Holding the soul close to the body or Na Avtomate

Aysel Akhundova

Aysel Akhundova (she/her) is a creative producer and multidisciplinary artist with a passion for storytelling. Aysel recently resonated with a quote from Rachel Cusk: “I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it.” This sentiment reflects her exploration of identity, memory and human experience through her creations. She is ¼ of the Salt Traces collective.

Holding the soul close to the body or Na Avtomate

I was rushing through a non-human-scale garden with alleys of spiky trees at risk of being hit by one of the sprinting amateur runners in tight bright clothing. The white cap with glittering silver details under the sun, the neon yellow snood on the collar protecting the neck, white sports shorts, a pair of black leggings paired with expensive sneakers.The vastness of the space and the impetuosity of the runners engendered an atmosphere of danger and created a feeling of being prey in my body.

Sickness has instilled a fear in me. A fear of becoming sick, sicker, sicker-er. Sometimes it felt as if I were a snake, unable to warm myself up from within. Sometimes it felt as if I were a sponge, collecting all the grievances of people, all the inequalities, and creating a mechanism of attack from within. Auto-immunity – the same prefix as auto-fiction – is a reflexive process, done to yourself by yourself. What else do we have with the prefix auto: auto-matic (a weapon), and auto-mobile (a car), and “auto” meaning right away in Russian, “na avtomate,” “avtomaticheski.”

Following the blue dot with an arrow on my phone map I passed the alley, crossed the bridge, and turned left. I was in three layers of wool and a winter jacket, my head in a hat and a hood. I wore a mask in public transport, insulating myself even more. I was trying to save myself, to save my phone battery, to save the internet data. I did feel like prey, like the prey of fate.

My body would attack itself ongoingly, the thyroid, my throat, my nose, my brain, my memory, my ovaries, my cervix. My body works against me; it takes away from me; it leaves my soul alone; it makes it a refugee, or better, landless, a soul without a body, a person without citizenship/rights. My body makes my soul feel as if it belonged elsewhere. My soul was leaving, cleaving from one organ to another, being ousted by the mysterious powers of auto-process.

In my black winter jacket I stood. A woman in a soft green turtleneck and a short suede jacket with fur lapels passed near me. Then some women in black, beige, and gray wool coats, all of them styled unbuttoned. Women without scarves, high heels, perfect makeup, perfectly imperfect hair, “effortless” French beauty. I will never be able to walk in a leather jacket or in a thin wool jacket in winter. My body will never allow it. My black winter puffer jacket that went lower than my buttocks didn’t insulate me completely from the scorching wind. The whole situation made me shrink. The cold almost made me disappear.

I feel like the only way for my soul to find solace is to pretend to belong to the body. And the body needs to pretend to belong to a place that is not its motherland. As girls pretended in many Iranian films, recreating the football game seen in off-site films they were not allowed to watch, like in The Offside. My soul has to pretend. It has to go to the acting school, to do the Stanislavsky method, be Mikhail Chekhov. The soul shall pretend that it is not ousted, that it is not deprived of its motherland, that it is here, that everywhere is her motherland. The only way to fight the auto is to play, to pretend that things are not auto and to take l-thyroxine. 

My body, by constantly attacking itself, didn’t allow me to adapt. For Paris, it made me weak. For Tbilisi, it inflamed my cheek until it swelled to the size of a Baskin Robbins extra large ice cream scoop. My birth in Baku gave me a slightly distorted map of Europe in my head, never to blend in with others, to always be out of place. I ended up following this map, traversing Europe, jumping from one city to another, my soul dragging behind like the hesitant blue dot with an arrow on a digital screen, forever trying to catch up to my physical location.