Swimming in Odesa

An excerpt from the author’s forthcoming book Ukraine—A Polyphony. The fourth chapter is devoted to a field trip with PEN Ukraine to libraries and schools in the Odesa region in February, 2025.

Odesa opens its mouth to the Black Sea. It embraces the sea. It faces the sea. All its windows seem to be drinking the sea. It is a city that does not need further introductions. “What associations do you have with Odesa?” Ukrainian philosopher Vakhtang Kabuladze looks at American sociologist Fiona Greenland awaiting her reply while we are sitting in a van on our way to the city. “Well, you know, it is famous for its eclectic and rich culture, Empress Catherina and Potemkin, for its excellent music and literature scene,” Fiona answers without hesitation. “And what about gangsters?” inquires Ukrainian writer Maxim Bespalov further. “And did you know that Silvester Stalone’s grandmother was from Odesa?” shouts Vakhtange from the front. “What? Really?!” exclaims Fiona in astonishment. Me, a forest’s child, who grew up TV-less, I have to google him. “But this is to no use,” concludes Vakhtange, “Fiona is an exception.”

Odesa is a harbour city. Meaning a city of merchants, immigrants, temporary travellers. Tankers, cargoes, and ships stitch the Black Sea, traveling from port to port. It is a city whose lava pavement came from Naples and its architects from France. First, merchants came from Greece, and later, Jewish merchants joined them after the change of taxation introduced by Catherina in order to attract Jews living in the old former Polish territory, where the tax was doubled, while Odesan Jews were spared it. Odesa was a Babel-port of languages, where one could hear Italian, French, Yiddish, Greek, Polish, Armenian, and Georgian in addition to Russian and Ukrainian. In the late 19th Century, Duc Rechileu, who administered the city, was preoccupied with how little Russian he heard on the streets, and so ordered the language be taught in the high school he founded. Two centuries later, in 2019, a new law was signed: a minimum of 80% of all publicly funded secondary education was to be taught in Ukrainian.

We arrive at one such high school in a small port town adjacent to Odesa. Pivdenne—meaning “southern”—the Ukrainian version of the former Russian Yuzhne. The PEN Ukraine van is loaded with boxes full of books donated by Book Aid International, Humanitarian Nova Poshta, and PEN’s book donations enabled by grants. It’s been two years now that PEN Ukraine has been traveling to small towns and villages visiting libraries, military units and schools to donate books. In 2023, they donated 23,000 books; in 2024—27,000. Eight hundred organizations applied for books both in Ukrainian and English. PEN members choose especially wounded places, small, often near the frontline. Particularly eager was the 124th Territorial Brigade from Kherson. Their commander is a fanatic about literature, says Maksym Sytnikov, executive director of PEN Ukraine, standing at the back of the van among boxes in a black hoodie with UKRAINER written on it, a real literature ambassador. PEN members and writers met with soldiers who ordered not only books devoted to military topics, but also non-fiction and poetry. Poetic succor as first aid.

We enter the school. The director in his sixties, wearing a tight-fitting grey thin V-neck sweater, greets us and wants to show us around. A wall to the right is tightly decorated with black and white portraits of Ukrainian soldiers from Pivdenne, all killed in the war. Are there any fathers and brothers of the students among them? Teenagers gather in the biggest classroom. We sit in a row against a huge mirror covering the whole wall. The listening students can see us and themselves in it. They are attentive, to a large extent. I speak openly about my transgenderness and queerness, and wonder what it means to the staff, while two girls in front of me are holding hands affectionately and one leans her head on the other’s from time to time. One of them approaches me later and wants to know what the tattoo on my arm is. I ask her about her background, where her family comes from, and her language. Ieva lives between the Kyiv and Odesa region and speaks with her mother in Ukrainian, Russian and English. She is shy, wants to leave. And what does your mother do? I ask before she quickly runs down the staircase. “She is a musician,” I hear before she disappears.

We are invited for cookies and tea in a separate room. I ask about language again. The director’s forehead frowns. Yes, it’s an issue, he says preoccupied. Kids speak mostly Russian between themselves, in the corridors. Lessons are held in Ukrainian though. Villages in the neighbourhood were founded by settlers from Russia. They were specialists hired to work, while the labor was from here. Thus, the Russian language was imposed on the rest of the villagers.

