Sharing the darkness | Eurozine

for Dr. Baha Alashqar, of Odesa and Gaza

Scrims of reminiscence.

24 February 2022. I wake with a begin at midnight. A nightbird putting the window? A bat within the eaves? Perhaps somebody within the theater of my sleep gave me a nudge – somebody I don’t know in waking life. It’s cloudy and heat this night time, so the waning moon isn’t seen by way of the window beside me, nor the intense star Antares to the correct of it. There isn’t any wind. There have been no sharp knocks on the door as I appear to listen to typically in my sleep, and no imaginary bell. A stillness has descended on all the pieces: the pile of books on the bedside desk, the water glass lit from inside, and throughout the room, a gallery of individuals searching from their images as if by way of home windows up to now. Nothing strikes. One thing has occurred, is what the darkness says. It needed to do with the maps I had been finding out in current days, with the drawings of tanks and the arrows pointing at Ukraine. At one time, equivalent to in Beirut years earlier, I’d have reached for the Grundig shortwave radio and spun the dial by way of frequencies of music, language, and white noise. Now I attain for my cellphone and start to scroll, tenting the sunshine with a bedsheet in order to not disturb my husband’s sleep. At first the world appears quiet. Kyrgyzstan’s President has signed a decree banning the slaughter of cattle throughout funerals. Anti-war protesters have gathered outdoors the Russian Embassy in Berlin. Singapore studies a file variety of Covid circumstances. I resolve the Wordle puzzle and the mini-Crossword, after which I play the sport of guessing what number of phrases may be constituted of the identical seven letters, utilizing the identical single letter in every of them. I study that it’ll rain tomorrow. I hear the water heater activate then off once more. Automobile lights from the street move over the partitions. Perhaps within the distance a racoon is opening a rubbish can. It’s all very regular, however one thing bothers the thoughts. This has to do with the warfare that’s coming is what the darkness is saying, and it’s proper. The nation on the map is now ringed by battalions and tanks, convoys with their missiles pointing on the clouds. The Russian army forces are arrayed alongside the borders of Russia, Belarus and occupied Crimea.

The air raid sirens sound simply after daybreak in Kyiv, and a few minutes later in Lviv. Blasts are heard within the cities of Dnipro, Mariupol, Kramatorsk and Odesa. This has to do with a metropolis close to the ocean, metropolis of wheat and light-weight, metropolis of limestone smooth sufficient to chop with a hatchet, as I had written in a poem about Odesa. Poems typically whisper at the hours of darkness like this. They seem at the hours of darkness like lights when the eyes are closed. Inside hours, I’d know what woke me up. In Kyiv it was already morning and it was clear {that a} full-scale warfare in opposition to the individuals of Ukraine had begun, a warfare to destroy kindergartens and libraries, theaters, farmer’s markets, hospitals, filling stations; a warfare on universities and maternity wards, factories and buying malls, house blocks and playgrounds, a warfare on a language spoken for hundreds of years, on the historical past of a individuals, on people songs and dances, fairy tales, literature, and meals; a warfare, as I noticed it, upon an opera home, a madhouse, a ghost church with wind for its choir/ the place two issues had been esteemed: literature and ships, poetry and the ocean. These strains are from a poem I wrote for the Ukrainian-born poet Ilya Kamin-sky after we traveled to Odesa twenty years in the past, when it appeared potential and even restorative for him to return, to see as soon as once more town of his childhood, town he left together with his mom and father within the years simply after the collapse of the previous Soviet Union.

