INTERVIEW: Alexandrine Ogundimu by Taylor Lewandowski, On Body Horror, the Void, and Transhumanism
We feel like we must transcend, because we feel so separate from our own body, but the feeling that’s making us feel separate from our bodies is our bodies. It’s still our brain functioning as flesh.
Alexandrine Ogundimu describes the familiar drug-induced, violent, pathetic, self-effacing, strip-mall, machismo, fast food chain Indiana I have known my entire life. She describes Bloomington, Indiana as “the Paris of Southern Indiana which is exactly like being the Paris of a toxic garbage island.” In The Longest Summer, her last novel, Vic is trying his best to escape the small city of Abboton, Indiana where it has “degraded into a rusted out husk of depravity and horror, as people with time and without jobs find new and interesting ways to ruin their lives” for the promise of Manhattan.
Ogundimu often dismantles notions of gender, race, and class through the familiar trappings of desire. Like the story, “Loveless,” in her collection, Cross Radical, which describes in fragments the relationship between a twenty-two year old woman and a thirty-year-old man: “He is skinny-fat and probably white but doesn’t have to be. He is a poet or photographer who studied English or Music. She is a metalworker or essayist who studied Comparative Lit or Gender Studies. They have mutual friends and never go to the same bars.” As the story progresses, their defects, past trauma, and the truth of the male’s lies and manipulation are revealed. Ogundimu’s ends on the inevitability of their failure to connect: “They can see the patterns, move in spaces already cut out for them by those who came before. The vestments have changed but the body remains. They are no longer victim or monster. Those words have dried out.”
Ogundimu references video games, Ben Affleck in Daredevil, Tiger Woods, the internet, the cliché narratives and damaging representation of what it means to be black and trans in America, and her fractured structure to chip away at the repressive roles we are prescribed at birth. As Ogundimu says in this interview, “What we write about, manifests itself in the real world. It becomes real by the virtue of you writing it. Writing about how repression can be broken helps break repression.”
This is an interview that was first conducted in 2022 for Northwest Review, but the editors could not agree on it, so it was dropped. I re-edited it this year and spoke again with Ogundimu.
Taylor Lewandowski: What does it mean to grow up in Indiana? How has the Midwest affected you as a writer?
Alexandrine Ogundimu: I don’t think it means anything to grow up in Indiana. It’s a void. If there’s anything it means to me as writer, it definitely gives me an appreciation for those liminal spaces where everything has been hollowed out. It gave me a great sense of place. I am very concerned with place in fiction and that was born from a place where I was acutely aware that I did not belong, that I did not fit in, that I did not particularly like.
TL: In The Longest Summer, Vic works at a knock-off Hot Topic in southern Indiana. He’s trying to get out of this shitty town: Abboton, Indiana. He believes moving to New York City will save him from his abusive Nigerian father; homophobic, drug-induced friends; and dead-end relationships. Could you talk a little about this tension between the “void” of Indiana and the promise of a larger city?
AO: I’m not sure if this is useful, but the genesis of the novel is the contrast between this shitty small city in Southern Indiana and how people who live on the coast, especially like New York City or Los Angeles, have no fucking clue what goes on in most of the country. They don’t know anything past Pittsburgh. So it’s the inverse. The void versus the promise. Is it a moral judgement? I don’t think it is, but maybe it is. It’s a universal promise. The promise of the unknown. Vic is more concerned with the void, because that’s where he lives. I almost feel like he’d be happy living anywhere, even an hour away by the end. It’s just a matter of not being there. Nothingness or this “void” becomes something. It’s very unnatural, a vacuum becoming a thing, even though it’s the absence of a thing. That doesn’t make sense ontologically, or epistemically, or in terms of concrete versus abstract reality. Unreality is antithetical to the concept of reality, but for humans we can’t conceive of things that are not unreal to us so everything is an object. The “lack” of Indiana becomes a toxic, viral, greasy, noxious poison. All that matters to Vic is to remove himself from it.
TL: You moved from Indiana to New York City. Did you find a sense of belonging in a larger city?
AO: Yes, but I will say The Longest Summer is not autofiction—the other stories are more autofiction in a way, but the novel is not. New York is cool. Vic is the exact asshole that doesn’t want to seem like he’s cool, but deeply needs to seem cool. I used to be that person, but in the time since I’ve moved to New York and left and came back it is a feeling of belonging, but more I just want to make it through the day. Also, people are way less weird about the gay and trans thing here. I’m not the only off-brown weirdo, but it’s nothing Vic would find valuable. I also like to be able to walk around and absorb energy. I’m living in New York right now and I get more from New York than I give to it. That’s why I like New York, because that’s true. Whereas a smaller city, or somewhere like Indiana, I’m giving so much more than I’m getting out of it and it’s much more difficult. I do have more respect for rural areas, especially those that are economically depressed, because there’s so much common ground between being broke in New York and living in a trailer park. Same shit, different location.
TL: What is your relationship with online communities, video games, digital media? How can it be a place of freedom or restriction?
AO: I am a big fan of online communities. They have changed my life literally. Just by infiltrating the scene right now changed my perception of things, my outlook, my opportunities. It was really beneficial. It started as something cynical, but became genuine, warm. Video games, I recently started playing “boomer” shooters again, which don’t super apply to what I’ve written but also do in a very abstract type of way.
