The first time I ate a khinkali was in 2003, and after one bite of that soupy, oversize dumpling, I became obsessed with the food of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. I started making pilgrimages to Georgian restaurants wherever I could find them, snarfing down cheese-stuffed breads and garlic chicken, pickled walnuts and those delicious khinkali. I often imagined what the food would taste like in its motherland, but for 20 years I was too busy and broke to trek to the small, mountainous nation. Then in March 2023, thanks to a research grant and a week off work, I finally got the chance to go.
It turned out to be a charged moment in Tbilisi, Georgia’s mazelike, cobblestoned capital. The country’s government had been rolling back democratic reforms, and its latest move was to advance a law against so-called foreign agents, just as Vladimir Putin had in Russia, that targeted organizations with international support. A year after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, this law seemed designed to appeal to Georgia’s former colonizers, not Georgians themselves. In the days before I arrived, protesters rocked Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s main drag, holding up furious and often profane signs. Graffiti on the street declared, in English, liberty is the only wealth and Revolution is the only solution. The door on the coffee shop near my hotel read, you are more than welcome here if you agree that Putin is a war criminal and accept the sovereignty of peaceful nations.
That March, I felt awe at the bravery of the Tbilisi protesters, some of whom actually danced—danced!—in the face of police. I also felt a profound sense of gratitude for the way my own country had managed to recover from the insurrection of January 6, 2021. By the spring of 2023, two years into Joe Biden’s presidency, I was certain that the threats posed by Donald Trump’s election lies and machinations were behind us. In retrospect, I should have been learning from the Georgians I talked with: The fight for democracy is not the work of a month or two, but of years—of, perhaps, a lifetime.
What did I do in Tbilisi besides meet protesters and read graffiti? I ate, of course, way too much. I walked up and down hills, admiring the ancient churches and monasteries. I rode a funicular to a hilltop amusement park. I talked with young Georgians—many Georgians’ English is shockingly good—about their lives. I bought socks at a street market. And I petted dozens of Tbilisi’s 30,000 stray dogs, the luckiest of whom are cared for by the community, neutered, inoculated against rabies, and fed the rich leftovers of a million Tbilisi office lunches.
After a week, I went home and began writing a novel about the experience. I imagined the story of an American woman who heads to Tbilisi to rescue one of those stray dogs, only to find herself caught in the headwinds of the Georgian protest movement. I wrote the novel in a rush, inspired by the people I’d met and the resolve I’d witnessed. Then in October 2024, I returned to Tbilisi to fact-check my work.
Although only a year and a half had passed, circumstances were much more dire for the nation’s democracy movement. Later that month, a parliamentary election was to be held in Georgia; its contenders were several pro-European parties and a Russia-aligned party called Georgian Dream. Many locals I talked with expected the election to be rigged in favor of Georgian Dream, which would then derail plans to join the European Union—a goal that was explicitly written into the 1995 Georgian constitution. This is exactly what happened.
In my own country, another presidential election was only a month away. I was trying to remain optimistic, but I had a terrible feeling that Trump was going to win, and that he, too, would begin dismantling democratic institutions. Although this is also what happened, I am still surprised at how efficiently he has done it and how little resistance he has met. I am surprised, most of all, at how little I myself have resisted.
The resistance of Georgians, meanwhile, is all the more remarkable because of the dangers they have faced for many decades. For them, self-determination is not a centuries-old tradition but an objective that has been repeatedly thwarted. They have been throttled by Russia, in one way or another, since the early 19th century: annexation in 1801, massacre in 1924, Stalinist purges in 1937 and 1938, military subjugation in 1989. In 2008, Russian troops invaded the country and got within striking distance of the capital; to this day, Russia occupies 20 percent of Georgia’s land. One Tbilisi resident explained to me that if she wanted to visit a family member in, say, South Ossetia, she’d have to leave Georgia, go to Russia, get a visa, and return to the part of her country Russia controls. This is a humiliation, although it’s arguably not as bad as the fact of her own federal government embracing the autocrat in Moscow who wants to end her dream of living in a fully functioning democracy.
So she, along with many of her friends, protests—even though she knows she could very well be beaten up and thrown into the back of a police van, strip-searched, and threatened with sexual violence. Moreover, she is fairly certain her protests won’t change a thing. The Georgians I met have chosen protest as a way of life because they have never lived with the illusion that rights, once granted, are permanent. In Georgia, I got the sense that you protest to remind yourself who you are and what you believe in. Even something as ephemeral as graffiti takes on the power of a civic declaration. You don’t just tag a building with your name: You tag it with an image of the Georgian flag next to an EU flag, as if marking the building with a prayer.
It’s hard not to feel a shiver of shame when I compare the bravery I witnessed in Georgia with my own response to the past seven months of American history. My life as a citizen of a democracy more than two centuries old has left me embarrassingly soft. Instead of marching down streets or tagging buildings or even engaging in tough conversations with my Trump-loving neighbors, I find myself bobbing and weaving, pretending that if I don’t rock the boat too much, the people in charge will let me imagine that the country I once knew still exists. In my work as a writer, I now find myself actively accommodating the priorities of the government. On a federal-grant application, I revamped a project to seem unimpeachably patriotic. On another, I wiped out words including diversity and Nigerian-American. On a flight home from Europe, I scrubbed my Instagram page of political memes and images of detainees, lest some rogue airport agent pull me in for questioning. And I almost reconsidered writing this essay, for fear of putting naturalized family members at risk of vengeful denaturalization.
But recently, a mother in our community without any criminal record was yanked by ICE, and I had to ask myself: When do I, too, put myself on the line? When law-abiding citizens are threatened with exile, when grants and government data disappear without a trace, when media companies and law firms and universities rush to settle frivolous cases brought by the president—when will I decide that I have to do something? When federal agents start patrolling my own streets? When more of my neighbors disappear? I know that it’s long past time to become the person who decides, in the face of water cannons, to dance.
The novel I wrote about Georgia was just released, and I celebrated at a restaurant in Philadelphia called Megobari Cafe, whose name means friend in Georgian, and which serves the best khinkali I’ve ever had outside of Georgia itself. I raised a glass to the book, and another to the Georgians who helped me write it. They have shown how to face an unknowable future with courage. But even more importantly, they have demonstrated that the consequences of staying silent are far worse than whatever a nation of people might suffer for raising their collective voice.
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