Part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures. We are surrounded by nostalgic visions, violently nostalgic visions. Fiction can imagine differently.... We certainly need it now. Because if we can’t imagine desirable futures for ourselves that stand a chance of actually coming to pass, our collective depression could well condemn humanity to a period of terrible savagery. Mohsin Hamid, New Yorker interview on Exit West
My thesis about this would be that all humans deep down, whether they admit this or not, know that it would be possible or it could be different. Not only could they live without hunger and probably without anxiety, but they could also live as free human beings. At the same time, the social apparatus has hardened itself against people, and thus, whatever appears before their eyes all over the world as attainable possibility, as the evident possibility of fulfillment, presents itself to them as radically impossible. "Something's Missing...," Theodor Adorno
To own your fate, she implies, is to own history
we stopped digging deep long ago,
just a couple fingers down,
we leave the plowed earth unturned,
so the fertile soil won’t all blow away in one generation
so we rake our beds,
make the sign of the cross, and sow
we sow, from here to there, like everyone
like everywhere
we stopped digging deep long ago
in this uncertain field of ours-yours
because all kinds of junk can turn up:
human bones, horses’ heads, unexploded mines,
a battle ax, the peg that marked the border
between our side and yours
we don’t go there
between the eyes out of sight about the eye
we don’t measure it in steps,
we can’t tell
when all our land’s stuck to our soles
and keeps us from moving our feet
She [Halyna Kruk] picks apart Ukrainian soil, unearthing the detritus of history. Ukraine’s fertile earth, known as “chernozem” or “black soil,” has been cultivated and coveted. The “breadbasket” of Europe was supposed to produce grain for the burgeoning Soviet Union. The Nazis saw the land as potential Aryan lebensraum. The land that has been sown with crops has also been sown with the casualties of history. As Timothy Snyder puts it in his 2012 Bloodlands, “Even human ash fertilizes.”
"History is inseparable from the present. Kruk, a poet and Medievalist from Lviv, aims to sensitize her readers to both. To own your fate, she implies, is to own history, to become more certain of your place in “this uncertain field of ours-yours.” The sticky soil that “keeps us from moving our feet” must be exhumed, if there is any hope of moving forward."
Halyna Kruk: Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.
from LITHUB a series on contemporary Ukrainian poetry.
*****[...]we stayed, we did things, Ukraine is present in our lives now,
{...] if we’re going to have a future, we’re going have to start thinking about different ways that things could turn out. And if the Ukrainians have given us anything, it’s that they’ve bought us that time, right?
I feel like every day that they stay on the battlefield buys us a week, a month, a year of thinking about how things could be.
Thanks to the fact that they’re doing something, they’ve given us this chance to think bigger.
[...] what’s interesting about the Ukrainians is that they seem to be moving more towards the argument that the nation is not about a clear story of the past. It’s more about action directed towards the future.
It’s not about having the past all in order. It’s not about having all of your blue books on a shelf, all of your red books on a different shelf. It’s about what you do every day, you know, as a collectivity which exists, as a collectivity because it’s directed towards some kind of a future. So I’m happy to talk about how the Ukrainians see their history.
But I think this business about being a civic nation and having a nation which is based upon asserting its own existence day to day is the real contrast with Russia, or at least not Russia, but the real contrast with Putin and his narrative and his myth.
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