Dispatches from Ukraine - An Introduction
A sovereignty under attack—a series on Ukrainian emerging and established voices for our community of readers.
by: Stella Hayes
Kiev a city-fortress that would never be surrendered to the enemy. These words from Alexei (Alyosha) Nikitin’s novel The Face of Fire, in this moment ring prophetic. Day 15 of fierce fighting by Ukrainian military and civilians against Putin’s reign of terror. Last week, as I watched CNN in abject hopelessness, I reached out to Ukrainian-American poet Gary Light, my childhood friend, about what I could do for our poet/writer friends in Ukraine from NY, from the west, from afar. I am not a fighter, I am a poet. And in my small way, as a staffer on the Washington Square Review, I set out, with the full support of everyone at the journal, to bring our readers dispatches from Ukrainian writers.
I was born in Ukraine to Jewish parents, Grigory (Grisha) and Bella, when it was under Soviet occupation. I spent a decade there, enough for Russian to occupy me. I spent years trying to free myself, rewiring, overriding the self.
My mother tongue didn’t belong to me. My mother’s tongue is mine, it seems and inerasable.
When the Russian military forces attacked, I began to feel the pull of what Russians, no matter where they are, call homeland. I have a double sense of home which in the last two weeks has included a homeland. Like the elusive term terroir for wine, it is almost impossible to translate into English: it encompasses a sense of native soil, a designated area, a mother tongue, and a home all in one. It became clear to me that my homeland is under attack. I never got to have another home as a refugee – in exile – following my father’s untimely and sudden death soon after he was let out of Kiev in 1979. I don’t have a home, but it seems I have a homeland.
Ukrainian-American poet Stella Hayes is the author of poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California and is a graduate student at NYU M.F.A in poetry. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Poetry Project’s The Recluse, The Lake, Prelude, Spillway, and is forthcoming from Stanford’s Mantis, and Poet Lore, among others. She is assistant fiction editor at Washington Square Review.