The Light That Burns Us – Jazra Khaleed

[World Books; 2024] 

Tr. from the Greek by multiple translators 

As I began to write this review, Aegean Air sent me a promotional email featuring photos of white, middle-class families spinning their children around on an untarnished beach, seizing with laughter. The azure Aegean Sea twinkled with possibility in the background. Another image depicted a father joyfully galivanting with his little daughter: “Children and infants travel free.” One child in the photograph is pretending to be an airplane. The family is dressed in casual attire unfit for their location, as though they had accidentally stumbled upon the beach on their Sunday outing in the suburbs of the American Midwest or Point Breeze, Philadelphia. Or maybe they stumbled onto a plane that dropped them off on the shoreline. Whatever the case, this is certainly not an immigrant family, coming out of the water clothed and frozen. They did not cross the Aegean on an inflatable boat. They are flying to Greece on vacation; their destination is paradise. 

The Light That Burns Us was published by World Books, translated by many and written by Jazra Khaleed. Born in 1979 in Grozny, Chechnya, Khaleed currently lives in Athens, and writes poetry in Greek. His vision of Greece is not a tourist assemblage marketed to me by the airlines, but focuses on working class and immigrant conditions and nationalist sentiments pervasive throughout the country. His short films, such as You Shall Not Disband Us, focusing on class struggle, or Gone is Syria, Gone, “a poetry film about the long and perilous journey of immigration, shot on Lesvos island,” show what lies outside the idealist framework of state propaganda and neoliberal media. Khaleed often names himself in the umbra of his poems, interplaying between narrator and poet—there is no crevice, no separation between his identities; he is at once the poet, the narrator, the proletariat, and the agitator. In the poem aptly titled “Self Portrait,” Khaleed writes: “Jazra Khaleed is my name / A holy whore / A bastard poet / A fighter sometimes, mostly a coward / I know who I am / I have gained the honor of every honorable family.” Khaleed and his words are multiplicitous, manifold, and culturally complex and move through the world together. The categories these words fit into are as real and diaphanous as carrying another man’s nightmares through customs, “[paying] the fine for excess baggage.”  

This second edition of Khaleed’s poems translated into English is divided into four parts. The first part contains twenty-eight antagonistic, formally singular poems, while the last three parts are single long poems divided into numbered sections or vignettes. Khaleed’s poetry is like a mosaic, using alternating segments, fractions, and disparate voices of the poet himself. The titular poem, “The Light That Burns Us,” is in the beginning of the collection. The poem’s sequencing brings me into the pith of the book without any previous expectations besides the title itself; I am to gather the book’s general mood before fully immersing myself into its substance. “greece, / but you must know that we who embrace the darkness within ourselves don’t want a share in your sun,” Khaleed proclaims in the final line, following three pages condemning Greece’s nationalistic burning light. The poem is engraved amidst his reverberating anti-nationalistic sentiments resisting capitalism’s endless envoys.  

It’s fitting that Khaleed is from the city of Grozny, a word in Russian with roots in гроз, most immediately relating to thunder, but then also menace, anger, foreboding, formidable, fearsome. The region of Chechnya—known for its resistance to Russian imperialism in an ongoing, decades-long conflict reaching its contemporary height after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s—continues to resist Russia’s hawkish agenda through militant group insurgency. Khaleed’s scathing words written in Greek seem intensely informed by Chechnya’s historical rebellion.

Groz, or гроз, is also the root word for гроздь, a grape cluster—a cluster of defiant, uncontrollable voices, formidable resistance, and individuals making up the whole—a conical recognizable symbol of the Mediterranean. Although the grape cluster is not inherently a symbol of rebellion, each bundle grows based on its own volition, uniquely shaped by multitudes of single fruits. In this model of multitudes, the many voices of Khaleed are brought to life in English by its nine translators. This multitude creates a chorus of disparate, yet formidable punches to the face of the reader: “I will drive a verb into your eye / I will plant a beta in your chests.” The “you” is me, and the “you” is you. Reading Khaleed, I’m constantly being interrogated and implicated in my own bourgeois hedonism, my passivity as a bedfellow of the state. Simply by reading, buying the book, and partaking in the economic and cultural exchange of Western hegemony, I, too, am receiving blows through the verb, the beta. 

Poetry for Khaleed isn’t meant for lamentations or grandiloquent delicacies of bourgeois sensibilities. He declares, “Fuck off, flower poets. Fragile as your amaryllis.” He is not a romantic, reminding me of the Russian Futurist 1912 manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, corroding past fancies of Russian imperial poetry, demanding a newness and risk: “Who’s naive enough to direct their last love towards the perfumed lechery of Balmont? Is that really a reflection of today’s potent soul?” Poetry continues to be a weapon of its own, functioning in a lineage of anti-tradition and resistance to establishment. I’m not saying that poetry is replacing action, but if poetry is the language of our actions, then Khaleed’s language is antagonistic towards the self-proclaimed progressive liberal traveler full of good intentions. In Khaleed’s poetics there is no room for mere passive observation. The reader becomes an active spectator, at times riddled with guilt. 

The fourth poem in the collection is titled “You,” addressing a past lover who’s duplicitous (anti) political and romantic actions betrayed the narrator, having “crossed / to side with the Greek state.” The poem ends with: “You always told me the personal is political.” Although I’m not the one who stained the mattress with blood, I remember the mattresses and sheets I have left blood-smeared, the lovers I left behind, and perhaps the politics I thought I’d held steadfast. Khaleed activates my self-reflection. I’m implicated in these pages, as Khaleed’s seemingly simple language burrows into the reader’s personal daily life, turning it inside out and politicizing the act of reading. He reminds me that reading or engaging with a text is neither passive nor easy.

