Guram Odisharia (II) — The President's Cat
Description:
Miriane (Guram) Odisharia (1951–) is a renowned Georgian poet, prose writer, playwright, and public figure, born in Sukhumi and displaced to Tbilisi by the Georgian-Abkhazian war of 1992-3. He was the Georgian Minister of Culture and Monument Protection between the years of 2012 and 2014, and is recognized as an expert in conflict and peace transformation in the Caucuses. He has written widely about his own experiences of conflict and dislocation, and his work has been translated into languages including English, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Armenian, and Italian. His work often explores themes of nostalgia, loss, the concept of home, dislocation, survival, and self, before, during and after experiences of violence and war. Literary scholars note that the Black Sea is a significant source of inspiration for Odisharia, functioning as a personified force or conceptual plain against which the historical, political, cultural, and personal may be brought into focus.
His novel The President's Cat paints a vivid picture of Sukhumi, a once-exotic city-resort marred by the horrors of the Georgian-Abkhaz war.
Excerpt:
And so, it was the morning of January 13, 1962, the eve of the Old New Year.
While I was talking about this and that, he had already opened the third window of the office. He was alone in the room and, therefore, waved his hand as a sign of greeting to the sea, which was shining like a dolphin’s spine, and shifted his gaze to the fluffy white blobs amidst the greenery of the trees in the seaside park.
Before him lay the most blessed and the, at the same time (and primarily for this reason), biggest and smallest city in the world. Eternally palpitating and pensively quiet. I think a city is only yours when you no longer rush away from it to some other place. You live there and walk around it with a sort of pampered disposition, with a sensation that your home is unshakeable. It is through the absence of such sensations in other parts of the Earth that a man’s eye and heart distinguish his hometown.
The city is a place for observation and scrutiny via countless rapid alien glances. Especially in summer. And a resort town more than anywhere. It is full, even in winter, of mischievous ghostly glances of the most varied kind, streaming, gleaming . . . Except for one difference, summer glances are relaxed if watchful, while winter glances are calmer and more unfettered, as it were.
In fact, he did not see, but knew, that a little way off, down by the launch jetty, on the tables of the coffee bar, old men had set out chess pieces on boards and were probably already playing. He could even visualise them, the pensive biblical elders of the town, with voices muffled by snow, and he felt the desire to be there with them. An unendurable desire. But he ought to have been in his office, he was after all the No. 1 man in Abkhazia. Besides, a meeting was soon to take place. A conference with the No. 1, that is, with him. An important meeting.
Explanation:
Georgian author Guram Odisharia’s The President’s Cat (2007) reflects the littoral Black Sea zone, in this excerpt, as a site of physical and symbolic collision between human and natural worlds. It opens with a signaling of respect towards the personified shore: “he was alone in the room, and therefore, waved his hand as a sign of greeting to the sea…” The littoral space is emphasized here as one that is complex, diverse, and desirable as a site of leisure: a seaside resort that is bustling, filled with visiting people, ripe for “observation and scrutiny via countless rapid alien glances.” This is a context filled with the unknown, but where its native inhabitants preserve a careful, and mediated continuity with the natural world.