Memory Against Oblivion: Rereading Olzhas Suleimenov’s Remember

When the anniversary of a figure like Olzhas Suleimenov approaches, a strange sense of bewilderment arises. Too much has been written about him—and, at the same time, not enough. People are used to calling him a poet, a diplomat, a public figure, the author of Az i Ya, and a man who defined an era. Yet, behind all these great labels, the most crucial element is sometimes lost: the vital force of his poetry. That inner energy keeps Suleimenov’s poetry from aging, allowing it to continue to trouble and provoke.For a long time, I pondered what to write for his 90th anniversary. One could speak yet again about his stature, his public authority, his cultural courage, or his influence on the Turkic world and Soviet literature. One could have chosen Az i Ya, as people always do when they want to discuss Suleimenov as a phenomenon. Yet, among all his books, I unexpectedly settled on The Clay Book (Glinianaya Kniga).One could write about the entirety of The Clay Book—its internal polyphony; The Cactus, where Suleimenov transforms irony into a philosophical tool; The Balcony, one of his most deeply human and poignant pieces; or the poem The Clay Book itself, where history speaks as if from an unburied civilization.But I wanted to pause.Suleimenov has books that demand a different kind of reading: a slow, almost painful one. To Remember (Zapomnit) is precisely such a piece. It does not read as a set of separate poems. Instead, it reads as a single arc of remembrance—from Bihar to Majdanek, from famine to war, from human helplessness to an attempt to preserve dignity, if only through the word. Moreover, it is in To Remember that Suleimenov’s defining quality is most clearly visible: his ability to fuse the global with the personal. He writes about India, Vietnam, Poland, concentration camps, famine, and human history, yet the text never devolves into cold journalistic rhetoric. A human being always remains at the center. A girl in a yellow sari. Grass growing on the site of a death camp. The solitary voice of a poet who understands that literature is powerless to feed the hungry—yet continues to speak anyway.Perhaps that is why it felt more honest to dedicate this article solely to the first part of the book. Not to try and encompass everything, but attend to its most unsettling notes. Because To Remember is not just a section of The Clay Book. It is its heart.The Moral Center of The Clay BookToday, The Clay Book feels strikingly contemporary. It does not feel like a museum piece, no sense of a text written merely "for its time." On the contrary, a nearly physical sensation arises that this book was written just now. This is because the world has still not unlearned how to justify violence with beautiful words. Because hunger still exists alongside abundance. Because humanity still knows how to watch a tragedy from a safe distance.In the first edition of The Clay Book, To Remember is not merely an opening section, but the moral center. Suleimenov opens the collection not with historical mystification, philological play, or satire, but with a scene of extreme human vulnerability: starving Bihar, Majdanek, a child, grass, a poet, and a monument that should not exist. To Remember is a poem about how memory begins precisely where art can no longer beautify suffering and must justify its existence again. In the first part, language is tested first by hunger, then by ash. In both, the poem rejects beautified falsehoods and searches for a form that does not obscure the dead. This is precisely why the true monument here is not a sculpture, but the grass; not rhetoric, but a prohibition; not the posture of an artist, but the break in his speech.The Clay Book was published in 1969 and opened precisely with Remember, which consisted of two parts: "The Girl in a Yellow Sari" and "The Girl on the Green Grass." This matters not only bibliographically. Although both parts were later printed separately, in the original composition they were bound by a shared subtitle: "Compositions: Girl – Grass – Artist." It is this triad that gives the work its tension: the victim, the living material of memory, and the question of what art can do in the face of death. Researchers rightly emphasize that in the first edition, the two parts should not be separated. Here, To Remember is not an appendix, but the moral opening of the entire book, establishing "a standard of truth, rather than verisimilitude" for the subsequent reading.Part One: The Dehydrated Verse and the Self-Critique of PoetryThe poem begins almost drily, in a journalistic style: rallies, geography, Bihar, Stockholm, Washington, Istanbul. Yet within a few lines, the chronicle ceases to be a chronicle. The epigraph "Shruti – Memory" transforms the word "memory" from a mere theme into the text’s organizing principle. Suleimenov does not say "recall." He constructs the poem as an act of holding on to what history too easily turns into statistics.Hence, the very first appeal—“Do you know, editor, what Bihar is?”