WRITING AGAINST ERASURE: FOUR CONTEMPORARY POETS OF WAR
Client: VATAHA Foundation
In Lyuba Yakimchuk’s poem “Decomposition” (2014), which we’ll look more closely at below, we see a city disappear through syllables. Luhansk becomes “hansk,” a name partially erased in front of the reader’s eyes. War, in these lines, doesn’t arrive as a spectacle. It enters the language itself until the name of the city starts to break apart.
War poetry is often imagined as a poetry of impact, of “big” things, of loud things. A blast, a charge, a hero. Some of the most arresting Ukrainian poetry of this century moves in the opposite direction. These poets and their work show the impact of war on language, memory, on ordinary folks and their ordinary habits-of-living. They work in worlds of erosion, or attempted erosion, and the continued endurance of resistance against it.
The body appears under strain: sleepless, displaced, aged, foreign to itself. Language becomes unstable, as if war has entered and occupied the written word itself. Home isn’t a settled and impermeable fact but an injured category, fragmenting into versions of defended, mistrusted, cracked-open. And memory becomes a task.
russia’s war has threatened archives, libraries, and books, many of the material conditions of cultural memory. Writing, in this context, isn’t symbolic resistance. It’s one of many ways of refusing disappearance and keeping names, places, history, tradition, and language from being lost.
There is, too, a long tradition behind this work. Ukrainian poetry has often been written under pressure, and shaped by questions of identity, language, and survival. The line runs, however selectively, from Taras Shevchenko through Vasyl Stus and into the work of Lina Kostenko, poets for whom language has never been separable from political life. The four contemporary writers that are considered in this article (Serhiy Zhadan, Iya Kiva, Ostap Slyvynsky, and Lyuba Yakimchuk) inherit their tradition and test it under familiar, though modern, conditions (occupation, displacement, bombardment).