A pause. A breath. Deep. Every few pages. Sometimes there are no pauses between segments, but only ever a short, limited number of pages manageable. Poetry needed to be read like that; yet here the language was simple, direct and straightforward. The witnesses and participants have of course seen remarkable, astounding events through the course of the war, and a large part of the effect comes from that burden. But then the way the story forms in the telling, dredged up from so many years before, reveals a great deal of natural artistry. Reading segments to a friend from Secondhand Time a few weeks ago there was understandable suspicion. This was oral history?... No mediated hidden hand of the author lurking?... One who had worked in the field and listened to old storytellers had complete confidence. The example of the Nurse Aide wheeling a barrow of bread and discovering the nature of her own heart was a good case in point. The final fragment in the section titled “Grow Up, Girls…. You’re Still Green….”
NB. Svetlana Alexievich, Unwomanly Face of War pp. 68-9
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