Translated from Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv, Yuliia Iliukha’s My Women is simply a poignant, inescapable short communicative collection about women confronted by the horrific brutalities of the Russo-Ukrainian War. The women in Iliukha’s collection navigate national and global political drama; the failure of lives, homes and livelihoods during the full-scale invasion; and cultural and self-preservation while facing seemingly insurmountable odds. Reminiscent of works like Anna Romandash’s Women of Ukraine: Reportages from the War and Beyond and Marina Sonkina’s Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border, reading My Women is like flipping through a scrapbook of visceral, painful snapshots of the conflict. It reminds us of the importance of maintaining a global, collective consciousness in the face of ongoing evil.
In the powerful foreword, Iliukha provides a keen representation of those women who appear in the collection. Those women “utter mundane and frightening words” and “share their pain and despair”. They are women who “believe and wait”, “persevere” and “know the price of each fresh day”. These women “want the planet to perceive to them and hear them”. This plea acts as a call for collective, global responsibility, 1 that becomes clear erstwhile Iliukha transfers that work to her audience: “My women… Now they are yours, too.” Iliukha’s call to action extends to not only native Ukrainian women enduring the war’s regular violence, but women everywhere who have been affected by war and injustice. This beginning strikes a peculiar chord in light of an October 2024 UN human rights call for “recognition of sexual force as torture” in order to strengthen legal protections. My Women’s stories do not focus explicitly or entirely on the sexual force to which Ukrainian women have been subjected during the full-scale invasion. They do, nonetheless, establish the integral and increasingly crucial function women have played in Ukraine’s military and societal roles.
One of the most effective propaganda lines Russian president Vladimir Putin has utilized to fuel support for the flames of war among the Russian population is the belief that the Ukrainian government is persecuting the Russian language. However, this propaganda has predominantly failed among Russian-speaking Ukrainians. 1 of the most overtly socio-political vignettes in My Women is simply a part about the “woman who had been waiting for the Russian world”. According to the story, the female had “taught Russian language and literature all her life” close her home, and just 2 years prior to her retirement, “the school had switched to the Ukrainian language of instruction, and she had been quietly dismissed.” To ease the pain of this “blow”, the female “immersed herself in Pushkin, read up on Lermontov with a pencil in hand, and got carried distant with Tyutchev”. The female “spent her evenings convincing herself of the greatness and glory of Russian culture while sitting in an old armchair she had bought 2 decades before”. The subtle stab at Russian society’s deficiency of social and economical advancement is adequate to make those who have seen the online stories about Russian soldiers pillaging Ukrainian apartments for toilets and washing machines smirk. However, the sly humour does not last long. Even though the female waits for Russian soldiers to save her – believing that Russian soldiers “would never shoot at civilians” – she yet finds herself “buried” by the “greatness of Russian culture”. This is done without “asking her opinion about Pushkin and Lermontov” after the Russians bomb her flat block. Thus, the communicative echoes pro-propagandist narratives facilitated by Putin backers specified as Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow. It is besides related to Russian attempts to eradicate Ukrainian culture by promoting the thought that Ukrainian language and Ukrainian identity – as well as Ukrainian nationhood – do not exist.
In another vignettes, the absolute demolition of villages and cities by Russian forces ties Ukrainian female identity to place. A female returns “to the town of her childhood and did not admit it”. “A deep crater and a pile of bricks” replace the woman’s school. “Only walls” stand where her parents’ home had stood, as her childhood, “which until late had lived within these walls”, has “turned to ashes”. For those who have read the news articles about Mariupol, Bakhmut, Popasna and another Ukrainian villages and cities obliterated as part of Russia’s “liberation”, the woman’s experiences of returning to a childhood home that no longer exists is more reality than fiction. However, it is the story’s final lines that show not only Ukraine’s determination but the fortitude of Ukrainian women who have risen to meet their homeland’s call to duty. As she looks “with dry eyes at the town of her childhood lying in ruins”, the female adjusts her gun, straightens her back, “which ached from the bulletproof vest”, and “walked back to her fellow soldiers”. The female is simply a solitary representation of another phenomena that has emerged in the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2014 and through the full-scale invasion. As of January 2024, women comprised 7.3 per cent of the military, meaning that more than 62,000 women – with 45,500 of them holding military positions – presently serve.
My Women does not shy distant from addressing the ecocide and environmental crises that have plagued Ukraine’s biodiverse regions during the full-scale invasion. Through a single communicative about a female who cares for abandoned cats, Iliukha manages to draw attention to the crisis that the war has created for all of Ukraine’s inhabitants, including pets. Known as “the female who fed abandoned cats”, the female remains in her nine-story flat building and shares her flat with 5 cats. Volunteers bring the female cat food, and all morning erstwhile the female stepped out of the flat building, “twenty hungry cat mouths met her”. They “cried out from hunger, cold, pain, and loneliness”. Nonetheless, the cats are not crucial due to the fact that their presence in the collection raises awareness about war’s effects on animal populations. They, in any ways, service as a metaphor for the Ukrainian people who, historically, have been starved and isolated by oppressive russian regimes. The outside cats cry out to the female due to the fact that “nobody else could hear them”, much like the Ukrainian nation during the full-scale invasion’s early days, erstwhile Ukrainian leaders’ pleas for more weapons and military support seemed to be ignored by planet leaders unwilling to hold Putin accountable. The female personifies Ukrainian selflessness, too. Her first concern is the cats’ well-being: “More than anything in the world, the female wanted to take home all the abandoned cats.” However, “she did not know how she herself would last the brutal winter.” The woman’s care for the cats mirrors real-life stories about selfless individuals who went to large lengths to defend and rescue creatures large and tiny by entering severely damaged structures, rescuing dogs, cats and even fish in aquariums. The female is simply a single character illustrative of the hundreds of Ukrainian businesspeople who, erstwhile invasion knocked on their city’s boundaries, transformed their business places into humanitarian aid stations that provided gear, food and even shelter for soldiers, volunteers and community members.
