Emerging from the Space of Noise: An Interview with Iryna Shuvalova
Iryna Shuvalova is a poet, translator, and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the author of five award-winning books of poetry, including Pray to the Empty Wells available in English from Lost Horse Press (2019). Her most recent and fifth book of poetry Stoneorchardwoods (2020) has been named book of the year by Ukraine’s Litaktsent Prize for Literature and received the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Book Award. Her new poetry collection Endsongs is forthcoming in 2024.
Shuvalova’s poetry has been translated into 25 languages and published internationally, including in Literary Hub, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, and others. Her own work as a translator includes renditions into Ukrainian of works by Louise Glück, Ted Hughes, and Alice Oswald, as well as of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. In 2023, she co-translated Ostap Slyvynsky’s poetry collection The Winter King into English with Vitaly Chernetsky. Shuvalova’s translations have appeared in Ambit, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Words Without Borders. In 2009, she co-edited 120 Pages of ‘Sodom,’ the first anthology of queer writing in Ukraine.
Shuvalova’s research interests lie at the intersection of culture and politics in Eastern Europe, with a particular interest in how identities can be shaped, manipulated, and weaponized through popular culture. Her forthcoming academic monograph 'Donbas Is My Sparta': Identity and Belonging in the Songs of the Russo-Ukrainian War explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian society. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she was a Fulbright scholar. Having lived in the US, the UK, Greece, and China, she is currently on her way to Oslo, Norway, where she will be a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo.
In a conversation with Iryna Shuvalova, Ukrainian author Anna Gruver delved into so-called unspoken topics, the importance of the ability to remain silent and listen to one another, the balancing act in poetry and translation, inner topography and freedom, and what happens when we don't turn on our phones. The conversation unfolded in two temporal dimensions: February 2022, the final weeks before the start of a full-scale invasion, and spring 2023.
The first half of the interview was originally conducted for ШО magazine which ceased operations in 2022 due to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
February 2022
I suggest starting right away with a rather challenging topic that is often avoided in casual conversations for understandable reasons. Fortunately, interviews provide an opportunity to discuss even the "difficult" and unspoken things. Has your perception of death changed? What was it like before, and how has it evolved under the influence of the pandemic?
Thank you for asking about this. It's a very important and necessary topic for me. It's truly unspoken. Moreover, the silence surrounding such topics is symptomatic of our society. First, I'd like to draw a parallel to another recent conversation I had. While discussing my dissertation research on songs related to the war in Donbas (including materials not only from Ukraine but also those created in the occupied territories or in Russia), my conversation partner questioned whether this research strategy seemed like legitimizing the occupation regime. But does studying a cancerous tumor legitimize it? The occupation regime works against us just like a cancerous tumor. And it seems absurd not to try to understand how it works, even if it's painful and unpleasant, even if the instinct is to turn away, to distance oneself. Similarly, it may seem natural, but in my opinion, it's equally detrimental for us to want to turn away from the experience of death.
The 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne believed that since no one can escape death, we should not shy away from the thought of it but, on the contrary, prepare ourselves for its encounter every day. Then, when it finally arrives, we will be ready to accept it without fear. However, we live in a society that seeks to sterilize the experience of death. This is a significant problem that can partially be associated with the cult of toxic positivity. Society imposes the idea that we must always be unchangingly happy and joyful and that we should feel guilty when something is wrong when we experience negative emotions or a sense of loss. Meanwhile, this is an extremely unhealthy psychological mechanism because it is precisely the awareness of negative emotions, experiencing them, and the process of grieving that allows us to internalize this experience, successfully overcome the dark times, and turn the page. Otherwise, repression occurs, and the repressed pain continues to gnaw at us from within, sometimes even erupting outward and causing harm to people around us.
By the way, the culture of toxic positivity, which has now turned into a massive industry (from countless self-help books to life coaching), doesn't grow on its own, on an equal footing. A person who is not shielded from their true experiences and feelings by the flimsy blanket of artificial positivity will sooner or later begin to search for the real sources of their discontent. And who needs that? Corrupt or populist politicians? Big corporations that exploit their workers and encourage a culture of consumption, even at the expense of our planet's survival? Excluding the experience of death from this artificially beautiful picture is one of the guarantees of its functioning.
