I asked if they had beer, and the shop owner said, Yes there is, in one syllable (“Đ„”). He explained the options. Zero of the words matched with the (if we’re being generous) 750 in my vocabulary. Seeing the empty look in my eyes, my sister-in-law translated. He led me to his beer selection and glassware options, glad to exercise his English-speaking muscles in the Turkish restaurant he proudly runs in small Hnivan. He’s so kind, I think, to speak English to me. But his inflection is flat, normal. I’m just overwhelmed with joy in hearing the civilized intonations of beautiful English that tears form in my eyes.
We roll into Brailiv after napping in the nearby forest. Air raid sirens hang above the town like static electricity, and outside the school girls sing and choreograph movements to “Ukraine Sings”, while stray dogs chuckle and drink from puddles. On this episode of Dissociative Village High School. Outside of the town’s lone shop we discuss where to go next. Two girls on recess coming out of the shop with ice cream muster up the courage to say Hello and Are you from English? before noticing their error and running off giggling, warm. It feels good to be important again.
The other Canadian Anglophone in online language course has a minor break and says there’s just no logic to the Ukrainian language. The other masc-presenting person who speaks Russian, agrees. The teacher (the only one who actually knows the language aka the only one with authority) kindly disagrees. Just because you don’t understand something, doesn’t mean it’s not logical, she wanted to say. I sit silently: I think he meant, there’s no logic to a world where an Anglophone bothers to learn another language. It doesn’t increase job opportunities, he’d told me. Why bother learning another language when people who don’t speak English are less intelligent, several hundred years of colonialism asks me. This same logic led to where we are now, air raid sirens disrupting chuckling dogs, armymen torturing journalists.
Small things. How they cement-in these slick tiles in outdoor spaces and then have to build wooden staircases overtop so they aren’t so slippery. How you’re surprised when they decide to actually turn down the house lights at a show. How their driving is so unsafe as to be uncivilized. How the rain slaps on the tin overhang at the apartment. Noticing cultural differences doesn’t count as learning when it is drowning in Canadian exceptionalism. That is, I’m not becoming a better person for seeing the nuanced differences in daily life if I’m not challenging the part of me that is conditioned to think that their differences are inherently worse. When you’re brought up being told your country is the greatest in the world, it takes a long time to decondition the idea that the squealing wheels of the tram-bus isn’t because they are merely a lower order of human.
All that I have internalized as better, is money. Village roads with more hole than road. Plastic bags for plastic bags. Litter in the pond in the village. Corrupt politicians. Plastic baseboards. All the ways that I remember home as better, more comfortable, more advanced, is merely the presence of disproportionate financial wealth, locally and globally. And in Canada, the presence of wealth is stolen land and its extracted resources. The things I remember from home as better are linked to theft of land, the same theft of land that is actively making people here poorer. Colonialisms upon colonialisms my god.
It’s certainly ok to feel relieved when you can order a beer naturally and without pain. It’s certainly ok to know that less slippery tiles are better than slippery tiles, even if they don’t look like a high-school drama production’s set of a plantation mansion. What’s not ok is to confuse ill-gotten wealth and language-supremacy with greatness.
On the way out the door, two beer buzz, he says “See you later alligator”. I giggle, warm. And that’s ok.
Balls of Rice 