Yegana Jabbarova talks about her escape from Russia. “I am the perfect enemy, in many ways,” she says. The poet, essayist and literary scholar had to leave the country at the beginning of 2024. As a member of an ethnic minority, a feminist, a queer person and an opponent of the war, she offered a lot of attack space; it became too dangerous for her.
Jabbarova was born in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 1992 and grew up within the Azerbaijani community in the Russian diaspora. In a café in Hamburg, where she has lived with her wife since June 2024, she talks about the Mesha literature festival that she organized and which took place at the end of February 2022. She speaks English because she doesn’t feel confident enough in German yet.
“During the first days of the Russian war of aggression, we were all shocked,” she says. It was spontaneously decided to recite poems by Ukrainian poets. The actual program of the festival dealt with feminist and decolonial perspectives in Russia, topics that Dschabbarova has been dealing with for a long time – and with which she is quickly marked as an opponent in today’s Russia. In particular, the topic of colonial violence and dealing with its consequences has a lot to do with what is happening in Ukraine today, she explains.
Yegana Jabbarova: “The hands of the women in my family were not meant for writing.” Translated from Russian by Maria Rajer. Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2025. 140 pages, 23 euros
By publishing two anthologies as part of the festival, she attracted further hatred: “These people said that the books and the whole festival were directed against the government. They see something positive in colonialism.” In addition, she never hid that she was against the war, and that alone became very dangerous.
Question about belonging
But in 2023 her debut novel “The Hands of the Women in My Family Were Not Meant for Writing” was published in Russia. It is now available in German translation and she says that it is strongly autobiographical. It’s about her family, about origin and the question of belonging.
The reason for the choice of topic lies in her existence, she says emphatically: “In Russia I was not a Russian girl, everyone emphasized that. In the 90s I was confronted with a lot of violence against me. And on vacation in Azerbaijan I was laughed at because of my Russian accent and didn’t belong there either. So I ask myself the important and powerful question: Where do I belong? It has haunted me for years, long before I wrote the novel.”
In the book, the first-person narrator is confronted with everyday racism at school and on the street; in one scene she is persecuted as a student by Skins: “That was the first time I felt the nearness of death with my skin, a real animal danger; then I understood that being foreign meant being hated, being a vessel for irascibility.”
Radicalization of society
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan declared its independence in 1991. The relationship with the former colonial power Russia has been characterized by tensions ever since. However, a large Azerbaijani minority lives in the Russian diaspora. According to the 2010 census, there are about 600,000 people, but their actual number is estimated to be higher.
The discrimination that Jabbarova tells about in the novel took place in the 1990s and early 2000s. Today the situation is even worse: “Xenophobia and racism are increasing rapidly. You can physically attack and insult people just because they don’t look Slavic or speak a different language, there are no consequences.”
In contrast to back then, right-wing extremist and nationalist groups are now supported by state structures. Migrants are per se defamed as criminals. The radicalization of society and the legitimization of violence make Jabbarova very worried, including for her own family.
Reclaiming existence through writing
In order to tell the story of her family in a literary way, the author does not develop a plot; she does not tell the story linearly or chronologically. In associative, flowing connections, in a language that is as clear as it is poetic, she writes not only about her own experiences as a daughter and woman in an Azerbaijani family, but about those of many Azerbaijani women.
She found a very special form for this: each of the eleven chapters has the name of a part of the body. Eyes or mouth, hands or shoulders are each the starting point. There are various reasons for this decision, says Jabbarova. First of all, it has to do with the fact that she belongs to a minority. The right to one’s own existence is always in question. So she wanted to reclaim her existence through writing, through her body.
Because, she explains, “on the one hand, your body is transparent, you are not noticed. On the other hand, it marks otherness, not belonging. That’s why it’s so important to make this body visible. I want other people to feel my body when they read the book. It’s a way to assert my right to exist.”
Trapped in her body
Yegana Jabbarova speaks very clearly, there is urgency in her words. Another reason for orienting the narrative around the body is the serious illness that the author shares with her narrator: Generalized dystonia is the diagnosis, which is a neurological movement disorder. Legs, arms, all muscles gradually cramp, resulting in unbearable pain. Ultimately, what can be saved is an operation in which a small device is implanted that sends electrical impulses into the brain, known as deep brain stimulation.
Jabbarova’s debut is also about this profound experience. Ultimately, locked in her body, she was faced with death alone. But that made it clear to her that she was entirely responsible for how she lived her life. And therein lay “a moment of liberation from the expectations of others.”
Jabbarova describes physical violence by men against women as an accepted normality
The body also becomes the starting point to tell the story of the oppression of women in the strongly patriarchal Azerbaijani society. “The mouth was not intended for speaking,” it is said. And further: “All the women I saw around me never said what they really wanted to say, none of them ever interfered in men’s conversations because that wasn’t proper for women. The mouth was there to taste food, eat food, sing children to sleep and pronounce rules.” Otherwise, women should remain silent.
From control to colonial violence
Jabbarova also describes physical violence by men against women in the book as an accepted normality. But it is very important to her that violence is not seen as inherent to Azerbaijani culture. Anyone who does this exoticizes their culture, portrays it as backward and aggressive and thus turns those who belong to it into enemies.
“Violence is never part of a culture,” she says. “It is a big lie that it is part of the cultural heritage that men rely on when they commit violence. It is a manipulation to control others, to control minorities, to control women.” Everyone can and must decide. She belongs to the Azerbaijani culture and has decided against violence and does not accept it.
Through the aspect of control, she once again draws a link to colonial violence. A lot of it is in the Russian language – which also gave her access to literature. Therefore, “I use Russian, but I try to use it in such a way that it is not Russian”: Yegana Dschabbarova wants to use the Russian language to bring into her literature what has (so far) been excluded by it, to make the voices that have been silenced audible. In her impressive novel she achieves this in a warm tone, far from bitter.