This was not my first journey to that a part of the world. A decade earlier, I had pushed by way of Belarus towards Ukraine to doc the circumstances of individuals dwelling within the exclusion zones surrounding the broken reactor at Chernobyl: the aged individuals who refused to go away, and refugees from the warfare in Chechnya, who discovered security within the peace and quiet of the place. In reminiscence, the enormous blue cabbages rising of their radiated gardens are seen by way of a scrim of acacia bushes lining the streets of Odesa. The passage of time has brought about these journeys to occur unexpectedly, the pictures flickering like photo-graphs in a chaotic slide present. Ilya and I are strolling within the chilly wind towards the Potemkin steps when he interrupts this reverie by playfully inviting me to bop, as instructed by the title of his first quantity of poems, Dancing in Odessa. And so we waltz down Prymorskyi Boulevard, and later, over a samovar of black tea within the Lodge Londonskya, he confides that emigration is demise. “You will need to die while you board the aircraft and stroll into your resurrection as you disembark within the new land. In case you are unable to do that, you stay a corpse. I’m undecided I can say now that emigration is an effective factor.”

That journey was the primary of many for him. He even went again throughout the warfare, partially to go to his ailing uncle, to deliver no matter assist and luxury he might to his family members and pals, the poets he had come to know within the a long time since that first journey, poets he had been translating and publishing, and now was making an attempt by some means to rescue, in no matter approach he might. Most Ukrainian poets had chosen to remain behind when tens of millions of girls, youngsters, and aged males boarded the trains, piled into automobiles, or walked to the nation’s borders. Like everybody else within the west, I used to be confined in my data of this exodus to images and video footage: arms reaching by way of practice home windows, crowded platforms, youngsters in snowsuits, home cats and small canine tucked into winter jackets, curler boards, rucksacks, wheelchairs. Some had packed believing they’d solely be away a short while. I questioned what they’d chosen to deliver with them and tried not to consider all they’d left behind. I did, nevertheless, perceive that the pictures earlier than me didn’t transmit how chilly it was, how uncooked the air, how painful the boots and sneakers, didn’t convey the determined hope for a bathroom, a sip of water, a spot to dry out the mittens and socks. Within the images, the black smoke pouring from burning house blocks doesn’t sting the eyes or burn the throat; there isn’t a stench of cordite and no overpowering petroleum odor of warfare.

Quickly after the invasion started, the author Askold Melnyczuk requested me to affix a Zoom gathering of Ukrainian poets, sponsored by the PEN-American Heart. Regardless of our far-flung places, within the pc display screen, it was as if we had been all in the identical house home, searching from our totally different home windows. In Ukraine, it was already darkish. The temper in our dimly lit poetry constructing was solemn. Vasyl Makhno was in New York, Ostap Slyvynsky and Halyna Kruk had been in Lviv, Oksana Lutsyshyna was in Austin, Texas; Iryna Shuvalova in Beijing, and Oksana Zabuzkho tried to affix us from Warsaw, however was unable to get the expertise on her borrowed pc to work. Askold welcomed us. There have been greetings and unhappy smiles, shrugs and figuring out seems. I knew that I’d share a poem I wrote for Ilya, titled “Exile”, however within the hours main as much as our assembly, I additionally composed a message within the type of a poem, an pressing message written shortly and skim in its uncooked state. Within the days that adopted, the message was revealed, translated into Ukrainian, and letter-pressed as a broadside in each languages in opposition to a discipline of sunflowers.

If there’s ink

If there’s ink for this hour if there’s
one thing to say to put in writing that might
ship the tanks the convoys and transports
into reverse on the roads they’ve rutted
ship them again to the borders they crossed
ship them again, and the hours too which have handed
since daybreak on the twenty-fourth day of the second month
ship these hours with them, and the enemy
troopers dragging with them their crematorium
and the corpses of their fellow troopers they’ve left
behind and their very own wounded ship them again if there’s ink
if there’s something to put in writing that might increase the cities
from the ruins the house blocks hospitals faculties
that might put the cities again as they had been
I’d give all the pieces to fill my pen with it