Pivdenne is an important point on the coast. This is where the pipeline transporting crude oil begins. It goes way up to Brody near the Polish border, and it was agreed it would continue way up to Płock and further to Gdańsk in Poland. So Pivdenne is where most people work. On our way further on, we pass an unfinished building, where just yesterday a man was killed in a Russian missile strike. He was a seaport worker, aged thirty nine, a former engineer at the mechanized brigade serving in engineering reconnaissance. His name was Serhiy Maistrenko. He was just passing by.

We continue inland to Dobroslav, formerly Kominternivske, with a population around 6,800. One Ukrainian poet, traveling with us, used to go to school in a similar small place nearby. He is originally from Odesa, where he lives with his boyfriend. They speak in Russian, but they use Ukrainian for mobile chat. The poet tells me that his boyfriend is from a Russian speaking family, and it is easier to communicate that way. The poet himself, however, writes his poems in Ukrainian. We enter the room upstairs in a local authorities building, which is filled with various army brigades flags hanging from the ceiling like leafy tree branches. The room is full. At the back, I spot a reproduction of the well-known painting by Ilya Repin, a painter originally from nearby Mikolaiev. In it, we see Zaporizhzhian Cossacks writing a letter full of insults to the Ottoman sultan, saying they won’t submit. Above, there is a modern interpretation of it made by a French photographer Emeric Lhuisset: a photo of Ukrainian soldiers featuring Roman Hrybov, a Ukrainian border guard, who was serving on Snake Island located in the Black Sea. The painting is considered Russian heritage by Russians and Ukrainian heritage by Ukrainians. The photograph is a way of reclaiming the Ukrainian past. One of the best known paintings by Ilya Repin depicts Ivan the Terrible with his son, whom he has just killed. The painting is huge and welcomes the visitors of the Tretyakovka gallery in Moscow. There is something ominous about this image. Subsequent Russian rulers would also be killing their own sons, their own people.

Librarians are excited and come to the table to have a glimpse at the books we brought. They take us to the local library and show us around, they are eager to talk. I notice drawers with catalogues. On one of them, there is a big X letter with flashcards of the Russian books that had been withdrawn from the library’s catalog. “What do you do with those books?” I ask. “We get rid of them, store them away or recycle them.” Entering a room with books for kids, we are greeted by colorful covers. The major problem is the paucity of textbooks in Ukrainian. A huge supply burnt down when the Vivat printing house was struck by a Russian missile. Kids often have to study Ukrainian history from books written in Russian. They don’t want to read in Russian. They prefer to borrow books in Ukrainian, the librarian tells me. We have to leave, but I wonder what language the two of the women working here speak among themselves. They pause and look at each other. And then one answers, laughing: “Ah, vy znaete, nu, of course we speak in surzhyk!”

Before heading to Odesa, we slide down a slalom clay road to a small oyster place in the middle of nowhere, attached to the shore of an inland salty lake, which I mistake first with the sea. “It is liman, you know, right?” asks Maksym. No, I don't, and look it up. The word liman is adopted from Russian and stands for an estuary formed from fluvial waters coming from the Black Sea. I check all other languages known to me: English, Polish, Spanish, French, Italian, Norwegian–always liman. The Russian adopted it from Greek, yet the Russian form spread. In 2007, Putin ordered the establishment of the National Russian Language Institute, since the authorities were highly preoccupied with the retreating Russian language in Ukraine. These days, in Kyiv, the common joke goes: “I’m afraid of speaking Russian, because Putin might come and want to liberate me.”

