Courage and tenderness: A review of Ribwort by Hanna Komar (2023, 3TimesRebel Press)
The opening words of Hanna Komar’s poetry collection, “wrap around me like ribwort,” grab the reader with courage and tenderness, grief and love, and never let go. Ribwort, a plant revered in Belarus for its potent healing properties in herbal medicine, is a compelling metaphor for the nature of these poems. While rooted in raw honesty and precision, these verses don't shy away from revealing the wounds plaguing the poet and her nation.
Many tend to categorize poets and their poems as being inspired by either protest or the personal as if these categories have no connection. But Ribwort has both, and Komar’s prowess lies in the ability to delve into what binds them together. The collection's first half explores her personal troubles; the second half is a testimony to what she lived through and witnessed firsthand during the 2020 protests in Belarus. Nevertheless, the two halves are inseparable. As Komar says, “I learned to hold a space for experiences bigger than mine, much bigger than me.”
Komar’s search for the root of the troubles in her life is driven by the same integrity and passion – and sharp insight – that later fuels her scathing condemnation of Lukashenko’s regime. She takes us on her journey from a vulnerable girl to a fierce activist and helps us see – and, more importantly, feel – why the struggle for democracy and freedom in Belarus should matter to us all.
Most of the poems about her personal life date from before the beginning of the protests. They explore the roots of her wounds, including her yearning for love. These poems aren't just random expressions of pain; they are experienced by women worldwide regardless of their cultural upbringing, a pain recognizable all too widely.
Sadly, I cannot read them in the original Belarusian – only in Komar’s own translations. But my sense is that nothing has been lost in translation, given that the author and translator are one and the same. Her choice of words in English, as well as her sense of rhythm, are precise and effective. The truth is in the clarity of thought.
These personal poems are mostly short, sometimes very short. But each packs a heartstopping punch. Komar finds telling images that reveal a whole world in a few simple phrases.
In the poem, “Volunteer,” she lays bare the emotional dependency of both the cared for and the carer.
I look after
this woman my mother’s age
she looks like my grandmother
and acts as if she were my daughter.
She honestly delves into the impact of childhood traumas and abuse on her adult life, revealing how they've affected her. This has made her difficult to be around, driving away the love she deeply desires, as she portrays in her short verse, “Radiation.”
I’m radiating love
Loaded with plutonium.
She yearns for simple comfort to heal these wounds, but no one, not even her mother, herself emotionally bound, can offer this. The psychological damage inflicted upon women in a patriarchal society prevents them from providing the comfort to each other they all need, as she crystallizes so tenderly and so desperately in the poem “Not what I wanted her to be.” Komar begs for someone to lie next to her with no agenda, but even as a child, her mother could only offer to divert clichés.
she’d my check my temperature
and give me medication…
rather than whispering to me
‘Forgive me, my little girl,
That no-one taught me affection…
What makes these poems so affecting for the reader is that they are shot through with emotional care. If nobody taught her mother affection, Komar at least found it for herself in abundance. These poems are not simply complaints but moving entreaties to love. She is deeply aware of her wounds and frailties and her need for love, and exploring this need with such tenderness opens the way to healing the hurt.
Komar writes in her introduction: “With the help of poetry, I have been healing my own personal wounds for a long time. This is where my art has been lifesaving for me.” Poetry is her ribwort, her herb of healing. But it is ribwort for readers too. Hanna takes readers on a journey in which she explores these deep wounds and accepts them with grace, the most noble path to healing and strength.
In the second half of Ribwort, Hanna responds to the events in Belarus from 2020 onwards. Komar was imprisoned in Minsk in 2020 for participating in the mass protests against Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko. The protests in Belarus were the biggest anti-government demonstrations in the country’s history, sparked by Lukashenko fraudulently claiming victory in the presidential election. Komar’s poems reveal the traumatic experience of incarceration for her, its ‘thickened time/questions/curses/nightmares’. But far from silencing her, it seems to have fired her poetic spirit to new heights.
She has been living in exile in London for the past two years. Her words don't just express her suffering; they give voice to everyone hurt by the Lukashenko regime's cruelty. She shares the personal stories of those impacted by the violence, just as her earlier poems revealed her own experiences, serving as witnesses to injustice.
These poems open with the story of a young Russian woman and her Belarusian boyfriend who were viciously assaulted by the police and imprisoned. Their story is told from the woman’s perspective, but Komar does much more than pass on the tale. She shapes it with the same skill she used in her more personal poems, breaking each phrase punctuated into lines like a heartbeat, a snatched breath, so that she becomes the poetic voice for these victims, as she was for her trauma. Each word, each phrase is telling.
Her icon-short account of what happened at Niamiha when police attacked unarmed people with water canons and batons is vivid and shocking in its simplicity:
when we are attacked
by a horde of black batons
when our wings are broken
against the blind
force of water cannons
what should I do
beg them to stop
or run away?
one enough is not enough.
Yes, “one enough is not enough” indeed. The struggle against oppression cannot just be the struggle of a few; it needs us all to acknowledge the damage, confront it, and call it out, not turn away.
But in Ribwort, Hanna shows us how this struggle is not just for an abstract ideal. Oppressive regimes like Lukashenko’s assault our humanity, destroy our ability to love each other, and ultimately deny any capacity for happiness.
At the beginning of the book, Hanna quotes from another young Belarusian poet, Kryscina Banduryna, “the ribwort on the wound taught us to how to love.” It is a tragedy and outrage that Lukashenko’s regime has forced one of Belarus’ most impressive young talents to leave her home and her friends to be able to write openly. But in this book of poetry, Hanna shows her voice has not been stilled, and she shows us how to love, by confronting our pain. “My hope,” Hanna says, “is that these poems will become ribwort for our collective wounds.”
John Farndon is a poet and translator of Slavic and Turkic literature. He is a joint winner of the European Bank Literary Prize 2019 for the translation of Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov’s The Devil’s Dance, and Finalist for the US PEN Translation Award 2020 for Kazakh writer Rollan Seisenbayev’s The Dead Wander in the Desert. Since 2022, he’s translated 30 Ukrainian plays for the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Reading Project, including Neda Nejdana’s Pussycat in Memory of Darkness(Finborough London, Wiesbaden and Kyiv), and collaborated on translating Ukrainian and Belarusian poets for Free All Words.