Belarusian poet in exile Hanna Komar, talks to AW’s Hollay Ghadery about her exile and poetry of resistance.
HG: Your poems carry such darkness juxtaposed with the softness of childhood to create gut-wrenching vulnerability. Would you say the darkness or tenderness is more of the primary driving force in your work?
HK: I myself have actually never considered my poems to have darkness in them. Every time I perform them, I am worried that I’ll make everyone sad again, but for me it’s not so much about darkness as about the reality of a vulnerable human or vulnerable people. Often, that vulnerability is a cause of violence: domestic abuse, gender-based and systemic violence, political terror. Now that you mentioned darkness, I wonder if that’s what people see in my poems, people from outside the experience told about by these poems. This experience is my life, and I wouldn’t call it dark. Heavy, maybe. Perhaps it’s tenderness trying to make it through the heaviness of violence. Tenderness which is mistaken for weakness by others and even by myself. You become tough when your tenderness is taken advantage of, and you become tough in order to protect your vulnerable self. But your tender and the vulnerable parts don’t disappear, they hide, and they come through in poetry.
HG: How has exile affected your creative practice and your view of the role of poetry in the world?
Back in 2021 when I was still in Belarus, I started working on this project: a collection of documentary poems telling twenty stories of Belarusians who left Belarus since the protests began in 2020. Some of those people were persecuted, others weren’t, but they all left because of the political repressions unfolding in the country. This was a big and emotional project. I collected written interviews of twenty Belarusians, and then I montaged them into poems, like you do to make a documentary film. Every poem is thus written using the exact words of the informants, or characters, as I prefer calling them. So I experienced all these stories together with those twenty Belarusians, they became part of my heart. This project felt very important; as a friend of mine said, it is bigger than me. Belarusians were leaving the country in dozens of thousands, so that is the experience of not just twenty individuals, it is a collective experience, a collective trauma. But living in constant terror, I had no emotional capacity to finish it. I found the strength and time when I was living in the safety of the UK and the security of the scholarship which I was receiving.
HG: What would you say is the most fundamental difference between your earlier work and your work written in exile?
Since I came to London in September 2021, besides the documentary collection I have written only one good poem — in the week following 24 February 2022. But I wrote a fairly good play and am working on long prose, self-writing about the experience of domestic abuse in my family and its connection with state violence. I am using this distance from the place and people to write about these big topics.
Initially, it wasn’t exile which changed my work though, it was the political events of 2020 and 2021 in Belarus. In August 2020, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians marched in a peaceful protest against dictatorship and were met with immense violence. I found myself actively involved in the resistance and in the women’s movement: at the peaceful protest, in solidarity groups, and ultimately, in jail. For months and months, the personal stopped existing for me, only the collective was left, and the collective mattered more than anything. I felt the need and mission to document our stories, not just mine but also of those who didn’t have a platform to be heard, which I, as a recognised poet, had. And now I’m trying to unite the personal and collective in my work.
HG: Can you please speak to your title choice and its deepest meaning for you? I am curious about your vision for the collection.
HK: My new poetry collection Ribwort is upcoming with 3TimesRebelPress in August 2023. The title has a special meaning for me, and that meaning has transformed from personal to collective together with the poems in the collection. Ribwort is a plant with healing properties. When I was a child, we would apply ribwort to our scratched elbows and knees, to small cuts to stop bleeding and help them heal.
Ribwort is a space to sit down with your pain and listen. You may think it’s not helpful, like a leaf of ribwort on a bleeding wound. The pain will probably be growing more and more acute, but if you face it, if you hold space for it. Eventually it will shrink to the size of a scratch which a leaf of ribwort can help to heal. When we have healed, we become leaves of ribwort for others, so we can sit down with their pain and listen. Listen with compassion and without fear, without getting defensive or running away. I want to hope the poems in this book can do that.
HG: How long did the first draft take for you to write? What was the core of the developmental process between drafts, were you working on the structure or the story world or aspects of style and language or something else? In terms of sheer length, what did the book look like after the first draft? Did the length change?
HK: I published my first Belarusian collection of poetry in 2017, and in it I gathered poems written over two years. I wrote another body of poetry over the next three years, and it felt like a complete one, ready to speak to the reader as a published book. Before the events of 2020, the new poems I’d written felt more intimate, although I was becoming aware that even things like romantic relationships, considered personal, can be political. Just like poems about one’s relations with their parents or country. Yet, I didn’t consider my poetry openly political. In 2020, there came my first explicitly political poems, and I added them to those collected previously. In the summer of 2021, I brought the script of this book to a publisher in Belarus. He told me that his business would be shut down for my protest poems. He couldn’t publish them, and without them, this book wouldn’t be complete. I didn’t try to look for any other publisher in Belarus, because I expected the response to be the same. Besides, there were things more important that needed my focus back then: helping the repressed Belarusians and continuing our protests in any form we could do without putting ourselves at a high risk. After that draft, I added two more poems, and it feels complete.
