“YOU POOR SEXUAL VICTIM OF THE NATIONAL IDEA”

CULTURAL TRAUMA, LANGUAGE, AND THE POST-SOCIALIST BODY

IN OKSANA ZABUZHKO’S FIELDWORK IN UKRAINIAN SEX

ELIZABETH DABULSKIS

JUNE 2016

UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION p. 3

PART ONE: CULTURAL TRAUMA p. 8

PART TWO: THE POST-SOCIALIST BODY p. 22

PART THREE: LANGUAGE – WORD TO FLESH p. 44

CONCLUSION p. 57

BIBLIOGRAPHY p. 59

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INTRODUCTION

“Ukraine has not died yet.” ~ Oksana Zabuzhko, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, p. 115

Twenty years after the publishing of Oksana Zabuzhko’s 1996 novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (Pol’ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns’koho seksu), Ukraine remains gripped in a struggle for ideological and economic influence, most recently in the ongoing conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the East and the current Ukrainian government’s failure to eradicate corruption and facilitate effective structural reform. Though two decades have passed, Fieldwork’s relevance as an attempt to frame Ukraine’s cultural trauma and forage a Ukrainian national identity remains just as relevant today. A meticulous study into the intimate lives and suppressed traumas of a people, Fieldwork narrows its focus on one research subject. That subject is Oksana, a Ukrainian poet and intellectual, who travels to the United States to complete a fellowship in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of an independent Ukrainian republic. Oksana narrates the story of her tumultuous love affair with a Ukrainian artist, Mykola, within the frame of a research study that she presents to an academic, American audience entitled with the same name as the novel: “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex.” In cyclical, belletristic prose Oksana examines how the difficulties she and Mykola encounter in their relationship are the reverberating symptoms of Ukraine’s cultural trauma. She identifies the historically rooted sources of this trauma and traces of its perpetuation in her personal and intimate life, hindering her and the rest of Ukraine from “breaking out” of the vicious cycle of regenerating trauma in subsequent generations. The body and language are the most visible sites of cultural trauma, a trauma that, according to Oksana, will continue to debilitate the Ukrainians until they can muster the means to not merely survive, but thrive as a free and independent people. In keeping with the title and form of the novel, I will treat the novel as not only a literary work but also as a subject of cultural trauma. To do so, I will draw upon cultural trauma theory and explore its intersections with the form and content of Fieldwork. In essence, I will study not only how Zabuzhko examines cultural trauma and suggests its cure, but how the novel itself Dabulskis 4 is a part of the process of transcending trauma. I will also examine how the novel links cultural trauma to the post-socialist body, drawing upon postcolonial theory and post-socialist studies. I will examine how language functions within the framework of cultural trauma, as well as the ways in which language and the body are linked. My investigation of the body also entails a consideration of how the novel interacts with feminism, especially because of Fieldwork’s particularly female perspective via a female narrator armed with, as some critics have noted, essentialist views on men and women. While some scholars have examined Zabuzhko’s work through the lenses of postcolonial trauma [Paoli 2015], the postcolonial body and spatiality [Sywenky 2015], and national identity and the body [Blacker 2010], a concentrated study that examines Fieldwork from all these perspectives is not yet available. Additionally, yet to be explored in greater detail is how the novel directly contradicts sociological concepts of cultural trauma, which consistently distances individual and cultural traumas as distinct and separate processes [Smelser 2004; Sztompka 2000, 2004; Yurchuk 2012]. Finally, I will note that this study will pay deference to Zabuzhko’s insistence that Fieldwork is not an autobiography, but a work of fiction. Some scholars have held Zabuzhko and her theoretical work accountable to the narrator’s views as expressed in Fieldwork [Blacker 2010]. While it is tempting to merge Zabuzhko the author and Oksana the narrator as one, based on shared first names and backgrounds as Ukrainian writers and intellectuals, to do so undermines a fictional character’s poetic liberty to function not only in agreement with, but in opposition to, the author’s own point of view. Thus, when referring to the author’s opinion, I will refer to Zabuzhko, and when discussing the point of view of the character, I will refer to Oksana.

“That-Woman-Who-Wrote-That-Book”

Born in 1960 in Lutsk, Ukraine, Zabuzhko is a prominent voice in the Ukrainian intelligentsia, with a marked interest in promoting Ukrainian national identity and culture. Having studied Philosophy, Zabuzhko graduated from Kyiv Shevchenko University in 1982 and completed a PhD in Philosophy of Arts in 1987. A novelist, poet, and essayist, Zabuzhko has taught at Penn State University (1992), and earned a Fulbright Scholarship in 1994, subsequently teaching at Harvard University and the University of Pittsburgh. Currently, Zabuzhko lives and works in Kyiv. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, her first novel, provoked fervid condemnation from critics who denounced the book as immoral (often without having read the novel) or anti-Ukrainian. Today, the book’s infamy lives on and its author, Zabuzhko, Dabulskis 5 continues to be repudiated as “That-Woman-Who-Wrote-That-Book” with each of her subsequent publications (Zabuzhko 2008). “By now,” Zabuzhko has commented, “I’ve learned to simply live with it. After all, in Field Work I did attack, quite intentionally and with full awareness, the hidden traumas and the most intimate (apparently self-defensive!) delusions of a considerable part of a nation, so why wonder that feedback turned out to be so violent?” (ibid.).

Unhealed Wounds

The novel begins with Oksana considering suicide in her American apartment. Despite determining that there isn’t much reason to delay her suicide, she decides to wait and test her strength for some time more. Here Zabuzhko introduces what is the principal theme of her novel: survival. For to be Ukrainian, according to Oksana, is to survive – and nothing more. “In general,” says Oksana, “all that Ukrainians can say about themselves is how, and how much, and by which manner they were beaten” (Zabuzhko 2011: 115). With dark humor, Oksana explains that eventually Ukrainians began to take pride in not dying, despite all the tragedy they’ve endured at the hands of their aggressors (see the Soviet authorities and Nazi Germany): “My Cambridge friends rolled on the ground with laughter when you translated the beginning of your national anthem as ‘Ukraine has not died yet’” (Zabuzhko 2011: 115). Here is the principal tension of the novel and of Oksana and Mykola’s relationship: the will to not merely survive, but to live and even thrive. Oksana is not any woman, and Mykola is not any man: they are Ukrainian, sharing not only the same language but also the same traumatized history. Even more importantly, Oksana is a Ukrainian woman with the will to survive and surpass the trauma plaguing her people. Mykola is the first Ukrainian man with whom she has been in a relationship and with whom she can share the same language and cultural background. Moreover, Oksana thinks she has found a Ukrainian man who can match her will to “break out” of the Ukrainian national tragedy: “it was the first time that she was dealing with a male winner. A Ukrainian man – and a winner: a bloody miracle, can you believe it?” (Zabuzhko 2011: 66). Yet, despite their shared cultural background and language, their shared artistic passion, Oksana discovers that Mykola is unable to surpass their national trauma, bringing his hopelessness and humiliation to their lovemaking. “In that language,” Oksana mourns, “there was everything, everything of which there would later be nothing between you in bed” (Zabuzhko 2011: 32). Dabulskis 6

Oksana traces the source of hers and Mykola’s relationship difficulties as one might do in a psychoanalytic session: first with the symptoms, and working backwards to their parents. She explicitly encourages us to consider the novel a psychotherapeutic session, comparing Ukrainian literature to psychiatry: “School of Medicine! That’s where one should take courses in Ukrainian romanticism, in the psychiatry department!” (Zabuzhko 2011: 47). By the end of the novel, Oksana has made all too clear that her monologue and her studies in Ukrainian sex are an attempt at applying therapy to Ukrainian national identity using the novel itself as a therapeutic session. Oksana identifies the problem in treating Ukraine as the country’s lack of a national literature:

A short course in psychology, the road to mental health: find the reason and the problem goes away. Why hasn’t anyone thought of doing this with nations: you neatly psychoanalyze a whole national history, and ‘poof, you’re cured.’ Literature as a form of national therapy. Hmm, not a bad idea. Too bad that we happen to have no literature. (Zabuzhko 2011: 158)

Zabuzhko portrays national tragedies, individual lives, and literature as fused together in the same wound infected by tragedy. In case her American audience might not understand her point, Oksana the narrator emphasizes, “In your [Americans’] culture tragedy is of an exclusively personal character, loneliness, love dramas […] however, you are unfamiliar with subjugation to limitless, metaphysical evil” (Zabuzhko 2011: 110-111). In other words, Americans’ personal tragedies are personal; Ukrainians’ personal tragedies are the symptoms of a larger national tragedy. Zabuzhko traces the roots of this metaphysical evil to the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union against Ukraine throughout the twentieth century, atrocities consciously directed at the bodies and spirits of the Ukrainian people: famine, political suppression, and cultural depreciation. The personal traumas that Oksana sorts through are not merely personal: she is a case study for her own research in “Ukrainian sex” and how these intimate relations are inseparable from Ukraine’s national tragedies. “Have you gone mad out there, you idiot, making a huge tragedy out of a bad fuck,” demands Sana, one of Oksana’s friends back in Ukraine, putting Oksana’s heartbreak and depression in perspective against the tragic death of one of their friends, Darka, in a car accident (Zabuzhko 2011: 101). The whole point of the novel, of course, is that it’s not just a “bad fuck” Oksana wrestles with: it is the weight of damnation to nonexistence and fear under which Ukrainians have not lived, but merely survived for most of the twentieth century – a weight, arguably, they are still wrestling with today. Dabulskis 7

Note

I cannot proceed in my analysis without first admitting to the irony of writing an analysis of Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex in English, from an English translation, and with secondary texts also written in English. (The greater irony, of course, would be to work from a Russian translation.) Such an Anglophone-oriented perspective will undoubtedly fail to consider the nuances of the original Ukrainian language, and could be said to undermine the protagonist’s purpose in the novel: to spread Ukrainian language and culture. However, it could also be said that such an analysis attests to Fieldwork’s established place in world literature. The novel’s protagonist, Oksana, expresses joy at reading an English translation of Lesya Ukrainka’s play, The Forest Song: “With numb fingertips and tears in your eyes you had read a translation of Forest Song done here in America, an authorized version meant for the Broadway stage, you were as high as a kite from your quickened, passionate breathing: it’s alive, alive, it hasn’t perished, seventy years later, on a different continent, in a different language – just look at that, it made it!” (Zabuzhko 2011: 36). While not excusing my own Anglo-centric and outsider’s perspective, I hope that this study will not only offer some insight on the novel, but contribute, however humbly, to Fieldwork’s already well-established place in world literature.

PART ONE: CULTURAL TRAUMA

We are all from the camps. That heritage will be with us for a hundred years.

