The Return to Post Disaster: On Anna Malihon’s “Girl with a Bullet”

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The girl possesses a bullet. “Girl with bullet” could be a painting title, a clear and simple  description of a scene or an abstraction. A girl with a bullet is not a sight expected. She stands  there, with a bullet. Or she runs. Or she sits. Maybe she holds the bullet, caressing its metal  binding. A souvenir’s indelible heave. 

What is carried. Those burdens. 

Her experience is singular, it’s hers alone, anchored into the present tense, yet it expands,  extending time and bodies: “The girl with the bullet in her stomach / runs across the highway to  the forest…/ through the news, the noble mold of solemn speeches / through history, geography, /  curfew, a day, a century.” She is without time, she’s anachronistic, as though a part of an ongoing  stateless primordial fairy tale or Eastern European folklore drudged in the soil. Girl with a Bullet  is a collection of poems originally written in Ukrainian by Anna Malihon and translated into  English by Olena Jennings. Although Anna Malihon’s imperative is to defend the nationhood of  Ukraine, to free the people of her land, her book, its pages and unceasing flickers of  being’s multiple layers is the land; her poetry is dependent on the nonhuman and the archetype in the presence of persistent time and its ceaseless movement, continuing to cross and criss-cross  repetition into the present tense. 

The book opens with work written after Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, ending with  poems Malihon wrote some years past, before the current war, then, when it was called “small.”  What is shocking is how Anna Malihon portended the war through the darkness and poignance  of those ending passages, tapping into the whispers of her surroundings: the shifts of a people,  nations. She runs through geography, curfew, history, a day, a century and writes: 

On the bed where the child slept 
were just feathers 
and charred clothes. 
Look, these poems are made of fragments 
pulled from the ruins  
Do with them as you wish  
Lead her further away  
from the black envelopes 
Holy Immortal God 

It’s difficult to live in a land that has consistently been transformed by exterior forces, borders  redrawn – the precarious, duplicate, and complex place. The land speaks – it is the remaining  consistency amidst borders and nation states. It speaks as the only constant, perhaps as the Holy  Immortal God, who is omnipresent and has no openings nor closures, only cycles now turned  poems, creations from destructions formed into annunciations, a redemption in the pile of  feathers. The war Malihon writes of isn’t only contemporary, it spans indefatigable durations  and historical eons; this land has been under the fire, below, and in fire for centuries. 

Everywhere in this book, the non-human rules the page, it is the remaining connection, those  who have always been. Fox. Bird. Appearing so frequently, if not more, than the human; the  animal, the inanimate natural world, the forest, the slow burning skin textures a displacement: “A  bird was flying through the humanitarian corridor / carrying in its beak a few foreign words / a  few branches for a new nest.” This begins. Our entry into the errantry. The bird needs not a  humanitarian corridor, yet it is exchanging roles with the girl who runs into the forest, she who  didn’t make it through the corridor: the girl and the bird trade places. Now, the bird carries  branches of what is left and what is known to its old place. Home. And language—that languid  spark. What will be built amidst the new environment, the branches intact as connecting pieces  carrying the past into the future’s unknown incomprehensibility? 

Could a bullet be a language? The language that gauges and launches into the body but never  fully assimilates, becoming a foreign part as though an appendage. “Girl with a bullet” – a bird, a  carrier of language. 

Burdens.  

Ukrainian, I attempt to read it. I do. The original Ukrainian, on the left page, like rocks in my  mouth. As a child, when I attended the first and second grade in Kyiv in the late 90s, I remember  consistently confusing the Ukrainian “и” with the Russian version of the same letter; the  difference being that Ukrainian makes a hard sound, and in Russian this is a soft “ee.” The  analogous letter for a hardened “ee” sound in Russian would be “ы,” usually appearing after a  hard consonant, ossifying brittle language into my mouth, changing the contours of how I speak.  Ukrainian is not a bullet – it’s a language I was once privy to. It is still in my body. When I need  to access it, I go inward. Shrapnel—pieces of an explosion, a broken event fracturing  progressive continuance—except, less violent, simply a move across the ocean. It feels timeless, unbelonging to my current reality, yet a part of my story, my becoming. I do not wish to return, I wish to build off, on top. I read from the present tense where I am. 

I carry. 

The only thing left: language. Some kind of proposition of continuing. “He touched his voice /  his voice in place.” The voice utters a language no matter how rocky, no matter how rickety and  lodged Ukrainian is in my body, I utter from the place I left, continuing through time. I do not  believe in perfection, but the continuation. The now. Where we are. Malihon addresses a fox 

friend who wishes to repeat their games together as though before: “Why are you standing above  me, stupid little fox? / No one’s going to play with you anymore / Because I’m not me anymore,  just some tired arms,” as if the self is only arms, those that carry. The human here becomes  nothing but arms, forgoing and renouncing the “me” or the ego, the individual is replaced with  instruments for labor or survival, only to return: “I’m coming back to get my things,” those  objects which make the “me” me. The return here is not permanent. To get one’s things and go  again. Leave and build anew with known twigs. The self is permeable, evaporating into the  collective experience of crossing the passage and carrying, returning. The passage is also a piece  of language, bound by form, made an excerpt – crossing the passage into the full spectrum, the  boundlessness of the work’s supplemental configuration of a book. 

