An origin story

I remember being in high school when I learned pedaheh wasn’t a word everyone used. We were standing in line at the Fortino’s hot food counter, and my friend said she was ordering some “perogies.” I smiled and nodded, not knowing what she was talking about. Considering the Polish version of the word, I find it surprising that I never registered the cross-over until then. I never intentionally thought about being Ukrainian until both my Baba and Gido passed away. Gido died ten years ago, and my Baba only 2. I’ve been realizing more and more that part of my Ukrainian identity has become a choice: I can choose to carry it on through rituals of my orchestration or leave it behind. I feel my privilege in having been able to hold onto even small parts of my culture so casually the majority of my life. Only now have I been feeling the slightest weight of colonialism offering me a cloth to wipe it away.

My Gido came here from Ukraine when he was about five years old. My Baba told me that Dziadziu (jah-jo) was asked to fight for Nazi Germany, and he refused, so as a result, they were put into a concentration camp. Babcia (bab-chya), Dziadziu, and Gido escaped and came to Nova Scotia first, then to Hamilton, where they settled.

I don’t remember Gido talking about his family or Ukraine, though there were reminders in some photos and decorations throughout the house. My mom and her siblings went to Ukrainian school as children, and we were semi-regulars at the Ukrainian Church. Still, besides certain words, foods, and holiday traditions, our family’s history in Ukraine is a big question mark to me. My mom was the one to tell us now and then through her story-telling that all Gido said he remembered was long train tracks and walking for what felt like forever.

We regularly practiced Saturday night dinners at Baba and Gido’s. Gido was the glue to our family. Whatever inter-personal conflicts existed between aunts and uncles were at bay in their household. When my Gido died suddenly of an aneurysm in 2012, I should have expected that our family would have to think about how we were going to hold ourselves together and, additionally, how we would hold onto certain practices that we only performed in that house.

Other than some arthritis, my Gido was perfectly healthy by socially accepted standards. He worked out regularly, worked full-time, and was the primary caretaker to my Baba, who was diagnosed with MS early on in her life. He loved to take us toy shopping and make us deruny (potato pancakes) on the weekends. When my mom called me one afternoon to tell me something was wrong, I thought it was about my Baba.

Piecing history together

My Gido was extraordinarily loving and incredibly hard-working. He had a book collection that could compete with the library and an ever-growing movie and music collection. There was always music playing in their house, and there was always food. When we would spend the night, we’d fall asleep to the sound of a movie playing loudly in the next room. The classical radio station reminds me of him. He would blast Bach as he drove us around town at what felt like lightning speeds as if we were part of a car chase and he was conducting the score. Looking back now, being close to 30, I think about how cathartic loud music can feel. How often, when I’m driving, music helps distract my thoughts. There’s so much about my Gido I’ll never get to know. It’s even worth noting he died on February 29, a day that doesn’t happen most years. Interrogating this blurry in-between is what I’ve been learning to sink into.

In studying Social Services, I’ve learned a lot about childhood development and how impactful the years between age 0 and 7 are for so many aspects of a person’s being. My Gido was gone so quickly and without warning. I wonder where his childhood memories and feelings sat in his body of 71 years. Hungarian-Canadian physician, Gabor Maté, says that childhood trauma can instill a sense of never being good enough in someone. People build up habits of working too hard to prove that they’re worthwhile. He explains he got this message as a Jewish infant under the Nazis during WWII. He got the message that the world didn’t want him, that he wasn’t good enough. He became a workaholic doctor. I think about how busy my Gido kept himself, also a doctor. I think about how busy my mom keeps herself. I think about how busy I keep myself.

Putin’s take on the history of Ukraine, Russia, and thoughts on the US, is another reminder of how war mentality has never really ended. What’s further illuminating is Ukrainian authority denying African and Asian nationals access to safety. This chess game to gain power is fought every day by our leaders through capitalism, oppression, colonialism, and white supremacy in one way or another. It’s always on these powers’ minds, the means they use are the only things that change. We are all the pawns. Authorities disguise themselves by co-opting words like allyship and diplomacy. These disguises can throw us off, making us wonder who we can trust, especially when we hear of sudden, specific tragedies or injustices in mainstream media. These leaders also like to convince us that events happen in isolation so they can get away with attempting to treat them in isolation. All actions come with roots and reactions, and most certainly, actions occurring on a global scale.

The war on social media

Researcher Scott Timcke talks about the fact that there is no common experience of social media, how each of our unique algorithms cushions our understanding of events and news. He says,

“My way of understanding a tweet is shaped by the tweets that happen to be around it… What am I reading around an issue or what are the other people commenting upon it?”

