Digital Poetics 3.6 KCL Writing Workshop 2022
The following are a selection of pieces written by King’s College London students during a writing workshop conducted by Azad and Kashif on 22/03/22
Table of Contents:
Jules Sokolowska
Nikolina Hua
Sophie Daubigney
Arya Sharma
Ishita Uppadhayay
Simran Garcha
Hamza Ibrahim
Isabella Stephenson
Sarah Arnold
Zahra Ally
Helena Gordon-Agbaje
Aminah Agha Alonso
Aatikah Essak
Nat Demarchuk
Jules Sokolowska
yearning
sorry i am a terrible person i will be bitter that you don’t hate yourself as much as i do that you’re excited to go home for the holidays that you don’t resent the love of your life for making you feel it so much that you couldn’t bear to touch her and oh my god what to do with all this DISGUST stirring in my throat please suck it away. it starts somewhere within me and slithers its way out into their air my blood beats with it it tangles with my nerves and solidifies my bones it coats my palms when i brush past someone it lingers on their skin where i touched them. there is a gay best friend on this show he comes out they pat him on the cheek it’s normal they say but it’s not don’t force us into your unfulfilling fucking cishet sex. thanks for legalizing the marriage the funniest thing is that instead of protecting our honesty once you oh so mercifully open the door we run into it salivating and if scientists made a moral fact detector and it said the queers were bad would you change your views on homosexuality? fun little thought experiment for philosophy majors.
Jules Sokolowska is a 21-year-old queer writer and poet based in London. Their writing mainly explores questions of desire, ephemerality, utopia, trauma, and yearning for the past.
Nikolina Hua
The thunder and lightning are in us
Doffing at all the inscrutable curtains I see, hat falls
upon this gentlewoman. Undisciplined eyes sheathing
me a rake - armed with swords.
Each time where the rock peaks, I sit and clutch, fingers draw and rub into self-portrait: Dueling of swords from different hands, snorting a realm, consisting
of my lungs from right to left; each time I swallow
the fuse from organs of different men: drawing back, blaze,
decease and revive, sending sneers and didactic summons beneath their Damocles pikes,
lying on me like ruthless revenge. A bad woman worth no soft touch
onto her infant-like flower which contains Rousseau’s tear!
They do not know a woman who guides tigers, I am fiercer than wolves through
salt water within two cat’s eyes until my only freshness, he sees,
at the end of a dusky lecture and a clutching of the polemic body.
About how furious I can roar during a poisonous climax; we lower our swords
when the first summer rain drops come with the force of May.
And there is thunder for me to slip out of a virgin world
From time to time. I swallow as if I have never swallowed anyone before,
When you stand among thunder and lightning - they are more salient
than any god or savior between animals and humans.
Finally, I know I have been missing, the lion inside your amber eyes
and each your step pounders an ebbing wave into my desolated moor,
Mushrooming, a spring wind ascends to the downhill, split me wide awake
- a diminished gluttony, a virgin reincarnates when she, loves again.
Nikolina Hua is from Shanghai, China. She is an English literature undergraduate student at King’s College London. Her epic novel series “Hurricane Tigress” (2016-present) has been published in an online series by Zhongheng. Her English poetry is mainly about nature, sexuality, cultural feminism, and sisterhood. She considers herself as an internationalist, and an animal right advocator.
Sophie Daubigney
Recreation
1.
On our lunchbreak we take a dip in the park, take a dip in the city’s grass.
How long till work begins? How long till work ends?
We’d like to swim through time, like liquid sunshine when you hold your breath.
How long can we live in this moment?
We set timers and think about the rays screwing the device.
How does it know when it’s time to kill time?
Stop.
2.
Sink into soil, fall into blue
Cast your mind back like the fishing line your father hurled at the sea,
Though they want to reel you back
like the harness around that dog or
child?
3.
In your shoal of thoughts you catch a glimpse of feeling
Diving deeper into the wreck, you think you can just about breathe again
And then you think you can’t –
you think you’ve forgotten how.
How many bars of oxygen left?
You panic: you check the screen: it tells you: 1 5 : 0 0
So close to the deep, now your chest feels punishing in a tight embrace.
4.
Blue. It’s still blue up there.
The gaps between thoughts are quiet and the thoughts are not your own,
there is so much quiet in queer.
5.
Rich takes you by the hand and you descend to face the wreck once more.
This time the oxygen is pure, limitless
dark.
