There are a few things I’ve been wanting to say for a long time.

I’ve had a hard time talking about identification ever since I was little and starting to think about who I am. That is due, in part, to all the troubles in our multi-ethnic family. Those conflicts (which in part arose from a refusal to accept the ethnic other) have shaped and defined me. And now, as an adult, I’m trying to explore my different family histories and cultures, my two basic identities (the Romanian-Moldovan one (dad) and the Ukrainian one (mom)). I understand that identity isn’t fixed, but a process. It’s hard to name and not always easy to make visible. But sometimes you have to try.

I’ve tried many times to write this “clarifying” (?) text “for others.” And just as many times, I’ve deleted it. I’m still unable to create a clear, coherent narrative. It falls apart into a myriad of painful narratives, narratives given to me by relatives and strangers, that end up fighting and screaming and biting like triggered children. And I always end up unable to comprehend what is actually being said.

I’ve decided to keep this short: this is my situation, these are my current positions/processes, they are subject to change.

First of all, it’s important to state that I am not an “exiled” poet. And I’ve never positioned myself as one.

I did not move to Ukraine in 2018 to escape anyone or anything in the russian federation. I moved here because this is my home, that’s how I feel. I wanted to live in Ukraine and get to know Ukraine because I’d felt a connection to the country for a long time, despite not really knowing it. This feeling was somewhat paradoxical, perhaps best described by the fairytale refrain: “go I know not whither / and fetch I know not what.” It was, however, an imperative. So I went.

Could I have known Ukraine in any other way? Perhaps, if my grandparents hadn’t been forced out of Ukraine in the thirties and sent to Siberia, where their identity and knowledge of their place of origin eroded bit by bit. Now my mother (Ukrainian by ethnicity) knows nothing of Ukraine beyond what she hears on russian television; she has given up this identity (along with any dialogue with me). But her mother (my grandmother) retained her Ukrainian identity and was able to pass on a few ruins of knowledge (about herself, about us), fragments of songs and stories, to me. Many years later, they were activated in an unexpected way: I started to think I had to make sure we could return. “We” meaning not just myself and my son, but all of our dead – those who were unable to return in the 20^th century and were lost to another, foreign history: in other words, my grandmother as well. She’s no longer with us, but she’s come here with me. That’s how I feel. Five years passed between the moment this “dream” was born and its realization. I can’t say I went about things in a strict, well-planned fashion; the road here was complicated and anything but clear-cut. Still, it was the road I traveled home.

This is also where my beloved lives. An entirely different and complex person, who nonetheless is home to me. A beloved someone can be both home and knowledge and someone through whom we define ourselves. A lot of things coincide here.

So I am not in exile. I have no plans of returning to “the russia of the future.” I believe the space currently occupied by “russia,” as an idea and a reality, needs major change in order for other life-worlds to blossom there. I don’t want to dictate to those who live there what to do and how to envision their future. I can only state how I feel at the moment. That no such “russia” should exist anymore. That the process of decolonizing these spaces – the conquered ones and the “original,” changed spaces – will make room for different, more just and more mutually open-ended ways of coming together and organizing a shared political life.

As for me, I would like to live my life in Ukraine.

This is why I at one point (not following February 24, 2022, but as early as 2019) began writing that I was born in Siberia and live in Ukraine when asked to send a brief biography to different literary festivals and publications. It better reflects how I experience my participation in space.

Besides, it reflects my wish to never lend support to russia as a state in any way. Neither as a political idea nor as a historical fact. I don’t want to invest anything I do or will do in this “russia.” I don’t want my future writings to belong to “russia.” They’re mine, and I’m translocal and diverse, created in part by the events and displacements of the 20^th century, in part by my own will.

I don’t believe there is some “alternate russia” (within the existing russia) that we need to bring to the fore and salvage. I may have at one point (?), but to me personally (not saying others need to feel this way), that seems like a delusion. Like I just wrote, I think different and more just spaces could grow where russia is today. And I don’t think those spaces have to be nation states; there could be spaces made up of new, reformulated unions based on a true federative principle, there could be autonomous cities in free alliance, there could be countless different geopolitical processes that create future worlds defined in relation to specific loci and political practices, which in turn are not insular but also have support from reborn international institutions. I’ve noticed decolonial activists and political philosophers already giving thought to these things and I’m trying to pay attention to what they say.

There are certain things I can’t do. I can not and will not represent russia and russian literature at international cultural events. I will represent myself. That’s the only way I can take responsibility for what I do and say.

But there are other reasons that carry a lot of weight.

The most important one is that the russian state is waging a war of conquest against Ukraine – my home.

The others are as follows:

I manage no cultural projects in russia whatsoever, and don’t plan to in the near future. Since 2020/2021, I am no longer an active member of any independent russian literary communities or projects. What is produced within them no longer has anything in common with my values and my experience.

I don’t write “russian anti-war poetry.” Any invitations I’ve received from russian or international institutions to participate in literary “anti-war projects” following February 24 have gone unanswered. I don’t support this discourse, which so many russophone poets who are or have been connected to russia are subordinating themselves to. I define my writing using vastly different values and relationships, which are not “anti-war” but recognize the necessity of meeting russian military aggression with armed decolonial resistance.

I can’t speak for those who remain in russia, and since 2020, I haven’t written anything relating to domestic political events/processes in russia.

I wouldn’t want any such representativity (of the russian federation, that is, a representativity sometimes assigned to me by international curators against my will) to define the contents of what I do now. But I also won’t disavow the poems I wrote between 2012 and 2018, when I still lived in russia. Nor the few pieces I have written in Ukraine in response to political processes in russia (like “My Vagina” or “The Great Russian Literature”). And I won’t disavow personal, friendship-based and poetic bonds with specific people who matter to me and have the same citizenship as I do.

