‘One Language’ by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Published in 2022 by smith|doorstop. Buy direct from The Poetry Business
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There is a photograph towards the end of Anastasia Taylor-Lind’s ‘One Language’ that shows her, aged not much more than two or three, with her father, their horses Star and Blue, and the wagon that they called home. With its faded colour and spots of damage, this image from 1983 reverberates with much of the same warmth and mystical appeal as Vashti Bunyan’s flight to the Hebrides just over a decade previously. Yet if Bunyan’s ‘Wayward’ rather gently punctures the myth of such an existence, then Taylor-Lind lays into it with a sledgehammer. In her text we are told that “The caravan has no plumbing. One cold night, Dad and Brother piss out the door into a bucket. Me too, one un-pyjamed leg swinging out, cocked over the rim, bracing myself off the aluminium frame, my aim inferior.” She goes on to describe the art of urinating in war zones, noting that “in Libya the threat of unexploded ordinance makes the verge a no-mans land for pissers” whilst “Winter in Ukraine” sees “hay-sweet steam rising between [her] haunches.” Notes too that “In Uganda they say Do you want to stop and check the tyres? Too polite to ask the real question.”

You can probably guess from these quotes that ‘One Language’ is hardly a cheery read, and you’d be right: it isn’t. Intentionally so, one suspects. It is an uncomfortable book, by some distance the most difficult thing I’ve read in 2022. It is a book outside of my comfort zone, the kind of thing I might once have been more drawn to but that these days, like news bulletins on television or in newspapers, I tend to avoid. I know that much of the world and many human beings that inhabit it are shit, I just don’t particularly want to be reminded of that fact on a regular basis.

If anyone is going to do the reminding, however, I’d pick Anastasia Taylor-Lind to do it, for there is at heart a positive spirit and an optimistic resolve to her work that is compelling. Perhaps best known for her work as a photojournalist in Libya and Ukraine (her ‘Maidan: Portraits from The Black Square’ is one of my favourite photobooks of recent times), ‘One Language’ is her first collection of prose and poetry. That her texts are more harrowing than her photographs perhaps says as much about the humanity which Taylor-Lind invests her visual work, or perhaps just highlights how much more easily words can cut through the ‘reality’ of what is seen to the much more troubling things that most of us need only visualise with our minds. In ‘1st Nat Geo Assignment’ then we witness Taylor-Lind “watch two policemen / prod a baby with sticks, / its plump white face bobbing face down” In ‘9.05’ we are in Stepanakert, reporting on the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War where men “look for their missing sons” and where “At the morgue , unrecognisable remains wait on DNA matches”. Anastasia almost blandly notes that is is her “job to photograph this.”

When I was teaching photography to 15 and 16 year olds in Devon I sometimes tried to approach this issue of the role of the (photo)journalist. It was always a difficult lesson and I never mastered its complexities, not least because of the varied needs and contexts of the students. Bottom line though is that almost no-one would ever stand up and say “I could do that. I could make those photographs.” I would wrap the lesson up by saying that it seems to me that the (photo)journalists are there because they care, but that paradoxically they cannot allow themselves to care. Maybe that is too simplistic, but maybe too it starts to at least scratch the surface of the truth.

At its core ‘One Language’ is about Taylor-Lind’s complex relationship with violence, and that previously quoted text about pissing sits within a series of short pieces titled ‘Stories No-One Wants To Hear’. It is a remarkable sequence, filled with candid confessions and grim realities that cuts to the heart of things. She writes: “My dad beat my mum, and me too when I tried to protect her. We all seek to reproduce the familiar conditions of our childhood, even when we are trying to escape them. Violence is familiar to me, it has always been present in my life and my relationship with it shaped my relationship with photography.” It’s all quite matter-of-fact, almost dispassionate. A mechanism to survive, perhaps, or a method of living, whatever. That idea, again, that one might exist within the space where the eternal duel between caring too much and not enough is fought. She goes on to describe how her dad (who had been a teenage boxer in the East End of London) “taught me how to throw a punch, the summer before starting high school” and that “he encouraged me to hit anyone who bullied me. He said Anastasia, some people only understand one language.” I’m sure it hardly comes as a spoiler to learn that her dad was the first person Anastasia punched, “to stop him from hitting [her] mum.”

It’s Taylor-Lind’s descriptions of the second and third people that she punched that really draw me up with a start though. These were fellow students at Tivvy High. Students who, like Anastasia, I taught at various points in their five years at the school. In the first incident Anastasia knocks out another girl’s front tooth in a scrap at lunchtime, all because the girl called Anastasia’s pony ‘ugly’. Twelve year olds, huh? The other is when she gave “one of the toughest bullies” a bloody nose in a maths class being supervised by a supply teacher. In her text Taylor-Lind is typically forthright, unapologetic. Real names are used. Names I’ve not seen in print since I packed away my markbooks many years ago. For some reason (nostalgia, no doubt) I kept the ones from my first few years teaching. They must be in a box in the attic somewhere, gathering dust and slowly decaying. When I read Anastasia’s text now I can just about see those faces as they were three decades ago. I remember that they were not all always bad kids. I remember that everyone is damaged and that everyone has their reasons. Mostly though, I wonder what poor member of the school leadership team had to pick up the pieces. Mostly I think about the fights and conflicts still taking place in those classrooms and corridors. And I wonder too, had I been teaching that lesson about (photo)journalism in 1997 and Anastasia had been in the class, if she would have stood up and said “yes. Yes, I could make those photographs.” I suspect she’d have glowered, silent and sullen in the corner, whilst inwardly thinking that of course she could. What a stupid fucking question. It would certainly explain why Anastasia Taylor-Lind is still out there, picking through the pieces and documenting the trauma and rage and desperation and love that human beings are capable of.

The ‘Stories No-One Wants To Hear’ closes with Taylor-Lind acknowledging that “Pacifism is a privilege of the peaceful and the empowered – inside the home, in our communities and on a global scale. For the most part I own those privileges but when I don’t it’s harder to be a pacifist.” She concludes with: “I’ve tried to tell these stories in professional discussions about violence so many times but no-one wants to hear them.”

Perhaps now, with the publication of ‘One Language’, not quite no-one.