~Oksana Zabuzhko, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, p. 60

Cultural Trauma as Process

Whatever themes may resonate in a reader after having completed Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, it is trauma – in whatever variation – that will undoubtedly inscribe itself into his or her memory. Zabuzhko structures the novel and her protagonist, Oksana’s, narrative on an interlocking web that links cultural, psychological, and physical traumas. According to Oksana’s narrative, Ukrainians’ corroded cultural identity not only affects Ukrainians’ cultural lives, but their personal lives – from their intimate relationships to mental and bodily health. Oksana’s fusion of cultural, psychological, and psychosexual trauma as part of one process contradicts cultural trauma theory’s standard separation of these conditions [Smelser 2004; Sztompka 2000, 2004; Yurchuk 2012]. However, because of Fieldwork’s emphatic insistence on the blurring of these boundaries, and, for the sake of a literary investigation, as opposed to a strictly sociological one, it is worth examining how Zabuzhko’s novel supports, disputes and interacts with studies in cultural trauma. Piotr Sztompka’s concept of cultural trauma as process as discussed in his article “Cultural Trauma: The Other Face of Social Change” (2000), and rooted in Neil J. Smelser’s comparison of psychological and cultural trauma,1 proves useful as a structural framework on which to anchor such an analysis not only because of its basis in sociological studies, but because of its six-stage framework of the traumatic sequence which, I can’t help but notice, resembles a classic narrative arc (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution):

1 Smelser, Neil J. “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma.” Jeffrey C. Alexander . . . [et al.]. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 31-59. Print.

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1. Conducive Background (structural, cultural) Exposition 2. Potentially Traumatizing Situations or Events Rising Action 3. Cultural Framing of Traumatizing Occasions Rising Action 4. Traumatic Symptoms Climax 5. Differentiated Sensitivity to Cultural Trauma - 6. Strategies for Coping with Cultural Trauma Falling Action/ Resolution (Sztompka 2000: 453-463)

Suffice it to say that the traumatic sequence is far from an accurate analogy to the narrative arc, but a process of potential positive or negative transformation reverberates in both of them. The difference lies in the narrative arc’s definite resolution, versus Sztompka’s conception of cultural trauma as a continuous and intrinsic cycle in social change: “Trauma is not a stable condition, but a dynamic evolving process or a traumatic sequence” (Sztompka 2000: 452- 453). Whether that process results in a positive evolvement of culture or its corrosion depends on what strategies that culture employs for dealing with perceived trauma. Sztompka further defines cultural trauma in relation to collective agency as “the active, driving force of social change residing in human collectivities of various sorts (from small groups to whole societies” (Sztompka 2000: 451). Cultural trauma serves both as the context of change and as the object of change – an equation that can be projected onto Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex as a novel written by Zabuzhko in the same post-Soviet context in which the fictional protagonist, Oksana, lives and struggles against the depreciated Ukrainian literary culture of which she is a part, and is literally inscribed into as a character in a Ukrainian language novel fixated on Ukraine’s cultural trauma. Oksana diagnoses the Ukrainian culture and psyche with self-victimization and fatalism because of a battered history and culture, reinforcing a lack of agency even after Ukrainian independence. Sztompka might describe this collective attitude as rooted in cultural trauma, which affects the body social as a “a specific pathology of agency” following traumatic change (Sztompka 2000: 452). Rooted in Sztompka’s conception of cultural trauma as a process of social change and a pathology of agency, I will examine how Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex operates within the traumatic sequence. I will focus particular attention on the first and third stages of the traumatic sequence (conducive background and cultural framing) to demonstrate how Fieldwork functions as the context of and object of change. Engaging with ideas from Neil J. Smelser’s article “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma” (2004) and Yuliya Yurchuk’s article “The Dabulskis 10

Nexus Between Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory and Social Trust: A Glass Half-Full, Half-Empty or Shattered. The Case of post-1991 Ukraine” (2012), I will elaborate on Sztompka’s construction of cultural trauma. The second part of this chapter will devote itself to cultural trauma studies’ adamant distinguishing between cultural, psychological, and medical traumas, as well as how the novel not only insists on their interconnectivity and interdependence, but also the generational inheritance of these traumas on a genetic level.

Conducive Background

“There cannot be any doubt that the collapse of communism was a traumatogenic change par excellence,” writes Sztompka in “The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Postcommunist Societies” (Sztompka 2004: 171). Cultural trauma, Sztompka explains, has the potential to occur in cultures which have experienced sudden and rapid “disorganization, displacement, or incoherence […] when the normative and cognitive context of human life and social actions loses its homogeneity, coherence, and stability, and becomes diversified or even polarized into opposite cultural complexes” (Sztompka 2000: 453). First published in 1996, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex not only portrays Oksana living in a newly independent Ukraine transitioning from the Soviet system, but the novel itself was written during (if not because of) the sudden and dramatic changeover of cultural ideology. Ukraine’s independence and transition to a free market system posited polarizing cultural discourses: 1) the Russian language versus the Ukrainian language (literary and conversational) and 2) the nostalgic, conditioned Soviet versus the romantic Ukrainian nationalist. Amidst an environment of undisclosed documents evidencing Soviet atrocities and efforts to reconcile with the past, the Ukrainian nationalist cultural movement competed against the established cultural bias in favor of the Russian language. The dramatic change from communism to capitalism did not entail the immediate adjustment of individuals to the new system, living all their lives as they had in the Soviet Union. Yurchuk recognizes a “dual trauma” in Ukraine:

On the one hand there is a post-war trauma, whereby some war memories had been frozen and doomed to silence by the Soviet regime, while, on the other hand, there is a post-Soviet trauma, by which a revival of the silenced topics of history occurs in the shocking and disorienting situation of a shattered society, where new silencing and exclusions take place. (Yurchuk 2012: 80) Dabulskis 11

Written in this background of cultural contestation and disorientation, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex not only situates its protagonist and narrator in circumstances conducive to cultural trauma, but is itself part of the traumatic sequence, using Oksana’s narrative to frame these traumatogenic events and conditions within a certain cultural discourse – in this case, advocating for the re-establishment of Ukrainian as a valid language for intellectual and literary discourse, as well as reviving Ukrainian national identity by first recognizing and then coming to terms with the horrors of the past. In Fieldwork, Oksana and Mykola’s relationship and break-up is subject to a similar “dual trauma” as Yurchuk describes in the above passage. In the newly independent Ukraine, they not only contend with their own conditioning under the Soviet system, but with their parents’ displaced subjectivities as victims of the Soviet regime’s worst repressions: the gulag and the Holodomor. Emotionally distanced from her mother (“and what else could she have been if not frigid, a child-survivor of the Famine”), and smothered by her overprotective father (“who had served his six (Stalin’s) years in the camps, was pursued, in the grip of terror, like a squirrel for the rest of his life by the specter of ‘recidivism’”), adult Oksana wrestles with the effect of her parents’ traumas on her relationship with Mykola, in which she tries to reconcile her own Soviet childhood with the disorienting cultural environment of post-Soviet Ukraine, in which she hopes to transcend hers and her parents’ traumas (Zabuzhko 2011: 148; 66). Mykola is less optimistic, jaded by his father’s humiliating imprisonment (“his old man had spent his life in concentration camps, first German, then Soviet, ‘lapped slops from the trough’), he situates himself within the fatalistic mindset of Soviet Ukraine, denying Oksana’s projecting onto him the persona of a Ukrainian man liberated from trauma (“Wanting to break out is not yet freedom”) (Zabuzhko 2011: 75-76). Both Mykola and Oksana situate themselves within their dual trauma, from which they want to “break out” (Zabuzhko 2011: 76). However, because of the defense mechanisms that they both employ against this trauma, their relationship – and their attempt to overcome trauma – fails.

Cultural Framing and Interpretation

According to Sztompka’s structure, the symptoms of trauma only appear once a potentially traumatizing situation or event has been culturally framed as traumatizing (Sztompka 2000: 453, 456-457). Sztompka emphasizes that “the traumatizing event is always Dabulskis 12 a cultural construction” influenced by society’s shared cultural meanings (Sztompka 2000: 457). Consequently, cultural constructions are capable of influencing whether a potential trauma results in traumatic symptoms, according to Sztompka (ibid.). A society may avert trauma if it explains away, rationalizes, or otherwise reinterprets the event, making it “invisible, innocuous, or even benign or beneficial” (Sztompka 2000: 457). Smesler also requires a process of cultural framing and interpretation, holding that an event must fulfill three requirements before qualifying as trauma:

It must be remembered, or made to be remembered. Furthermore, the memory must be made culturally relevant, that is, represented as obliterating, damaging, or rendering problematic something sacred – usually a value or outlook felt to be essential for the integrity of the affected society. Finally, the memory must be associated with a strong negative affect, usually disgust, shame, or guilt. (Smelser 2004: 36).

Citing the scale and complexity of national cultures, Smelser determines that it is those with access to influence, institutional, and cultural structures – the “cultural carriers” – who must actively inscribe cultural framing (Smelser 2004: 38). Smelser identifies those carriers as “priests, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, moral entrepreneurs, and leaders of social movements” (ibid.). Thus, cultural framing is an inherently political and ideological step in the traumatic sequence that can determine whether a society views an event as traumatic. Consider the Soviet Union’s outright denial of the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-1933, and the present- day Russian Federation’s subsequent insistence on generalizing the Holodomor along with the Soviet-wide incidental famines during the transition to collectivization, despite incontrovertible evidence in undisclosed documents that attest to Stalin initiating and sustaining the famine as conscious act of genocide.2 The novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is, itself, an act of cultural framing. The narrative’s references to Soviet repression and atrocities is an inscription of these events into memory as debilitating to Ukrainian cultural identity and agency. The novel contends that Ukraine’s traumatized history is responsible for the affects of fear, defeatism, and humiliation, all of which Fieldwork situates as ongoing in post-Soviet Ukraine. Meanwhile, the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s struggle to assert itself (literally, in its existence, as well as economically and politically) next to the United States and Western Europe is framed as yet

2 See Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine (1986), in which Conquest makes the first official reference to the Holodomor as genocide. Dabulskis 13 another traumatic event. Oksana’s attempt to plant Ukrainian literature in the United States is intrinsically linked to the Soviet Union’s depreciation of the Ukrainian language, as well as the world’s (ongoing) ignorance of the Holodomor and Soviet atrocities in Ukraine. Oksana identifies invisibility as a defining characteristic of Ukraine and the Ukrainian language:

The Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake – I’m here! I’m still alive! – but unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time and on your own –how the hell are you supposed to get out? (Zabuzhko 2011: 46)

Both Oksana the character and Zabuzhko the author are writers and intellectuals who frame Ukrainian national identity and culture, thus contributing to a “meaning industry” (Sztompka 2000: 455). The novel addresses its cultural framing of the Ukrainian situation to multiple audiences. Foremost and primarily, to a Ukrainian audience, not only by fact of its being written and published in Ukrainian, but because of the linguistic nuances and political implications of its specifically sprinkled uses of English and Russified Ukrainian that only a native speaker would understand. Additionally, the novel’s aggressive confrontation with suppressed aspects of Ukrainians’ national identity and intimate lives, makes clear that Ukrainians are the intended primary audience. However, Oksana’s lecture itself, “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex,” which is one and the same as the text of the novel, is addressed to an academic audience at an American university. Her tone towards her American university audience is alternatively and simultaneously expository and confrontational; she assumes that her audience is unfamiliar with lived experience in a traumatized country such as Ukraine, and often confronts their assumptions or romanticized exoticizing of the horrifying reality of her country’s national tragedy:

I’m making the point, ladies and gentlemen, that it’s not such a great thrill to belong to a beaten nation, as the fox in the folktale said, the unbeaten rides on the back of the beaten – and that’s what the beaten one deserves, the problem is that in the meantime that beaten one manages to sing, let’s say, the ballad of the misfortunate captives, and in this way – legitimizes his own humiliated position, because art, don’t you know, always legitimizes, in the eyes of an outsider, that life that gave it birth; and in that fact lies its, that is, art’s gre-eat deception. (Zabuzhko 2011: 116)

