Kapusta

Erín Moure

Image | BOOK COVER: Kapusta by Erín Moure

Caption:

In Kapusta, Moure performs silence on the page and aloud, writing "gesture" and "voice" to explore the relation between responsibility and place, body, and memory, sorrow and sonority. Here, poetry flourishes as a book "beyond the book," in a space of performance that starts and stops time.
In Little Theatres, Ern Moure's avatar Elisa Sampedrn first spoke about theatre and the need for smallness in order to articulate what is huge. Sampedrn, who reappears in the translation mystery O Resplandor as the translator of a language she does not speak, vanishes later in The Unmemntioable when the split in human identity that results from war and displacement is acknowledged. Now, in Kapusta, the character E. is alone, in the smallest of spaces — the bench behind her grandmother's woodstove in Alberta. Here, E. struggles to face the largest of historical and imagined spaces — the Holocaust in Western Ukraine — and to understand her mother's silence at the sadness of her forebears, her "salt-shaker love." (From House of Anansi Press)

From the book

(The impossible language)
She lets me stay here, behind the stove, even if my mother
thinks it's too hot, thinks I'll burn myself or get an infection,
have a heart attack at the age of five, or just catch a fever.
From here I can hear the voices of the others. Their
conversations I don't understand. I the old men who come
into my grandmother's house and sit down on the chairs.
Friends of my grandfather, immigrants now old. Who
had worked hard in their lives. Who had seen things. Who
had made decisions so their families could live.

From "(The impossible language)" by Erin Mouré, Kapusta ©2015. Published by House of Anansi Press.