—is addressed not to an anonymous reader, but to the figure of an editorial intermediary. From the very outset, the editorial office, the printing press, and the machinery of editing and fact-processing become part of the poem. Consequently, tragedy is immediately confronted with the question of how it will be named, transmitted, and edited. In an early discussion about the book, A. Marchenko highlighted To Remember as an exception against the backdrop of the collection's more polemical and experimental pieces: the moral seriousness here was too obvious to be mistaken for an exercise in form.The first part, "The Girl in a Yellow Sari," is structured as a strange and terrifying swaying between the public square, ritual, media imagery, and the internal shame of the poet. The refrain of "saun," the sparse lines, fragments of phrases, and constant enjambments make the verse feels parched rather than melodic. Hunger is heard in the rhythm before it even becomes the subject of description. The girl first appears in motion:“Swaying on a swingis a girl in a yellow sari...”This is one of the most powerful images in all of Suleimenov's early poetry. The swing here is not a childhood detail, but a form of oscillation on the threshold of death—between life and death, earth and sky, body and image. The girl does not walk, does not speak, and barely acts; she specifically sways, existing in a state of a fragile remainder of life.In the square, a crowd gathers to listen to the poet Shri. He presented in two opposing ways: as a popular orator and almost as a withering plant. “The bones of his ribs line Shri’s shirt,” his white head nodding “on a black wiry stem.” The poet is transformed into a flower, but this flower no longer grows in a garden, but on a takyr (a cracked, arid desert plot). Shri is not only a character but a mirror for the lyrical "I." His famous two-line speech, “There are no castes in the world / other / than the hungry and the sated,” sounds like a simple, even slogan-like truth. However, Suleimenov does not leave it at that. He immediately questions the sufficiency of noble public speech when a hungry child still stands at the center of the world.The most critical moment occurs during poetry’s self-indictment. The lyrical subject, also a writer, confesses:“What do we write about? What do we fill our cries with? When there is no bread in Bihar, why did we sing!..”This is neither a gesture of the rejection of art itself nor a naive call to silence. On the contrary, the poem pronounces judgment on stale and complacent rhetoric precisely through verse—meaning it demands that poetry become something else. As T. Mashkova accurately notes: “here, the thought of the uselessness of old poetic rhetoric is itself formulated poetically.” Thus, it is not about the death of art, but about a rethinking of its premises. Shri and the narrator are not enemies: one still believes in the sweetness of the mantra, while the other already hears how this sweetness crumbles beside an empty stomach.Hence the distinct role of the witness. In Remember, he is neither an impartial observer nor a documentarian. He is compromised by the fact that he himself belongs to the world of words. The appeal to the editor, his own "meager books," the journalistic frame, the footnotes explaining "shloka" and "kikar"—all of these are not decorative apparatuses, but the traces of literary guilt. The poem seems to ask: what does a cultured person do in the face of famine—explain an exotic word, compose a slogan, publish a note, read poetry? And can he, while doing all this, remain innocent?Particularly sharp in this regard is the fracture of biblical memory: “not by grain alone shall one live.” This recognizable formula is reduced to a fragment. The spiritual maxim is not dismissed, but it sounds inverted; man is offered to live by imagination where he has no bread. Thus, Suleimenov demonstrates the limit of any grand abstraction. It is no accident that Shiva, Vietnam, Sophia Loren, napalm, Indian ritual, and a journalistic rally coexist side by side. What lies before us is not "exotic color," but a fractured global field of images upon which various forms of pain are projected—sacred, political, and cinematographic. The girl in the yellow sari touches Italy with her elbow because suffering has already become mediated, though it has not become any less corporeal because of it.Part Two: Majdanek and the Aesthetics of AbsenceThe second part, "The Girl on the Green Grass," makes a move that might seem paradoxical: after immediate hunger, the poem moves into a space of memory; after Bihar comes Majdanek; after the girl comes the grass. Yet this is not a change of theme, but its deepening. In the first part, the question was: what can art do in the face of imminent death? In the second, it is: how is it possible to embody memory at all after death has occurred?The beginning is intentionally written in prose, carrying an almost museum-like tone: barracks, shoes, hair, gas chamber, crematorium. The tone is as dry as an inventory log. It is precisely from this documentary plainness that a new poetic rupture is born:“A concentration camp is not only a chimney and an oak-tree of green smoke – into the sky. It is – the grass, which in the public square is gone.”This is one of the key moments of not just To Remember, but the entire book. Memory is defined through absence. In Bihar, there was “a grain of rice that is not there”; in Majdanek, “the grass that is not there.” T. Mashkova rightly connects these images as an oxymoronic principle: that which is named has nonexistence as its primary characteristic.Hence a new ethics of perception: one must look not at the object, but at the scorched emptiness around it. One must remember not only the smoke but also the root that was eaten; not only the furnace but also the fact that nothing grew for three years.Suleimenov is merciless toward the false monument. The "anxious sculptor," the competition statue, the gigantic skeleton reading in the sky like a scribble of "BREAD!"