Over Facebook, my cousin R., a mother of five in Ukraine, shares a text conversation she had with her son. In it, he tells her that they are learning to handle guns in school. Their exchange is light, dryly humorous – that particular Ukrainian brand of sardonic humour I know so well.
A few days later, R. and I talk over Zoom. Her kind, round face is the very image of my grandmother’s visage as a young woman. Past and future collide in history’s echo chamber as we speak. “I never imagined that my children would experience what our parents went through,” she says, meaning war and occupation.
Our family is from western Ukraine, occupied, over the centuries, by Austria, Poland, Germany, and Russia, in turn. Colonialism has, perhaps, made us inflexible: we are avowed speakers of Ukrainian, not Russian. R. says that if Russia invades Kyiv, Ukrainian speakers will be the first to be taken in. There has, after all, been a war in the east for eight years. We know what happened to Ukrainians in Donbas. We’ve heard about the so-called “basements,” the torture.
While making my 2015 documentary, This Is Gay Propaganda: LGBT Rights & the War in Ukraine, I met queer activists who had been threatened and beaten by Russian occupiers. I say to her, “No, it will be the LGBTQ who will be taken first,” and she nods, vaguely. It is all unimaginable and hardly quantifiable, and yet we have been brought up by our traumatized elders to imagine the worst.
The newspaper, the online journals, even the alternative media space of the left, bristle with crude anachronisms and xenophobic assumptions. The New York Times op- ed writer Ross Douthat suggests the U.S. retreat from Ukraine, making an ill-fitting analogy with Afghanistan. Ukraine, he complains, is “too economically weak, too internally divided and simply in the wrong place.”
A left broadcaster features a Russian “expert” scolding those who are “too” anti- Russian, as though that autocratic theocracy could still be redeemed by progressive ideals of early Communism, long since disavowed. My left community is largely disinterested in Ukraine, claiming ignorance with elaborate shrugs. Bewilderment, too: isn’t Ukraine a right-wing state? I sense their unspoken assumption: Ukraine should go with Russia so that the U.S., and NATO do not grow stronger.
I find myself pulling out facts and statistics like so many baseball cards, to anyone who will listen: that Ukraine was the first post-Soviet country to legalize homosexuality; the only country in the world to non-violently relinquish its nuclear arsenal. That Ukraine is a leader in artistic, culinary and technical innovation; that its feminist and queer organizing are a model for the faltering state of North American feminist and queer politics.
As for its supposed fascism: the right wing garnered less than 5% of the vote in the last federal election, while the U.S. elected a right-wing leader. Ukraine has achieved all of this despite grift and corruption, despite the devaluing of its currency, and the widening sphere of Russian propaganda. An educated younger generation is demanding a different kind of national culture; one that can parse the difference between nationalism and citizenhood, between language and identity.
My connection to Ukraine was forged in the fierce language of the revolutionary songs and poetry: “God give us strength and glory, freedom and sovereignty,” we sang in church. Our small bodies were dressed up in fine embroidery, ushered onto church basement stages, and made to recite the words of our national poet, Taras Shevchenko: “Break your chains/and sprinkle your freedom/With the enemy’s blood.” Consciously or not, our elders were preparing us for this very moment.
Ukraine is mysterious, cryptic, and full of contradiction. Its people are deeply hospitable, profoundly untrusting, and love a good party. As an adult, when I first travelled to Ukraine, my body thrummed with the dissonance of identification and disidentification. To meet a generation of queers who spoke the same mother tongue as me. To hear Russian spoken everywhere; to eat salo (cured pork fat) and rye bread in a tent during the Maidan revolution; to watch far-right thugs circle the art gallery where my film was being screened in Kyiv.
And so, even in the diaspora, the threat of further invasion hangs over me, too – a storm cloud that has scudded over from a country 5000 miles away.
It occurs to me that all of these fears, memories and sensations, – these hauntings – are experienced, to a greater or lesser degree, by all peoples fleeing, or having fled, autocratic regimes. (In point of fact, I was born in Canada, and fled my own culture’s heterosexist imperatives, until, thirsting, I returned.) Centuries of colonialism are embedded in the psyches and bodies of our ancestors, passed on through blood.
Sigmund Freud pointed out that this haunting, this trauma can lead to acting out – in a strange affective locution, he called it melancholia. Alternatively, he theorized that there can be an actual metabolizing of the trauma, a working through, a mourning. This working through, Freud argued, would entail being able to mourn the lost object — a family member, or an entire community killed in war, say — and to move forward. Perhaps, even, to tilt towards empathy. In current therapeutic parlance: closure. But how do Ukrainians as a people work through centuries of invasion. PTSD in our very DNA?
On the radio, a Ukrainian Canadian leader lists the lethal weapons demanded from the Canadian government. All I can see are lines of coffins holding the bodies of idealistic people taught, as I was, to be ready to defend Ukraine. I am no militarist, but the Russians in Donbas are no separatist rebels: they are, rather, a Russian-backed militia defying a sovereign border. For eight long years, media and governments overlooked the invasion of Crimea and Donbas, and eight years of war. Over 14,000 people have died; 1.5 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced. Russia has ignored the diplomatic agreements for a ceasefire; Ukraine has had no choice but to defend its people and its border. But also, I wonder: what’s in it for Canada and the U.S., with their nefarious histories of interference, in Haiti, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan?
My cousin and I agree to speak again soon. Living in a village outside of Kyiv, she, a former TV producer, longs to return to the capital, with its avant-garde art scene, its packed cafés (even now, on the possible eve of invasion), and its cinemas. But R. tells me, almost sheepishly — for no Ukrainian wants to surrender — that Plan B is to pack their family of seven in a car and drive to Western Ukraine. This nationalist Ukrainian-speaking stronghold may be the one part of Ukraine that Putin won’t bother with. Our mothers come from the Ternopil region, not far from Lviv. Our identities are forged in a deep language of loss and resistance, of scarred geographies, traumatic memories, and ripped borders of long ago wars.
But at the back of my mind there is always a dream of solidarity. I see us, marching down city streets, demanding freedom for Palestinian Territories and Ukraine, Belarus and Yemen in the same breath. I know that these are not equivalent histories but I also know that our parallel struggles for dignity, independence and peace have the potential to create a powerful common cause.
Liberation is meant for all of us, if only we could see it.
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