Mesopotamia

"Serhiy Zhadan. He’s a brilliant writer, a poet, novelist, and the lead singer of the ska band Sobaky v Kosmosi (Dogs in Outer Space.) Mesopotamia is Zhadan’s most recent book to appear in English. It’s a novel composed of different stories, mostly prose with some poetry as well. The stories are set in Kharkiv, a city in eastern Ukraine where Zhadan, who is himself from the Donbas, now lives. It was unclear in spring of 2014 whether there was going to be a separatist rebellion in Kharkiv, whether it was also going to become part of the territory ensconced in war. Serhiy Zhadan is really a genius at drawing the reader into the inner lives of these characters in post-industrial, post-Soviet places. His literary influences are ones that American readers will understand: the Beat poets, Kerouac and Burroughs, magical realism. Despite the fact that he’s writing about people in a radically different time and place, it’s somehow very easily relatable. He has an uncanny ear for dialogue. And he evokes a deep love utterly devoid of sentimentality for these people about whom we have long known nothing. I wanted to capture the revolution as lived experience. The commentary on the Ukrainian Revolution was largely being written, understandably, by political scientists and policy people who are used to writing about events as they occur, reflecting on their impact on geopolitics. This book offers no policy prescriptions. It does not say we should put sanctions on x but not on y. It tries to put human faces on historical actors, to capture the subjective experiences of participants, to help us understand what pushes people to risk their lives, to make decisions that a few months earlier they never could have imagined themselves making. You learn about the human capacity for solidarity—even though this solidarity is fragile, precarious, and almost always short-lived. Nonetheless, the Maidan is testimony to that human capacity we rarely suspect we possess. Revolutions also reveal aspects of temporality. During the Maidan, people began to lose track of time, the distinction between day and night blurred. What does it mean that the human experience of time changes? The present has always been a problem for philosophers: how can we capture the present, which seems to have no duration? As soon as you try to grab it, it has already passed. Jean Paul Sartre describes the present as a border between the en-soi (the “in-itself”) and the pour-soi (the “for-itself”) by which he means a border between what has been, what has happened, who you have been up to that moment, that is, what is inert, cannot be changed—and the possibility of going beyond what has been, and who you have been, the possibility of something new. That border—the present—is with us every moment, but we generally do not notice it. We’re not conscious of crossing that border from the realm of facticity into the realm of transcendence. Revolutions illuminate that border. Yes. It is what in German is called a “ Grenzerfahrung “—literally a “border experience.”"