Five Questions for... JLM Morton

We continue our series of occasional short interviews with contributors and friends of Elsewhere with five questions for JLM Morton, who we featured in our Trespass issue. 

What does home mean to you?

Home, in it’s very truest sense, is the place where I grew up – Cirencester, a market town in Gloucestershire where I wore a groove into the street I lived on, going back and forth to the parks at either end of the street: the now paywalled Bathurst Estate park and the municipal Abbey Grounds with its sweeping cedar tree, elderly mulberry, a lake full of pike that my brother used to catch and the old cold store that looks like an egg cupped by a mound of grass. I couldn’t live there now – there are aspects of the place that I can only stomach in small doses (like a toxic family member) – the showy Cotswold privilege and snobbery, the loafers and chinos, small town social dynamics, the town/gown antagonism with the Royal Agricultural University that led to many a fight in the marketplace on a Saturday night when I was younger. I suppose I found home in the out-of-the-way quiet places, in the ‘maze’ we built as kids in the thicket at the back of the school field, in the den we claimed on the dirt hill at the edge of the car park, in the copse where I snuck out at dawn with a friend to set a fire and fry an egg in the skillet I’d smuggled from our kitchen in a rucksack. Home was also the rivers and brooks that run through the town and in and out of both parks, where I paddled, as well as the open-air pool where I seemed to spend entire summers diving off the board and burning my tongue on too-hot chocolate in plastic cups from the tuck shop. Now, wherever I go in the world, water feels like home to me – I can sit and be with water for hours and never get restless.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I feel a very special connection to West Africa, a region I spent a lot of time living and working in during the early 2000s and 2010s. I have a background in education, particularly supporting girls and children with disabilities to access school which took me to various places including Nigeria, Benin Republic, Ghana, Togo, Cameroon. I feel a very particular affinity with Sierra Leone – there is something about the people, the colleagues I’ve worked with over the years, that I love and admire. It’s something like resilience but not – everyone I’ve ever met there has always welcomed me with open arms, with a kind of high-spirited joy, a no-f*cks-left-to-give attitude that carries them along and which I find inspiring. I first went there in 2003 just after the civil war ended to work with the Forum of African Women Educationalists. Though excluded from public decision making, what women have done to create nonpartisan community dialogue to advance peace has been extraordinary. The majestic cotton tree that stands in the oldest part of Freetown is the most on-point manifestation of this attitude – associated with the founding of the capital by a group of formerly enslaved African Americans, known as the Black Nova Scotians, who gathered under its shade to pray and celebrate their freedom, the tree is a landmark, revered by the local community for its spirit and historical importance. Sierra Leone is an extraordinarily beautiful country – I especially love the area around Kenema, where the trees look like gods and the forest is all you can see for miles.

What is beyond your front door?

Immediately beyond my front door is a street full of families and elderly folk, rows of houses built on an orchard in the mid-1950s where the springs along the hill still seep up through the kerbsides. Some of the residents have lived here since these houses were built. Beyond our gardens is the A46 road down to Bath. To the back is a steep climb up to Rodborough Common. To the front, over the rooves, Selsley common and a view towards the Severn Vale where the land flattens and on a good day you can see the Forest of Dean beyond the river.

What place would you most like to visit?

I have always wanted to go to Rajasthan, lured in part by the textiles, beadwork and jewellery as well as the desert. I’m really fascinated by the ways women all over the world have used weaving and making as a kind of language that speaks beyond the confines of the written word. It’s a way of transcending boundaries and telling stories that express culture and history which I feel deeply connected to. I come from a long line of textile workers – something I only discovered recently and which explains why I have boxes full of textiles that I’ve collected from around the world that I really have no space for at all but can’t let go.  

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

I’ve been collaborating with the brilliant comic Emma Kernahan and composer Mara Simspon on Lost Mythos, a show that blends the unruly folklore of old, weird Albion and stories from modern rural life, simultaneously embodying and exploring ancient archetypes and questioning our yearning for them. Mara has written a beautiful album, Living Matter, in response to my poems and I’ve got that on repeat. She also did a brilliant playlist ‘Humans in the Room’ for 6Music’s Freakzone which I highly recommend banging on.

I always have multiple reads on the go and my tbr pile is ridiculous. I’ve just finished Isabelle Baafi’s collection Chaotic Good which was thrilling to read – innovations in form and one of those books that make you feel like you’re being let in on a secret that only you will know. I’m now reading Michael Symmonds Roberts’ brilliant and moving memoir Quartet for the End of Time which is about grief and the premiere of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps to a crowd of Jewish prisoners of war in a deathcamp and its legacy – it feels remarkably prescient. I have also got Jen Calleja’s demented and revelatory Goblinhood on the go, a series of encyclopaedic essays and poems on her theory of goblins in pop culture. I can’t describe it, you have to read it. I’m writing about pilgrimage at the moment, so I’m reading Esther de Waal’s The Celtic Way of Prayer too which is about inner and outer journeying, poetry and prayer / poetry as prayer.

I’ve just binged Narrow Road to the Deep North on BBC iPlayer. Lured in by the love story, I got sideswiped by the turn into the horrors of the Death Railway built by Asian labourers and Allied POWs to connect Thailand with Myanmar, but I thought this was an utterly brilliant drama, one of those ones I can't stop thinking about. I realise I’m being drawn to war stories right now, no doubt looking for answers to our current predicaments. Original novel by Richard Flanagan, the only writer to have won both the Booker and the Baillie Gifford. The way he / the director handle the subtleties of emotion really blew me away. Incredible storytelling.