Squeezing past ship’s carcass, the splinters threaten to
burst.
Space conquers time here and bits of wood are let
be.
They don’t hurt, their faces just pulled in frozen pain, never to
thaw.
Here they are silent and they are free.
Submerged under rippled history,
you think you see your future
Sophie is a second year BA student studying English with Film. She is interested in combing various mediums of expression from short films, art reviews and zines to encourage mindfulness and a greater appreciation for our environment. Her work has been published by The Strand Magazine (https://www.thestrandmagazine.com/single-post/hayez-susanna-and-the-gaze)
Arya Sharma
Echoes
I
am synthesising an existential crisis
upchucked onto the page and neatly arranged
into lines verging from one side of the page
to the middle where they float in white space
I
arrange with a pretence of thoughtlessness
that is the way of anxious poets with their
O’Hara dreams so I
synthesise panic onto these lines
these lines born from the dull thrumming knowledge that I
need to pee and I need to eat and I need to sleep and
I have to do something after this
so I should draw
what I write and
write what I like
I always like
what I write when my ego is doing well which
admittedly
isn’t all the time – how to take what I write and bake it into
fluffed up time
time simply is.
I don’t want to run after it I
do not chase but in this case I do not want
to be chased either
because all of that simply culminates into
a big
grotesque
fall
into the after this
fuck the after this
I hate the after this
I have nothing in the after this only
fear
but what is the ‘this’ what
constitutes difficult writing when the act of writing is easy and physiological
like the need to piss
but the act of meaning is fleeting and overly contrived or else self-deprecating
like wallowing in shit
I seek standing ovations for my therapy sessions
time is
a void
that’s my edgy gamer girl handle I
am the depths of civilisation in that I am spitting
words into the void and hoping they live meaning
my words may live through time
but till what point in the fall
do they stay mine what does it mean
for language to be mine let alone stay (mine)
Is all extensional writing merely overly self-reflexive and arrogant?
Is that ‘merely’ unwarranted?
Should I nurture this narcissus till it blooms?
What constitutes full bloom?
A publishing deal and profit and standing ovations till the yellow withers
What then becomes of language?
The words die in the void while meaning dives
somewhere
I don’t know where. But it certainly isn’t
the after this. See,
I don’t want the ‘after this’ now
because it prevents my writing
but once I am done with my writing
I want it to go into the ‘after this’
This is my narcissus flower in bloom:
existential prattle on the state of things
my state of self
and the nature
of writing nothing – it’s fucking meditative, see!
[exclamatory]
[wryly]
[self-deprecatingly]
Arya is a Third Year English student at King’s College London. She is interested in contemporary literature and theory. She mainly writes non-fiction, critical essays, and poetry. Her poems have been published in ‘Bloom Magazine’ and ‘The King’s Journal’.
Ishita Uppadhayay
Hero
And, so, like, you know
I love to tell stories
It was April, it was June
That’s the way I used to keep my hair
Man on the bus I complimented
Paul. I want a coat like that
says me
in the story
I’m telling
Fast voice new words rehearse
some times
Save that story
for dinner time another time
I tell stories to myself sometimes
It’s called a hero narrative
because I overcame
I chart my own progress,
You can always exaggerate
suffering for effect
the story about the crisis time
who could know how bad it was?
Am I unreliable
who holds that truth,
you know?
Ishita Uppadhayay is a writer and third-year English student at King’s College London with interests in public policy, philosophy, and journalism. They are Essays Editor at STRAND Magazine as well as Co-Editor of the King’s Tab.
Simran Garcha
I am alive in the living room
In the evenings we sit amongst cushions and throws,
laugh at the known, comment on the consistent.
I am only loved with a head in my lap –
quiet, warm, and eventually in dreams.
It is here, in this stillness I am so aware of my body –
whole, breathing, strong enough to hold two hearts.
At night when you leave, my thighs will become cold,
I will spit out the salt from under my tongue
over my shoulder, adding to the pile where the paint
has dripped onto the floor, I will sneeze three times
and eat something sweet, I will hide my hair from the
neighbour’s eye in plaits, I will knock on wood until it
splinters into my skin. I will spend all day on the couch
waiting, bleeding, and covered in crumbs.
Simran Garcha is a writer from London and currently studying English Literature at King’s College London. Her work has appeared in The King’s Journal and Strand Magazine.
Hamza Ibrahim
“Be Honest About Your Work”
This is necromancy.