Our last stop is a newly re-designed library–M. S. Hrushevsky Odesa Regional Universal Scientific Library–with huge windows through which light generously pours in, wide wooden window sills with welcoming pillows, warm light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and plants. The room is full: young cadets–dressed in black uniforms with POLICE written on them. We are about to recommend them books to read. I am trying to understand who they are, what they believe in, what they need. Only a few doze off, the rest are attentive and listening. Ukrainian literary translator Anna Vovchenko swiftly translates my words from English to Ukrainian when I tell them that, paradoxically, I feel very safe in Ukraine because I feel protected by people like them. The last time I felt that way was in Sicily, where, after being robbed, I ended up at the police station discussing the poetry of Giacommo Leopardi with the carabinieri. A few of them smiled. How to reach their hearts and minds? I recommended to them Ukrainian poets who were fighting on the frontline and writing about their experience: Artur Dron, Yaryna Chornohuz, or those tragically killed, like Victoria Amelina and Maksym Kryvtsov. At the very end, I stand up and read my own poem written in Polish to a Ukrainian poetess Iya Kiva—my dialogue with her—and Maksym reads the Ukrainian translation. Fiona thanked me later for this, saying, this was like a real transmitter, a genuine poem-donation.

In the evening, we are wandering with Fiona around the streets of Odesa. In the past, their street names were written in Italian and Russian. Poet Maria Galina informed me later that people intentionally changed the position of some streets’ signs to mislead Russian soldiers who might have entered the city at the beginning of the invasion. This is probably why we would often end up walking in circles. We are standing on the crossroads of the former Pushkinskaya, now Italiiska and Niny Strokatoi streets. The name hasn’t been changed yet and is still detectable on online maps. Hotel Bristol and Philharmonic face each other like sculptures on Easter Island. The buildings were heavily shelled just a few days ago. The hotel’s facade looks untouched apart from one caryatid’s missing face, as if it was not able to look at it all. Like a woman’s disfigured face after the atomic bombing of her home city Nagasaki in Abe Kobo’s novel The Face of Another. The building, though, is entirely gutted. Meanwhile the philharmonic is visibly wounded from the outside and now embraced by scaffolding. Its main door is made of plywood. Inside, we find some pieces of wood and stones lying on the floor, a simple cash box window, and randomly scattered posters on the plywood wall. I feel as if we entered a provincial railway station. Yet, the soprano Darya Serdyuk singing from behind the wall is superb and changes the place immediately into a palazzo of music. The concert is nearing the end, but the woman at the cash box lets us have a glimpse and half-opens the door, where I can see musicians surrounded by a small group of audience in the lobby. Apparently, music can live anywhere.

I am about to retire when Maria Galina texts me to come over and join her, poet Maya Dimerli, with whom Ilya Kaminsky has already put me in contact, and others in a local bar for a reading. It is a group of young poets, they call themselves Naked Poets. I am intrigued and curious. The venue is in the basement, a very low key place. Mikhail Son takes a photo of me and Maria, with a loud flash that dazzles me. Maria in her black leather trousers sits behind the table, drinking beer, and makes me familiar with people in the room. Maria herself is from a Russian-speaking family: “My situation is even more complicated,” she says. Her great-grandmother was a Georgian noblewoman, her great-grandfather a Polish Ukrainian landowner, then a professor of Geography in Kharkiv. Maria’s grandfather was a Jewish doctor, arrested during the campaign against Jewish professors. “And for all of them, Russian, as the language of imperialism, was the language of communication,” Maria retells. She grew up in Kyiv in an Ukrainian environment, meaning, while many kids were watching a popular TV series with four animal characters in Russian "Spokoinoi nochi, malyshi," Maria was listening to fairy tales by the same title, but in Ukrainian: “Na dobranich, dity.” When she moved to Moscow, she couldn’t comprehend why she didn’t hear Ukrainian on the streets. Maria writes poetry in Russian. “I have tried in Ukrainian, I now auto-translate some of my poems to Ukrainian, but the system is totally different, with different images.”

