“Kosovo Diary” was written on a trip I took with women from MOSAIC, an organization devoted to helping women establish and fund their own organizations in different parts of the world. We made connections with the Kosovo Women’s Network, led by Igbal Rugova (Igo in the piece), and we worked in the camps. We focused on women and young people in our workshops and interactions. I also led a workshop as a trainer for Alternatives to Violence. I had been following the Yugoslav war and its effects on women with the help of other contacts, including Lepa Mladjenovic, a Serb lesbian activist who resisted ethnic identification during the war and crossed borders. My understanding of what happened to split up the former Yugoslavia did not match the media’s portrayal, and there was very little anyone could do to stop the terrible killing and violence, stirred up by propaganda. Kosovo Albanians were secondary even during the Yugoslav Socialist Republic, and their legacy became entwined with the historical moment of the defeat of the Serbs in Kosovo by the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century.
Women’s advocate and author Eve Ensler came to Kosovo to learn about the struggle and to capture some of the stories for an expanded version of The Vagina Monologues, a theater piece which has been successfully produced in many countries and is used as an organizing and empowering tool by women’s groups. Eve says that one out of three women in the world experience violence. Following our stay in Kosovo, MOSAIC, our women’s group, went to Hungary to meet with a Budapest organization (NANE) devoted to preventing violence against women. I played roles in The Vagina Monologues on two occasions when it was produced at Laney College where I work.
“Talking to People in a Township in South Africa” takes place following a period of time when I belonged to the Socialist Workers Party of the U.S. I was an activist working with organizations and unions to build working-class consciousness to fight for our interests. We tried to make a case for a labor party and allied with progressive movements in that direction, bring requests for solidarity from international fighters to our unions. Among the great movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the anti-apartheid movement was galvanizing support internationally, but its fulcrum and inspiration was the internal anti-apartheid movement led by the African National Congress, a socialist organization headed by Nelson Mandela. The Inkatha Freedom Party was another organization that led the freedom fight. Some of the conflicts between the two organizations were alluded to in my conversations, but this was not entirely clear to me at the time. For an understanding of the South African struggle for liberation, the great works of Nelson Mandela are indispensable, especially Nelson Mandela Speaks: Forging a Democratic, Nonracial South Africa. I also highly recommend Gillian Slovo’s great historical novel, Ties of Blood. Slovo, a writer and memoirist, is the daughter of Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party, and Ruth First, a journalist who was murdered for her anti-apartheid work in 1982.
“The Rest Is Poetry” was published in Good News, a publication of Laney College in 2006 and performed as a monologue by Tracy Held Potter in 2007 (included in Fusion II: Turning Tables, a performance at Laney College). It was such a thrill to watch Tracy recite my piece! The Argentine poet and activist mentioned at the beginning of the piece is Ilse Fuskova-Kornreich, whom I met in San Francisco in 1988. We translated a joint bilingual manuscript of our poetry (unpublished), and in 1990 we read together with Judy Grahn at Old Wive’s Tales, a women’s bookstore in San Francisco. Ilse has long been a leader in the Argentine queer movement.
“Revolutionary Romances:” in 1991 a gay newspaper called Tema (theme is a code word for queer) was being published in Moscow, as well as other underground or samizdat journals. Roman Kalinin, the editor, and Evgeniya Debryanskaya, a political activist, worked with Julie Dorf of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and others to produce The International Gay and Lesbian Symposium and Film Festival (July 23—August 2, 1991). An account of what occurred is available online http://www.qrd.org/qrd/world/europe/russia/first.soviet.pride-wockner-91 by journalist and delegate Rex Wockner.
“Amazon Sisters on the Trans-Siberian Railroad” was anthologized in Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s Lesbian Travels in 1998. Although it’s a travel piece, it includes parts of my interviews with Lena and Asya. The audio and video interviews I have done are in a film archive in my private collection called The Pink Flamingo Archives, some of which are available in the Moscow Lesbian and Gay Archives in Moscow and have been shown in 2012 in Space Taiga, St. Petersburg with the State of Mind exhibit by Annica Karlsson Rixon & Anna Viola Hallberg.
“Eighteen Years in the Gulag: Interview with Kuzmich” was the longest of the Siberian interviews that Tracy Thompson and I did for a project that never came to fruition—a film and book about queers in Russia transitioning from communism to perestroika. Instead I put together a book of Siberian interviews edited by Moscow LGBT Archives friends Elena Gusyatinskaya, Sveta Barabanova, and Victor Pismenny. Because of the complexity and questions about his violations, Kuzmich’s interview was not included in Pink Flamingos. This is its first publication.
“In the Crimea:” a version of this piece appeared in my self-published chapbook, Berry of a Mountain Bush, San Francisco (2002). An informative book by an archaeologist on the Amazon phenomenon is Jeannine Davis-Kimball’s Warrior Woman.
“Sissies and Queers” is based on a talk I presented on April 13, 2001, at Lancaster University in the U.K., at the second conference of the International Gender and Language Association.
“Who Is Sophia Parnok?” Only after perestroika was Sophia Parnok published in Russia. Scholar Sophia Polyakova’s 1979 courageous book about Parnok and Tsvetaeva’s love affair called The Sunset Days of Yore is only available in Russian. My interview with Polyakova appeared in Ostrov, the lesbian journal in Moscow.
“Kaleidoscope” uses variations of my name Sonja (which is the Yugoslav spelling of Sonya or Sonia.) In Russian Sophia is the given name and Sonya is a nickname, also Sonechka. In the poem, Tsvetaeva’s lines “bylo telo, xotelo zhit’” mean “there was a body, it wanted to live,” an example of her wordplay—telo (body) xotelo (wanted). This was Marina’s hallmark. The line comes from her intense and dramatic narrative poem “Poem of the End” (1924) about the end of her affair with a Russian White Army officer and friend of her husband, in Prague.
“My Tsvetaeva” I have read many books by and about Tsvetaeva; Simon Karlinsky’s and Lily Feiler’s biographies are the best. Good translations of Tsvetaeva poetry are difficult to find; some translations are available on the internet. Marina Tsvetaeva’s name is sometimes transliterated as Cvetaeva. Translations into English in this book are mine unless otherwise credited.
It is worth quoting Marina Tsvetaeva’s vision of the poet without a nation in a letter to Rilke here. The text is from Nina Kossman’s “Translator’s Note” in Tsvetaeva’s Poem of the End: Selected Narrative and Lyrical Poems. From Tsvetaeva’s letter to Rilke in July 1926: