Relieving the Terrible Knots of History: An Interview with Alex Averbuch

I can’t recall exactly when, but I came to know Alex Averbuch’s poetry somewhere in our shared intersections of Ukrainian studies, gender studies, and poetry. A native of Novoaider, a village in the Luhansk region of Ukraine, Averbuch spent fifteen years in Israel before moving to Canada to complete a PhD in Slavic Studies at the University of Toronto. A poet, scholar, and translator, his work engages questions of identity, liminality, history, and memory (although this list is not exhaustive). In addition to his own writing, he also organizes multilingual literary readings and festivals, including the Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry in the summer of 2020, and the first-of-its-kind series of bilingual literary events dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew translation in 2022.

Averbuch’s most recent poetry collection, The Jewish King (Жидівський король), is his first written predominantly in Ukrainian, although importantly, as he clarifies, the letters (which make up over one third of the collection) are in Surzhyk—a blend of Ukrainian and Russian languages that many throughout Ukraine speak. In October 2022, I talked with him about this new collection, the ‘dissections’ of his identities and selfhood, and the capacity for poetry to render of the historical.

What I find most arresting about Averbuch’s poetry, and particularly in The Jewish King, is the way he plays with the edges of history. I say “play” not in any trivial sense, but as a creative dynamism of exposure and recognition; a vehicle for bringing legibility to historical memory and the ways it haunts our bodies and imaginations. Averbuch refers to this as “documentary poetry”—a straddling of the historical and the literary, and genre that he describes as “queer: it escapes belonging or binarity; it pretends to be both history and literature, but it’s neither.” I can’t help but think of Audre Lorde, who, like Averbuch, held multiple identities and locations—immigrant, queer, poet, scholar—and whose notion of the biomythographical sought to wield history’s erasures and absences in the corrective through mythmaking, through poetry, through agentive memory. In reverberating the capacious possibilities of the poetic, Averbuch, like Lorde, relieves these “terrible knots of history” through his poetry.

Averbuch is currently an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

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I want to first begin by asking you to talk a little about yourself and your background. Growing up in the Luhans'k region of Ukraine, how did you find your way to poetry—or perhaps it found its way to you? Were there particular poets who shaped you?

The English word “background” is intriguing. The ground that is in the back. Luhans'k, and my native village Novoaidar, are my back-grounds. My grounds, my lands, back in time and space. Background—a ground to return to, to step back to, to close your eyes and fall calmly into an abyss. To be absorbed by it. You feel it with your back, yet don’t see it. It breathes warmly on your neck. It’s so solid, like actual ground, it nourishes me. Currently I cannot go back to my back-ground, I cannot set foot on this ground; it’s a place where I cannot physically be. You know, Sandra, Novoaidar was captured by the Russians only in March 2022. Before that it was on the borderland, 20 km from the capture line. And, although it was so close, so potentially the next piece of land for them to seize, still, I could never imagine this might happen. I went there in 2019, through all the checkpoints, after a week in Kyiv, with all the books in my little suitcase that my poet-friends had given me; I went through the checkpoints, and our guys, our Ukrainian soldiers, looked at me like I was crazy. “Where are you going with all this poetry?”; “Are you some kind of pro-Ukrainian propagandist?” they asked. And I was just going to my village, because both my grandmas had died—the one in Israel and the one in Ukraine—and I wanted to go to the places where I had spent my childhood with them, to my back-ground.

I’ve never examined the path by which I came to poetry. I have a quite banal belief that poetry is born out of something traumatic, something violent that you have to say in a broken language, to mock this violence, to imitate, to make it approachable, to adjust the words to what you’ve gone through. I don’t think poetry is beautiful; not sure what “beauty” is. It doesn’t have a reference. It’s just different, it’s unusual, and hits you unexpectedly. And this is because of some unbearable excess, when you can no longer be silent. Because I think people should not talk much. There is nothing new to say. But, when you cannot shut up, when this silence and unrest accumulates to a form, to a combination of intentions—words, rhythms, rhymes, intonations—then say it. It’s like an earthquake or a teenage wet dream. It’s just uncontainable, strong, hot, concentrated, naïve.

