Yanara Friedland, Groundswell

 

The shuffling will promote a kind of agitation from which everything will need to be suddenly contemplated: the courthouse in Tucson, where the previous week I had watched the “ceremony” of detaining between fifty and sixty people through the fast-track system known as “Operation Streamline.” Those men and one woman also shuffled, but within the actual constraint of chains. They sat on benches, watching and watched, listening to the judge who did not listen.

And though the protocol maintained an automation, the judge was confused, mixed up one man’s name with one who turned out not to be the man in question. Later another man, whose first language was not Spanish and whose native language did not match the languages spoken by court interpreters in the room, was dismissed. So, despite the ceremony’s attempted rigorousness, a slight air of the unexpected and impalpable moved through the courtroom that Monday.

Ideas don’t scare me, but their bodies, gravities, and actions do. The monastic gardens will bloom like hallucinations. We will rest and watch a water fountain with four lion heads spewing infinite streams. Thoughts such as these will pass by: Are we monotone, restless, spiteful and the woods and trees and light corridors of this planet are not? Have we descended like an alien force on a beatific countenance only to become its ultimate poison? Inside one of the chapels, light will play with walls. It will be quiet. I will be alone for a brief moment, in front of a large altar. A sheet of memory will peel off. I will sit in one of the wooden chairs and focus on the saints whose names I don’t know. Another thought will pass: You will not always be able to do this. Then an image of myself, a smear, will pull through the air. A portrait against a green background and several doubling heads slowly dissipating. (“ORACLE ROAD”)

I was first introduced to the work of German-American writer, translator and teacher Yanara Friedland through her debut, the 2015 winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Award, Uncountry, a mythology (La Cruces NM: Noemi Press, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Her latest title is the evocative Groundswell (Essay Press, 2021). Groundswell is self-described as an essay collection, although the division of genre through these two books seems rather arbitrary, as both could be considered echoes, structurally, of each other: one book, as a thought continued, and furthered, leading directly to the next. Both, for example, are assemblages of short prose, accumulating into the structure of the larger collection, speaking to and about borders, identity and belonging through a blend of research and memoir, the author/narrator works through a consideration of such. The seeming arbitrariness of genre-designation reminds of Vancouver writer Michael Turner, who submitted the manuscript of his Hard Core Logo (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993) sans genre, for it to be originally produced as a collection of poetry, and then, once the film adaptation appeared in 1996, was reissued as “fiction.” Even as Friedland, herself, suggests early on in Groundswell: “Everything is biography and sentences.” Currently an assistant professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies Bellingham, Washington, her online biography begins:

I am a writer and translator born in Berlin, whose research interest include border poetics, autofiction, critical and creative insurgencies in archives, and experiments with documentary forms. My first book Uncountry: A Mythology (2016) selected for the 2015 Noemi Fiction Award, narrates the gaps between official history and the more unreliable spaces of private memory and unspoken unofficial history. My second book Groundswell (Essay Press, 2021), a collection of border narratives, interviews, testimonies and biographies investigates the living archive of ruins, walls, and borders. The essays include lived experiences of borderers, walks along the geopolitical line, as well as my own confrontation with spatial and temporal bordering processes.

Groundswell is structured as a suite of lyric essays on borders, crossings, occupations and conflicts, opening with histories surrounding Germany, including around Nazi occupation and the German-Polish border, before moving her thoughts into and around the American-Mexican border. She writes of returning to Berlin as an adult and exploring her childhood geographies, providing linkages to how borders are considered in other fraught geographies, including Arizona, where she lived and taught for a time. Friedland works through archives, research and interviews, as well as her own commentary, working through identity as much as the arbitrariness and the, at times, cruelty of borders. She writes a documentary poetics that weaves through Berlin and Arizona; she writes of Palmyra, and the erasure of Jewish cemeteries in Poland. She speaks of how she carries her geography of origin inside her, exploring the implications of carrying as much of the dark histories of that space as any other. She studies actions and reactions, and the stories of displacement, trauma and horror. As she writes to end “STATELESS,” writing:

I imagine taking this country, cutting it out of my body, drowning it in the sea. What would it be like in here? Would it precede absence or nostalgia, a primordial crime? Instead, I buy a light bulb that will last one thousand hours and listen to Saskia Sassen speak to a half-empty room. “The Guantanamo hunger strike was inspired by the IRA hunger strike. In other words,” she adds, “meaning circulates.”

And I this raven with a piece of hot coal in my beak.