Meanwhile, for me—perhaps as it was for Montaigne—death is one of the inseparable, fundamental components of life. We are having this conversation now, and as I look out the window, I see a beautiful yellow three-story building on a street in Kyiv in front of me. That building is a morgue. Occasionally, you can see hearses coming out, several a day; during the peak of the pandemic, there were sometimes lines. Pretending that these hearses don't exist is senseless. During the pandemic, we also experienced losses: several close friends of our family passed away. It is important to understand and acknowledge this experience—to live through it, to also acknowledge these—different—versions of ourselves, upon whom the reflections of nearby deaths have fallen. Just as someone's face is illuminated in the darkness by the flickering of a fire, it appears unfamiliar.
As a poet, death interests me as intensely and deeply as any other life experience I encounter. In that sense, there are no taboos for me: what can be touched upon and what cannot, what I write about and what I don't. Therefore, for example, themes of sexuality and corporeality are prominently present in my writing, as well as, of course, themes of death. In fact, writing about death is a very healthy ritualized way of engaging with it. If you think about it, writing (especially poetic writing—excuse me, prose writers!) is one of the few sacred ways of interacting with reality available to us in the modern world, particularly in a non-religious context. Sacred ritual has always been a way of working with liminal, boundary experiences—such as the experience of death. So now, when the sacred and ritualistic component in our lives is increasingly marginalized, it is not surprising that it makes us dysfunctional and bewildered, especially in the face of death. Poetry, rooted in a sacred and ritual space, allows us to work with these experiences.
There is a wonderful South Korean poet, Kim Hyesoon, whom I was fortunate enough to hear live in Cambridge. Hyesoon directly connects her experience and poetic writing with the female shamanistic tradition in South Korea. One of her books, "Autobiography of Death," was written after a terrible tragedy that occurred in Korea in 2014 when a ferry with schoolchildren sank. The book consists of 49 poems symbolizing the 49 days during which, according to traditional Korean beliefs, the soul of the deceased wanders the earth before leaving it forever. Therefore, the entire book is poems about death, including various, sometimes very physiological, almost body horror aspects. In this sense, my writing is still quite innocent.
In your essay "The Language in Which I Live," you mention that your Ukrainian-speaking grandfather was mostly silent, and you write that you loved his silence even more than his words. Are there historical moments when silence becomes more important than speech? For example, in a situation of information overload. Are there topics that are talked about too much (often without adding anything new or important) where it would be better to remain silent?
You know, I think that in any conversation, this component of silence is very important. I would think of it not as a counterbalance to speech, but as a necessary element for the conversation to take place at all – precisely the element that is currently lacking in most conversations.
Silence can be present in speech in different ways – for example, when we remain silent and listen to our interlocutor because that's how a real conversation is formed. This is lacking today because most of the time we talk over each other, not really hearing one another. This is very noticeable to me in online communication, like on Facebook, for example, but not only there.
Moreover, moments of silence can be present in speech as pauses, as an internal calm, an opportunity to gather one's thoughts, and a chance to interrupt oneself before hurting someone with careless words. As they say to little children: be quiet, count to ten before saying something. But we don't stop, we don't count to ten, we pour streams of uncontrolled aggression onto each other, and we speak nonsense.
Speech is so abundant that it turns into white noise, and in this white noise, we hide from silence. Why do we hide? Because when we are silent, we hear our thoughts, see ourselves—maybe not as we are accustomed to seeing ourselves—and see others—perhaps more multidimensional than usual. It is an unsettling, not always pleasant experience. But it is also an opportunity—in silence—to touch the world, to feel it in a way that is not possible amidst the noise and chaos.
