On Doing Poetry

Essay on shorts collection shorts 3
Screened during FIELD RECORDINGS 5
Autor Akvilė Šlėgerytė
Published November 10, 2024

“There is a pit in the garden, and my parents will soon plant around it,” says Vasyl Lyakh about an artillery shell crater in his film Kharaltida; it will soon be buried among other memories that left scars on the land and people. Echoes of it can also be heard in the films by Ewelina Rosińska, Sara Rajaei, and Daniel Jacoby, where memories are obscured, forgotten, and erased, concealed in landscapes but found in accidents, seen in cracks, in in-betweens, and heard in the background. Can these cracks and memories of places and peoples subvert myths of nation- states, wars, colonial histories, and presents? Can we weave the new narratives from these stories in-between, beyond the borders, nations, and empires?

Sara Rajaei’s City of Poets

I grew up hearing the tales my grandad would tell me of a faraway land with gigantic trees, swift rivers that wouldn’t freeze, ancient mountains from which you could hear thunder. A land I have never seen has left deep memories inside me. A land that my grandad was deported to, tearing him from his childhood and his home, but a land which he cared about, and still does. Landscapes are keepers of memories, active participants in histories, some of which are marginalised or silenced. How many memories does that land hold?

Ewelina Rosińska’s film Ashes by Name is Man reads as the poetry of a landscape with people in it. Shot delicately, as if in secret, through a window as her grandmother is reading on a balcony, or from somewhere above, in a corner, as below her grandfather takes a loop with a priest in the garden, it takes people out of focus and weaves them into the landscape of a place. Thus, the film is not just about grandparents, their spirituality and their everydayness, but rather a melancholic portrait of a place enriched with memories which are embedded in its soils, hills, forests, crosses and churches, that carry histories. It seems to portray an idyllic landscape of rural Poland, and yet it feels pensive and even distant. We follow the time flow from summer to spring, but while we witness the seasons change, the film still leaves an impression of archival footage, of something coming from the past, stuck in time, and nostalgic. While it might look like an idyllic view of something lost, something that is to become absent, and will be left to imagine, it is rather a portrait of something that has never been idyllic, but instead oppressive, something whose idleness has always been at least partially imagined, a part of romantic national and catholic narratives.  

Many lives and stories have been written in landscapes, many events left marks on them, and if you listen closely, you can hear the big narratives cracking, you can see glimpses of humble, some things beyond and some things in-between. As Korean poet Hyeisoon Kim explains about her practice of creating poetry, she focuses on doing, rather than writing it, and that doing is achieved by orienting herself towards places, animals, and people that are humble, fragmented, and seem insignificant, thus, to her, poetry is doing-woman-animal-Asia:
  
“I felt as if the place itself had positioned doing-woman-animal somewhere in the cross section of that nation and was carrying on a vital activity different from the grand national ideology.
At the point where these movements pulled away from calcified, monolithic national
identities, I thought it might be possible to discover alternatives to these great narratives through the people’s doing-woman-animal. This became my discovery of movement that risked insignificance, movement that shrugged off Nation with a capital N or Human with a capital H.”

Ewelina Rosińska’s film thus turns away from a zealous nationalist myth that idealises serene rural lives of Poland, and focuses on a place where histories, embedded in landscapes and people, disturb the dominant national identities, where oppressive foundations of such national utopias sprout through the surface of the romanticised ideological image.

Still From Ewelina Rosińska ‘s Ashes by Name is Man
I do not remember my granddad’s stories as one cohesive Narrative, with a beginning, build up, and conclusion. I do not remember the numbers of people who were deported to Siberia, nor the exact dates of deportation and arrival. I still need to google them if I am telling these stories to others, although by now I know the year was 1948. Instead, I put them together, one by one, into a portrait that does not have a linear time frame; I unconsciously fill the gaps myself: some things my grandad has never told me and never will, some things he suggested but never explained. I feel the water on his feet as he watches his barracks flooding during the first days of spring; I smell the aroma of freshly roasted pine nuts gathered from a Siberian pine tree, even though I had to look them up to paint a better picture in my mind. I share his sorrow, of the childhood he lost, of the bag of dried peas he left, because he didn’t like them, which he regrets to this day, of his house which he never saw again, of his memories that were destroyed with it.

