SIPHOKAZI JONAS

If the point of a review is to help a reader decide whether to pick a book up or not, I’ll start with the end in mind. Pick this book up. Take it home with you. Feel the press of its weight in your (very likely) tote bag. Don’t let it languish on your bookshelf like all the other books which you have promised you will read. This is a haunting treasure worthy of slow and intentional excavation. My experience as a performer often leads me to ask the question of embodiment first. How does the ‘thing’—in this case a text—enter the body through the senses? And how do I enter the thing which must be read? What is the nature of these two points of entry, which are a disruption between body and place? The experience of reading for An Archaeology of Holes can be extrapolated from ‘The Empty Plot’ on page 197:  

Deep holes sunk in the earth, now filled with murky water that collects debris, the pokes of steel foundations casting dancing shadows on the surface, like the spines of poisonous fish.

This is not to suggest messiness or confusion, rather that Stacy Hardy is a writer who is at home in discomfort and who is interested “murky waters… [and] the pokes of steel foundations”. She leaves it up to the reader to determine the parameters of their own comfort. And this text prodded, nibbled and tore its way into my psyche.

It makes sense for a collection titled thusly to have such a strong sense of place. The discipline of archaeology is consumed by what place can tell us about human behaviour. These short stories drill through you with relentless intention, and often just as I thought I was grounded, an abrupt shift, a contradiction, an ending. At times I was caught up in the headiness of a gravity-defying ride at the fair of ‘The Taste of Your Tongue’. Then there is ‘Point of Departure’ and ‘Men on the Side of the Road’ which leave you with an itch, but not for resolution, the kind you feel under the scab of a healing wound, skin tightening, as you try your best to resist the urge to pick at it.

In the beginning I had questions: What ties these stories together, besides holes? Is it place? Nameless character? Is it the ever-shifting I? I soon realised that I was asking the wrong questions. Not only because the delicious heft of the book meant I could not read it in one sitting, or that the sometimes macabre, disturbing, and erotic horror of the imagery demanded that I step away. But maybe connection is not the point. As the feminist group leader in ‘An Archaeology of Holes’ says on page 178:

She tells me that I have misunderstood the whole thing. She says that what I am making is a round wall. She says the hole is only revealed at the moment of collapse. It is in the collapsing, that the hole divulges itself to us, its potential and its mysteries…I walk to the fence and kick my hole in. I am dismayed at how easy it is. One stomp launches an avalanche. Nothing remains but a small indentation.”

It feels as if this is Hardy’s point, or at least what I am reading into the work. When I release my efforts at excavating for some meticulous meaning, I become aware of the embodied experience of engaging this text. My tense jaw and shallow breath while reading “The Pattern of Trees”. I am both fascinated by her creative approach to a familiar topic, and once again reminded of the prevalence of missing bodies in South Africa. Around the time when I started reading the book there had been an uptick in the circulation of ‘Missing’ posters on Whatsapp. Only one person was found alive by the time I had finished the book. Many families have still not come back with a social media update; there is only the waiting. The gore in ‘The Wound’ evokes the same involuntary fascination of looking at a car accident scene. This time the infection and degeneration are still accompanied by breath. The girl is as fascinated by the wound as we are. The things that go missing, not in the body of the earth, but her own body.

There is an interesting echo between ‘The Day White People Walked into the Sea’ and ‘River Blindness’. The latter makes me think of Plato’s cave, briefly. Characters like marionettes playing out a doomed performance, the shadows which look like truth. The movement of bodies in full momentum is driven by different types of blindness. Hardy unravels a complicated but inevitable kind of magic, revealing something of societies confronting their decay:

Everything is losing its edge, everything bleeding into everything else. A matter of giving away, of no longer resisting. She is herself becoming we. Becoming a forest. (The Pattern of Trees, 16.)

I love books where authors don’t reveal craft on the page, but make you feel something deeply all the same. Not only does the text enters the body through familiar spaces, but it makes new and surprising pathways. And Stacy Hardy has a deft hand. One that points to the violence of the axe while we obscuring the knife piercing the skin over and over again. This work made me think of an isiXhosa saying “uluma, evuthela.” Usually, this saying, relates to someone with double standards. It comes from a myth about rats, which I grew up hearing. The belief is that rodents nibble on your flesh while you sleep and blow gently on the wound as they go to prevent you from feeling the pain. But in this case, it feels apt to describe An Archaeology of Holes, an unflinching reflection which is no less poetic,even when the images were unsettling and uninterested in beauty. So many lines were thrilling, and they satisfied the poet in me deeply.

There is a moment in ‘An Aesthetic of Rat Bites’ where the protagonist turns her eye and the lens inwards, from witnessing society to looking at herself. The delicate membrane between dream-imagination and reality is ruptured and the resulting abrasions caused by rat bites is “depraved; unclean, and overly revealing” and on seeing herself the speaker feels “raw, alive, hungry… gazed, exhausted, and transfixed” page 149. This feels like an invitation to the reader to be just as aware of their own gaze as well.

In an interview with Fortunate Jwara, the author shares that, “For me, ethics emerge through form, not message: if a text unsettles the reader’s habits of looking, if it disrupts narrative comfort, if it refuses easy identification… that refusal is already an ethical act.” This collection was unsettling, in the best way. It is visceral, it enters the body and leaves traces which linger long after the last page.