I was not molded into the “Soviet Man” model, as the Soviet empire was beginning to crumble when I was barely ten years old. I am the child of great changes, the child of permanent crisis, who had to search for a long time, and with great application, his own identity. I was undoubtedly forged by Lviv, the city where I was born, which belonged to Poland for 600 years and saw its borders move seven times during the 20th century. When I was little, it was a Soviet city; as I grew up, it became the center of Ukrainian independence thought.
In these complex entanglements of History, it was not easy to find myself, especially since my ethnic origins are mixed; as a teenager, I moved to Poland. For me, it was not an emigration: I knew the Polish language well, I made many round trips between my old country and the new one. In this new country, the question of identity did not arise – everyone was Polish, regional differences and accents did not matter – and this reinforced my fears of finding myself without an identity of my own. But, in the end, there was everything else: my youth, the birth of my children, literature…
“This revolution is like a design”
In 2004, after the rigged elections in Ukraine, the Orange Revolution broke out – bloodless, marked by youth, its dancing spirit. The cities of Krakow and Warsaw danced with those of Kiev and Lviv and all wore the same colors. Cheerful orange ribbons were pinned to my chest and for the first time in my life I wore a yellow and blue flag: Could this be mine? “This revolution is like a conception,” my friend Ksénia told me at the time, our conception as Ukrainians. It was an interesting idea. She gave birth to my first novel, A city with an open heartt.
Then there was life in Poland, a life as a writer, an artist, a student, and the always too long queues at the Polish-Ukrainian border. I always wondered, with a sigh, when they would finally remove this unbearable border. When would it become a simple place of passage between worlds, languages, chickens roaming freely in a small Ukrainian village and those hidden in their henhouses in Poland? If Ukraine entered the European Union, it would be a kind of throwback to the days of the Second Republic, when Poles and Ukrainians lived together, side by side. With the Jews also, who, alas! there aren’t very many of us anymore.
Thanks to the Dignity Revolution, we were born as Ukrainians
Then there were the protests of 2014, and the bloodied bodies draped in yellow and blue, which lay in increasing numbers in Kiev’s central square. I watched with horror as literary fiction scenes I had written come to fruition in real life. Faced with bullets from Russian snipers, bicycle helmets and wooden shields served as protection for civilians. We watched them die live on our screens. It was the revolution of Dignity. Ukrainians were tired of being stuck in the inhuman values of the Russkiy mir, the Russian world. They were already part of Europe, they now wanted to join the European Union. “This revolution was like childbirth,” summed up Ksénia. Thanks to her, we were born as Ukrainians. Yes, it was indeed a childbirth, it was necessary to extract itself from the cracks: the head first, then the shoulders, and finally the cry. And you are free to choose what you want!
When Ukrainian songs are part of the resistance
But then came the annexation of Crimea and the underhanded Russian-initiated war in eastern Ukraine. Many Ukrainians flocked to Poland as a result. Suddenly, one heard in the faculties, the restaurants, the supermarkets and the taxis long vowels, melodious words, a permanent song. The Polish language is hissing and rough — in the mouths of Ukrainians, it turns into vocalizations. According to French specialists, Ukrainian is one of the most melodious and singing languages in the world, just after Italian. Ukrainians sing a lot, whether at home or in society, it is their way of coping with life and its tensions. During all those years when they had no state of their own, when it was impossible for them to learn their own language, their songs also became a way of resisting.
How to name what has been happening for a few days?
One morning, I see on the screen of my mobile phone a face contorted with an inhuman mimicry, accompanied by this sentence: “Explosions are ringing out in the big cities of Ukraine”. I started shaking. My mother is in Krakow at the moment, but she might as well have been in Kyiv, in one of the bomb-hit blocks. The mother of one of my friends screams into the phone, from Lviv: “What panic? No one panics here. We organize the defense of the territory and a special prayer in our church.”
“Are the tanks going to enter Krouglouniversitetska Street?” asks another, helpless, whose mother lives very close to the government buildings in Kiev. Now, this friend calls her every evening from Poland, at the time of the bomb threats, to beg her to go down to the cellar. His mother prefers to stay put, she meditates, for peace.