And there’s something about this excessiveness and affect that first and foremost defines me. Something about naivety and being caught off guard—by a new word, a new poem, a new verbal orgasm. I like sharing these with people, I like looking into their eyes, watching their reactions, shame and pleasure, approval and denial. I like how my irresistible words penetrate their minds; and how these words, sometimes, get pushed back at me. It’s about the feeling of redundancy and overflow.

I wrote my first poem when I was four years old. My grandmother kept it, and when she died, my mom took it. I don’t have it, and this is quite symbolic, as every poem I write is immediately taken from me, liked or disliked, absorbed by somebody, without a trace, like an unborn child, like a jet of sperm, incomplete, miserable, orphan.

I have “umbilical” connections with all my poems, I remember their unborn embryo-faces, how ugly they were, and how beautiful they could’ve been. But I don’t possess them. I don’t want them. They bother and irritate me. I want them more and more, but they never satisfy me. I will never feel or reach the end of my poem, I’d rather drop it and forget.

My mom now has this first poem about flowers. I am colorblind. But I really wanted to see the colors other kids were seeing. And so I wrote a poem about beautiful flowers, which I could not see. I felt unable to perceive, to share with others what they see and enjoy. There were no poets who shaped me and my poetry. The only thing that shaped me was my envious desire to see things others could and I could not. This inability was a mechanism of attraction for me. Later in life, there was likewise a motivation of envy: the poets who “shaped” me were those who wrote better than me. I didn’t care about my poems, I only wanted to write a better poem. I could’ve been a horrible parent, and I am happy that I won’t ever be one. I don’t want to leave anything behind, anything physical, memorial. Although I do keep many things, but mainly those of my deceased relatives. I enjoy smelling them, wearing them, putting their hair or nails in the pockets of my clothing. My poems don’t interest me, I don’t count them and don’t preserve them. I don’t have drafts or an archive. I just cannot focus enough on one text to reach the pleasure radiating down my stomach. I am constantly full of some unutterable, unquenchable desire that burns me from inside for no reason.

Secondly, you are someone who holds multiple identities—Ukrainian, Jewish, poet, scholar, queer. What are some of the ways that the intersections (or individuations) of these identities contour your poetic voice?

I appreciate the question’s terminology: to “hold” an identity. Like I am in control of it. It’s in my hands. I also like my (and your) attempts (potential, unpronounced) to assign values to these parts of identity. My book plays on these two in particular—the Jewish and the Ukrainian. The book (and the interview) are also attempts to put one in their place, to locate, fix, ground. I wrote this book to ground myself, because I was tired of walking around with ethnicities and names, tired of sorting out my grandparents. But mostly I am tired of this ethnic mixture.

I don’t see these as intersections, rather as dissections. Of my body, of the solidity of my selfhood. I wrote this book because I was tired of balancing between and mitigating dualities. But my Ukraino-Jewishness is not a duality. My blood is not dual, I know that, I smell that, I can taste that. It’s one substance, exempt—by my birth and my writing—from facile categorizations and binary definitions. I live through and enjoy this definitional “crisis.” My queer multiplicities afford me an orgiastic pleasure. The target of the book and the interview(s) was to discover who I am, but once I finished the book, even before it was published, I rejected what I was. As a gay Jewish Ukrainian, I find some aspects of my identity empowered within the space of my (ethnic, sexual, national, linguistic) queerness. But I also ache for them (and they also pain me), when they are weakened if not negated in this same space. Because I fall between the categories of ethnically marked outsider and white privileged author. I realize that I am an ethno-sexual monster within a quite traditionalist culture. It doesn’t know what to make of me. It probably feels some post-Holocaust guilt towards an author “of Jewish descent.” I don’t want anyone to feel guilt. It’s a self-destroying, deconstructing feeling. It separates me from them. I’d love to talk of my difference as a term of value, but I don’t want to, because I am tired of being different. I want henceforth to be a conventional personality.