HG: How did you arrive at the form/structure of the work? Did you have a form/ structure in mind when you started? What other forms/structures or shapes did you consider? What was driving the choices of form/structure – efficiency or something else …style, urge for innovation, compulsions of the genre, compulsions of a literary movement it aspires to connect with?
HK: Ribwort may feel like two books, as mostly personal poems flow into those talking about the collective experience. It consists of sections which tell about my relationship with my parents and with the self, romantic relationships, a little experimental miniature poetry cycle, relationship with my home country, and the poetry of civil resistance. In my first poetry collection I put the poems in the chronological order because I wanted to show my development as a poet. When I came to the point of putting together this new collection, I already felt quite confident as a poet, and the themes of the poems were more diverse this time, which had to do purely with the circumstances of my life. This is how I came to these sections. The question for me was which section to put first. In 2021, my priority was the civil resistance, and I put that section first. But then, the connection between the personal and political in this book wasn’t so transparent. So I put the personal in the beginning, because by sharing personal pain I learnt to hold space for experiences much bigger than mine, much bigger than me.
HG: Are any aspects of the book that is autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with your intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) in a way that avoids the dangers of straight autobiography?
HK: The book is strongly autobiographical, but what are the dangers of straight autobiography? Is it the feeling of shame, is it fear of judgment? I know they are very real, but autobiographical writing has been my strength and I cherish it. When I’m interviewed sometimes to talk about my experience of the protest, when I talk about incarceration, when I tell about my experience of domestic violence, the interviewer always tells me that it’s ok if I don’t want to talk about it. With a sad smile, I reply that I’m a poet, I’ve been sharing all these things so that I’ve become professional in it. It’s almost my job. When I am sincere about my experiences, when I don’t hide my vulnerability, when I talk about traumatic experiences, and when others read it or hear it, and I know that from the feedback I receive, it is liberating for them. Because with these poems I say, look, this happened with me, and if it happened with you too, it’s okay to feel the way you feel about it, and it’s okay to share it. We aren’t perfect people with some crystal clean stories here, and sharing them helps us be more genuine to ourselves.
HG: How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?
HK: In the context of protest and anti-war art we’ve been having some conversations regarding artistic value of the work you create in such times. I can’t separate the social meaning of my poetry though, as I’ve never created art for the sake of art. Perhaps it’s a luxury which you can’t afford when you live in an authoritarian state. Perhaps the opposite, art for the sake of art is a form of resistance to oppression and ideologies. I would hope for these poems to change something in people and society though. I want to believe that by telling these stories and raising these issues through poetry I can bring about change. Poetry has also become a way of documenting collective experience for me. If history is erased from history books, as it is happening in Belarus, it will remain in poetry, and, hopefully, will reach those who want to know the truth. I also would hope for this collection to have a therapeutic effect as I do believe in the therapeutic power of poetry.
HG: Have you ever collaborated on a writing project with another writer or artist? Can you share that experience?
HK: In Ribwort, I included a series of six photo poems “Unprotected” which we created together with a Belarusian photographer urbanparadox. In the beginning of September 2020, almost a month into the protests, we went to the key places of the protest where some brutal things had happened, she took photos and I wrote poems. I was wearing a white wedding dress which belonged to the grandmother of a friend of mine who was abducted by the police on the 11th of August 2020 at the bus stop in the centre of Minsk. He called us three days later from hospital; he had head injury and a bunch of other injuries, bruises all over his body were probably the mildest of those. When he was out of hospital, he showed me this dress, and I knew it was a perfect metaphor for Belarus, because before the beginning of the protests, Lukashenko said in one of his speeches something like, ‘Belarus is my beloved, and you don’t let go of your beloved.’ A perfect metaphor of an abusive relationship of a dictator with a country.
HK: What do you intend for the readers to be left with after the final page?
HG: I would say, I just want the reader to feel. I don’t have expectations and I would want the reader to have absolute freedom in what these poems leave them with, but I would hope for them to be a conversation with the reader. And if after the final page one feels like they’ve had a conversation which touched them somehow, it would be enough for me.
Author Bio
Hanna Komar is a poet, translator, writer, and researcher. She has published three poetry collections, “Страх вышыні” [Fear of Heights] and a collection of docu poetry “Мы вернемся” [We’ll Return] in Belarusian, as well as a bilingual collection Recycled. A member of PEN Belarus and an honourary member of English PEN. Freedom of Speech 2020 Prize laureate from the Norwegian Authors’ Union. Hanna is currently taking a PhD on using poetry to support Belarusian women to share experiences of domestic abuse and patriarchy. You can find her at http://www.hannakomar.com.