On Friday 31 May, SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea hosted and In Conversation between writer, editor, researcher and head of Creative Writing at Wits University, Stacy Hardy, and Chicago-based poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky, featuring Chicago-based poet, artist, and editor Fred Schmalz and moderated by Impresario for the Less Good Idea, Neo Muyanga.

Using Hardy and Borzutzky’s new publication The Breathers as a point of departure, the four discussed breath as a form of resistance, asphyxiation in Africa and the Americas, and writing as a collaborative act.

The Breathers

The Breathers is a collaborative long poem written by Borzutzky and Hardy. The project is an attempt to experiment with ways to document both the suppression of breath caused by capitalism, and the liberation of breath, or, the mere act of breathing as a form of political resistance to those forces that confront our bodies with what cannot be said, what cannot be seen, and what cannot be done.

Part opera, part angry rant, part lullaby, part dream song, part soliloquy, The Breathers channels what the politics of breath looks like across languages and borders, and through Africa and the Americas.

Collaborative writing and multiple points of departure

What one word must never be said?
Dead, and these men fight off our dying,
Cough in the theatres of war.

– Muriel Rukeyser

Hardy and Borzutzky cite The Book of the Dead, Muriel Rukeyser’s long narrative poem as an essential point of departure for their own long poem, The Breathers. The book itself is dedicated to Rukeyser and features extracts from her prose.

Opening the In Conversation, and situated throughout it, are moments of collaborative reading. Here, Hardy, Borzutzky and Schmalz read from The Breathers – the structure of which lends itself to a conversational, call-and-response kind of reading – while Muyanga compliments the prose with an improvisational musical performance. A series of drawings and illustrations from the book are projected onto the wall behind them.

Hardy and Borzutzky explain that psychoanalyst and social philosopher Frantz Fanon’s notion of breath as resistance was another essential source of inspiration for the text. Over time, their collaborative writing practice grew into a series of cross-continental musings on machines, repair, bodies, breath, labour and death amongst other things.

The idea of holes became another generative metaphor throughout the book, as did the notions of writing for the dead, and economies of disease and dis-ease. Writing via email to one another over an extended period of time, explain the authors, also lead to a certain cross-pollination – a process of “infecting one another’s practice.”

Similarly, Muyanga and Hardy reflected briefly on their own history of collaboration through the cultural production platform Chimurenga, and how a long-term process of thinking and working alongside one another can influence creative practices.

At the end of the discussion, questions from the audience prompted further reflections from Hardy and Borzutzky in relation to the act of writing.

CREDITS

MODERATOR | Neo Muyanga
DISCUSSANTS | Stacy Hardy, Daniel Borzutzky & Fred Schmalz