Deaf Republic. Ilya Kaminsky. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2019. 76 pages. $16.00.
It’s been fifteen years since Ilya Kaminsky’s first poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa, was published to critical acclaim. With Deaf Republic, Kaminsky delivers another stunning achievement.
Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. Deaf Republic draws heavily from both traditions. It tells the story of Vasenka, a town overtaken by totalitarian soldiers. The residents of Vasenka have gone deaf after a young boy was murdered by soldiers and left in the street for days.
Except for a pair of poems that border the story in Deaf Republic, Kaminsky builds his book like a play. Complete with dramatis personae and two acts, Kaminsky’s tale highlights the theater of nationalism and amplifies the complicated relationship between power and silence. Kaminsky dresses his characters in Soviet-era clothing and gives them Slavic names, but the USSR is only a cloak over Vasenka, masking the country that truly shapes and influences the world he presents—our United States of America.
When he breaks the fourth wall in the final few pages, the reader is shaken to remember this story is about the US.
The first act follows newlyweds Alfonso and Sonya, who are expecting a child, when normal life unravels with the murder of the young boy Peyta. Kaminsky paints the world outside their life with their newborn daughter, Anushka, in broad strokes. We hear of townspeople and soldiers, but this is very much the private tale of Alfonso’s inner life as a newlywed, a new father, and a man newly living in a fascist country.
In the second act, we follow a different Vasenkan character: Mama Galya, the town Madame. The second act is a more public story. We see Mama Galya start a revolt in a way only she can orchestrate, but it is the effect of this revolution on the town that interests Kaminsky. As the repercussions of that night play out in horrible detail, Kaminsky shows us how the mob continues to live up to its nature. Just as we vote against our own interests, the Vasenkan townspeople turn against the only one who took a stand against the soldiers.
“We Lived Happily During the War,” the first poem bordering the “play” in Deaf Republic, situates the reader squarely in America. Privileged readers recognize ourselves “in the country of money.” We have the luxury to tweet, sign petitions, like protest photos, post elected officials’ phone numbers online, all from our beds, bathing in the blue light of our phones: “And when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not // enough.” Invoking Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” (say it), Kaminsky asks forgiveness on behalf of all of us who do not experience the immediate effects of our country’s wars abroad and at home: “we (forgive us) / lived happily during the war.”
At the end of the book, the inverted pair to “We Lived Happily,” “In a Time of Peace,” is the only other explicit reminder the story of Vasenka was always about America. “I watch neighbors open // their phones to watch / a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When the man reaches for his wallet, the cop / shoots. Into the car window. Shoots. // It is a peaceful country.”
Throughout Deaf Republic, Kaminsky works themes of silence and otherness from one’s body to describe totalitarianism’s effect on the individual. Kaminsky, who is hard of hearing, makes a point to distinguish deafness from silence: “The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.”
The town’s deafness is a choice—a revolt, their “only barricade”—and a comfort: “Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers. / In the name of Peyta, we refuse.” While they choose not to hear, the townspeople themselves are not exactly quiet. They resist their circumstance and evade authorities by teaching one another a sign language.
The Vasenkan sign for Earth is made by one hand pinching the skin of the other arm’s wrist. It shows us how painful it is to be on Earth. We are pinned here. We can’t raise our arms and fly up and out of here any more than the snowflakes can reverse their path and return to the cloud. War shows us how we are rooted to the earth and to the body. Paradoxically, it also breaks people out of their bodies.
In “4 AM Bombardment” our protagonist, Alfonso, is dragged from sleep into a war zone and cannot catch his body. “My body runs . . . / I look for a man who looks / exactly like me . . . // I, a body, adult male.” Kaminsky repeatedly breaks down language when describing traumatic events. In “Yet, I am,” Kaminsky collapses grammar to show the distance trauma puts between Mama Galya and her sense of self. She has to remind herself, “I exists. I has / a body.”
War separates the townspeople of Vasenka from themselves, and yet the deafness they use to defy their oppressors fastens them to their bodies. Kaminsky writes, “deafness nails us to our bodies.” Where war would tear them from themselves, Vasenkans choose a rooted and bodily deafness.
By the end of the book, Kaminsky reminds the reader that we’ve been watching a play all along. He ends the story by breaking the fourth wall: “We are sitting in the audience, still. Silence, like the bullet that’s missed us, spins—” Even as we exit Deaf Republic, coming back to our seats in the darkened theater, Kaminsky invokes silence, that invention of the hearing, the deadly bullet ricocheting off the balcony seats.
And as the curtain falls and the lights come up, he gives us a silent poem made up of signs: TOWN WATCHES EARTH STORY. Like the children in his story, we are now able to link these signs to meaning; by this point, Kaminsky has taught us the ways of Vasenka and we are honorary citizens of the village, if not the raw material that inspired it. This story hasn’t been about people from a different time and place. It’s about us—“our country is the stage.”