I keep meaning to get up to that London to see the Ithell Colquhoun show at Tate Britain. Painter, occultist and poet, Colquhoun is getting a long-overdue reassessment. She reminds me a lot of Monica Sjöö, a radical anarcho ecofeminist who played a pivotal role in the peace and women’s movements of the 1970s and beyond. She got her own retrospective in 2023 at Modern Art Oxford and at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Both of these artist remind us that we are not simply one and the other, goddess and god, male and female. Our boundaries are permeable, all matter is vibrant and that nothing comes from nothing, our differences are joyously multiple at many levels and scales. Such is the fecundity and variousness of our planet – that recognising our relationality and radical inter-connectedness, not focusing on our oppositions, is a form of resistance. A callback from the past, a reminder we need now more than ever.

JLM Morton is a writer, celebrant and community arts producer from Gloucestershire in the west of England. Her poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Anthropocene, The Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere. Her prose writing has won the Laurie Lee Prize, been longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize and extracts from Tenderfoot have been published in Caught by the River, Oxford Review of Books and Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Juliette is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her debut poetry collection Red Handed, was highly commended by the Forward Prizes and a Poetry Society Book of the Year (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). www.jlmmorton.com

You can read ‘Over, Across’ by JLM Morton here.

Love that Cures

Image credit: Olga Bubich, from the photography series/photobook Bigger than I

We at Elsewhere are proud to publish “Love that Cures” as the first in a series of essays on memory and space by Belarusian essayist Olga Bubich.

I remember when my grandma

always talked us into clearing our plates

and we ate for mama, for tato, for baba, and for dido

for all the relatives from the photos in the family album

until our plates were completely clean

to this day we eat for those relatives

who a century ago

half a century ago

and even just this past year

suffered from hunger

From a poem by Lyuba Yakimchuk,

translated from Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk

In my childhood, love tasted like thymus and marshmallow roots and sounded like the metal cling of a tablespoon against my teeth. It felt like the stethoscope’s cold circles on my bare back and chest. Love could be precisely measured, strictly following the prescribed doses, taken three times a day after meals, crushed into powder, rubbed in, mixed, swallowed, and digested. In other words, pharmaceutically controlled by the professional’s eye. In rare cases it lasted no longer than a fortnight.

My mother and two daughters of hers—my mother and her elder sister—were pharmacists, so being surrounded by both medical vocabulary and practices was a routine no-one questioned. On the phone with each other, how-are-you was frequently replaced by how-is-your-blood-pressure, and the success of a new recipe defined by the ease of bowel movement the morning after. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Pertussin [1], Festal, and gorchichniki [2] were among the first words my cousins and I learnt to navigate our family landscape. To fit our festive dinner moods and keep up with physiological jokes, one was to diagnose ailments in neighbours and acquaintances.

With our parents being the first postwar generation and us—first postwar grandchildren, we were subjected to their experimental love, we couldn’t but accept. Having no alternatives to choose from, we learnt the unobvious alphabet of a newly invented language where cure stood for care.

Diligent girls, role model daughters, assiduous students at the renown Medical School in Marc Chagall’s native Vitebsk, my mother and her sister were doomed to make good parents, and we had to master the role of their grateful patients. By early adolescence, I was skilled in measuring affection in drops and dosages, defining mood swings through thermometers, and believed in the secret healing potential of anything bitter—if not now, then at least in hindsight.

I remember my mother not hiding her agitation every time she learnt I was unwell and wanted to skip school. She felt most alive, most loving, when she could make herself indispensable to my recovery. She needed me to need her. It meant I couldn’t manage without her, that I was fragile and lacked my usual prickly “no”-energy, that I would relent. It meant she felt loved. And what did I feel? Well, I simply felt unhealthily feverish and either vomited non-stop, slept, or watched the Winter Olympics. In other words, inadvertently I was helping her normalise it.

Once, giving in to the popular irrational trend of—if not treating oneself, then at least getting diagnosed by self-proclaimed hypnotists, my mother even arranged for me to have an audience with one of them. Having paid an outrageous (for those times) sum of money, we got seated on a gargantuan sofa in the spacious, poorly lit but richly carpeted room where then I was made to drink a glass of “charged water” that was supposed to heal me of whatever symptoms I showed. What happened next, I no longer remember, but I am still alive.

Unable to receive much attention from her own parents—strong-willed ambitious grandma Maria who herself had to become a parent to her own elderly, rapidly losing sight mother Pelageya and cancer-stricken grandfather Stanislaw—my mother had her own emotional gaps to fill in. And, not knowing well of other means, she made love of what was available in the pharmacy she was running: gauze, suction сups [3], and smelly Vietnamese ointments with golden stars on metal covers. I wonder if it was Communism or shamanism that eventually worked. Probably neither—both were placebos.

Later in life, when I encountered the research of the neuroendocrinologist Rachel Yehuda [4], I could locate possible roots of my pharmaceutical family’s behaviour—only partly irrational. Their disproportional response manifested in avid attempts to cure anything that slightly digressed from their imaginary health norm could have to do with the intergenerational trauma inherited on their maternal lineage from my great grandmother who survived famine in Tambov in the early 1920s. Not being accountable for their excessively caring attitude, it was not us they were curing but those who never lived to experience the smell of Vietnamese ointments or a bitter taste of thymus syrups—my great grandmother’s family lost in the tumultuous Bolshevik 1920s.

The famine in Tambov province at the beginning of the 20th century was one of the most severe and large-scale crises in the history of Soviet Russia, preceding the Tambov Uprising. It was caused by a combination of forced grain requisitions (prodrazvyorstka [5]), civil war disruptions, drought, and a complete breakdown of local support systems. Entire villages were left without food, leading to widespread starvation, disease, and death, particularly among children and the elderly. This humanitarian catastrophe fueled the violent rebellion of the locals, who saw in food apportionment what it actually was - state-legalised looting. The revolt became known as one of the bloodiest peasant uprisings against the Bolsheviks and was met with extreme repressions, including mass arrests and the use of chemical weapons. For families who survived, such as my great grandmother’s, the trauma of loss, fear, and deprivation was profound. In the first years of Soviet’s rule, she was only 15.

