With the help of poetry, Hanna Komar has been healing her personal wounds. This is where her art has been life-saving for her.
RIBWORT is a space to sit down with your pain and listen. You may think it's not helpful, like a leaf of ribwort on a bleeding wound. The pain will probably be growing more and more acute, but if you face it, if you hold space for it. Eventually it will shrink to the size of a scratch which a leaf of ribwort can help to heal. When we have healed, we become leaves of ribwort for others, so we can sit down with their pain and listen. Listen with compassion and without fear, without getting defensive or running away. This is what keeps us going.
In the summer of 2021, Hanna Komar brought the script for this book to a publisher in Belarus. He told her his business was going to be shut down for her protest poems. He couldn't publish them. Since then, almost all independent publishers of Belarusian books in the Belarusian language have had their business suspended or liquidated. Books have been labelled "extremist" and people have been imprisoned for selling or owning them, while writers have been persecuted for writing them.
This is just a tiny tip of the iceberg of the repressions which unfolded in Belarus when the people stood up against the falsified election results on 9 August 2020 and the violence which followed afterwards. Every day, still, dozens of people are arrested in Belarus on political grounds. Some call that summer the awakening of Belarusians; others call it the birth of a new, free Belarus. No matter what it's called, these years have felt for the nation, and for the author of this poems, like unlearning what was already learnt helplessness. Yet these have also been maturing years through courage, solidarity, hope, pain, suffering, and disillusionment. A lot of wounds have opened. This book doesn't start with the protest poems of 2020. It consists of sections which tell about the poet's relationship with her parents and with herself, about her romantic relationships, about her relationship with her homeland, and the poetry of civil resistance. Each of them is administering a leaf of ribwort to help the wounds heal.
"Hanna Komar's poems display a refined ear for sound and sense both in Belarusian and translated by her into English. Her poems move seamlessly from the personal to the political, speaking with the urgency of a life experienced with compassion, dignity and resolve."--Mary Kollar, poet and educator, USA
"Komar's poetry quenches our thirst for truth. These are poems that brim with urgency: clear, bracing, live-giving."--Clare Pollard
"Hanna Komar's poems are a rumbling ache in the heart, a low cry in the darkness against oppression - of the people of her native Belarus, crushed by Lukashenko's brutal regime, and of so many women through the centuries everywhere. Searingly honest, yet brimful of human sympathy, this collection seeps into your mind with its powerful conviction and determination to alert the world to what truly matters."--John Farndon
"Komar never turns away, always towards: gifted equally in the expression of grief and love, in anger and tenderness, in after and before. A life torn down the centre finds something beautiful in RIBWORT--and, we sense as its reader, something almost inadmissible, something of hope. Anyone unsure of the power of poetry in translation should take RIBWORT as their remedy."--James Appleby
Translated from Belarusian by the author, with the English version edited by the American poet Mary Kollar.
Poetry.
