Mara Zalite represents the generation of Latvian writers that matured as artists under Soviet occupation. There are signs of political and intellectual malaise with the constraints of that regime in her own early poetry as well as in her commentaries on Latvian authors, such as Austra Skujina, who were lauded by the socialist realist critics for the wrong reasons. For Zalite, folklore is an important source of potential liberation, as evidenced most strongly in her play Pilna Maras istabina (Mara's Room Is Full, 1983), which depicts the pagan nature goddess Mara. Since Latvia regained its independence in 1991, Zalite has remained an active force in Latvian culture as a poet, playwright, librettist, and editor.
Zalite was born on 18 February 1952 in Krasnojarsk in the former Soviet Union into a family of political exiles. After her family returned to Latvia in 1956, she spent her childhood in the countryside. In 1975 she graduated with a degree in language and literature from the philology department of the University of Latvia. She began working in the field of literature early, starting out as a technical secretary at the Writers Union, presiding over the Young Writers Studio, and, from 1977 to 1990, serving as poetry consultant for the journal Liesma (Flame). Since 1989 she has been the editor in chief of the prestigious literary magazine Karogs (Banner).
Like some other Baltic writers, in the early 1980s Zalite participated in and furthered the movement for Latvian independence. In 1983 she wrote Pilna Maras istabina , the play that, perhaps more than any of her other works, captured the imagination and interest of readers. Before that, she had published poetry in periodicals as well as in the collections Vakar zaļaja zale (Yesterday in the Green Grass, 1977) and Rit varbut (Maybe Tomorrow, 1979), a portrait of contemporary youth, with its alienated and nihilistic tendencies.
Although the theme of Pilna Maras istabina may not seem as contemporary and politically relevant as the poetry, a careful reading will quickly disabuse one of that impression. The central situation is that of motherlessness. Madara, the central female figure in the play, laments: "Where shall I find the source? / They're looking to me, all of them. / But I-where is my source? / My god, my god, / None of us has a mother." The text uses the folktale plot of gifts wished for, received, and mostly misused, and it is written partly in the mode of a folk song. Three brothers do not know how to use the gifts they receive from the goddess Mara, while Madara works hard to fathom the meaning of her gift of "writing." Writing, in Latvian, also refers to embroidery, the traditional female means of access to ethnic culture.
Mara is, as she herself says, "the mother of all mothers," a goddess of pre-Christian wholeness. There is some hope in this play for the continuing of a feminine tradition, and perhaps even more importantly, some hope for that feminine tradition to lead to a new society built on values and ideas beyond those that motivated the brothers. The men's brutalized use of their gifts stems from a dull, earthbound literalness on the one hand and a vacuous, unthinking borrowing of symbolic values on the other. The tablecloth fosters untrammeled greed; the boots facilitate a foolish transcendence, ignoring all the actuality of life; and the hat provides the covering of denial and unconsciousness for the aggression of a hireling fighting for others' causes. For those who are left at the end of the play, living myth and an active "working through" of folk tradition may eventually provide an answer, but that remains beyond the limits of the play.
Another play, Tiesa (Trial), first performed in 1985 and published in 1987, mixes history and allegory in an examination of social conditions and their origin, the meaning of truth and lies in a social context, and the meaning of freedom and human happiness. The play includes among the varied characters Garlieb Merkel, the Baltic German enlightener who wrote an early and influential work on the Latvians at the end of the eighteenth century, and Zalite uses many quotations from that work. As in Pilna Maras istabina , there is a female presence at the center, and she is again connected with the word. In this play she is a vardotaja, a sorceress. Toward the end of the play, this "witch" cautions against mere hedonism:
That is all I will tell you.
Don't be surprised if some morning
Your arm feels strong.
Don't be afraid if suddenly
wounds heal from your words.
Don't fear it. It happens to those
Who have looked me in the eye.
Just don't forget one thing-
To assuage pain-is not the end.
Pain gives birth to words of happiness.
In the play Dzivais udens (Living Water, 1988), first performed in 1988, situations of moral conflict in various areas of life are explored, and myth again informs the plot and the characters. In 1988 there was also a performance of the rock opera Lacplesis (The Bearslayer), based on the national heroic epic, for which Zalite wrote the libretto. Her musical drama Eza kazocins (The Porcupine Fur) was produced by the Valmiera Theater in 1991, and her musical epic Meza gulbji (Wild Swans) was performed by the Daile Theater in Riga in 1995, with a score by the prominent Latvian composer Raimonds Pauls.
Even though Zalite increasingly turned to drama in the 1980s, she did publish two powerful collections of poetry. The 1985 volume Nav vardam vietas (No Words Needed) celebrates motherhood, from the individual to "the Mother of all Life." It also emphasizes, again, the strong ethical strand of Zalite's work. One poem addresses that insistence on what seems to be the collective level:
When you lift your helpless
arms, again,
you remember all-the fire, and the night,
make the sun rise again
over the ruin of power,
when you lift your helpless
arms, again.
That this poem is addressed to the Latvian collectivity can be seen most clearly in the mention of "fire and night," a hidden reference to a national monument, the play Uguns un nakts (Fire and Night, 1907) by the Latvian poet Janis Rainis.
Zalite has an ongoing interest in folklore and myth; she has also written an essay, "Pilna Maras istabina jeb tautasdziesmu Maras meklejumos" (The Goddess-Figure Mara in Folk Songs), published in the literary journal Varaviksne (Rainbow) in 1985. Yet, this interest is never merely antiquarian. Rather, she uses the archetypal figures and materials in lively and provocative ways. As she writes in an untitled poem about "the native hearth," published in the anthology Maju svetiba, edited by Anna Rancane:
We cannot learn from the snail,
for Home is not our shelter.
We will be Home's shelter.
In other words, culture, tradition, and ethnicity do not constitute a ready-made easy recourse, but have to be constructed ever anew. It is humankind's responsibility to do that; considering it as shelter would wrongly relieve people of that responsibility.
Zalite, like many writers whose native language is threatened by exile or imperial colonial power, feels a protective love for language even stronger than that of poets generally, as illustrated in her poem "Valoda" (Language), published in Jauna Gaita in 1987:
Language, you are blood and flesh
for my godknowshence flowing thoughts.
I love you, and everyone who
touches my hearing
through you, glimmering river.
In you only do I sense the eternal,
stepping into the same place as always,
where everyone always, everyone and always.
................
Glimmering river.
See-I am.
You alone
can affirm that.
In the wake of Latvian independence, Zalite, in her capacity as editor in chief of Karogs, was responsible for supervising the complex privatization process of the journal and managed, in addition, to continue writing drama as well as poetry. Her collection Vai tu vel turies" (Are You Still Holding On"), published in 1992, was followed by the publication in 1997 of Apkartne (Environment). In that same year, Zalite published a collection of speeches and editorials in a volume titled Kas ticiba sets: Runas un raksti Latvijas atmodai 1979-1997 (What Has Been Sown in Faith: Speeches and Writings for Latvia's Reawakening 1979-1997).
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