Once, the psychologist at my high school in Israel (for years I resented her, but now I understand that she was wise) told me that I constantly choose dissident identities: sexual, ethnic, professional. I didn’t understand how I could. Now I do. Everything was a choice. Sometimes I think of alternative choices I haven’t made. Unproblematized, unchallenged, un-denatured. This never happened, because I was never deprived of polyvalence. And this is also a privilege. I just lived and live a happy life within false dichotomies, a pleasing blindness, and pathos-filled poems of ethnonational longing. But I like this pathos, it was sincere and cathartic. But I moved on, looking for what’s behind it, what’s left naked when all this is gone. What I am left with and what am I to do further.

Your latest poetry collection, The Jewish King (Жидівський король, 2021), beautifully explores ancestral and familial bonds, history, war, testimony—among other themes. I’m interested in how you use the term “documentary poetry” in this collection: to what extent does this approach merge the literary and the historical? How does it allow you to animate the past through the work of poetry?

Bonds are only ways to fit and speak clearly to others. Family is understandable. Loss and grief are understandable. War is understandable. I used all the possible clichés to make my readers feel comfortable. And myself, of course. But I really believed in these. I felt attached to them. They ruled over my imagination. I have never lied in my poetry. I was looking for words, for concepts, discourses. Clichés are codes of something unspeakable, that substitute for it. I wanted to speak of my de-specification, but on the contrary went too far into specifics. I was afraid of partiality, and I created an excessive whole, in a desperate attempt to reinvent it. I wanted to create a text that comfortably discomforts. Not to transgress limits. Not to cause too much pain to those who might feel it. To talk about Jewishness in an overall hegemonic picture of Ukraine’s multiculturality. To name something (zhyd) that was unnamable. To provide a sense of unsettling but releasing. To use a problematic, irritating term, the problematic nature of which I wanted to denature. I employed a reverse discourse by using the same "abusive" vocabulary, the same categories by which we, I, were previously disqualified. Maybe this title should be translated into English as The Yid King, as it seems that "Jewish king" in English is an entirely neutral phrase, whereas the English "yid" approximates the Ukrainian zhyd, generally considered to be derogatory, although as said I aim to remove it from that category.

People are afraid of this word. It harbors a great deal—the burden of a heavy atmosphere, guilt, shame. And this shame is both for Jews, who are still often ashamed of their Jewishness, and for Ukrainians, who are ashamed of something in their past. Various psychotherapeutic and psychological practices recommend talking about trauma, voicing what bothers you, leaving the comfort zone of whitewashed language. And this non-use of the word zhyd is, in fact, a comfort zone. Therefore, with this title of my collection—a title pronounced by me, a Jew who has no problem with it, with this word—I want to denature it, I want to free this word from all the burden it carries, from shame, from awkwardness. That is, I am not talking about this word only, you understand. This is a whole discourse of guilt and misunderstanding, which makes both Ukrainians and Jews uncomfortable. Therefore, I release everyone from this awkwardness. I am not afraid of this word, it does not affect me, and I want it to not affect anyone.

And this is exactly how I merge the literary and historical. I clash between them. And literature, I hope, releases certain dense trigger points of history. And documentary poetry here plays a central role, as it has one foot in the field of history, the other in literature. In a way, this term, “documentary poetry,” is queer: it escapes belonging or binarity; it pretends to be both history and literature, but it’s neither. It is also quite subversive: it makes you believe that what you’re reading is history, is testimony or document, but then you realize that this is poetry, this is literature, and you should not trust it. It betrays you. I as an author betray my reader. Documentary poetry will be punished along with its authors. Maybe burned on the pyre of all the pseudo-documents it was using to push some truth. In a way, my preoccupation with documents, letters in particular, became a mode of desire, implying eros and masochistic pain—in multiple animations of the condensed horrors of the past, these terrible knots of history—which I would like very much to relieve, through my poetry.

