Interview - Jonathan Bazzi
by Michela Arfiero
by Michela Arfiero
[Michela Arfiero] In the preface to Corpi minori you write: “What follows is inspired by a story that is only now true” (“Quanto segue è ispirato a una storia che solo adesso è vera”). It reminded me, in part, of the preface to Mare oscuro by Giuseppe Berto: “Ever since Flaubert said Madame Bovary is me, everyone understands that a writer is always autobiographical. Yet one can say that he is less so when he writes about himself” (“Da quando Flaubert ha detto Madame Bovary sono io, ognuno capisce che uno scrittore è sempre autobiografico. Tuttavia si può dire che lo è meno quando scrive di sé”).
[Jonathan Bazzi] I was interested in making sure that whoever read the book wouldn’t take for granted that everything being said could be traced back point by point, one to one, because I think that a novel, a book, is in any case a construction, a set of mechanisms that are created with the idea of making the reader go through a certain kind of experience, and perhaps instilling questions and connections in them. And for me, that’s the meaning of a book, not the fact that there is some kind of fidelity to a supposed reality, to a given reality.
I wanted to make it clear that my intention wasn’t to transpose certain things that were true. But that there is a sense of narrative truth that interests me. I mean, our own perception is a mixture, it’s already narrative in some way, transfiguring; but at the same time, this idea that a novel only exists if there is a construction of plot and characters, I find that a bit superficial.
[MA] Reading you, I had the feeling of your gaze on things, an aesthetic point of view on places, bodies, illness, characters, and also on political issues. Is it a conscious position, or rather the way you see the world?
[JB] I realize that I’m driven by an attitude that is basically, purely aesthetic. I expect this can create, and does create, forms of annoyance. It may seem like someone is claiming the pure intellectual pleasure of things in the face of serious questions of justice. The point is that, because of my history, because of the conditions I was born into, I have gone through and continue to go through a lot of difficult situations where my own body has been at risk. So I absolutely understand the issues at stake, and it has happened to me, and still happens, although less and less, to intervene from a purely political-critical perspective. There, it’s clear that there is a voice and a certain direction to the words and thoughts that belong to that kind of practice, which has very precise internal logics.
But I understood that I’m driven by an aesthetic attitude. This is something that is also present in my first book, and that’s why I’m sorry when it is seen as a victimhood book, because instead my gaze, even when telling the story of the most complicated family issues, is always somehow looking for what is curious, anomalous, exciting. It’s as if, from a very young age, I think, I was driven above all by this need to feed myself on the most interesting, vivid, paradoxical manifestations.
[MA] Let’s talk about your debut book, Febbre. I wondered if you were ever afraid while you were writing it.
[JB] No, because Febbre was born in a kind of altered state. I had this childhood where communication and words were very scarce. Maybe I saw things happening around me, or overheard them, even spied on them through the keyholes, literally, but with very little habit of talking about them with the people around me.
I started planning it, I’d say, in 2014–2015, so that was before I discovered I had HIV. I had taken some notes, making a kind of outline, a framework, because I wanted to write a book about these characters, these figures I had carried with me since childhood. When the book was about to come out, that’s when, yes, I remember that two or three days beforehand I had some pretty strong bouts of agitation because it seemed to me that the book was armed.
[MA] The difference between having an illness, going through it, and telling its story… Have you ever thought that reading Febbre might have helped someone?
[JB] Yes, I realized that afterward. There are definitely a lot of people who have told me that, and of course it makes me happy, but it’s a positive side effect. I didn’t write it for that reason, just as I didn’t write it to do myself any good. I wrote it because for me it is natural and vital to appropriate experiences through writing, and so I go back to the sentence you quoted, which I put at the beginning of Corpi minori.
I realize that as long as things have simply happened to me, there remains a kind of distance and impersonality. When, instead, I write about them and appropriate them through writing, then they have a status of truth. Because at that point I am really there. I don’t feel that I am there in the idea, in the way people see HIV; I feel that I am there in the way I told the story, with all those paradoxical things, like the fact that when I found out, I was relieved, for example, because I had imagined a whole series of worse scenarios.
Or the fact that afterward I went down a hypochondriac path, I had convinced myself that I had much more serious things, and that ended up being my problem, rather than the discovery of the virus itself. Or also the fact that I stutter, and this characteristic, this condition of stuttering, was extremely more limiting and negative for me than HIV.
[MA] In Corpi minori there is this very geographical aspect. As if you were a “mapper” of your own areas, an animal that leaves and picks up traces. There are, for example, many streets in Milan, and then there is the route between Rozzano and central Milan. Reading it, I had the impression of being somewhere between a landscape and a tram stop. What is your relationship with your landscape?
[JB] I have a degree in philosophy, but I had this first part of my studies in art, and I have always been primarily interested in the human, personal plane, meaning the figure, faces, the body. Everything else, so architecture, landscape, places, are things I was never interested in, that never fascinated me.
