Dispatch – April 15 – To kill a swallow

Sometimes it feels like the only thing different about Georgian Dream supporters is that they just got tired of it all a lot sooner than the rest of us did. It is remarkable how much energy a lack of energy can have. Exhaustion, or the state of being drained of power, is still powerful enough to create discourses, build ideologies, poison with propaganda, transform worldviews, confront, destroy, hate, alienate, accuse, excuse, name and shame, or gaslight your former comrades into giving up. It also seems to be the most difficult of all negative emotions to address. There are no pills to cure it, no therapy to talk you out of it. It doesn’t soothe like anger or calm like fear. Daily mental health walks can only make it worse, and the only known treatment – a long, good night’s sleep – can easily be mistaken for death.

Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter to tell about transgenic mice, sleepy cows, endangered swallows, and fatigue.

If you look at the classic works of Georgian literature or film, you’ll find a constant confusion about whether we’re dead or just taking a nap.

“He’s not dead, he’s just asleep, and he’ll wake up again,” reads the famous line from Sickman, a poem by the revered 19th- and 20th-century Georgian poet Akaki Tsereteli. With his sharp and witty pen, the poet was one of the leading voices of emerging Georgian nationalism under the Russian Empire, along with other important intellectuals and public figures such as Ilia Chavchavadze. Tired of watching their nation dormant, the two great men, Ilia and Akaki, spent years shaking and waking up those around them.

It was partly due to that wake-up work that history booked them special places as fathers of the Georgian nation. Just go to two major avenues in Tbilisi named after the two big men, and you’ll see how the country treats their legacies. In recent years, those are the two streets that have been most taken care of, respected, reinvented, reinterpreted, debated, and misunderstood. But at least they’ve stayed true to the wake-up calls of the men: either you stay awake – the most awake you’ve ever been – when walking down those streets or risk getting hit by a bus that’s coming from a direction it shouldn’t.

While it’s mostly Chavchavadze (the man) whose words and legacy have been used and abused for political purposes, Tsereteli has had his share of (mis)fortune. His lines were recited by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire founder of the Georgian Dream party who, like the great poet, hails from the western Georgian province of Sachkhere. Drawing on Tsereteli’s famous verses, Ivanishvili once proudly compared his NGO critics to bats with identity crisis. The original poem – A Bat – tells the story of an arrogant mouse who looked down on his fellow mice and wished for wings like birds. God granted the wish, only for the mouse – now transformed into a bat – to find that neither birds nor mice now enjoyed his company. Be careful what you wish for, and please don’t try to interpret this poem at home.

It’s unlikely that Tsereteli – who has done some pioneering NGO and media work in his time – was going after the same targets as Ivanishvili when he penned his version of the “Batman origin” story. But there is little doubt that he had his beloved nation on mind when he rhymed about sleepy, sick men and longed for them to wake up. At least he always meant Georgia whenever he composed those passionate verses about lost lovers, or so our Georgian teachers claimed.

A dead has risen!

Tsereteli was right. Georgia had indeed awakened from imperial hibernation, something the two “fathers of nations” didn’t live to see. But the country soon fell back into a deep and prolonged Soviet sleep. The checking of the pulse continued in the creative works that followed, including Me, Grandma, Iliko, and Ilarioni – a popular story by Georgian writer Nodar Dumbadze, published in 1960 and adapted into an iconic film two years later.

“Is she dead?” – A man is seen asking in one scene as he walks by and checks with his foot whether a cow lying unconscious on the road is alive.

“She was up all night, Sir, and just fell asleep,” the old lady in black, or Grandma, replies. “It’s you who’s dead,” the lady sneers, supported by a group laugh from two old men and a young man who accompany her.

Unlike Tsereteli’s sick man, we see the aging cow – Phakizo – actually wake up. The woman and three men help her to her feet and guide her kindly along the village road, on her way to be sold to a butcher: the family needs money to pay for the young man’s education in the city. Did Dumbadze, too, have his enslaved people in mind when he wrote Phakizo’s brutal plot? Unlikely – sometimes a cow is just a cow. In fact, Phakizo may be one of the rare female protagonists in allegory-dense Georgian literature who suffers her own worldly pains without the added burden of symbolizing the tragic fate of an entire nation.

But the dead-or-alive theme kept coming back. “A dead has risen!” a crowd can be seen frantically shouting in Imeretian Esquisses, another masterpiece of Georgian cinema from the Soviet era. The humorous scene shows mourners paying their respects to the body of the deceased, who then suddenly stands upright, sending the entire village into a state of shock and agony. The crowd later discovers that the “deceased” was actually their fellow mourner, who had been laid to rest for an afternoon nap and covered with a white blanket after his own dramatic mourning performance earlier drained him of all his energy.

Nor is this film, though widely admired, known to contain any hidden grand patriotic metaphors. Still, the Georgian obsession with is-s/he-dead-or-just-asleep plots is too great to be ignored. And it is even harder to ignore now, when occasional fatigue overcomes present-day Georgian protesters and the question arises again.

Kill your darlings

It’s been almost 140 days since the non-stop anti-regime protests started in Georgia, and the resistance continues despite the persistent repression aimed at crushing it.

Now, with the arrival of the spring months, the protests have entered a “big-dates” streak, marking different major anniversaries of national importance every week. We had this big rally on March 31, Independence Restoration Referendum Day. We had an all-night vigil on April 9, a double anniversary marking the 1989 massacre and the restoration of Georgian independence two years later. And now, on April 14, Mother Tongue Day, a large, dynamic march took place in Tbilisi to commemorate the 1978 mass rallies against Soviet efforts to strip Georgian of its national language status, with protests back then culminating in an unexpected victory. Rallies also take place on other days, daily, though with smaller turnouts.

But months of resistance without any of the key demands being met may have robbed activists of their ability to feel joy. Instead of satisfaction, large rallies are now more often followed by hangovers filled with negative self-talk and recriminations. Some are even quick to pronounce protests dead.

They may have their reasons: even the larger rallies now struggle to match the size of those last spring or during the first weeks of the current protests. And it’s hard to expect anything to change if things just go on like this: we will eventually run out of big anniversaries. The spark that was expected to come from the “people’s spring” has yet to appear. In fact, actual spring itself has yet to appear, as April has so far only winter temperatures to offer.

The ongoing controversial sessions of the Georgian Dream’s parliamentary commission to investigate alleged crimes of the United National Movement (or, as critics complain, to rewrite history) continue to generate anger. Rather than being transformed into protest fire, however, this anger seems only to be adding to the overall fatigue. The despair has been so profound that psychologists got involved, advising to focus on small victories and to shift from the language of anger to that of hope and solidarity. Indeed, while demands remain unmet, protests are still making a difference. The resistance may not be winning, but neither is the Georgian Dream. As the days, weeks, and months pass, the two camps seem stuck in a never-ending Harry Potter-vs-Voldemort epic showdown.

As for the language of hope, it comes again in verses by Akaki Tsereteli. “Even if you kill the swallow, spring will still be here tomorrow,” reads the line from Tsereteli’s lesser-known poem Song. The line was contextually re-embraced during the recent commemoration of April 9, a date associated with both loss and rebirth. (We traced the poem and found that it was originally published on April 9, 1875. Some might see this as a coincidence, but we are in desperate need of magic here, so there you are….)

Well, it’s a sin to kill a swallow, a lovely bird and harbinger of spring in Georgia. But still, it sometimes feels like something in us has to die for the big awakening to happen. Is it our pessimism that we need to get rid of? Or is it the opposite – our optimism about the inevitable spring – that needs to go first?