The other day, I woke up and decided not to touch my phone the whole morning (usually, it's the first thing I do when I wake up—check it). I picked up a book that happened to be nearby and started flipping through its pages. I went for a walk without my phone: it was an early Saturday morning, so I also strolled through the empty streets of Kyiv. And then I had a somewhat mystical and esoteric experience. I stood in the park, observing how the leaves fell in smooth spirals, and suddenly, I understood everything about life. Absolutely everything. I realized how we constantly try to move against the natural world instead of moving with it, how we struggle to align ourselves with its rhythms, and how we fail to hear and feel even our own rhythms. Do you see what happens when you leave your phone at home? A tiny personal revelation. And this is despite my efforts to regulate my level of information overload and to have a somewhat controlled flow of information compared to many others. Still, it was a shock to me: stepping out of the realm of noise and hearing profoundly important things – complex, beautiful, and diverse.
How does changing places affect your inner self-awareness and, as a result, self-identification? Iryna Shuvalova in America, Iryna Shuvalova in China, Iryna Shuvalova in Ukraine – are these different people or the same you, the same Iryna Shuvalova?
You know, I'm particularly glad that you're asking about this because I wrote about it just... when was it? The day before yesterday. I'm currently working on a long prose piece, and I myself don't fully understand how it will ultimately look: there's a certain narrative frame, but it's quite flexible. For now, I'm packing small fragments into it, including everyday experiences that happen to me. So, I asked myself this question about how my identity has changed in different spatiotemporal contexts, and here's what I've come to: I wrote that at some point in life, we don't realize that as we grow into certain places, adapt to them, settle in, we leave a part of ourselves behind when we move on. We move forward feeling incomplete, unfinished, diminished – as if we left our old shadow behind and haven't grown a new one yet. Maybe it will eventually grow back, but will it be the same as the first? It's like a lizard shedding its clipped tail and running away, but already changed, different, forever losing a piece of itself.
And with each new place, your shadow fades, becomes thinner, and diminishes, like an onion from which layer after layer is peeled off. It would seem that by moving, I should be growing with things: possessions, acquaintances, and cultural experiences. But instead, I feel that with each move, my inner core is increasingly laid bare. You understand it's about who you are beyond the situational factors, not defined by your familiar cultural, social, and economic context – family, school, work, community... And the more you immerse yourself in these cultural solvents – each time new ones – the more the external layers, the accumulated ones, gradually dissolve, leaving only the core, the pit inside the apricot, the true essence of who you are.
So, moving, and reshaping oneself to fit different places, societies, and cultures primarily gives me a sense of vulnerability. Although it is a good way to discover who you really are, I don't want to do it indefinitely because I risk being left without a skin. However, at the same time, this experience is so valuable to me that I have almost developed a dependency on it: I want to feel how this otherness tickles you, even though it's almost painful.
Was there a specific moment (perhaps when you went to study in America) when you suddenly realized, and felt things will never be the same again? A moment that became a sign of global changes within you, in your life?
Yes, such a moment existed. It would have been better if it happened when I first went to America – after all, I was only fifteen at the time, and in our younger years, we have better emotional plasticity. Instead, this moment occurred quite late for me - very recently, actually. It was a challenging experience for me, associated with the completion of significant aspects of my life: personal, and professional, and they coincided. I had to learn to let go - and letting go can be very, very difficult for me at times.
I have always had a complex relationship with time and my presence in it. A sense of mortality doesn't frighten me; I am acutely aware of it. I am aware of the process of letting go of fragments of life: small, completely unique contexts of the world you inhabit every moment. Especially when you are attentive to them or when they simply impose themselves on you, and you cannot help but see and feel them. It is precisely my personal emotional constitution that makes it difficult for me to lose them, to understand that they will never happen again, that they now exist only in memory, imagination, and writing.
By the way, this is yet another very important function of writing for me: capturing that tiny mosquito and encapsulating it in a droplet of resin. When I reread my text and feel the chill outside my skin from being transported, transported into that tiny life preserved in amber, it's an absolute sign that yes, magic has happened. It has always enchanted me, in cinema, in painting. That's why, for example, I love Renaissance portraiture so much: I look at people who are no longer here, and I meet them through their gaze, here and now. It's an incredible thing.
