Abstract
THE PRAYER-LIKE WORDS of Lyuba Yakimchuk may be what this year’s Grammy Awards will be best known for. “Forgive us our destroyed cities, even though we do not forgive … our enemies,” she said as she implored listeners to protect her family and her country.
A name few outside Ukraine had heard of until that moment, Yakimchuk, 36, has long been a prominent voice within Ukraine’s literary circles, and in 2015 she was listed in the 100 most influential cultural figures by Kyiv’s New Time magazine.
War is not new to Yakimchuk. If anything, it’s defined much of her career. Originally from the Donbas region, she was visiting her parents at their family home in 2014 when the area was invaded by Russian troops. Witnessing the conflict, and seeing friends killed and imprisoned, influenced her book of poems, Apricots of Donbas. We publish one of them below and discuss with Yamichuk the implications of Russia’s war when it comes to freedom in Ukraine.
However much Ukrainian territory Russians occupy, the planting of apricots – which are on our side of the eastern border and disappear when you cross over the border post – continues to flourish although, of course, trees are destroyed by explosions and traces of chemicals left by missiles poison the soil.
The apricot trees nevertheless continue to grow, flourish and bear fruit throughout these eight years of war in east Ukraine because, unsurprisingly, apricot trees are more stable than real borders. That’s why I selected apricots as a marker of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian territory.
The book itself is about the difference between love in a country where there is war and love in a country where there is no war: about the elusive meanings of words that change simply during our lives and, therefore, the elusive feelings that we name with these words. It also concerns what happens to a country and its people when the war begins. It shows how, during a war, poetry in its old meaning is impossible, and only the decomposition of forms and meanings is possible, because literature competes with reality and loses out to it. Military reality is always more impressive than literature, whereas in a peaceful country the opposite is true. I’m searching for ways to speak about military losses.
Initially, after establishing their power upon gaining control over these territories, the Russian occupiers confiscated textbooks on history and Ukrainian literature, both modern and classical. The situation is different across these locations: in some places they are just removed, in other areas they burn them.
Independent journalists and bloggers are arrested and charged with sabotage or terrorism. In the DPR there is a special concentration camp in the premises of the former arts centre Izolyatsia (“Isolation”). Exhibitions were once held there, poets gave readings, but now people or journalists who criticise the occupiers or simply express their Ukrainian viewpoint are tortured and abducted and interned in this location. Incidentally, you can read in detail about this camp in a book by Stanislav Aseyev, The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, which has been translated into English. He escaped from that torture chamber thanks to a prisoner exchange.
Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk performs onstage during the 2022 Annual Grammy Awards
CREDIT: Credit: (main) Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty; (right) SOPA Images/Alamy
You can be criminally liable now for public criticism of these so-called “republics”, including for “slander” on social networks. (My understanding is that this law is copied from Russian legislation.)
If in Russia, prior to 24 February, there were still some free media that called things by their correct names (they are closed down now), in the so-called LPR and DPR they did not exist, and they either tortured or got rid of all the independent journalists.
Freedom of expression isn’t even mentioned during hostilities. Many people from Mariupol pass through Russian filtration camps: their phones are checked, their correspondence is read, they are undressed, inspected and searched for tattoos with inscriptions or symbols. Anything that the Russians do not like can lead to a person’s murder – although sometimes they don’t need a specific reason for their antipathy. In the first week of the war, for example, there was an order to kill people in black clothing.
With regard to education, they took Russian programmes as a basis and developed a separate course on the history of the “People of Donbas” which contains elements of indoctrination – in particular the attitude to Ukraine as occupying the LPR or the DPR. This is nonsense! In short, they are brainwashing children with some fictitious historians working on their policies of invasion.
People hide in an official underground shelter in Lviv, Ukraine, after the beginning of Russia’s invasion
Russian troops in the newly occupied Ukrainian territories are currently seizing grain and oil – sending a portion to Russia, and trying to sell a portion on foreign markets. Even as we speak, a Russian ship with stolen Ukrainian grain, which a port in Alexandria refused to accept, is roaming the sea somewhere.
If you look at the terminology used in such documents, all of these words, such as the “expropriation of surpluses”, are words taken from the Moscow decrees that led to the Holodomor. The Russians also want to achieve famine conditions now. Ukrainians are already starving during the occupation and there is simultaneously a threat of starvation in African countries which Ukraine supplies with grain.
We can only imagine that it must have felt bittersweet, performing at such a high-profile event, but under such awful circumstances.
The Grammy producers sent yellow and blue flowers with a note for me to my room. Everyone was so sweet. I felt very out of place, because I came with just one set of footwear – leather boots with laces – and it was 27 degrees in Las Vegas. At the same time, I felt very much at home, primarily due to the attitude to me as an equal. This was thanks to conversations about Ukrainians as people who defend freedom and democracy around the world. I was impressed and it warmed me up somewhat emotionally.
Or there is the word “corridor”, a transitional part of your home, just something that leads from the street into the house. However, during shelling people have to hide either in a bomb shelter or in a room with two load-bearing walls and no windows. That is in a corridor. My son slept in the corridor, because there isn’t a place for everyone, and it’s 20 minutes’ walk to the nearest bomb shelter and takes forever to get through the checkpoints. So now the corridor, for every Ukrainian who was under fire, means a safe place to sleep.
There are, in addition, many new words related to modern weapons and obscene language ceases to be taboo. Even children in bomb shelters quote a famous phrase about a Russian warship [the one that was sunk in April and has been renamed in Ukraine ‘Go Fuck Yourself’ warship], and adults don’t prohibit them from swearing.
Now imagine that you want to say something using these words that have changed their meaning. You say it, but it turns out not as you intended. And now imagine that there are already hundreds, tens of hundreds of such words. How to speak in a war-torn language? How to write in such a language? We have to invent new ways of expression.
Translated by
I have a crisis for you
you lit up a cigarette
but it wouldn’t burn
it was summer
and girls would light up from any passer-by
but I didn’t light up from you anymore
—our love’s gone missing, I explain to a friend
it vanished in one of the wars
we waged in our kitchen
—change the word ‘war’ to ‘crisis,’ he suggests
because a crisis is something everyone has from time to time
remember the Second World Crisis?
correspondingly, also the First World
Civil Crisis—to each his own
I forgot about the Cold Crisis
it seems they also came in twos
also the Uprising Crisis
it sounds so good—
the Uprising Crisis of 1648-1657
write it down in the textbooks
a crisis that liberates
releases forever
my great-grandfather fell in the Second World Crisis
possibly by the hand of my other great-grandfather
or his machine gun
or his battle tank
but it is unclear
how they conducted this crisis with each other
perhaps it was the crisis itself that killed them, like a plague
for nobody is to blame for the crisis
it is inexorable like death
and when our own domestic war
turns into crisis
does it get better?
does it hurt less?
do birds come back to us from the south
or maybe, we come out to meet them?
why is our language like that—
we lack words to describe our feelings
only crisis and love are left
as antonyms
but if love is bound to be so complicated
with these blazes and smolderings
like blood and pain
(and blood is not like periods
but some new feeling of mine)
(and pain is yours)
if love is made up
of two different feelings
then soon love will also be called crisis
I have a crisis for you, darling
let’s get married
it’ll be easier for us both
we’ve got a crisis
we’d better split up
Translated by