What you’re reading is my revival of dead words that were redrafted
but share the same lack of substance as its first draft. Perceptible palimpsest.
A poet can’t play with meaning when the words mean nothing.
Anyone can be a poet. Everyone can be a poet.
There is no metric for a successful poem, and no metric structure necessary.
And following this criterion should be a recipe for success,
So why can’t I seem to string the right words together?
There’s a reason that I study poetry and don’t write it.
You can rest inside the cerebrum of the poet, protected by its beloved reception.
You’ve been told what good poeticism is, what’s engaging and what’s right.
How could you possibly reproduce the surgical accuracy of their language?
Naturally, the novice gives into a first attempt,
Before realising that their metaphors reach humorously beyond the fabric of reality,
tearing it until it seems plausible to metaphorise euthanasia with a flannel shirt.
Is it a good poem without the elusive lexicon?
Here goes...and here it ends.
The pen repels the paper, at least in terms of coherence.
Expression is now simply an impression - residue on a sheet that tells no story, evokes no emotion, defies all
requisites of work.
In all truth, I’m better off playing with the pen than with semantics.
How long until this gets good?
“Practice” is the undisputed advice. Poetic mastery is a product of cultivation.
And cultivated, the poetic works become roses, universally beloved.
But from that garden, the novice pricks every thorn from the very roses they seek inspiration.
How does every good poet overcome these thorns?
‘Your poetry won’t shine with a pessimistic approach’ – or something to that effect.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I don’t want to believe her.
I’ve gotten this far. What would she say…?
The words - the bones of this piece – are reanimated by the author’s impulsive desire to describe his ineptitude.
Ironically, I think he might have written something I didn’t think I could have.
I can only hope that my words have more substance than I believe them to.
Even so, writing a coherent sentence doesn’t make it a good one.
Is this necromancy?
Does the inversion of ‘is’ and ‘this’ bring to life a new meaning?
Is it as simple as making an effort to write something, even reluctantly?
Maybe she is right. Have I brought these words to life?
Hamzah Ibrahim is a student currently studying English at King’s College London. He finds great interest in deconstructing an author’s process of writing, following their stream of consciousness through their lexicon, as if it were to be decoded. His work is inspired by that of Virginia Woolf, especially in Woolf’s own efforts to expunge presumptuous approaches to literature and instead, encourage an effort to understand and “become [the author himself].” He also takes great interest in polemical works and seeks to iterate and develop the skillful use of language that these author's use to propel their causes.
Isabella Stephenson
The sky could be bluer
She said ‘again?’
Green green fronds, green green grass.
Scrambled eggs don't
Taste
As they could –
(they were eggs).
Unless?
*****
I can't eat another fucking egg.
Another film, five minutes in, the ending greeting the nebulous ‘you’.
Sterilise the plot before you cook it, thirty seven degrees C,
Cut off its qualitiveness, demonic jeweller with a diamond
to grill, MAKE IT FIT THE EGG!!!!!
Crush the yolk, you're spinning outwards
spinning spinach
grim reaper, meat cleaver
Oh an Oval, another Oval. Another round soup bowl, so potent, so permeable –
Not again.
Not another day in this systemically racist capitalist globe.
Isabella Stephenson is a first year BA English student at King’s College London.
Sarah Arnold
May Smoke Dissolve our Bodies
Artificial, acrylic – can my nails melt from this? –
Keys clacking – where were we?
Ah yes! Topic CX: The ultimate guide
to eNPS
Translate: strategies to reduce
customer churn
START YOUR FREE TRIAL
(shush, we collect our payments
Later)
Remember!
your two most powerful assets: customers & employees
We simply want to
Create a healthy, happy, horny work environment,
- It’s five times more expensive to acquire new
Customers / Employees / … than to retain old ones -
We simply want some
Fucked up Foucauldian
Docile bodies
To produce, to market, to sell
Toxic productivity in sleek, glass-door-offices,
modern-day panopticons.
I like to think
I sit, like A Woman
Sitting At a Machine, Thinking
And I’d really like a fucking cigarette right now.
Would you like a listicle, dear public, dear reader, dear consumer?
We all love a bloody listicle!
5 ultimate tips and
10 ways to and
Here’s a number of reasons,
So, here I shall offer to you
Reasons I disintegrate my body,
For you,
I smoke because I’m busy and need a break
Or because I’m bored, it’s all a break
I smoke There’s a glamour about
Smoking in a burnt down flat
Or when the world’s on fire
Or because someone smokes in a film
Or because you smoke
I smoke because I live where I can smoke inside;
Where the walls won’t stain, and we won’t start
Tracing shapes in yellow wallpapers.
