Kapka Kassabova: "I am much more of an easterner than a westerner in my soul, in my sensibility."

MM: At what moment did you cease to write poetry — or lose the impulse to read it publicly?

KK: I don't want to read my poems in front of an audience because my poems are now inside my prose.What's happened is a merge. I used to be a poet, also labeled a poet, but I think it's much more fluid than that. And I think I will always remain a poet until the day I die. To be a poet is not to write stanzas on a page that are shaped like poems.

It's about how you view the world, how you interact with it, and then what you draw from it. I know people who are poets but they don't write poetry. 

There is a character in my latest book Anima, a shepherd that I spent a summer with. He's from a marginal background, but he's a poet. He's also an alcoholic. He's also got many issues. But he's an everyday poet because of the way he interacts with the natural world, with wilderness, with the dogs and the sheep and with himself.

I was able to write this book thanks to him and others like him, who are everyday poets and everyday heroes.

Poetry and prose merged for me, but I continue to look for the symbols in an experience, in a place, in a person that I meet. I'm always interested in symbols and patterns, you know, the motifs. And we live in a universe that is absolutely full of patterns and symbols and we clearly see this often in a negative way. For example, in war, we see how a pattern from the past is repeated. This is not our present. It's the past and we are being dragged into it. 

MM: You continuously work with your Bulgarian identity, roots and heritage in your texts, but the “Balkan Quartet” has become even more than that. Critics even call it an “Ode to Balkans”. What is the symbolic meaning of the tetralogy for you?

I completely rediscovered what it means to be from the Balkans, my understanding of myself, of my family and my ancestry, of relationship with nature — it all changed. I was totally changed by these journeys.

I spent 10 years on these four books that form the Balkan Quartet. It was an epic journey. I knew nothing about the Balkans. I was a beginner and I love being a beginner. I like to start every new journey, every new book as a beginner because then you can learn, then you are not imposing yourself on your subject. You are letting your subject come to you and you are kind of a vessel.

I'm a practicing Buddhist and I love this concept from Zen Buddhism that if you empty yourself of your ideas and your desires then you can be filled with the world. And then you experience reality in a different way. 

Let’s start with “Border”, the first of the four books: I learned to listen and to be present. It's a real skill to be present with another person or in a situation or in a place where you are not at home. You are out of your comfort zone. Those encounters in the border zone with border people, both locals — Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, Gypsies — and the refugees coming in from Syria at the time, and others, it's that merging where you forget your history, you forget your ideas and you become that place, that moment. This is my Nirvana  and it's only possible because of the act of writing. I would not experience these amazing encounters with people if I didn't have the intent to write about it.

And again, I couldn't write these books if I wasn't completely open to these encounters and these experiences. I think  the Balkans can only be understood from a position of radical openness. 

In the next book, “To the Lake”, the last chapter is set in the monastery of Saint Naom, a hermit monk who lived on the shores of Lake Ohrid and died 1,000 years ago. He's buried there and that's a holy place that people go to for healing, both Christians and Muslims. If you spend time there, everything dissolves, time itself. It's also because of the presence of this great body of water, Lake Ohrid.

It's actually on the border with Albania, which is now open. You can walk to Albania, but there is still a political border on the water, so you can't cross on a boat. It's one of those crazy legacies of the iron curtain between Yugoslavia and Albania. However, when you are there for a few days, you experience what I describe as dissolving or merging, in other words, healing.

And I was in search of healing, especially through the inherited pain in my family, during these 10 years, from book to book, from journey to journey, meeting hundreds of people and listening to their stories, whether it's the Bulgarian-Turkish-Greek border or Lake Ohrid and Prespa with the Albanian-Macedonian and Greek sides. 

The last two books, Elixir and Anima, took me more to the non-human world, but again it's about people still. 

It almost felt like a magical journey, also very frightening at times. There were places where you don't know what's going to happen. But I like that. I don't mind being afraid and I don't mind risking my safety because I have to go to the end of the road.

I'm like a treasure hunter. I'm always digging up the gold of the story. Trying to get to the bottom of it: what is this really about? What is the truth? That's the gold and that's why the third book in the series is called Elixir, which is an alchemical term. The alchemist is looking for the Elixir of life. And of course it's not immortality, not in the literal sense. The elixir that I found is contained in the heart. 

MM: To write about the Balkans in English is, in a way, to explain — to translate for Western readers the philosophies, histories, politics, and ecosystems of the region. Yet in the feedback — from critics, readers, journalists — there are often words mysticism, magic, mystery. Does this persistent romanticizing of the Balkans interfere with a deeper understanding of Eastern Europe?

KK: During our discussion at Frontera Literary Festival in Lutsk, Ukraine, there was a mention of the long shadow of the Soviet Empire. I thought, at least Ukrainians are decolonizing themselves. In the most horrendous sort of circumstances, in wartime. But Bulgarians haven't decolonized themselves fully. I suppose a lot of this is very subconscious (and we can even colonize ourselves!). That's actually one of the subjects of  the second book “To The Lake”: how colonization, oppression,  and the patriarchy can penetrate the psyche of a nation, of families and how these power games can be reenacted in a very intimate setting, like a family, or our own lives, our own inner conflict as individuals. I don't think that this idea of mystery that is present in the book in any way takes away from the political experience, from the much more material concerns like mass migration.