—all of this is exposed as the aestheticization of horror. The artist wants to be profound, expressive, and "eerie"—and that is precisely why he is inauthentic. He creates a work about suffering too overtly, turning an execution into an aesthetic success too willingly. The poet does not deny art as such; he rejects art that admires itself too conspicuously against the backdrop of death.The true monument turns out to be almost nothing: a sign reading "do NOT pick the grass" and the very grass that grew on the ashes. A stunning formula emerges:“As a monument to man (such is the logic!) not stone and not iron – became the grass.”Grass here is neither an idyll nor a sentimental reflection of "nature being stronger than history." It is a sign of memory that does not triumph, does not heroize, and does not pretend to understand the dead. It is insignificant, organic, ordinary, and nameless—and therefore honest. This is precisely what elevates it above the "statues of Lamentation." In an article by R.I. Utepova and G. Tleubai, Suleimenov's grass is called the embodiment of immortality, memory, and rebirth. For To Remember, this conclusion is exceptionally accurate, provided we remember that this grass grows on podzol soil fertilized by ash.The final lines of the second part carry this idea to its extreme conclusion:“allegories are – false, they are murderous.”The provocativeness of this formula is clear. Of course, Suleimenov himself is writing a metaphorical poem. But here, the blow is directed not against imagery in general, but against the habitual cultural replacement of reality by a beautiful label. As long as suffering is processed through ready-made symbols, it is sanitized. Therefore, on the field of Majdanek, poetry must become literally poorer, barer, and more restrictive. The production of images has not ended; their irresponsibility has.Rhythm, Syntax, and the Transcultural TextureThe poem’s structural power comes from its composition that is subordinated not to a plot, but to a rhythm of moral escalation. The first part is dominated by swaying, repetitions, outbursts, and fragments of direct speech; the second part features inventory-like prose, followed by a chorus of prohibitions, and finally, a sharp philosophical conclusion. This is not just a montage of different materials, but a gradual stripping-down of language, the removal of rhetorical excess.The syntax of the first part relies on anaphora, parallelisms, and short lines that constantly "collapse" downward. T. Mashkova views this as a connection to the Kazakh zhoqtau (a funeral lament), and this observation seems accurate both as a matter of genre and of sound. The repetitions of "saun," the chain of appeals to "mama," the enumerations of the deceased, and the rhythmic oscillation between question and answer do not merely form a narrative about death, but serve as its vocal accompaniment. Even when the dying girl barely speaks herself, the structure of the lament crystallizes around her. At the same time, Suleimenov does not reproduce folklore literally: he merges the ancient intonation of the lament with the form of the historical-journalistic poem so characteristic of the Soviet 1960s. It is within this fusion that the distinct sound of To Remember is born: simultaneously archaic and journalistically modern.The lexical texture is also highly expressive. The poem is saturated not with one, but with several foreign lexicons: Bengali, Polish, Indian, Soviet-journalistic, and mass-cultural. “Shruti,” “shloka,” “kikar,” “saun,” “zapomnieć,” “zabytiek,” “Shiva,” “Sophia Loren”—these are not decorations, but the tracks of a world entering the Russian text without being fully assimilated.In a broader sense, this is how Suleimenov’s poetics operate in general. Z.K. Temirgazina and R.O. Aselderova demonstrate that foreign linguistic elements, including Turkic ones, serve as markers of a transcultural space where the local and the global do not cancel one another out; they illuminate one another. In To Remember, there are fewer Turkicisms than in the book's title poem, but the very structure of speech is already transcultural: a poet from Kazakhstan writes in Russian about Bihar and Majdanek in such a way that neither culture becomes an ethnographic backdrop.Color deserves a separate mention. The yellow sari is not just a detail of clothing. For Suleimenov, yellow here is the color of desiccation, hunger, and the depletion of life; toward the finale, it transitions into a fiery sari, the color of incineration. The green in the second part is neither an idyll nor a holiday in nature, but a belated, terrifying sign of return, grown from ash. Black and white in the first part are torn apart: a black cloud is bleached, people blacker than