I smoke because I like the way the smoke hovers, mid-air, in the projector’s light
And so does my body
And I think, for now – I shall really stop – but for now, what else is there to occupy one’s hands?
Mid-air-smoke-fragments, suspended, and how else to trace and
Capture the atoms
as they fall?
It’s funny
Our neighbour’s got an eviction notice
yesterday, and
Fuck, we might be next.
There’s new commodification, chic
Consumerist pleasure capitalising on
Ohhhhh warehouse life
The artist is chic if we can wear them
Can we put them on?
How – how about we knock it down and build a high rise?
How about we say three-story ceilings and massive windows? We shall
All be happy!
How about we knock down your homes
and we shall mash you all up
And then from this rubble we can make new floors?
Your flesh is so smooth,
We just want smooth carpets under our feet.
We shall be happy.
Here, take our offers, we bring plenty
To the table.
Ha! How about a thing like this?
Why do your veins shake like mine?
This is London.
And thank fucking god, we have statues, and thank
Fuck, we have eNPS so our employed voices,
Dismembered preaching to machine mouths,
Feel heard.
Do you feel heard?
Do you have time to evaluate your interaction with our company?
Remember,
your two most important assets are
your body and your cost.
Sarah is a London-based poet and writer, who lives in a warehouse community with other artists. Her work is primarily concerned with how bodies and spaces are coded, negotiated, and explored, with a specific focus on the visceral realities of being chronically ill. Her practice is rooted in the habit of flâneusing the city, collecting fragments, and processing them through different mediums from screens to typewriters.
She is currently completing her MA in Modern Literature at King’s College London, where she researches illness, female corporeality, and spatial politics in modernist writing. In addition, she works freelance as a copy writer and translator.
Zahra Ally
Nine Wives with Nine Lives
Nine wives with nine lives.
The first provided the womb, the last brought forth the coffin,
Her own coffin that was.
Wife number two became the bible for adultery, striking the fundamentals of family and marriage from existence.
Number three carried the weight of middle child syndrome, neglected and irrelevant (easily explains her 48 hour survival time).
Number four was number one in reincarnation, returning in John Connor-style with her ‘’I’ll be back’’ branded attitude.
Her duration is not currently decipherable as it remains unclear as to whether she ever departed.
With remnants of number 4 still amidst the house, and her recipe for pear and cardamon cake folded neatly into the cutlery draw, number five makes her entrance.
Number five pushed us into the shadows,
or so she thought
Taking on the epitome of the trophy wife,
or so she thought
If the trophy was one of those plastic, yellow, gold-coloured medals you received from third place in the egg and spoon race,
Then yes. I gladly award her the trophy.
Number six had learnt the ropes from her predecessors and fit neatly into the algorithm of wives.
What happened to nine?
Well in this lion’s den of marriages, seven e(ate)ight nine.
Zahra Ally is a MA student studying Contemporary Literature, culture and theory at King’s College London. She is interested in writing about familial traumas from a detached and witty stance. Currently writes for a personal fashion blog, including fashion trend commentary, opinions and advice. Available at: https://allyywhyy.wordpress.com
Helena Gordon-Agbaje
writing without stopping
she started off by telling jokes
to cope with the pressure of living in her body.
she imagined perfectly timed canned laughter
but the live studio audience didn’t react.
why does her joke-telling voice sound so foreign?
so hollow, so dissonant?
she’s only nineteen
and already saturated with the sound of metal
vomiting guitar feedback and white noise.
everyone around her fights for something.
she tries to pick a belief
(a fully operational faith system
something freshly packed, frozen on harvest, ready to use)
it’s easier said than done —
the comedic monologues draw on.
she performs them all hours of the day,
even when she’s alone.
especially when she’s alone
because all the world’s a stage.
the sketches pour out until they lose their humour
and melt into truth:
play-acting is a child’s game.
she has mastered the art of switching masks
when they inevitably chafe.
disguises are part of the fun;
conceal an emotion,
construct a spectacle.
she begs history to remember her.
living in her body taught her
to write jokes without stopping,
so she writes and writes and writes and writes and
Helena Gordon-Agbaje (they/she/he) is a Black, queer writer currently studying English Literature at university. Their mediums include prose, poetry, and research. You can visit them on Twitter @helenalovesyouu, where they discuss literature and pop culture.