Although I did have a chance to see my great grandmother alive, my recollections are scarce: I was too young, and she was too sick and weak to talk to me and my siblings about what she had to endure. Already half blind, her fragile, petite figure slowly followed the well-rehearsed route from bed to the toilet along the narrow hall of her daughter’s two-room apartment shared with six other family members. My cousin remembers her recognizing us by our bleak silhouettes against the light from the window and always keeping a cup with water and a slice of bread on the wooden stool at her bedside. Its edges were another thing she learnt well: she would collect all the crumbs from its surface and, with a familiar brisk gesture, put them into her mouth.

Since I had never met a blind person before, I was curious to check if her eyes actually looked different from any other’s. They did: pale blue, as if covered with a delicate hazy veil, instead of us, her great-grandchildren, the room lined with beds we slept in, the walls densely populated by colorful Orthodox icons–a parallel family my cousins and I grew up in side by side—they saw something else. Later a distant relative of ours would remember that my grandmother Maria, who was that very offspring of Pelageya’s to take her from the looted Russian province to a safer and back then more predictable Belarus, was actually not her eldest child. There were others whom she lost because of famine and diseases for which there was no cure. She became a mother at a rather young age, giving birth in her late teens, surrounded by deaths, mass executions, and food shortage. Was it by chance that her eyesight deteriorated so fast? How much could she probably not want to see any more? How hard did she try to forget? Did she really manage to?

But no unprocessed trauma disappears with time “by itself”, suggests Rachel Yehuda. Her research confirms [6] that succeeding generations are affected by adverse psychological and physiological experiences that can be passed down biologically through changes in the stress-response systems. In other words, trauma doesn’t simply live in memory—it embeds itself into the body, shaping how we feel, react, and even how we love and allow others to love us. But what also should be kept in mind: the effects manifested in the generations to come do not necessarily have to be negative. “Epigenetic response may serve as an adaptation that might help the children of traumatised parents cope with similar adversities,” writes Yehuda. Trauma survivors pass on not only their scars, but also their survival strategies.

The Bolsheviks and their senseless food requisitioning campaign left a literal mark in the genes of my young great grandmother and its consequences manifested themselves in her offspring. Two generations later, my mother and her sister chose both the job and the strategies of care-givers— equipped with the tools their ancestors lacked, they were striving to prevent what had already occurred: to feed, to care, to cure, but also to teach us to care about others. To break the loops of time. This time—to make it.

Berlin-Barcelona, 2025

1 Pertussin – a cheap thymus-based cough syrup prescribed for bronchitis, tracheitis, pneumonia, whooping cough, and other inflammatory diseases of the upper respiratory tract.

2 Gorchichnkini (from Russian горчичники, literally “made of mustard” – горчица) – a traditional remedy made of mustard powder spread on paper or cloth, placed on the chest to stimulate circulation and relieve congestion. Used to be popular in the USSR.

3 Cupping therapy is meant here - a traditional healing practice in which heated glass jars or special suction cups are placed on the skin to create suction. This method was historically used in various cultures, including Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European medicine. In the former Soviet Union, it was a common home remedy used to treat colds, bronchitis, and back pain. The suction was often created by briefly igniting a flame inside the glass jar before placing it on the skin. The treatment would typically leave round reddish marks that faded after a few days.

4 See, for example, Yehuda’s talk titled “Some Thoughts about Intergenerational Trauma, Epigenetics and Resilience” at UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (12.02.2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dCDIY5noCE&t=589s&ab_channel=UCSFDept.ofPsychiatryandBehavioralSciences

5 Prodrazvyorstka (short for prodovolstvennaya razvyorstka, or “food requisitioning”) was a Bolshevik policy and campaign of confiscation of grain and other agricultural products from peasants. It was introduced during the Russian Civil War (1918–1921) as part of war communism. Its aim was to forcibly extract grain and other foodstuffs from peasants to supply the Red Army and urban populations. The state demanded fixed quotas from rural producers, often far beyond what they could spare, leaving them with little or no food for themselves. This policy was especially harsh in grain-producing regions like Tambov, where it was met with deep resentment and growing resistance.

6 Yehuda, Rachel. How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children. July 1, 2022 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-parents-rsquo-trauma-leaves-biological-traces-in-children/

Olga Bubich is a Belarusian essayist with a focus on collective memory research. memory manipulation, and misremembering, art/photocritic and photobooks reviewer, photographer, lecturer with more 15 years of teaching, curator promoting Belarusian photography internationally. Having left Belarus in 2021, in 2023-2024 she was an ICORN Fellow in Berlin - the city she is based at the moment. https://en.bubich.by/

Five Questions for... Tom Branfoot

We return to our series of short interviews with contributors and friends of Elsewhere with Tom Branfoot, whose essay 'Every Landscape Is Also That Landscape: Fields, Housing and Land Ownership in Britain' appears in our Trespass issue of Elsewhere. 

What does home mean to you?

Home to me is West Yorkshire. It means greenness and wildness, moorland, dear friends and great pubs. 

Which place do you have a special connection to?

The M62 is an enduring symbol of home. I have always lived nearby to it and when I first moved away, to university in Manchester, it was the route there and back. Each time I travel through it, returning or departing, seeing Rishworth Moor open up and the white permanence of Stott Hall Farm fills me with an unmistakable sense of belonging.

What is beyond your front door?

