“What is a wave? Composition and muscle. The same goes for lyric poetry.”
– Marina Tsvetaeva, “Poets with History and Poets Without History”
Springtime Churchyard Flowers
This week has been about: poetry, trying to find my way back to structure and rhythm, trying to find my way back to a regular sleep schedule, and spending time with my Mama! Structure, rhythm, poetry, and a sleep cycle not reminiscent of college have proven elusive, but spending time with my Mama has been a blast. We’ve tapped our shoes all over the roads and cobblestones of Tbilisi. Stuffed ourselves full of kninkali and khachapuri. Wound up and down and around Kakheti’s roads. “There are no straight roads in Georgia,” our guide Georgi told us as we took yet another hairpin turn up into a valley. But there’s a lot to say, see, and eat; but I am tired, so I leave you all with a visual journey through some odds and ends of my week.
Soviet-era car in distinctly un-Soviet colorsFairytale of a Russian TsarevnaStreet Booksellers
“A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.”
– Anne Carson, “Autobiography of Red”
Sunset over Sikander Lodi’s tomb
Two months in India, and I spent most of my time in Delhi: a city on its seventh life. A city of refugees. My homes have been: a beautiful mansion adjacent to Lodi Gardens, an apartment in Defense Colony, a hostel near the Jama Masjid, an apartment in Jangpura. Over a month, total, in South Delhi, an area that was mostly farmland until refugees from the Partition resettled there. Now it’s packed, spilling further and further out, coming up around areas like Shahpur Jat, which used to be a village on the very outskirts of the city, and now finds itself ensconced by Delhi on all sides. Khan Market, possibly Delhi’s most expensive and bourgeois market, was started as a market for Partition refugees (thanks to Aanchal for teaching me about that).
People talk a lot of shit about Delhi, both natives and tourists alike: it’s hectic, it’s crowded, it’s smoggy, it’s aggressive. And that’s all true, and when I first landed I found it an unloveable city, despite the loveliness of the home I was staying in, and of my hosts, and of the friends I made there. I ran off to Jaipur, came back, then ran off to Amritsar, came back, flew to Nepal to get a second visa, and when I returned planned to stay in Delhi for only one more week. Suddenly, three went by, and I was still in Delhi. And, unsurprisingly, I had grown to love it.
One week in Georgia (the ex-Soviet nation in the South Caucasus, not the American state famous for peaches), and I have to say: it’s cold, cold, cold. Especially after Delhi, where it was climbing past 35 degrees Celsius in the days leading up to my departure. The whole city is still in winter, just on the verge of spring; from the window in my first apartment I could see buds struggling to grow on the edges of trees. Along the boulevards and alleyways, a few white cherry trees have already bloomed and dropped their flowers on the street; mimosas, too, the kind Margarita carried in her arms when she met the Master, clump heady and yellow among the landscape.
I woke last Wednesday at 4 AM. Two full days left in India after almost two months, and I waited until the last minute, until the temperature was in the nineties, to see the Taj Mahal.
For a long time, nothing in India reminded me of anything else. Like Italy (the first real trip my mother and I took together), New York, and Petrovskoe (the small Eastern Ukrainian town my family is from), India reminded me of nothing but itself. Unlike Belfast, which reminded me alternately of Dublin, Brooklyn, and Petrovskoe; unlike Cape Town and Johannesburg, which grafted different parts of California together into strange, funhouse-mirror-esque configurations. India – Delhi, Jaipur, Amritsar, Chennai, Puducherry – was everything and nothing like what I had imagined.
The Taj was like that, too. I cried when I saw it, gleaming white against the smoggy blue sky. It was like a bed time story come to life; the film of every photo I’d ever seen reeled before my eyes and still, it was amazing. It was hot, too, little shade on the long walk down from the West Gate towards the mausoleum, and chock-full of tourists already. Everyone wanted a photo with the Taj, and some kind of herd-instinct drew us all to the same spots to pose, elbow to elbow with strangers.
End of November, sunset coming down from Lion’s Head
Draft after draft of blog posts have piled up behind the scenes of this blog in the past month (month and a half? two months?) , as I wrestled with what to write, what to say, what to think. In the week after the election I was shell-shocked, hollowed out. I couldn’t put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard; everything I wrote seemed trite, over or under blown. I thought about Toni Morrison’s words, tried to keep writing. Failed. Tried. Failed some more. The days rolled forward, I read, I interviewed, I hiked, I wrote rarely, I slept fitfully. My South African housemate asked me why I looked so harried; many people asked me what I thought of the developments back home. The election of Donald Trump, I told them, was the confirmation of many things I had understood about America, about the interlocking web of racism, sexism, neoliberal capitalism, that underpins and arches over our lives. I told them we were headed for dark(er) times, that I was heartbroken, that I was angry, that I was sad.