Polish doors to the West wide open for Ukrainians
Grabbing a box on which is written “Black tea”, my eyes automatically read: “Black Sea”, and in my head resounds a sentence: “Crimea is Ukraine”. Someone calls me from there and asks me how he can leave, since he has cats? I inquired, the Polish customs officers let in Ukrainian animals without papers. The most important thing is that they also let people in without a passport and without a vaccination pass. These gates to the West, once unwelcoming to Ukrainians, are now wide open. Polish mobile phone operators do not charge for communications with Ukraine, they distribute packages with Polish SIM cards.
The line of refugees marching towards Poland stretches for about fifteen kilometres, the people are there, with their packages, their children and their dogs, they stay in the freezing cold for a day, two days, three days… with bomb threat sirens as background music. On the Polish side, open arms await them. Poles, friends or strangers, stand at the border crossing, they welcome the refugees, drive them home. Rooms, lodgings, attics, an entire house, convents are prepared. Polish trains transport Ukrainians free of charge. Here and there Ukrainian flags flutter, the Ukrainian anthem resounds.
… I have another friend too, a Ukrainian who lives in Poland. Now he’s crossing the border the other way – he’s going to war. In the early hours, he is alone in passing. He is aware that the return will not be easy. He arrives at his home, in Drohobytch, and receives a call from his aunt, who lives in Russia: “You attacked us, but we are going to manage this, she says in all seriousness. You are shooting at nativity scenes! Who would have could have supposed that Ukraine would one day attack Russia…”
Aren’t we right here in Orwell, “War is peace”?
A war started by a ghost from hell?
On social networks, my Ukrainian editor writes that her parents were children of the war, and that today her own child, forced to go down to a shelter every night, is himself a child of the war. She also writes that the copyright owner of the complete works of Ernest Hemingway, recently published in Ukrainian, has refused any collaboration with his Russian publisher.
Since the announcement of the war, a demonstration for peace has been held permanently in front of the Russian consulate in Krakow. Since then, no one enters the consulate, no one leaves it, we do not perceive any movement behind the windows completely hidden by blinds.
We launch our angry slogans in the direction of a sort of cardboard house, of the void, of nothingness. Is the one who started this war a man or a ghost from hell? I am thinking of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein who, after the bombing of London, worked with an English boy. He had fun being Hitler attacking England: “Who is it?”, asks Melanie Klein. “It’s Hitler, an assassin,” replies the little boy in a mournful tone. “Look at him carefully. He’s not Hitler, he’s just a little Hitler, and he’s in you.”
“The umbilical cord finally cut. The beginning of an adult life”
Like Melanie, I tell myself that here too it’s just a little Poutine. It’s not a bloodthirsty monster outside of me at all. I am not his victim. From now on, no Ukrainian, whether in his country or emigrating, is his victim. Certainly, we have been so for many centuries: without a state of our own, without the ability to develop the Ukrainian language or culture, with a class of educated people regularly annihilated. A nation annihilated by artificially induced starvation, exterminated in Soviet gulags. As a Ukrainian writer said: “We cannot read our history without bromine”
But now, all of this is coming to an end now, once and for all. Everything that began under the orange flags, which continued under the roar of gunfire in Maidan Square, is played out today as a finale, a coda, in a war that the aggressor has not the courage to name by name. Under the eyes of the whole world, David, with fiery eyes, straightens his shoulders, cleans his slingshot and violently strikes an opponent a thousand times stronger than him. Truth and strength are on his side.
While, endowed with a small yellow and blue heart, we shiver at the demonstration, I question Ksénia: “So, for us, what is this war?” “An initiation. The umbilical cord finally cut. The beginning of an adult life.”
Zanna Sloniowska (born 1978 in Lviv, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian literary woman who lives in Krakow, Poland and writes in Polish. His first novel Une ville à coeur Ouvert was published in Poland in 2015, won the Conrad Prize and has been translated into 6 languages, including French (published in France in 2018 by Delcourt Littérature, now La Croisée. trad. Caroline Raszka-Dewez).
Translated by Caroline Raszka-Dewez