“We” and the Language of War: On the Poetry of Serhiy Zhadan

The essay focuses on we-discourse as a cross-generic phenomenon, broader than we-narration in prose fiction, and examines how Serhiy Zhadan's recent work constructs a “we” of the society shaken by war. Infinitive structures and impersonal imperatives of his new poems create a syntactical possibility of a collective subject position initially open to anyone. While this openness eventually fills, the poems' first-person plural nevertheless avoids reproducing the antagonistic reference of “us” versus “them,” inherent in communal ethos, and thus points to a potential for an alternative construction of solidarity.