Photo: Märta Thisner

Ahmad Shamloo och poetens solidaritet med folket

1954 skriver Ahmad Shamloo:
Jag är den gemensamma smärtan
Skrik mig^[1]

Dear friend,

Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, I have lost almost all words. They have become so tiny in the shadows of griefs and pains that they are hardly to be found among the latter. The very words that used to be a home for my restless thinking are now a lonely wall of a house bombed by the Russians, with only two sides: testimony and resistance. Language has no other forms nowadays than testimony: the testimony of those who have lived or continue to live in the catastrophe; and it has no other purpose than resistance: the resistance to those who deny your very existence. Everything else around is absorbed by the silence that settles in the destroyed cities and villages, in the yards and basements, among the lumps of concrete, metal, pieces of cloth and furniture, invisible mines and tripwires in houses and gardens, broken glass pieces, mangled trees, and blackened blood. Perhaps it would be easier to talk about all of this at a certain distance, and perhaps the right words, texts, and books about Russian crimes will be discovered by those who have never known this silence but will open themselves to it, so will be able to find its scattered signs everywhere. It is quite possible that they won’t even be Ukrainians; perhaps they will be Norwegians: yourself, your colleagues, or friends. I would like it to be so.

Der er en ting, jeg frygter, når vi taler om kunst og klima: Didaktikken.

Den kunst, der beskæftiger sig med klimasammenbruddet, løber altid en fare for, at indskrænke sig til sit oplysende formål og ikke komme længere end det didaktiske og pædagogiske. Robert Louis Stevenson advarede i et af sine erindringsstykker, “Across the Plains”, mod den realisme, “der består af mudder og gammelt jern, billigt begær og billig frygt”, og så fortalt han en fabel om en munk, der forlader sit kloster og går ud i skoven for at lytte til en fugls triller. Da munken vender tilbage, viser det sig, at han har været borte i halvtreds år. Det er måske ikke realisme, men poesi, en poesi, vi kan lære mere af end mange bind fyldt med didaktiske pegefingre.

Photo: Valentyn Kuzan

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which has been ongoing since 2014 and took the form of an open armed invasion in 2022, was from the very beginning centered around the region called Donbas. In Russian (and often also in foreign pro-Russian) media, this region is considered as “having the right to self-determination”, “debatable” or – in line with Putin’s pseudo-history – even “historically Russian”. Russian ideological and political manipulation around Donbas is often compared with the situation around the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which also gained pseudo-independence due to military support of the Russian Federation and have remained in their status of unrecognized states under Russian political and military control to the present day. However, the independence aspirations of the peoples of Abkhazia and Ossetia were based on the obvious ethnic identity, cultural and linguistic specificity, which determined the distinctiveness of these groups against the background of the cultural landscape of the region. We cannot see anything like that in Donbas.