"We are only now beginning to pay attention to language": An Interview with Oksana Lutsyshyna

I first encountered Oksana Lutsyshyna’s work in 2017 with the publication of Words for War, an anthology of Ukrainian poetry in English responding to the ongoing war in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas, in which she is featured as both a poet and translator. What struck me about Lutsyshyna’s poetry is its profound honesty, not only with regards to language but the sensitivity with which she turns her reader’s attention to the veracity and vulnerably that accompanies grief. Grief here is not merely an individual phenomenon, but it is part of the cartography of a national history, one that, for Lutsyshyna, often emerges through the body, as she writes in Words for War, “don’t touch live flesh/if you must, touch a wound no longer open/this one—let me embrace it/coil myself around it/leave it alone, let me carry it back home.”

Born in 1974 in Ukraine’s western city of Uzhhorod, Lutsyshyna studied English at Uzhhorod National University before moving to the US in the early 2000s for graduate school. She completed two Masters degrees, one in French and one in Gender Studies, at the University of South Florida, followed by a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia. She currently resides in Austin, Texas, where she is a Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. As a writer, poet, translator, literary scholar, and professor, Lutsyshyna is able to speak at the intersections of invention and critique, moving not only between these intellectual contexts but also between linguistic and cultural spaces. It is her reflections on these movements, and moreover, an awareness of this liminality, that profoundly texture her literary voice.

In March 2021, Lutsyshyna was awarded Ukraine’s highest literary achievement— the Shevchenko National Prize for Literature—for her latest novel Ivan and Phoebe, which is currently being translated into English by poet and translator, Nina Murray. The novel moves between different spatial and temporal contexts, excavating Ukraine’s post-Soviet and post-colonial conditions. In a sense, Lutsyshyna invites her readers to sit with these realities, to bear witness to the inheritances of collective trauma, and to recognize the embodied living legacies of administrative uncertainty, economic insecurity, and persistent infrastructural failures.

The gift of Lutsyshyna’s work lies in its demand to recognize of oneself in the “Other,” to build profound empathy through the power of stories, to remind her audiences—in Ukraine and beyond—of the interwovenness of our lives. For her, this is not blind optimism, but something more transformative: an insistence on the power that language holds in shaping our worlds.

In April 2021, I spoke with Lutsyshyna via email.

I’d like to start our conversation by thinking about the role of ‘place’ as part of a literary imagination. For instance, your latest novel Ivan and Phoebe moves between the boundaries of Kyiv, Lviv, and Uzhhorod in the final Soviet years and into the first years of Ukrainian independence. I’m also thinking about some of your poetry in which you’ve addressed US cities, like New York, Portland, and Tampa. What is the significance of place (or perhaps location) for you, both in your writing, as well as in your own movement within and between languages and cultures?

I have lived in Texas for six years, yet only now I am beginning to think about it as home. For a long time, it seemed to me that Uzhhorod, my hometown, would be the only place that I would be able to call home. Life proved me wrong. For a long time, my home was Florida; somehow its landscapes supplanted the landscapes of my native Transcarpathia, and I long for the ocean all the time. At one point, I lived in Athens, Georgia when I was a Ph.D. student, but if both Florida and Transcarpathia found their place in my writing, Athens and my experiences there turned out to be so concentrated, so dramatic and so magical at the same time, in a good and a bad sense simultaneously, that I am still looking for a way to put it into words. It’s not a big town and you cannot see the sky because it is all covered with trees. Their canopies lock you in, as if you are in a William Blake’s etching, a song of experience or a song of innocence, or better still, a deadly combination of both. I am looking forward to finding the language for describing it.

Can you talk a little about how you came to writing? What drew you to it?

When I was about twelve, a friend at school started writing stories she made up in a notebook cut in half, and I thought it was a great idea and I should do the same. I wrote some horrible detective stories in Russian that were, strangely, very popular with my classmates. My mother, a university instructor, was working on her research project on Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, and my stories were a peculiar combination of hard-boiled detective stuff and some elements of the Russian and Ukrainian literatures we read at school. All these cool detectives in my “books” were speaking in the stylistics of the Ukrainian 19th century writers, and the stuff we read was mostly about peasants, their struggle against serfdom, and so on. Dashiel Hammett would have loved it. Later I also started writing poems, not yet out of the teenage feelings of crushes and loves, but more out of certain natural-occurring, in my case, existential angst. The truth is, Soviet intelligentsia read a lot, and I always tell my students that this is because there was nothing else to do – no cars to drive, no trips abroad to take, not even any good TV to watch. My parents had a decent home library in several languages, and so did my grandparents and my aunt. I feasted on it, and this is what probably made me a writer.