Beyond my front too is a wobbly bird feeder lodged into a patch of shared grass mowed periodically by the landlord. It would be pointless to plant anything, yet the floor is currently flecked with clover and the occasional bird’s-foot trefoil. Beyond that is a car garage which emits a continuous hum, and down the road is a patch of wasteland behind the church filled with written-off vehicles. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I would love to visit Bosnia and Herzegovina, Shetland and Cornwall, and have a trip planned to Swaledale. 

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

I am currently reading The Sky is Falling by Lorenza Mazzetti translated by Livia Franchini and Silk Work by Imogen Cassels. Caleb Klaces’ forthcoming novel with the mightily stylish Prototype, Mr Outside, is a triumphant balancing act between comedy and tragedy.

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Writers' Award in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023. His poem ‘A Parliament of Jets’ is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Volatile, his debut collection, is forthcoming with the87press. 

You can read Tom’s essay for Elsewhere here.

In A Strange Land Again

We’re delighted to publish an excerpt from the latest book of Latvian writer Vilis Kasims. Svešuma grāmata, which could be translated as “The Book of Strangeness”, is a “novel in essays”, largely non-fictional but including some imagined elements. Vilis mother is from Gagauzia (an autonomous region of Moldova where the dominant languages are the Turkic language Gagauz and Russian), but migrated to Latvia during the Soviet period, while his father is Latvian. Vilis grew up in a very rural part of northern Latvia speaking both Latvian and Russian natively, and has subsequently lived in the UK and Spain, as well as in Riga, so has quite an unusual perspective on both Latvia and Moldova. This excerpt has been translated by Will Mawhood, the editor of Deep Baltic, which we can really recommend to anyone interested in the culture, societies and history of the Baltic Republics.

I accepted long ago that the death of any relative meant unwilling contact with something alien and strange, its entrance into carefully arranged everyday life. But this time, heading together with my mother to her sister’s funeral in the village of Başküü in Gagauzia, it was we ourselves who were going into this strangeness. At least that was how I felt, as I hurriedly sorted out the necessary transport and those jobs that were immediately pressing, while simply putting off everything else. However gradually death sometimes came, it still wasn’t wanted, it still couldn’t be predicted. Life had to accommodate itself.

My cousin’s friend drove us from Chișinău airport to the village, for two hours racing the car along the country roads. This time, unlike on our previous trips, the radio stayed off, and we also kept quiet, only now and then exchanging a few words about the weather. It was several days before Easter, but spring had still not really started and the air was chilly, with an annoying drizzle. And it was good at least sometimes not to think about our destination, even if it filled the whole car regardless. Even the police officer who stopped us in Comrat understood after a short discussion why we were hurrying and let us go on.

We got out of the car in Başküü to be met by tears and covert glances. There was now no time for greetings, we had to hurry to the guest room, where the open coffin was already lying on the table. On the right by the wall, women were sitting on stools pushed close together, dressed in black with shawls on their heads. The sodden air from outside seemed to have got in there too, lying heavy between the quiet whispers of the watchers and the candles burning at the head of the coffin.

We squeezed into a free spot, and a moment later the leave-taking started; it had been delayed while they waited for us. One after another the women walked past the body of my aunt, touching with their lips first the icon that had been placed on her chest, then her forehead, then going out into the courtyard. For the moment I continued to sit there, head bowed, trying to inconspicuously observe what was going on in order to work out the appropriate behaviour. I knew that the rules here were stricter, and that any violations would be viewed more harshly than in Latvia. What did it matter that I wasn’t quite a local – I was a grown man, wasn’t I? I should understand these kinds of simple things. I wouldn’t hear what was said myself, but it would inevitably reach my mother, and I didn’t want that. The views of the people in my home village cut deeper than any public criticism. It had for so long been our own world, our true framework, that to leave it completely was not possible. And it was quite often traditions and customs that defined this sense of belonging. We do it like that because that’s how you have to do it. Those people who do things differently or speak differently, they are outsiders – it’s really that simple. Birthplace or family ties help, but also place extra responsibility on you, and forgetting the correct behaviour is almost treachery.

I knew only the basics: you have to bring a white cockerel to a new neighbour as a visiting present, newborn children can for 40 days only be looked after by women, just-cut hair must be burnt, so that no one can get hold of it, and so on. But death came with too many rules for me to have learnt them all. Almost every step involved in commemorating the dead person was set out. But it couldn’t be otherwise; these customs helped keep you on your feet when it seemed that the earth’s solid foundation had vanished from beneath you. They gave a structure to the first days right after a death, allowing you to believe that everything would be OK if you just did what needed to be done. At least that was how it was for people who had grown up within these rituals. For outsiders – myself included that day – they were to no lesser an extent a minefield, carrying the risk of revealing yourself as an imposter – but at the same time also the possibility of feeling part of something bigger.

*

When we had finally all come out, the men who had been waiting outside went into the house and carried out the coffin, placing it in the middle of the courtyard. The mourners assembled in a semi-circle and began quietly to converse, while my uncle went off with both his sons in the direction of the barn. They returned just a moment later, holding by the legs a shrilly bleating lamb. Lugging it to the middle of the courtyard – a thought about sacrifice shot into my head, but I didn’t want to believe it – they carried the lamb around the coffin counterclockwise three times, then let it go, and my uncle went back to the barn, coming out with a cockerel in his hands. This time he was awaited on the opposite side of the coffin by the eldest of my cousins. My uncle handed the cockerel to his son, then both stood aside, as my cousin’s place was taken by a neighbour woman. Meanwhile my uncle’s daughter-in-law had brought out into the courtyard one large and one smaller bag. Leaving them on the veranda, she took out from the smaller one a bundle with the clothes of the deceased and handed them to the neighbour. She would have to wear them for 40 days, so that the soul understood what had happened to it and wouldn’t keep wandering between worlds. Afterwards, the rest of the clothes would have to be divided between the other friends and neighbours of the dead woman, as a final reminder of her former closeness.

The other mourners also got presents – simple, useful everyday things, which the relatives of the departed had provided. Blankets, pillows, brooms and so on. The distribution of her things went on longer than I had expected, one vaguely familiar relative on the opposite side of the coffin being replaced by another. Sometimes funerals cost more than weddings, whispered a cousin twice removed, who had noticed my awkwardness and taken me under her charge. She also prodded me when my turn came to receive a gift. And then finally it was time to move on.

It wasn’t a long way to the graveyard, but the day really was unpleasantly chilly, and what’s more it had started spitting again, and so a number of women climbed up into the box of a lorry that had driven up to the gates. The engine roared, and they drove away, tired faces gazing over the edge of the box at the mourners left in the courtyard. For them it was neither the first nor the last time, they didn’t feel the alienness that was knitted into my movements. And yet they were different women, not the ones who at home tended the garden, cared for their grandchildren and cooked meals for the family.

Meanwhile on our side of the yard, we got ready for the procession. The men took the coffin and carried it out onto the street, where a wailer was already waiting – I don’t know if he had come on the request of the family, or if he had himself taken it on as his job. But his loud voice accompanied us the whole way to the graveyard, while I followed, feeling an almost inappropriate relief that finally I could simply think about each step I was taking, instead of about the right behaviour or the expectations of those around me.

*

We returned to the graveyard on each of the seven days that followed, except for Sunday. We had to light a fire and commemorate the deceased. Here I only needed to stand alongside the others, with cold hands gazing at the plot, which looked strangely high alongside the older graves. The text on some of them could no longer be made out, but on others my surname could be seen, still completely clear. I don’t know how people in Latvia feel at their family plot, which they visit several times a year, but the memories that really stick in my mind from the graveyard in Başküü were from when I was still a child, when I was able to collect up the sweets left on crosses and so had eyes for nothing else. The times that followed they were really nothing more than graves.

But now, occasionally casting a glance at the Kasims lying not far away – several already dead before they had reached the age I then was – I again felt like an imposter. As if they could see my behaviour, my odd pronunciation and uncertain movements, and would now discuss what on earth to do with me. I didn’t know what I could do so that they would accept me, or if that was possible at all. However meticulously I learnt the customs here, my actions were and would always remain just imitations, nothing more than a subtle fake, just like a foreign language learnt in adulthood. Or, in my case, like the basics of a language learnt in childhood and which had always stayed at that child’s level, amusingly unsuited to attempts to express any kind of emotional pain.

But it was just the same for them – they would also have felt like outsiders if they had one day found themselves in my home village of Zaļupe. Even if they had been able to find the way to our home, to our kitchen, drawn by the aroma of so-familiar food, even if they could have settled themselves down on the sofa and got talking about the usual things in their native tongue. Even if they had seen how my mother handed me a kulich cake wrapped in her late sister’s handkerchief, hearing her say “just don’t you tell the others how we commemorate people here, no one would understand anyway”. Even if I had taken them under my wing, brought them to Riga and introduced them to my friends, and they had received them in as welcoming a way as possible, not looking at the peeling scraps of skin, the face starting to rot. I’ve spent too much time in foreign lands not to know that it comes along with you, no matter where you go, no matter what you do. Perhaps that’s just why I’m talking now about that funeral, about our customs. Nothing brings people together more than shared secrets.

But in that place right then, I just looked at the inscriptions on the graves of my relatives, while alongside there flickered a flame lit in a bucket. And a little further, on the other side of the field, beyond the sanctified ground of the graveyard but before the sheep visible in the distance, there was a very small gravestone with the name “Hagi”. He had died before being baptised, and so did not have the opportunity to be buried with the other villagers. The plot was covered with fresh, sodden flowers.

*

At my uncle’s house almost everything happened according to the precepts. The mirrors were covered up, the television was turned off, the doors to the guestroom were closed and washing was forbidden. For those 40 days, you should commemorate the deceased, not think about your own appearance or comfort. But these days the traditions were no longer as strict as before, said my uncle, invoking with a sigh his grandfather’s firm faith. He had taken part in secret Adventist meetings, taking along his grandson, who would sit in a corner in the semi-darkness and listen to the men talking about the world order. But now everything was dependent on each individual person’s conscience and beliefs, the firm grip of the village had slackened here, just like everywhere else.

I will confess that during those days of remembrance, I brushed my teeth and in the evening washed my armpits in a bowl, remembering my own childhood. But sometimes between doing the housework, visiting the cemetery and simply going for walks, I took a look at my phone, to keep track of events in the outside world, and to tell an acquaintance who later became my wife about what was happening. I wasn’t quite an outsider in this house, but more allowance is still always made for guests.

One evening my uncle even offered to turn on the TV so that I wouldn’t miss a Champions League quarter-final match. On the screen the slightly blurry players chased the ball around, while he sat next to me, showering me with questions about the best players of his youth and grumbling that even football wasn’t so easily comprehensible as it once had been.

Before long his thoughts moved on to practical problems, to getting along with the new reality. That didn’t so much mean loneliness – one of his sons lived right next door – as a simple restructuring of day-to-day life in order to deal with that strangeness that was now inescapably there. First of all, he had to decide what to do with the sheep. He didn’t have many, no more than ten, but they needed a lot of caring for and outlays for feed and to herders, for their grazing and shearing. They didn’t bring in any income, prices for everything were low, so it was better to just buy meat and bryndza at the market, he said, more to himself than to me, the TV images continuing to glow in the background while I fruitlessly tried to find a suitable reply.