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Oksana’s expository and confrontational tone towards her American audience could have the interpreted effect of entering the novel into a mutual understanding between itself and the Ukrainian people, the ones who are on the inside and thus are the only ones who can truly understand. It could be said that the novel’s us versus them orientation dilutes the novel’s aggressive dissection of suppressed Ukrainian complexes to a digestible level. That is, it could be said – except for the overwhelming and violent criticisms the novel provoked. When Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was first released it unleashed a storm of controversy and criticisms from Ukrainians. In an interview (2008) with translator Halyna Hryn, Zabuzhko notes that she was the focus of media controversy for over a year, with harsh criticisms against herself and Fieldwork for public immorality and for compromising Ukrainian national identity. Nevertheless, Zabuzhko also notes that she was shocked with overwhelming positive feedback from female readers, for whom Fieldwork resonated with their own experiences. “I didn’t expect that, honestly. It stunned me. Never before did I realize to what extent half of the nation had been deprived of a direct voice of their own when it came to the most intimate, everyday life experiences,” explains Zabuzhko. These polarized responses to Fieldwork could be explained, in part, by the mechanisms of the traumatic sequence. Prior to the publishing of Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, a uniquely female perspective on potentially traumatizing events in Ukrainian society – the Holodomor, the gulag, Stalin’s repressions, the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s independence – as well as intimate, sexual relations and the body, might well have been lacking in Ukraine. Although other “cultural carriers” were indeed in the midst of framing these atrocities as cultural traumas, none had seemed to do so from both a female and psychosexual perspective. Thus, with Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, Zabuzhko actually participated in the traumatic sequence by articulating and framing Ukraine’s potentially traumatizing events and situations from a previously unrepresented perspective. If Fieldwork’s individual readers had already recognized these events as traumatic, or whether the novel itself induced traumatic affects, cannot be certain. But Ukrainian society as whole was clearly affected by Zabuzhko’s cultural framing of Ukraine’s history. The widespread and polarized reactions to the novel validates Fieldwork’s diagnosis of a cultural trauma in Ukrainian national identity.

Individual Trauma vs. Cultural Trauma

While Zabuzhko’s position as cultural carrier and Fieldwork’s role as the artistic platform with which she can frame Ukraine’s cultural trauma adheres to Sztompka’s structure Dabulskis 15 of the traumatic sequence, the actual framing of that trauma as formulated by the character Oksana, does not. Oksana directly links individual psychological and physical traumas to Ukraine’s cultural trauma, a link that sociological and cultural trauma theorists not only dismiss, but actively advise against. “Trauma affects the collectivity,” writes Sztompka, “and therefore cannot be treated as an individual psychological predicament […] Cultural trauma affects culture […] In other words cultural trauma is the culturally interpreted wound to cultural tissue itself” (Sztompka 2000: 458). Yurchuk designates the same separation: “It should be stressed that in my discussion I do not refer to psychological or physical trauma since I believe in a clear distinction between the cultural trauma and psychophysical trauma. As many scholars contend, cultural trauma can be considered a social construct, and I believe that psychophysical trauma exceeds the social constructivist perspective” (Yurchuk 2012: 79). Meanwhile, Smelser engages in an analogical exercise, attempting to find the structural equivalents of psychological trauma in culture. Smelser bases his analysis on Sigmund Freud’s studies on psychological trauma and hysteria from 1888-1889, a choice that Smelser admits is arbitrary but useful for analyzing cultural trauma (Smelser 2004: 32). He acknowledges that while applying psychological theory and research to cultural trauma has potential, such an application can only go so far (ibid.). “Above all,” Smelser emphasizes, “it is essential to avoid psychological reductionism (via which the cultural level evaporates) and uncritical analogizing (a sin that recalls ancient fallacies associated with biological models of society and conceptions of the group mind)” (ibid.). Fieldwork not only links cultural and individual psychophysical traumas, but sometimes borders on problematic reductionism. However, Oksana gives a convincing portrayal of how the “culturally interpreted wound to cultural tissue itself” can trickle down from a fractured national identity to manifest itself in people’s personal lives (Sztompka 2000: 458). While aware of Sztompka and Yurchuk’s explicit divisions of cultural and individual traumas, as well as Smelser’s warnings, I will take the liberty of putting their articles in interaction with Fieldwork. While such an application might be considered a misuse of cultural trauma theory, it is justified for the sake of exploring the tension between the conceptual givens of cultural trauma theory and Fieldwork’s contradictory upending of these givens.

Identity as a Link

Oksana roots the origins of her disconnected and sado-masochistic sexual relations with Mykola in their shared and traumatized Ukrainian identity. Oksana examines how the Soviet Dabulskis 16 regime’s repression and genocide of the Ukrainian people directly affected her parents and her own childhood, indicating that her relationship with her parents (particularly her father) shaped her relationships to romantic partners as an adult – most influentially, with her first Ukrainian lover, Mykola. Oksana extends this formula to all Ukrainian women, explaining their endurance of rough treatment from Ukrainian men as a choice between supporting the Ukrainian national idea, or the Soviet regime:

What can I tell you […] That we were raised by men fucked from all ends every which way? That later we ourselves screwed the same kind of guys, and that in both cases they were doing to us what others, the others, had done to them? And that we accepted them and loved them as they were, because not to accept them was to go over to the others, the other side? (Zabuzhko 2011: 158)

In other words, Oksana frames Ukrainians’ national identity as shattered and humiliated, and each individual Ukrainian not only lives within a traumatized culture, but experiences the effects of this depreciated national identity in his or her personal life. If we were to find a theoretical structure to support Oksana’s connection between cultural and individual trauma, we might look at identity in the context of cultural trauma. When Smesler discusses how negative affect is a condition of cultural trauma, he operates on the understanding that individual and national identities are linked:

Affect also occupies a position of centrality in our understanding of cultural trauma. A cultural trauma is, above all, a threat to a culture with which individuals in that society presumably have an identification. To put it differently, a cultural trauma is a threat to some part of their personal identities. As such, this threat, if experienced, arouses negative affects. (Smelser 2004: 40)

Thus, while national identity cannot be reduced to composing the entirety of an individual’s personal identity and as the sole explanation for that individual’s choices (to do so would be exactly the kind of group mind Smelser warns against), national identity certainly plays a role in influencing a part of an individual’s personal identity. In Fieldwork, the key fracture in Ukraine’s national identity is located in cultural agency, or rather, the lack of it. Oksana holds that Ukraine’s cultural agency suffers from negative affects sustained from the Holodomor and Soviet repression, as well as Ukraine’s struggle to transition into an independent and competitive country among more powerful and culturally influential countries, such as the United States. “I am so sick of this classic national Dabulskis 17 defeatism – can’t take it anymore!” exclaims Oksana (Zabuzhko 2011: 106). Defeatism, Oksana makes clear, is the symptomatic affect of ruptures to Ukraine’s cultural identity. Stalin’s genocide of the Ukrainian peasants, the transition to collectivization, and the systematic repression of Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians, inevitably resulted in the Ukrainian Homo Sovieticus. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence, Zabuzhko diagnoses fear and self-victimization in the Ukrainian people – including herself. She portrays herself as seeking out misery:

In psychiatry, I believe it’s called victim behavior, but there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s the way I was taught; and in general all that Ukrainians can say about themselves is how, and how much, and by which manner they were beaten: information, I must say, not very enticing for strangers, nonetheless, if there’s nothing else in either your family or your national history that can be scraped together, we slowly but surely began to take pride in this – hey, come see how they beat us, but we’re not yet dead. (Zabuzhko 2011: 115)

However, despite Oksana’s self-deprecating portrayal, she paints her younger self quite differently, as a young woman determined to overcome Ukraine’s defeatist mentality: “She spent her whole youth trying to break out of the vault filled with the poisonous stink of half- decayed talents, motionless lives rotting out, mildew and mold, the unwashed stench of futile endeavors: Ukrainian history” (Zabuzhko 2011: 66). She distinguishes herself as apart from the prevalent defeatist attitude in Ukraine, instead determined to revive Ukrainian culture and national identity by promoting Ukrainian literature abroad. And despite diagnosing herself as self-victimizing, Oksana emphasizes throughout the novel her personal strength and will to survive. The opening section of the novel is, in fact, Oksana talking herself out of committing suicide. The section concludes with Oksana reprimanding herself: “you’re not allowed to duck out, you deal with this properly, step by step, and then we’ll find out what you’re really made of. Got that?” (Zabuzhko 2011: 4). Oksana’s personal survival and the survival of Ukrainian culture is linked. However, Oksana considers herself strong enough to not only lift herself out of Ukraine’s defeatism, but Ukrainian culture itself. And when she meets Mykola, Oksana thinks she has found the perfect match both on personal and cultural levels: not only does she perceive Mykola as stronger than herself, a Ukrainian man capable of transcending defeatism (“A Ukrainian man – and a winner: a bloody miracle, can you believe it?”), but finds her artistic and intellectual equal: together, they can nourish Ukrainian culture with her poems, his paintings, and their child (Zabuzhko 2015: 66). However, it becomes clear to Oksana that despite Mykola’s artistic potential and his determination to “break out,” he is unable or Dabulskis 18 unwilling to overcome defeatism. Oksana, fervent to save Ukrainian culture and their relationship, is disappointed:

It’s okay, bro, no worries, we’ll break out, I’ll pull, drag you out on my back, I’ll have enough strength for all of it: bring half of Ukraine to its feet, bring half of America over to Ukraine to take a look […] and to all of her inspired exhortations he would only give a wry smile: well-well, “We’ll see”; that “we’ll see” of his with time began to sound like a password for hopelessness. (Zabuzhko 2011: 107)

However, despite Mykola’s defeatism and the failure of her relationship with him, Oksana makes clear by the end of the novel that her will to live and revive Ukrainian literature is sustained. While aboard an airplane back to Ukraine, Oksana thinks: “When I was young, I dreamed of such a death: plane crash over the Atlantic, an aircraft dissolving in the air and the ocean – no grave, no trace. Now I wish with all my heart that the plane land safely” (Zabuzhko 2011: 160). Oksana’s personal struggles with suicide and her relationship with Mykola, as well as her professional mission of reviving Ukrainian literature, are her attempts to assert agency not only in her life, but in Ukrainian national identity. “An identity crisis and the struggle to re- establish, reshape, or construct anew a collective identity may be the most empirically salient variety of cultural trauma,” writes Sztompka (Sztompka 2011: 459). It is Ukraine’s identity crisis Oksana wants to, in Sztompka’s words, “re-establish, reshape, [and] construct anew” (ibid.) by re-establishing the Ukrainian language and literature both within Ukraine, and to the rest of the world – to save Ukraine and Ukrainian from nonexistence.3

The Body as a Site of Dissonance and Rebirth

More difficult to support theoretically is Fieldwork’s portrayal of cultural trauma affecting the body. I will not devote too much time here analyzing Oksana’s links between cultural trauma and the body, as the following chapter does so in great detail. However, I will briefly consider the different manifestations of cultural trauma in the body, as specified by Fieldwork. There is scant justification for bending cultural trauma theory to support

3 Particular attention is given to cultural trauma and language in “Part 3: Language – Word to Flesh” Dabulskis 19

Fieldwork’s claims of a link between cultural trauma and the body, but where it can be stretched slightly I will do so for the sake of theoretical inquiry. Where the body is linked to psychosexual trauma, there is the best argument for cultural trauma’s manifestation in the body.4 As discussed in the previous section, Oksana explains Ukrainian women’s endurance of their male partners’ violent and detached sexual desires as a matter of loyalty to a humiliated Ukrainian national identity. Additionally, it’s clear that a Freudian element exists in her seemingly unresolved issues with her father, whose suffocating overprotectiveness and defeatist fear drives her towards a romantic partner who embodies recklessness and ambition. Oksana frames her submission to sado-masochistic sex with Mykola, forsaking her survival instincts, as a willingness to provide Mykola with catharsis for his own traumatized experience of Ukraine’s tragedies. However, instead of a site of healing, Oksana’s body becomes a space on which personal and cultural traumas are inscribed: it is on her body and in sex with Mykola that Oksana frames cultural trauma. Insofar as the body and sex are part of personal identity, we can link them to cultural trauma via the concept of a fractured identity, as analyzed in the previous section. More difficult to support theoretically is Zabuzhko and Oksana’s mutual suggestion that cultural trauma is inherited on the genetic level. In an interview with Halyna Hryn, Zabuzhko explains that Ukrainians are unable to throw away a moldy piece of bread, but instead give it to the birds. Instead of attributing this habit to what could be interpreted as a cultural custom inherited from Ukraine’s collective memory of the Holodomor, Zabuzhko suggests a biological connection: “I believe this is due to an almost genetic memory of the 1933 famine. […] I’ve recently been reading how psychologists now find traces of subconscious trauma in fourth-generation Holocaust survivors” (AGNI 2008). While such studies are underway,5 an application of this research to Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex would require a separate examination that roots itself in a collaboratively scientific, sociological and literary approach – a project that extends beyond the scope of this study here. Alternatively, Oksana hopes to transcend Ukraine’s cultural trauma by having a child with Mykola. She suggests, problematically, that there is a genetic justification for their having a child, as she and Mykola are a part of Ukraine’s intelligentsia:

4 See “Part Two: The Post-Socialist Body” 5 For example, see Rachel Yehuda’s studies on epigenetics, in which she examines how trauma can be passed on from generation to generation via DNA: http://www.mountsinai.org/profiles/rachel-yehuda. Dabulskis 20

How much of that Ukrainian intelligentsia is there among us anyway, pitiful, forcibly dragged back against the current of history – a tiny group and even that scattered: a dying species, almost-extinct clan, we should be breeding like crazy, and all the time, making love where and when we can, uniting in orgiastic insatiability into one, yelping and moaning mass of arms and legs, extending ourselves and populating this radioactive land anew! (Zabuzhko 2011: 77)

While understanding Oksana’s fervor to resurrect the Ukrainian intelligentsia, given Ukraine’s cultural suppression, the passage above is problematic in assuming that cultural intelligence operates on a genetic level. As Maria Rewakowicz notes, “A hint of eugenics is simply unmistakable here” (Rewakowicz 2004-2005: 208). Oksana’s call for eugenics in favor of the Ukrainian intelligentsia is problematic for obvious reasons, among which is Ukrainian nationalists’ and some locals’6 active collaboration with Nazi Germany in murdering Jews during the Holocaust.7 The above passage is prefaced by another that suggests that hers and Mykola’s combined intellectual and artistic backgrounds would provide a structure – “a nest” – that would condition their child to transcend Ukraine’s trauma and take up his own role in the intelligentsia (Zabuzhko 2011: 77). Such a suggestion, while still potentially problematic in class and economic bias, does echo Sztompka’s assertion that with a higher level of education comes a greater sensitivity to identify and express cultural trauma, as well as the means to cope with trauma in an active way (Sztompka 2000: 460). Less educated people, Sztompka asserts, have a more difficult time coping with trauma, thus attesting to the importance of at least a general education (ibid.). This fact asserts itself most obviously, Sztompka holds, in the fact that educated people with professional training and a cosmopolitan outlook will fare better in transitioning from communism to capitalism (ibid.). Finally, Oksana’s conviction that a new generation of Ukrainians growing up with the cultural resources to transcend Ukraine’s trauma aligns with cultural trauma theory. Sztompka cites generational turnover as the most effective means of overcoming trauma (Sztompka 2004:

6 In the case of some Ukrainian locals, on their own initiative, independent of any military authority.

7 Yurchuk’s article focuses in particular on Ukraine’s unresolved guilt for Ukrainian nationalists’ participation in the Holocaust. This guilt manifests itself in a general suppression of collective memory, preferring to ignore nationalist heroes’ collaboration with the Nazis, and consequently failing to take responsibility for Ukraine’s role in the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the pro-Russian camp in Ukraine demonizes WWII era Ukrainian nationalists and casts the Soviet military in the heroic role of liberators. Yurchuk considers Ukrainians’ self-victimization a defense mechanism against the suppressed trauma of Ukrainians’ unresolved guilt in regards to local populations’ involvement in the Holocaust. Fieldwork falls into the same trap, comparing the situations of Ashkenazi Jews and Holodomor victims, but failing to acknowledge the role of some Ukrainians in their neighbors’ genocide. (Yurchuk 2012: 81-86) Dabulskis 21

193). New generations, brought up in democratic conditions and a free market society, will not carry the internalized legacies of their parents and grandparents who lived under communism (ibid.). “They are the children of a new epoch, the carriers of a new culture inoculated against postcommunist trauma,” writes Sztompka (ibid.). Sztompka adopts the same medical terminology in reference to cultural trauma as Oksana, who frequently refers to fear as a disease that enslaves Ukrainians: “Slavery is the state of being infected by fear. And fear kills love. And without love – children, poems, paintings – all is pregnant with death. A+, girl! You have completed your research” (Zabuzhko 2011: 156). Despite this fatalistic conclusion to her research, Oksana ends her presentation on a positive note, focusing instead on the inevitable promise of a new generation. When the novel ends with Oksana sitting on plane back to Ukraine, wishing for a safe flight, she delights in watching the other passengers prepare for take-off (Zabuzhko 2011: 160-161). She first watches an old man put a tennis racket in the overhead compartment, noticing his wrinkles, then notices a young mother transferring her infant son on the seat while her smiling five-year- old daughter darts her excited glances in all directions. The little girl catches Oksana’s eyes and says hello. Oksana returns the greeting enthusiastically. This is the ending that Zabuzhko leaves us with at the end of Fieldwork, despite Oksana’s bitterness and disappointment. For, the novel itself is Oksana’s own attempt to articulate – for herself and for Ukraine – Ukraine’s cultural trauma, on a collective and an individual level. We might say that this ending, strikingly bright and simple in its optimism, shows that Oksana, despite her own inability to surpass cultural trauma, is confident that the next generation will have the cultural context with which to do so themselves. “In spite of the disruption and disarray of cultural order that trauma brings about,” Sztompka writes, “in a different time scale it may be seen as the seed of a new cultural system” (Sztompka 2004: 194). Even if her attempts to overcome cultural trauma may have failed in her relationship with Mykola, Oksana seems to have found reason to believe that, in spite of everything, love and poems and the promise of a new generation can still liberate Ukraine from its tragic past and renew Ukrainians’ cultural identity.

PART TWO: THE POST-SOCIALIST BODY

“Good God, we used to be a good-looking people.”

~Oksana Zabuzhko, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, p. 89

The Body as Space

When analyzing the post-socialist body in Ukraine, postcolonial studies serves as a useful theoretical framework. Due to a lack of theory to discuss post-Soviet conditions, some scholars have borrowed from postcolonial theory, citing shared features of post-Soviet and postcolonial contexts. Madina Tlostanova has examined both the political implications and justifications for applying postcolonial theory to post-socialist contexts. Tlostanova offers the decolonial option and post-dependence studies as viable alternatives, both of which intersect postcolonialism. In this study of the post-socialist body in Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, I will rely on Tlostanova’s framework of filtering postcolonial theory through the critical lens of the decolonial option. From there, I will examine the interconnectedness between decolonial studies and spatial theory, drawing upon Irene Sywenky’s analysis of geopolitics and the female body. Having established the post-socialist body as space, I will then examine the implications for that body as framed by Zabuzhko in Fieldwork. The crux of my argument lies in the tension between the unedited inscription of postcolonial theories onto Oksana’s body and the alternative potential of the decolonial option in liberating the post-socialist body from cultural trauma. Applying postcolonial theory to post-socialist contexts typically raises objections from scholars in postcolonial studies who do not find the situation of the postcolonial subaltern equivalent to that of the post-socialist subject. Additionally, Tlostanova points out a methodological conflict between postcolonial and postcommunist critics in her article “Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality” (2012). Whereas postcolonial critiques usually are rooted in neo-Marxism, postcommunist scholars tend to avoid any sort of critique of capitalist ideology (Tlostanova 2012: 130). Addressing these issues, Tlostanova proposes that the decolonial option can serve as “common ground” Dabulskis 23 between postcolonial and postcommunist contexts (Tlostanova 2012: 132). At the epicenter of the decolonial option is coloniality, a concept referring to colonialism and communism’s shared origins in the darker side of modernity, a system rooted in ideological basis (race, class, religion, etc.) that justifies the domination of people, spaces, and time under one or another “mission of progress” (Tlostanova 2012: 132). In other words, the decolonial option recognizes the same dominating power structure driving colonialism, communism, capitalism, and all other systems of modernity. Thus, while the postcolonial and post-socialist subalterns’ experiences have marked differences, they share origins as victims of coloniality. In another article, “Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing” (2015), Tlostanova identifies postcolonial studies’ inherently Western bias in viewing the post-socialist as time, and not space – a methodological position that abandons the people who still live in the places that are embedded with the effects of socialism, despite the time that has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union (Tlostanova 2015: 27). However, Tlostanova indicates that the decolonial option considers the concept of space along with other intersecting planes, such as time and multiple subjectivities evidenced in fiction such as Fieldwork:

Many recent examples of fictional texts […] demonstrate a clear intersection and echoing between decolonial and postsocialist as well as post-apartheid and post-dictatorship sensibilities, artistic devices, leitmotivs, and subjectivities that could be defined through the decolonial aesthesis […] A good sphere to demonstrate this parallelism is the spatial-temporal dimension – the tempo-localities of post-dependence at the intersection of postcolonial and postsocialist imaginaries.” (Tlostanova 2015: 32)

While geographical space plays a crucial role in Fieldwork, the space that comes to the forefront in the novel and intersects with all themes and subjectivities is the body, which transcends and interacts with time, geography, national identity, gender, and psychology. The body is the epicenter of the interactions between all of these subjectivities, where cultural trauma is played out. In her article “Geopolitics of the Female Body in Postcolonial Ukrainian and Polish Fiction” (2015), Irene Sywenky addresses the importance of examining space in post-socialist societies and emphasizes the female body as embedded in national identity: “The human body is intrinsically spatialized, and bodies and the spaces which they inhabit mutually inform and shape one another” (Sywenky 2015: 199). Sywenky borrows Judith Butler’s concept of “the body as a site of inscription” which, Sywenky argues, “can be extended conceptually to include bodily performativity within specific spatial discourses and structures in order to further decentre and destabilize the gendered body” (Sywenky 2015: 199). While Dabulskis 24

