Gulag Slang for Backyard Boys
Zura Jishkariani
STURM AND SLANG, EDITORIAL, ARCHIVE
"When the sky ends there, we say: Oh, the little paper boats were carried away by the river and killed."
— Dato Barbakadze
“We are helped by the Red Cross and other crosses too.”
— Eduard Shevardnadze, the second president of Georgia.
— Dato Barbakadze
“We are helped by the Red Cross and other crosses too.”
— Eduard Shevardnadze, the second president of Georgia.
01. King Shulgi and Rapper Kids
On a hot summer evening, I sat down to write this text to the voices of children in the Italian courtyard outside. They were rapping. With primitive rhymes and primitive words, a thin-voiced boy, no older than thirteen or fourteen, demonstrated to his opponent who was the stronger one — the more dangerous and the cooler of the two. Each witty line or insult was followed by cheers and claps of excitement from the boys and girls gathered around. This lively process reminded me of something — something both distant and familiar.
Drawings by Ana Gzirishvili, Untitled, 2024, Aquarelle Pencil on Paper.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Zura Jishkariani, a writer and self-proclaimed mayor of Sukhumi, is an IDP from Abkhazia. His first novel "Chewing Dawns" received the Saba Literary Award for Best Debut and the Ilia State University Award for Best Novel of the Year in 2017. In his latest work "Tanapha" (2024), the author explores flat ontology, authenticity, sacred and border situations, introducing main characters that are not human beings.
Alongside literature, Zura is known for musical projects such as Kung Fu Junkie, described as “second-hand techno,” and Kayakata - psychedelic hip-hop prayers for urban warriors.
By blending programming languages, personal experiences, and psychogeography, he has created diverse multidisciplinary works: the movement “illegal kosmonavtika,” which aimed to explore if the survival tactics used by Zura and his generation of war children in 90’s post-Soviet Georgia could be applicable to survival in a post-societal world in caseof massive societal collapse (2008);
a sentence erected on a Soviet building in Tbilisi suburbs with Tbilisi Public Art Fund (2024); interactive oracle avatars at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2018); a ship suspended in the air and connected to the sea at the SOU Festival (2017); and the first Georgian-language chatbot in 2010-2012, which was a textual interactive simulacrum of a Georgian poet, used by many teachers in their classrooms, among other projects.
Today, he is studying sociology at Tbilisi State University and plans to pursue a master's degree in Europe.