In some of the countries of the African continent, it was a common strategy in the 1960’s to write in the language of colonizers by doing a literal translation from the language of the colonized. One of the leading poets of that time from Nigeria, Gabriel Okara, hijacked English to his own aims. In his case, he went even deeper, translating the language of his beloved river, the rich and nourishing river Nun, to English. “My river’s calling too!” exclaims the narrator, and we can hear the river’s mother tongue. We understand that they are related and thus each language is transmittable on the wavelength of the river. Is it still English of the colonizers? What does it say of me writing now in English too? “I will bend it, I will change it, I will use it and subdue it until it serves me,” Lola Shoneyin told me, referring to the English language, while we were talking online. Lola is a Nigerian writer, writing in English. Lola is tall and bald, wearing big earrings that swayed while we talked. She was educated in the UK, in Edinburgh, and the first poetic voices she encountered were the male English, Scottish and Irish voices. There are five hundred languages in Nigeria, nearly twice as many as in the entirety of Europe. If I asked Lola after a day at her family home, which language they spoke, she would not know what to say. They would blend the local dialect of her parents, Yoruba, English and some mimicking and singing as if they were preparing a language stew. “There’s always a lot of singing,” she told me with her own melodious voice. At the end of the day, what does English mean to her? “This language is for me to control,” stated Lola assertively. The idea of subjugating the language of colonizers has existed in other parts of the world: to Arabize French or English. Chantal Zabus, writing about postcolonial literature, calls this phenomenon “relexification,” as if it was like taking an old engine from a BMW and adapting it to a Fiat car, or the reverse. As if some languages were better cars or better currencies, as the French linguist Louis-Jean Calvet notices in his book on language wars.

Yet, not everyone is able to switch from one language to another. Taya Naydenko, whose ancestors spoke Russian, on both sides throughout generations, poses a rhetorical question: “How can one say: I don’t need that language anymore?” She affirms quickly, “But this does not say anything about me.” Taya writes poems in both: Russian and Ukrainian. She has a different relation with both languages, as if it was a polyamorous relationship. So how would you describe each of them? I asked her later over the phone. “Russian is hard like wood, Ukrainian is soft like glina,” she says. Glina means “clay” in Russian.

It is slightly different for Mikhail. He is not able to compose poetry in Ukrainian. “Technically,” he says, “I could write poetry in Ukrainian, although this would sharply reduce the range of my technical capabilities.” Mikhail does some translations to Ukrainian though. Dark haired Mikhail is a biologist studying, among other things, aquatic alien species in the waters of the Black Sea. His roots go as far as Korea. His great-grandparents fled from Korea, while his grandfather was deported from the Far East of the USSR to Kazakhstan. Later, he managed to forge the documents to escape. He got married and settled in Odesa. He would sometimes speak Korean to his sister, but this language never meant much to him and he did not transmit it further on. His paternal grandmother was of Jewish-Ashkenazi and German provenience. Maternal, Sephardic. Yet, the main language of communication throughout the family history has been Russian. The same as Ilya Kaminsky’s family, whose relative was beaten to death for speaking Yiddish on the street. That language was cut like a tree and not transmitted. Russian was safer. They would rather Misha not write in Russian, young poets told me later, when we sat down to talk in a popular bar Kompot.

They call themselves “naked” since they wish to appear as plain, honest and clear. Yet they obviously attract our attention quickly when two young men enter the stage one after the other dressed in a pleated kilt or a long silky skirt. Danko Ptashynyi tells me that he is from a Russiphied, not Russophone, family. He still speaks Russian with his parents, but writes his poems in Ukrainian. Whereas Tymofii Bezverkhov and his parents switched to Ukrainian, his mother speaks with difficulty, but does try. Both of his brothers speak Russian, and the older has served in the army hospital as a surgeon. “Everyone speaks Russian there,” Timofii tells me. His surname comes from his great grandfather who decided to take a more Russian sounding one—Bezverkhov—instead of his former Ukrainian Havryluk. There was a time Timofii was fascinated with Brodsky. “But how can I read him if he did not like my own country?” It was hard at first to write in Ukrainian, but when the full scale invasion began, there was no coming back to writing in Russian for Timofii. Language for all of them is a sign of self-identification. Language changed their personality (Timofii), or made them want to create something new in Ukrainian (Kateryna Kharchenko). For fair long haired Kate, Russian is the first language she cannot ignore (or biological, as Timofii calls it), but Ukrainian is for expression, a language of choice. It is the language they want to teach their kids later.

