Review: Motherfield
Motherfield, by Julia Cimafiejeva
Deep Vellum
280 pp.; $18.95
I am reading Julia Cimafiejeva’s Motherfield when I hear sirens scream down the long Houston boulevard that I’ve lived on for nearly thirty years. The sound pierces me. I know these sirens herald suffering in my own city, unlike those sirens alerting a city to missile fire sanctioned by a tyrant, or the water cannons, tear gas, and stun grenades targeting a peaceful protest by those demonstrating against a fraudulent election. Here in the U.S., for the moment, we can gather to protest the horrific shooting of people of color, or state oversight of women’s bodily autonomy, or the banning of books from our schools and libraries, without the threat of immediate incarceration. For those in 21st-century Belarus, Cimafiejeva tells us in Motherfield, such freedoms—“[w]here they’ve had the same president/[f]or twenty-seven (!) years”—do not exist.
Julia Cimafiejeva is a Belarusian poet and author of four poetry collections in Belarusian, as well as a literary translator from the English and Norwegian. Motherfield, translated by poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib, is her first volume of poems to appear in English, published in December 2022 by Deep Vellum, a Texas literary press founded by editor and translator Will Evans and dedicated to publishing books with a global perspective. With 168 titles in its catalog since 2013, Deep Vellum is now the largest publisher of translated literature in the country. With 168 titles in its catalog since 2013, this Texas literary press is now the largest publisher of translated literature in the country. A beautifully crafted book, Motherfield opens with selections originally written in English from the poet’s “Protest Diary.” The diary begins with entries from August 2020, the day after the contested re-election of Aleksandr Lukashenko whom many believe manipulated election results in his favor. The entries conclude in March 2021 with the poet’s writing from the Austrian city of Graz, as she recounts events leading up to her current life in exile. What the reader learns from this diary, in direct, tactile images, are the current historical circumstances surrounding Lukashenko’s regime. First, we see the election itself positioned among the “cheap and vulgar aesthetics of his power” — balloon garlands in patriotic colors, the Alivaria Beer tent, loud pop music, “a teenage girl in a pseudo-folk costume…singing about her love for the Motherland.” Subsequently, Cimafiejeva describes scenes of riot police wielding batons, and of protesters detained and tortured, their arms and legs bruised, heads bandaged, “[f]aces caked with blood,” “their swollen eyes full of terror.”
The initial diary contextualizes the present political moment in the poet’s home country for an American readership who may have little direct knowledge of Belarus’s history. It is a long story, Cimafiejeva tells us, in “My European Poem,” also written originally in English and concluding the volume:
Sorry, it’s a long poem,
Because it’s a long story,
I spent more than two-thirds of my life
Under the power of the man
I’ve never voted for,
Who harassed and suppressed and killed. . .
The diary’s prose also emphasizes the importance of digital communication, such as the Telegram app, in resistance to an authoritarian state, and, simultaneously, distinguishes screen language from that of poetry, its urgency and depth of human feeling. The poems, composed in Belarusian and superbly brought into English by Mort and Abdurraqib, use a direct, minimalistic style that “cuts like a sharp knife,” according to Mort, that penetrates, as I hear it, like a scream. These are devastating poems.
In a recent interview, Mort discusses the voice of her own poems as a kind of ekstasis, a “spilling voice” that allows the poet to stand outside herself, beyond her “lyrical I,” her “musical I,” and instead engage the “screaming I” that acknowledges atrocity and suffering. So too Cimafiejeva’s poems are a spilling of voice that resists being controlled by external or internal censors. The poems wrestle with language — Russian, Belarusian, English — where language itself becomes the instrument of an authoritarian regime’s nationalistic agenda, that of cultural genocide. Cimafiejeva considers what happens when language is under such intense political pressure that it collapses, or when a poet — whose deep reliance on words as her artistic medium — loses faith in language’s ability to communicate meaning. It is this language failure that she enacts most dramatically in the piece, “MSCRRDG”:
tossed
gross
red
ain’t a bud-
dy, stick-
y ain’t a thing
ain’t a tad-
pole. . .
As Lukashenko has worked to marginalize Belarusian in favor of Russian, Cimafiejeva has said that even to say hello places one on a political spectrum, whether one knows it or not, that to speak or write in Belarusian is a kind of historical “wave” or salutation. In “Linguistic Negative Capability,” she says, “The language I speak/is not my language.” The same can be said for Putin, whose relentless efforts to undermine the sovereignty of both Belarus and Ukraine commandeers language for his own imperialistic purposes. Thus, to speak or write in Belarusian or Ukrainian can be a defiant act inviting a tyrant’s violent response. In the collection’s first poem, “The Stone of Fear,” the poet writes, “The stone has no mouth, / it can neither scream/ nor talk,” and yet over the course of this volume, the poet does scream, she is able to speak, and she does so with courage and sharp-edged specificity. These are “poems made out of barbed wire,” as she states in “Language Is a Prison Sentence,” that hold the duality of her conflicted mother tongue. They speak in the language whose use imperils the speaker, and, simultaneously, they bear witness to the injustices perpetrated against Belarusians. Cimafiejeva’s is a voice not to be silenced, and her translators render the power of that Belarusian voice with equal power in English. The book’s title too is a confrontation, both linguistic and ecological, with the official “truth” of an authoritarian state. Cimafiejeva was born in Sperizh’ye, a town in southern Belarus very near the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve, a 507 square mile reserve created in 1988 to seal off the Belarusian area most highly contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster. This same area once comprised the farmlands of the poet’s youth, and thus, her “Motherfield” is both the poet’s colonized mother tongue and her beloved motherland, no longer fertile nor habitable, contaminated by the colonizing force of Soviet aggression.
When Cimafiejeva speaks in English, she says that she tries to tell this complex history of her country as if she were someone else,
As if I am like all those European poets and writers,
Who do not have to get used to the thought
That they could be arrested and beaten
For the sake of their country’s freedom.
These lines from “My European Poem” echo those from the November 1st–2nd entry in the “Protest Diary” in which the poet describes “The Night of Executed Poets.” On a single night in late October 1937, one hundred thirty-seven Belarusian intelligentsia were murdered and buried in the forest of Kurapaty near Minsk by the Soviet secret police (the NKVD People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Several thousand Belarusians were killed in comparable mass shootings between 1937 and 1941. It’s a long story, it’s an old story.
As I reread Motherfield, I am struck by the poet’s choice to begin and end the volume with her writing in English, so that the poems composed in Belarusian are enclosed within, insulated by an acquired foreign tongue. Perhaps Cimafiejeva intends this as an assertion of the poems’ interior, secret linguistic nature — the original, undefiled beauty of her mother tongue. Perhaps her positioning the poems at the book’s center offers protection to a beloved language at risk of erasure. Whatever Cimafiejeva intends, “the script-mist/ of [her] own poetry” is the work of courageous witness, and her co-translators Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib have offered to readers of English an enormous gift.
Houston's second Poet Laureate (2015-2017), Robin Davidson is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo, City that Ripens on the Tree of the World, and Mrs. Schmetterling, as well as the full collection, Luminous Other, recipient of the Ashland Poetry Press 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. The recipient of Fulbright and NEA awards, she is co-translator with Ewa Elzbieta Nowakowska of two volumes of Ewa Lipska's poems from the Polish, The New Century and Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton University Press, 2021). She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019, and teaches literature and creative writing as professor emeritus of English for the University of Houston-Downtown.