Of Slavic Souls, continued

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The Polish woman and the Russian woman crying their eyes out together, listening to Ukrainian songs.
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“God blessed America, and crucified Poland.”

– Me, in The wake, my first full-length play in English

I met a Russian woman last year, while on a research trip. We became friends quite quickly. At some point, we found ourselves sitting on the grass, outside, talking about our traditional Slavic culture and music. I played her the traditional Ukrainian song, “Niesie Hala Wodu”, on my phone.

A magic settled on the moment like an unexpected large and colourful butterfly. A deep longing and love, what the poets used to call “Żal” in the Polish language, arose in both of us, a feeling of being deeply cared for by the ancients, and also a feeling of missing touching the soul of the deepest and truest thing, all at once. We both started crying, tears pouring down our faces. It was surprising, this. In the theatre, we say that both tears and laughter are a response to the Truth.

My Russian friend’s grandmother was from Ukraine, while my own great-grandmother was Russian. And now, here we were, both of us, Slavic daughters, sitting on the grass, and listening to Polish, Russian and Ukrainian songs, and bawling our eyes out. The tears, the grass, the songs, us holding hands – a hard-fact proof of the existence of the Slavic Soul, a deep and beautiful and unfathomable thing, that still lives on. A True thing, that, in the face of which all we can do is laugh and cry – and what else is needed, to be human in this world?

I’ve been thinking about this moment again and again, the feeling that came with it, that I have no words for, all of this week. Perhaps a premonition that came upon us then? The Polish woman and the Russian woman crying their eyes out together, listening to Ukrainian songs – one of them remembering her Ukrainian grandmother, the other one remembering her Russian grandmother – and those grandmothers also remembering us in that moment, reminding us that the Slavic Soul is not the violence of the wars that have passed through our terrains, but a deep, wild thing in love with the forests and the rivers and nature – a thing of Mokosz, our Great Mother, our Goddess of the Earth.

***

I called my mom yesterday. (It’s no secret that our relationship is wobbly at best.)

“The situation in Ukraine is really tearing me apart,” I told her.

“Yes, it’s very sad. It’s sad for everyone,” said my mom.

“I was thinking about you, and how you left Poland, and what happened with my grandmother, Babcia Ania,” I said. “It’s a really sad story.”

“Yes, it’s a very sad story, a war story,” said my mom.

“There are many sad stories,” she added noncommittally.

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All things come from stories.
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“I was thinking that the way that you left, what happened, that maybe that also is the reason for how difficult things have been between us,” I said.

“Yes, all things come from stories,” said my mom vaguely.

Pause.

“You don’t want to talk about it,” I concluded, neither making a statement nor asking a question.

“It happened; what else can I say? There are many stories,” my mom finalised the issue.

My mom was 20 years old when she left Poland in 1981, soon before martial law was declared in Poland, my aunt and uncle arrested, and the country cut off momentarily from the world, leaving both of my parents involuntary refugees for the next ten years. My mom had left Poland a few months before, at the prompting of her mother, my grandmother, Ana Rosa (Anna Rossa, if you want to get very technical). My grandmother, who had so scrupulously tested herself for the uterine cancer that her mother had died of, had suddenly been diagnosed with uterine cancer, and told she had only a few months to live. From her deathbed, she told my mom to leave the country as soon as possible, and through some contacts (my grandmother was a Spanish translator) arranged for my mom to go to Spain. “Don’t you dare come back for my funeral!” my grandmother instructed. “There are bad things coming in this country, and you are not to come back, no matter what!”

My mom cried and howled and refused. Her hands had to be pried off from her dying mother’s bed, as her aunties told her to calm down, that this really was not proper, to behave like this in her sick mother’s room. Ultimately, one of her aunties dragged my mother out. (I think about those aunties, about all of the women, about the Slavic women who do all that is necessary, who keep on getting up the next day, no matter what, who are the real winners and the most tragic losers of all of the wars.)

