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Mourn the Dead, Fight Like Hell for the Living: Moez Surani interviews
Veronika Gorlova

Thank you for these poems, Veronika. I’d like to start with specifics: the dishes kholodets and holubtsi that are mentioned in “Traitors.” Do these have an inner personal register of meaning beyond what we may find in a recipe or restaurant? What is encoded in these dishes that may not be apparent?

For me, food is strongly associated with memory. The first dish I chose, kholodets, was a dish that was almost always served at our community gatherings. Funnily enough, it’s a dish that I hate, even though the memory it brings up is one of joy. Holubtsi, on the other hand, is one of my favourite Ukrainian dishes. They remind me of my childhood, and whenever I visit my grandmother in Mississauga, I always ask her to make them for me. Food is also an expression of love, especially for immigrant communities. In many cultures, parents might not express verbal love but will demonstrate their love through cooking. I wanted to bring that out, and contrast that love with the hostility and suspicion that the war brought to our community.

In these poems, knowledge and “understanding” are vexed things. These terms are ironized because, I think, this mode of receiving the world and events is vulnerable to the insidious aspect of “general knowledge” and the political torque that is applied to general knowledge. Do you ever wish for a society of Rousseau-like exalted beasts who lack this institutionally constructed memory and could look at the world in a raw way?

I actually don’t agree that knowledge is a vexed thing in my poems. “Traitor” addresses my lack of knowledge and understanding of Ukraine’s history. When I say “everyone seems to know more than I do,” I’m not debating any of the statements other people have made. I’m being earnest and confronting myself about just how little I understand. Everything is political, whether or not it gets labeled as such, and “general knowledge” only reflects the dominant political standpoint of a society. But I’m not interested in neutrality, I think neutrality is a myth. It is not possible to look at the world in a raw way. Rousseau’s state of nature was a thought experiment. I’m more interested in philosophers like Antonio Gramsci who look at knowledge as “conceptions of the world” that represent the experience of particular social groups. Gramsci was concerned with how to harness that knowledge into what he called a “common sense” in order to challenge the dominant hegemony and create the conditions for revolution. I’m interested in how art can be part of that “common sense.”

Would you be able to talk a little about writing in English, writing poetry in English, and what feeling the English language evokes for you as you use it? Has this feeling changed as you’ve worked in it? I ask this because language choice seems to be so important to these poems.

Using Russian in my poetry has been a way for me to reconnect with my language and my history. Although I was born in Ukraine, I moved to Canada when I was 5, and shortly afterwards stopped reading and writing in Russian. My Russian vocabulary is limited. I can barely read Russian and I cannot write in Russian without the help of translation. So, I’ve written in English almost my entire life. When I was younger this didn’t bother me because I was trying to fit in, but the older I get the more I regret not preserving my Russian language skills. Language is history and culture, and when you lose a language you lose part of your heritage.

I often feel like I don’t have the right to use Russian in my poetry at all because I rely on online translation, or I ask my mom to help me. So, when it came to using Russian in poetry about the war in Ukraine, not only did I have the feeling of being an imposter because of my poor language skills, I was also confronted with the fact that I never learned how to speak Ukrainian. Growing up in Canada, I didn’t learn about the history of Ukraine, so I never questioned why my family spoke Russian instead of Ukrainian. It wasn’t until the Russian invasion of Ukraine that I started interrogating these things. I remember going to a Billy Ray Belcourt talk at the Vancouver Writer’s Festival a few years ago. I don’t remember the details, but at one point they discussed the implications of using settler language to critique colonialism. When I was thinking about the history of Ukraine and how the Soviet Union prohibited the use of Ukrainian language, I came back to this idea of using an oppressor’s language to critique them. “Traitor” was a way for me to explore this contradiction.

Grief often makes me wonder about an afterlife—this is an especially acute connection for me if I find the death in some way unjust. Do you believe in an afterlife beyond this world? Is justice a part of this afterlife?

There’s a saying amongst organizers which comes from labour activism that I try to abide by: Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living.

I think the idea of justice in the afterlife can be a distraction from the work that needs to be done here and now. The injustices we face are created by systems, and they will continue until we confront and dismantle those systems. One thing I would like to bring people’s attention to is that Palestinian refugees fleeing Israel’s genocide in Gaza face unreasonable barriers to be reunited with their families in Canada, and many of them have unfortunately died waiting. Less than 900 Gazans have been reunited with their families since the genocide started in October 2023. Contrast this with Canada’s incredibly generous program for Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion, which has brought in almost 300,000 Ukrainians since 2022.

In my poem “Following the lodestar” I directly address this injustice by including a news headline about a Canadian family whose relative starved to death in Gaza while waiting for one of these scant visas. The poem is an account of my uncle’s attempt to flee the war in Ukraine, but at its heart it is a critique of the global border regime. The poem is dedicated to him, and all refugees and migrants who have died trying to make it to relative safety in the west. Many of whom, like Palestinians, are dehumanized or completely ignored by our institutions.

I don’t want to imagine that these migrants are going to get justice in the afterlife, I want to fight for justice for the migrants who are still alive.

Gazan Canadian families have organized a national sit-in movement in front of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) offices across the country. I encourage everyone to join a sit-in or help support this action.

Is there something you wish people could know about Ukraine? Is there a poem or movie or artwork or anecdote you would like to point us to?

To be honest, the only thing I want people to understand about Ukraine is that Ukrainians are not more worthy of support than anybody else who is fleeing war, genocide, climate change, etc. It was bittersweet to see the outpouring of support for Ukrainian refugees. On the one hand, I knew many people who were fleeing and it was wonderful to see how warmly they were received all over Europe and North America. On the other hand, I’ve never seen this type of positive response to a refugee crisis, both from governments and from ordinary people, and it solidified the racism and injustice that lies at the heart of immigration and border enforcement. A year-and-a-half later, when Israel started its genocide in Gaza, that racism and injustice was amplified.

There’s a brilliant essay written by Palestinian American writer Hala Alyan, published in the New York Times, that was originally titled “Why Must Palestinians Audition for Your Empathy.” In it she writes: “[I]f your shock and distress comes only at the sight of certain brutalized bodies? If you speak out but not when Palestinian bodies are besieged and murdered, abducted and imprisoned? Then it is worth asking yourself which brutalization is acceptable to you, even quietly, even subconsciously, and which is not.”

I know many people who wholeheartedly support Ukraine, but still, almost two years into a genocide, find every excuse to look the other way when it comes to Palestine. So, to those who still find it hard to support the Palestinian cause, I want them to ask themselves why.

And lastly, how would you like these poems to be read? What would your ideal response to these be?

I don’t write about Ukraine because it’s a political cause for me, I write about the war in Ukraine because it has profoundly impacted my family, our community, and my relationship to my own history. I am not a nationalist. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is horrible and illegal, and many people have died because of it, including my uncle. But I do not support the way Ukraine is being used as a political tool by so-called liberal democracies in order to shore up support for NATO and increased military spending, and perpetuate the lie of “western values.”

That doesn’t mean that my poems aren’t political, they are. In “Traitor” I explore the history of Russian imperialism through the lens of language, and how language continues to create rifts in the Ukrainian community. In “Following the lodestar” I frame my uncle’s journey of migration in the larger context of border regimes.

I want people to meet these poems where they are, and engage with their specifics, instead of looking at them as Ukraine poems.

 

 

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