#25/ TO DIE A THOUSAND TIMES

Welcome to issue twenty-five of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator and an artist based in Amsterdam. Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.

🎙️ an audio version of the attention span newsletter is available on your favourite podcast app: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast…or to listen on the attention span website.

A friend once told me that if I wanted to make a tangible difference in the world, I should get into politics. It made me angry. How wasn’t culture enough, I thought. I cannot get into politics, I would definitely be bad at it, and I had believed in culture as a vehicle for change for as long as I remember. Years later, I reflect on my friend’s comment again and I realise that what made me angry wasn’t that he suggested politics was a better vehicle than culture to bring change, it’s that I did not know any other way. I still don’t. I have come to accept and embrace that very simple fact that has shaped how I place myself in the world.

In issue thirteen of this newsletter, I wrote about Culture and Politics, focusing on the role of cultural institutions in times of political crises. How I believe in the necessity for art and culture to display political courage. It is exactly what filmmaker Agnieszka Holland has done with her latest film, Green Border, which takes place in the forest bordering Poland and Belarus.

Rachel Handler who has interviewed the director for Vulture, describes the film as “a call to arms from director Agnieszka Holland and co-writers Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Maciej Pisuk — a viscerally disturbing, two-and-a-half-hour warning about the international encroachment of fascism and mass dehumanization, captured even as tragedy continues to unfold.”

Agnieszka Holland has previously shown political courage in her films and public statements. Throughout her work, she has predominantly explored individual experiences that are intricately interwoven with cultural, political and societal themes. With Green Border she also had a political impact: the film came out in Poland prior to the 15 October 2023 elections and sparked a backlash from politicians, including President Andrzej Duda who said “Only pigs sit in the cinema,” quoting a World War II slogan used by the Polish resistance during German occupation when only Nazi propaganda films were shown in Polish theatres.

People in power were not happy with the mirror Holland was holding to them. In an interview with Al-Jazeera, Holland said that despite the backlash “[…] people are going to see the film. People are discussing it, people are crying, expressing very deep emotions. That is what I wanted to do, to touch the hearts and conscience of my co-citizens.”

I had known about the situation at the border between Belarus and Poland thanks to writer and journalist Chris Keulemans who wrote about what was happening there a couple of years ago. That forest is also on the cover of his latest book, Verzet (Resistance, published by Jurgen Maas, 2024). And the moment I saw the poster of the film next to the Holocaust Names Monument in my usual neighbourhood walk, I thought of Keulemans’s account and experience. Most importantly, how he has brilliantly woven different stories of resistance throughout his latest book, starting from this very forest, this criminal green border. This colossal shame of a Western civilisation.

The story of Green Border is one of excruciating cruelty: Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko in his attempt to provoke Europe, has refugees lured to the border by propaganda promising easy passage to the EU. Poland does not want refugees from the Middle East and Africa, and systemically dehumanises them in the national media, in political discourse and throughout the training the military receives to keep them out of the Polish border. In the meantime, these people who were tricked into believing that the route to Europe via Belarus would be safer than the one through the Mediterranean sea are paying the highest price. Like rapper Youssoupha writes and sings poignantly in Mourir Mille Fois, a song that Agnieszka Holland brings into the narrative of her film, they “die a thousand times”.

Most reviews I read about the film have been focusing on the geopolitical situation on that specific border, creating a distance between us viewers in the so-called West, and that mad dictator who has used refugees as pawns in his political game. There are mentions of “Europe”, always in the most generic terms, but I did not come across any proper self-reflection from reviewers in our Western European countries. If Lukashenko can play this game, it is because Europe has been building Fort Europa for decades. How is it possible to review a film like Green Border in major Dutch or English-speaking media, and not make a connection with how right wing politics in our countries are constantly vilifying migrants and refugees through their policies and discourses? How can we not think of that horrific deal the EU made with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016 so that he would make sure to keep the people Europe doesn’t want within the Turkish borders.

It is much easier to be appalled within distance.