A akin communicative appears later in the collection, but alternatively of cats, the communicative depicts a female who returns to her destroyed village and weeps over the skeleton of her beloved cow. The scene might evoke images of a jarring scene from the epic miniseries Chernobyl, during which a russian soldier shoots an aged woman’s cattle erstwhile the female refuses his orders to board the evacuation bus. In Iliukha’s story, 1 of the woman’s first concerns erstwhile her boy calls and tells her she must leave the village is what she will do with the cow, who looks at the female “with her big, damp eyes”. Frightened by explosions, the cattle flees towards the woman’s vegetable patch “with her tail raised high” – an act of opposition entirely of its own. The female is forced to leave without the cow, and upon her return, the female discovers her barn is “just a pile of bricks and boards” and the cow’s remains “lay next to the burned hayloft”. The female weeps, wanting “to believe that the cattle had not suffered besides much”. Again, the communicative seems little fictional if 1 is acquainted with Ukrainian headlines surrounding ecocide, environmental destruction, and even disruptions to Ukraine’s agricultural industry. Ukrainians have reported that Russian soldiers shoot livestock specified as cows, and how those cows do not immediately succumb to their injuries and endure for long periods of time. Nevertheless, the woman’s attitude concerning the cattle represents Ukrainian attitudes towards and respect for nature, as well as the unmistakable fact that, for many agrarian Ukrainian households, the cattle is an almost irreplaceable lifeline.
In another stories, My Women fuses the folkloric with Ukraine’s national symbols and folk traditions. In 1 vignette, a female who no longer believes in God “remembered the black death curses that her grandma had taught her”, bringing to head stories from the war’s first days erstwhile women could be seen placing curses on Russian soldiers. The communicative captures, too, the function of tradition and ritual in Ukrainian society, as well as the importance of remembering one’s ancestors. The female asks her ancestors for aid while brewing the potion, which she “sprinkled on the ground” and “where a single drop fell, the ground opened up and swallowed the enemies”. This communicative bears a folkloric tone, 1 reminiscent of the folktale surrounding Ukraine’s most recognizable tradition – the vyshyvanka (embroidered blouse). It besides echoes a scene which made global headlines – that of a Ukrainian female encouraging Russian soldiers to place sunflower seeds in their pockets so that, upon their deaths on Ukrainian soil, their corpses would fertilize sunflowers.
It is no secret that throughout the full-scale invasion, Russian forces targeted Ukrainian heritage sites specified as cathedrals and museums, as well as another cultural artifacts like books and artworks. Like vyshyvanka, the Ukrainian flag has become an global symbol of opposition against Russian aggression and occupation. In Russian-occupied territories, specified as Crimea and parts of east Ukraine, people have hidden Ukrainian flags. In My Women, a brave female “who taught Ukrainian language and literature” buries her Ukrainian flag in her garden, knowing that Russian forces “would come for her soon”. Cultural artifacts and household heirlooms are key to the woman’s identity: “Everything betrayed that she was a ‘nationalist’ and a ‘saboteur’: the shelves tightly packed with Ukrainian books; her grandmother’s embroidered towel under the icon that her parent had given her as part of her dowry; her embroidered shirt, the vyshyvanka, which she always wore to the back-to-school ceremony.” Knowing that she cannot save everything, the female decides to save the flag, due to the fact that the flag “did not belong to her alone”. Rather, the flag “was part of the nation”, and even though the female could not single-handedly “save Ukraine and its language and culture”, she could at least “save the flag” – a simple, yet strong symbol of the Ukrainian people’s independence.
Part of My Women’s emotional grip comes from its compactness. A slim collection of only 73 pages, no communicative is more than 2 pages in length. The compactness and brevity reflect war’s rapid, always changing nature. It besides represents the specified divided seconds a single individual might gotta make a life-changing – or even life-saving – decision. My Women is undoubtedly destined to become 1 of the Ukrainian literary canon’s most crucial contributions, echoing compilations like Bohdan Ben and Orysia Hrudka’s Dark Days, Determined People. More so, My Women is simply a testament to the unbreakable Ukrainian female spirit that has been evident in all areas of Ukrainian society for centuries.
My Women by Yuliia Iliukha. Published by 128 LIT 2024.
Nicole Yurcaba is simply a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. A poet and essayist, her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, fresh east Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poesy workshops for confederate fresh Hampshire University, and is Humanities faculty at Blue Ridge Community and method College in the United States. She besides serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and confederate Review of Books.
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