Does language shape us? Does it make one Polish speaking Polish, or Russian speaking Russian? Frantz Fanon would say yes: “The Negro [.. .] will be proportionately whiter [. . .] in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language,” he wrote in his groundbreaking book Black Skin, White Masks. Edward Said argued, in his book Culture and Imperialism, that it does too. He saw language as an electric transmitter channeling cultural substances into the minds of people. Classical linguists Whorf and Sapir saw the source of the multi-cultural world in its multilingualism. The problem began when politics tamed the language. When language became a hunting dog. When one language became the Logos, one language was superior to the other. Subjects use language in order to produce discourses, and discourses are a medium of power relations, as Michel Foucault observed. What Said tries to figure out is: how to use the same language, and yet speak the truth.

I am about to leave, but I have a chance to speak to Maya Dimerli and learn about her family story. Her and her parents’ home language has been Russian, yet, during the holidays, her mother and grandmother would sing Ukrainian songs. Interestingly, her way to poetry led from a certain reading of Marina Tsvetaeva’s work in Bulgarian, a book she found at a bookstore where her mother used to work. She read it without much understanding, yet she was transformed and possessed in a mystical way. Still, Maya wouldn’t be able to write in Ukrainian, but she does inspire younger poets to write in the language. She takes part in the project started by Ilya—poems not bombs—writing poetry by refugee kids, who found themselves in Odesa.

In another project, young poets are encouraged to translate poems from other languages to Ukrainian. One of the participants, Oleksandra Shvied, aka Chainka, fled to Odesa from her hometown Kherson. Curly blonde haired Chainka has just turned eighteen. Her entire family comes from either the city or nearby villages, like her father who mostly speaks Surzhyk. While her mother speaks Russian, she does know Ukrainian very well. Chainka learnt Ukrainian at school and was enchanted with it. For her, language is a big part of her identity, and at the same time she recognizes the value of what one has to say. She sees Ukrainian society as a family, whose members differ and should be included as they are. “It wouldn’t be good to push people to speak a language, we need to give ourselves time,” she concludes.

The bar is slowly emptying. The older generation of poets still writing in Russian is sitting at the back facing the stage. The younger writing in Ukrainian is sitting closer to the stage, at its left side. Timofii enters the stage playing guitar, and sings a song written to Mikhail’s poem about Stalin, about those who lost their lives from his hand.

Maria walks me back home. It is cold and windy. We pass by the monument of Isaak Babel sitting and noting something down in a notebook. These days, this statue, and other monuments symbolizing Russian imperialism, are being dismantled or removed. Karl Marx dismantled himself on his own though. His big head was placed instead of Catherine’s on a plinth facing the harbour. Yet, as it was made of papier-mâché, the first storm hijacked it and the head of the Marxist ideology could be spotted jumping and flying around the streets of Odesa like a huge balloon. Babel, however, is made of bronze and is still sitting there, still stirring emotions. The following day, during the Georgiy Gongadze Prize Media Day, scholars and writers would quarrel about his status: is he part of Ukrainian heritage? Babel was born to a Jewish family in Odesa and could write very well in Yiddish, but chose to make the Jewish district Moldovanka famous in Russian. Boris Khersonsky renounced Babel’s heritage, addressing the issue in a few of his poems. Babel was a complex figure to many. A Jew who joined the Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army that was erasing Jews and Poles alike, covering the massacres on the ground in a very fine style, which made the book Red Cavalry. He approached the violence with criticism, yet he was there not only as a witness. Babel was not praised by the Soviet regime, and just as Ilya Repin would have it, he got executed on the wave of Stalinist purges in 1941. When Bucha, Borodyanka and Irpen were raped by Russian soldiers, I had a devastating feeling of déjà vu—or, for Babel, déjà lu . Would we read today a report written by a Russian soldier?