Art stops time. Nothing else can stop time anymore, but art can, and it's simply astonishing. Roland Barthes' book "Camera Lucida" is also about this: why photography deeply unsettles and captivates us. According to Barthes, photography reminds us, through its existence, that every captured moment in a photo is simultaneously both with us and forever irreversibly gone – we live through constant loss. And one can only envy the protagonist of Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," who could experience all those moments simultaneously, albeit selectively. By the way, this is also about poetry: because poetry offers us the unique opportunity to exist in time as we do in space.
Only recently did I realize that as I moved through time, I yearned for everything dear to me that irreversibly slipped away, but I didn't have the chance to mourn and let go of my past self. If we look through this lens at the trajectory of my texts, the first books – "Ran," "Os," and "Az" – it was primarily about longing for the departure of a certain world, for the loss of places and things. The next stage and the next book, "stonegardenforest," were largely about how close (though perhaps never known) people fade away, move further away from you in time, while you keep moving farther away from them. As for my new book, "final songs," it will likely be primarily about my personal (yet familiar to all of us) experience of distancing myself over time.
I will quote your text: "Freely reads in the language of roses and birdcages / daggers and torn-out tongues"... In poetry, do you first encounter sound and then the image, something in the Wittgensteinian sense (where you can imagine space empty in the place of a thing, but you cannot imagine the object without space)? With an incredibly precise selection of words, is it ever the case that you are led by the sound first, rather than the meaning?
No, sound is very important to me, but it doesn't happen separately from meaning. I never work solely on sound; it always occurs in the process of creating the text: the semantic and sonic elements are inseparable. Language itself exists at the intersection of sound and meaning.
In my academic work, I employ a methodology called multimodal discourse analysis, which argues that a full exploration of the meanings embedded in discourse can only be achieved through the analysis of all its components, including non-verbal ones. This approach emerged from linguistics, which initially focused on the purely linguistic dimension of expression. Later, the analysis shifted from individual utterances to discourse, recognizing that the meaning of an utterance depends on its discursive context. However, it was later understood that this alone was not sufficient. Conducting multimodal discourse analysis means taking into account its visual, auditory, tactile, performative, and other components.
In the same sense, poetic language is the intersection of sound, its embodiment in writing, and meaning or concept. Remove any one of these, and the word ceases to exist. And it seems to me that's why I can't separate these things: sound carries meaning for me, and meaning cannot emerge without sound. Of course, poetic expression can start differently: sometimes an image comes to you first, sometimes a combination of words, sometimes a mood or intention. However, regardless of which string is struck first, the rest of the strings must also resonate to understand what chord is being formed and what melody this sequence of chords can create.
Konstantin Moskalets describes the foreword to your book as "the sea and sky of Iryna Shuvalova's poetry." If we were to speak in the simplest (and therefore most difficult) terms, as you do in poetry, are words more like a forest or still more like the sea for you? Or perhaps, animals?
Words are like stones on the shore. We can play with them, and arrange patterns. We can create the illusion that we not only operate with these words but also control them. However, in reality, words, like stones, have their mysterious inner life. What we lay out with pebbles on the shore, let's say the inscription "I love Nastya," in no way brings us closer to the essence of these stones, not at all.
Let me generalize, but one of our greatest problems as humanity lies in our utilitarian attitude toward the world around us. At best, we communicate our love for Nastya using stones, and at worst, we try to transport them somewhere, crush them, grind them, and bury them in the foundation of some, unfortunately, often grotesque structure. We simply don't know how to coexist with the world around us—not because we are incapable, but because often no one taught us or we have forgotten how to do so. In this sense, working with words is also coexistence with the world of language. And, by the way, we are equally poorly educated in this regard. Yes, of course, language encompasses both "give" and "no," "mine" and "get out of here!" But language is also a living organism that has absorbed the experiences of millions of people over millennia—an experience that we most often do not try to capture or empathize with in today's language.
Philosophers have often spoken about poetic language as precisely the language in its non-utilitarian dimension. It is a unique opportunity not to try to build a house or grindstone but simply to sit by the stone, to be with it, to see how a small crab crawls on it. And these are very different modes of interaction with the world. Holding the stone in your hand, feeling its roundness, roughness, and weight. Caressing it with your fingers and pondering where the sea brought it from, and how long it had to be in that sea to acquire such a shape. You can also look at it with the eyes of a geologist and ask, "What mineral is this?" Or with the eyes of an artist, "What color is this? How can it be described?" It's neither green nor blue, not black... but what is it? By listening, observing, and questioning, we come closer to the secret, enduring, inner life of these stones.