This was earlier than Mariupol was razed to the bottom, earlier than its theater was bombed, killing 600 individuals who had taken refuge inside it; earlier than the invention of the torture chambers and the corpses of Bucha; the aerial bombing of Vinnytsia, Chernihiv, Kyiv, and Izium, a litany of cities and cities; the siege of the steelworks; a baby photographed mendacity lifeless beside a child carriage; a mom in labor carried on a litter from a burning maternity ward. It was potential in these first weeks and months to think about myself to be following “the information”, particularly by studying The Kyiv Unbiased, simply because it was potential to hope that the sanctions would work, that the braveness of a besieged individuals might prevail in opposition to despotic aggression, that the most important land warfare in Europe in virtually seventy years wouldn’t finish in thermonuclear warfare; that Ukraine would by some means survive this onslaught in opposition to vital odds. In spite of everything, hadn’t the Russian warship been sunk off the coast of Snake Island? Hadn’t the farmer’s tractor towed the damaged tank out of a discipline? Didn’t they put these pictures on postage stamps? The warship and the trac-tor-towed tank?

I lie at the hours of darkness most nights, conscious that at that very second, on the opposite facet of the world, a rocket had struck an influence plant and the lights had gone out. After which I used to be mendacity once more on a basement ground in Beirut a few years in the past, listening to the thunderous shelling of Ras Beirut from the Maronite east. Nearly each journalist posted to Beirut was in that resort basement, together with a handful of individuals from neighboring residences. There have been thirty or so of us. Beside me was a younger Lebanese lady mendacity underneath her coat, whispering to me about her life, and questioning if there could be something left within the morning. “In fact, there can be”, I reassured her, “they will’t destroy all the pieces.” Nonetheless, the reality was that sure, they may. I feared that our constructing could be hit and we’d be crushed beneath it. “Now we have to sleep”, I mentioned to the lady. Within the morning, we are going to get up, and it will be over. I mentioned issues like that till she fell asleep, after which I lay there, staying awake to maintain the world intact. That’s how one thinks in a makeshift shelter underneath bombardment.

As I scroll by way of images taken in Kherson or Nikopol, I bear in mind not solely the stench, however the deafening sounds of detonated ordnance, acrid mud and particles, the screeching of steel on steel, the coughing of the mortars and shattering of glass. Within the morning, the streets of Ras Beirut had been lined with damaged home windows, inexperienced, jagged scraps that made it look as if the streets had been iced. It was exhausting to stroll. And there’s a lot else one can neglect: how for hours and even days nothing occurs, and it appears secure to come back out as a result of in spite of everything it’s obligatory to search out meals and water, to arrange meals and wash up, to consider the place to go subsequent. I bear in mind the younger boy who every single day ran from doorway to doorway with a tall stack of pita bread he balanced like plates in a circus act. He typically needed to dodge rifle-fire, however he by no means dropped the bread, and folks watching from a slight distance cheered him on as if he won’t die at any second, as if this had been an excessive sport.

Generally within the early hours, I uncover my buddy, Edward, awake in Odesa. He’s on Fb’s Messenger. I ask him if he’s someplace secure, in a shelter or basement. “No”, he replies. Then: “Round 20:00 hours, two heavy photographs sounded proper subsequent door to our home. It was our protection firing. I now stay not removed from the restaurant the place you and I dined. My spouse and three animals. I don’t lose coronary heart. We aren’t afraid.” Then: “A number of hours in the past there have been ten photographs, very loud, so my head ached however we’re not discouraged. We predict will probably be over quickly.” Later: “In Odesa there have been a number of volleys from the ocean and the air. Within the metropolis for a very long time a siren and a distant bombardment had been heard. My spouse and I and our three pets – Santa, Puma, and Charlie – are calm and assured in our victory. We’re ready for the top of the warfare. Thanks for being with us.”