I cannot sleep at night after the air raid wakes me up. I look up the Telegram channel from time to time. After a long day, I cannot be bothered to go and sit in the corridor of the small hotel without any shelter in it. “Center–it goes to you,” says the message in the channel dedicated to Odesa. After a short moment, I hear a sound that cannot be mistaken with anything else. A shaheed-drone got shot down by the Ukrainian defense somewhere nearby. The explosion is a double-sound, as if a star exploded before dying out. Half a year ago, one missile destroyed the Russian Orthodox church. Russian priests operating it were sheltering underground. What were they praying for? The church was rebuilt within a few months from Ukrainian funds. I recall Maria’s words: “Let Russia forget about Odesa for good, it is not a Russian city.” We were walking down the Polish Descent, one of the slopes heading down to the bay. I was advised, by the way, to venture out further to the south, if I was interested in some good urban graffiti. Later, I would see one, made by a Kharkiv-based street artist Gamlet Zinkivskyi, depicting a man in swimming pants, with his legs slightly bent and arms straight forward, ready to jump into the water with a caption above him saying: кожен день схожі на стрибок в прірву–Every day is like jumping into an abyss. Which feels so very true over here.

Is the Black Sea an abyss? I hear that people are still swimming in the sea, even though it’s tightly mined; the water attracts them, the sea seduces them. The transcultural project Black Sea Stories brought together authors from Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, and Ukraine to the Literature Festival in Berlin in 2023, with the goal of sustaining a dialogue around (better) understanding the Black Sea region. Some of them had never been there, or never felt before that it was a point of reference. The sea was an imaginable threat. An exclusive unity. A reminder of being from the periphery, which fed other lands. Of her project, a Dutch-Ukrainian writer Lisa Weeda said: “Bucha’s dead will return to life, the only thing you need to do is dance.” Her interlocutors asked: “How long do we have to dance?” They never asked "why?", only time mattered. How long do we have to dance? Maybe forever.

My friend texted me weeks later: “Did you dance in Odesa?” obviously referring to Ilya’s book. Not really, I answered, but I did swim in Odesa.

I wished to have a swim in the sea before my departure. There was little time left. It was minus ten and the wind grew. I grabbed my coffee from a small coffee shop on the corner, which I would do each morning of my stay in Odesa, saying “dziakuju” and “do pobachenia” in Ukrainian to the woman at the counter, who would answer a bit nervously “pozhalsta” and “do svidanya” in Russian. I decided to order a bolt. The air raid began when I entered the car. They wouldn’t strike the sea, I thought to myself desperate for a swim.¹ The water was icy and refreshing. The air raid ended when I was out of the water standing on the Langeron beach busy with people walking in both directions. There was one dead fish on the shore and a cat lingering around my legs hoping for a stroke, which I granted him gladly. Giorgio Agamben wondered whether language pre-existed the man, whether man’s soul inherited the animal's soul and its language. Like the bee dance or fish fin strokes. Agamben was searching for the origins of language and believed in its sacred power. One would need to grant words faith first. The poet is a shaman then, and like a shaman, listens to the soul of the fish and transmits their words on.

1. Only later did I learn the Russian ballistic missile damaged two vessels: the Panamanian-flagged container ship MSC Levante F, and the Sierra Leone-registered bulk carrier Super Sarkas, which had restarted operations a year ago in July. Two port workers were injured. Oleksiy Kuleba, Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Community and Territories Development, issued an official statement that the vessels were carrying civilian cargo.

LISTENING ON ZOOM TO IYA KIVA READING A POEM ABOUT WAR

Yesterday we listened on Zoom as Iya Kiva
read a poem in Kyiv where the golden
caps of the orthodox churches did not run to the shelters,
we listened from our homes,
nearly everyone, listened,
and we were all eyes, as if there was
nothing else, just eyes, as if we wanted
to protect her with our eyes with which we absorbed
every word while Babi Yar burned in the background,
but memory does not burn, we trust, memory is rustproof,
memory will survive, hibernate like a mole,
all of us, a thousand people on Zoom,
two thousand eyes, wanted to hold
an umbrella of air over Iya,
shield her with our gaze,
when she finished reading, I raised my head,
on the table was a book from the library,
Emil Cioran’s La Tentation d’Exister,
the hills held Bergen in their lap,
the first crocuses were in bloom, everyone
was looking forward to spring.

The poem comes from the book: morze nocą jest mięśniem serca (the sea at night is a muscle of the heart, PIW 2022), in translation from English from Polish by Ann Frenkel and Gwido Zlatkes.

Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

Crooked Runs the World