This doesn’t mean I’m writing in “a vacuum.”

A lot of what is happening and being written in Ukraine affects me greatly. That is what makes up my “context.” I know I study it, that it’s very important to me, I know which Ukrainian (and other) texts define me now, while still feeling that I can’t be 100 % rooted in this context, and that the last thing I’d want is to present it as my own.

So when I perform, I represent nothing besides myself, I stand apart from states and national literatures.

And I don’t represent Ukraine (I know full well I have no right to) or present myself as a “Ukrainian writer.”

I consider myself a writer residing in Ukraine with a Ukrainian political identity and of Ukrainian ethnicity. As an individual, I am in touch with Ukrainian culture. But none of these things make me a “Ukrainian writer.” Because the relationship between identity and writing, language, time, and participation in culture and history is probably an even trickier business than political identity itself. Simply living in a country for a long time does not grant you the right to speak in the name of its national literature.

There are other ways of “making yourself heard.” I am looking for those ways.

Another important question is this one: where does my responsibility lie?

Exactly where my passport is. I carry them with me. They are real, I can see them and sense them.

I won’t hide the fact that I had plans to renounce my russian citizenship before February 24, 2022, but didn’t have time to start the process for a number of external reasons. So it is what it is. I’m also not sure that the absence of a russian passport would in any way relieve me of the feelings of responsibility and guilt (the latter of which I am still struggling to handle). I want to renounce my citizenship, but I’m not dissociating myself from my life and my experience, from everything I saw and went through while living in the russian federation. Those things will stay with me for the rest of my life. I won’t pretend that my twenty-eight years in the russian federation never occurred, or that they were all doom and gloom. What was is a part of me, and I am a part of what was.

I’m accountable for where I lived and how, for what I did and said there, for everything that helped shape me. A lot of it is genuinely destructive, and I’ll be dealing with the consequences for a long time. That might also be a way to take responsibility – trying to deal with the consequences of the destruction sown in you, making sure you don’t repeat it against different people and under different circumstances.

I feel responsible for what I did and said in a public capacity as an activist and organizer of various independent literary projects (particularly from 2012 to 2018). Responsible for my optics, my inner imperialisms, which I now realize were blinding me even when I thought I could see the other, the others. For my lack of courage, rage, clarity, and firmness in my political stances. For all the collaborations and projects that ignored the reality of war, for all the “compromises” in situations where they should have been unthinkable. For my fear, which actually dictated so many of my life processes and political decisions that it may not have been fear at all, but cowardice. For my cowardice. For not comprehending what was really going on in Ukraine till I came here in person and started talking to people, reading local independent media and blogs. For being more comfortable “not fully comprehending.” For believing the leftist or liberal russian sources of information I had access to (which often presented a distorted image of the ongoing war) and letting them shape my perception of reality. In short, for my stupidity, my rigidity, and my blinders. For my lack of attention and sensitivity to what the Ukrainians said and did. For believing, for a time, that I was engaged in “universal writing,” writing “for everyone.” How wrong I was.

I think this piece is also a clumsy attempt to speak responsibly (?).

I’ve always felt hesitant toward all forms of identity politics, and I haven’t wanted anything I write to be read as a speculation in identity/ethnicity (least of all now). As a consequence, there are certain things I’ve never put into words (perhaps not even to myself), or have only put into words in poetic forms. I still have a very hard time saying I am somebody, since my parents wanted most of all for me to be nobody.

But as I make this effort to overcome my fear and insecurity, it isn’t just that I want to be seen “from the outside” in a way that is at least a smidge closer to the knowledge I am trying to gain about myself. It’s mainly that I don’t want any identities assigned to me from the outside (by others, that is) to be used to further narratives I don’t share – regardless of whether they concern russia’s war against Ukraine or speculative and inappropriate stories about “the troubled fate of russian literature.”

In the past few years, I’ve read a lot of texts in various languages about my books and poems. A lot of them say I’m a poet living in exile from russia, that I fled the regime’s persecution, that I miss my home and have no prospects of returning to russia – and all of this sort of adds additional optics to interpreting my poems. But it’s not true. In the same vein, the past two years have brought multiple invitations to participate in international literary events about exile or writers in exile (including russian ones), to projects themed around “the loss of home and feeling of homelessness,” and so on. I have a lot of friends who really have fled persecution from the russian regime, I know what that’s like, and I don’t want to speak for them or in their place. After all, I have a home.

That’s why I’ve decided to tell more people than just my friends why I moved to Ukraine, what truly motivated me. The story of my grandmother really is very important to me (it was one of my primary reasons for emigrating). I grew up with her, we were close, I’m named after her and she left me a part of her identity/self-concept. She died fairly early (when I was eighteen), but I knew she wanted to go to Ukraine, she just ran out of time. Over time, I started to think I had to come here “for our sake.” This, of course, is a story about the link between grief and (self-)imagination, it has nothing to do with the issue of responsibility. It obviously doesn’t relieve me of responsibility, nor of any other problems that accompany my sense of cultural belonging and self-concept.

I’m just trying to figure out how all these things function within me. Only later did I read texts about how descendants of deported persons and families (people like the Ukrainian side of my family) conceive themselves, how the narrative of deportation functions in the imagination and memory of those who haven’t experienced it themselves. Why does it suddenly become important to descendants of the deported to return to the place their parents or grandparents were deported from, and how does this idea of returning take shape, an idea they can’t always articulate, rationalize, or politicize?

I realize how difficult it is to try to fit all this into a post on Facebook. I’ve at least made an attempt, although I’m not sure I’ve managed to express myself clearly. Perhaps I’ll be able to write more sensibly about all this – later, when I’m in better shape.