By Irina Moga
Content warning: sexual violence
Cristina A. Bejan is a poet, historian, and theatre artist who hails from Denver, Colorado. An Oxford DPhil, Rhodes, and Fulbright scholar, she is also the author of eighteen plays produced in several countries.
Green Horses on the Walls, her first collection of poems, is a 2021 Independent Press Book Award Winner and the 2021 Colorado Authors’ League Book Award for cover design—which is also Bejan's creation.
In Green Horses on the Walls, Cristina A. Bejan delivers a poignant quest for identity that transforms the rawness of everyday events and unbearable trauma into a fluid and polyphonic poetic discourse.
Some of the poems in this collection were included in the show Lady Godiva, part of the Mead Theatre Lab Program in February 2016; the chapbook's tone vibrates with immediacy and, at times, whimsical humour. It engages the reader in media res of personal experiences, reinterpreted through witty lines:
"Things could be worse
Parents with cancer
Love of your life leaves you for the priesthood
You could have more than mental health "issues" and actually be totally insane
….
Never cry
Not sleep enough
Swear off chocolate" (2)
The bittersweet decoding of Bejan's heritage, starting with "A Tricky Diaspora," introduces us to a suite of poems that reveal the pain inflicted by the Communist regime in Romania and how this suffering echoed through generations and across geographies. It is a tortuous thread that the poet is willing to surface and, in doing so, lets readers judge for themselves the facts narrated.
A key poem in the volume, "Green Horses on the Walls," can be read as the allegory of a tipping point in which the writer comes to realize that art is precisely what keeps her in step with her inner self:
"My truth is displayed on the open canvas of my art
My truth runs with the green horses
Through the fields, down Rockville Pike, and eventually all the way through
the heart of DC—14th St." (14)
But the darkest and, arguably, most daring narrative in the book comes to us towards its end, in sequences of betrayed love, rape, and its effects that Bejan recounts in a gripping monologue:
"Thank you for proving that not all rape victims look alike
Thank you for proving that there is a reason for the ‘little black dress’stereotype as I was indeed wearing one" (32)
It's a moment of gloom and dissolution. Yet, we sense that the author has surpassed it through her faith, anger, and the catharsis of writing.
This poetry volume made me think of a quote by Shelley: "Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."
In a brave new world in flux, millennial writers like Cristina A. Bejan are likely to find their way towards this perennial aesthetic goal.