Given her commentary around occupation, and even colonization, it does seem curious her relative silence on aboriginal communities, whether in Canada or the United States: colonized peoples that have historically and systematically been brutalized for centuries, even continuing to the present-day, although that could easily be seen as too vast a potentially related but entirely separate conversation to include here (and the conversation isn’t not-there in Friedland’s work, but the shadow of such dark and unacknowledged histories have grown long, especially in recent months). There are structural echoes in Friedland’s work to a number of other non-fiction works over the years, writers that have blended the personal with research, weaving in and around their own articulations of archive and experience, including Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s non-fiction trilogy on living beyond her familiar geographies: Crossing the Snow Line (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1989), The Only Snow in Havana (Dunvegan ON: Cormorant Books, 1992) and Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993). Other echoes of prose that blur the boundaries of genre could be seen through Anik See’s Sausade: The Possibilities of Place (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], Monica Kidd’s any other woman: an uncommon biography (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2008) [see my review of such here] and, more recently, Johannes Göransson’s Poetry Against All: a diary (Saxtons River VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) [see my review of such here]. It is curious to consider how simultaneously Friedland’s travel might have originally prompted her research as much as her interest in researching borders and countries might have led her to explore travel. Simultaneously managing a prose both lyric and narratively straightforward, her research connects the past to the contemporary, writing of the refugee and the displaced, of traumas not purely historical, flowing through and across geographies, ideas and thoughts like water. As the piece “CROSSINGS” begins: “What do we take into the future?” Further in the same essay, she writes:

Hannah Arendt wrote “We Refugees” in the early 1940s while in exile, laying out a fundamental and brilliant analysis of the modern German-Jewish condition, a protracted migratory identity that then threatened statehood and nationalism. The eternal and yet failed attempts of Jews to assimilate (“You can hardly realize how serious we were about it”) went beyond adjusting to the country they were born into and to the people whose language they happened to speak (“We adjust in principle to everything and everybody”). Despite 150 years of Jewry proving their non-Jewishness, they “succeeded in remaining Jews all the same.” Arendt equates the Jew to the refugee, not protected by citizenship and whose stateless identity bears an ongoing political threat. “If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings. I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we actually live in a world in which human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while; since society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Yanara Friedland

Yanara Friedland is a German-American writer, translator and teacher. Her first book Uncountry: A Mythology was the 2015 winner of the Noemi Fiction Prize. Abraq ad Habra: I will create as I speak, a digital chapbook, is available from Essay Press. She is the recipient of a DAAD and an Arizona Commission of the Arts research grant in support of a collection of essays written collaboratively in the German-Polish and US-Mexican borderlands.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I am not sure when I started writing Uncountry. I sometimes think I've been writing it my whole life. There were so many narratives and characters that I wanted to tend to and investigate that have been with me for a long time. Writing the book felt like understanding the many geographies that impacted my own becoming. From literary lineages to blood ancestors, historical events and mythic lore, I was able to bring various threads into one place and let them be in conversation with each other.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I really don't think in those terms. I have always written across and within forms, and each work requires a different gesture. I remain open to what that can look like. In terms of beginnings, I think I started with dreams, with the fragment that obstinately courses the system and can never be fully captured.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It depends on the project. Uncountry took many years and many drafts. I have several folders of drafts, several books that are called Uncountry. It took me  a long time to really find cohesion and attunement between the various narratives that the book is holding. It was initially very unwieldy and for a long time rather unreadable. My second book, mostly poems, came out of three long walks across European border regions. I wrote this fairly quickly, though that evaluation may be relative. I do keep notebooks, usually recording moments, observations, dreams and ideas. They are often illegible, but keep me on track. There is often a logic in the illegible note taking practices that I cherish that I often only understand after some time.

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Again, it depends. Uncountry began from many divergent and often short prose pieces. Sometimes I would write between these shorter pieces and they became a longer story, but I prefer in many ways juxtaposition to one large cohesive sweep.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I am the sort of writer who likes being read, and so I like readings as a way to make the work visible, and to also hear it in a collective space in encounter with others. I read as a way to listen to the work, and as a way to make let language travel and haunt.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

How can I approach you with care?

What is hiding behind our disastrous present?

What are the invisible worlds communicating?

What is the root of this country's sorrow?

