An “Ammunition Belt on the Wall, Filled with Paintbrushes”
It all happened under a toxic tree.
I was traveling in Provence, in the south of France, when I met a Ukrainian woman and her daughter. We happened to start talking, first in French, and then we switched to English. She was staying in the apartment on the other side of the house that my husband and his French family were staying in.
I watched her daughter play with my niece on a swing that hung from a giant tree in the garden. The woman said she was from Ukraine. I was so curious. How long had they been in France? Where was her husband? She told me her daughter was in a French school. It struck me that she was in a gilded cage, waiting out the war. Her eyes looked nervous when I talked to her. I sensed that she carried trauma.
Over the few days I stayed there, we said hello to one another, we chatted, but it was always cut off because we were either coming or going. When my French family and I were leaving, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to know more. I wanted to help, but I really only had a surface understanding of what was happening in Ukraine. Back in America, I listened to NPR while making breakfast and dinner. I got bits and pieces.
The only thing I thought to do was to give the woman a poem from the only Ukrainian poet I knew. I copied down We Lived Happily During the War by Ilya Kaminsky. I tried to find a way to give it to her, but I couldn’t find the right time. I regret not slipping it under the door, but it felt dangerous, uncomfortable. What if the poem was too provocative? What if I was interfering too much?
It wasn’t until this fall that I got an email from The Irish Pages, a press in Belfast, asking me if I would like to review their special issue on Ukraine, its title War in Europe.
I responded yes, directly thinking of this woman and her family.
War in Europe arrived in the mail. I read it hungrily, curiously, and at times, I was completely befuddled. I looked up Ukrainian facts to give me context. I realized how little I knew about this remarkable country.
War in Europe is a beautifully curated museum that changed me.
The reader enters with a foreword by issue editor Askold Melnyczuk, a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and editor of Arrowsmith Press. Here, he makes the comparison between Ukraine and Ireland; Ukraine is resisting Russia in the same way that Ireland resisted England. There is a recurring motif of Irish writers comparing Ukraine to Ireland. Much later in the book, Mark Cousins writes, “Ukraine further disconnects from the control of its invader, and here in Northern Ireland, in a more minor way, we had to take some distance from the colonial story told by the British State” (231). In another essay, the author Natalya Korniyenko writes of emigrating to Ireland to escape the war (probably similar to the woman I met in the garden). She felt safe only when she was in the Dublin airport and the Irish border agent gave her children some colouring books. She writes that Galway is “the Lviv of Ireland” (216) and goes on to compare the histories of Ireland and Ukraine. She notes that the Irish people she met told her, “Ireland will always stand by the victim” (217).
The next few rooms of War in Europe include the history of Ukraine and its relationship to Russia, specifically Serhii Plokhy’s piece that gave me an understanding of the deep historical complexities between Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. I first heard the term “Little Russia” and understood that Putin wants no interference from the West in his plans for “a big Russian nation” (35) and that in his eyes “Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people” (35). Plokhy’s piece gave me a historical foundation with which I could approach the rest of the book.
Here I wondered whether a book from an Irish press full of poetry, art, creative nonfiction, and essays could act as weapons. Was a large part of this war in Ukraine a war on language? Many of the writers included in the book circle around this question.
Natalya Korniyenko writes, “At first I felt no need to [speak in Russian] and then it became my principled position not to switch to the language of the country that had spent centuries trying to destroy my native language, Ukrainian” (213). Carolyn Forché writes, “We know that war destroys language, as it destroys everything within its zone of prosecution. Under conditions of such extremity, language is wounded, fragmented, cratered. It is put to military use in the creation of euphemisms” (208). She explains that Russia refers to the war not as a war, but as a “military operation” (208), and when ordinary people like teachers and fathers are killed, it is “collateral damage” (208-209).
At the same time that the Ukrainian language is being silenced and killed, it is also being reinvented by Ukrainian poets. Amelia Glaser cites a poem by Iya Kiva:
a frozen sea of people rolls stones around its mouth
this dead language of the time we will turn to
when the wind cuts the thread of life like a flower (201).
Glaser writes, “Language has been reinvented by the emotions of war, but also by the vocabulary of war” (201). The poets are hopeful; their language is blossoming.
This book brilliantly shows the history of the erasure of Ukraine by Russia. Iaroslava Strikha writes about translation as a subversive act. In 1863, a minister of the Russian Empire said, “a separate Little Russian language never existed, doesn’t exist and couldn’t exist” (189). Many of the pieces in this book are themselves translations. It feels important to note that, as if to say that the Ukrainian language is alive and well.
I never saw that Ukrainian woman and her daughter again, but the garden outside the house became symbolic. Here in the green grass, near a trampoline and a burst of lilac, her family and my family played, drank wine, talked, ate little chocolates. But then, the Ukrainian woman told me to make sure my daughter didn’t eat any of the tree’s needles; the tree was toxic. It was deadly.
As Melnyczuk points out, by naming this book about the Ukrainian war, editor Chris Agee brilliantly includes Ukraine in the European Union. The toxic tree became a symbol for Ukraine in this lovely garden (Europe).
As the woman and her daughter waited out the war in Provence, France, their homeland was being destroyed. I could feel their anxiety, their worry. There was no mention of her husband, and I wondered how quickly they had to leave. I wondered if he was fighting.
The last time I saw the woman, she was walking down the street with groceries. She was wearing a Chanel belt and was well-dressed. I realise now that I wrote down that poem because I wanted to be her friend. I wanted to use my “American-ness” to help her. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Kaminsky’s poem melted in my pocket, and I threw it out in Lyon a few days later. In his essay, The Girls who were Buried and the Old Man who was Saved, Héctor Abad Faciolince writes, “When we read writers we become their friends” (275). War in Europe offered me the friendship I didn’t get. A friendship with the writers, intellectuals, professors, and artists who appear in this stunning collection.
Amelia Glaser writes, “While poetry cannot shoot down missiles, the week I spent in Kyiv gave me the strong impression that poets in Ukraine are helping to buoy the nation, both in its cities and on its frontlines” (195). Reading this book changed me. Perhaps, let it change you too. Order this book. By reading it, you are both understanding and celebrating Ukrainian culture and language. Writing is a form of resistance; these essays are not bombs or bullets. They are paintbrushes used as ammunition. More beautiful than violence, but just as powerful.