The sheep were mostly his wife’s thing. Her father, my grandfather, had been a herder himself, during pasturing season he had spent his days in the meadows and his nights in a crooked shed that had been put up right there by the dried-up river. But that was long ago now; my uncle was continuing the story in Comrat, where we had driven to pick up his grandson from his martial arts training, and to get some money from the cash machine (that was my job, he had never done it himself). Everything really had changed, whether we wanted to or not we had to feel alien even in our own homes. Especially now, when the days of remembrance were coming to an end and we would have to return to our everyday life, which would become irreversibly different – but it wasn’t him who said that, I was thinking it myself, immediately feeling ashamed at how banal I was making death.

Of course, time makes foreigners of us all, I continued to think to myself in Riga, returning there after my visit to Başküü and ten years spent living abroad. That city had also changed, and I was a different person too. I hadn’t died and been resurrected, but the world doesn’t stop just because we look away for a moment. And in every one of my steps, every word, even in the pupils of my eyes were involuntarily revealed all those earlier years – the fields of my childhood, the behaviour my mother taught me, the scenes of foreign lands. So I try not to be surprised when people speak to me in English, or ask where I’m from. I just smile and get down to explaining, for the umpteenth time, who I am.

Good books we read this year

We know that we are probably too late for any recommendations for presents, but we wanted to take the opportunity and share some of the books that we as Elsewhere editors enjoyed the most this year. 

Anna’s picks:

And the Walls Became the World All Around, Johanna Ekström, Sigrid Rausing - translated by Sigrid Rausing

I’ve just finished reading this remarkable memoir, the last book of Swedish writer Johanna Ekström, that she asked her close friend Sigrid Rausing to finish after her death. Rausing transcribed and edited the thirteen handwritten notebooks given to her by Ekström, to create a book that is incredibly moving, beautiful and immersive, and that is also about friendship and grief. These last notebooks describe dreams, the view from the window, the ordinary moments of life, relationships and memories, along with meditations on illness, loss, writing. These fragments are interwoven with Rausing’s own voice, so that the book becomes like a dialogue, but one that is fractured and undone by time and distance.

Published by Granta Books, 2024

Roman Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri - translated by the author and Todd Portnowitz

I really enjoyed these compelling and well-crafted stories which evoke the city of Rome, its inhabitants and temporary settlers. Lahiri has chosen to write in Italian, and her fascination with language and place, as well as the streets and neighbourhoods of this city shines through, as well as a draw to the transient in her choice of subjects and stories that seem to reveal moments of uncertainty.

Published by Picador, 2023

The Singularity, Balsam Karam - translated by Saskia Vogel

I found this book captivating and powerful, a work of imaginative empathy, by Swedish-Kurdish author Balsam Karam. A novel about migration and loss, it is stylistically inventive, and the writing is lyrical and poetic. The book circles outwards from a moment that haunts the narrator, to which she is perhaps the only witness, when a woman searching for her missing daughter vanishes into the sea. The narrator finds herself unable to forget the unknown woman, and the book traces her own grief at the loss of a child and a refusal to let go. Together these events become the site for an unspooling of memories, as the narrator writes in fragments, the pages of a notebook, about leaving behind a language, a country, an identity, and the arrival to another place. In imagining the unknown woman as present, the book seems to map the inner distances of memory, the voices of the displaced and unseen, and of those who carry with them the stories of the lost and the missing.

Published by Fitzcarraldo, 2024

Marcel’s picks:

Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss

This summer, I read Sarah Moss’ “Ghost Wall” again, a hard-hitting small novel about a group of experimental historians, human sacrifice and power dynamics. Like in her novel “Cold Earth” which has a similar setting, Moss’ atmosphere of dread and eeriness here is perfect.  

Published by Granta, 2024

The Language of War, Oleksandr Mykhed - translated by Maryna Gibson, Hanna Leliv and Abby Dewar

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s attempt to recreate the Russian empire remains a bloody reality, and this books is one of the best about that reality for Ukrainians. In this extremely personal war diary/memoir/report, Oleksandr, whose parents survived the Russian massacre in Bucha, charts his failings to write about the war experience. His openness as a writer combined with conversations with other people directly affected by the war creates a devastating book that is crucial to the understanding of the Ukrainian experience. Everyone who still thinks that Ukraine should give up so we in Western Europe can live unmolested by the war should be slapped in the face with it.    

Published by Allen Lane, 2024

Resistance, Halik Kochanski

As someone who grew up in Germany, I’ve always been fascinated by the history and legacy of the resistance fighters and partisans who defeated National Socialism after a long and difficult struggle. This excellent and exhaustive account of European resistance against Germany from 1939 to 1945 surveys the many ways people fought back against occupation, propaganda and totalitarianism, and the endurance needed to do so. Covering the lives (and deaths) of many resisters and all the different aspects of resistance from creating an underground press to blowing up railways, it almost becomes a handbook of future resistance.  

Published by Penguin, 2023

Out of Place No. 05: ‘After Leaving Mr Mackenzie’ by Jean Rhys

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by editor and regular contributor Anna Evans.

‘The hour between dog and wolf’. Cities of twilight in Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie.

There was zest in the air and a sweet sadness like a hovering ghost.

As I reach the Place du Châtelet it is twilight. In the half light, in the softening pitch of night falling, I can see the stark contrast of the trees stretching outwards to their blackened endings, to their shadows that meet the pale of the sky and the hint of darkness descending. How long is this state of twilight, this in-between time when day begins to be covered over, when light remains, and is finally lost? Sometimes it is hard to say. It slips past as I am trying to catch the moment. I have walked across the river in the dwindling shadows of afternoon, slipping by unnoticed like the fading light, until suddenly I look around and it is darker still, changing the look of the streets like a spell cast, concealing the way I have come.