Sywenky discusses the female body specifically, which still aligns with my analysis of Fieldwork, Zabuzhko’s novel, while emphasizing the female body, contends that it is on both men’s and women’s bodies that Ukrainian national identity and, subsequently, cultural trauma is inscribed. Zabuzhko gives imagery of inscription onto the body throughout the novel, most especially on Oksana’s body, which Sywenky argues “becomes a map, a site of inscription, in a rather literal sense” (Sywenky 2015: 202). Using the decolonial option and spatial theory, the post-socialist body is not only the space where multiple subjectivities intersect and are inscribed – it is also embedded with memory. Tlostanova links memory and space as interconnected parts of postcolonial healing:

Memory is materialized in the most unexpected places – from language to real physical spaces, so that it becomes necessary to purify language, contaminated by the rhetoric of dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, and colonialist states to use it very carefully afterwards. Space also requires purification and exorcism. The postsocialist world is full of such contaminated places that remember. Exorcism as a symbolic and public purification might not be enough. What is needed is a painstaking effort of gazing into the face of the past. And art and fiction are the best instruments for such questioning and purification. (Tlostanova 2015: 34)

Among the spaces that remember is the body, which in Zabuzhko’s novel contains symptoms of trauma. Even though the novel takes place in a free and independent Ukraine, Oksana and Mykola’s bodies are, nevertheless, still dominated by the same oppressive forces of coloniality. Oksana and Mykola have internalized colonial and postcolonial discourses (both Western-centric and rooted in coloniality) into their bodies and unconsciousness so that, even after Soviet time, their post-socialist minds and bodies are still spaces possessed by the same forces and symptoms of coloniality. The novel itself is an attempt to break out of the stranglehold of coloniality by practicing such a re-examination that Tlostanova describes in the quoted passage above. Zabuzhko’s novel attempts to engage in a decolonial exercise by confronting the “contamination” of the post-socialist body and, as will be discussed in the following chapter, the Ukrainian language. The purpose of this chapter is to recognize colonial inscription, manifested as trauma, in the post-socialist body and to examine in what ways Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex succeeds or fails in transcending coloniality.

Dabulskis 25

Bodily Decay

Cultural trauma lives in the body, according to the images that Zabuzhko gives us of the post-socialist bodies of Ukrainian men and women. The enslavement of the Ukrainian people under communist rule, Oksana argues, has resulted in their physical corrosion: “Slavery degenerates a nation […] survival as soon as it takes the place of living, turns into degeneration” (Zabuzhko 2011: 90). Survival comes at the cost of the physical well-being of a people. While they might have survived the atrocities of the Soviet regime, Oksana portrays the Ukrainian people, her parents, Mykola, and herself as still suffering physically from the effects of the Ukrainian Holodomor and the gulag. The Ukrainian people have devolved, she argues, into a physically lesser species: “stooped men with drawn, rumpled faces on bowed legs, the women buried under walrus-like gyration of raw-meat dough, young guys with retarded laughter and wolfish bite” (Zabuzhko 2011: 85). Oksana links unattractiveness with sexual relations committed out of necessity or lust – both resulting from the need to merely survive within the Communist system: “they’re like objects made without love, any which way to get it over with: had to meet the quota at the end of the quarter, or needed to produce a child to get on the housing list, or simply fucked somewhere in the alleyway or, after some heavy boozing in a train corridor” (Zabuzhko 2011: 85). Traveling in a third class sleeper car, Oksana is accosted by a man. Recalling the event after her break-up, Oksana ponders whether the coarse and sordid sexual encounters on the train between cars and in bathrooms are “healthy sexuality in its purest form, no complexes, no paralysis caused by civilization and all its twisted perversion – only, damn it, why do they end up having such ugly children[?]” (Zabuzhko 2011: 88). Oksana makes clear that these sexual encounters of convenience and lust are consequences of Soviet rule. As evidence, she conjures up photos of Ukrainian peasants who exemplify how only three or four generations ago before the Soviet regime, Ukrainians were more attractive (Zabuzhko 2011: 88). Oksana launches into a romanticized description of Ukrainian peasants before the twentieth century wars and before the Holodomor, portraying the young men as “lads like oaks, one sturdier than the next, a feast for the eyes” and the young women as draped in jewelry and clothes that can’t “conceal the luxuriant healthy bodies, ready to give birth” (Zabuzhko 2011: 88-89). Oksana takes the time to describe the youngest boy in the photo as appearing “to be burning a hole in the photo with his fiery glance,” embodying the determination that the Ukrainian people lost in the following generations (Zabuzhko 2011: 88). Oksana’s description of the peasants portrays them like their own farmland: beautiful, stalwart, Dabulskis 26 and fertile for growing the next crop (generation). This comparison makes explicit the concept of the (post-)socialist body as space that has been possessed and exploited by the oppressors. The people that Oksana describes in these imaginary photos are the backbone of Ukraine and the most traumatized victims of the Stalin’s atrocities: the Ukrainian peasantry. “What happened to all of them afterward, did they really all die out in the 1933 Famine? Did they perish in the camps, in the NKVD holding cells, or did they simply work themselves to extinction on the collective farms?” asks Oksana (Zabuzhko 2011: 89). The Ukrainian peasants were most resistant to the collectivization of their farms, which destroyed their way of life. In retribution for their resistance, Stalin imposed a famine on the Ukrainian people by seizing more and more grain from the Ukrainian peasantry on the collective farms. The grain was sent elsewhere outside Ukraine, sold for cheap to promote the image of the Soviet Union as a land of plenty. Meanwhile, the peasants starved. Soviet authorities seized not only grain but any food they could find. Peasants who attempted to flee to other parts of the country or the cities, which were suffering but less so than the countryside, were forbidden and prevented from doing so. The population of Ukraine was decimated: between 1932 and 1933, three to four million people died as a result of the Holodomor (Graziosi 2013: xvi). As for those who survived: they were no longer the same people as before the atrocities and, Oksana indicates, yielded subsequent generations of a paltry and bitter people. The bodies of Ukrainians in Fieldwork are depicted as geographical spaces possessed and made degenerate by the Soviet oppression, much like their once fertile land made barren, or a yielding poor crop embodied even after independence. Oksana’s desire to give birth to a Ukrainian child conceived and nurtured by love indicates her desire to transcend the subjugation of coloniality and to (re-)create a new, liberated space in the body of her child to parallel the political liberation of Ukraine. However, Oksana’s faith in the revitalization of the Ukrainian body veers on the side of pessimism when she compares the situation of Ukrainians to Ashkenazi Jews. This comparison is actually an elaboration upon the comparison Robert Conquest makes in The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), in which he equates Nazi crimes against the Jews with the Holodomor. “That’s right, my Jewish brothers, my dear Ashkenazi […] this glass is raised to you too,” says Oksana (Zabuzhko 2011: 90). She describes visiting Jerusalem with a male Ukrainian colleague, who she describes as effeminate and with slouching shoulders that make him appear like a “hunchback” (Zabuzhko 2011: 90). Zabuzhko juxtaposes this Ukrainian man’s lack of physical beauty and presence with the Israeli soldiers, whom she paints as “mythological Titans […] broad mountain-plateau shoulders, movable tree-trunk thighs, strong, bluish teeth glowing against olive tans […] in Eastern Europe go try and find yourself Dabulskis 27 such luxurious Semitic giants” (Zabuzhko 2011: 91). While noting that her hunched colleague has been subjected to the same slavery and physical decimation of Ashkenazi Jews, she notes that at least the Jews have a Jerusalem to dream of, to look to for models of the physical embodiment of freedom as beauty and strength: “Nonetheless, they do still have those hills, burnt to a yellow ochre, where history goes on, but where is our Jerusalem, can somebody please tell me, and where do we look for it?” (Zabuzhko 2011: 91). The implied answer: there is no Jerusalem for the Ukrainian people, no alternate homeland or ochre hills from which to gain strength. In other words, the Jews have a “(re-)newed” geographical space in Israel that is free of the more immediate 20th century traumas of the Holocaust, fascism, and anti-Semitism in Europe. Ukrainians have only Ukraine, which Oksana describes in terms of infanticide: “Ukraine is Chronos chomping away at his children, tiny fingers and toes” (Zabuzhko 2011: 20). Though the temporal period of the Soviet regime has ended, Ukrainians have no alternate and “pure” homeland in which their bodies can regenerate. Re-invigoration of the post-socialist body, a traumatized space, living in the “contaminated” space of Ukraine will have more difficulty escaping the forces of coloniality.

The Female Body as Territory and Prisoner

Though Zabuzhko makes clear that both men’s and women’s bodies in Ukraine are victims to Soviet oppression in and as post-socialist space, she places particular emphasis on the subjugation of Ukrainian women’s bodies to Ukrainian men. In a 2008 interview with her translator, Halyna Hryn, Zabuzhko states that men are affected more profoundly by social humiliation than women, who can at last “retreat” to kitchen and home:

As a result, in the end it is always women upon whom men take revenge for their defeats ‘out in the world.’ But this, I’m afraid is rather universal, nothing particularly Ukrainian about it (alas!) The ‘Ukrainianness’ of the story just helps make it all the more striking and visible. (Zabuzhko 2008)

Uilliam Blacker echoes Zabuzhko’s argument in his article “Nation, Body, Home: Gender and National Identity in the Work of Oksana Zabuzhko” (2010), in which Blacker approaches Zabuzhko’s work with spatial and postcolonial theory from a feminist perspective. Blacker grounds his analysis on feminist spatial theory, which perceives gender in time and spaces Dabulskis 28