Our lives are shaped by who and what surrounds us, and online, that’s explicitly curated to our liking. We don’t have to deal with contesting opinions as much. We can unfollow, mute, and ignore the discomfort altogether. We can log off instead of working through conflict. This control is helpful when we need a good break. Still, on the whole, it becomes dangerous when we start to think that we could build a separate life that suits our needs and our needs alone. Social media is tailored validation, a place where we find the collapse of context, nuance, and complexity. It fits just right, so long as you stay inside your echo chamber. Algorithms at their most intense are the pinnacle of individualization. Things become black and white, and we start to think in extremes and binaries.

Life would be so much simpler if things were clear-cut. Boundaries would be easier to set, and we’d have more control. Relationships are never as clear-cut as we want them to be, and they are usually more about choice than we’d like them to be. The complexity in which the world operates needs a type of involved, critical participation that we are not well equipped to deal with. I sometimes wish most things were about the content that leaders try and convince us of and that I could accept them at face value. Nothing is as it “naturally appears” online. Algorithms have been described as “empathetic” to this war, calling attention to the lack of empathy (i.e. racism) coding has to genocides, tragedies, and violence going on globally elsewhere, particularly the Middle East and African nations. I’m trying to wrap my head around the use of the word empathetic to the construction of algorithms as if they are their own being, as if we don’t participate in the process. To challenge this, I offer that our relationship to social media is another which might be more about choice than we’d like it to be too. We have to put in a bit more work to try and figure out what is actually going on and even still, we might not fully know.

Being critically participatory is essential yet can feel impossible due to how overwhelming and messy it is, and how tempting it is to want simplicity. I’m also thinking about the pandemic and the buildup around its “ending.” We know the impact of COVID will not be over once the mandates change or the reporting stops.

Intergenerational-trauma

There are very few things in this world with firm beginnings and endings — perhaps a sports game, a song, feature film, but most things never truly end. Despite declarations, most experiences live on in the bodies that survive them. Ignoring this is to accept that heightened diseases, heart failure, and stress-induced illnesses are inevitable in certain bodies instead of something that we could care for if we were willing to. It is to live in ignorance of the dire need to shift our society’s care systems. You can only unfollow or mute so many people; sooner or later, you will have to step outside. What do we reach to when we can’t mute someone IRL? A weapon? We think we’ve come so far from our ancestors, and that may be true in some regards, but we still have so much further to go. We are not binary beings, nor are our experiences linear. Sitting in this complexity forces a sort of maturity that allows you to do something that feels next to impossible otherwise: accept. Accept that we are in a place needing to address the repercussions of history and our actions before moving forward with our lives. It’s tough to care for what you refuse to believe is there.

To think that all of this escalated while Ukrainians were still sleeping, that so many woke to attacks. To think about how much of the Western world was watching as bystanders. To think about all the times we’ve been bystanders. To think about the specific motivations behind when we deem it appropriate to step in. Ukrainian anxiety rose with the sun. We watched the war “starting.” We watched the cloth of war doing what it does best: working to erase and further instill a sense of unworthiness in yet another generation of people.

An expansive timeline for healing

You could place your ancestry on a timeline to avoid the question marks or context. My Gido’s life: 1941–2012, but where does that leave me? The times I’ve tried to ignore the history that’s made me, I end up with a version of myself that feels so utterly disconnected and individualistic –lonely. In accepting the interconnectedness of relationships and history, I think that my Dziadziu’s refusal to fight for Nazi Germany is the part of me that shows up for the community and dreams of a better world, the part of me that knows actions speak louder than words, even if it means living a harder life with my loved ones. I want to believe that my Gido’s trauma shows up in my practicing having a bigger heart to care for those around me. I play classical music and think about him, thankful that we never lose anyone completely. I am grateful for those who came before me who live on through me. I think about the responsibility I feel to them, noting the privilege we had in even being able to escape. I feel the responsibility to do better in the ways I can and to still acknowledge the harm that has come and that is still coming from my ancestry. I hope that their trauma is in part healing through me two generations later. If I ever have children, I hope all of this work means that they will inherit the feeling of being enough.

In conversation with Kamea Chayne on Green Dreamer, Shilpa Jain shared a familiar quote: “hurt people hurt people” and mentioned she heard someone add, “then they then build institutions that hurt people.” Conversely, Shilpa says, “healing people are healing people, and create systems that are healing people.” She also importantly recognized how these systems are operating almost all of the time. At any moment, she says, “I might be the one hurting or hurt, or healing, or supporting the healing.”

She applies this while thinking through colonization,

“ I know that in order to colonize, a person has to be separated first from themselves, and from the earth, from their own humanity… What I’ve learned over time is that we have to make space for even hurt and pain. People want to have that acknowledged. When we acknowledge it, it can flow out of us, instead of being stuck. We’re just constantly defining ourselves against what didn’t work, against our own pain, against the thing that was wrong, instead of looking towards what we want to grow, and engaging with that creative energy.”

Perhaps if we could expand the ways we help each other heal from places of acceptance, we could stomach complexity and pain because we would know of the possibilities to transform them and move from them. Perhaps we could innovate from that place, and find possibilities for different futures there too.