It is impossible to feel within distance when your parents, grand-parents, elders come from a geographical region vilified by the official narratives of the country you or your parents chose to live in, and when the majority of your friends also share roots in those places. There is no such possibility because there is no such distance. The so-called “other” is a part of you.

Every frame in Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is a mirror I look into, reminding me how much, we, the “european others” as Fatima El-Tayeb so rightfully coined in her book already in 2011, would never be seen the same way as the “right kind” of migrant and refugee. Holland shows this to us in her epilogue, when the same Polish border guard who has been beating up Syrian and Moroccan refugees, throwing people into the Belarusian swamp across a barbed wire border, how these exact same people were gently guiding Ukrainian refugees, many accompanied with their pets - cats, dogs, birds in a cage - into the right buses traveling to different Polish cities. The people to blame here are not the Ukrainian refugees but the unrightful EU policies and their compliers.

I did write about the difference in how Europe has been treating the refugees from Ukraine compared to the refugees and migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, or the African continent. My piece was called Documenting our Humanity. That was two years ago. In the meantime, the citizens in the country I chose to call home have massively voted for an extreme right wing party back in November 2023.

How is it possible to watch Green Border and not make that connection?

I walk among the 102.000 names of people sent to their deaths in the second world war with Youssoupha’s song in my mind: “On ne sait pas vraiment de quoi on est fait tant que l'on n′est pas brisé. Mais on se relève toujours, tu l'vois. Même si perdre tant de proches donne l'impression de mourir mille fois” (We never really know what we are made of until we’re broken. But we always get back up, you see. Even if losing so many loved ones gives the impression of dying a thousand times).

I look up to the mirror the architect Daniel Libeskind has placed in his careful design. They are called steel reflections according to the concept brief on the monument’s website. I can choose to read “steel” as a verb rather than a noun, and the reflections become something difficult I mentally prepare myself to do or face.

And I do.

I see myself reflected in the steel. The image mirrored back to me in between clear blue skies and a dark history places me in the present. I look up. “Et on repart sans que le temps nous répare” (And we go again without letting time heal us) sings Youssoupha, and we die a thousand times again.

I think of the opening sequence of Green Border: a gigantic green forest shot with a drone, the camera flying above a landscape that is alive, prolific, abundant. Green. In colour for a few seconds until the image turns to black and white for the rest of the film. Artistically beautiful, painfully close to the polarised discourses of how we define humanity. Agnieszka Holland chooses fiction to remain as close as she can to truth, so that we in turn feel and reflect within that same closeness. Because distance is no longer an option.

LISTEN
Podcast: Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. In this episode of the Thames & Hudson Podcast, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler – three of the co-authors of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography – delve behind the scenes of their book in which they offer up an alternative understanding of photography as something that is inherently collaborative, and explore the countless complex relationships between photographer, subject, viewer, camera and more. It’s a fascinating conversation. I have always wondered how the subjects of the so many photographs we admire and celebrate were feeling about finding their image in a museum, a book, in someone’s private collection… So many questions the book explores and this podcast touches on.

WATCH
The Hell of Auschwitz - Maus by Art Spiegelman by Pauline Horovitz on Arte TV. I read Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer winning graphic novel more than a decade ago. It truly is one of those works that makes you grasp the power of comics as a narrative medium. I was therefore very curious what the filmmaker wanted to capture with this documentary. I found the way she puts herself in the story very interesting, and the detailed way in which she takes the viewer through Spiegelman’s process, spoke to me. It is a really well made documentary that highlights how Spiegelman has revolutionised the medium of comics.

READ
Since I mention the documentary about Maus by Art Spiegelman, let me tell you more about the story. This comic book depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs. It is a mix of memoir, autobiography, history, fiction, no matter what one wants to call it, it is an essential read for anyone who is interested in how personal narratives set in complex historical contexts, can be told through comics. In 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

SKETCHBOOK PAGES

FROM THE ARCHIVES

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ABOUT

Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator and artist based in Amsterdam. They established The Attention Span website and its newsletter to publish their work independently: making the time to reflect, analyse and imagine.

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