(Blacker 2010: 487). He summarizes how time is typically categorized as masculine, and space as feminine in spatial theory (ibid.). Postcolonial studies’ temporal fixation and the decolonial option’s examination of planes of space becomes, posited against feminist spatial theory, gendered as well. However, feminist scholars have also identified that public space is often considered male, and private space female – designations that align with Zabuzhko’s statements above (Blacker 2010: 487). Emasculated in the public space, the post-socialist man retreats to the home, a private and feminine space which would only serve to emphasize his impotency. Blacker introduces a third spatial construction that supports Zabuzhko’s reasoning for male vengeance on women: the female body as territory. For the colonizer, Blacker explains, the native land is “maternal and nourishing,” whereas the colonized land is to the colonizer a source of desire (ibid.). Thus, for the colonized subject, his “maternal” and native land is often perceived “as having been raped by the colonizer” (ibid.). If colonized women’s bodies are an extension of that native land or space, then women themselves become the territory that the colonized man needs to repossess or reclaim to restore his sense of dignity and agency. “This use of woman as a symbol for territory in colonial and anti-colonial discourse has practical implications for women themselves, in that their social and sexual behaviour becomes loaded with political significance,” notes Blacker (Blacker 2010: 488). Thus, the female body becomes a space or territory that the emasculated, colonized male seeks to control or dominate. In Fieldwork, Zabuzhko frames Oksana’s body not only as territory, but as prisoner to the insecurities and insufficiencies of the Ukrainian men in her life – her father and Mykola. Oksana’s father, a survivor of the gulag living in perpetual fear of re-institutionalization, grips his daughter in a stranglehold of overprotectiveness that extends to her developing body. Lacking any way to actively work against the Soviet system without fear of retribution, Oksana’s father attempts to control and contain his daughter’s pubescent body, thus enacting postcolonial territorialization of the female body in order to assert his own agency. It is Oksana’s father who nurses and guides her through the pains of her first menstruation, inducing in Oksana “shame at her secret being revealed so openly” and “a kind of searing vulnerability, a wary uncertainty” (Zabuzhko 2011: 146). Oksana’s body, locked in her home with her father as sentry, is subject to his oppressive (if well-intentioned) supervision. While his actions on a personal level are rooted in love, underneath the lenses of feminist, spatial and postcolonial theory, Oksana’s father’s (over) concern with her body could be construed as a strategy to not only protect his daughter from, but to enact resistance against the Soviet regime. “The colonizing Russian-Communist powers inflict physical violence on this territory [the female Dabulskis 29 body] in order to control it and the culture inscribed in it; the anti-colonial discourse struggles to reclaim and use it as a space of resistance,” writes Blacker (Blacker 2010: 498). However, adolescent Oksana does not consider her father’s preoccupation with her developing body as an act of resistance against the Soviet regime, but instead compares his supervision of her body to that of a guard supervising a prisoner in the gulag. Rather than a sanctuary, for Oksana the home acts as a miniature version of the Soviet state from which Oksana seeks to “break loose” (Zabuzhko 2011: 146). Oksana religiously attends school dances every week, embarrassingly aware of her awkward and girlish clothes compared to the mature elegance of her peers. She scrubs the stolen make-up off her face before going home because “it was frightening to think what would happen if Daddy saw – Daddy, who was always so afraid for her” (Zabuzhko 2011: 147). In a comedic parallel to the Soviet authorities, Oksana describes her father “collecting dossiers on each of her girlfriends” of whom he doesn’t approve because of their smoking and fraternizing with boys (Zabuzhko 2011: 147). Just as in the Soviet state defiance results in punishment, so does Oksana receive a slap in the face for screaming back at his declamations. If the female body is a space the colonizer desires to possess, then it can be understood that the more desirable that territory, the more vulnerable it is to assault. For all his efforts, Oksana’s father cannot stop her natural growth into a sexually desirable body. His frustration and terror at not being able to contain the biological reality of her body’s development is not only rooted in concern for her safety, but also a fear of further emasculation via an assault on his daughter’s body. Unable to prevent puberty and Oksana’s body from growing beyond the walls of the home, her father watches “with horror,” telling her to “lift up your nightie” to survey her breasts’ growth (Zabuzhko 2011: 150). He treats Oksana’s body as his own property or prisoner, subject to his investigation. For her part, Oksana recoils from his infringement on her body’s privacy, describing her feeling of shame and vulnerability when her father forces her to lift up her nightgown:

That anxious, obscene feeling of exposure, the first experience, far stronger than any of that knee-touching under the classroom desk – and yet you yearned to break free, God how you yearned to break free – like a condemned soul from under the executioner’s axe, but – where? (Zabuzhko 2011: 151)

Oksana uses terminology appropriate to the gulag which her father so fears. In attempting to assuage and process his own experiences of imprisonment, Oksana’s father subjects his Dabulskis 30 daughter to the same power relation of a prison: control of the body’s appearance and, when that fails, surveillance that denies the agency and dignity of that body. However, when adolescent Oksana becomes ill and her female doctor tells her to undress, the doctor undermines her father’s authority by ordering him from the room. Oksana describes her father as having “shuffled to the door in humiliation, flustered and dwarfed as if caught red-handed” (Zabuzhko 2011: 154). Despite all her father’s attempts to deny his daughter’s maturing body, eventually the outside world in the form of the doctor denies him that authority by asserting Oksana’s right to bodily agency and privacy. “This [female] body,” writes Blacker, “becomes a space of conflict, of power relations, a field of battle between colonized and colonizer” (Blacker 2010: 498). At this moment, Oksana’s father realizes that he no longer has control over his daughter’s body, that her femaleness belongs to her alone and he no longer has the authority or the right to safeguard it – much like his country, for which any attempt at ownership or possession on his part risks his re-incarceration in the gulag. He realizes that he is losing the battle over the contested territory that is Oksana’s body.8 For her part, Oksana frames her father as being at war against her body itself, a war that as her body develops and society recognizes her womanhood, defeats him in yet another battle he cannot win: “His panic at her unrestrained growth – ‘Hey, stop that!’ – settled into his insides and slowly sawed away at them with a dull blade” (Zabuzhko 2011: 155). Oksana considers herself at war with her father’s attempts to keep her in the home and under his control. Even her father’s diagnosis of cancer she perceives as another strategy in his attempts to keep her under his control: “In fact, it was nothing less than war, a war in which there could be no winners because, having exhausted all means to get his way […] having done all that, the man resorts to the ultimate weapon, death, and that does the trick, you lay down your arms and you go over to his side” (Zabuzhko 2011: 156).

8 There is an incestuous undertone to Oksana’s narration, when immediately after describing the doctor’s order for him to leave the room, Oksana notes in parentheses that her father was an attractive and dynamic man “and there would have been absolutely no problem finding some action outside the house, so why did he guard his chastity like some Galician old maid” (Zabuzhko 2011: 154). She attributes her father’s faithfulness to her mother as less an act of love than an act of guilt for having destroyed her life. However, the word “chastity” indicates that her father himself suffers from some kind of disconnect from his own disabused body, impotent before his fear of the Soviet authorities. Essentially, the line seems to intimate that her father exercises some kind of sexual urge by surveying his daughter’s body. However, his seemingly unnatural preoccupation with his daughter’s body might be explained by a need to assert control over the contested territory of Oksana’s body.

Dabulskis 31

Virginal and Violated Space

In contrast, Oksana associates her mother with a lack of authoritative presence. While detailing her father’s oppressive surveillance of her adolescence, Oksana digresses to discuss her mother’s virtual absence. Her mother plays the part of an ineffective peace keeper, which Oksana puts into harsh language: “Mother was quite beside the point in all this, Mother was, in fact, frigid, and obviously out of it, a black windowpane deflecting all light” (Zabuzhko 2011: 148). On the same page, Oksana again refers to her mother as frigid, but notes that her mother’s frigidity is a direct consequence of the Holodomor: “And what else could she have been if not frigid, a child-survivor of the Famine” (Zabuzhko 2011: 148). Oksana indicates that it is because of a childhood ridden with starvation that her mother, along with other women of her generation, are overweight: “Eat, that’s what these babes wanted to do when they hit twenty – eat, that’s all! – stuff their faces with meager bread rations in student dorms, both hands, picking up crumbs, what a clitoris was they never did find out” (Zabuzhko 2011: 149). According to Oksana, her mother’s starved childhood and overeating adulthood subsequently led to an obesity interconnected with a lack of awareness of her own body’s sexuality. “So,” Oksana concludes, “Mother was as innocent as a lamb, or rather the Virgin Mary” (Zabuzhko 2011: 149). Oksana’s tone in regards to her mother switches at the mention of this comparison, and describes her mother’s features as a young woman in a way that recalls the Virgin Mary: “she glowed with such gentle innocence, a girl in curls […] delicate long face with a slim tapered nose – a now lost, quiet kind of beauty illuminated by an inner smile, the Cossack baroque portrait three hundred years later” (Zabuzhko 2011: 149). Oksana links her mother’s younger self in one passage with both the Virgin Mary and the idyllic image of a Cossack beauty, thus linking the image of the Virgin Mother with national identity. This passage relates back to Blacker’s discussion of the feminization and maternalization of the colonizer or the colonized subject’s native land:

The actual territories of the colonial enterprise are also characterized as feminine, but in terms of desire, rather than maternity: they are virgin lands in need of masculine potency of the colonizer to reach their potential. The feminization of the native land applies equally to colonized cultures, which often construct their homeland as having been raped by the colonizer. (Blacker 2010: 487)

Dabulskis 32

Oksana’s portrait of her mother in her youth as Virgin Mary and Cossack Beauty would seem to indicate an idealized version of Ukrainian femininity – a female body that despite the horrors of the Holodomor, managed to retain her innocence and parallel a maternal and virginal Ukrainian territory, spared any significant violation by the Soviet regime. Yet, Oksana makes clear, even her mother becomes the “sacrificial lamb” of the system (Zabuzhko 2011: 150). Despite the challenges of meager and unpleasant living conditions, her mother completes her graduate thesis. However, this accomplishment is undermined when she was expelled from graduate school because of her husband’s questionable status in the Soviet regime. From this point, it seems, her mother’s gentle innocence is recast as frigidity and absence (at least in the logic of Oksana’s narrative). While raped might be too strong a word, instead it could be said that the Soviet regime nevertheless enacted punishment against Oksana’s mother for the alleged political resistance of her husband. This sort of oppression, while not literally posed against her mother’s body on the level of the Holodomor, nevertheless would seem to contribute to the “gentle innocence” of her mother’s appearance as a young woman devolving into middle-aged absence and frigidity – “a black windowpane deflecting all light” (Zabuzhko 2011: 148). If Oksana paints her mother’s younger self as a Cossack Virgin Mary, Oksana describes her own features as fallen from grace: “even your own good looks are already by two exponents coarser, more vulgar – let’s not forget to make that were” (Zabuzhko 2011: 149). Beside her mother, Oksana paints her (once) beauty as sharper and sexually attune. Her mother’s communist body, locked into a childish innocence, remains soft in both negative and positive ways: gentle in her youth, overweight in her middle age. Meanwhile, Oksana indicates that her own post-socialist body is both sharper and more sexually aware in comparison to her mother’s. It is also important to compare the communist bodies of Oksana’s father and mother: her father’s chastity emerging from a loss of agency, her mother’s from a childish naiveté. Thus, what Oksana indicates is a clear generational gap in sexual awareness and potency between her parents’ generation and her own. It is in sex that Oksana attempts to bridge the transition from communist to liberated society. The difficulty that Oksana encounters in her relationship with Mykola is that their sexual life is still enacted upon the post-socialist spaces of their bodies. Despite both of their successful careers and leaving Ukraine, their bodies are still post-socialist spaces in transition, burdened by the traumas of theirs and their parents’ generation.

