Hi dear Iya Kiva, what`s your routine at the moment?

I usually don’t have a daily routine as a horizontal sequence of planned actions. My day is more like a construction set (like a children’s LEGO construction set, for example), filled with certain activities: I read, listen to music, walk, write, think, check email, sometimes play sports. If I have some priority tasks that need to be done (writing or translating texts), I start the day with them, and read before going to bed. But this is a slightly ideal situation, since in today’s Ukrainian reality, war has its own voice and its own right to interfere with your plans and completely change them.

What`s now particularly important for all of us?

Practice love and self-care, learn to respect yourself, the needs of your body and psyche, and also practice all this in relation to other people, understanding that their comfort and needs may be very different from ours; to be as eco-friendly as possible in how we treat the world and all living things that live in it; to appreciate what brings new impressions and emotions to our experience, and to be able to give thanks for it, and I mean very specific words and gestures with which to do this. It seems to me that people do not always understand that what kind of world we live in and how we live depends on us, and that every choice we make is a political and ethical gesture. When faced with evil, injustice, violence and all the hell that people are so good at inflicting on each other, we can always stop it on ourselves, not multiply it and not pass it on.

In a social sense, I personally miss projects that would help me see what is happening in different parts of the world right now and why. I don’t want to see news about what this or that temporary politician said in some country, I want to know about the problems of people like me who live with me at the same time. I would like to see some analytical sections for a month, half a year and a year or another format in which you can think about this. Our world is very divided, and I think horizontal ways of solidarity need to be scaled up.

New start, new beginning. What will be essential and which roles will literature, art play on society?

At the very end, we can become the story(s) that we have told ourselves or that will be told about us. To be able to be a witness to your own life, or to have witnesses to your own life with whom you can share it, like lunch or dinner, is a great value. In general, the right to say that peoples with experience of colonization in the recent past know very well is a great privilege.

Literature and art help us expand our emotional repertoire, make us human in a humanistic, rather than biological sense, develop empathy and imagination, and change us. If we look at a person’s life as a story that can be written, rewritten, or even destroyed, it seems to me that literature and art give us many tools to make this story important and valuable, first of all for ourselves, but also for those who wants to read it after us.

What are you reading currently?

«Glass, Irony, and God» Ann Carson

Which quote, text will you propose to us?

One who loves himself will never сause harm another.

Thank you very much!

Vielen Dank für das Interview, liebe Iya, viel Freude und Erfolg weiterhin für Deine großartigen Literaturprojekte und persönlich in diesen Tagen alles Gute!

5 Fragen an Künstler*innen:

Iya Kiva, poet, translator and journalist,
member of Pen Ukraine

Zur Person _ Iya Kiva is poet, translator and journalist, member of Pen Ukraine. She was born in 1984 in Donetsk, because of the Russian-Ukrainian war she has moved to Kyiv in 2014. She is the author of two collections of poetry, „Farther from Heaven (2018) and „The First Page of Winter“ (2019), as well as a book of interviews with Belarus writers „We will awaken as others: conversations with contemporary Belarus authors about the past, the present, and the future of Belarus“ (2021). Her poetry has been translated into more than 30 languages. As books were published translations into Bulgarian (a poetry book „Witness of Namelessness“, 2022, translator Denis Olegov) and into Polish (a poetry book „ The black roses of time“, 2022, translator Aneta Kaminska). Kiva is the recipient of a Gaude Polonia fellowship (2021), the Dartmouth College writer support program (2022), Documenting Ukraine program (Austria, 2022), the participant of the International Writing Program (USA, 2023), and others. Based in Lviv, Ukraine.

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27.11.2023 _Walter Pobaschnig

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