Daniel Moysaenko’s Overtakelessness Watches the Watchers
A collection exploring the complexities of war is always at risk of tempting the speaker into trying to prove they are sufficiently burdened, sufficiently informed, sufficiently moved, and therefore safely on the right side of history. But Ukrainian-American poet Daniel Moysaenko’s debut collection Overtakelessness is far too attuned to the humiliations of diaspora to fall for this false sense of morality. Moysaenko instead gives us a book that keeps discovering, with almost painful precision, that witnesses are always already tangled up in the obscene convenience of distance, and the diasporic subject is never simply “outside” looking in but split open by the fact of living in one imperial order while watching another imperial order in the process of erasing their place of origin.
Moysaenko’s poems broadly reckon with the history of Ukraine and the imperial violence it has endured (Horlivka and the Donetsk oblast in 2014, Babyn Yar in 1941, the Holodomor in 1932), and they often do so beautifully—a particular line from “Missing in Action…” comes to mind: ”Nothing intimate as your shirt / folded like a letter in her drawer.” These poems are personal, insofar as they occupy the lives of people, of pen pals, mothers, and they are submerged in “occupation’s molasses,” to borrow a phrase from Moysaenko himself. Moysaenko’s ‘molasses-sunk’ poems, so to speak, have the dangerous glamour of seriousness, the kind that can make a reader feel morally sophisticated only before Moysaenko subverts that fantasy; the poems understand that to write about occupation from a position of displacement is to write from a position both intimate and embarrassingly nonidentical, close enough to feel the bruise and far enough to know you are not the one being struck.
In the prose poem “Dried Flowers,” Moysaenko takes the vantage point of Vera, a New England Polish woman born in the second republic, and in that voice, he catches the American witness in this exact act of self-congratulation:
She’s overheard the Americans waiting at the mechanic’s or buying apple cider donuts say the photos were so moving or war makes me question how I witness. Even cattle by the road notice people watching them. They’re perturbed. They know the truck driver who loads them at the end of the week means to kill them.
Moysaenko’s poem exposes the people, the Americans, as plausibly sympathetic, but immediately cuts through their sympathy with the subsequent counterimage. The cattle bear the knowledge of their surveillance by spectators seeking to kill, and that knowledge makes the outsider’s gaze look startlingly predatory instead of enlightening. The poem’s force comes from that inversion: the supposedly mute animal world understands the economy of surveillance, loading, and slaughter better than a society that falsely considers itself to be morally awake. The witness is not redeemed by sensitivity, and sympathy is not the opposite of consumption, since the American viewer can feel deeply and still remain inside the same imperial core.
Moysaenko, however, both problematizes the witness itself and the modes of witnessing: the photograph and the phone are parts of the etiquette of watching, the tasteful disturbance one can carry into a mechanic’s waiting room or over apple cider donuts and then rinse off before dinner. “Phantom World,” a poem whose title purportedly nods to Günther Anders’ 1956 essay “The World as Phantom and as Matrix,” is after the apparatus of witnessing. In accordance with Anders, the photograph and the phone deliver Ukraine to the viewer, while also fabricating the viewer’s relation to Ukraine: “Everything it says has everything to do with us.” The modern spectator believes that to look is already to know, to know is already to care, and to care is already to have done one’s part. The Ukraine perceived is present and untouchable. It is, to Anders and to Moysaenko, a “phantom” defined by its alienation to us—the speaker doesn’t “expect anyone in the flesh”; when Zooming his family, they wave, but he knows their hands are delayed. When relation itself is increasingly subcontracted to screens, things are always hovering somewhere between presence and ghosthood.
In a sequence of poems titled “Winnowed,” the political slant of that visibility is scrutinized, in which Moysaenko curates the stray linguistic particles that circulate around Ukraine in global media. Winnowing, after all, is an agricultural verb: the shaking of grain so that the edible kernel separates from the useless chaff, and he performs a version of that act by lifting phrases out of their original journalistic habitat and scattering them through indentation. A phrase like “what Ukraine has described as,” as used in a Guardian article, avoids editorializing by attributing the term “campaign of terror” to the Ukrainian spokesperson rather than saying it outright; the kernel here is complicit in a false narrative. Meanwhile, appearing later in the poem, the chilling text message received by Ukrainian forces, “The East won’t forgive you and the West won’t remember you,” both captures the broader object of Russian separatist propaganda and hides a kernel of truth in the alienated position of Ukraine within the West’s imagination. Even the apparently domestic fragment—“it came into my home uninvited and became mine,” spoken by a woman named Yadviga about a stray dog during turmoil—acquires an imperial glow. Finally, the remark in the final poem of the sequence, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia,” a quote from Tucker Carlson that in its original setting functioned as a specific piece of provocation manufactured for the American Right instead reads as the distilled expression of the modern spectator’s indifference.
What the “Winnowed” poems make visible is that Ukraine’s appearance in the Western imagination is always processed and mediated before it ever reaches the reader, which means that what we are often witnessing and weighing in on is the washed-out afterimage of a far-removed reality.
It’s interesting, then, that if Overtakelessness is so preoccupied with criticizing the language and media we consume, that the book itself is also so masterfully attuned to language’s beauty and force. There is no shortage of moments in the collection that were so rich with emotion that I had to set the book down for a moment, struck by the grief and loss Moysaenko renders so precisely. The title of the book itself, unwieldy a word as it is, is exhumed from the loss-stricken Emily Dickinson—“The overtakelessness of those / Who have accomplished Death, / Majestic is to me beyond / The Majesties of Earth”—where it names the condition of the dead, who cannot be caught up to, who have moved into a register the living cannot follow. The dead are overtakeless—beyond overtaking. The word is Dickinson’s, is American, feels ungainly and over-suffixed. And it is precisely that awkward rightness that makes it so perfect for Moysaenko’s project: a poet writing in English about Ukraine, borrowing a strange American word to describe a condition that Ukraine knows far too well, the stubborn irretrievability of the dead in a country where history has so often tried to erase the living.
Rishi Janakiraman is a poet and essayist who writes from Raleigh, NC. He has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Urban Word, Young Poets Network, Bow Seat, and Best of SNO. A Top 15 Foyle Young Poet of the Year, his work has been published in The New York Times, The Poetry Society, Rust + Moth, and Dishsoap Quarterly, among others. He serves as the Co-Editor-In-Chief of Polyphony Lit and as the NC Youth Poet Laureate.