Author Note: Claudia Serea
Claudia Serea is the author of “When I got back from the Gulag, my father says,” a poem in The Puritan Issue 49: Spring 2020. As part of our Author Note series, she explains some of the context behind the poem.
Human experience is riddled with pain. History is written with pain. It seems as if pain is embedded into our genetic code. Old or new, the pain resonates within us because of its universality. For me as an artist is important to write about the events of recent history, to draw the pain from them and convert it into poetic language.
To better understand the context of my poem, here is some background information: I am the daughter and granddaughter of former political prisoners in Romania. In 1958, a huge wave of violence swept the country in the push of the communist regime to complete the nationalization of the land. Everyone who didn't want to give away their little parcel of land, horse, or tractor to the collective was accused of "conspiracy against the social order," sent to a masquerade trial, then off to prison or forced labour camps.
Hundreds of thousands were terrorized, and tens of thousands of peasants were arrested. Among them, my grandfather and his two sons: my father and my uncle. My grandfather was sentenced to 25 years of hard prison. My uncle was arrested in 1956 in connection with the Hungary uprising, and he was sentenced to 10 years. When the Securitate ransacked my grandparents’ home in search of proof against my grandfather, they found a notebook belonging to my father in which he had written snippets of poems against the regime.
My father was 18 at the time of his arrest, just out of high school. He never published the poems or read them in public, but because of them, he was sentenced by a military tribunal to 8 years. He was sent to a forced labor camp where the prisoners had to cut reeds, dig up land, and fill in with dirt some huge swamps. He served 5 years out of the 8, and his life was marked forever.
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The Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga said: “The one who forgets doesn’t deserve.” We can’t allow ourselves to forget this much pain. Although more than 30 years have passed since the fall of the Iron Curtain, little has been done to offer justice and moral reparation to the former political prisoners. There is less and less talk even about the victims of repression in general, as if communism never happened.
I have strong reasons to write about these events while memories are still fresh and survivors, like my father, are still able to tell their stories. I always write about my father: he shows up in my poems almost like a character, or my alter ego. He’s my connection with history and with Romania. I believe these events make my poems stronger if I stare them in the face and allow poetry to tell the truths about recent history. It’s my way of giving a voice to the victims of repression, of honouring their sacrifice.
Claudia Serea’s poems and translations have been published in Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Malahat Review, Oxford Poetry, Asymptote, Gravel, and elsewhere. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Twoxism, a collaboration with visual artist Maria Haro (8th House Publishing, 2018) and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, 2016). Serea’s poem “My Father’s Quiet Friends in Prison, 1958-1962” received the 2013 New Letters Readers Award. She won the Levure Littéraire 2014 Award for Poetry Performance, and she was featured in the documentary Poetry of Witness (2015). Her poems have been translated in French, Italian, Arabic, and Farsi, and have been featured in The Writer’s Almanac. Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month, and she co-hosts The Williams Poetry Readings in Rutherford, NJ.