In this short documentary I asked my grandfather to translate into his native Tatar, and to read it out loud, an excerpt from The Love of the Wolf, an essay originally written by Hélène Cixous in 1994. He translates it from Russian, which is already my adaptation of the text from English. The essay discusses the poem Le Gars (The Kid) by Marina Tsvetaeva. In it, a young girl falls in love with a were-wolf and sacrifices her life for keeping his secret. Cixous talks of the self-destructive and the sacrificial properties of love [between species]:

'What ties this wolf to this lamb, she figures, is the fact that it hasn’t eaten it. Painful mystery of the gift that returns through reflection: what the wolf loves in the lamb is its own goodness. It’s thanks to the lamb that the wolf accedes to the plane of love—the love that gives of itself without hope, without calculation, without response, but that nevertheless gives of itself, seeing itself give of itself. The wolf given to a lamb of the Griniov type who doesn’t even notice the enormity of the gift—that’s really love. There remains the infinite solitude of the wolf, invisible and unrecognized except by itself. What interest does Pougatchov have in not eating the lamb? The ascetic and dangerous interest of self-love. The lover loves the beloved, which is the occasion for generous love. But thereafter—thereafter there is the aftermath. Now the wolf can no longer break away from the lamb, for the lamb retains, for better or worse, traces of the gift. That which is given in love can never be taken back. It is me my entire self that I give with the gift of love. This is why the wolf can’t stop loving the lamb, the chosen one. Repository of the wolf. All of the wolf. That’s how love can ruin the lover.

And this is not the end of it. What else? One more riddle: ‘The black thing that loves the frail whiteness.’ Me loves non-me. Othello loves Desdemona. But Desdemona loves the black thing as well. The round goes on. The lamb loves its wolf. The wolf turns all white and starts quivering out of love of the lamb. The lamb loves the wolf’s fragility, and the wolf loves the frail one’s force. The wolf is now the lamb’s lamb and the lamb has tamed the wolf. Love blackens the lamb.

Wolf, whom do you love?'

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This work was my earliest attempt at communicating my ancestral belonging before I had the words for it. 'Indigenous' was not yet pronouncd, I was brought up in polarities of 'us' and 'them' and as a white-passing person as a means of protection from racial discrimination, and my Tatar side was known only as 'Ethnic Minority'. I am adding these notes in 2026 amidst the ongoing systematic erasure of Indigenous Peoples worldwide.

My grandfather's side are Ethnic Tatars from the South East of Ural Mountains in Bashqortostan - the First Nation People of the region. Tatar, Bashqort, and many other First Nations were colonised under Imperal Russia, have sufferred segregation, disposession, and violence leavng many generations traumatised; Tatars were the first Indigenous group sent off en mass as gun fodder in the current war against Ukraine. Writing these words would automatically makes me a 'foreign agent' in the state of Russia, where Indigenous activists are imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

My grandfather's early childhood was spent in an all Bashqort - a sister language to Tatar - speaking school at the insistence of his father, and although Russian is his second language, it was the required standard (read: assimilation), and became his primary and more fluent one. He never complained, but told many stories of hardship and survival. I have always found it heartbreaking that he, his siblings, and many others had much of their culture and language taken away from them. Today Tatar language is considered endangered.

In the course of two days of filming the text becomes secondary giving way to the process of translation and an unfolding on a grandfather-granddaughter relationship as we search for the missing words online. The parts of the film where no subtitles are given are spoken in Tatar, only some of which I can understand. As a child I was taught only a few words in Tatar at home, my granddad finding joy in creating this bond between us. We spent almost two decades apart since I was moved to the UK, and it was only towards his later years we got to re-establish this bond during my visits, his storytelling, and making the most of limited time.

His life was one of harsh realities, and the word 'love' was never said out loud at home, not in relation to people anyway, although I always felt it in abundance. Hence my selection of this text - to speak of something unspeakable in a place where sofness and vulnerability are a weakness. This softness became accessible to him as he ag, perhaps forgetting himself, and he often talked about his mother: his answer to almost every one of my questions was, 'this is how our mum taught us, that's why we do it this way'.

Supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts, new work commission for The Political Animal event at The Showroom, London.