Saturday, March 26, 2022

Samantha DeFlitch

Deaf Republic

Lately, I’ve been re-reading Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic. Kaminsky, deaf since the age of four, grew up in the city of Odessa—and his book Deaf Republic is a narrative that reimagines silence simultaneously as power and as complacency.

Deaf Republic takes place in the occupied city of Vasenka during a period of political unrest, and occupying soldiers have killed a deaf boy, Petya. The gunshot that kills Petya is the final sound the townsfolk hear, or choose to hear, as they create resistance to occupation in the form of silence. Momma Galya inscribes NO ONE HEARS YOU on the barracks as the poems of Deaf Republic become increasingly visual; drawings of Vasenka’s form of sign language constitute nearly entire poems.

Yet silence—and unhearing—is also a weapon pointed at the people of Vasenka. “I do not hear gunshots / but watch birds splash over the backyard of the suburbs. How bright is the sky / as the avenue spins on its axis. / How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.” This intentional unhearing of a speaker removed from the immediate violence of Vasekna also reappears in “We Lived Happily During the War.”:

We Lived Happily During the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible

house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month

of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of

money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

The book ultimately demands who—if anyone—is listening. And it asks how that act of listening—or unhearing—can be wielded both as a powerful tool of resistance and as a harmful act of ignorance. Who speaks? Who says nothing? Whose voice is heard? What does it mean to choose not to hear?