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Met a guy in a coffee shop in Portland who showed me a banned poem from his home country
He was from Belarus and quietly read me a few lines from a poem by a writer I'd never heard of, Uladzimir Nyaklyayew. He said the poem was about memory and the police had taken his copy at the border. It made me wonder, how many voices like that are we missing because they're just not allowed to cross over?
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dixon.amy6mo ago
Man, you're not wrong. I do that all the time with old cult classic movies. The fact they were a flop or controversial makes me watch them looking for genius, and sometimes it's just... a weird movie. But I guess the ban tells you the words hit a nerve somewhere real, even if the translation feels flat to us.
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harperwright6mo ago
It's a powerful story, but sometimes I wonder if focusing on the banned stuff gives it a magic it might not have on its own. A poem can be important to a person and still just be a regular poem, you know? The act of banning it makes us listen harder, but that doesn't always mean the work itself is what we'd connect with. We might be putting the wrong weight on the suppression instead of the actual words.
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wesley1395mo ago
oh man this is like that time I picked up a copy of "The Satanic Verses" way back in college because everyone was making such a big deal about the fatwa and all that. I read the whole thing waiting for something that would blow my mind or make me see why people were so upset, and honestly it was just... a book? Like a decent book but not this earth shattering thing I was expecting. I think I wanted it to be more because of all the noise around it, you know? The controversy made the book itself feel smaller somehow. But then again I guess that's on me for walking in with all these expectations instead of just reading the words on the page.
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