Sophia Shalmiyev
The release of Portland author Sophia Shalmiyev’s debut memoir, Mother Winter, comes at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is teetering on the edge of hysteria, funding for birth control and access to abortion is precariously positioned, and eyes are looking to Russia, a looming question mark in our current political saga. Distinctly feminist and speaking to the experience of an Azerbaijani-Russian immigrant, Mother Winter could not come at a better time.
Shalmiyev weaves an interlocking bricolage of abandonment, transnational identity, feminism as salvation, and the many mothers who shape our psyches—at the center of which is her biological mother, Elena, a figure of loss and unresolved longing. Elena is a woman haunted by alcoholism and instability and Shalmiyev, as a child and political refugee, is forced to leave her behind in Russia.
Many makers become de-facto mothers to Shalmiyev through art: Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Richardson, Sappho, Catherine Millet, Anne Desclos, Sinéad O’Connor all make appearences, and the list goes on. Throughout the text are anecdotal meditations on holes, the number four, car accidents, and photographs—symbolic windows into the obsessions of the author that always channel back to the question of what it means to be mothered and find belonging.
That’s how I felt with Sophia Shalmiyev. She plays Fiona Apple and pours us tea. Her cozy apartment is decorated in a style I’d call feminist bohemian: overflowing bookshelves and a velvety couch. We had spoken briefly once before, at Our Words Are a Bridge, The. Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. She is an MFA graduate of Portland State University with a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from The School of Visual Arts. Sophia is a feminist writer and painter and lives in Portland with her two children. Mother Winter is her first book. Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to America in 1990. She is a feminist writer and painter living in Portland with her two children. Shalmiyev’s work has appeared in Literary Hub, Guernica, Electric Lit, LARB, The Rumpus, Vela, Portland Review and other publications. She teaches creative writing at PNCA and PSU. Her first book, Mother Winter.
A particularly memorable section occurs when Shalmiyev recounts a conversation with an American-born citizen who shows his distaste for this country and his desire to move abroad. She responds, “I ain’t ever leaving. I love America. It’s broken, like me.”
When I ask her about this moment, Shalmiyev says, “I do not mean it as a patriot or nationalist, but I feel so passionate about how hilarious women are allowed to be here, how irreverent we’re allowed to be…. Feminism [in the Soviet Union] meant you’re just the best at your career, and in America I feel like I can really fail. And I need, and all women need, the right to be wrong. People who feel they want to leave and say, ‘Fuck this place, I’m leaving’ should totally do that, but a lot of times, they just have the privilege to do that. But for us crawling here, trying so hard, I can’t afford to really shit on America.”
In conjunction with Shalmiyev’s book release, the Basil Hallward Gallery at Powell’s City of Books in Portland will present an installation of paintings Shalmiyev created during the writing of Mother Winter. Thematically intertwined with the book, Forty by Forty, Paintings from Mother Winter: A Memoir, will be on display for the month of March.
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Rendered with an urgency consistent with the language of Mother Winter itself, many of the paintings feature figures adrift and enmeshed in layers of webs and paint, creating a sense of being held under. There’s a feeling of raw ugliness beneath them, which stands in contrast to some of the more mesmeric and painfully constructed sentences that pepper the text.
The prose of Mother Winter is rendered with perceptive, enduring grace. “My mother is a cut flower, a bloom crinkling brown on one end and a closed stalk with no water to drink,” Shalmiyev writes. “By what means does this orphan-maker survive? Her child was all daffodils between her thighs. Spilling out yellow. Slimy fungus water on stems in the jar kept too long on a shelf. Her daughter transplanted, transported. A twig re-grafted onto another species of tree.”
It’s strange, the three books Alexandra Fuller chose to publicly stab through the spine in the New York Times last week. They don’t have a lot in common. They are all three women’s memoirs, and I’ve read only one of them: Sophia Shalmiyev’s Mother Winter. I know a little bit about Reema Zaman’s work, and I suspect her memoir is going to be another Big Magic. Pam Houston simply isn’t for everybody—I respect her as a writer and particularly as a teacher, but I’ve never latched on to her books. Shalmiyev’s book reaches rare feats of lyricism and collage, comparable to Kate Zambreno but with more muttering and pacing. Why Fuller chose to group these three is beyond me.
Mother Winter tells a story that verges on unbelievable. Sophia was raised in Soviet Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again), her parents astonishingly neglectful, her environment one of deprivation that contemporary Americans will have a hard time getting their heads around. Her mother vanished from her life because of addiction and general depravity just before Sophia and her father emigrated to America, after which she sort of got on the path to a normal Western adulthood. That path took her through drugs, peep-show stripping, and a lot of murky rooms before she found herself married and a mother twice over.
Shalmiyev’s body tells the story of Mother Winter. It speaks its own language to the reader, through both its own motherhood and its animal yearning for someone to mother it. Every memory, every detail, is filtered through a body experience, even jars of preserves: “No, there was a shelf to the left as you left. It stealthily held our winter hopes in jars. The sours. The bitters. The salts. The brines.” I suspect that the poeticism of Shalmiyev’s work disguises a less-than-reliable memory. The narrative has little logical or chronological order. Even in ordinary language it would be a difficult story to follow, but no matter. It’s a book full of sensation, and small polygons of meaning, rather than a linear story.
Especially toward the end, Mother Winter takes extraordinary risks for a book from a mainstream publisher:
Mike is not coming home from school until later and I feed the kids the old soup. Save the chops for another day, since they will just suck on the bone and mush the rest to meat juice. Their teeth are like magnets, which are sacred and holy and keep us going round. My stepmother has used magnets on her ailing joints and brittle bones.
That’s a single paragraph, one joined with Shalmiyev’s instincts rather than narrative cogency, and man, are her instincts incredible to watch at work. Mother Winter’s most distinct pleasure is Shalmiyev’s authority as a writer, on a language level and in her capacity for assemblage. Whatever Fuller was looking for from this memoir, in the course of not finding it, she missed a hell of a book.
Sophia Shalmiyev Mother Winter
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