This is how my mother left the country. Shortly afterwards, her mom died. Shortly after that, martial law was declared. Shortly after that, my mom, lonely, isolated, alone in a way that is unfathomable these days – without the possibility of calling her family, of writing an email, of messaging somebody on Facebook – my mom wanted to kill herself in Spain. She took a rope, and began to tie it to the rafters of the place in which she was staying. That morning, of all mornings, the postman decided to ring the doorbell. That postman saved my mom’s life.

“All things come from stories,” says my mom, decades later.

Two nights ago, in another fit of crying over the war – crying and laughter are both responses to the truth – I saw that the reason my mom spent her whole life pushing me away is because she didn’t want me to experience the same pain as she did, the feeling of her hands being torn off the railing of her mother’s deathbed, her last encounter with her mother, the frightening experience of exile from a country she deeply loved and still loves.

All of this – the decisive and cruel train of historical events that swept up my mom and led her to go into exile. Is it any wonder that this mother of mine could not open her heart to her strange, insistently-in-love-with-Poland daughter? When loving her mother, as well as loving Poland, had both been the biggest and most tragic heartbreaks of her life?

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Am I waxing poetic about Russian culture? No, I don’t think so. I am not saying that Putin is good, or doing good things. But I have seen and experienced and read and been born into a life that sees, very well, that to heal the cycles of violence we are used to, we need to think differently to how we have been feeling thus far.
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All things come from stories.

***

Still, Poland is what I loved and love. Except that Poland, as we know it, is relatively young, and what I love is very old – the language, the songs, the earth, the deep forest, the wisdom, the stories (from which all things come), the laughter and the tears. What I love is the Slavic Soul and is symptomatic of the Slavic Soul. A thing that is, above all, good and human. That is why I have been pouring my guts out on Facebook, of all places – to tell the world that the Slavic Soul exists, to remind it of its own existence, to use my words in the face of a tragic war in order to remind us of how GOOD we actually are meant to be.

All things come from stories.

***

“Many things you say, I disagree with,” a Polish friend of mine writes back in response to one of my posts on Facebook. She says that Poland has fought to be a part of Europe for thousands of years. The Russians stood by and watched Warszawa burning and did nothing in World War II (she is right). She says the similarities in our cultures – the Russian and Ukrainian and Polish – are there, but the atrocities have to be acknowledged. She says that to say that Poland is not European is harmful at the moment. She may very well be right.

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Is it useless, in this moment of war, to emphasise the unity of Slavic culture and the Slavic spirit? To remind ourselves that we are family, and that our cultures and languages lead to one root that is connected to a profoundly good and beautiful human spirit?
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And yet, people in Poland – the same people who, overnight, have accepted half a million refugees and more coming, who are spending their own money (and they don’t have much, truly) to feed and clothe and house the people who are running from war – these people, our people, are scared that we are next. This is a big fear. Being in NATO and being a part of the European Union doesn’t ease the fear. This needs to be understood – the deep traumas that are coming to the surface now. These are old creatures, old beasts, old feelings, old fears – and yes, it could very well be that what happens next is the recycling of old nightmares into contemporary forms.

I am reminded of a conversation I had with a Polish friend I met in Macedonia 11 years ago. I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but somehow we got onto the subject of Russia and Russian culture. I might have said something about admiring Russian culture. I believe he did as well, but somehow he was irked by my lack of anger at the Russians. “The Russians shot at our grandparents,” he declared, “and that still means something to me. It should mean something to you.”

Indeed. All of this means a lot to all of us, and yet how to make meaning out of it as well? Is it useless, in this moment of war, to emphasise the unity of Slavic culture and the Slavic spirit? To remind ourselves that we are family, and that our cultures and languages lead to one root that is connected to a profoundly good and beautiful human spirit? Somehow, I don’t think so. The Russians who are refusing to fight – they do so in the name of the greater human spirit that unites us all. The Russians who spent all of their tank fuel going in circles on a field in order not to have to storm Kiev – those are the people whose humanity is going to move all of us towards peace. After all, we are all hoping that the change will come from within Russian society, and so how can it be wrong to remind all of us of where we come from? The Slavic Tribes are not my invention – they are an old and beautiful people who value, above all, humanity (this is clear in all of the records), who build relationships and beauty in their lives, and who honour the Great Mother. (Marija Gimbutas’s research is key here as well – she proved that there was an old Europe that was peaceful. The Slavic people were part of that old, peaceful Europe that did not think of war as a solution, that valued creation over destruction in every part of life.) The time of top-down orders of war and violence should have long ago come to an end – should have, and why haven’t they? Politics won’t save us. We know it. We feel it.