Aminah Agha Alonso
Fluid on the brain
Toes slipping out of your sandals
kissing the ground as you chased
stray cats through the flowering bushes
and freshly trimmed grass.
Plucking daffodils from the soil
I laced one through your hair
as your mom puffed out your golden curls
to disguise the water swimming in your head*.
We raced through the gardens with our bicycles
balancing chocolate ice lollies
on one hand, your giggles
rippling through the watermelon air.
Laughing at jokes nobody but you understood
wearing my purple sunglasses
you absolutely insisted on ‘borrowing’
that made you look like a dizzy fly.
One day i’ll pick up the phone to call your mom
and hopefully she’ll say
that you left
the same way you lived
your giggles like a melody rippling
as you rode away in your tricycle.
* A reference to Hydrocephalus, a condition where there is a build up of water in the brain.
Aminah Agha Alonso is in her final year reading English Literature at King’s College London. Born in Spain, but raised in Cairo and London, she loves to capture the tiny details of each world, culture and people in her poetry. Her work centers around the themes of nostalgia, loss, childhood and memories.
Aatikah Essak
Fine Dining
You find yourself reading books
Plastered on the walls of tube stations,
But don’t you yearn for something more?
More
Than stories boxed-up
In pre-packaged clear-cut
Categories of identity,
This – is what you need to consume.
Step into some swanky restaurant in Mayfair
Calvin Klein boyfriend hanging on your arm
Teeth almost as white as the tablecloths.
All the rest dark muted colour schemes
And opulent rugs,
Pendant lighting so low
You can’t see a thing.
No matter,
This is how high society dines.
Ask for the special
Because you can’t pronounce anything but ‘Filet Mignon’
And they don’t have a simple salad either.
Any dietary requirements?
No,
just gluten-free, meat-free and pleasure-free.
The waiter sets down
A hideous mess of leaves
Scallops littered on top.
Aren’t you allergic?
You shut up and eat it,
anyway—
You asked for this.
Ath is an undergraduate student studying Liberal Arts at King’s College London. As a creature of habit, she spends most mornings (and afternoons) in the library, but never really manages to get much done.
Nat Demarchuk
un(Rooted)
I give you a Rubik’s Cube. Please, complete it.
If you are unable to, then that is not an issue; I myself haven’t figured it out, and probably never will. There’s more than one colour, more than one side, and certainly more than one square. Six different colours with six individual sides, fluently intertwining with one another the more you twist and turn each joint. The puzzle can only be solved using method and skill; such consistency is key.
People are nothing like Rubik’s Cubes, and yet strangely, somehow, I started to
consider how fitting it was to see this six-sided, multicoloured lump of plastic as symbolic of the six people who took care of me as a young child. Mama, papa, and their two sets of heterosexual parents. While they took turns bathing, burping and bouncing, passing me from one embrace to another, the members of my family were forming the basis of the care which I would soon endure to lose. Six individual colours on six individual sides which materialised into this version of me I present to you now. Think of how complete, how unified, a finished Cube looks. Appreciate the fundamental role each face has to the objects general shape. Without one side, the cube fails to be a cube. Once you start rotating the puzzle, colours mix and match, and you’ve now got yourself this interactive play between multicoloured, mosaic squares, encompassed in one solid block of plastic. Take away one, or even two colours, and you’re left with gaps and fragments; empty spaces that desperately need filling, before the cube loses its appeal. Before Rubik’s ‘Magic Cube’ becomes anything but magic; a speckled, misaligned mess. An unfinished, unsatisfied puzzle.
A British psychologist like Bowlby would ask, ‘So when you say ‘un finished’, is that how growing up without all six caregivers makes you feel today? Incomplete, perhaps?’
The honest answer I would give this elitist, sexist white man [who theorised that if a child couldn’t afford the privilege to be raised by one primary caregiver, stereotypically their mother[1], then they would go on to form form unstable relationships in their adult life] would be: ‘NO.’
And yet a small part of me would want to nod my head.
Apprehensively, I might go on, and tell him that yes, it wasn’t easy growing up away from the people that I loved most in the world, and who cared for me as coherently and lovingly as they could. But, I would explain that such caregiving was the only option I had during early childhood. My mother became a widow a year-and-a-half after I was born, so a fairytale, nuclear family dynamic wasn’t really on the cards for us. She suffered the struggles of early parenthood and bereavement all before the age of 26, parts of her life which she resentfully aimed to conquer. This put pressure on four grandparents to act under Hobson’s Choice[2], taking on parenthood once again. They each took turns raising me, pipetting droplets of their souls into mine.
