18 pages • 36 minutes read
Ilya KaminskyWe Lived Happily During the War
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Kaminsky’s poem is written in the lyric mode. His invocation of Bishop in Line 11 further shows that Kaminsky chose to honor both American and Soviet literary lineages. Further, the poem was published one year after the Iraq war and the shooting of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, challenging poets to reflect on their role during a time of crisis. During this era, Kaminsky was involved in a number of translation and editing projects including Words Without Borders, and Poetry International and the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.
Many poets choose to confront the reality of the Iraq war in their poetry. Notably, in the early 2000s, American poet and Iraq veteran Brian Turner wrote a series of books examining the brutalities of war and trauma. The idea that poetry must also speak to times of crisis finds roots in Kaminsky’s own early literary influences: the poets Mandelstam, Brodsky, and Tsvetaeva, all poets for whom political persecution is inseparable from their written experience. As a fellow USSR-born poet, Brodsky is especially celebrated in Kaminsky’s first collection, Dancing in Odessa.
Detisch, writing in Blackbird, draws attention to the way Kaminsky both honors and transcends his literary predecessors:
One can feel the pressure of the “Great Ones” bending the poems into lines and music not yet totally fulfilled. In Deaf Republic, we hear the result of Kaminsky’s endeavor—he’s listened hard to the silences between his poems, his poems and the poems of his masters and has returned with lingering harmonies entirely his own (Detisch, Christian. “Deaf Republic: Review.” Blackbird).
In his poem “Elegy for Joseph Brodksy,” Kaminsky writes:
I left your Russia for good, poems sewn into my pillow / rushing towards my own training / to live with your lines / on a verge of a story set against itself. / To live with your lines, those where sails rise, waves / beat against the city’s granite in each vowel […] (Kaminsky, Ilya. “Elegy for Joseph Brodsky”. 1985. All Poetry).
Similar to Brodsky, Kaminsky found a form where the pressures of moral responsibility and peaceful daily life are interrogated. It is intriguing to read Kaminsky’s poem alongside Brodsky’s poem, “Bosnia Tune,” given the way the mundane privilege is compared to mundane trauma.
Historical Context
Early poems from Deaf Republic began to appear in magazines as early as 2009; “We Lived Happily During the War” first appeared in 2013. Two years prior to this, the Iraq war ended, the Syrian war began, and Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense. In 2012, unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin was shot.
Kaminsky told The Guardian that Deaf Republic is about “what happens to language in a time of crisis, how we carry on and how we try to remain human […] It’s something I’m trying to find out in my book and in my life.” Although “We Lived Happily During the War” laments suburban complicity in war, Kaminsky’s background as a Soviet Jew is not alien to injustice and violence. As a translator and editor, Kaminsky was also heavily involved in bringing forth the work of poets from around the world, including Iraq and Russia, to English readers.
At the time of the poem’s publication in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement was forming. In many ways, the question of moral responsibility to crisis was in the air and the question of the responsibility of white writers would dramatically change the conversation. Two years after the publication of the poem, Claudia Rankine writes in in Literary Hub:
This is not to say that the only solution would be to extend the imagination into other identities, that the white writer to be antiracist must write from the point of view of characters of color. It’s to say that a white writer’s work could also think about, expose, that racial dynamic” (Rankine, Claudia. “Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary Literary Hub).
In many ways, Kaminsky’s understanding is ahead of its time and thoroughly rooted in a mode of social witness close to him. The closing poem, “In a Time of Peace,” again situations the play in America and directly confronts police violence—notably the shooting of Philando Castille: “I watch neighbors open / their phones to watch / a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When a man reaches for his wallet, the cop / shoots. Into the car window. Shoots. / It is a peaceful country” (Lines 2-6) (Kaminsky, Ilya. “In a Time of Peace” 2019. Poets.org.).
Here, Kaminsky explores complicity and guilt while also reimagining a way forward through new understandings of silence and sign language. With the glowing reception of the book, BBC named him one of the 12 artists that changed the world. Craig Morgan Teicher wrote in NPR: “In this extraordinary book-length narrative work, re-envisioning disability as power and silence as singing, Kaminsky has created a searing allegory precisely tuned to our times, a stark appeal to our collective conscience” (Morgan, Craig. "I Reject Walls": A 2019 Poetry Preview. 2019. NPR).