TL: I noticed Cross Radical begins with the epigraph from the video game Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest, “What a horrible night to have a curse.”
AO: Yeah. That’s partially because of the connection to Konami, because I use a Metal Gear Solid quote in one of the pieces. The first thing I ever wrote was called “What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse.” It’s also a name of a song by The Black Dahlia Murder. So, I’m actually referencing the song, because I like the song more than the video game, but I just really like that phrase. It felt right. It felt like that’s what the book is about.
TL: You make music too, right? How does that practice feed into your writing?
AO: There’s definitely some relationship between the two. Writing is about creating order for me. It’s about taking control of my life and the music is more about creating chaos and expressing chaos. I have a weird relation to screaming and yelling, like it’s negative and positive. Part of what I’m trying to do in music is emulate that sound, which also comes out through the music, so it’s the same root causes. It manifests differently.
TL: What does literature look like through a lens of transhumanism? The short stories in the anthology, Human Rights, play with these ideas, especially in a suspenseful, action-packed disintegration of our lives declining into bodies as commodities.
AO: I welcome transhumanism. I welcome the alteration of the human form. I’m a big fan of bodily autonomy. I don’t fear these things. I fear and loathe this economic, political system that treats humans as machines and cattle as it is. That’s concerning. But everything is concerning under that. Every machine is bent and twisted to harvest from us. We have casinos for children. We started with the desire to check our emails and now we’re at child casinos driven by “AI” and social media scams, so that should tell us something about how this works.
TL: In several stories in Cross Radical, you use a father figure and the family as an act of repression. Why is this important to deconstruct? How do we begin peeling back all the different forms of repression we are born into?
AO: As far as the family being repressive. Yes, that’s true. That’s an astute observation. Are you asking how can literature help us move past repression? Through expression we can fight repression. So by talking about yourself, you can become yourself in a weird way. It’s like a magical kind of thing. What we write about manifests itself in the real world. It becomes real by the virtue of you writing it. Writing about how repression can be broken helps break repression.
TL: You often explore addiction in your work. In the story, “Ben Affleck,” it’s structured as a fifth step in AA—a sort of confessional. What is your relationship to addiction and how has it informed you as a writer? Is addiction another form of repression?
AO: No, addiction is not another form of repression. Addiction is a form of worship. I’m stealing that from David Foster Wallace, but it’s true. I don’t know what my relationship with addiction is. I am not sober and I don’t really believe there is such a thing, I’ve gone through nasty periods since writing all that, and now I just don’t bother with substance use much at all, just because it’s boring. I was sober for a while, or what felt like a long time. It didn’t necessarily improve my life. It just made it more stable, which was a distinction I didn’t make at the time. I’ve written a lot about AA and addiction, because writing about a weird cult is good fodder at the end of the day. I’m often written somewhat autobiographical. It’s a way of working through my personal experiences or experiences I’ve gathered from other people. It’s a natural outgrowth of that.
TL: In “Wound,” a young trans girl finds refuge in her bathroom and pulls out hair on her leg until it becomes a massive, ugly wound. You often use body horror and extreme violence to show a possibility of transcending the body. How do you use the genre of horror to explore these human predicaments?
AO: I like violence. It’s not much deeper than that. I like the aesthetics of violence, so I’m using that as my medium. I’m using violence to create the kind of image I’m looking for. I have lived so steeped in violence, real and perceived, and the threat thereof, that it’s just making stuff out of my environment. It is a bit odd, especially that story. That was basically taking something real and amping it up till it became absurd. That’s the impulse. I’m not really talking about the body transcending anything. I’m very much about we are flesh and that is it.
TL: Tell me more about that. You see the body just as flesh. What exactly does that mean?
AO: Well, it means even the spirit is a manifestation of your consciousness. We feel like we must transcend, because we feel so separate from our own body, but the feeling that’s making us feel separate from our bodies is our bodies. It’s still our brain functioning as flesh. That’s the fuckery of it. As Rust Cohle says in True Detective, “It’s an act of nature that’s separate from nature.” It’s a brutal way of looking at things.
TL: There are so many voices of subjugation in The Longest Summer. From the father’s homophobic actions and diatribes to Vic’s supposed friends, there is a constant system of negating sexual exploration. There’s the scene of Vic reflecting on ways men choose to enact societal control, conscious or not: “Being well read was gay. Being liberal was gay, and being a socialist was extra gay. Spending a significant amount of time on your appearance was gay, as was dressing in anything but t-shirt, jeans, or a double-breasted suit. All of my affections, from reading books to not watching sports, all the way to listening to pop punk and new wave and my predilection for skate shoes, was considered a sign of latent homosexuality.” How does Vic and your other characters push against these notions?
AO: I would argue Vic doesn’t do that. It’s the classic trope of the cop in your head. Vic is oblivious, which is largely a function of me writing naturally and not realizing the character is oblivious, but a lot of it is Vic isn’t intentionally pushing. There isn’t enough space for his struggle to expand outward. It’s going to come out. It’s always going to come out. The longer you stay in the closet, the more explosive the exit. In those novellas, which will now be called Temperance (expanded, compiled, rewritten, out soon from Feral Dove), it’s different. It’s more out of control. The pushing is like a mosh pit. There’s so much internal and external energy. It’s the greatest flaying I could imagine.