The Jewish King is your first book written in the Ukrainian language, with your previous publications in Russian. Would you talk a little about this linguistic shift in your writing—what prompted it, and in what ways has it transformed your work, your audience, or even you as a poet?

The Jewish King is not written entirely in Ukrainian. The letters, which are more than one third of the book, are written in surzhyk. This is a very comforting language. One that allows you to make mistakes, to smash the borders between the Ukrainian and the Russian, to pretend being both. This language is also very violent. Its inner violence nourishes its beauty. A language that is jerked this way and that, pulled to many polarities, Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian. And each wants to rule, each desires dominance, and this desire, this struggle incessantly generates new forms, new words and expressions, new mutations of something ugly and so beautiful. A language without borders, or rather a language that constantly destroys its own borders, is the most poetic one; it lives on the edge of its own survival, on its own shame. It’s crazy, it’s a language that has lost its mind, that uses all the words that come to its mind, and doesn’t see anything but everlasting transgressions of norms and rules—grammatical, ethical, formal, geographic, ethnic. The queerness of this language is in its denial of being determined, of being ruled out of its frightening all-belonging, its sprawling attachment to everything that is a word.

When I wrote in Russian, it was always a broken language. How could poetry not be in a broken language? I am not a journalist. I am a poet. And my task, my duty and mission is to destroy the language. To make it different. I take risks. It’s not always the case that when you destroy something or tear it down, you are able to replace it by building up something better. My switch to Ukrainian started from my very first poem in Russian, because I was dissatisfied with that language. When the war started in 2014, I wanted to smash it, to splash out my aggression onto this language. I wrote poems in a weird Russian. I started mixing both languages in the same poem. They didn’t want to be there together. These poems are the most violent, the most painful to write.

And then I left it. I wanted to dissociate myself from it. Writing in Russian was and always will be longing for Russia. “Russophone” literatures are all longing for Russia, however much they may want to dissociate themselves from Russianness. It’s an illusion. I used to believe that Ukraine might have its own Russian, Russophone Ukrainian literature. But I have become disappointed in this idea. I came to see that every word in Russian would always gravitate towards Russia, as if to a magnetized surface, from which you cannot unstick yourself unless you stop writing in it. Have I succeeded in this unsticking? It’s a really tough question. A question of a broken identity—of a poet, of a scholar, a translator, a person who feels simply betrayed.

My audience has obviously changed. My Russian poet-colleagues are not interested in my Ukrainian works. They simply don’t understand them. For them I simply no longer exist. Sometimes they make attempts to drag me into some projects under airy rubrics like “Slavic” or “Eastern European,” but they are not really interested in me as a Ukrainian poet. They want to hold onto, not to lose, a certain feeling of hegemony over “minor” literatures, where The Russian will always be in the center. And this colonial, soviet, imperial impulse is and always will be disguised in some tricky Slavicness or Eastern-Europeanness, some anything-to-avoid-the-word-“Russian”-ness. And I can say that this liberation from these -nesses has empowered me, made me a different poet, more self-conscious and free.

The Jewish King explores some of the parallels between the Second World War and Russia’s current war against Ukraine. For instance, in one of your poems, you write “як пережити те, що вже відбулося”— “how to survive what has already happened.” In many ways, I see this form of storytelling as doing the work of history itself in powerful ways. How do you see your poetry’s movement between historical boundaries revealing some of the urgency of Ukraine’s present moment? How do you want it to shape your audience’s historical imaginations?

Thank you for bringing up this poem. I have seen it quoted as a reflection on current, post- February 24th events. In fact, it’s about Jewish suffering, not only the Holocaust, but also pogroms. But I am OK with my poem’s performing in different contexts, fitting into other constellations of pain and horrors, where it can explain something, and be of comfort to its reader. And this is a matter of solidarity. Solidarity in poetry, by means of poetry. I often think of poetry as a form of solidarity; of reading poetry as a search for sympathy, kinship, consonance with the pain you feel now, and which (similar to your current one) has already been felt by someone long ago, or by someone just recently. You get to know pain (other people's and your own) through the lines, you recognize sensations, horrors, injuries. Maybe even learn from this experience? The solidarity of poetry and in poetry is about how the pain of the other, the distant, and sometimes a stranger, or even the collective pain of a different nation or ethnos that once experienced something similar, can explain something, or help survive something, that is happening to you today.

