Excavating the Unconscious in "An Archaeology of Holes"

alepique

Dec 8

In a 2018 interview, author Stacy Hardy cited Sylvia Wynter as one of her favorite authors and theorists; Hardy specifically noted her admiration for Wynter's work on the social strictures and boundaries that form a shared concept of "humanity." Hardy, like Wynter, is deeply invested in the liberatory potential of asking, What does it mean to be human? Who gets to be human? What does a human look like?

Hardy, an editor for the pan-African journal Chimurenga and a current Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago's Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, poetically centers these questions in her short story collection An Archaeology of Holes (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2022). As an English translation of the book became available from Bridge Books in November of this year, English-speaking readers can now access the twenty-four stories that bring life to Hardy's own experience growing up under South African apartheid. Yet, this is not to say that Hardy's work is strictly biographical; rather she lays bare the logics of violence that are intertwined within systems of oppression. Through the dissection of these relationships, she illuminates how social conceptions of race and gender become weaponized under systemic cruelty. This weaponization in turn renders certain bodies vulnerable, penetrable, and not fully human.

The repeating image of a hole then becomes a central motif throughout the collection. The hole becomes the avenue by which Hardy communicates not only the anatomical penetrability of bodies, especially those of women and girls, but also the isolation and fear that the apartheid society engenders. In the story "The Wound," featuring an omniscient narrator who details a nameless protagonist's changing relationship to her titular injury, she writes, "Human beings are fragile; skin can be torn, cut, pierced, bones can be broken, even hearts, she thought, encased in the ribcage, aren't safe" (116). As the story continues, the protagonist's wound gains new importance and sway over her selfhood: "She stared into its chasm and felt hunger well up" (119).

It's at this turn in the relationship between hole and character, absence and presence, that Hardy succeeds in subverting reader expectations. The story's protagonist considers feeding the wound toy soldiers that remind her of her father's own military history, a narrative development that allows readers to visualize the body's ability to contain histories and violences, yet endure. The body as history, an archaeological dig, is also the lesson of "The Little Skeleton," which tells the story of a skeleton, once a girl, who finds her way home to discover her boyfriend (and potential murderer) living with a woman who closely resembles her. The nameless boyfriend's response to the reappearance of his formerly deceased lover is to begin obsessively making pancakes, while firmly insisting that both women join him in eating. While the living lover protests about the food's calories, the skeleton eats her fill. Though the skeleton's consumption is now unencumbered by the gendered expectations of the female body, her disregard and tenacity in the face of the boyfriend's quiet menace present the possibility of a type of life after death.

With prose compared to Clarice Lispector's, Hardy's collection explores the possibilities of the body under violence as a container, as a historical site, and as a vehicle for transcendence. The image of the hole and its excavation becomes a means by which Hardy communicates how beyond absence, beyond the void, beyond the repressed, there lies the unconscious: unruly, untamed, and utterly full of life. With stories that range from the despicable cruelties of racial violence to the experience of abjection in a gendered body, and that navigate the thin line between acts of barbarity against animals and people, Hardy's collection is uneasy, uncomfortable, and utterly unmissable.