In Jean Rhys’s novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the cities of Paris and London feel like dwelling places for ghosts, where shadows fall differently, and light and darkness are intensely felt. ‘The Place du Châtelet was a nightmare. A pale moon, like a claw, looked down through the claw-like branches of dead trees.’ Julia wanders the Paris streets until she finds herself in an unfamiliar part of the city: ‘I’ve gone too far,’ she thought. It is a moment of the book that marks a turning point, a sort-of-epiphany, powerful and understated. It is the impact of passages like these that sends me chasing for echoes and reverberations in places, searching for Jean Rhys’s cities, as if the Paris and London she writes about could be traced in footsteps or on a map.

Jean Rhys is a writer of twilight. The city streets at night can be magical but also sinister, dreamlike and unreal. Her cities are spaces of half-light and her writing leans towards the shadowed side of the street, to corners and hiding places. In her books there are countless images of shadows and reflections. Rhys wrote four novels during the 1920s and 1930s, and is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the book that brought her the most success and recognition. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie can be regarded as something of a turning point for Jean Rhys’s writing. Published in 1930, it is her second novel, and feels like a point of departure, in which she is starting to set out on a path of her own; a crossover book that allowed her to see herself as a writer.

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie starts and ends in Paris, mostly the quays and the streets behind the Left Bank of the Seine; with a sojourn in London, where Julia stays in a hotel in Bloomsbury and a boarding house in Notting Hill. The settings of the book are liminal and transient locations such as hotels, restaurants and cafés, cinemas, taxis, the underground. Streets and areas of the city which dispel a certain twilight atmosphere: ‘this deserted street, with its shabby, red-lit hotels, cheap refuges for lovers, was the right background for what she was saying.’ The book begins with Julia living in a cheap hotel that offers rooms by the day or month. The archetypal Jean Rhys hotel that offers anonymity and a hiding place, somewhere to recover following the end of her affair. She receives a weekly remittance from Mackenzie, that he pays to avoid any scenes. By the time the book begins, she has been there for six months and is leading a monotonous life, a pattern that is broken one day when instead of the usual cheque she receives a final payment from Mackenzie’s solicitor. Something snaps and Julia goes to confront Mackenzie in a restaurant about the way he has treated her. Returning to her lonely hotel room, she becomes restless and makes the decision to return to London, where she confronts her disinheritance from her family.

In her introduction to the novel, Lorna Sage describes it as ‘a novel poised between hope and despair’. The terrain of the book is this axis of hope: ‘There was such sweetness in the air that it benumbed you. It woke up in you a hope that was a stealthy pain.’ The book is tightly structured and shaped, the prose finely balanced. The book depicts a series of turning points. Lorna Sage describes the book as evoking ‘the dizzying, slightly nauseous feeling that you’re teetering on the edge of a revelation that’s just beyond your grasp.’ Julia is often at the edges of a realisation or epiphany that she never quite reaches. The attempt to put into words her own experience, perhaps a rendering of the author’s search for authenticity: ‘I knew that if I could get to the end of what I was feeling it would be the truth about myself and about the world and about everything that one puzzles and pains about all the time.’

Julia is described as someone of uncertain identity. ‘Her career of ups and downs had rubbed most of the hall-marks off her, so that it was not easy to guess at her age, her nationality, or the social background to which she properly belonged.’ She is described as ‘soft’, ‘afraid of life’, someone who lacks survival instinct. This is the territory Jean Rhys is interested in exploring in her fiction - the marginal, minor character that she places at the centre of her novels, quietly radical, the subject hovering at the edges of the frame. She writes from the perspective of women who depend on men to get by, without money, connections, or status, and nothing else to fall back on. ‘You see, a time comes in your life when, if you have any money, you can go one way. But if you have nothing at all – absolutely nothing at all – and nowhere to get anything, then you go another.’

For Julia, Mackenzie and his solicitor, represent money and respectable society, against which she has ‘a dog’s chance’. The mode of living Rhys describes is one of living by chance, a sense of constant insecurity, a life which feels like a ‘series of disconnected episodes.’ This impulse to portray what it is like to have these narrowing, diminishing choices. It is a world in which stability and continuity does not prevail – is not really one of the options available: ‘Because she could not imagine a future, time stood still.’ Twilight is the perfect time of day for this sort of person to emerge, who occupies the shadows; she knows that in the shadows it is possible to hide. In the approach of night, her heroines are the ones with nowhere to be, friendless and jobless, who lurk in cafes, drift through the streets or hide in hotel rooms. Julia lives a precarious existence in which reckless decisions can seem like the only course of action. The return to London feels like one last roll of the dice: ‘If a taxi hoots before I count three, I’ll go to London. If not, I won’t.’

London is portrayed as dark and impenetrable and covered in fog. After the illuminated streets of Paris and the atmosphere of the cafes, London feels deserted, and the streets are badly lit: ‘This place tells you all the time, “Get money, get money. Get money, or be for ever damned.” Just as Paris tells you to forget, forget, let yourself go.’ Rhys’s cities are often claustrophobic, but her portrayal of London is particularly enclosing, described as ‘a heavy darkness’ that ‘made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt you could not breathe.’ The book holds a mirror to Rhys’s own return to London, and to England; the sense of claustrophobia when she writes of this particular form of exile, trapped by circumstances. The outsider perspective that is not made explicit until her later work. After a while ‘you stopped believing that there was anything else anywhere.’