It’s been surreal, in a Twilight Zone/Black Mirror way, to watch this unfold from the other side of the world. As the Canadian immigration server crashed, as reports of hate crimes came pouring in, as I reached out to the people I loved, I wanted desperately to be home. I wanted to be among the people that I loved, the people that I feared for more than ever. I wanted to scream, and cry. Later, I did both.
The story of the Red Hand of Ulster changed every time I heard it, but in general, it went a little something like this:
At a point in time long, long ago, the ownership of the land of Ulster, green and bountiful, is up in the air. The solution is a race: boats of hopeful heirs speed towards the shore, and whoever first lays their hand on the land is the new king. The men are hungry mercenaries, or beloved sons of a king who cannot choose between them, or invading Vikings; they hurry towards shore, each eager to claim the land. Ulster is in sight and one boat is far ahead of the other, too far to beat, but the straggler does not give up: he raises his left hand, chops it off with his own sword, and throws his bloody, severed hand onto the shore. The land of Ulster is his, and the Red Hand of Ulster becomes a potent symbol forever more.
It wasn’t until my second week in Northern Ireland that I noticed how many flags there are, but once I noticed, I couldn’t stop. Along the Ormeau Road, every block has a Union Jack fluttering in the wind, and alongside it one or another Loyalist flag; most often you can find the Red Hand in the center of it, inside a six-pointed star or a shield. Along roads in heavily Republican areas, you can find green flags that say “Irish Republic” and the Irish tricolor; Palestinian flags, too, are not uncommon. I noticed more flags in Protestant areas than Catholic ones; flags have become a contentious issue in Northern Ireland again, in the past four years. In 2012, after Sinn Fein (the Irish/Republican/Catholic party) won a majority of seats for the first time, they formed a coalition with the Alliance Party, and voted to limit the amount of occasions the Union Jack was to fly above City Hall. Ulster Loyalists flew into a rage: this was seen as the crest of a rising tide of anti-Britishness; their cultural heritage and pride was under siege, and so they struck back. They rioted for weeks, and flags protests still occur outside City Hall every weekend; it’s been years, and although the number of people in the streets has dwindled, the dissatisfaction still simmers.
“Our revenge will be the laughter of our children,” read one Republican mural, the words a banner above the head of Bobby Sands and other Irish hunger strikers. “Prepared for peace, ready for war,” said a Loyalist one, bookending two masked men pointing machine guns at the viewer. Northern Ireland has a long history of extremely political street art, and that’s still very present, especially in neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly from one or the other community. If you couldn’t figure out what area you were in from the flags, the walls will certainly tell you.
In Loyalist communities, the murals are often memorials to fallen paramilitary members and to fallen soldiers from WWI, celebrations of William of Orange, or glorifications of paramilitaries. Red poppies and hooded men wielding machine guns are par for the course. In Republican communities you’ll find murals honoring Irish rebellions, celebrating Irish history and mythology, commemorating hunger strikers, Troubles victims, and paramilitary members. Bobby Sands, with his flowing locks, makes a frequent appearance, as does the phoenix motif: the theme of rising from the ashes.
A poor photo of the amazing purple trees & the purple sunset
On Tuesday I landed in Johannesburg, after over twenty hours of travel that involved battling a manspreader as I flew from Lisbon to Dubai, eating bland sushi at 2 am in the Dubai airport, and crying over the Frida movie next to my confused seat-mates on the way from Dubai to Johannesburg.
On the ride from the airport jacaranda trees blossomed in the landscape, so lovely they made my heart ache. Later that night I found myself out to dinner with a group of activists, friends of my host from a conference earlier that day. A poem began in my head then, and spun through dinner and drinks and sleep and the morning, still beautiful and fragrant. It’s in its formless drafting stage, which involves cliches and vagueness, but I’m trying to let my writing breathe a little more.
somewhere, rain
body a tapestry of hands
stitched into skin
holding me up, holding me in
gesturing towards that nameless space
where fires rage
and my words writhe across the page
at night the old words old worlds burn
it smells of sin
holding us up, holding us in
My second trip to the seaside town of Bangor, where I meet with a poet (among other things) and a comic artist (among other things) to talk about Northern Ireland, identity, folklore, you name it. After a few hours of chat and approximately three cups of coffee I walk the coast, wind pushing in my back on the way there and grasping against my face, my hair, my clothes on the way back.My mind swirls with questions.
Sam is a great bear of a guy, with a shaved head and a giant red beard. We talk for over an hour. His parents lived through the Troubles, but he doesn’t feel he has the right to lay claim to that trauma, that struggle, those stories. They’re not his battles. He does tell me, though, about the day British troops came into the factory his mother worked in and told the women there was a bomb threat, but instead of letting them out, they locked the women in and forced them to search for the bomb themselves. He tells me about his uncle, whose two best friends as a teenager were kidnapped and executed by paramilitaries. He tells me he hates the labels of Protestant or Catholic, and sticks simply to Irish.
Look Back || Move Forward 