Daria Serenko, the anti-Putin activist exiled in Madrid: “I write to prevent her voice from being the only one heard”

Many things have to happen for one day to write: “I wish ashes for my house.” That they put you in a Preventive Center for fifteen days for asking for a useful vote on your Instagram account. Getting your friends arrested for having a private queer party at their house. Let them smash their faces into the ground. Then they declare you a Foreign Agent, a euphemism for Enemy of the People, and soon they open a criminal case with your name. Let them look for you. Let them ban your books. That you go into exile, first in Georgia and then, for fear of extradition, in Spain. May you still have hope that your country will rise like a phoenix. “Maybe it’s a stupid hope,” says Daria Serenko (Khabarovsk, Russia, 1993), who has only been living in Madrid for a few months. «And in reality it is something that prevents me from living. Because when you think that in the end you will be able to return to your home, to your homeland, in a certain sense you ask yourself to what extent it makes sense to take root in the place where you are. Now I’m here and I’m not very sure if I should really get used to this, if I should put down roots in Madrid,” he continues.

Serenko is a writer, activist, literature teacher, artist and performer. She is one of the founders of the Feminist Resistance against War movement. [de Ucrania]which operates in more than twenty countries, and with which it continues to collaborate. He has just published in Spanish ‘I wish ashes for my house’ (Errata Naturae), a 2022 book that was born after that fifteen-day confinement. Spain hurt Unamuno. Russia hurts her. And a lot. «I wish ashes for my house. I won’t notice any heat until it burns. “I would approach a bonfire like that to warm myself, without holding back tears,” the poem continues.

—It’s a strong title.

—The other option was: “When I grow up, I will also be a dictator.” [sonríe]. But I preferred this one, more tragic, because Putin exercises a monopoly on concepts like homeland, house, home. And, in this way, what I am doing is saying: if this is my house, if this is my home, I am going to set it on fire. So that my house, my real house, can rise from the ashes like a phoenix.

—«I’m afraid of being a migrant. I see what it means. “I will lose everything, even though I don’t have anything,” he wrote in 2022. How are you handling your exile now?

—It is the second time that I am a migrant. The first two years I lived in Georgia, and for a few months I have been in Spain. They are very different migratory experiences. It is one thing to migrate in the post-Soviet space and another thing to migrate to the European Union. My fear of the book was not unfounded. I feel like a little girl who got lost in a supermarket. And I’m like that four-year-old girl who knows about three hundred words and tries to relate to the world around her with that minimal vocabulary.

—How did you get to Spain?

—I had to be urgently evacuated from Georgia because Russia opened a criminal case against me. They accuse me of failure to comply with the obligations of a foreign agent, which is a kind of discriminatory status that basically marks you as some kind of enemy of the people. That law on foreign agents was also passed in Georgia. Russia declared me wanted and captured. I had very little time to leave. And Spain helped me in this situation. For security reasons I cannot give more details.

—Are you still participating from Spain in the Feminist Resistance Movement against the War?

-Of course. I’m going to be in this circle for quite some time. [sonríe]. As long as I have the opportunity, no matter what, from wherever, I will help the anti-militarist movement. I’m not going to let him die. It’s a responsibility.

—What kind of actions do they carry out?

—I can only tell a few, because many of our activists and coordinators still remain in Russia. We hold demonstrations with posters with phrases that they send us from Russia, and that would be impossible to show there, because the police would immediately arrive to arrest you. We also demonstrate for reproductive justice, because in Russia they are trying to ban abortions.

—How did you start in activism?

—It was in 2014, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. War propaganda entered the universities, and we began to fight against it.

—Your literature is combative, of denunciation. How can it help change?

—Just by writing it is impossible to stop a dictatorship and a war, that is obvious. But you can do something. Now I am doing many writing workshops for feminist writers living in Russia and I repeat a lot that our task is to prevent the voice of the Government from being the only voice that is heard. It is a job for the future, because it is not going to do anything for you here and now, but it can influence the education of society, how that society relates in the future. What we do is describe the terrors of war and dictatorship so that we can imagine a world without those terrors. Because if we cannot imagine a world without dictatorship and without war, we will never be able to build it.

—Is there any cultural bridge left between Ukraine and Russia?

—There is cultural exchange, but it is something that is not talked about, because it is complicated. It is not very clear who talks to whom, what ideas are exchanged. The invasion of Ukraine was not only a geopolitical movement, it was also a cultural movement, an attempt to Russify the area. That is why today what many artists and writers and creators want to do is distance themselves from Russia, from everything Russian. And it is a position that I understand, of course. I’ll tell you an example. There was a Ukrainian poet who died in a Russian bombing, and as a tribute several writers translated her into Russian. Many Ukrainians were outraged, saying that the last thing she would have wanted was that translation. It’s all very complex. I believe that we must try to build bridges, but according to their own rules.