You have a background in Women’s Studies, and you often include issues of gender in not only your poetry and fiction but also in your research as a literary scholar. How do you see your work challenging or resisting some of the narratives or assumptions around this (often slippery and complicated) category that is not only embodied and performed but also part of our structures of relating and belonging? What kind of work do you think literature can do in creating more equitable worlds? Which writers have influenced your thinking about questions of gender?

This is a great topic. I was always innately feminist before I knew the word or the notion. The Soviet world was quite harsh and unforgiving of femaleness, of the condition of being a human being who is female. It was kind of Darwinist: the physically stronger and more privileged wins. Also, that society did not know what the concept of boundaries was about. I hated it when either family members or some uncles or aunts on the street would tell me not to sit on cold surfaces, because it would supposedly damage my ovaries and therefore make me incapable of bearing children in the future. Mind you, they would lecture any girl this way, from an early age, and the message was that you are not important as a person, you are a receptacle, a walking birthing machine. I resented it when teachers at school would tell us girls that women should have jobs but not careers, and dedicate themselves to family matters. Girls were expected to cook, clean, do shopping, pick up younger siblings from daycare, and this was my life from about age eleven. Our parents were never home because Soviet professional life included endless meetings and lectures about Marxism.

Somehow it was implied that you would grow up and as a grown woman would be happy to continue this life full of chores, work, and responsibility in your adulthood. I dreaded it. I still hate cooking and cleaning. When I became a young woman and had my first encounters with post-Soviet gynecology, I was horrified even further. In those days, I could not yet really sort it all out and protest coherently, even via literature. When I relocated to the U.S., I came into the office of the graduate director of the Women’s Studies program at the University of South Florida, Professor Marilyn Myerson, and told her that I was a feminist and I wanted to study with them. She smiled and said that it was a refreshing statement because even in the States people often start the sentence with “I am not a feminist, but...” That program really shaped me into who I am now. I learned there that critical theory was a place of healing. I found camaraderie, mentorship, kindness, and, last but not the least, academic rigor. Specific influences would be too many to mention, but I can name a few ground-shattering ones (for that particular moment in life). I recall how stunned I was reading Monique Wittig, Le corps lesbien, and realizing that this turbulent, non-linear, highly dramatic, raw, crazed way of writing was not only possible, but also legitimate and that women actually can write about their bodies in this manner, and not only mimicking the “traditional” pattern. Women (and women-writers) were for centuries not really seen for what they are and told instead that the best way to write was to write like a man, preferably under a male pen-name, and that nobody was interested in that which constitutes a woman’s life – periods, childbirth, menopause. My other big influence was Andrea Dworkin, and, in particular, her analysis of de Sade. She brings up there the issue of naming and categorizing; de Sade actually really did kidnap and torture women, but even if the matter received the attention of law enforcement, it would be dismissed because “de Sade paid the woman.” We still struggle with this issue; during the MeToo movement, a lot of people made the comment about “these women having been paid” (having roles in the films) by Weinstein. They were therefore belonging to the category of the “women who get paid,” that is, prostitutes, or “sluts.” We are only now beginning to pay attention to language - not simply as to a structure through which we speak, but as a structure through which we think.

One of my favorite things about your writing is how piercing it is in its honesty, especially in your poetry about the war in Donbas. In the anthology, Words for War, for example, one of your poems begins, “eastern europe is a pit of death and decaying plums/I hide from it in the body of America/but sooner or later I’ll slip from this light/back down into that other/and will start talking about death because that is our national sport.”

I want to draw a comparison to the presence of violence in the US, especially this past year with the conversations around the legacies of white supremacy, the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests, the rise anti-Asian violence in the US (and the list goes on). While, in many ways, the US and Ukraine are different places, what kinds of intersections or parallels do you see in these conversations around violence, the state, and civil rights? How might they speak to the enduring (often implicit) investments in colonialist logic? In what ways does the psychic presence of violence texture you as you write and move between these national spaces?

