{beet tails, whilst making Xmas borshch, jan.6}
Whilst eating with my family last night, I was thinking of all the times I'd heard northerners, Inuit people in particular, talk about how much they missed 'country food' -- arctic char & caribou & seal -- while staying in the southern cities... How other foods could sate hunger temporarily, but not truly 'nourish' a person... because it was not connected to the land in the same way the meat of a caribou was, for example... & so at dinner I was thinking about not only how lucky I am to eat such abundant & healthy food without want, but also how I definitely feel that are certain foods for me that also nourish me wholly, beyond the sum of their nutrients, even their effects on my palate. Borshch -- beet soup -- would have to be my favourite example of this sort of food. I love eating it, I love making it. Beets are the most gorgeous vegetable, with their woodgrain centres, & I love how the scarlet-purple juice stains my fingers around the nails, dries my palms so they feel older, like a baba's, makes them smell like clay & magical garlic. Eating it always reminds me of being three years old & sitting at my baba's kitchen table & eating my weight in borshch every lunchtime. & the memories go beyond my own lifetime, I think -- because as in my borshch-poem, with borshch I really am eating my 'roots'.
{In the June archive scroll down to June 6th see my own borshch recipe; it's based on that of my baba's (but no lima beans!) & my mamas (less tomato)}
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Also, speaking of things Ukrainian & poetic, I am enjoying muchly the writing of Halyna Petrosanyak. She's a Western Ukrainian poet from the Carpathians who writes a lot on belonging to a place/home as well as travel & effects on identity -- as well as more myth-y, allegorical pieces. Interestingly, she studied extensively in Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanislav), which has been an epicentre of Western Ukrainian art & literature (esp. poems) since the 1990s, and is named in an article on this very 'Stanislav' phenomenon. (Stanislav is the largest centre nearest to the village where my relatives are from, & so I am especially pleased to know poetry is flourishing in their area)
But anyway, I would recommend reading Halyna's poem "A tiny town..." as translated by Michael Naidan. The image of the internal string inexplicably holding you to a birthplace like the insides of a wood-nymph is so delightful & visceral & so distinctly Carpathian*. Her aesthetic in some poems makes me think of Seamus Heaney, but so so Ukrainian. Mmm. "To remain at the Dominican school" is good too.
*should explain that some Ukrainian forest spirits look like humans from the front but have transparent & ghostly backs so their guts can be seen, sometimes trailing out behind all diaphanously...
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