Sara Rajaei’s imagined City of Poets paints a complex feeling of belonging in an absence, where the colonial histories and myths of the nation have erased the memories of places and people in them. The film starts by peacefully introducing a place, a city that has never existed, a city of poets where all streets were named after poets, and later, after writers, and later after scientists, and later after martyrs, until there were no poets left on the street names and "citizens“ found themselves lost amid the memories of forgotten poets.” This utopia is constructed from archival footage, thus, in a way, from the memories of people who lived, and read poetry, before wars, traumas, refuges, outside interference and nationalistic myths created new realities in Iran. The City of Poets no longer exists, and maybe has never existed, it is a place that was lost, memories that were erased, it is remembered in its absence. And exploring this absence, this statelessness of feelings and fragmented memories, however traumatic or healing it may be, is a form of doing poetry, doing-woman-animal-Asia, it is a way of creating friction in narratives which slowly disturb the grand national ideologies.

“There is a pit in the garden and my parents will soon plant around it.” In Vasyl Lyakh’s Kharaltida, Vasyl’s family also planted around Soviet war medals and an aborted foetus. His aunt did not like talking about war, did not believe in it, and medals were not something to be proud of, a sign of courage or victory, but rather physical reminders of pain. Here, painful family histories that were suppressed and hidden are left in the margins of the grander historical narratives about the creation of the nation, victory, and empire. In the film, Vasyl and his brother dig deeper into their family history, their Azov Greek heritage, and find more scars of imperial histories whose echoes are felt today, in his parents’ garden in Mariupol during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As he and his brother look for medals in the earth, we find out that the stories of his family’s roots were also left in the background, never shared, never discussed. We see archival footage of a traditional Azov Greek ritual, but its meaning is obscured, ghosts of the past that are remembered through their absence. The soil remembers more than the family, or maybe the scars left on the land are just more visible than the scars left on the people.

Still From Vasyl Lyakh’s Kharaltida
When I was a child, I was a bit afraid of my granddad; he always seemed so serious, so cynical and pessimistic, never asked for help, always worked, and rushed others around him to work. Always with his rules not to eat after 6pm, of one candy a day (which I despised, every day climbing on closets and cabinets to find his stash). But I hadn’t listened yet, the scars can be hard to find. Some memories are buried, hidden deeply in soils you can hardly recover, and some are told but not listened to, that lay in the background like dust on tables and bookshelves, and in the corners of the house you barely visit, that disrupt the clean surface, which then we dust and wipe, and dust and wipe. Yet they are always there, they always come back, we still have to live with them. Now I understand that listening to the memories not only offers a chance to mourn and heal but to see how narratives are formed about what to remember and what to erase. To see how they affect people around them, not the nations, not the empires, but people who carry them and then bury them. And maybe to imagine alternatives.

Daniel Jacoby’s film 315 is a history told through personal memories of the artist’s birthday and visualised through his family video archive. The more we hear about May 31st in the film, the more the mystery of the event which happened when the artist was 4 deepens, but it stays in the background of everyday life events and celebrations. Finally learning about the terrible events creates a dissonance in the narrative; through the memories of the artist, we start puzzling pieces together not just about the massacre in Peru that has been left in the margins of history but also the complex influences of patriarchy, colonialism, and neoliberalism that are otherwise left unnoticed. The friction created through doing poetry, geared towards what was deemed insignificant, left in the in-betweens of the ideological narratives, allows the insignificant to question the predominant histories and to propose new discourses and new relationships.

Still From Daniel Jacoby’s 315

For a while now, I’ve been wondering how to comprehend these memories I’ve been passed by my grandad. I used to hear them every day as he raised me, but I only started listening when I became older. And while they were stories of loss, of pain, of dispossession, he also mesmerised me with tales about the taiga, about how he herded horses, how he tricked a neighbour’s aggressive rooster that was bullying his family’s rooster into losing a fight, and how he was caught by the neighbour, how good the village vet was, and how tragic his life was. It was only in a history class when I was in my late teens that I somehow placed these stories in a grander historical narrative, and they lost the beautiful taiga, the deep rivers, the evil roosters and unfortunate vets, it was only the suffering that was left. Then the memories became a bit alien, a bit empty and nameless. So here I am attempting to do poetry about the memories that are flowing in my body, in all their sadness and suffering, yet with all the care, complexities, and in-betweens. I am trying to not make them shallow parts of something bigger, of something that uses this pain to write nationalisms and ethno-states. In turn, I believe that doing poetry means looking for frictions, for memories in-between, beyond the grand histories of the Nation or the Human, for memories that may deal with trauma, that we seal, suppress and forget, memories that hide in the soils, or forests, or cracks in the walls, the narratives that have been erased or left in the margins. Doing poetry means challenging the status quo, subverting the tales, listening to what seems fragmented or insignificant. Doing poetry means healing, caring, it means unlearning.

References 
I Do WomanAnimalAsia by Hyesoon Kim, translated by Anton Hur (2019)

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