I don’t know whether the multiple catastrophes of the Jewish people, the "experience" (a terrible term for this, but I can't find another) of national trauma and what is written about it, in particular in literature and poetry, can fulfill the function of (historical?) solidarity, which according to the dictionary is "support by one person or group of people for another because they share feelings, opinions, aims." I only know that when it is unbearable to the point that it is impossible to express myself, I look elsewhere (in literature, cinema, painting, and especially music) for answers, support, means of expression. I look for a language that, at the moment, I myself don't have the strength to create; don't have the strength to speak. So I take "support" and " group of people" from the definition of solidarity.

For many of my readers in Ukraine, this poem, written about the Holocaust and pogroms, has a strong resonance with the current war. And in a way, as you mentioned in the question, it indeed does the work of history itself, by bringing to the fore the experience of suffering, the experience of surviving the unbearable through poetry. Until the Russian invasion, which constitutes an attempted genocide of the Ukrainian nation, many Ukrainians had simply never experienced some of the horrors the Jews had. And as a person, as a nation you learn new senses, new pains and emotions, you encounter them and survive. But these emotions have certainly already been experienced by others, who can support you, who can give you the tools—literary, poetic, even physiological—to process all this. And this is the solidarity that poetry offers us. It teaches “how to survive what already happened”—and this line is twofold: how to bear something horrible that happened to me—in the form of a question “how can I do it?!”, or, like a manual—affirmatively: “This is how to survive what already happened to someone in the past, and now is happening to you—see, learn, and live through.” And if my poetry shapes my readers’ historical imagination in such a way as to give them solace while they are at the eye of the current hurricane of pain, then it performs its main duty: to be with them, share with them, and to support.

As someone whose work is also engaged with gender and sexuality studies, I want to explore some of the ways that your work resonates with questions of queerness and queer epistemologies in Ukraine and beyond. I think often gender and sexuality—as well as race, class, ethnicity—in the context of Eastern Europe have long been rendered through colonialist lenses by Western media, intellectuals, journalists, etc. We’ve seen these issues emerge even more fully due to the war. How do you see your poetry, and perhaps also your scholarship, intervening in or contributing to these queer Ukrainian genealogies?

I think that by this point of the interview, I’ve mentioned the word “queer” a few times, in the context of language, documentary poetry, and ethnos/nationality. All these queer multiplicities in my poetry destroy differential valuations—in language (by using surzhyk), in poetry (by mixing document with literature), in ethonationality (by collapsing pure ethnicities into a monstrous mishmash). And in this sense, I am very much Foucauldian, as my target is not to discover what I am, but to refuse what I am, what I was assigned to be; to possess many different and changing identities. It might seem as though I speak of my difference as a term of value. No. It's just how things are. Even on a biological level. My identity lacks this clear definitional content; the differential valuations others find handy to keep you in “your place” are, in my case, all blurred. Because I don’t have a place, neither geographical, nor temporal. And I do treat this lack of clarity as a legitimate condition for my creativity. I knowingly occupy marginal positions in literature and academia, just because my queerness banishes things like centrality or glory—things that are always associated with positivity, comfort, and the normative—my queerness places these things far from the essence of life and mission. The de-specifications that I mentioned all stand in opposition to mainstreamness and wholeness, which are alien to creativity. My work, in a way, lies in expanding partialities, validating and reinventing them. And probably because of this, I created a text that—by its very title, its language, and ultimately its de-essentialized authorship—causes its reader a great deal of discomfort. In a way, my book is not so much a reconciler (as many seem to see it) as it is a destabilizer, because it emphasizes time and again the unsayable and the unnamable. And this unsettling dynamic of reading (and I must admit, of writing as well) is very much queer. And my position of “neither-here-nor-there” allows me to confront all these solidities of selfhood, nationality, ethnos, sexuality, literature, document, history from my marginalized place of non-belonging. And that non-belonging generates modes of desire and eros, fueling thought and creativity.

