Svetlana Alexievich, a giant of a journalist, looked like a tiny brown dot floating on a stage that was soaked in blue light. She had to fiddle with the device that translated the German questions from her interviewer into Russian. There was a full programme at the event and, also because simultaneous interpretation always lags, the interview was short.
But the few words she spoke landed hard following the outbreak of war in Gaza.
(All the pull quotes in today’s letter are from my notes while listening to her speak in Berlin this week.)
‘Darkness is part of the human soul.’
Alexievich’s books are polyphonic symphonies made up of the voices of ordinary Russians, telling her about what it was like. The ‘it’ is hardship. Oppression. War. The Chernobyl disaster. Russians living through Perestroika in the Eighties.
Alexievich said, in her Nobel Prize lecture in 2015, which really is worth reading, that her books are all really a single book about war.
‘We have to talk about these wars as long as people are still alive.’
You don’t have to be in a war to be in a war.
By the time I was born, the Second World War had ended more than two decades earlier. But there it was in our house at every meal time when I couldn’t finish the food on my plate, or when someone slammed a door accidentally, and my father would go off like a rocket. I still go off – not quite like a rocket, more like a cracker – at sudden sounds or when someone enters the room behind me and I turn around and there they are.
We all dwell in a world of people damaged by war, or the children of people damaged by war. War trauma pushes itself forward across generations like a bilious wave.
In some of the footage I saw this week, a father and his two children are bundled into a van of some sort. They are covered in grey dust so thick, their eyes gleam like marbles in a bag of cement. The man is holding and rocking the younger child, whose tears have left trails on their dusty cheeks, and is saying in a voice full of fear, ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid.’
He was not talking only to his children.
‘We have to talk about these wars as long as people are still alive.’
I used to believe that if the people who had survived World War II had spoken more about what it was like, perhaps we could avoid another world war. This is one of the ways in which war makes a joke out of us: our wishful thinking, our naive fantasies, our childish hopes.
As a journalist, I used to believe that I was involved in a noble calling to tell the world about horrors it didn’t know existed. The ones who hadn’t heard would gather the powers of goodness and make the nightmares stop. All we – the journalists – had to do was make people listen.
Name it. Say it. Neutralise it.
It seemed so simple.
See it. Hear it. Stop it.
I miss being idealistic sometimes.
Idealism has so much energy.
Mostly I don’t miss it though, because idealism also takes energy.
‘The dreadful stories we hear should not rob us of life. Culture gives people strength. But it doesn’t mean hope is easy.’
There are more than 30 deadly conflicts going on in the world right now. The latest one in Gaza hasn’t made it on to any of the websites I checked. It didn’t even make it on to this website of predictions for war in 2023. Thousands have been killed there this week, and thousands more have been wounded. Most of the people dying and wounded are not soldiers. They just people trying to have their breakfast and earn a buck and get their homework done and hang their washing.
If the stories people tell of their experience of war or oppression do not change the course of history – if we learn nothing at all from the books, plays, memorials or even the shivering or raging silent trauma of our parents – why is it important to tell the stories; to hear the voices? Why are we so compelled to represent – to re-present – our stories of suffering?
‘The work of artists is to help people listen to themselves.’
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
‘We need courage to live.’
The soundtrack of your life
My friend Patrick and I had an on-and-off game over several years in which we arranged imaginary soundtracks for our own lives, imagining the minor dramas of non-war-torn lives as art movies.
Well, he probably wasn’t doing that. He was never dramatic like I was.
On a longer-than-usual city train trip this week, I was looking for Glen Hansard music to listen to. I’d seen a poster that he was performing in Berlin and I was filled with aching to watch the movie Once one more time.
That made me remember all the movies – mostly from the 1990s and early 2000s – that I’d loved, partly also because of the quality of their soundtracks, all of which I had on CD. Here are my favourites in no particular order:
Once (2007)
Philadelphia (1993)
City of Angels (1998)
Romeo & Juliet (1996)
Juno (2007)
Pulp fiction (1994)
Trainspotting (1996)
Drive (2011)
I wish I’d written down the songs I thought would be on my own soundtrack. I think I will just have to start playing that game again. It’s like those other two favourite fantasy games: What book would I take to a desert island à la Desert Island Discs? And: What would I do with the money that remains of the lotto I win after I’ve paid off my flat?
Have you watched The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar yet? There’s this scene in which Henry Sugar causes chaos by throwing money off his balcony. I wouldn’t do that with my leftover lotto winnings, but I do have fantasies of anonymously dropping money into the laps or pockets or accounts of people in need. There are so many laps and pockets and accounts to service, I’d never get through them all.
But, a lot like my old fantasy of a world without war, I like to imagine being rich and having zero obstacles to handing out money to people who don’t have it as I see fit.
Lots of love,
K.
PS: The book I would take to a desert island is a big, fat dictionary. I have thought about this for many years and in a very deep way. And it’s the only solution I can come up with for ‘one book forever’. What would you take?
Thank you for this. I was particularly interested in the quotes you selected after wondering why we feel compelled to re-present our stories. I think you answered it well: to help us listen to ourselves because we need courage to live. The stories might give us hope when previously we would have despaired that suffering so great will break us.
I remember feeling that way about The Choice by Edith Eger - I might not be as strong as her but it made me feel that I could bear more than I usually give myself credit for. It can always be worse. As long as I don’t focus on gratitude or hope to the exclusion of feeling my entirely valid feelings, even grieving the loss of something I was never entitled to, I find that’s a useful thing to remember.
🤍🤍🤍