I would say it is violence against the Other that serves as a common denominator. When the events of the George Floyd murder were unfolding, we witnessed a lot of rather racist discourses coming from the countries of the former Soviet Union. I tried to make sense of it all and wrote an article about it. The problem of racial oppression in the US was spoken about a-historically in the former Soviet Union. It was generally perceived as a done deal, everybody liberated and free. The only books widely available on the subject would be things like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which African Americans do not consider all that great in terms of resistance strategies, actually quite the opposite. Only two of Toni Morrison’s novels were translated into Ukrainian, and that happened already after independence. I compiled a list of readings for one Ukrainian online journal on the topic of racial oppression and violence in the United States and found that regrettably little was available in Ukrainian. No Baldwin, no Harlem Renaissance, no bell hooks – not even Frantz Fanon, who is a classic. The narrative that dominated the post-Soviet terrain as a response to the murder of George Floyd was along the lines of “What do these people want, haven’t they been freed?” Nobody seems to have understood what Jim Crow laws were about, what or the Civil Rights Movement fought for. Looking at the reasons, I think it is hard for a post-totalitarian country to fully understand somebody else’s trauma if it has not yet fully voiced and analyzed its own. Empathy is a resource that needs to be built up, and survivors often don’t have this luxury. I am, of course, not talking about specific people who may feel empathy just fine, but collectively. In feminist theory we talk about standpoint epistemology – the look from the bottom up versus the look from top-down, that is, thwarting the hierarchy. In this sense, it may seem that for the oppressed it is easy to empathize and understand simply because they share the condition with all the oppressed groups in the world. But the matter is infinitely more complex.

You are also a brilliant translator, and I know you have translated the work of Kateryna Kalytko, Vasyl Makhno, Marianna Kiyanovska, and Bohdana Matiyash. Can you talk a little about how you see translation as a process and a project? What potential or possibility do you see in the work of translation? I’m thinking especially about recent discussions in feminist and decolonial translation studies that consider translation to be a form of activism—a way to challenge and/or reclaim authority.

A lot of credit, if not most of it, belongs to my co-pilot – Olena Jennings, a New York-based writer, and poet. I like the idea of translation as a form of activism. I know it is more than that, of course, it’s an art, but I think these days I am driven by both aspects, the love for the art and the desire for activism, in this case - telling the world about Ukraine and what is going on there. Olena and I translated Absolute Zero, the memoir of Artem Chekh, and are now working on a collection of poems by Kateryna Kalytko. I am fascinated by translating poetry because I am fascinated by poetry. To me, it is always paradoxical and therefore the truest to the essence of life.

There was a time, and not so long ago, when Ukraine did not occupy much space in the US political imagination. But after the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14, it seems that Americans began to pay more attention. Even more recently, with Trump’s first impeachment, Ukraine has been embroiled in US politics. As a Ukrainian living in the US, how has Ukraine’s amplified visibility affected your relationship with a US context? (I also want to acknowledge that neither Ukraine nor the US are cultural monoliths—so this could mean multiple contexts).

I tend to think that I am lucky to live in the amazing epoch when Ukraine is actually a nation-state. Generations of the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States and Canada were living with the desire to see Ukraine out of the Soviet Union and independent. The Soviet Union demonized these people, called them “traitors,” and we still had to deal with this legacy of dis-union, separation, miscategorization. Our diaspora writers could not reach their readership in Soviet Ukraine, of course. I am happy to see that this changed and that the narrative of immigrants-as-“traitors” is finally belonging to be the past.

You have received numerous accolades and literary prizes in Ukraine for your writing, including winning this year’s Shevchenko National Prize in Literature for Ivan and Phoebe. What is it like to teach university students in the US but to hold this kind of notoriety in Ukraine? Does this pique students’ interest in Ukrainian literature and culture?

I would say it does, because people feel that I have a very strong connection to the country. I don’t always tell the class that I write, but the students often discover it from other sources. At times it is pleasant, and in other times it worries me a bit because I tend to adhere to Buddhist philosophy, as far as my teaching or my visibility is concerned, and dis-identify, when I can, from any narratives of my own greatness and authority. Of course, I must hold on to some authority just because I work for a university system. But when I say “dis-identify from authority,” I mean not the authority of a specialist in a particular subject, for instance, Eastern European literature, but authority in a more global sense, in the sense that presupposes a certain kind of self-congratulatory discourse and an inflated ego.

As for why students are interested specifically in Ukraine, we have different scenarios here. I think a lot of it comes from a better general understanding of post-coloniality. Since Russia obviously has been conceptualized as the colonial hegemon of post-totalitarian Eastern Europe, there came the realization that you cannot know the truth about the region by only reading what the colonizer had to say.

Interviewed by Sandra Joy Russell

Photo by Valentyna Schneider