Several of your poems have also recently been translated into English—Isaac Stackhouse-Wheeler translated several from the Russian for Hominterm, Survision, and Mumbermag in 2020. Since many of our readers are English readers/speakers, and perhaps are less familiar with Russian and Ukrainian, can you discuss how you see your work resonating in English or for English-reading audiences? What was gained or lost in translation for you?

Isaac is a very attentive translator with an excellent ear. I like how we did these translations— we spent more time on “tuning” intonations than on the actual rendering of the words. And intonation, the overall aura, is more important for me also when I translate poetry. And I like to see this resonance in the translation of my poems. Many of my poems from The Jewish King have also been translated from the Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. I like working with them and I appreciate their enormous efforts to convey both the form and meaning of my poetry. When working with Helena Kernan on one poetic cycle from Testimony of the Fourth Person, I told her about my fears when people translate my poems, especially into languages that I know. This anxiety has to do with whether you can have full trust in the translator, can merge your voice with theirs and yourself in their performance. Because you place your confidence and your voice in their hands, their ear. It’s a transformation of your own being, and they are your new creators. And if you’re going to be reborn, you want to be reborn pretty, and/or similar to who you were before. You want to recognize yourself, to look in the mirror of translation and be pleased with your new appearance. The translators that I have been working with are my co-authors. This is how I see them. They teach me, I teach them. The main thing in this collaborative work is to listen to what the other side has to say. Because translation is a tricky task of simultaneous sacrifice and birth of something new. And as an author I am painfully ready for these sacrifices. At times they are quite cathartic.

In addition to your poetry and research, I know you, too, are engaged with the work of translation—working in Ukrainian, Hebrew, English, and Russian. Can you talk a bit about your relationship with translation and how you see it contributing to literary and historical knowledges and worldmaking? In other words, what kind of hope or possibility can we find in these practices?

Translation for me is an act of very intimate engagement with the authors I choose to translate. It’s such an intensive hyper-reading and intimate process of recognizing the other. I’ve noticed that any time I like a poem, I start translating it in my mind already during the first reading. It’s a quite automatic, non-rational process, when the beauty of the poem makes me want to immediately engage with it in some form. It’s like a physical attraction to a person, a charm, a scent you like and want to sniff as deeply as you can. You become drunk with it. You want to undress the poem and dress it up again. You want to touch each letter of its body, to play with it, to absorb it and dive into this textual body fully. To merge. To destroy its boundaries, to lose your own, to playfully lead it in some wrong directions, to allow yourself to be led in the right ones.

Translation is always a negotiation and struggle, a risk of not getting the sense, of missing or over-interpreting. When I don't understand a line or a sentence, or when I don't know how to translate it—that's actually a good sign, because it just means that the poem has more than one reading. And I am lucky to get one of them. I'm also happy with my inability to decide which option to translate. I play with it, I don't immediately contact the author for assistance (which is not always possible in any case!); I falter and get aroused. And this translator's insecurity, my hesitation, is just so pleasing, because in this way the creation of the text continues—beyond the boundaries of the language in which it was first written. Finding a good translator is just like finding a good, attentive lover, who knows how to please you, what to skip and what to stress, when and where to press harder. And this gives us hope—the hope of being felt and heard, of being understood, moved, trusted. Because translation is about love and tolerance, self-devotion and attentiveness, sympathy and interest, appreciation of the other and willingness to understand and accept. And this gives me hope and satisfaction.

Will The Jewish King be translated into English in the future?

Yes. Many poems from it are being translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, and hopefully will be published in the near future as a collection, although of a slightly different composition and concept, and with new poems. I enjoy the translation process, and the fact that this translation is being done by a married couple.

Interviewed by Sandra Joy Russell