When I started writing, not just books but also often smaller things, stories or articles, I found myself contradicting myself, because by talking about myself and the people I’ve had and have around me, I ended up talking a lot about places. In Febbre, where Rozzano is almost a co-protagonist, and also very much in Corpi minori, there is this mapping characteristic, but it came about spontaneously.
In Corpi minori, that thing emerged in the early stages of writing. At first, to remind myself what was in each chapter, I would put the street where it happened. Then when I saw the first five or six, I said, “But I could also keep them like this.” And this thing, repeated throughout all thirty, forty chapters of the book, creates this map-like structure of the book, which then connects very much with the spirit of the novel.
The thing you were saying, perhaps it’s connected, about the animal that goes around, since I only get around on foot, I don’t have a driver’s license, I don’t use any kind of transportation. My parents taught me how to ride a bicycle very late, so I don’t have exactly a very close relationship with it, and I never rode a scooter. I get around on foot, and perhaps this structure, this way of seeing things, also has to do with this very direct contact with places.
[MA] Jonathan in Corpi minori thought that changing places was enough to change your life. Does he still think so?
[JB] Yes and no. Certainly, the move I made at a certain point from the outskirts to the city was absolutely necessary. I grew up in that place, but I already belonged to the city. After that, I keep realizing, by now I’ve been living in Milan for almost twenty years, how much the outskirts keep emerging again and again even in the city where I live.
To the point that this thing almost seems to have a kind of face or a destined nature, it seems that I simply can’t leave these margins behind, which is not to say that I reject them. But this is precisely the theme of being under siege, of violating boundaries, of precariousness, of the violence around me—it’s something I often find myself in even though I’m in the city.
I think, more simply, it has to do with social class. Then obviously there is something I’ve also talked about recently, which is the implicit, or insufficiently emphasized, class filter that exists in cultural professions, in intellectual professions, which are difficult to access without the privilege of being born into it.
The thing is, this has consequences. If the world that produces opinions, ideas, stories is somehow only accessible from a certain class upward, a problem of narrowness is created, of having only a partial relationship with the truth, with fidelity to all the forms, varieties, and conditions of life. I definitely feel anomalous in the fact that people born and raised in the places I come from don’t do what I do, they don’t write, they often don’t even finish compulsory schooling.
[MA] Do you ever miss Rozzano?
[JB] I go back. And, still speaking of landscape, over the years I discovered the nature of Rozzano. At a certain point, somewhat by chance, walking through the transition areas between Rozzano and Milan, for example along the Naviglio Pavese, I realized that this is a corner of the Po Valley, and so there is all the flora and fauna of the plain.
Until I was living there, I had absolutely no eye for this. I realized what kind of nature Rozzano had been built on, what the apartment blocks of public housing had been built on in the ’60s and ’70s.
I remember very well the first time, fifteen years ago. I was walking and in the distance, in one of the fields—because that is also an area with a great agricultural past, where there used to be farmhouses, rice fields—I saw a heron.
For me, the fact that there was this heron was really a kind of short circuit. And then, in recent years, I discovered that right there in Rozzano, between the highway, the shopping center, and a chemical plant, there is this small nature reserve, this oasis. It’s called Oasi Smeraldino, and it came about at some point from a landfill that was reclaimed and cleaned up.
Now it is a protected area, managed by this group of volunteers who are all women, and it was another shock to my imagination. That is an area that represents a natural corridor, because the Lambro runs through there.
This too, today, given that I have developed this sensitivity toward animals, toward other species, well, all of this has reconciled me quite a lot, and I have my own vision of that place.
[MA] Do you have any rituals when you write?
[JB] Well, rituals. I’m thinking. I definitely need quiet. Quiet and silence, or something like that. So I don’t write with music, I don’t write outside the house. I’m very sensitive to interference, to disturbances, even sensory ones.
In the past I was a little more habitual, so I would get up very early in the morning and sit down to write. I mostly wrote during the first part of the morning.
Today, instead, it’s a little more varied. So actually what I need is some emptiness. I find it very difficult to write books by fitting them in between four, five, or six other things I have to do during the day.
This is something that is difficult, in my opinion, to get across and also to make people understand. Especially for long projects, I need this immersion in a fairly extended period of time.
[MA] I really like the word emptiness. The word, the theme of this issue, is heat. Heat has an ambiguous reputation: it oppresses, but it also comforts, it reveals, as happens in Febbre. How do you inhabit heat today?
[JB] Immediately, when I hear this word, my thoughts go to environmental conditions and climate. I don’t like heat, I don’t like summer. Again, I don’t understand why, in this ever-expanding polarization, we have to think that if you don’t like heat, you must like winter. No, instead I like intermediate temperatures, those conditions in which the climate doesn’t affect you, doesn’t limit you, it becomes subtle, gentle. For me, that happens between 15 and 22 degrees.
