can grab onto that’s going to get me up, and we’re just going to go from there! It’s going to be a series of weird strategies that I have to find in the midst of floundering and falling.”

And it’s always about movement!

Here’s another anecdote and I think perfectly captures the humor in this book. I had my passport, and all my papers stolen when I was in Angola, and all my money. I had nothing, and I had to try and get my way from the border all the way to Luanda to get to the embassy with no passport, no papers, and no money. So, I managed to borrow a bit of money of people and get myself onto a public bus that took 48 hours, roaming over roads that are not roads anymore. And of course, it’s stopping in every tiny village, and there are no toilets. So, you have to just, you know, find a space…

Oh god, I would be so doomed! I have to piss all the time!

[laughs] I was doomed! I mean, anyone who knows me knows that I need to pee like 500 times a day!

So, all you can do is rush out the bus and try to find the nearest place, run into the bush or whatever. And of course, because I was this white woman on a public bus in Angola, I was already a spectacle. People just were not used to it. So, I would arrive, and the bus would stop, and I would get out and all the little kids from the nearest village would be amazed to see this little white woman, and they’d latch onto me. And then they would see me run off into the bush and follow me. And then, I would pull my pants down, and the minute they saw my shiny whiter-than-the moon little ass, the kids would start to laugh. And then, they’d cheer and clap!

[laughing] Oh my god! Oh wow!

So, I literally peed my way across the whole of Angola to an audience of cheering, clapping, and laughing children.

That’s glorious! That’s amazing. Well, this is a good segue to another question I wanted to ask about creating a kind of African collective across borders. You’ve worked for a long time with a pan-African creative collective called Chimurenga that serves as a kind of cross-cultural, cross-discipline hybrid of pursuits, similar in a lot of ways to what Bridge is trying to do. And yet, I know it has been very difficult for you, forging a kind of creative home—or series of satellite homes—in South Africa.

So, with all that in mind, I’m curious to hear about how your involvement with Chimurenga intersects with your evolution as a writer.

I always say I don’t work for Chimurenga, but that I’m a student at the University of Chimurenga, because it really is a space where I have learned more than I could ever dream of.

In terms of my evolution as a writer: What I aspire to do has been hugely informed by working with Chimurenga. I’ve had an opportunity to work with the brightest, most brilliant minds in the world.

I also think that it’s a pan-African space, a liminal space that’s quite awkward in South Africa, but more than anywhere else, it’s a home for me, as a writer. It’s my community.

But it’s also meant that I always struggle to place my creative writing. Chimurenga doesn’t really publish fiction books, and I’ve always struggled to find a home, to sort out those more hybrid spaces, so to speak, that don’t draw the set lines between different genres of things, and I suppose publishing with Bridge feels very much a homecoming, in that kind of way.

The Bridge Books English translation version of Hardy’s An Archaeology of Holes (click image to order).

Chimurenga will always be my first home and the space where I got my education, where I’ve had the opportunity to learn. And I’m a great believer that these constructs between genres are very artificial, and very much part of the colonial project of dividing up art, music, and writing. And I think that there’s an enormous danger in that. I think that the best writing always happens in conversation.

I think the best writing is in conversation with music, that the best writing has musicality, and the best music has literary value, and all of these things are forms of visualization as well, and that our work is always strengthened by interacting across and through different forms. That’s certainly how Chimurenga operates: A refusal to draw the boundaries between these different forms.

It’s very important that I don’t just interact with literary communities, but also with artistic communities, with musical communities, because my own work has been strengthened so much by music. And you know my writing always exists in conversation with music, and I know that that’s something that you will also deeply appreciate because I know that you’re also a musician and a singer. And I think that that’s really important. I always try to work with musicians. One of the blessings of coming to Chicago is I’ve been working with musicians here, and poets.

Yeah, so much of my frustration around academic, craft-oriented conversations of writing are steeped in this performative responsibility, this expectation that you're the expert of your domain, that you have to perform this role of being the expert of writing fiction (as opposed to nonfiction or poetry or whatever), which really limits the breadth of what you can gesture to, and really limits learning about your own discipline as a writer. If you have to be the expert of this little narrow thing, you’re not going to expand the possibilities of what you can do, or expand your own understanding of what’s possible.

Since we’re talking about conversation: So much of your work is steeped in a spirit of conversation and collaboration, from the Pulmonographies project you’re working on with anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rayan, poet Daniel Borzutzky, and the musical artist Neo Muyanga, to the work of Anna Kavan, who has inspired a book project that’s kind of an alternate imagination of Anna Kavan’s life during that period when she lived in South Africa.

I’d love to hear more about, what collaboration and conversation mean in the projects you’re working on, and what’s to come.

Well, I love to learn and it’s via collaborating that I learn and I challenge myself. And I am just so blessed to work with the amazing people I’m getting to work with at the moment, and I count you as one of these, Meghan. I’m just very grateful and indebted. I’m grateful for this collection. Certainly, it’s fiction. And there are a myriad of writers that have informed both this collection and my current work. Kavan has informed it, Clarice Lispector is another huge kind of influence on it. And also philosophers. I often find that when I read philosophy, I write better fiction, and that’s the thing that spurs me to want to write.

And I’ve learned so much via working with an anthropologist in terms of thinking about how one can expand one’s practice, the role of field work, how it understands the relationship between research and writing, by working with an anthropologist like Kaushik Sunder Rayan, who has also in many ways informed both this collection and the new work.

I’ve been very blessed in Chicago to be able to work with Daniel, which has been a life-changing experience, and I will forever be grateful and in his debt to how much I’ve learned working with him. And I’ve also learned so much through his refusal of going, “What is poetry?” His refusal to draw boundaries, his radical openness. We’ve done a little book together, and he just said, “Let’s do sketches for the book.” I’ve learned so much from the beauty of work that comes from entering bases where one is not an expert, entering in the spirit of learning.

That’s such a beautiful thing. People need to be less afraid of looking like they don’t know what they’re doing.

I think that's something that I realize more and more. No one knows what they’re doing. We’re all just kind of struggling and feeling our way around in the dark. I certainly am, and I’m always amazed. I learn more from my students when I teach writing that my students will ever learn from me. I often think I should be paying them and that there’s something backward in this student-teacher dynamic, but I always relish every opportunity to be a student as well. Which is why I was very lucky to have taken a class with you, Meghan. And I’m taking classes with Daniel at the moment ,which has been the best thing that I’ve ever done.

For me, those classes offer me the most enriching moments. When you open yourself up to be a novice, to learn from scratch, that’s when you really grow.

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