Akhmatova's 'Requiem' in the Age of Terror

"If we are not ready to shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of revolution is that?”
(Vladamir Lenin, qtd. in Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. Oxford University Press. New York. p. 77)

“'I will speak for myself as a Third World person' is an important position for political mobilization today. But the real demand is that, when I speak from that position, I should be listened to seriously; not with that kind of benevolent imperialism, really, which simply says that because I happen to be an Indian or whatever....A hundred years ago it was impossible for me to speak, for the precise reason that makes it only too possible for me to speak in certain circles now. I see in that a kind of reversal, which is again a little suspicious” (Gayatri Chakraovorty Spivak, “The Post-Colonial Critic”, qtd in this bridge we call home, Ed. Gloria Anzaldua and Keating, Analouise 185)

I picked up The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited by Roberta Reeder at St. Marks after a reading up there. I declared, “I’m going to read this whole thing,” waving around the nearly thousand page volume in a sort of grotesque masculinist display. eww. I believe Simone, who I was reading with, reminded me that I’d have to carry that thing for the rest of the trip (solid point), but took it as challenge (later, she also gave me the most wonderful gift, a pocket Akhmatova for just such crises).

Returning home to a city that very much bears the markings and demographic underpinnings of the Holocaust and the Stalinist and Leninist purges, I brought Akhamatova as a sort of spreading into. Not a shield, not a raw tearing of the veil, but rather an opening into the world around me. And this is what her verse, which is arguably among the most powerful I’ve ever encountered, does. I learned first of it by means of Carolyn Forché, who mistakenly catches too much flack for thinking and writing politically (i.e. considering other humans on the planet). Her book, Against Forgetting illuminates more than I could or will ever. I love what she has given, her work, poetries, editing, volumes. all.

No, not under the vault of alien skies,
And not under the shelter of alien wings -
I was with my people then,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.
(Akmatova 384)

skies turn alien. that which stands over as the outside is no longer at home, but bent out of shape. not at home. alien. yet, I’m with my people. we are here and yet, not at home. unfortunately we were.

Once, someone “recognized” me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who,
of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which
everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

“Can you describe this?”
And I answered, “Yes, I can.”
Then something that looked like a smile passed over
what once had been her face. (384)

Once was a face. Once was a smile. or description. or mind. having of its time a possible of being and ability to which nothing that is and nothing is not, crusht. To be able to speak to and with the absolute crushing of what is amidst a totalizing destruction of all that once was living. I cannot even imagine the life of one losing husbands and son to execution and incarceration. Or, wait. that happens every day here. With Akhmatova in hand, one privileged perspective is, “Must have been tough!”.....However, another perspective includes the police security state of oppression that incarcerates more humans than any other state on the planet.

For seventeen months I’ve been crying out,
Calling you home.
I flung myself at the hangman’s feet,
You are my son and my horror.
Everything is confused forever.
And it’s not clear to me
Who is beast now, who is man,
And how long before the execution.
(Akhmatova 388)

son/horror, hangman’s feet. these are not comparisons. this is not analogy. no metaphor. The question remains who is beast and who is man? After such assassinations, genocide, terrors, after multiple trips to perhaps see her son, small wonder then that all is confused permanently. Suspended. Hanging before the hanging. I’m just...I’m just “hanging around.” Waiting. And with love, I hope there is some chance I’ll be granted to see you and be with you, but everything’s a stillbirth. I’m dying.

Forget how that detested door slammed shut
And an old woman howled like a wounded animal,

And may the melting snow stream like tears
From my motionless lids of bronze,

And a prison dove coo in the distance,
And the ships of the Neva sail calmly on. (Akmatova 394)

have you met my prison doves dear reader? Know that whatever I may be, I love and unconditionally so. being’s collapse and this morbidity of the enclosures of the worst, most elitist facets of the political turned back upon itself. We, dangle in the town square (Haymarket), perhaps setting an example, look ahead and behind—imagine what they and countless others do see.