Rozalija Grace

poetry

Rozalija Grace is a Russian diasporic writer and heritage activist from southern Alaska. Her poems, short stories, and essays exploring exile, intimacy, language, and faith have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Dappled Things, Rust & Moth, Room, and other journals, while her translations of gay, women’s, and minority voices in Soviet poetry have been nominated for Best Literary Translations. She currently serves as a poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and lives in Minneapolis as the fiancée of a great Hungarian American novelist. Read more at her website.

 

After Terebenev’s “Map of Russia and Its Peoples” (1866)

The daughter of a double-headed eagle couldn’t stop looking both ways if she wanted to, and so I hung the walls of my childhood bedroom with maps, trying to hold everything in only two eyes. My parents, between them, had two heads, but both looked the same direction—east and up—to the Stars and Stripes fluttering overhead like ribbons of the northern lights. For them, Alaska was America: hamburgers and sitcoms and grocery stores that never emptied. Everything moved east. There was nothing to speak of in the old country. My parents filled the living room with a TV, so I watched White Sun of the Desert and remembered, like Sukov, that the east is a delicate matter. They loved John Wayne, but somehow it was only me, with Tatar blood burning in my ears, that heard the call: “Go west, young woman!” For me, Alaska was Ninilchik Russian and Old Believers, mushroom picking, cigarettes bummed off friends from Khabarovsk while listening to KINO. America was far away—a place one saw in movies. When my parents went to bed, I’d listen to Saturday Night Live through the wall and study my maps. The American ones never knew what to do with Alaska—stuck it off in a box somewhere in a corner—so my favourite was one I tore from a Soviet atlas, a reproduction of a map drawn by Nestor Terebenev in 1866—the year before the Sale—that shows Alaska as part of the expanse of Asian Russia. This, one hundred and twenty- one years before I was born, was the first map illustrated with figures of the Peoples of the Russian Empire. It was the last ever made that shows where I am from.

“ Many parts of the United States have been colonized twice—first by an overseas power and then by Americans. For my assimilated parents, the Russian presence in Alaska was a footnote—a state history trivia item. But even after the last Russian ships sailed away, the Orthodox Church never left, and elements of the culture and the language endured among both Russian descendants and Alaska Natives (many Alaskans were both). Indeed, there are still villages (like Ninilchik) where you can hear elders speak 19th-century Russian. When I was young, a new wave of Russian immigrants arrived, bringing a fresh infusion of our culture from the old country, so that the voices of my ancestors seemed to play in stereo. As an adult, I strive for my art to stand in solidarity both with the Indigenous Peoples of North America and with the descendants of the French, Dutch, Swedish, and other colonies whose legacy the United States has sought to absorb and obscure, reminding this country that we are still here and that our difference will not be erased.”

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