A Review of Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky is a poetry collection in two acts about what can happen to a community when the military moves in to control them. It is a tale of how the ethics of those who love, desire, or harmlessly gossip, can be transformed into actors who rape, torture, and engage in murder. Power as exerted through military might has not changed since the dawn of agriculture. The archetypes and structures through which hegemonic systems exist have evolved to fit the needs of the various figures or groups that have control, or in contemporary parlance, the man with the largest army wins, even if–or especially if, this man happens to be a fascist. Deaf Republic is not so much a cautionary tale of what happens next, though it can certainly be interpreted as such, but a tale of what has already happened countless times before, and follows in the rich tradition set forth by Zbigniew Herbert in Mr Cogito, or in Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks.

The first act of Deaf Republic follows the lives of the townspeople of Vasenka, namely Alfonso and his pregnant wife Sonya (who gives birth to a son Anushka). When a deaf boy, Petya, is murdered in the middle of the town square during a puppet show by a group of invading soldiers, the townspeople revolt and become deaf as an insurgency: “Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.” (“Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins”). Here silence is used as the revolutionary impulse of townspeople who gather around the body of Petya:

Observe this moment
—how it convulses—
The body of the boy lies on the asphalt like a paperclip.
The body of the boy lies on the asphalt
like the body of a boy. (“The Map of Bone and Opened Valves”)

The soldiers fire on the people “—may god have a photograph of this—“ (“Soldiers Aim at Us”), and begin the business of an occupying force. They set up “Checkpoints:” “In these avenues, deafness is our only barricade,” and they round up dissenters. In the meantime people are going about the business of eating, sleeping, and loving.

Perhaps some of the most beautiful pieces in this collection are the love poems between Alfonso and Sonya, “You can fuck/anyone—but with whom can you sit in water?” (“While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses”). It is a type of Eros—the love of wisdom and the striving for wisdom—that brings life and breath into the golem of poetry. Our lives would be bereft and meaningless without this higher movement. Eros is immediately a transcendental force, it seeks to bring us to something that is not us—that is not the same—and that can never be made the same. Philosophers seek wisdom yet—as Socrates himself said—the mark of wisdom is the realization of your own ignorance. When Sonya is taken by the soldiers and is subsequently raped and murdered Alfonso says, “You left, my door-slamming wife; and I,/ a fool, live” (“I, This Body”). A modern day Job bereft of his beloved, cast in a heap to scrape himself with clay shards. In this case, it is an institution of state power which plays the role of Satan. The perfect military state is ensured through brutality and genocide, often without sufficient repercussions for the persecutors. In “Such Is the Story Made of Stubbornness and a Little Air,” the reader is reminded that:

There will be evidence, there will be evidence.
While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will open, will open.
What is silence? Something of the sky in us.

According to Andrew Davis in his preface to the Voronezh Notebooks, “For Mandelstam, the sky (nebo) most often suggested not some paradise or heaven but sexless, inhuman, asphyxiating emptiness,” and air represents the “freedom to move in a physical world.” Such freedom is restricted for the citizens of Vasenka, and in Act II, Momma Galya, who stands up to the soldiers and indeed creates a system of escape for Vasenka’s citizens, becomes herself a target, not only of the soldiers, but of the townspeople who need a scapegoat. When critically examined fascism is a manipulation—or possibly a misinterpretation—of Platonic philosophy: “I suppose that if the rulers are to be worthy of the name and their auxiliaries likewise, the latter will be willing to do what they are commanded and the former to command” (Republic 458b). From “Search Patrols”

a language—
see how deafness nails us into our bodies. Anushka

speaks to homeless dogs as if they are men, speaks to men

as if they are men
and not just souls on crutches of bone.

Momma Galya is the only one who acts in the face of the horrors of the occupying force, and for that she is at once heralded and then violently accosted: “From the sidewalks, neighbors watch two women step in front of Galya. My/ sister was arrested because of your revolution, one spits in her face” (“The Trial”). Thus, the arc of fascism has come full circle, from a dictator who uses military force to control the citizens of his country, to the citizens themselves who turn on each other instead of on the locus of their persecution.

At its heart Deaf Republic seeks to return agency to its reader since it invites each individual to rely upon their own self as the moral authority, and to shape their own ethical lives in a way that—while not necessarily contradictory to the established rule of law—is not beholden to any constructed system. It seeks to transcend ethicality from a preconditioned moral drive as established by authority, and place it into one’s own hands. It’s a collection that tells us we have a burden of ethicality and cannot simply pass off our ethical decisions to the highest governmental authority and delude ourselves that we have made the right choice. From the poem “Anonymous:”

from the funeral to his kitchen, shouts: I have come, God, I have come running to you— in snow-drifted streets, I stand like a flagpole without a flag.

Deaf Republic is not so much a collection as a moral framework from which one can make use of language not as a colonization but as a bridge to communication. Emmanuel Levinas put it this way, the duty of the I is, “welcoming the other, as hospitality, in it the idea of infinity is consummated” (27). We must interact in the world with compassion as the guiding light of understanding. Ultimately this is the message of Deaf Republic for this reader, the practice of infinite compassion and communication, or put another way, “a subject for meditation:/the arithmetic of compassion,” from “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper.”

-Maria Garcia Teutsch, Berlin, Germany, 19 February 2019

Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa, and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, among others. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty

Published by Graywolf Press, purchase here

The New Yorker: We Lived Happily During the War

www.ilyakaminsky.com

books referenced:

Herbert, Zbigniew. Mr. Cogito: The Ecco Press, 1993

Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961

Mandelstam, Osip, Voronezh Notebooks: New York Review of Books, 2016

The Republic of Plato