October, 2023. I start texting, typically by way of the night time, with a physician who had taken shelter, first within the hospitals the place he labored, and later in a white tent pitched in a metropolis of tents in Gaza. He texts me about his work, tending to the wounded and maimed. He texts about illness and illness, lack of meals, lack of water, lack of medication and medical provides. He sends images and movies taken on his telephone, and he tells me about his bombed home, his uprooted olive groves, his household, and the gorgeous life they as soon as lived in Gaza. His Ukrainian spouse, whom he met whereas finding out medication in Odesa, had already been evacuated by the Ukrainian authorities, along with their 5 youngsters. However with out Ukrainian citizenship himself, the physician had been unable to affix them. When aerial bombardment of Odesa intensi-fied, his spouse and kids fled once more, taking refuge in Germany. I had begun working with a small group of pals in america and Egypt, who had been serving to individuals to cross the border at Rafah, and that’s how the physician was capable of attain Cairo, the place he’s now enduring the very lengthy await an appointment on the German embassy to plead for a visa to go to his household. He texts images his spouse sends him from Germany: his youngsters in snowsuits, the littlest in a carriage. He sends a video somebody took of him as he extracted a coin from the esophagus of a ravenous little one.

11 April 2024. The genocidal wars in opposition to the individuals of Ukraine and Gaza proceed by way of the sleep of all who nonetheless stay in security. Mendacity awake at night time I insist to myself that sure, that is occurring once more now, within the coronary heart of Europe and in Palestine. What the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote is true: “If a factor exists in a single place, it is going to exist all over the place.” There may be nothing that can’t occur, nothing unimaginable the place humanity is anxious. Battle is an previous story. As for human survival and so-called civilization, there aren’t any ensures. In our instances, all the pieces senses that an finish would possibly come, that annihilation is feasible.

We all know that warfare destroys language, because it destroys all the pieces inside its zone of prosecution. Below circumstances of such extremity, language is wounded, fragmented, cratered. It’s put to army use within the creation of euphemisms which have develop into all of the extra sinister with the advance of expertise. What is going on earlier than our eyes just isn’t “warfare” however a “army operation”. Mass homicide is “ethnic cleaning”. In Ukraine and Gaza, there aren’t any “shortages” of meals, water, and medication. These are intentionally withheld as a weapon of warfare. We are saying the “combating started” as if by itself, and never in response to an order. We “come underneath” assault as if positioning ourselves by our personal volition. Whereas firing rockets at house homes, we converse of the civilian lifeless as “collateral injury” in order to not admit that we’re deliberately killing noncombatants. Battle doesn’t start as a sudden incidence, like an vehicle accident. Preparations are made and may be seen from a good distance off, like a storm on a horizon. But in opposition to this destruction, poetry is written within the midst of warfare and in its aftermath. As is perhaps imagined, many of those poems don’t survive. They disappear into the pockets of corpses and the drawers of demolished desks. The poems that do survive usually have an odd tone: ominous and pleading, as pressing as an SOS or m’aidez despatched into the night time from a broken ship. These poems are sometimes addressed to the longer term, like messages in a bottle (Paul Celan) or to those that stay in security past the warfare zone. In studying poems as witness, we learn all that the poet endured, all that she noticed, felt, tasted, and smelled. These are studies from the human soul, from the depths of being – not factual dispatches equivalent to would seem in newspapers, however “information of artwork”, testifying to the reality of the human expertise. The poet writes as if making an incision in consciousness. On the web site of this wound, language breaks, turns into tentative, interrogational, kaleidoscopic. Nevertheless it endures. Within the phrases of Paul Celan at Bremen: “One factor remained attainable, shut, and unlost amidst all of the losses: language. Language was not misplaced, despite all that occurred. Nevertheless it needed to undergo its personal responselessness, undergo horrible silences, undergo the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.”

In response to Miłosz, “the poetic act adjustments with the quantity of back-ground actuality embraced by the poet’s consciousness.” Consciousness of that background actuality calls for vigilance, this very wakefulness at the hours of darkness, and is sustained by way of the college of the empathetic creativeness, by our means to reply to hidden forces, to disturbances within the cosmos, the best way horses run backwards and forwards throughout a pasture earlier than a storm, or migratory birds sense an early winter. The background actuality for many who stay removed from the warfare zone is the warfare itself. It shares the darkness with us, the second of night time.