It should come as quite of a shock then, that after about two years of living this way, haunted by memories of my father, and suffering the suffocating pity-looks of passersby in our hometown ‘New-Smiths’, Novokuznetsk[3], my mother choose to: ‘Fuck depression’ and ‘Fuck everyone!’, and fuck off to the UK. This is where she established a new life, independent from all the mess she had left behind in Russia during the early years of the new millennium. However, my mother’s calculations were a little off; if her mission was to start a brand new life which involved forgetting her past, then how was she successfully going to do so by bringing me along with her to this foreign land?
‘You are leaving your home and you are taking her with you! You have no idea what you are doing to us! Do you really hate your family so much that you would tear us apart like this? Think about what you are doing. To us, to yourself. TO HER! Think about what you are putting her through. How will you handle this alone? Seriously, how do you see this working out? While you’ve been planning this fairytale, we’ve been the ones changing our work shifts just so she can get to sadik[4] on time. We are the ones who know when she has a cold or a fever. She’s all we’ve got, do you understand that? She’s all we’ve had to keep us from losing our minds. You’re not the only one who’s suffered! Again, think about them. Did you even ask them what they make of all of this? She’s their granddaughter too! We know what they’re like, and no, we haven’t always agreed in the past…’ ‘No shit.’
‘…BUT, how? HOW could you decide to do something so drastic? So crazy?! And without saying anything to either one of us, only to spring this on us, as if it were one of your new hairstyles! Selfish. Egotistical. You’ve never taken anyone’s advice! We help one another in this family, you know! Have we not done enough for you, for her. This is what we get for being good parents. You want to leave your family and leave your country, but this is your home. How could you leave this all behind? This is the only true home you will ever have.’
The woes of my Baba Nadia[5] and Deda Vitaliy[6] echoed within the walls of their small living-room for generations, but I was only made aware of these battles in the years to follow.
‘I wouldn’t trade this country for anything in the world, because I love my Rossiya[7] and I love my family. But you, you don’t love anybody other than yourself! If you think we will ever forgive you for what you are about to do to this family, you should consider yourself crazy enough for a psikhushka.’[8]
Consider what it is means to be ‘normal’. Normal upbringing, normal experiences, normal families. The truth is, there is no such thing, for ‘normal’ is a culturally inflected idea. This is the needle Bowlby couldn’t find in the haystack. Bowlby’s theory of attachment doesn’t fit within collectivist cultures like the one I was rooted in. Throughout Russian history in general, the role of the family and the wider community has consistently played a crucial factor in the upbringing of children. My mother herself spent a great deal of her youth with different caregivers. Perhaps it’s because of this, or perhaps it’s that we’re both only-children (or perhaps it has nothing to do with either) but my mother and I are both arrogantly independent. This doesn’t sit well, however, within a family who know no boundaries - who make it their business to always know yours. That’s how the collectivist mindset trickles down generation after generation.
I’ll say it again: ‘normal’ is a culturally inflected idea. If I told you it was ‘normal’ to eat dinner food for breakfast, would you? Pelmeni[9], with sour cream and dill, shall always sound far more appealing than toast, no matter the time of day. I remember one summer, I must have been eight or nine, because I had just started wearing the top half of my swimwear set, that I asked either Baba Nadia or Baba Ira to cook pelmeni for me every morning and every night. My midnight snack was more of a 3am feast consisting of 20 pelmeni and gallons of kompot. By the end of the summer, I had grown almost 2 inches and put on an extra 6 pounds; the two matriarchs were thoroughly pleased with themselves.
‘Наше дело сделано.’[10]
While my mother’s parents joke how I’m more like their second child rather than their granddaughter, my father’s parents would get jealous and resentful of the fact that I saw my mother’s side more during my stays. As years went on, each one tried to buy more time with me, finding new activities to entice my interest with. It went from excessive love and affection during summers away, to regimented, self-sufficient school months back in England, filled with daycare, bullying and the dreaded fear of parents evening. Then, when my mother and I would have blood-curdling fights over who used the last of the shampoo, I would crave for the seven hour time difference to come to a reasonable hour, calling Baba Nadia, crying over my mother’s wrath. I feared my mother, but my mother feared them more. Her one great weakness? Craving their approval. My family functioned best under conflict, meaning, when trying to ‘resolve’ situations, disorderly phone calls with one another would take place. Deda Vitaliy dressed up for his annual telephone call to Deda Uri[11] about who would be covering the cost of my plane ticket back home for the summer holidays.