Humanity will.

Thus I write again, and again, and again, about the Slavic Spirit – about our original connections, about the family that we are, that feels the deep forests, the Ancestors, that cries, “Slava!” – “Praise be; let it be honoured!” – that uses “Cześć ci!” as a greeting, meaning, “May the spirit in you be honoured and praised!” The people who bake the bread and weave the dolls and sing the songs and feed the Ancestors and praise all of the Gods and dance the dances that go round and round like the sun, moon, stars and our whole galaxy, even. The people who laugh loudly and cry louder, because both are expressions of the Truth – and we value Truth above all. The people who have known oppression for so long that it would seem like we no longer know the taste of freedom – but that is not true (so we can’t cry or laugh at the thought, because that is simply not true – we are a profoundly free people at heart).

I call on the Slavic Soul.

I call on the Slavic Spirit.

I call on the Spirit of our Grandmothers and Grandfathers, of our Great Ancestors, to come and rebuild the relationships between us.

I am a child of the soil, of the people, of the heart of the mountains and the waters, and I have every right to be so. Who will stop me? The Russians? They are me! Who will deny me my Russian great-grandmother, who had to flee Russia on foot and died in Poland of homesickness? Who will deny me her heart, her grief, her story? All things come from stories. Who will deny me my Polish family, who suffered from the brutality of Russian political regimes, again and again and again? Who will deny me my grandfather, who died homeless on the streets of Warszawa after being molested and tortured in a Soviet-Polish mental hospital – and that’s after nearly being murdered by the Germans in World War II? Who will deny me my Aunt Kasia, who was imprisoned and tortured during martial law in Poland? Who will deny me the poets of the language that I know to move the tough hearts of the Greatest and Oldest Spirits? All things come from stories, in all realms. Who will come and deny me Zbigniew Herbert, Stanisław Barańczak, Czesław Miłosz and the other beautiful exiles whose broken hearts fed my own spirit with their sweet words – Czesław Miłosz, who himself wrote, “I was not born in Poland, I did not grow up in Poland, I do not live in Poland, yet I write in Polish”? Who will deny me my language, which goes so deep that it touches the very heartstrings of the galactic centre, and thus creates a music so profound that all of life is changed into the peace and love that we all crave? Who will deny me the heartbreak of my people, and who will deny me their laughter?

It is that family that speaks through me now, and that family that I call on in my words – translated, true, but the voice and the Spirit are still there.

Who will tell me that they know for sure, for a fact, what it takes for peace to happen? Who will tell me that they know, without any doubt, that this action will cause more peace, and this one more war? Who will tell me that they know what motivates the heads, hearts and hands of people holding the guns? Who will tell me what I know to be untrue – that the ceremonies and rituals and prayers and love that the Slavic People have in droves are ineffective during a time of great need? Who will tell me that we do not know how to be human, and must be taught by politicians how to be so?

Who will deny me the power of MOKOSZ?

I’m tired of people trying to tell me what I am or am not, or who I can or cannot be – and, therefore, who we can or cannot be, as humanity. I have sought the world over for the human spirit, and I have found her again and again in the hands and the hearts of the people and the trees, everywhere – EVERYWHERE. Politics will not save our humanity. It never has. Politics must start to express our humanity, but it will do so only when we ourselves start to express our humanity on a very basic, holy and even mundane level.

When we express the humanity of the stories, from which come all of the things.