This book, as prescient as it is of the war, is also the book of what happens after the disaster. 

I am reminded of Christina Rivera Garza’s story “Strange Is the Bird that Can Cross the River  Pripyat,” published in a collection New and Selected Stories by the Dorothy Project, taking place in the aftermath of  Chernobyl’s meltdown. I once remember thinking of the land, loam and the earth of Ukraine as continually bulletpocked. I remember thinking about the never-ending tragedy that has crossed the terrain. Garza, too, shifts the tragic into the fairy tale-like in this story of surviving, of those who survive and try to find others. There are always those looking for others, for the return to them, the return to others post tragedy, post disaster upon the barren earth: 

…beneath its ground, dead is the dead earth. Barren from before. Barren from forever more.  Dead is the bird that flies above the disaster and dead is the insect unnerving colors that crawls  and collapses and digits until it finds or constructs the niche of its own dearth, the eternal… Behind: the city and the forest and the Invisible Sniper. Behind: the keyboard and the television  and the photographs. Behind: the wind that, when it sharks a curtain or a blade or an object that  is otherwise stationary, unsettles or startles. A bathtub. A monumental empty pool. The avenues.  Behind the herds of horses that gallop through a city without men or women or children. They  are left with the now: the here. 

Malihon’s poetry lives within the culture it originated from. It cannot be separated spiritually  from those who had to leave, return, and perhaps leave again the land they once knew and loved.  Her poetry lives within the archetypal images and the cultural prehistoric and primordial. It is  hinged upon the culturally produced media and stories invoking and infusing the individual person  grown from its tendrils. The legend, the ethereal message is not one of a nation, but of the land. 

In Sergei Parajanov’s In The Shadow Of Our Forgotten Ancestors, ancestral pasts watch over the  two young people in love in the forests of Western Ukraine. Ivan and Marichko fall in love  whilst children. Unfortunately, their love is cursed by the ancestral lineage due to Marichko’s  father having murdered his own with an ax. The Orthodox Christian traditions of the Carpathians  fused with the village’s tribal superstitions does not allow for Ivan to be with Marichko.  Nonetheless, Marichko and Ivan marry . Early in their marriage, while Ivan is away,  Marichko drowns. She slips on some slick rocks while rescuing a lamb. With the lamb still in her arms, she falls down into the river’s deluge. Ivan eventually remarries, only to find his new wife fooling around with the town sorcerer. The  two engage in a confrontation ensuing in the sorcerer killing Ivan with an ax, as Marichko’s  father had done years prior. After  death Ivan ends up in the forest; his spirit uniting with  Marichko in the thickness of the Carpathian woods. Their hands touch, reconnect in the  dreamscape of the wood; a space of possibility, unhinged from territory via statelessness. 

Marichko and Ivan become spirits in the forest, the place of their becoming, in the land.  Unknown spirits like an atmosphere. The shadow upon the forest floor. Like the spirits in  Parajanov’s movie, (who, by the way was Georgian), Malihon’s poems latch onto the ephemeral  and eternal shadow – a presence through the ages— posing a scene of animal and nonhuman  bonds with death: “…The shadow of the sheepdog / sits on the unnamed grave.” This image of  war, of place, of displacement. Nobody knows who is buried here, just another body, another  daughter, son, father, orphan, widow — what’s left is the collective endurance of who a person  was, their titles. This particular image is reminiscent of Nostalghia by Andrei Tarkovsky, who  produced the movie after having been exiled from the Soviet Union. The ending is a long shot of  the protagonist, who died in a small town of Italy after searching for a poet. The screen is black  and white, and there he is amidst ruins with a sheepdog. The grave and the shadow may not be  the same, yet, displacement, shadows, ruins, and what we must leave continues to haunt a  people. What’s left is the known image, an archetypical production and specters. 

Or, perhaps a bone, a physical presence of who was once: “Look, this was a Person – now it’s a  bone / An omen for everyone – a blackbird… / you sigh, creature, with difficulty / and I also  smile with difficulty…” Yes, this was a Person with a capital P, but we do not know which  Person, Malihon does not name a particular individual, a Person is just one of the many  individuals of time, history and centuries. This person was once a person but now a bone – death,  that which continues, even when too early. Yes, an omen, yes, a blackbird as an omen, and yet,  Malihon returns to the primordial and the superstitious of the folk traditions. This feels cyclical.  As dark and tragic the poems may be, written in a contemporary war, her poetry lives beyond, in  the telluric—that which had given life. 

And we return to the archetype of the mother or the family structure where names do not matter,  but what does is the relationality or dance of continuance, a survival of a people and the creatures  they commune with. A daughter will always be. Mallihon begins the ultimate poem of the book:  

“Someone is tenderly or is it cautiously / caressing my check with a feather: / ‘Daughter, this is  our land!’ / ‘Daughter, this is OUR land.’” The repetition. The emphasis on daughter, on land, on  “OUR.” An emphasis in the repetition, the return of the sentence. Daughter, which daughter? The  daughter. A daughter will always be. A daughter will always be as long as humanity continues.  The daughter, a role, not just of Ukraine, or of Russia, but of the family, a daughter is a daughter  is a daughter is caressed with a feather. This is OUR land, the land is not of a nation, but of the people and entities continuing to inhabit it, whether the same ones or not, but of those who have  always existed and returned, moved, crossed, carrying a word.