‘Your Northern pension can’t allow you to pay this once for her flight? You and Ira are ridiculous! Are you being serious?! Perhaps you should stop funding your low-life son’s drug addiction and start caring for this family, just like we have all these years. I’m already working overtime on site. My pension is more than half of yours, and you’re telling me you're ‘tight for cash.’ Don’t take me for a fool, Uri. I may have not suffered 15 years of my life working in the middle of Yakutia, but I know what’s it like to graft! I have a family to feed too, Uri! I know what it’s like to watch your child go hungry! Ёб твою мать![12] Don’t make me come over there and bash some sense into you!’
But this tension between my grandparents did stem from somewhere. The fall of their good-natured relationship grew from the knowledge of my uncle’s terrifying drug addiction, which they persistently denied. As their youngest and last-remaining son, Deda Uri and Baba Ira couldn’t bring themselves to accept his problem and ask for help. That was just not the done thing. Fear of social judgment and fear of failure as parents saw that no matter how many times my uncle beat his parents for hundreds of thousands of rubles, my grandparents always wore a smile in front of others, as if to say, ‘Our family is quite alright, thank you very much.’
This enraged my mother’s family more than their hatred for Stalin and ‘the whole damn Party’ itself. If it wasn’t bad enough that my mother had married a man who’s most recent ancestry blindly followed the rules and regulations of the Communist Party, it was made severely worse knowing they ‘condoned’ my uncle’s drug addiction by not cutting him off. But in the 1990s, and especially in regimental, authoritarian countries like Russia, matters of family life were never discussed publicly. Instead, they could be overheard during secret meetings, between crippling babushkas[13], while sitting on paint-flaking benches in the yards of apartment blocks. Or in hushed whispers, between neighbours, who kept tabs on everyone coming in and going out their building. These small, ‘inoffensive’ habits seeded from mass surveillance, grew like fungus up a tree, becoming rooted in everyday routines - it became criminal not to watch or whisper. Cynicism was a lifestyle. All media was censored. Personality cultism, restriction of free speech and persecution for not complying with the Bolsheviks was mandatory if you wanted to last.
By the 1980s, the USSR faced a new wave of internal problems. The economy was suffering, the political elite were dying out. Corruption was eating away at society, like a locust plague to new harvest. While people were starving, state officials travelled in luxury and style. Alcoholism was more prevalent than ever before; vodka was, ironically, one of the cheapest commodities at the time. Instability in a state which spanned over 22 million square kilometres became an inherent aspect of life. My grandmother went 9 months without pay one year, instead receiving salary through food tokens or second hand shoes. Instability you say? Sounds more like a national shit-show. Then, when all hope seemed to be lost, a beacon of hope. A man with a plan! The Marked One.[14] A leader ready for a little change, and a little more chaos.
Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on the political scene in 1985, and despite being 54, he was one of the youngest members of the Communist Party. Gorbachev’s policies were centred around the idea of reforming and modernising the Soviet Union, believing the conservative Communist approach to be outdated. Proposing new solutions, Gorbachev attempted to radically restructure the USSR in his six and half years as leader. The socialist state was lagging behind its competition, the mighty West, so Gorbachev proposed two policies in the era that followed: Perestroika[15] and Glasnost.[16]
Perestroika was the kind of word I’d hear mentioned sporadically during my visits back home. Someone at some family barbecue would start an anecdote, which would spiral into enraged reminiscence, usually led by Baba Nadia, about how debilitating life was as an impoverished village child. Generally speaking, I then had no clue what all these adults were so riled up about. I was content, aged 6, listening to my grandmother’s anti-Communist jargon while eating an entire bucket of boiled crayfish.
‘Oh please! Tell me of one person who was really happy living under surveillance and fear каждый божий день![17] You couldn’t do anything without everyone knowing! And don’t get me started on those never ending queues which I spent all my free time in. Two and a half hours for milk! No, never again. No matter how many times they asked me to join their official Party, I refused. I played my part as the good Komsomol just before it all came crashing down, and thank God I did! Внучка, никогда ни на кого не полагайся.[18] You cannot trust anyone. Do not, under any circumstance, go around telling your personal business. They’ll just use it against you. You have to make your own way in this world, or it will eat you alive.’