For Julia, London appears a dark and terrifying place to return to, and as she walks around the city her fear and unease deepen: ‘A feeling of foreboding, of anxiety, as if her heart were being squeezed, never left her.’ She has lost the indifference to her fate that sustained her precarious existence in Paris. Julia begins to feel as though she has returned to where she started, as though she is caught in a circle of time, ‘predestined’, a familiar and uncanny feeling instilled by the hotel room and her return to London. As she walks around London she encounters the ghost of her younger self, walking towards her through the fog; it drifts up to her and passes by: ‘The houses and people passing were withdrawn, nebulous. There was only a grey fog shot with yellow lights, and its cold breath on her face, and the ghost of herself coming out of the fog to meet her.’

Throughout the book, Julia is described as a ghost. She is ‘pale as a ghost’, ‘silent and ghost-like’, ‘an importunate ghost’. The picture of Julia is of someone in the process of disappearing, haunting the streets and hotels of Paris. Jean Rhys often described herself as feeling like a ghost. In the book, Julia constantly seems to be searching for someone to hear her story as it to convince herself and to believe that it really happened. The fear of becoming a shadow, of erasure and non-existence, parallels Rhys’s own intense self-doubt and determination in the story of her struggle to become a writer. The fear of judgement, and the idea that no one would believe her, is present in the book. She had to construct her own universe, to create a new space for her truth and authority as a writer.

Within the haunted spaces of her cities, shadows are imagined as the ghosts of those who have passed through, just at the edge of the conscious world. This twilight city is when these ghosts might emerge, invisible and unnoticed apparitions, the lost souls of any city. A series of doubles haunt the edges of the narrative, in cafés, on the streets, travelling on the underground, buskers and street musicians. Some appear as doppelgängers, like a mirror image or perhaps a forewarning of the future, and the gaps and the spaces they create are revealing. Those who drift in and out, at the edges of her city spaces, reveal an affinity with the precarious or homeless, a sympathy for the lost and forsaken, and often for animals. Rhys’s heroines are always one or two steps away from them, the border between them is porous.

In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the river has a presence, and Julia watches it through the window of her hotel. At the start of the book there is a sense that she resists the river, watching it only from a distance, observing that at night the character of the river seems to change and its forces to grow stronger. Later in the book, it feels like a turning point as she walks towards the river, no longer resisting its pull. The calm surface of the water retains its mysteries. The river is unpredictable, and disguises hidden depths: ‘Anything might happen.’ Julia is entranced by the shadows of branches in the water, and the way they appear to be dancing, snake-like, twisting with long arms that reach out and beckon from pools of silver light. Below the smoky surface of the water, they appear to be struggling from the depths. In her work, the city streets are often figured as rivers, full of reflections of light and water that suggest a fluidity, a crossing of boundaries. At night the river becomes, like the streets, a living presence, an unknown world that drifts through the city, fearful and strange, and alive.

The starkness of the city and its intense poverty, offers spaces for encounters with those who emerge in twilight. As Julia walks through the city at night, crossing into a quarter that she is less familiar with, she has the realisation that she has walked too far. This turning point, in an unknown part of the city, marks a turn towards indifference for Julia, she detects a difference in her feelings towards herself and the fate of others around her. In a doorway she sees a figure, hungry and poor: ‘It used to be as if someone had put out a hand and touched her heart when she saw things like that, but now she felt nothing. Now she felt indifferent and cold, like a stone.’ Here is a quiet turning point for Julia, a moment in which on the surface nothing changes, and yet it seems that something extraordinary occurs on the streets of Paris where she loses her sense of empathy. ‘And it was funny to end like that – where most sensible people start, indifferent and without any pity at all. Just saying: ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I’ve got my own troubles. It’s nothing to do with me.’

Rhys describes the crossing over into twilight as ‘the hour between dog and wolf’. In the change of the light, anything can happen, everything is shifting and uncertain. When you shake off the inhibitions of daylight, as you might shake your fur and slink off into the cool of evening, eyes widening. The cloak of night wrapping itself around your shoulders as you sink into the streets, your footsteps absorbed in shadow. The night conceals and casts longer shadows for you to hide, the unaccountable wolf drifting off into unseen places. The hour between dog and wolf, between the tame and the wild, crossing back into a species of twilight, as if finally, Julia accepts her fate. The turning point brings no great transformation. Everything continues as it was. She sits on the terrace of a café, and has another drink, as day melts into evening. Alone again in the city, as night is falling, the end of another chapter.

The street was cool and full of grey shadows. Lights were beginning to come out in the cafés. It was the hour between dog and wolf, as they say.

Fading out and into this understated description of twilight. This is no elaborate passage describing the coming of night, and yet reading it I find myself in the twilight hour. The in-between hour, where the light begins to dissolve into darkness. A gradual and then sudden falling away, of imperceptible changes. Paris is slowly illuminated, transcending into evening. The lighted windows of cafés. The streets around the left bank of the river, the quays, the shadows lengthening.

***

Anna Evans is a creative non-fiction writer with interests in place, memory, and migration, and an editor of Elsewhere. She is a writer from Huddersfield, living in Cambridge in the UK. Some of Anna’s recent work has featured in Echtrai Journal and Panorama Journal of Travel, Place and Nature. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Jean Rhys (24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was born in Dominica in the Caribbean and lived there until leaving for Britain at the age of 16, where she attended school in Cambridge and stage school in London. After working as an actress and on tour with the chorus, she married a Dutch-French journalist and spent some years in Europe, in various cities including Vienna and Paris. It was in Paris that she met Ford Madox Ford who encouraged her to write and published her first story in the Transatlantic Review. Her first book, a collection of short stories, The Left Bank (1927), was followed by four novels set in Paris and London: Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Following the publication of these books, and the start of the Second World War, Rhys fell out of view and drifted into obscurity, and her books fell out of print. During these years she wrote very little. It was many years later that she emerged with a new book, Wide Sargasso Sea, to great success and acclaim, followed by two books of short story collections, Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976). Her final book, Smile Please, an unfinished autobiography, was published following her death in 1979.