[MA] You are mildness.
[JB] I’m the middle ground, which is always something people don’t really like because it seems like giving up a position. Even in politics, the center, meaning those who don’t take a position. Or that the middle ground is made up of people who don’t commit themselves, something without personality.
And instead, I think it’s a hugely underestimated subject, which has to do with regulation, with self-regulation, and therefore also with discipline, which is something very transversal, that also applies to our relationship with desires, with the instinctual side.
I also connect the subject of heat to this question: how much heat, too much or too little. And yet yes, the subject of the middle ground, of the right balance, also has its own noble, ancient tradition.
[MA] Going back to heat. Do you have a physical memory of your body warming up?
[JB] In contact with others. This is also a subject I sometimes think about, because I was definitely a child who wasn’t very used to physical contact. I had this distant mother, in the sense that we didn’t live together. And anyway, I don’t have many memories, I have to say, of cuddling, hugs, tenderness with her.
Maybe I have more of them with my two grandmothers, maternal and paternal. And those are perhaps the memories that are most about relational warmth, warmth in the sense of contact.
[MA] “Da grande voglio essere Vanessa Beecroft.” Is she still one of your favorite artists, or have you changed your mind?
[JB] Even though I follow the visual arts less now than I did in my twenties, she is still a figure who fascinated me a lot because she was in line with my childhood passions. I’ve always had this passion specifically for the female figure, and when I started drawing and painting, they were my favorite subjects.
The characters I’m interested in also tend to be female, with a kind of female strength and power. Ever since I was little, I’ve had this passion for superheroes, witches, Joan of Arc, for these heroines with more or less superpowers.
[MA] What did you watch? Who was your favorite?
[JB] Wonder Woman, definitely. The TV series from the ’70s. They would record it, so I would watch it again on VHS, and while I watched it, like mirror neurons, I would imitate her movements, these geometric jumps she did.
I felt that I wanted to be that thing, and the same thing happened to me with Catwoman, for example.
[MA] So, if you could have a superpower, what would it be? Or what would you transform into besides Wonder Woman?
[JB] It’s not easy because then there’s a conflict between what might be useful to me and what I like most as an imaginary. I’m thinking. Let’s put it this way: speaking all languages.
Maybe partly because of the stutter, with English, even though I studied it and take lessons every now and then, I still have a lot of trouble.
Then, controlling the weather elements.
And then, I don’t know if it can be considered a superpower, but it’s my great obsession in life, at least in my adult life: animals, being able to save all animals.
[MA] Books you’ve never forgotten, or rather, the ones that come back.
[JB] There are many, definitely many. Maybe not so much novels. One above all, perhaps also because I like to mention her because she really was an important encounter: Simone Weil.
Every time I read her things, or when they come back to me, I feel that they belong to me. And then she has this thing that I recognize myself in, this writing in fragments, somewhat aphoristic, sometimes thoughts or images captured on paper without necessarily needing there to be a structure, a flow.
[MA] What is your wildest side, that part of you that resists domestication?
[JB] I have many. My wildest side is that very often I do what makes me feel good, and obviously that’s not a very civilized thing.
In fact, I also have a strong instinct for self-preservation, an instinct that feels wild to me. But this has to do with what I was saying before: I only do what makes me feel good, in the sense that I don’t know how to stay in a situation, in a hierarchy, if it’s not what I want.
At some point I connected this to the family I sort of didn’t have, so I’m not very used to compromise, to the blackmail that often binds families together. I love you if you somehow meet or fulfill the expectations I have of you.
Not having had that, I’m very free, in the good and positive sense of the word. Very wild, actually. Free.
[MA] Future desires? I imagine you have many, but let’s talk about the closest one.
[JB] Maybe it’s to share my life with animals again, because I had two cats who passed away over the last year. They were brother and sister, and I lived with them for seventeen years.
And that was a change, because I wasn’t a child who particularly loved animals. From what I remember, even in cartoons or fairy tales, I always focused on human beings.
And then I got them, I started living with them, partly out of curiosity, on a whim, because I had discovered this breed, Devon Rex, which are very unusual, also because of the shape of their faces, with these very large ears. Then they have short fur, almost like satin, like velvet.
They caught my attention and I got them, and my life changed from that moment on. They were definitely the most important relationship of my life.
A great exchange that made me more responsible, more adult, but also freer. Like cleaning everything away in order to return to the animal that we are and that we systematically forget we are.
Through them I remembered, for them but then also for myself, that there is a much simpler, more basic level, that that is enough.
So also, going back to the heat we were talking about before, I discovered a lot of it there too, in contact with them.
[MA] What were their names?
[JB] Mirtilla and Purè.