Similarly, words, like stones on the seashore, live their own lives. But it is also good for us, humans, to sometimes live our lives alongside their lives, even if only briefly, in the same rhythm: in the rhythm of these waves, in the light of this sun.
What does translation mean to you in terms of interaction at what level: co-author, translator, interlocutor? What is your "task as a translator" according to [the philosophy of Walter] Benjamin?
Probably, this task is somewhat different for a poetic and prose work. I once wrote a comparative study on the mode of interaction between the lyrical hero and the natural environment in the works of Ted Hughes and Arseny Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky often uses the metaphor of translation to explain what a poet does: translate the language of nature into the language of culture. "I learned from grass, opening my notebook, / And the grass began to sound like a flute..." In Hughes, there is a transformation of the poet. The poet is a shaman who "puts on" a supernatural being and speaks with the voice of this being. Like a shaman, he is not just playing a role, pretending to be a spirit of ancestors; he truly becomes the spirit of ancestors at that moment – a shell, a vessel that contains something else within it.
When it comes to translating poetry, it seems to me that you have to somehow resort to a shamanistic mode. You have to put on not just the text, but a piece of the world embodied in this text; you have to be in it, and try to speak not with your own voice, but with the voice of the author. That's why it is an extremely difficult task. It's no wonder that a shaman can fall down and sleep for three days after dancing for a whole day. A conscientiously performed translation also exhausts us greatly: it takes a lot from us, although it gives a lot in return.
In the process of working with prose, shamanism is also undoubtedly present, but it is a more prolonged process with a different rhythm, as we cannot stay in a state of such high tension for months as the shamanic ritual requires. Perhaps translating prose can be compared to a long meditation - a state of altered consciousness and being in a not entirely one's own body, voice, and writing style. However, if the translator is also a poet or a writer, it is also a departure from the boundaries of one's own "written" body. We must keep one foot on the shore of our linguistic and cultural reality while standing with the other foot in another world. This act of balancing requires significant endurance, technical ability, and inner strength from the translator.
What place on Earth is the most peaceful for you? Existing or non-existing, any place. Where do you always want to return for peace and tranquility?
I believe it's not a place, but a time. Especially since I mostly perceive time as a place. And the textual space, for me, is always a place. Emotional states are also a place. In short, wherever I look, I see, feel, and experience a place (in its deepest sense – as a topos). So, the most peaceful place you're asking about is childhood. I talked about it in the essay about language that you mentioned. It's the garden near the rural house built by my great-grandfather – a clay house that only memories remain of. My grandfather grew up and lived a significant part of his life there, and when he passed away, the house collapsed a year later. It was somehow very logical: when a person departs, the material embodiment of their world also departs. A metaphor that suddenly takes on tangible form in reality.
The garden, in general, is an incredibly important place for me and one of my favorite metaphors. I often think of the world as a garden. Through tattoos, I cultivate the garden on my own skin because I understand my body through the concept of a garden. And my garden in the ancestral yard is old, unorganized, and without any landscape design. It has twisted trees covered in moss, tall grass, and overgrown hedges. By the way, perhaps because of that garden, the border in a more abstract sense often appears to me as a physical space overgrown with various wild, impenetrable vegetation. Even now, when I think about liminal, boundary things, I imagine them as a space of elderberry, wild rose, and hops. It's like a semi-wild hedgerow that separates the inhabited, more domesticated garden from the wild world around it. Essentially, it's the edge of the inhabited world, where one can easily fall, and beyond which, "there be dragons."
Crossing boundaries, the state of transition, both between different stages of life and from life to non-being, has always been considered dangerous. It's no wonder that these transitions have long been accompanied by numerous rituals and ceremonies. When I, as a cultural anthropologist, became interested in magical practices associated with liminal and transitional states, the contemporary concept of hedge witchcraft caught my attention: literally, "hedgerow" witchcraft. The hedgerow itself is that overgrown boundary from the garden of my childhood and serves as a metaphor for walking between worlds, being (simultaneously or alternately) a little bit here and a little bit there.