Even though he’s an emigre, Khaleed writes exclusively in Greek. This choice comes off as a big fuck-you to the nationalist state rhetoric and Greece’s conservative values emergent in the last decade. Khaleed is aware of how language is wielded towards a nationalist ritual. By tampering with Greek and utilizing it as the matter of his poetry, Khaleed breaks down and interrupts this monocultural and monolinguistic assumption of who is supposed to be part of the Greek nation state. Johannes Göransson, critic, poet, and translator, who currently teaches in the English department at the University of Notre Dame, discusses this fear of the foreign in his essay collection, Transgressive Circulation, about translation: 

The threat of the foreign is portrayed time after time as a problem of false, improper, counterfeit, or shallow “influence.” This anxiety hides a greater concern: the fear that foreign literature will destabilize the native literature, flooding the culture with poems and ideas that are not properly installed in the reigning tradition . . . “potentially deregulating power.”

Göransson is writing about the act of translating and the fear of foreign influences that translation is often met with. But Khaleed’s urge to use Greek as his poetic language enforces a foreignness into the fabric of the Greek nation, disrupting a cohesive Greekness, or an idea of what a nation should look like. Khaleed’s anti-formulaic language moves like the people who use it, changing the user from within, and in turn the language itself is morphed, turned inside out. 

This morphing, turnstile act of foreignizing the familiar is exemplified in one of the two long poems in the book. “Revolving Door” is reminiscent of a cento, a poetic form made up of extraneous lines of other poems. Khaleed’s poem utilizes news sources, advertisement, marketing promotions, and social media posts as its verse. The words and phrases interchange and contradict themselves, yet they are all a part of the same narrative. Khaleed manages to stitch all the fallen and seemingly contrasting pieces into one full catastrophe, as “people are coming out of the freezing water some with frozen babies in their arms / the local hospitality and the breathtaking scenery are what memories are made of.” These brutal maxims are interspersed throughout the poem as though daily occurrences. It is also a rearrangement, or a scattering, a shuffling of the same lines into new contexts. Each time a line is reshuffled throughout the poem a new meaning is made. “The local hospitality and the breathtaking scenery are what memories are made of.” The soundbites or the phrases from media become aphorisms, revolving and circulating throughout the piece. Language becomes a carrier of the person, story, and the ageless migrant. “I have no fatherland / I live within words,” Khaleed asserts, utilizing and embodying language unbound to a state. 

This language shape-shifts within the travel and movement of its carrier. Language does not leave a trace; no residue is left. There is no vacant space where words evaporate into Athen’s marine breezes. But language, too, is a record when written; it is easily manipulated. Language is an ongoing contradiction revolving with its times. Khaleed knows this, refusing to give language a loyalist fixation, constantly disseminating it across the page, using its grain as a kind of armor. The word “translation” in English comes from trans latus, or carrying across. A fixed, static object or idea is brought into a foreign or strange land. This version of the word is not widely used in most Romance languages, turning translation into “traduction,” or the conversion of information from one language into another. In Russian, too, the word is “перевод,” or re-conduction, a re-transference. Khaleed’s translated poetry isn’t left in Greece, but is re-conducted into the US, maybe foreignizing, or maybe bringing English closer. In this collection, the word “hope” turns empty and passive, reminding me of Rebecca Solnit’s attempt at activism post the first Trump election, Hope in the Dark. For Khaleed, hope is superficial, it is momentary, a surface-level distraction: “hope is a concept of the bourgeoisies / hope is a concept created by the bourgeois which then donated it to the working class / hope is a concept created by the bourgeois that came from a degeneration of the word ‘chop.’” For Khaleed, hope is a hackneyed term thrown around when I do not want to take action, residing in the machinations of nationalists, populist states, and the free market. It placates us.

The translation of Khaleed’s work also flows into multivalency, resulting in dissonance, an acute prospective double-meaning. The poem “Words,” translated by Peter Constantine, ends with the line: “I’m seeking a new passage.” A passage is a written excerpt or fragment of the whole. It is also a portal. The phrase “safe passage” implies a voyage across. In this one line lies a request, or a search for a new, borderless world. A place where language does not belong to a nation. The passage is passaging. Sentence structures are blown up, rules and cultural norms are put into question and through the meat grinder. The you is the I. The body is not a nation, it is simply a body. Another numeral configuration of the whole—a grape cluster. The passage has taken a turn. Place and language are intertwined, and therefore the body and the country are also at times mistakenly compounded. Khaleed negates this idea: “Because my body is not a country. / Because my body does not belong to Greece.” The passage across the Mediterranean simply won’t do, and will not stave off emigration. The passage is not forever—it will be identified as a new entity only through the passage of words, and their interiors’ abilities to capsize liberal antics and hope’s pacifism. “Hope should die so that we can live,” Khaleed writes, refusing passivity, alchemizing individualistic hope into a collective, displaying the uncomfortable and uncontrollable reality of Greece’s socio-political landscape, free from the light of corrosive marketing campaigns selling tourists an imaginary, static hope.

olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. Her debut chapbook cities as fathers is out with Tilted House, and “our monuments to Southern California,” she calls them is forthcoming with Ursus Americanus Press. Other works can be found in mercury firs, Literary Hub, Cleveland Review of Books, Metatron Press’s Digital Publications Space, and elsewhere.