My mother had got out while she could. Escape was a popular choice for many following the Dissolution of the Soviet Union.[19] Once she realised there was really nothing holding her back, it didn’t take much effort for the glitz and glam of the West to entice her into immigrating. I remember how lonely she was for a long period of time. I remember her craving human connection, friendship, love, from others besides me. We didn’t spend much one-on-one time together, even when it was just the two of us. But elements of her childhood slipped their way into mine; I grew up under surveillance, under rules, expectations, which I consistently longed to outrun; storing the secrets of my mischiefs like precious artefacts you couldn’t put a price on. Her biography is quite different to mine, but there are crossovers and parallels within both. I try to put myself in her shoes, try to see things from her perspective, my way of defogging that mist of ‘why did I have to leave?’ Someone asked her once if she was planning on having anymore children.
‘No-thank-you. I’ve already had one, and don’t want to do that again. My daughter has passed her exams and is going to University. Мое дело сделано.’[20]
***
She told me once, that as she said goodbye to me on my first day of school, September 2005, I didn’t wave goodbye. There was no turning and running back, or blowing kisses across the playground. She told me I just marched, straight to the front door, grinned at a teacher, and went inside. I don’t know what that must have felt like. Relief? Grief? Whatever it was, it made walking into unfamiliar spaces second nature for the both of us. We remind one another of everything we have, and everything we’ve lost. We’re cuttings of the same plant, stemming millions of miles away from the same roots. We’re just as rooted and unrooted from our past as we are to our present, and to one-another as we are to ourselves.
Footnotes:
[1] Sexism
[2] A free choice in which only one option is actually offered. It’s a term used to describe an illusion that multiple choices are available: ‘Take it or leave it’.
[3] (Russian: Новокузнецк). Founded in 1618, Novokuznetsk is located in south-western Russia, and translates literally as ‘New-Blacksmiths’. Previously known as Kuznetsk, ‘Blacksmiths’, until 1931, and Stalinsk, until 1961, the city is the second largest in the oblast, after Kemerovo. (Oblast: a type administrative division/region).
[4] (Russian: садик). Kindergarten, or preschool, which children typically attend between the ages of one and a half to six years old.
[5] (Russian: Баба) Deriving from the word Бабушка (Babyshka), meaning Grandmother. Nadia derives from the full name Nadyezhda, meaning ‘Hope’.
[6] (Russian: Деда) Deriving from the word Дедушка (Dedyshka), meaning Grandfather.
[7] (Russian: Россия). The Russian pronunciation for ‘Russia’.
[8] (Russian: психу́шка). A Russian diminutive for ‘psychiatric hospital’.
[9] Pelmeni: Traditional meat dumplings.
[10] English: ‘Our job is done.’
[11] My father’s father. 1947-2019.
[12] (English: ‘Fuck your mother!’) Intense, vulgar interjection, rarely used by people in a public, social setting.
[13] English: ‘grandmothers’.
[14] Gorbachev’s nickname stemmed from the birthmark he wore on his forehead.
[15] Perestroika means ‘restructuring’ in English. Gorbachev’s policy aimed to create a new market model, which would give business more freedom, in the hopes economic balance would naturally be resolved.
[16] Glasnost means ‘openness’ in English. This refers to Gorbachev’s hopes of increased government transparency. This was a proclamation for individual freedom of expression in both political and social aspects of Soviet life.
[17] English: ‘every single day!’.
[18] English: ‘Granddaughter, never rely on anyone.’
[19] The internal political, economic and ethnic disintegration of the 15 Soviet Social Republics (1988-1991).
[20] English: ‘My job is done.’
Nat is a 21-year-old writer living in London. Born in Novokuznetsk, an industrial city in south-western Siberia, Demarchuk immigrated to the UK aged four with her mother. Here, they found opportunity and the prospect of a better life to the one her mother saw in Russia following the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Nat spent her childhood living between south-east England and Russia, which she would visit annually over the school summer holidays. Her heritage and upbringing meant that as a child, she struggled fitting-in and feeling heard. Today, she uses her biography and developing sense-of-self as inspiration for her poetry, prose and non-fiction, with un(Rooted) being her first overtly critical and introspective piece on what it means to grow-up questioning the bonds of family, and oneself.