I was struck by how these liminal walks reminded me of poetic practices. After all, a poet is a professional "walker" along the boundary: between words and things, between what is and what is not, or what may never be, or what may never have even been. Between speaking and silence. In Fellini's film "La Strada," one of his early works that I have long and deeply loved, there is a character named Il Matto – literally, the fool, the madman. But this fool is a blissful one who possesses a special knowledge inaccessible to "healthy" reason. He is one of the major arcana of the Tarot: standing on the edge of a precipice and, looking up, does not see himself stepping into the abyss. A beautiful metaphor for a poet. It is no coincidence that the fool in Shakespeare speaks the truth to King Lear and remains with him when he is abandoned by everyone.
Surprisingly, the space in which I feel at home is precisely the state close to boundaries. What lies beyond the boundary? Dragons? It is precisely this proximity to dragons, the proximity to the edge of the world, that deprives the poet of peace and thus grants them the ability to write.
An acquaintance who is a photographer told me about the experience of life in China and the pervasive control that existed even before the pandemic, no matter where you were. You have the experience of freedom, where every moment you risk your own life and the lives of your loved ones, and the experience of a protected life under the watchful eyes of countless cameras. Tell me, what is ultimately more important: to feel like a free person or to be under constant surveillance and control at every step? Does this affect the sense of inner freedom?
I wouldn't say that it's such a significant contrast for me. You see, I don't know where I'm not being watched. I've lived in the United Kingdom and the United States, spent a lot of time in Greece, and most of my life in Ukraine. But it seems to me that we have to come to terms with the fact that in the modern digital world, most of us live in the reality of Foucault's panopticon: where everyone is visible, and everyone is being watched (and punished if necessary). Especially after the recent scandal with the "Pegasus" project, where spyware that can self-install on mobile phones gained notoriety and is extremely difficult to detect. This "software" was developed by an Israeli technology company for counterterrorism purposes but has been used by governments around the world to monitor thousands of individuals: human rights activists, journalists, and leaders of other nations.
And that's just a glimpse of what we've seen, not to mention how relentless data harvesting takes place through our beloved network-connected devices – the so-called "information harvest," where big corporations actively gather, study, sell, and resell our information. Since, due to the nature of my work and my transnational way of life, I cannot do without a smartphone, nor go long without access to a laptop, I know that my assumed state of freedom is not so drastically different from what we consider a state of unfreedom. Although, of course, when we are being suppressed, we still have many ways to resist. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that Orwell and Huxley are two sides of the same coin. In both cases, it's about control: it's just that in one case, control is achieved through violence, and in the other, it's through pleasure, but essentially, they are interchangeable and complementary.
The inner space of freedom can exist anywhere. Freedom sometimes needs to hide, to be somewhere where it won't be tracked. It's the inner freedom of people who allow themselves to speak, think, and act differently. We cannot consider the population of tightly controlled states as masses of oppressed individuals. The Chinese writer Wang Xiaobo, in his essay "The Silent Majority," spoke, among other things, about the importance of people who don't take to the streets with banners but remain free inside. Thinking differently, even when you remain silent about what you think differently, is also a form of resistance.
In an interview for PEN Ukraine, you said a beautiful thing: that if you weren't a writer, you would have become a gardener and eventually become one with that garden. If we imagine that you have no limitations in space, and you can cultivate anything from different climatic zones and even imaginary plants, what would your garden be like? What would grow there? (You can imagine a garden where not only plants thrive but also, for example, emotions.)
You can't ask me such a question! It's really tempting (smiles)! It's like asking me what valuable, beautiful people I would surround myself with if I weren't a writer. We unjustly perceive plants as mere objects, things, when they are alive, complex, and incredible beings... Sometimes, while walking on the street, I conduct an experiment: I imagine that all the trees around me are different living creatures, such as animals or humans. It immediately removes me from the mundane and saves me from visual dullness. And suddenly, you find yourself surrounded by a herd of elephants swaying their trunks, flapping their large ears, and looking at you with wise eyes. You realize that around you are large, magnificent, mostly much older living beings who interact with each other and with you in the same way. You are never alone in the forest, garden, or park.
