The SHATTERED PROJECT is the brainchild of visual artist Oana Maria Cajal and the result of a complex international collaboration.
Inspired by Oana Cajal’s artistic vision, poets from Ukraine, Romania, the United States and Canada contributed poems, and several musicians composed instrumental or vocal pieces, all reacting viscerally against the atrocities of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The concept is simple but original: artists respond to Oana's artwork with new creations while protesting the war at the same time. Here as part of this project is a poem by Claudia Serea in response to Oana Maria Cajal's painting BABUSYA.
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| BABUSYA by Oana Maria Cajal |
My Grandmother Set Her Ladder Against the Moon
by Claudia Serea
She kept all her belongings in a small wooden trunk
where she hid her despair among linens.
Nightgown billowing in the wind,
she climbed to the sky each evening
on her thin ladder:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
Why did you make my world bruised
and blood-warm?
Thy kingdom comes; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Why did you allow brothers
to butcher each other?
Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses.
Why did you give this burden to me?
I can’t carry it.
As we forgive those who trespass against us
Here it is, translucent,
quivering like the egg
still unformed inside the hen:
my life
with no protective shell.
And lead us not into temptation.
Take it.
But deliver us from evil.
And I’ll only keep this prayer
for my family’s return,
Amin.
Oana Maria Cajal is an award-winning visual artist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet. She was born in Bucharest and immigrated to the United States in 1980 with a grant from the American Theatre Association. She attended the Ph.D. Theatre Criticism program at New York's City University and obtained her M.F.A. in Playwriting from University of California San Diego (UCSD). Cajal has written plays that have had successful performances in cities across North America. She returned to graphic art in 2007, with her volume of Picto Poems, Solenodon, and had numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, America, and Romania.
Oana Maria Cajal is a Fulbright scholar and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, as well as many art prizes. She is also a member of Dramatists Guild of America, Writers Union of Romania, Theater Union of Romania (UNITER), the Union of Fine Artists of Romania, Playwrights Workshop Montreal, and Playwrights Guild of Canada. Her play, The Last Pact, was voted “Best Play of 2011” by UNITER. Her screenplay for the feature film The White Gate was nominated for the Gopo Awards, 2015.
Claudia Serea is a Romanian-American poet, translator, and editor. Her poems and translations are published in Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Oxford Poetry, among others. She is the recipient of the Joanne Scott Kennedy Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia, the New Letters Readers Award, and the Franklin-Christoph Merit Award. Her poems have been translated in Russian, French, Italian, Arabic, and Farsi, and have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac.
She is the author of seven poetry collections and four chapbooks, most recently In Those Years. No one Slept. (Broadstone Books, 2023) and Writing on the Walls at Night (Unsolicited Press, 2022).
Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month, and she co-edited and co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry. (Talisman House Publishing, 2011). She also translated from Romanian Adina Dabija’s Beautybeast (Northshore Press, 2012) and Iulia Militaru’s The Seizure of the Beast. A Post-research (Guernica Editions, 2023).
Claudia Serea serves on the editorial board of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets and is one of the curators of the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Readings in Rutherford, New Jersey.
The SHATTERED PROJECT multi-sensory exhibition was featured at La MaMa Umbria International in Italy in June 2022, at the National Museum of Romanian Literature in Bucharest, part of the International Poetry Festival in September 2022, at the Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado, part of the Ukraine-Freedom Showcase in December 2022, at the National Theater from Craiova, Romania, in early February 2023; at the Ukrainian Institute Open House ; and at the Romanian Cultural Institute . We are also planning to publish an anthology including all the writing and visuals created so far.
Many of us have reacted as soon as news of the war broke out, offering material support and donations to help the refugees and different organizations who are on the ground in Romania and Ukraine.
The SHATTERED PROJECT offers another kind of support—support for the soul: a direct connection with our brothers and sisters in Ukraine. Because we are far away from the war, but we feel very close. Personally, I feel like the war could have happened in Moldova or in Romania, as it did in the past. So we offer this symbolic gesture of solidarity, a metaphorical holding of our hands together channeling strength and hope. We hope that the SHATTERED PROJECT will inspire you, reaffirming the power of culture to connect us across borders and to ensure the survival of our shared humanity.
18 poets participating in the project: Ana Blandiana, Angela Baciu, Cristina A. Bejan, Magda Carneci, Adina Dabija, Catalina Florescu, Ioana Ieronim, Nora Iuga, Olena Jennings, Ruth Margraff, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Ksenia Rychtycka, Claudia Serea, Adela Sinclair, Sylvie Simmons, Vera Sirota, Gabriela Toma.
Composer, pianist: Michael Roth
Video director: Stefan Cajal
