Uncountry: a mythology is divided into four histories: "History of Ash," "History of Breath," "History of Hunger," and "History of Future." This naming is perhaps Friedland's first gesture to push us toward the very displacement that is at the center of her narrative. These are not histories of the four natural elements—fire, water, earth, and air—or of certain individuals or families, or certain time periods that we might have expected. The world of this book has its own natural elements, its own histories, geographies, peoples, dreams, and memories. It has its own tradition, its own language.
Yanara Friedland is a German-American writer, translator, and teacher. Her first book Uncountry: A Mythology was the winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Fiction award. Abraq ad Habra: I will Create As I Speak, a digital chapbook, is available from Essay Press. She is the recipient of research grants from the DAAD and Arizona Commission on the Arts, supporting her current book project Groundswell, a chorography of border regions in the Germany-Polish and Sonoran borderlands. She teaches at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and curates an occasional reading series Mutter Courage.
"As a descendent of Chantal Akerman and Unica Zürn—among others—Friedland reimagines the origin myth. Friedland's permeable pages allow the reader entryway into a 'mirror [that] becomes an open door,' a door through which we hear the echo of Ana Mendieta telling us 'There is no original past to redeem: there is the void.' Uncountry is an invitation to that void, and Friedland serves as dream guide through this blend of the personal, political, and stunningly poetic." - Lily Hoang
"Those patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis wander through the tales of creation as if creation has never stopped, Abram still seeking that singular God in another land, his faith making him a nomad; Sarah still watching her son Isaac walk away with his father to Mount Moriah, a sacrifice in the making. Such stories—like the myths and fairy tales so easily excluded from the reality of the world they are bedrock to—tend to be kept in the airtight container of holy into which the imagination gazes but from which the mouth never takes a breath. The ease of such approach is—thankfully, fearfully, gracefully—not the case in Yanara Friedland's beautiful book, Uncountry. Deep in the ethical vision of these prose pieces (each so dreamlike it seems the dream itself is dreaming) arrives the suggestion that the events of history—the heart-nulling wars, the Holocaust, the refugees broken by their own resistence; but also the personal fact, the harm of being anyone—reach back into the ancient tales and refuse them their pre-ordained eternity. The vision is reciprocal." - Dan Beachy Quick
"Uncountry: A Mythology demands of us the kind of journey into time and space that cannot be planned, but rather needs to be experienced and revealed, requiring a trust of the unknown." - Poupeh Missaghi
