“Mama Writes. I Writes,” presented below in English translation, is a new poem by Galina Rymbu, a Russian-language poet from Lviv, Ukraine. As admirers of Rymbu who have translated and written about her stylistically and politically daring poetry in the past, we are happy to be able to share it with the American reader. The poem presents what today has become a common script for Russian-language communication between people being bombed in Ukraine and their relatives—often older relatives—back in the Russian “Federation.” In this script, the person writing or speaking from Ukraine is conveying their experience of being at the receiving end of Russian military aggression, while the Russian relatives engage in downplaying, doubting, and gaslighting. Themselves the objects of years of coordinated propaganda by the Putin regime, the Russian relatives accuse the person under fire in Ukraine of misrepresenting their lived situation and of engaging in propaganda on behalf of NATO. As Chico Marx put it in Duck Soup, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” We are hoping this script will not soon be replicated in Canadian-American families.

Rymbu first published “Mama Writes. I Writes” on her Facebook account on March 31, 2025. Given the political opportunism of Meta’s American founder, it may seem surprising that Facebook continues to be the preferred social medium of many delocalized communities of resistance. In particular, it enables communication among Russian-language writers, scholars, journalists, and activists from all over the world, including some back in Russia, whose participation via a VPN can expose them to risks. Rymbu’s publication of her poem on Facebook immediately after composition, rather than waiting for an official, career-worthy publication as a US poet would do, is not strange but rather the norm in that community.

Galina Rymbu, poet and activist, was born and grew up in 1990 in Omsk, Siberia, a landscape of poverty and post-Soviet deindustrialization. In the 2010s, as a student in the Literary Institute in Moscow and the European University in Saint Petersburg, she co-founded and curated the feminist cultural project F-writing, which formed a generation of young feminist writers such as Oksana Vasyakina and Daria Serenko. In February 2014, as Russian troops were invading Crimea, Rymbu posted her great song of revolutionary defeat, “the dream is over, Lesbia, now it’s time for sorrow.” In 2018, while Russian troops were operating in eastern Ukraine, Rymbu left Russia and emigrated to Lviv.

Rymbu was the voice of young Russian resistance back when young Russian resistance still had a voice. Today, her poetry is translated into over twenty languages. In English, it appeared in n+1, Granta, The White Review, Music & Literature,Asymptote, and other publications. It also came out in book form in the chapbook White Bread, and in the full-length collection Life in Space, translated mostly by Joan Brooks. Rymbu edited, together with Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky, F Letter, an anthology of young feminist poets that was written about by, among others, Time Magazine and the New York Review of Books. She also edited, with Mykael Nudahl and Dinara Rasuleva, the online collection The Non-Russian Russia: The Decolonial Literatures, published by Swedish PEN.

—Kevin M. F. Platt and Eugene Ostashevsky

• Mama writes:
Do you have internet? Are your lights on?
(May 4, 2022, following rocket strikes on Lviv)

• I write
(in the black notebook):
Every cry is about origins.
But what’s identity? Is that something they cry you out with or decry you for? Or is it a whisper—secret, intimate, imprecise—somewhere deep inside, alone with yourself? The impossibility (?) of writing poetry in that whisper. Name-testing.

• Mama writes:
I think we’re actually Belarusians, not Ukrainians.
Poda–Chikalenko isn’t exactly a Ukrainian surname.
I’m telling you for a fact. It’s Belarusian. A history specialist
told me so. He looked it up in the internet. We
are Belarusians. And our family was always bound to Russia.
It’s a shame you forgot your motherland. Forgot your home.

• I write:
I am home now. Are you?

• Mama writes:
It’s all because of you.
Your son is sick because of you. I’m sick because of you. Dad doesn’t want to talk to you. He’s sick because of you. It’s not right to hate Russia.

• I write
(in the black notebook):
Reading Petar Bojanić, Violence and Messianism. I don’t understand what he means. I don’t want people to be able to carry out violence—messianic or otherwise. Can there just be a defense that does not overpower, but instead somehow transforms the horror, the violence, this “evil”? The transformation of violence into resistance: could that be considered messianic?

• Mama writes:
Today is Mother’s Day.
A mother’s love is absolute.

• Mama writes:
The white birches outside / veiled with silver, wrapped in light.

• Mama writes
(in reply to the photo of evening Lviv drenched in summer sun):
Teach him Russian!
Your child must not be deprived of the right to learn the Russian language.

• I write:
But didn’t you forbid papa to teach me Romanian?
Who at that point decided our linguistic fate—yours and mine?

• Mama writes
(in reply to the photo from Mariupol):
Peace to all the world’s children!

• Mama writes
(in reply to the photos from Bucha):
Fakes. Go read the book Ukraine: Empire of Lies.

• I write
(in the black notebook):
“In the hot night we sink ever deeper into the bloody streams of water. Here we lie clenched among roots; there among shark’s teeth.” (Rose Ausländer)

• Mama writes:
Integrity is memory.

• Mama writes:
I advise you to read soothing classic literature. Turgenev‘s Home of the Gentry, for instance.

• Mama writes:
No one is firing on residential buildings.
In Naples they put up a new fresco of Dostoevsky in support of Russian culture. The artist is protesting the growing wave of Russophobia in the world. I don’t like Russophobia.

