Time and Again
Several of us at the National Writing Project had been working with educators in Ukraine around an international learning exchange focused on teachingthe essay within the values of liberal democracy. We would have started a formal online course together on February 24 — the day the Russian invasion began.
We hear intermittently from our colleagues (who have more important things to worry about than writing to us), and in one recent message learned that one of our colleagues, Olga Bryukhovestska, had published an essay in L’Internationale Online. We include a brief selection below to entice you to read the whole thing.
Follow the link to read the full essay.
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A selection from Olga Bryukhovetska, “Time and Again” at L’Internationale”
It is a new and unwanted experience to hear bombs exploding on the outskirts of Kyiv at 5 o’clock in the morning of 24 February 2022 — and then to hear more explosions, time and again.
‘It is exactly the same time, again.’ This phrase is repeated by Kyivians in make-do bomb shelters as the memory of the first Nazi bombing of the outskirts of Kyiv on 22 June 1941 resurfaces in the shared time of these newly formed underground communities. I gradually get used to the nauseating sound of the siren announcing an imminent airstrike, over and over again.
One week into the war, when drinking water becomes a scarcity in the city, it is again a new and unwanted, but this time accepted, experience to evacuate from Kyiv. I am leaving behind my home, my books, my writing table, without knowing if I will ever be able to return to this space where I have lived my life. It is another newly shared experience to escape with the bare necessities and become an internally displaced person.
As I write these words, one month into the war, I seem to have regained the ability to express this experience, to share it with the world. It was too unbearable before. It has been a month of feeling a bleeding pain in the face of aggression against the country to which I belong. It has been a month of an acute awareness that we are being killed simply because we exist, or, to be more precise, because we ‘do not really exist’ in someone else’s illusory world, in which we are perceived as an irritating obstacle to their ‘Grand Cause’. It has been one month of facing the unbearable lightness of being. The famous title of Milan Kundera’s novel finally makes sense as a reference for the real-time unfolding of damaged life. Time and again.”
