Natalie Paoli ‘Let My People Go’: Postcolonial Trauma in Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Abstract: In The Museum of Abandoned Secrets the connection between memory and history is fundamental. This is because, for Ukrainian authors such as Oksana Zabuzhko, one’s relationship with the past is at the heart of one’s self-identification as ‘Ukrainian’. However, with the past comes the issue of collective trauma—the collective trauma the Ukrainian nation experienced as a result of Russian and Soviet oppression. While this trauma is collective in that it affected an entire nation, it is at the same time also individual. In her novel, Zabuzhko’s protagonist must negotiate both types of trauma, particularly in relation to identity formation in postcommunist Ukraine. She does this by going on a quest to reveal the truth of one aspect of her people’s history, and in doing so, works through her own trauma, giving it voice.

Published in English in 2012 (it was first released in Ukrainian in 2009), The Museum of Abandoned Secrets may well be considered Oksana Zabuzhko’s magnum opus. During an interview with the Kyiv Post, Zabuzhko referred to the novel as ‘something of a textbook on Ukraine and Ukrainian history’.1 It is an historical novel in the sense that it spans sixty years of Ukraine’s contemporary history and is characterized by its episodic prose style, giving the reader a sense of how memory functions. The novel presents the reader with a number of issues, from explorations around the gendered body to questions about the role of history in the present. This chapter seeks to examine those concerns specifically dealing with questions of trauma, on both a collective, national, level, as well as the trauma of being an individual and especially a woman. The issue of identity and identity formation, and questions around nationalism in what may now be termed ‘postcolonial’ Ukraine are also explored. During another interview, Zabuzhko stated that Ukraine ‘is a country which doesn’t yet know how to speak for herself ’.2 Following from this statement, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets becomes a mouthpiece for Ukraine and its people, and it is Zabuzhko’s primary protagonist, Daryna Goshchynska, through whom the reader gains insight into the traumatized psyche of a postcolonial, or even decolonial, individual. Postcolonial, or postcolonialism, is a contentious term which needs to be qualified, and, in the Ukrainian context, it has come to mean something very

1 Oksana Faryna, ‘Oksana Zabuzhko: “Hard to Be a Woman”’, Kyiv Post, 1 December 2011, Lifestyle section, available at Accessed 25 March 2013. 2 Alexandra Hrycak and Maria G. Rewakowicz, ‘Feminism, intellectuals and the formation of micro-publics in postcommunist Ukraine’, Studies in East European Thought, 61.4 (2009), 309-333 (p. 325). 162 Natalie Paoli specific. Literary critic Vitaly Chernetsky explains that of ‘all the subjects of the former Russian empire, Ukraine has had one of the most complicated and difficult relationships with the metropoly’.3 It is a nation which endured, at the hands of the Russians, a ‘consistent and lengthy policy aimed at suppression and eradication of national identity, language, and culture.’ 4 Additionally, George Grabowicz elucidates that Ukraine’s past is a matter of Ukraine being ‘ever the object, not the subject of history’.5 This problem, as Grabowicz remarks, is ‘generic and constitutes a paradigmatic post-colonial issue’. 6 Grabowicz also explains that just as ‘the territory of what was Ukraine expanded many times, so also the content of what is ‘Ukrainian’ evolved in the cultural, political and even in the ethnic sense’.7 Significantly, he highlights that Ukraine’s independence ‘is particularly evocative of post- colonial transition,’ adding that, similarly to what Frantz Fanon observed with regards to postcolonial Africa, in Ukraine there now exist ‘economic and political crises, rampant corruption and, above all, a ruthless exploitation of national resources for the aggrandisement of the ruling elite’.8 The historical cultural and political relationship between the Russian or Soviet Empire and Ukraine is evocative of what Edward Said refers to as the ‘unequal relationship between unequal interlocutors’.9 In The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, these concerns are highlighted and grappled with: in particular, Ukraine’s position as a former colonial subject of the Soviet Union is emphasized throughout the novel. The question of national identity is an important one in The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, although it is brought across to the reader in subtle ways. This is because in most cases, as Maria Rewakowicz writes, Ukrainian female authors do not ‘champion national concerns, but a preoccupation with identities—national, gender, and class—is certainly there’. 10 Chernetsky explains that authors such as Zabuzhko (along with Salomea Pavlychko), are ‘responsible for an unparalleled revitalization of feminist consciousness in Ukraine, a recognition of the close ties between the personal and the

3 Vitaly Chernetsky, ‘Postcolonialism, Russia and Ukraine’, Ulbandus: The Slavic Review of Columbia University, no. 7 (2003), 32-62 (36). 4 Vitaly Chernetsky, ‘Ukrainian Literature at the End of the Millennium: The Ten Best Works of the 1990s’, World Literature Today, 76.2 (2002), 98-101 (p. 98). 5 George G. Grabowicz, ‘Ukrainian Studies: Framing the Contexts’, Slavic Review, 54.3 (1995), 674-690 (p. 675). 6 Ibid., p. 675. 7 Ibid., p. 676. 8 Grabowicz, p. 682. 9 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 191. 10 Maria G. Rewakowicz, ‘Women’s Literary Discourse and National Identity in Post- Soviet Ukraine’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 27.1 (2004-2005), 195-216 (203).