How will we live here now?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think the moment we stop believing that the writer, or for that matter any artist, maker has a role in culture we are in dangerous territory. Writers often sit between spaces, at the margins, inquire and gather what is not always seen. I believe in the writer as seer and augur, as someone who can constellate the complexities of the worlds and offer throughways or at least space of recognition. A writer is someone who listens, who is connected to the messages of place, mystery, suffering. A culture without poets, writers artists is a culture that wants to forget itself and has forgotten others. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I usually feel very honored by the hard work an editor does, tending someone else's lines and concerns. I think this relationship is essential, not necessarily to make the work better, but to begin to usher it out of my own room towards the world. That being said, here are a lot of average editors out there. I think it takes a very particular skill set and giftedness to be a good editor.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

The antidote to fear is a baby step.—Mark Baumer

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It begins with the lighting of a candle, with a notebook, half open eyes. I usually don't write whole days at my desk, but a lot of writing also happens when I am not writing; that is when I teach, take a train, stare at people, when I sleep.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Dreams, poetry, Clarice Lispector

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

baked apple cake, snow, a struck match

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I am always impacted by where I live, the landscapes that surround me, right now the desert. I write frequently in the great companionship of music (Lauri Anderson and Meredith Monk, Keith Jarret, Leonard Cohen among others) and in collaboration with art. For Uncountry I worked with an amazing visual artist, Mollie Hosmer Dillard, who created the images inside the book, for each History, and also painted the book cover. Walking is important to me, or perhaps, movement in general. I write well in trains, in transit, crossing the Atlantic.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

There are some core writers that carry me through most years: Unica Zürn's work, Christa Wolf, Clarice Lispector, Ana Mendieta, oral histories and life writing. More recently Svetlana Alexievich, Else Lasker Schüler, Daniel Borzutzky. Right now, I am reading a lot of books on Berlin pre- WWI and the Sturm movement.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

astrologer, rabbi, social worker

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It stayed and persisted, grew and traveled, but I do other things too. I find myself moving between a lot of different kind of action in the world. I teach, I research, I work in communities. I am not completely identified with "the writer" and yet it has been the one thing signaling continuity.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

One more time with Feeling—Nick Cave

20 - What are you currently working on?

A book of essays (or maps) titled Groundswell, built from first hand accounts, interviews and archival material speaking from the German-Polish border and the Sonoran borderlands.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Yanara Friedland, Uncountry, a mythology

Her favorite story is death. When you die you go down along a wall of stones pointing out of the earth like large bones. When you die you fall down a well and bring blood to the moon’s reflection. When you die the bird-killing hind toe carries you to the arch of Orion. When you die you go back to the clay and fog. When you die the golems will cry. When you die the world disappears. When you die I will die.

Mimmy’s son born bad is pulled out like water from a well. Large forceps embrace his neck. The tumble of sounds, he pushes back. His arms, oars. Jugular vein thumps. There are squirrels on the roof. Mimmy’s words shake up rough, they call out of her mouth like unripe berries. Several nurses have to hold her down. Mimmy roars; woman of a thousand heads on all fours, the forceps still stuck somewhere. The egg sandwich vomited onto white sheets. The baby is suddenly surrounded by numb flesh, his head in the slow current of a dark pond.

German-American writer, translator, and Arizona teacher Yanara Friedland’s first novel, 2015 winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Award, is the remarkable Uncountry, a mythology (La Cruces NM: Noemi Press, 2016). Composed as a series, a sequence, of self-contained prose sections, Friedland’s novel explores how stories of real experience shift and shimmy into mythology, writing a series of episodes that feel unreal at first, and then begin to cohere into something solid, concrete. One gets the sense that these stories could be centred in autobiography, writing outwards from stories collected from parents, grandparents and other points of extended family, and yet, whether they are or not are irrelevant; stories such as these not need to have happened as they are depicted for them to be “true.” Writing the character Mimmy from the old country to the new, Friedland tells tales of Europe during the war and contemporary North America, writing tales of love, death, memory and survival, from the carnage of war itself to the inevitable hangover once war finally ends, as well as what remains long after such experiences become history. Through an incredible book-length sequence that begins almost dreamlike, there are elements here that Friedland shares with Milan Kundera for the sense of personal story and intimate detail amid grand storytelling, bleeding between fact and memory, history and mythology. Hers are the small moments that make up a life, lived amid and between the details of historical fact, specifically the madness of the Second World War. This is very much a book about being and not belonging, the trauma of war displacing the soul from a connection to a home that no longer exists and surviving: whole, but not unscathed. This might be the sharpest and strongest novel I’ve read in some time. 

When you walk, you return to the human prodigal. To move across, trespass, leave behind. Retrieval of distance. Of arrival.

Marshland, basalt rock, nesting swans, washing lines. “The March” refers to a series of Death Marches of allied prisoners during the winter of ’45, also called “The Great March West,” “The Bread Walk” or “The Long Walk.” At the same time many thousand civilian refugees move away from the Russian occupation zone. Later that year, during the summer, Czechs expel their German minorities from Sudetenland to Austria, which is later referred to as the “Brünn Death March.”

It appears that the year of 1945 saw one of the largest human migrations dying on foot in European history.