Guest Critic: Maria Tumarkin

Many people whom the world calls “survivors” reject that word’s shadowy sense of moral elevation—how it implies that they (the still-heres) survived either because there was something morally special about them or because, by virtue of their experience, they grew an extra moral gear. In Philip Gourevitch’s 1998 book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, he writes that “survivors” (he uses the word) of the 1994 Rwandan genocide had to survive their survival time and again. It’s not enough to make it to the other side of trauma; it’s barely a start.

I’ve been interested in works that drain every last triumphalist note out of the experience of staying alive. Works that thwart the inspirational vibe, written in full knowledge that there are always others, kin and strangers, who didn’t/don’t/won’t/can’t make it; that surviving is often closer to death than to life; that bearing witness to the demise of another or to your own near-miss is part torture, part self-mutiny, and it does not end. What doesn’t kill you doesn’t necessarily make you anything. What can works of art that don’t traffic in redemption or inspiration offer in their place? We live in a perpetual state of the aftermath (this is truer now than it was in 1994); this question won’t go away.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster—Svetlana Alexievich (2005)

This is my favorite book by Alexievich, a collection of searing monologues from those affected most directly (and also permanently and intergenerationally) by the 1986 explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Alexievich says that the “human being speaks beautifully only in two situations… either in love or near death, when people rise beyond themselves.” Who else believes in the numinous potential of a conversation between two people the way she does? For each of her books, Alexievich picks about a hundred voices out of the three to five hundred people she speaks to, and of these hundred, ten to twenty become “pillars”—she returns to them maybe twenty times. The magnitude of her belief: is it language that she believes in, I wonder, that somehow if you don’t give up on it and not rush it and not use it for conversations about nothing, it can carry you to the truth of how people live with loss that should have obliterated them? Alexievich doesn’t do ...