There are certain trees that I particularly favor. In fact, I even have a list for my specific future physical garden. Right now, I'm afraid I might forget someone, but in that garden, there would definitely be rowan, elderberry, dog rose, oak—all these boundary plants dear to me. Hawthorn, honeysuckle, lilac. Apple trees, like in my grandfather's garden. Olive trees would be there too, living so much longer than humans (it's simply incredible when you can touch something that has been alive for a thousand or two thousand years). And a pomegranate tree—definitely, it's a must-have. In my garden, there would also be moss. And stones would also grow—at their own stony pace. Birds would build nests and fly away from those nests, then return to them or build new ones. Cicadas would live underground for their incredibly long seventeen years, and then emerge, filling the garden with their chirping sound. There would be some cats, dogs, and children, each going in their own direction; children going up, and the elderly going down, as my grandmother used to say. And I would definitely grow there too—maybe already downwards, or perhaps inside myself, or I would sprout into something different, into the next life. And most importantly, everyone would grow towards each other. All of them. Cicadas towards trees. Trees towards humans. Humans towards stones. And humans growing towards each other as well. I would really love it if people grew towards each other.
April-May 2023
Ira, back in April-May 2023, while we were conducting our interview, we concluded it with a metaphor of a garden. We finished it on February 11, 2022, shortly before the full-scale invasion. Tell me, how do you and your inner garden feel about these changes, about this invasion? What would your feelings look like—like a fire or uprooted trees? Is it like weeds, or perhaps mistletoe, or something more poisonous and terrifying than them? Or maybe the garden still stands peaceful and protected?
You know, a garden exists even when it no longer does. It exists as long as someone knows that it once was, as long as someone knows that it can be again. When I told you in our previous conversation that I wanted people to grow toward each other in my garden, I also meant this. A gentle, cautious touch to shared knowledge (across different points of time and space) is being in the same garden.
I recall how in Odesa, in Bessarabia, I once found a groove on a shard of an amphora, imprinted by someone's large finger, pressed into the still soft clay. I placed my finger into that groove, and thus, I touched someone's hand that no longer exists, yet still does.
Therefore, no matter how much the enemy uproots, burns, or tramples our gardens, as long as we preserve this space of shared knowledge (including self-knowledge and knowledge about ourselves), our garden will exist, even if temporarily absent. Similarly, those we have lost in this struggle remain present—they persist in their presence, although not, in the same way, we, the ones left behind, may desire.
Nothing disappears without a trace. I believe that everything that has been speaks to us, even when we no longer understand its language. Because the intonation of the call is infallible and exists beyond language, transcending it. My garden still stands, but even if it ceases to exist, I will still grow within it; it will continue to grow within me.
What can you see from your window right now? When we were talking before your departure to China, you could see the Kyiv morgue from yours. And from mine, a regular Kharkiv house with a large lettered sign on the wall that said "WE ARE HOOLIGANS," and a small table for ping pong. My house was hit by a blast wave, and the windows of the house across the street were also blown out. How has your life changed during this time? What brings you comfort, what is your light in these times?
One of the most painful things for me is that I don't know what's outside my window right now. I only know what my wartime Kyiv looks like from photographs. In the summer of 2021, I was supposed to go to China for work. The visa process dragged on until the end of October, so we ended up in China in early November, not imagining what February would bring. Actually, we had our previous conversation just a few days before our departure, and we finalized the text in mid-February. Since then, and until recently, China mostly didn't allow anyone (especially Ukrainians) to enter or leave (at least with the possibility of return), so I haven't crossed the threshold of my home in Kyiv for a year and a half. By the way, I remember the photos of your damaged house that you shared online. I remember looking at them and wondering how long it would take for me to find out if something happened to our home. Will I hear the phone ringing if they call me in the middle of the night due to the time difference? Will the neighbors send photos, or will they simply send a message?
