Groundswell
Yanara Friedland
Groundswell is a collection of border narratives, rituals, and biographies of Grenzgaenger. Inside the narrator’s dream to return home, we encounter the living archive of walls and ruins. Along Germany’s former east-west division or the southwest borderlands of the US and Mexico, the ground begins to swarm with stories. The multivocal text, composed from oral histories and memories, presents voices at the crossroads who weave a map between teller and listener, site and onlooker, the dead and the living as well as the walking body and earth itself.
“In its work with no solution, no epiphany, no landing on one side or the other, no progress, I felt a promise within the pages of Groundswell. Exhaustion as nothing to fear, and taken for what it is, perhaps exhaustion contains within it some vitality we may be unpracticed at recognizing. We certainly do not design it and therein lies the key. Exhaustion’s vitality cares little about betterment or pre-determined outcome. It is a kind of ‘giving up’ in order to give everything to something brand new. ‘When groundswells all eyes go under.’”
— Jill Magi, from the introduction
“Yanara Friedland’s transnational and transhistorical investigations of borderization, militarization, nationalism, exile and statelessness in the Americas and in Europe push us to feel and imagine the spaces between the visible and the invisible, between appearance and disappearance. This intertwining of the Arizona desert with the shifting political and linguistic power structures of post-War Europe unfolds across “parallel times” in a powerful, moving, eloquent and poignant fusion of documentary, poetry, and testimony. This is a singular and beautiful book.”
— Daniel Borzutzky
“Friedland’s book of essays, brilliantly interweaving personal memories and documentary poetics, is a captivating and timely meditation on flight, refuge, belonging and the transgenerational spectres of borders. Friedland knows that in order to narrate into the future, language needs to be ‘errata,’ a gifted smuggler. Each word an ear to the ground, she tunes her multilingual listenings to the overlapping and displaced regions that make up our past and our present: ‘Each separation is a link.’”
— Uljana Wolf
YANARA FRIEDLAND is a writer and translator born in Berlin. Her first book Uncountry: A Mythology was the winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Fiction award and is published in German translation (Maria Meinel) with Matthes & Seitz (2021). Her collection of essays Groundswell (Essay Press) has been supported by grants from the DAAD and Arizona Commission on the Arts. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she teaches at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and is writing a book on sleeplessness.