***

When you come into a Polish home, traditionally you are greeted with salt and bread. We say, “Gość w domu, Bóg w domu” – “Guest in the house, God in the house.” We are aware that every Guest brings with them the holy and the sacred, and so we must treat every Guest as part of the holy. We also know that the Holy doesn’t necessarily bring easy things with them. Sometimes the Holy comes in order to burn our house down. That is why, in our old culture, the dead were buried in the floors of houses, so that everything that happened inside of the home was supported by the infrastructure of the bones of the Ancestors. There is no firmer infrastructure than that.

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When you come into a Polish home, traditionally you are greeted with salt and bread.
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I call for peace and for the rebuilding of the home that is burning as we speak – a home that has been burning for hundreds if not thousands of years, a home devastated on top of the bones of murdered masses – how many millions has it been?

So many tragic stories, from which all things come.

If you go back far enough in Slavic culture, you won’t just find the three brothers, Lech, Czech and Rus, those ones who travelled the world and looked for signs from the Gods in order to find the land that would become their home (Rus found Russia, Lech found Poland, Czech found Czech – my people have always been nomads). You will find a culture deeply in love with the beautiful and the sacred. You will find Mokosz, who comes in many names across the region (Mokor in Russia, Mokosza in Poland, Mokosz in other places), our Great Mother. You will find Światowid, the many-faced Ancestor who sees the whole world, and who keeps one hand over his belly, his centre of power, and the other over his heart, indicating what we as people should value most as well (he has never placed a hand on his head, that funny and spirited Ancestor of ours). You will find stories of how greed disrupted the kindness of the human spirit and kept the good spirits at bay – and how, ultimately, the goodness of the heart prevailed. You will find stories of orphans who travel deep into the forest in the dead of winter, as they have been kicked out by evil stepparents, and who are then taken in by kindly Forest Spirits and ordained into spiritual royalty by virtue of their very good hearts.

You will find stories that connect us all. And all things come from stories.

Again and again and again, you will find a culture deeply in love with kindness, goodness and doing the right thing at all costs.

I didn’t make these old stories up. I was raised on them, yes – but they have always been, for me, a form of ancient remembering.

If we do not remember who we are, truly, then how can we behave as that which we truly are?

If we do not remember, on a soul level, that these people are our brothers and sisters, then how can we stop shooting at them?

I call on the Great and Wonderful and Deep Holy Thing that first birthed the Slavic Soul, and the Souls of all of the Original People, to help us heal the relationships between the three brothers – Lech, Czech and Rus.

I call on the Original Human Slavic Soul, because it is people’s hands that put tanks into motion and shoot guns, and it is people’s hands and hearts that can decide not to do so.

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Politics won’t save us. We know it. We feel it.
Humanity will.
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Am I waxing poetic about Russian culture? No, I don’t think so. I am not saying that Putin is good, or doing good things. But I have seen and experienced and read and been born into a life that sees, very well, that to heal the cycles of violence we are used to, we need to think differently to how we have been feeling thus far.

I call on the Slavic Spirit to come and tell us a story of our own goodness, once again.

I call on the original story – and all of the good things that come from this story.

See also:

Russians: Hostages of our own state

Stories from Stellenbosch and Kharkiv: Dzvinka Kachur and Hannah Yanovska (3 March 2022 at 09:50)

Die tragedie van Rusland en Oekraïne

The West’s economic war

Putin’s invasion and the failure of peace

Die Rusland-Oekraïne-konflik: die geskiedenis en Poetin se wêreldbeskouing

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Kommentaar

  • Etienne Viviers

    Wanneer fasciste aan bewind kom, is swaar belaaide kulturele begrippe soos "the Slavic soul" (of, in 'n plaaslike konteks, "die Afrikaanse gedagte") tog eintlik die talige raamwerk wat met propaganda ingespan word om militante geweld as die enigste en laaste uitweg te probeer regverdig. Die "menslikheid" van kultuurnasionalisme bied uiteindelik geen oplossing vir 'n gewelddadige nasionalistiese politiek se onmenslikheid nie. Kultuurnasionalisme is juis die begronding wat gebruik word om onmenslike politieke aksies as diep gewortelde menslike reaksies te herinterpreteer.

  • Reageer

    Jou e-posadres sal nie gepubliseer word nie. Kommentaar is onderhewig aan moderering.


     

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