LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
“War contends with language” writes Kharkiv-based poet Serhiy Zhadan in Lithub, “words get lost, spill all over, and seem misplaced.” Zhadan sees that, after the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine, Ukrainians were faced with a choice—survive or be annihilated—and expresses caution about language that is “too pretentious, excessively emotional—perhaps even idealogically colored.” This caution, however, is eclipsed by the extremity, the incongruity, of war itself: “when you get a call and are told that your friend who received a vehicle from you the previous day has apparently been killed and can’t be buried because his head is nowhere to be found, you realize that these words [survive or be annihilated] are the most precise and truthful…”
For our team, issue three was ethically fraught. Writing during war is complicated by distance or proximity to the bombardments and land mines, by distance or proximity to the disfigurement of peoples and places, the disfigurement of psyches and recognizable patterns. Our editorial team is scattered between San Francisco and New York City. And even as racial capitalism makes warzones of many US cities, we hesitated at the ways complexity or distance could lead to—or become an excuse—for complicity. As Gaza taught us, the word choice “conflict” can obscure power imbalances and conspire with the tools of the state. Our bulwark: the works themselves. Centering the underrepresented has always been Pocket Samovar’s reason for being. It is our only defense against reinscribing russocentrism.
In our third issue, centering the underrepresented meant centering those who contend with Zhadan’s choice: survive or be annihilated. Genya Turovskaya’s “X” opens the issue and is a spare, unsettling poem that interrogates the complicity of language in war: “war… unmasks [language’s] mangling / the grotesque / damage all those bitten tongues.” The poem understands a blank page is now “the only language” and asks “how many / millions / of raised white rectangles / would it take to take / the language back…?” In his journal on March 13, 2022, 12:22 pm Zhadan writes from Kharkiv: “I suppose the language will be completely different: the language taking shape right here, right now, every day, across the whole country. As of now, it’s filled with too much pain.”
In the hybrid work “post-soviet sleeper car,” olga mikolaivna traces the imprints of war and displacement on the post-Soviet psyche: “clothed in adidas with a cigarette/ foreground to the window” and continues “‘night trains, air raids, fallout shelters…’ / the transit. / motion of bodies over sea and land.” olga’s photographic memory scans the landscape for what is unchanged—or eternally present—amid the changing. Similarly, Turovskaya’s “Enter Ghost” series plumbs the depths of a war-torn language with surgical—etymological—incisions. We are confronted with the healing properties hidden in the wound itself: “mother of all suns trillion-eyed trillion-armed mother / of all saviors mother of all bombs all balms all salvos all salves...”
The post-Soviet space is interdependent, and in the wake of the invasion, border clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan further destabilized the region. Our contributing editor, Zohra Saed, curated a luminous section of Central Asian poetries, “calculating wars, faultlines, and migration” with poems that are “devotionals.” She brings us translation of the Altai poet Janga Todosh Bedyurov, the Tajik-American poet Naima Muminiy, and the Afghan-American poets Ahmad Rashid Salim, Mina Zotal and Huma Aatafi. They are witness to the fact that atrocity and resistance—or devotional as resistance—are no stranger to the regions adjacent to Ukraine and Russia; in fact, these experiences are carried into diaspora. Here’s Aatafi: “Sounds are closing in, coming to trick your unconscious into being afraid of what might happen… You want to bleed the blood of an immigrant bird. Your migration is occurring. It’s always occurring.”
As in our other issues, the visual art in this issue is eclectic. Two photographs come from Ukrainians in diaspora: Olga Mikolaivna, whose hybrid work also appears in this issue, and Loukia Hadjiyianni, a Georgian-Ukrainian photographer based in Cyprus. We are also honored to feature the art Farangiz Yusupova, born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan and a graduate of New York City’s FIT. Her work explores her “childhood home, Indo-Persian miniature paintings, Soviet Brutalist architecture, and Islamic art…through mark-making.” It is also important to emphasize Pocket Samovar welcomes any work with thematic import. Over half of the visual art contributors do not originate in the post-Soviet space. And in critical ways, these artworks show that often the human experience does not know boundaries. It blurs them.
During the first months of the invasion, Ukrainian writers boycotted Russian culture—including literary classics accused of nationalism and imperialism—, finding Russian culture complicit in promoting or enabling the uninterrupted, centuries-old assault on the Ukrainian people, land, and language. This is precisely why Russian poet Dmitry Golynko said the following shortly before his death in June 2023: “the entirely deserved stigmatization of Russia and Russians will continue for years, decades, if not centuries. I think the main thing now is to grit our teeth and keep working, no matter what.” This humility—this reverence and responsibility to resist the status quo—is one of the most human responses to Russian imperialism. And, now as ever, it is the human that is most desperately needed.
In the Russian-born poet A. Molotkov—whose dissident work we also published in issue one—, we see how war disfigures human experience. In his poem “Traveling from Point A to a Missing Point,” disfigurement is physical and also psychical—and precisely in the same breath—they become indistinguishable. However, we also see how—almost without effort—experience persists in its strange monotony, its figures and forms eerily, painfully ordinary: “How quickly a cluster / bomb does its dark magic. The building / with eyes: ours, as we see / through the new / holes a kitchen, with an unfinished / sandwich covered with blue / mold and half a living / room with peeling / wallpaper we’d been planning / to replace, the other half / where Mom used to / sit subtracted, / reduced to / memory.”
In her landmark anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, Carolyn Forche writes “poetry of witness reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion." However, in many ways, the individual alone is not sufficient. In a 2016 interview with Music and Literature, Galina Rymbu shared that in regards to solidarity, she prefers the “path that brings together activist communities with artistic and intellectual ones, promoting their mutual transformation.” We can imagine that this is the same feeling that gripped 33 year-old Russian poet Artyom Kamardin before he read anti-war poems that led to his arrest. This is the same feeling that gave him courage when—this December—a Moscow court convicted him to seven years in prison. For Kamardin, it is preferable to give up freedom than be complicit in the plunder of other people’s freedom.
Later in the interview, Rymbu elaborates that “poetry must work for a utopian exclusion of the languages of violence, but it can only do this with the help of a certain violence of its own, fiercely struggling with those languages for a future of peace.” In a series of poems closing our issue, Rymbu writes “can letters become dugouts? can / freshly excavated text / keep you alive no, / no.” The poetry of many of the poems in this issue are anti-poetry because they acknowledge poetry is futile in a time of war, because they demand we do everything possible to keep our humanity intact, to keep us alive.
Konstantin Kulakov
Co-founding Editor
Pocket Samovar