Petra Hůlová: Trying to think differently than me (Attempt at Barubara)

Can we think in another way than human? Inspired by the author’s visit to a forest and meadow plot in the Orlické Mountains, the text is an attempt to think beyond humanity, which, against the background of real and imaginary situations from the symposium itself, explores the possibilities of seeing and feeling of the people, animals, and the author herself. Hůlová changes perspectives of experience in the text, stepping out of her body to comment on the action as an amusedly disinterested observer one moment, and then falling into the rhythm of sheep’s breath, grass, and the gaze of a hen’s eyes the next. The text was presented to the public through a performative reading at the More-than-Human Curiosity symposium in July 2023.

Petra Hůlová is a Czech writer and author of journalistic and dramatic texts. Her provocative novels, plays and screenplays have won numerous awards, and she regularly comments on current events in the Czech press. She studied Mongolian studies, cultural studies, and anthropology at universities in Prague, Ulaanbaatar, and New York, and was a Fulbright scholar in the USA. Her eleven novels and three plays have been translated into thirteen languages. Her novels are often told in the first person and range from intimate confessions to brisk epic sagas.

Sample text: 

The netting protecting the hens from predators loosened over the winter and Edita’s entire chicken yard is drowning in its lace. If hens are princesses, patriarchal values are represented by Henry the rooster.

Edita says the rooster is an aggressive coward - the worst combination. He terrorizes the hens, but when a predator arrives, he’s the first one to bolt for cover in the coop. 

The hens then spend days recovering from the stressful situation with the predator. For two days, they might not come out of the coop at all. How do they bear being alone so long with Themselves?

Get rid of the bad mental habits. For example, the idea that hens locked in a coop for two days move little or not at all, can’t muster strength for anything, and solely meditate. 

Leave this horrible human view once and for all. 

We have fled from our common world and now we are desperately homesick like at a strange school in nature without nature. I’m opening my eyes. The warm animal belly still rises and falls beneath my head to the rhythm of the surf of the primordial sea in which we all once lived together, but the sheep is gone. I turn my face into the grass and become immobile.

From the sentence I wanted to say to the ants, I gradually cut out the superfluous words until not one remains. I breathe through my mouth into the dirt, nothing more. To cut off my head like a helium balloon from the fair and wave it towards the sky with the leaves of my hands until it is completely lost there. Burst that giant blister so that all the intellect flows out. 

We are deserters from the shared world. Proof: even when I breathe into the dirt, I don’t stopThinking. 

The holocaust of the word I. Never to be uttered again, even in the form of timed verbs.

The whole text can be downloaded here.