• Mama writes:
Again, I advise you to hold your tongue.
Don’t frighten your child. Don’t pay attention to fakes.
Hold your tongue.

• Mama writes:
I will never betray my motherland. Unlike you.

• I write
(in the black notebook):
Poetic pornography of media images of war in “antiwar” Russian poetry—that’s what’s going on in the majority of those texts now. But I feel a connection. I can’t stop being ashamed. It rips out your tongue by the roots. Undermines the very possibility of poetic work in your language. And what’s happening right here, with me? Some sort of impoverished language moving in fits and starts. In words which do not feel my own. It’s not even poetry on the verge of collapse. It is collapse. I may be here, inside it.

• Mama writes:
The motherland is the place you were born. Just for your information. And you can’t make sense of everything that’s happening in the world from a basement in Lviv.

• I write:
6/5/2022: This is what the map of air-raid warnings looks like right now. All of Ukraine is under attack. That’s how the entire country starts its Sunday morning.

• Mama writes:
Come back to us!

• I write:
We will come back to a different Siberia. One that will become a separate country / countries / autonomous regions with democratic governance.

• Mama writes:
I don’t want to listen to that. I’m going to make goulash.

• I write
(in the black notebook):
Benjamin wrote about temporality and the rhythm of bombings during World War I. As an example of the acceleration of civilization, its new velocity. The rhythm of a rocket attack, the flight time of a hypersonic missile. Today. Supervelocity. Compression of horror in an instant. Mobile alerts for air raids come after the fact. Sometimes the siren on the street is delayed, too. It’s impossible to be safe anywhere in our part of town.

• Mama writes:
Happy National Unity Day!
Happy Moscow City Day!

• I write:
We’ve taped up all the windowpanes. Everything is taken care of. But we’ve got a mouse here in the basement. It makes noise and chews on the insulation. Makes it hard to sleep.

• Mama writes:
In sleep I swallow the language of hate.
Cold dead language.
The horror of a maternal language gone glacial.
How long ago did they encase me in ice, in the dead language of ideology?
I am the princess in the snowdrift. I am a Ukrainian. Daughter of a Ukrainian.
An ethnic Ukrainian. I am the sleeping one. I am a ballerina!
I kiss those five chestnuts from last year, the ones you gathered on the playground as you came home from school.
I kiss your bread sticks, matches, iodine, scissors, and batteries.
I kiss the three hard candies forgotten in the pocket of your coat: pear flavor, coca-cola flavor, bim-bom flavor.
I love you and the messages Russian soldiers leave on artillery shells.
I love your spelling mistakes and this war of conquest, which feeds on the past.
I love your horror and your preparations for deportation.
I kiss the concept of a preventive strike, the acuteness of the language question.
I love midnight in Moscow which I have never seen.
I love my house in the same language that aerial spiders are now dropping on me from above.
I am a resident of a country!
I love it when neofascists study your Instagram.
I love “Don’t block me.” That is sacred.
I love when “The Music is Broken.” I kiss all of the organ stops of your face.

• I write:
An imaginary libretto. My story.
My position. My language of a murderer. The history of the 20th century. Everyone I came from wound up in Siberia. But never knew Siberia. My language: the mother tongue. Miglena Nikolchina writes. Julia Kristeva writes. Old materials. I eat words like snow.

• Mama writes:
It’s no better in the sky. You are gone. The documents are gone. Grandma’s documents are gone. We remember nothing. Everything was lost. Your uncle burned everything. You have him to thank that he burned everything after the funeral. A maiden name is a motherland. A bride. No one is firing on residential buildings. Are the windowpanes taped? I am your beast. I am your sovereign.

• I write:
To retain memory of concrete details.
How mama is shaping Siberian dumplings and writing lesson plans in thick, yellowish composition books. And I try to copy her. I am also writing, though I still don’t know what the letters mean. I make whole waves of chimerical letters, endless cardiograms of my own text tens of pages long. An asemic protowriting. Maybe everything is already there, everything is contained in it. Papa is making a boat for me: his legs are covered with an azure “maritime” blanket, and I rock in it. The smell of mama’s armpit. The dusty almost earthy color of the sack of potatoes and squash that papa carries home from the dacha on his shoulder. I’m running after him. The taste of the round loaf of bread he baked in the oven himself. The songs of the Romanian lăutari on an unmarked cassette. One of three cassettes that we own. Mama’s black autumn hat with the wide brim that I’m not allowed to put on. Mama doesn’t know that when she’s not home I try to make it into a magician’s hat, and also smell it on the inside. When mama is away, the smell of mama’s head from the hat is like she’s still here. The steel springs of the two beds set side to side where we sleep, all three of us together. Before sleep I like to lift up the mattress and shove my fingers into the springs. Water stains on the ceiling that, lit up by the old floor lamp at night, turn into various beings: there’s the wind god, flying through the air in a blossoming chariot, blowing out clouds of frosty air.

• Mama. This is my mama:
Solid, with broad shoulders. Narrow, perpetually dry, rough hands. Wide, tanned neck. Her smell that I will always remember: of wind from the steppe, green onion and milk, Siberian apples, nettles and the cat. When I was little that’s what I called her: mama-cat. When she sleeps, she snores loudly and wheezes. When she starts to weep, she can’t stop. Somewhere far away, deep in time she is holding me tight.

—Translated from the Russian by Kevin M. F. Platt and Eugene Ostashevsky

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