Right now, outside my window, the bright signs of several restaurants and a karaoke bar are shining in the darkness. They are not far away, and I can see them well from the eleventh floor. I have no idea what these signs mean or how they are pronounced because I never learned to read Chinese. If I look to the left, I can peek into the apartment of the neighbors across the way, who are watching their favorite TV show on a late Sunday evening. Remember my love for peering into other people's windows? Now I have the perfect observation point. But my favorite view is to the right, where no high-rise buildings obstruct the horizon all the way to the Yangtze River. There, beyond the university buildings, lies a hill crowned by a small pagoda. Just behind that, during this time of year and throughout the rest of the summer, the sun sets. That, actually, is one of my joys: to observe how, from my winter "touchpoint" near the Purple Mountain (which Nanjing is well known for, by the way), the sun's arc gradually shifts, and I manage to catch a glimpse of it by rushing home from work as quickly as possible. And I already know that in the summer, the evening skies will be painted with such incredible fiery colors that they will literally take my breath away. I don't know why, but the sunsets in Nanjing are the most dramatic I have ever seen anywhere.
By the way, the pagoda on the mountain is called the Crane Pagoda because the mountain itself has two peaks and supposedly resembles a crane spreading its wings. It is rumored that the oldest Daoist temple in Nanjing was located here, built during the time of the Han Dynasty, which ruled two millennia ago. I remember when I first climbed the stairs to the pagoda, a tricolored cat and a white dog ran ahead of me, almost leading me to the top. They seemed to be little guardians of the temple. Actually, that's where I find solace: in touching the bare skin of a place and the skin of time with the palm of my hand, in endlessly trekking along paths through mountain slopes and parks, in observing the sparrows' quarrels on rooftops, in bidding farewell to the sun and welcoming the first bats in the warm summer twilight. Sometimes, I sit with my cats and silently watch—I focus more on the sun, while they pay more attention to the bats. In such a vast and painfully chaotic world like ours, it is often the small things and small creatures that can prevent us from losing all hope or simply burning out from within.
I read your recent interview with Katerina Iakovlenko, where you discuss the importance of naming things out loud. And I have this image of the Kharkiv wall in my mind. Well, not specifically the wall, but walls in general, on which you can write something and be heard. Walls as metaphors for circumstances in which the whole world is forced to listen, to see, and unable to turn away.
If there was an opportunity to write something in big letters on a hypothetical "wall," two or three words about our war, what would your words be?
You know, it's a fantastic metaphor, and I'll allow myself to expand on it a bit further. The thing is, as Ukrainians, we have a lot of work to do before we can write two or three words on such a wall of visibility and be certain that these words will be properly understood. In other words, before we can write on the wall, we must build that wall, mix the paint, make the brushes ourselves, and teach those who pass by the wall the language in which we will write. Now, let me explain what I mean.
For any statement to be understood, its context must be clear. Unfortunately, as we have seen (especially over the past decade), our context was not known and understood by the world. It is precisely because of this that Russia did not face stronger resistance from the global community after Crimea, and Western politicians could afford to forget that a war in Europe, which terrifies everyone now, has been ongoing since 2014. And, of course, it's not that we were lazy to tell the world about ourselves and build the necessary context for understanding. Colonization and subjugation work exactly like this—when someone else speaks to the world about you, when your context is shaped not by you, but by those who have subjugated you. Certainly, with each Russian missile hitting a Ukrainian civilian target, the cracks in the Russian imperial narratives become more and more apparent. But still, it is up to us to build a new reality on the fragments of colonial gigantism. We must construct the wall on which we will finally be able to speak to the world. The foundation has already been laid through our collective efforts, and now we must work together to complete the rest.
And when this work is done, I am certain that finding the right words will not be so difficult. However, these words are unlikely to be exclusively mine or yours because things like a collectively sung song or a shared chant should be spoken together. Even I, a poet caught in my own individuality, understand this. Perhaps it is the poets who especially understand the illusory nature of such separateness.
Interviewed by Anna Gruver
Photos provided by Iryna Shuvalova
Translated from the Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan