New Year’s Letter to Oksana Zabuzhko
My Dear O,
I began this letter a month ago, a few days after our president was impeached. The moment was historic, but it didn’t feel that way. Maybe that’s because the world’s on fire: Paris was shut down for months by strikes; the rain forests keep burning, along with vast stretches of California and Australia; there have been protests in Hong Kong, Santiago, and Caracas, not to mention in Kabul, Cairo, Beirut, Tehran, New Delhi, Bogota, and Baghdad. Ukraine is a soccer ball kicked around by parties who care only about scoring goals. These days, newspapers spare little room for the Syrians, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the Rohingya, or the Kurds. Occasional stories about these tragic places appear fleetingly, like trees glimpsed along a highway down which you’re hurtling full speed, heading who knows where?
I began my letter and put it aside repeatedly. There’s too much to say, and every day the headlines offer fresh jolts. I’ve also written little about our contemporary political situation in part because so much of what I think gets voiced already across a thousand platforms. I keep remembering lines from a poem by my old professor, the wonderful poet Ira Sadoff: “I read the papers and weep./I give the finger to the president.” Yes, both.
At the same time, as my country prepares for elections, one needs to clarify one’s thoughts and hopes.
I know what you did to your corrupt president when he wouldn’t leave: you chased him out. He didn’t go peacefully, though. You, I know, are still coming to terms with the trauma of those days out on the streets of Kyiv, fires burning, the Berkut shooting protestors from rooftops. Blood was spilled. I hope, and expect, we’ll manage to avoid that. You “won” that battle — and yet the war goes on. Everywhere, perpetual war. As my friend Leila, a political scientist, pointed out, we’ve entered a world devoid of all principles: winning is everything. Principles are inconveniences, encumbrances, to be discarded like rinds.
The subversion of all values is everywhere. Consider the case of the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical company promoted the abuse of addictive opioids even as the family purchased respectability by patronizing the arts at the highest cultural levels, at the Metropolitan Museum, at Harvard, at Yale. Several of the company’s founders were themselves physicians who had taken an oath to “do no harm.” The institutions receiving their money never asked where the it came from, and never allowed themselves to consider that what they were doing was tantamount to money laundering. Hundreds of thousands of deaths are directly linked to the family’s accumulation of billions, several billion of which they are now trying to shield from the lawsuits being brought by attorneys-general around the country. And they are just one case among thousands dramatizing what happens when the ethos of money and winning at any cost become the rule of the land. We could as easily consider the Koch brothers, the circle surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, and of course, our president.
Do you remember an observation made by Albert Camus, a writer we both love, in his magnificent, still relevant book, The Rebel? The central problem of the 19th century, he wrote, was how to live in a world abandoned by grace. With God gone missing, the solution then turned on humans creating their own earthly paradise, a utopia founded on the principle of justice. But justice according to whom? Lenin? Hitler? By the middle of the 20th century the question became: how do we live in a world ruled by neither grace nor justice?
In fact, events had already provided the answer. Into the vacuum marched the will to power: power not even nominally in service of grace or justice, but rather as an absolute value in and of itself. This is certainly not the first time in history power for its own sake held sway over the human imagination: “Might makes right” describes the relation between polities in “a state of nature.” That ethos appeared to have lost credibility after the devastations of the Second World War. The evolution of international institutions such as the UN, and transnational ones such as the EU, seemed to indicate humanity had recognized its common stake in mutual well-being. Disasters teach lessons too soon forgotten.
Unlike its predecessors, grace and justice, power in service of itself appears unwilling to yield the floor. Even formulating the next question is difficult. What might arise once we admit that not grace, not justice, not even the will to power have, will, or can succeed in bringing the social forces tearing us apart into some kind of equilibrium? Yet until we do imagine it, power and the pursuit of it will seem like the only game in town.
Power is the subject of our oldest literature. Long before Foucault, Homer’s Iliad chronicled power’s fluidity. In her essay “Poem of Force” Simone Weil analyzes the ways in which everyone in Homer’s poem abuses power in the brief moments they appear to possess it, never realizing it is power that possesses them. And once they overstep, retribution is certain:
This retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force, was the main subject of Greek thought. It is the soul of the epic. Under the name of Nemesis, it functions as the mainspring of Aeschylus’ tragedies. To the Pythagoreans, to Socrates and Plato, it was the jumping off point of speculation upon the nature of man and the universe. Wherever Hellenism has penetrated, we find the idea of it familiar. In Oriental countries which are steeped in Buddhism, it is perhaps this Greek idea that has lived on under the name of Karma. The Occident, however, has lost it, and no longer even has a word to express it in any of its languages: conceptions of limit, measure, equilibrium, which ought to determine the conduct of life are, in the West, restricted to a servile function the vocabulary of technics. We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in their apprenticeship to virtue.
What can we, as writers, offer a world appearing to invite another universal catastrophe, this time on an unprecedented scale?
First, I’d like to rehearse some personal history — if only to remind us that what appears a monolithic, irresistible darkness is itself transient, vulnerable, and bound to change.
You recall how we met, thirty years ago, in Kyiv, at a poetry conference? The US was about to invade Iraq. The Soviet Union was on the verge of dissolution: the Iron Curtain — the term feels quaint — was about to come down. I was about to start a new teaching job, about to meet my wife-to-be back in Cambridge.
I remember you, not quite thirty, standing at the podium of that lecture hall, your eloquent anger as you chastised us for assuming we, the visitors, your guests, knew something about what “you” had been through. Then, as now, you spoke for the collective — a risky strategy, yet sometimes a necessary one. In truth, neither side, neither group, knew much about each other — not the natives, not the diasporans or their children.
You see how history immediately put us into contradictory positions. You in Ukraine were about to experience the exuberance of emancipation, a cultural and intellectual renaissance such as the country had perhaps never known. We — I — on the other hand, as a citizen of the empire, was watching my country march inexorably toward yet another unwinnable war, the consequences of which continue to devastate a region “we” have been playing with for centuries — as though our superior weapons, our technology, gave us the right to act as the world’s cartographers, redrawing maps to suit ourselves, with little thought for those who must live with our decisions.
You and I agree on many things; but our differences are inevitable. You were born and raised in a country under siege, its language, traditions, and faith forced underground, one which lost more people to war and famine within three devastating decades than any other country on earth, a territory which had endured centuries of occupation and repression. Entire generations of intellectuals had been decimated, murdered, imprisoned, prohibited from writing, corrupted or compelled to write in support of an experiment which went wrong from the start. I, on the other hand, grew up close to the heart — or, because I live in Boston, it’s fairer to say, the brain of — the empire. It’s an empire, like all others, built on the bones and the blood of the “losers” in the vocabulary favored by our president. Fortunately, here, as for you in Ukraine, there are still many people who don’t subscribe to the vocabulary of triumphalism.
One thing that’s certainly changed is that today the world knows of Ukraine’s existence. When I was growing up people didn’t believe there was such a place — it was a territory in Russia, they told me. They told me I was speaking in dialect. Today, however, I wish the word would drop off the airwaves for a while. To paraphrase Wilde, the only thing worse than not being talked about at all is being talked about all the time.
But it’s clear from what our impeached president has said — his attempts to blame Ukraine for hacking the US elections — that the propaganda wars are far from over. You and I have been dealing with fake news for a long time. And so the story we are living today is intimately connected to the earlier narrative.
(Let us also acknowledge that it’s sheer hypocrisy for us in the U.S. to be “shocked” that Russians tried to sway our elections. Lord knows we’ve been doing the same world-round for the better part of the last century: consider our actions in the Middle East, in Egypt, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, not to mention in Haiti, Cuba, in Central and South America. No doubt we played favorites in Ukraine. In all those countries we have ignored ethics and principles in order to secure commercially beneficial arrangements for “our” corporations.)
But where does this leave us? What are writers, mere writers, to do in the face of such vast indifference to what we, along with billions of others, value? Humanism, we’re told, belongs to the past. Today technology proposes the evolution of the “transhuman.” Can we help each other in the task of imagining what might come to replace the blind worship of power? That’s a question I’ll take up in my next letter.
“Wisdom,” observed Confucius, “lies in watching with affection the way things grow.” That simple utterance, with its implication of absolute respect and even delight in the well-being of others, holds a clue to where we must look. Ok, let this be a start. More soon enough.
love,
a
Askold Melnyczuk’s book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, appeared in 2021. His four novels have variously been named a New York Times Notable, an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. He is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian Writers. His published translations include work by Oksana Zabuzhko, Marjana Savka, Bohdan Boychuk, Ivan Drach, and Skovoroda. His shorter work, including essays, stories, and reviews, have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Missouri Review, The Times Literary Supplement (London), The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review and elsewhere. He’s received a three-year Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction, the McGinnis Award in Fiction, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his contributions to the literary community. As founding editor of Agni he received PEN’s Magid Award for creating “one of America’s, and the world’s, leading literary journals.” Founding editor of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Most recently he has been organizing readings in support of writers in Ukraine, as well as interviewing writers for his For the Record series which appears online at Agni Online (https://agnionline.bu.edu/blog/for-the-record-conversations- with-ukrainian-writers/), as well as on Arrowsmith Press’s website.