shadows walk upon white, cracked earth, and the white head of Shri sways on a black stem. The world is decomposed into sharply contrasting layers, as if stripped of middle tones. R.I. Utepova and G. Tleubai further demonstrate how a paronymic series condenses around the image of the palm tree in "The Girl in a Yellow Sari"—palmovaya palka (palm stick), napalm (napalm), opali (scorched/fell away), plamya (flame)—so that the exotic tree begins to signify drought, war, and the fire of sacrifice. This is meticulous philological work, but within the text, it is perceived primarily as a growing inner fire.Conclusion: A Heritage of ConscienceTo Remember is deeply rooted in its era, but not as a document of trendy civic engagement. Yes, behind it stand the late 1960s—a global anti-imperialist sensibility, the Vietnam War, the mass politicization of culture, and the conviction that a poet is responsible not only for the aesthetic quality of a line but also for its historical weight. This is precisely why T. Mashkova sees in the poem a synthesis of folkloric lament and the historical-journalistic poem so prevalent in Soviet poetry of the 1960s. However, Suleimenov is vital not because he repeats this model, but because he radicalizes it: in Suleimenov’s hands, publicistic poetry becomes a self-trial and civic rhetoric turns into a crisis of its own language.The Kazakh dimension of the text does not lie on the surface of national ornamentation. It runs deeper—in the type of memory and the generic memory of the form. To Remember traces back to zhoqtau, but it makes an anonymous girl the subject of its lament, and along with her, the very possibility of human dignity in a world of famine and camps. This is a fundamental gesture. A traditional genre of steppe culture is transposed to Bihar and Majdanek, as if the Kazakh poetic memory proved capable of mourning not only its own but the world's grief. Thus, a genuinely Kazakhstani, rather than provincial, optics emerges: foreign pain enters the national consciousness not as a borrowed topic, but as an extension of its own ethics of memory. T. Mashkova emphasizes that Suleimenov's turn to the Russian language does not destroy but transforms national tradition, forcing it to speak within a dialogue of cultures.And therefore, the most crucial word of the title is not a noun, but a verb. Not "memory," not "monument," not "grief," but precisely to remember (zapomnit). In this infinitive, one hears a command, a plea, a duty, and an incompletion of action. For Suleimenov, memory is not a state of culture, but a labor of conscience. It must be performed anew because history continuously manufactures methods of forgetting: the journalistic cliché, the competition monument, the beautiful metaphor, and the public compassion that admires itself. In this sense, To Remember is strikingly contemporary: it describes not only famine and the camp, but also the mechanism of media numbing, which is no less familiar to us than it was to his contemporaries.Surprisingly, for all the power of the text, To Remember did not become the center of the sharpest book controversies in 1970. The main brunt of critical disputes fell upon other parts of the collection, primarily The Cactus. T. Mashkova explicitly notes that, unlike that poem, To Remember did not provoke a conversational explosion, though it was written about extensively and sympathetically. Critics emphasized its humanistic and anti-war clarity, its sense of historicism, and its tragic knowledge that the world is not only beautiful but also cruel, while considering the choice to open the book with this composition as entirely deliberate. In other words, contemporaries early on sensed that before them was not just an "topical" piece about Vietnam and concentration camps, but the moral tuning fork of the entire collection.At the same time, A. Marchenko's early article remains vital precisely for its caveat. Dividing The Clay Book into more and less successful parts, she made an exception for Remember, as if recognizing that this text lives by its own law and does not depend on how we evaluate the rest of the collection's experimental architectonics. In later research, this intuitive gesture is validated: To Remember can indeed be read as an autonomous piece, but in the first edition, it is more powerful precisely as an opening chord, in which all the main questions of the book are already set forth—memory, the sign, the artist, truth, and false expressiveness.Today, scholarly readings have added two important adjustments to that early ethical perception:First, it has become clearer how deeply the generic mechanism of the lament is embedded in the poem and how closely it is linked to the Kazakh oral tradition.Second, attention has shifted to linguistic multilayeredness: to the foreign insertions, the work with non-Russian vocabulary, and the way the verse assembles the world not on the principle of exoticism, but on the principle of a difficult mutual translation.These two lenses—generic and transcultural—allow us to see in To Remember not only a civic poem of its time, but a complex work exploring the very boundaries of representation.

Memory Against Oblivion: Rereading Olzhas Suleimenov’s Remember

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