We Lived Happily During the War

“We Lived Happily During the War” is a poem by Ukrainian, hard-of-hearing poet Ilya Kaminsky. In many ways, the poem is complex portrait of moral responsibility and guilt in the face of inhuman violence. It was first published in Poetry International in 2013 and most famously appears in print as the prelude poem to Kaminsky’s well-regarded second collection, Deaf Republic (2019).

Deaf Republic is a two-act play based in the fictional town of Vasenka. After a deaf boy is shot by the occupying forces, the townspeople of the Vasenka feign being deaf, developing their own sign language as a way to resist. This unique perspective on silence as resistance—as well as silence as suburban complacency—demonstrates Kaminsky’s gift of startling insight and irony.

Kaminsky was born in Odessa in 1977 (modern Ukraine) and immigrated to the United States in 1993, seeking asylum from the US government. Throughout literary history, many white émigré writers enjoyed the individual liberties in America while turning a blind eye to American wars and injustices. The fact that Russian place names and personal experiences of deafness comprise the play could lead readers to think this is a book chronicling Soviet or post-Soviet authoritarianism and violence. However, this is complicated by the fact that both “We Lived Happily During the War” and the closing poem “In a Time of Peace” take place in America. Set in a fictional town, Deaf Republic is structured so it speaks to the universal subjects of tyranny and resistance. As in Kaminsky’s own life, politics and resistance know no borders.

Critics like Christian Detisch hesitate to label Kaminsky’s work as political, arguing “every poem, if it honestly engages with the urgencies of the poet’s life, inevitably situations itself into a political reality” (Detisch, Christian. “Deaf Republic: Review.” Blackbird, https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v18n1/index.shtml.). He concludes: “Kaminsky’s aim here is as ambitious and unclassifiable as the parables of Kafka, the troubling modern psalms of Paul Celan” (ibid). Thanks to Kaminsky’s broad scope and unflinching attention to detail, the personal is political and vice versa. For Kaminsky, this poem (as well as the book as a whole) blur the line between autobiography and collective sensibility, opening the reader to a difficult, but expansive worldview.

Kaminsky is also a prolific translator and anthologist of international poetry. The influence of poets like Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Paul Celan can be felt in the surprising way image and sound unite to form an intimate, ennobling experience, writing from and to conditions of political cruelty.

Poet Biography

Ilya Kaminsky was born into a Jewish family in 1977 in Odessa (modern-day Ukraine)—the former Soviet Union. At the age of four, due to the misdiagnosis of a doctor, Kaminsky developed mumps, leading to the loss of hearing. In an interview with The Guardian, Kaminsky says that the day Breznev (former Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) died, his mom learned of his deafness: “Pretty much all my childhood and adolescence was spent watching the Soviet Union fall apart, but I couldn’t hear, so I followed the century with my eyes” (Armitstead, Claire. “'I will never hear my father's voice': Ilya Kaminsky on deafness and escaping the Soviet Union.” 2019. The Guardian). This tragedy is also an advantage (the idea of deaf gain) that strongly figures in Kaminsky’s work because, for one, it taught Kaminsky how to speak in the “language of images” (ibid).

Throughout his adolescence in the multicultural Odessa, Kaminsky had a strong relationship to languages and literature. The Soviet Union placed a huge emphasis on recitation and a tradition of stadium poetry loomed large. When he was 12, he published a piece of prose in a local newspaper. When he was 15, one year before immigration, he released a chapbook of poems entitled The Blessed City.

Resistance and political persecution was not new to his family who mingled with prominent intellectuals and journalists, facing arrest when Ilya was one-year-old. However, Kaminsky is also careful not to paint a completely dreary picture of asylum, saying that at the time, smoking and dating girls took a forefront in his life. The ability to see beauty and humor in spite of terror and sorrow make Kaminsky a profoundly rare voice, translated into 20 languages.

In 1993, Kaminsky’s family moved to the United States where he regained some of his hearing with the help of hearing aids. Immigrant life was difficult for his ailing parents going into exile, leading him to hold a complicated view of immigration: He “doesn’t recommend it to anyone… It breaks lives” (ibid). Weeks after obtaining his hearing aids, his father died, leaving him with no memory of his father’s voice.

Kaminsky started to write poems in English in 1994. He completed his BA in political science at Georgetown University and earned his JD from University of California Hastings school of law. Kaminsky worked as a law clerk at the San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. This ability to understand social and political injustice makes Kaminsky’s language all the more authentic: Justice-work in the public sphere is just as important as writing poetry. In 2001, he was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s distinguished Ruth Lily Fellowship and in 2002, he published the chapbook Musica Humana.

In 2004, his first full-length manuscript, Dancing in Odessa, was awarded the Dorset Prize and published with Tupelo Press to great acclaim. The collection—composed of five sections—was hailed by critics as an original, beautiful, and luminous response to the weight of familial, literary, and local inheritance and memory. Many critics were astounded by the way Kaminsky made the city of Odessa strikingly familiar, leaving readers with a fresh perspective on their own humanity and daily life.

It took 15 years for Kaminsky to complete and release his second full-length collection, Deaf Republic. In an interview with The Guardian, Kaminsky said: “I am a lyric poet, but I wanted to tell a story, so I had to find a way to do it. It had to be this minimalist telling of a large story. I think great poems are like spells. They’re not just about an event. They become an event themselves. Even without wanting to, you remember them” (ibid).

Poem Text

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month

of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

Kaminsky, Ilya. “We Lived Happily During the War.” 2019. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

The poem abruptly opens with the bombing of “other people’s houses” (Line 1). The speaker of the poem uses the plural “we” who are not personally targets of the violence but feel a moral responsibility to protest. However, for the speaker, this responsibility is “not enough” (Line 3) because they remain in the comfort of their own bed: “[A]round my bed America / was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house” (Lines 5-7). The speaker also makes it clear that this is an ongoing tragedy. Still, the speaker’s general response is to choose private joys: “I took a chair outside and watched the sun” (Line 7). Following this, the speaker widens their reflection on time and space, intensifying the drama and tragedy: “In the sixth month / of a disastrous reign in the house of money / in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money” (Lines 8-11). The only consolation or gesture that the speaker can find besides protest is apology for choosing to experience happiness.