The Aprili Media blog section is dedicated to various individuals and diverse viewpoints. These blogs are not an editorial category and reflect the personal opinions of the authors. The positions expressed by the authors may not necessarily represent the stance of Aprili Media.
Author: Nico Gorgiladze
When I saw Claude Monet’s painting at the Bern Museum of Art in Switzerland, I froze, as if I had seen a long-lost relative, and I cried out loud. I was very young when my Georgian teacher assigned us to write about our impressions of Monet’s painting as one of our first classroom assignments. I barely dared to admit that, instead of an essay, I wrote a poem. My first poem. I was afraid of being ridiculed. I will never forget how my teary-eyed teacher hugged me and said, “It’s very good!” In truth, to the surprise of many, I am still as timid as I was then, but I am eternally grateful to these two precious individuals. Wherever I go, I look for his paintings, and when I find them, they take me back to the little Nicoco who believed he could write—nothing more fateful and exhilarating has ever happened to me.
Especially since I had to leave Georgia, my main weapon has become the language, the Georgian language, which has never disappointed me. No matter how pathetic it may sound, whenever I was in great difficulty, it proved to be a bigger refuge than any living being. That’s why it’s amazing that it seems to be alive itself, tangible, graspable—not of the gods, but a god itself! The Black Sea and the Georgian language—these two things were the anchor of my soul since childhood, and over the years, I have loved this language so much that, since I left the sea, I seem to swim in it. I love speaking Georgian, writing with this beautiful alphabet, writing poetry in this language, and feeling certain words that make my heart ache and beat faster, just as it does every time I enter the Black Sea. That is my homeland, both in reality and in dreams—the Georgian language and the Black Sea!
Living in emigration is difficult, among other reasons, because you lose people right before your eyes and hands. With them, the windows to the past close, taking with them precious memories, flavors, scents, pleasant and painful adventures, jokes that only the two of us would laugh at and no one else in the world. Of course, new people come along… and the same cycle begins again.
The road is the best solution—the road and the journey, perceiving the whole life as an endless path. In this sense, you know that anything can happen on the road: someone might fall behind, someone might turn into a dead-end, someone might get tired, and someone might simply stop and cease moving forward… and no one is to blame! No one is obliged to accompany you on this path! The main thing is the perspective of the view. To illustrate, I am reminded of the uniquely interesting exhibition “Oi Non Si / No Yes No” by the Swiss artist and sculptor Markus Raetz. The main part of it consisted of his three-dimensional sculptures that change form depending on the viewer’s perspective, thus questioning the reliability of our perceptions, including fixed concepts like “yes” and “no.” (It is noteworthy that this occurs in the context of sex). Through lighting and mirrors, using various visual tricks and perception games, concepts change form so that what is perceived as a glass from one angle is actually a bottle, and a woman turns out to be a man. (Standing in front of this piece, I laughed inappropriately, remembering the anti-gay protest poster: “In Georgia, a man will never be called a wife.” Apparently, Markus Raetz has not heard of this). Particularly impressive were the iron wires moving with nylon threads, like faces scattered throughout the universe, approaching and distancing from each other independently of us…
Queer Georgians who have become refugees and left Georgia in recent years have told me that, among many other things, one thing unites them— “the nightmares”—they dream of being in Georgia…
They wake up terrified, only calming down once they are certain it was indeed just a nightmare…
What could be sadder than this?—Homeland as a nightmare…
In my dreams, as in real life, the only constant is the road: on the shores of the Black Sea, or on a narrow road in one of the beautiful villages of Kobuleti, I hurry with a dear person who suddenly disappears. I search and cannot find them. Left alone in the dream, I wake up lonely in reality.
In 2018, in a refugee shelter in Leipzig, I wrote a poem where I asked Jesus of Nazareth, who had become a refugee: “Did you have such dreams too, Nazarene?!”
And yet: the feeling of homeland is magnificent, even if only in a dream and in a terrifying way… terrifyingly far away…