Sometimes we label things magical or mysterious through a habit or through a lack of a better word. What I'm really interested in, especially in Elixir and Anima, is the sacred within nature and our relationship with the sacred through nature. Because nature is inherently both completely material, going through its inexorable seasons and cycles of life and death and rebirth, and at the same time sacred and ensouled.   

It's a deeply personal thing. My own experience of the world's soul, Anima Mundi. That's why I titled the last book Anima. Yes, it is the root of the word animal in many  European languages, but originally the word animal means soul.

So an animal is a being which has a spirit or soul. And so the Anima Mundi, that is everywhere, is really what I am exploring in these books. And if someone thinks that's mysterious or magical, that's fine by me.

My four books explore a very, very small part of the Southern Balkans. The last two books are actually entirely set in Southwest Bulgaria. But they are still Balkan books because within those places are contained much larger histories of people. As pastoralist migrants who have come from other parts of the Balkans. What’s also very important is Islam and Christianity cohabiting in the Balkan's peacefully.

Elixir is set in an area which has a lot of pomaks. They are the Bulgarian Muslims, a unique thing in the Balkans. It’s the only place in Europe where Muslims have lived for centuries, where Islam has shaped a lot of culture, architecture, and the culture of food. Generally Balkan food is influenced by the Middle East. It's very different from the rest of Eastern Europe and Western Europe.

That's why I'm drawn to the Balkans as a writer, I sense the richness of untold stories. I think that Balkan civilization is a civilization in its own right. It is not just culture. You can see it in the faces of people. You can see that the whole world has come to the Balkans at some point in the past and has mixed and produced this incredible alchemy of culture, and nature, and languages, and ways of life.

MM: Having the privilege of belonging to two contexts — Eastern and Western Europe — you’re in a position to observe how perspectives differ on major issues, such as the Russian-Ukrainian war. What are your observations?

KK: They are different worlds. To start  with Bulgaria, we touched on colonization — and I think the Soviet damage is still part of the societal fabric in the country.

These things, these collective traumas take generations to heal from. Every nation has lived it differently, and yet we share common damage, common hopes and common culture. We are part of the Soviet world in the post-Soviet world.

There is this feeling of polarity, which I think is a very crude way of seeing ourselves. It's there, between West and East. In Bulgaria, unfortunately, the east means Russia, and the West means progressive values, Europe is equated with progressive values. I think it's much more complex than that. 

First of all, the east doesn't just mean Russia. I am personally very drawn to the east.

To me, the east means I am drawn to the Balkans because the Balkans still are quite eastern. I am much more drawn to the Balkans as a writer than to Western Europe, for example. I am drawn to the east as in Southeast Asia, but also India and Hinduism, and Tibetan and Zen Buddhism.

I am much more of an easterner than a westerner in my soul, in my sensibility. And I think generally in my sort of emotional makeup. At the same time I am the writer I am because of my partially western education. And that means actually Anglophone.

That has shaped me in a certain way and given me the kind of distance or filter which makes it possible to experience Eastern aspects of the Balkans which otherwise would be so overwhelming for me emotionally that I couldn't write about them.

I probably couldn't have written the Balkan Quartet in Bulgarian because it's overwhelming, and because there is so much pain there. Yet at the same time I have rewritten these books in Bulgarian once I'd written them in English. I needed to pass through that filter of English which is not my mother tongue. It's a more rational language for me, whereas Bulgarian is almost pre-verbal.

Going back to your question, I don't know a single Bulgarian who doesn't support Ukrainian sovereignty, it goes without saying. I don't know anybody who thinks this war is okay. At the same time, there are people—mostly of the older generation—who have a complex relationship with the idea of Russia, who still would like not Russia itself, because they haven't actually been to Russia, but the idea of Russia.

There is this kind of  tradition which was implanted, of course, by the communists in Bulgaria, that Russia saved us. You know, Russia saved us from the Turkish yoke during the Russian-Turkish war in the late 19th century, after which Bulgaria gained its independence.

This is the myth of one east saving us from another east. That's why I think the Bulgarian relationship with the east is complex. 

It's Russia or Turkey. Both are unwanted generally, and yet both are a part of our history, our culture, and that's the long road to emancipation for Bulgarians: understanding fully who we are, understanding fully what 500 years of being part of the Ottoman world have given us. Instead of rejecting it, understanding it and celebrating it.  We haven't got there yet as a nation. And I think that's part of the mission of my books.

I am exploring the East in the Balkans, I am telling these stories, learning a lot about   this kind of syncretism between Christian, Muslim and pagan in the Balkans over the millennia. It's much more interesting than official history has taught us in Bulgaria. 

I think Bulgarians are very damaged by the Soviet system, and they don't even understand how damaged they are. And that's why for a lot of liberal Bulgarians Western values are good, Eastern values are bad.

I think it's more complex than that. Looking at the situation in Gaza and the reaction of many Western European or generally European governments, what are European values exactly? What are we talking about? It seems that Arabs are basically second class citizens.

Racism, I think, is still very much part of the European psyche. The European mentality is still unconsciously or even consciously racist, especially when it comes to the Palestinians who are being exterminated. Western governments still support Israel.

I think it has to come back to our shared humanity in the end. Not the East and West.

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The material was prepared within the framework of the project “Ecocriticism: European Contexts for Ukrainian Culture,” implemented by the Frontera Literary Platform with the support of the British Council’s “Support for Cultural Activities in Ukraine with the Participation of the United Kingdom” programme.