A Message from Haska

This coming Sunday evening at 8:30pm, we’ll gather together in the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in solidarity with our fellow Ukrainian writer. Six Northern Irish writers will read the work of their Ukrainian counterparts and Kabosh theatre will perform a short piece from a Ukrainian play. If you’d like to join us in person or online or contribute to the funds we’re raising for the Red Cross’s humanitarian relief programme in Ukraine, you can find more information and booking details here. I’ll be reading the work of my lovely friend and fellow EUPL Laureate, novelist Haska Shyyan who has kindly shared some of her thoughts about the situation in her home land. I may not be able to read her full statement on Sunday evening, but I wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to read her powerful words in full.

(The photo is of Haska and I reading together in Vilnius Book Festival in February 2020)

Dear audience, dear Belfast! 

Less than two weeks ago it was impossible to imagine that all of us would become witnesses of tragedy in its absolute. 

Each morning I wake up with the feeling of anxiety for this world and shame for not being there. I first check family chat where my family safely isolated in the western city of Lviv spends their night waking up to the alarms. For now they still sleep in their beds because solid walls Austrian architects built at the beginning of the century survived WWII and that allows them not to go to the basement with a two month baby and a five year old. 

They made a choice not to leave the country yet and I proudly understand it. 

On the walls of their apartments there are a lot of paintings. 

Some of them are the works of my friends, great Ukrainian artists who created them specially for the Ukrainian edition of DBC Peirre’s “Lights out in Wonderland”. One of the paintings glows in the dark. I remember us looking for luminescent paint to reproduce this on the book cover. The factory was in Luhansk - a city taken by russia back in 2014.

Ukrainians did kickass art projects, creativity was booming - and it still does - the collections of the images, songs, memes, short animation, poems Ukrainians create now to support their spirit is definitely going to become part of international events.

Yet. After checking on my family I have names popping up in my head - names of people I still didn’t check on since the beginning of war.

The publisher of my novel - the excerpt of which is going to be read today is based in Kharkiv - the city in the East that was heavily bombed during past week. It was a huge corporation with a massive capacity to publish Ukrainian literature and textbooks. The best printing houses were also based in Kharkiv. 
Many people evacuated from the city but there are brave ones who made their choice to stay or had constraints that kept them from leaving. Like the editor of my novel who takes care of her 85 year old father under  constant terror of bombing. She asks not to give her name and dreams about going out with friends. She sends me the messages that look more like telegrams from WWII 

There is some good news - thanks to the efforts of the publishing house owners blind children were evacuated from the orphanage 15 minutes before the major explosion on the main square. It was 300 meters away. 

One of my courageous colleagues Yulia Iliukha, a writer of kids’ books a mother of 9 y.o. refuses to leave even after a missile landed in the backyard of their residential building while classmates of her son were hiding in the basement (for six days already)

She sends the message: “Kharkiv will stand! We are as united as never before! We always were Ukraine and we will be! The victory will be on our side!”

I wish I could do more for this brave woman! And I just want to hug her too while having a drink in the shiny bar our cities were full of. And to buy my daughter her new books scheduled for 2022. 

Throughout history russians were putting a lot of effort to stop Ukrainian literature from existing but ruining laws and repressions of Ukrainian speaking writers. But each time we were like Phoenix. 

The russian culture was presented as the only one worth exporting and it absorbed the talents from other nations trying to sell the lies about Panslavic territory where russian is the language and the rest - just funny dialects. 

They succeeded in Belarus and we all see the effect. 

I am grateful that you are standing with Ukraine today! 

We are going to succeed in stopping russia together

Culture is a strong tool so we call for Boycotting Russian Culture Products 

Because you can not use art as red herring as paravant to hide ugly crimes of the dictator and it’s obedient people. 

It is a collective crime and this punishment is obviously not enough. 

Russian culture is intoxicated and toxic for others - so it is also a hygienic measure.

Each time I hear a russian poem I used to like as a child I see a bomb hitting a chidren’s hospital and killing a young, girl Polina, (you know she had this pinkish hair).

Each time I hear a russian melody I used to enjoy I see a woman in labour in Kyiv subway

Each time I see a scene from russian ballet - the shelling of residential building is in front of my eyes.