Hi friends,
I apologize in advance for today’s post— it’s a little heavier than usual and not exactly summer fare (but it is Fogust here in San Francisco…). I don’t plan to get into politics here, but it’s hard not to think about the state of our country when reading from Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 book of poetry.
Maya picked this one off the shelf, maybe because of the front cover, probably because it stuck out a little further than the others. It was fitting, because Tuesday evening I started a baby sign language course and the task of communicating without words was on my mind.
The interview with Ilya on Commonplace is one of my favorites. I’ve listened to it several times, and now that I’m thinking about it, I want to listen again. Ilya is Ukrainian, from Odessa, and he has been tuned into and writing about the violence in his home for more than a decade. Through poetry, his book, Deaf Republic, tells a story of citizens responding to an occupation by abandoning their hearing. Separate from the story, as an introduction or epigraph, is his poem, “We lived happily during the war”, which went viral in February when Putin invaded Ukraine. (Seriously, read it if you haven’t already.)
I opened to a poem titled “The Townspeople Circle the Boy’s Body”. On the lower half of the page is an image of two arms crossed, hands in a V, captioned: “The town watches”. The Vs remind me of the sign for victory.
The dead boy’s body still lies in the square. Sonya spoons him on the cement. Inside her—her child sleeps.
I’m struggling to write about this work, because as much as I love his art and the concept of this book, it’s become incredibly hard for me to bear violence toward children. This image especially hurts—a pregnant woman cuddling a dead child in the snow. For all the solidarity of the town and their circle, the child is still gone.
Yesterday I saw someone on the bus who I hadn’t seen in over 5 years. He played bass at a church in a part of the city that used to be predominantly Black and is now predominantly bourgeoise. He told me the church hadn’t gathered since before the pandemic. How can it possibly survive, I thought. Then I remember the pastor, an incredibly intelligent and charismatic speaker, Reverend James Noel, who died within weeks of a stomach cancer diagnosis. It was a huge blow to an already struggling congregation, with members who used to walk to church having to drive from Oakland or Daly City. Sometimes there were more people in the choir than in the pews. But people kept coming, drawn by some kind of inner instinct that in hard times it’s better to connect more, not less.
It feels like hard things are happening to many people in my life. Partly this is aging, but another part of it is the heaviness of living in a country that feels at war with itself, and this pervasive sense of disconnect and animosity. It’s also hard to feel powerless. I’m not going to end the war in Ukraine, but I want to take a lesson from Kaminsky as well as the church and lean in when it feels hardest.
[He] puts one hand to the ground. He hears the cars stop, doors slam, dogs bark. When he pulls his hand off the ground, he hears nothing.
Haha & thank you! And you're right, politics are hard (impossible?) to separate from art and life. I'm going to commit to reading and writing about a Ukrainian or Russian poet every month as long as this war is going on. They know what's going on and we should too.
C'mon Chloe, get into politics here....you are good at it and it is necessary! But beyond this petite encouragement, thank you for the lovely post, and for always turning my ignorant-of-poetry self on to worthy writers. I love the tie in with the church, bringing it back to the local, reminding us that all things are connected and calling for more (also, yay for the bus....I can bet you wouldn't have run into that holy bass-player in an Uber ;) Talk about connection, yo.).