Dabulskis 33

Deterritorializing the Post-Socialist Body

In sex, Oksana is confronted with the post-socialist space of her body, a space traumatized by the conflicting desires to submit and rebel against male control. Oksana explicitly links her father’s attempts to control her body to her sexual relationships, including with Mykola. Oksana attributes the feminine submission that pleases her sexual partners as originating in her initial submission to her father’s authority over her body: “the same eternal sense of daughterly duty, ultimate feminine submission from which men, not having a clue of its source, would necessarily go wild (“You’re such a good fuck!”) and then she would leave them. Break loose, that’s all she wanted to do, break loose” (Zabuzhko 2011: 146). Oksana enacts with her sexual partners a routine of initial submission and subsequent rebellion that has its origins in her father’s monitoring of her burgeoning womanhood and independence. Essentially, to each of her sexual relationships she brings the symptoms of her father’s trauma following the gulag, not to mention her own trauma from living in an environment of submission and surveillance. Despite her desire to break out from her father’s authority and the oppressive past of Ukraine, Oksana finds herself engaging in a cyclical repetition of trauma: though Ukraine is now independent, the trauma of her country and interconnected personal experiences manifests itself in her re-enacting a cycle of submission and rebellion with each of her sexual partners. Despite wanting to break out of each subsequent relationship built on these power relations, it is this unequal power dynamic that attracts Oksana to her sexual partners. In the below passage, Oksana directly links her father’s ordering her to lift up her nightclothes to future sexual acts men order her to perform:

“Lift up your nightie, I want to see how you’ve been growing” (and would it not be the same kind of both concerned and authoritative intonation twenty years later – “Turn around, I want to take you from behind now” – that would awaken in you that long-forgotten feeling of home?) (Zabuzhko 2011: 150)

Despite wanting to break out of this home, as an adult Oksana finds herself wanting to return to it. She both wants and does not want her body to be possessed. Sywenky’s article proves useful here when she refers to Deleuze’s concept of deterritorialization, which she applies to postcolonial spaces:

Dabulskis 34

These movements and transmutations – both physical and symbolic – are particularly intrinsic to postcolonial spaces, which are located between the past and the future, and in transformative interstices of collapsing master narratives and changing socio-political structures. (Sywenky 2015: 198)

In sex, Oksana’s body is caught in a similar transition, caught up in a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. With Mykola, she enacts not only deterritorialization from Soviet oppression, but a reterritorialization under Ukrainian national identity. However, this reterritorialization is just yet another territorializing of the female body – but now, under the auspices of national identity and love. It is with Mykola that Oksana has violent, painful sex for the first time, after which Oksana thinks to herself: “well, you’ve been properly fucked, girlfriend, uncensored version – properly fucked for the first time in your life” (Zabuzhko 2011: 26). Unlike her previous sexual partners, Mykola does not concern himself with gentleness or pleasing Oksana. Instead, Oksana notes that he took her and “screwed the living daylights out of you like a thug, no dither” (Zabuzhko 2011: 25). After first fearing to see her reflection in the mirror, Oksana is surprised to find herself looking younger than before:

You found yourself flushed with pleasant surprise: a clear, suddenly youthful and doing justice to your authentic beauty, delicate, thin, almost childish face peered out at you, dark eyes darting out ahead, a face you always knew was in there somewhere but hadn’t seen in the mirror in God knows how long: you had come home, you were home. (Zabuzhko 2011: 26)

It is in Mykola’s literal possession of her body via violent sex that Oksana initially thinks her body is no longer a post-socialist space, traumatized and contested territory. Instead, she sees in her suddenly refreshed post-coital features a body that is home. Tlostanova writes that in post-Soviet fiction “a crucial topos remains that of home in all its contradictory manifestations” (Tlostanova 2015: 39). For Oksana, home – a place understood as safe – is to be possessed by one of her own, whatever pain that possession entails. Oksana initially does not consider herself a masochist: “N-nope, you weren’t a masochist, you were a fucking normal woman whose body took pleasure in giving joy to others” (Zabuzhko 2011: 27). Oksana makes the specific point to the audience that her relationship with Mykola cannot be considered pathological because he is Ukrainian:

Dabulskis 35

So, ladies and gentlemen, please do not be in a hurry to qualify the presented case of love here as pathological, because the speaker has not yet stated what is most important – the main point, ladies and gentlemen, lies in the fact that in the research subject’s life this was her first Ukrainian man. Honestly – the first. (Zabuzhko 2011: 30)

However, Oksana makes clear by the end of the novel that her initial perception of abusive sex with Mykola was flawed. After examining the tragicomedy behind the Ukrainian national anthem (“Ukraine has not died yet”), Oksana makes the sarcastic remark: “and that’s why, that’s why, my dear girl, since that’s the case – you should shout and rejoice that you haven’t died, you poor sexual victim of the national idea” (Zabuzhko 2011: 115). Oksana portrays Ukraine, a country that prides itself on survival, of having a paradoxical subculture of women who compromise their survival instincts in sex for the sake of Ukrainian national identity. Oksana makes quite explicit what this national sexual victimization entails when, upon a friend asking Oksana why she endured such horrible treatment in bed, Oksana replies:

What can I tell you, Donna-dearest. That we were raised by men fucked from all ends every which way? That later we ourselves screwed the same kind of guys, and that in both cases they were doing to us what others, the others, had done to them? And that we accepted them and loved them as they were, because not to accept them was to go over to the others, the other side? And that our only choice, therefore, was and still remains between victim and executioner: between nonexistence and an existence that kills you. (Zabuzhko 2011: 158)

Just as her father attempts to control her body to assert some kind of agency in the face of the Soviet regime, so does Mykola vent his feelings of humiliation and pain out upon Oksana. Tlostanova views this behavior as operating at the meeting point of post-Soviet and post- colonial theories:

One of the obvious intersections of the post-Soviet and the post-colonial lies in the psychology of colonialism and in anti-colonial resistance. It acquires additional, often gendered overtones in the Soviet case – the colonized and the politically repressed Soviet males react identically by projecting their humiliation onto those who are still weaker and more dependent – women and children. (Tlostanova 2012: 137)

Tlostanova cites Fieldwork as an example of fiction portraying this power relation (Tlostanova 2012: 137). As a nationalist, Oksana is (at first) only too willing to submit herself to Mykola’s treatment because of their shared language, background, and humiliated national position. Dabulskis 36

Blacker gives his feminist critique of Oksana’s acceptance of violent treatment, which Blacker believes is romanticized by Zabuzhko: “The narrator sees the placing of the national culture above one’s own subjective and bodily freedom as a romantic, self-sacrificial virtue. This seems to undermine the more liberating position Zabuzhko takes in her theoretical work, which identifies such psychological complexes rather as problems to be overcome” (Blacker 2010: 490). While acknowledging that Blacker’s observation does encapsulate part of Oksana’s attitude towards sex with Mykola, I would argue that Blacker fails to consider the obvious inner turmoil Oksana experiences within herself because of this attitude. Oksana is by no means lacking in self-reflection and self-critique on the very contradiction of submitting herself to an abusive relationship under the pretense of national identity (see the heavy dose of sarcasm: “you should shout and rejoice that you haven’t died, you poor sexual victim of the national idea”) (Zabuzhko 2011: 115). Arguably, the whole point of Oksana’s fieldwork is to examine how and why she would have engaged in this relationship. Blacker entirely misses the caveat: the relationship fails and Oksana does not view the damage inflicted on her body and her spirits as ideal by any means: “They never taught us, all our literature with its entire cult of tragic love […] they somehow forgot to warn us that in reality tragedies don’t look pretty” (Zabuzhko 2011: 117). Oksana’s portrayal of the physical effects of Mykola on her body are hardly romanticized: sagging breasts, skin discoloration, shriveled nipples – brought about by a man she dismisses as having “had a foggy notion of what you’re supposed to do with a women’s breasts except perhaps pinch them through a blouse” (Zabuzhko 2011: 38). (The lack of romantic idealization will become all too clear, if it hasn’t already, in the following section.) Finally, suffice it to say that Blacker’s view that Zabuzhko’s fiction should support her theoretical work is utterly arbitrary. In Fieldwork, Zabuzhko is not exploring what should be, she is examining what is: her narrator is confronting her psychological complexes, and that confrontation is not obligated to polemically dismiss the reality of her feelings and experience for the sake of supporting a more “liberating position” in Zabuzhko’s theoretical work. Furthermore, as already established in the introduction, Oksana the character is not Zabuzhko the author. A character in a fictional work, however teasingly autobiographical, has the freedom to express views that contradict the author’s theoretical work. Lest we forget, Mykola’s body and relationship to sex also reflects postcolonial and decolonial constructions. Mykola is also portrayed as a prisoner of his post-socialist body and condition, a condition apparently relieved via sadistic sex. Tlostanova links this relief achieved via inflicting violence to Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial examinations in Wretched of the Earth:

Dabulskis 37

One of the deeper intersections uniting postcolonial and postsocialist fiction is the leitmotif of trauma, violence, repentance, and revenge in all the richness of its semantic overtones and poetic representations. In decolonial terms, this corresponds to coloniality (and decolonization) of memory and the complexity and contradictoriness of violence as a destructive yet also cathartic Fanonian force. (Tlostanova 2015: 41)

After their first bout of violent sex, Oksana notes that Mykola “emerges from her with so many years washed away from his face, smoothed with a moist sheen of happiness” (Zabuzhko 2011: 25). In that moment, Oksana sees beneath “this taciturn, thin-lipped, carefully groomed and clean-shaven man” an indication of the child that he once was, a child locked away because of the trauma inherited from his parents’ experiences: a father no sooner freed from a Nazi prison camp than he’s imprisoned in the Gulag, and a mother forced to work on the collective farms. She imagines the child Mykola with “thin, sharp features, pointed ears and cheekbones of a postwar village urchin” caught in awe by the beauty of the colors in the horizon, an early indication of his artistic potential (Zabuzhko 2011: 25). This child, Oksana believes, is buried beneath Mykola’s hardened exterior and is only made visible to her by her submission to the adult Mykola’s sexual whims. In other words, it is only by allowing Mykola to abuse her body and cathartically re-assert his agency that this child can emerge. “That in itself,” comments Oksana, “was a completely satisfying work of art in which your personal physical dissatisfaction did not weigh all that heavily” (Zabuzhko 2011: 25). Blacker argues that Oksana herself is responsible for fueling the colonial-gender conflict by submitting herself to Mykola’s emotional and physical abuse: “She actively inscribes the cultural narrative of anti-colonial resistance (or postcolonial survival) on the surface of her own body […] for the sake of the continuation of the race of ‘Ukrainian intelligentsia’” (Blacker 2010: 492-493). On this point, I concede that Blacker gives us a fair assessment of Oksana’s responsibility for her own situation. Oksana notes that she knew from the beginning that hers and Mykola’s relationship was doomed. From the first moment Oksana shakes Mykola’s hand, she senses danger when he bends her thumb in a way that gives her a sharp pain: “Your sirens also instantly started screaming – a lightning-quick flash through your consciousness – strange, how in that confused moment the message was so clear and you knew, as if some bystander in your head uttered a calm, meaningful grammatical sentence: ‘This man is going to hurt you’” (Zabuzhko 2011: 12). Even if Oksana’s conscious thought ignores her body’s signals, then her body’s intuition manifests itself unconsciously in her writing: “Only your poems, which switched on immediately and rushed forward in a steady, unrelenting Dabulskis 38 stream, sent out unambiguous signals of danger: persistent flashes of – hell, and death, and sickness” (Zabuzhko 2011: 27). During the end of her relationship with Mykola, Oksana shares a poem with him that exemplifies how she already knew their relationship would end, which induces an angry reaction from Mykola: “you knew this would happen? So why the hell?...” (Zabuzhko 2011: 27). To which Oksana replies: “Uh-huhh, my dear, that’s the point…” (Zabuzhko 2011: 27). That point, of course, is that Oksana was willing to play the “sexual victim of the national idea,” taken as she is by the idea of rectifying Ukraine’s national identity in the form of a child born from love (Zabuzhko 2011: 115). Oksana plays into the rhetoric of coloniality that dominates her consciousness, choosing to play the role of the sexual victim of Ukrainian national identity. Blacker also points out that in her narration, Oksana inscribes this narrative onto Mykola as well: “The character of Mykola is not given a voice with regard to the national discourse, the reader must interpret him as merely a symbolic figure in the female narrator’s desire to facilitate the survival of her culture” (Blacker 2010: 492-493). Oksana actively lends Mykola a symbolic quality, intimating that he has some supernatural connection with evil, dubbing him her “sorcerer-brother” and comparing him to a black cat (Zabuzhko 2011: 9-10, 12, 51-53, 68). Mykola’s body and his experience is secondary to Oksana’s and given comparatively less attention or psychological depth. However, we might attribute this lack in Mykola’s character development to a narrative unapologetically committed to voicing the overwhelmingly silenced and neglected female perspective in the literary canon. Whatever Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex’s flaws might be in the context of feminism, the novel provides a committed representation of female experience. It appears that Zabuzhko herself is conscious of the discrepancy of representation between the male and female experience in her novel because of the heavy-handed symbolizing of Mykola. Additionally, in her 2008 interview with Halyna Hryn, Zabuzhko compares herself to Milan Kundera:

What particularly tantalized me while working on the book was to examine precisely how that massive, dark and powerful mainstream of history affects, quite surreptitiously, people’s most unconscious behavior, words and gestures in bed … (I think the first writer to have ever approached this problem with due attention was Milan Kundera, but his standpoint remains thoroughly ‘male,’ in the most patriarchal sense of the word). (Zabuzhko 2008)

We might grant Zabuzhko credit for giving an intimate portrait of a feminine perspective on sexual relations against a canon of literature from the male perspective that colonizes that Dabulskis 39 female experience. Even if, as Blacker rightly argues, Oksana does herself the un-feminist service of inscribing the national narrative on herself for the sake of male catharsis, credit must be given for Zabuzhko’s thorough investigation of this pathology – as well as the fact that Oksana eventually sees the flaws in this submission. As for Oksana’s denial of Mykola’s voice and the unsolicited inscription of Ukraine’s cultural narrative onto his body – this could well be one of the reasons why the relationship fails. However, we might say that Zabuzhko is actually deterritorializing patriarchal narratives (such as Kundera’s) that prioritize male experience and perspectives. Mykola occupies the seductive and bewitching role that the canon of literature consistently assigns to women. By having Oksana inscribe the national narrative onto Mykola, Zabuzhko is – to some extent –overturning the male colonization of the female body on the semantic level – if not in actual fact. Of course, Oksana finds that she cannot continue to offer her body as a sacrifice or outlet for Mykola’s suppressed traumas. It is not only the physical abuse she suffers that leads Oksana to fall out of love with Mykola, but rather his inability to be emotionally or physically intimate in bed. “It turned out that he ‘didn’t like to be pawed,’ indeed this aversion to intimate contact was plain unhealthy,” notes Oksana (Zabuzhko 2011: 96). When Oksana interrogates Mykola as to how he can treat her in such a cold and emotionally abusive way, he replies: “It’s just that many things inside me have been killed!” (Zabuzhko 2011: 96). Mykola’s presence soon becomes not only abusive, but parasitic and poisonous to Oksana’s body and spirit. “The simple awareness of his lying beside her shut down all channels of connection,” writes Oksana (Zabuzhko 2011: 95). Robbed of emotional intimacy and connection, Oksana finds herself imprisoned by the weight of trauma manifest in Mykola’s body. Contrary to her hopes for transcending the post-socialist body’s trauma with Mykola, Oksana finds that her body remains a colonized and violated space. In essence, in “liberating” Mykola by offering her body as space on which he can inscribe his trauma, Oksana is entrapped even further in Fanon’s postcolonial paradigm of violent catharsis. “The interstices of the discourses of gender and postcolonialism are sites in which female subjectivity is torn by contradictory impulses,” explains Blacker (2010: 494). By compromising her own subjectivity, Oksana prevents any transcendence beyond her post-socialist condition by cementing postcolonial structures of dominance on her body. The very notion that women should play the role of sexual victims of Ukraine’s national identity imprisons them and their partners in the rhetoric of coloniality. The decolonial option exposes that for Oksana to free hers and Mykola’s bodies from cultural trauma, their self-victimization and self-colonializing cannot continue.

Dabulskis 40

The Imprisoned and Invisible Body

Oksana consciously invokes a parallel between the communist body wasting away in the gulag and the post-socialist body corroding from the psychological and physical effects of cultural trauma: “Ladies and gentlemen, the sense of one’s own body wasting away day by day – is a feeling familiar perhaps to the prisoners of the Gulag” (Zabuzhko 2011: 37). Following her break-up from Mykola, Oksana surveys herself in the mirror every evening and takes notice of her once pert but now sagging breasts adorned with shriveled nipples (Zabuzhko 2011: 38). She makes a direct link between her body’s aging and decay and her relationship with Mykola:

This was a good-looking body, healthy, smart, and vigorous […] it hung in there for an awfully long time, it was only with that man that it instantly began giving me a hard time, but I put the screws to it, harshly and unsparingly, and still it resisted, chafed with various chronic colds, swollen glands, and febrile rashes, a ‘weakened immune system,’ the doctors said. (Zabuzhko 2011: 38)

The body mimics the breakdown of Oksana’s survival instincts in her relationship with Mykola. However, if Mykola plays the role of torturer to Oksana’s body, she is her own warden. In an attempt to revive her body, she “torments” it with exercises in the morning and trips to the pool in the evening (Zabuzhko 2011: 39). Despite explaining that her devotion to swimming “is the sole way I can save myself from depression,” it is difficult to believe her when she describes exercising in a way that recalls concentration camp exercises intended to hasten death, rather than prevent it (Zabuzhko 2011: 39). Aside from physical decay and tortuous exercises, Oksana emphasizes the post-socialist body’s invisibility. Tlostanova also identifies invisibility as a particular characteristic of post- socialist subjects, who, she explains, “have acquired the problematic human status they occupy today not through race but through a poorly representable semi-alterity. They have become the off-White Blacks of the new global world – looking and behaving too similar to the Same, yet remaining essentially Others: hyper-visible invisibles” (Tlostanova 2015: 29). It is not the fallen Soviet regime that sustains the post-socialist subaltern’s invisibility, but the forces of Western modernity (Tlostanova 2015: 29). When Oksana thinks that she has escaped the suffocating defeatism of Ukraine by moving to the United States, she is instead confronted again with the Western, first world’s ignorance of Ukraine, its culture, and its history. Oksana Dabulskis 41 feels the embodiment of Ukraine’s non-existence to the wider world when she notices that men stop looking at her in the streets. It is significant that while attributing her diminishing attractiveness to age and the effects of the break-up, it is in the United States that Oksana first experiences invisibility from men’s attentions. “As you forcibly dragged your miserable, oppressed body down the streets of an alien city,” Oksana explains, “you first became familiar with the notion of invisibility […] men walking toward you would glide over you with indifferent, unseeing eyes, like you were an inanimate object” (Zabuzhko 2011: 41). The image of Oksana dragging her unnoticed body through the streets of a foreign city parallels another statement Oksana makes several pages later: “The Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake – I’m here! I’m still alive! – but unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time” (Zabuzhko 2011: 46). Zabuzhko links Ukrainian literature and the post-socialist body in their mutual suffering from a lack of attention that is analogous to invisibility or nonexistence. The invisibility of Oksana’s body is a projection of Ukraine and the Ukrainian language’s invisibility to the international community. More specifically, it is the suffering and dying bodies of Ukrainians that remain ignored or unnoticed by the rest of the world. At the beginning of her lecture to her American audience, Oksana takes the time to thank them for their attention:

I would like to thank all of you, present and absent, for the completely unjustified attention you have given my country and my humble persona – because if there’s one thing that we haven’t been spoiled by yet it’s attention: to put it bluntly, we’ve been lying there dying, unnoticed by bloody anybody. (Zabuzhko 2011: 30)

Aside from Soviet suppression, the other obvious atrocity inflicted on the Ukrainian people that received little to no attention from the international community is, of course, the Holodomor, its existence forcibly denied by the Soviet authorities. Today, the Russian Federation insists on generalizing the obvious genocide as merely a part of the incidental famines that occurred during the transition to collectivization throughout the Soviet Union. On a global level, the Holodomor was and continues to be largely unknown despite scholarship insisting on the magnitude of the Holodomor and its qualification as a genocide. When Zabuzhko gives us a tragic portrait of Oksana walking through the streets of the United States, she embodies the non-existence of a traumatized and dying Ukraine for the rest of the world. Dabulskis 42

Of course, we cannot completely isolate the portrait of Oksana’s physical aging, decay, and invisibility outside the context of gender. She is also a woman mourning the loss of her youth and health, as well as transitioning from a once desirable to now unnoticed woman. We could say that Oksana’s body is a space no longer perceived as lush or fertile – a territory no man wants to colonize any longer. In this sense, Oksana is engaging in her own subjugation by objectifying herself. Blacker critiques Zabuzhko for approaching this issue uncritically: “Her distress at this may well reflect the experience of many women, but it is disappointing that this problem is articulated uncritically, and the idea of challenging the reduction of the female subject to sexual object is not entertained by Zabuzhko in this instance” (Blacker 2010: 492). While Blacker may be disappointed in Zabuzhko’s neglecting to critique female sexual (self-) objectification, Zabuzhko’s preoccupation in Fieldwork is not critiquing the objectification of women in general, but rather within the frame of Ukrainian national identity and trauma. “Apart from her internalized essentialist assumptions about femininity – which deserves a separate study – the radical separation of the protagonist’s body from her self is highly significant in the context of the economic and political separation of the national self from the maternal ‘body’ (manifested in the ‘ownership’ of the language, culture, land, etc.),” writes Sywenky (2015: 204). We must analyze Oksana’s body perception and self-objectifying, as Sywenky does above, as a combined question of gender and coloniality with the awareness that Zabuzhko’s feminism entails a problematic reduction of female experience to entrenched gender roles.

Postcolonial Death vs. Decolonial Rebirth

In the beginning of her relationship with Mykola, it is Oksana’s hope to free herself and Mykola from the burden of Ukraine’s traumas by having a child with Mykola, “a sturdy, wonderful boy, pure as gold” with a body and spirit strong enough to transcend Ukraine’s battered history (Zabuzhko 2011: 77). Nurtured by his intellectual and artistic parents, Oksana imagines a child that embodies not only a return to the physical beauty and emotional strength Ukrainians once possessed several generations ago, but a revival of the persecuted and rare Ukrainian intelligentsia. “Our son, he, finally will be free of that legacy which we spent all of our youth settling accounts with – it’s been so painful, we may have actually paid it off by now” (Zabuzhko 2011: 77). However, Oksana and Mykola’s shared dream of a son is never conceived. Instead, as a result of her body’s suffering and imprisonment in emotionally disconnected, violent lovemaking, Oksana finds that her essential ability to give birth to new Dabulskis 43 life is threatened. “Her body, shattered by night, always felt heavy and awkward, somehow bloated inside, like she really was pregnant – a bag of meat from the market dripping blood,” notices Oksana (Zabuzhko 2011: 95). This imagery is a morbid overturning of Oksana’s dreams and expectations from her relationship with Mykola. She no longer carries within her, she senses, the ability to create life, but death. Speaking to Mykola, Oksana explains, “You have taught my body to castrate the perpetrator: all of my feminine strength, accumulated for generations, which has thus far been directed toward the light […] with you has turned itself inside out, black lining outward, has become destructive – death-bearing” (Zabuzhko 2011: 97). The post-socialist body is a body in transition, a body that possesses the potential to transcend trauma into new life after imprisonment and near-death. However, the post-socialist body, if locked in a cycle of postcolonial self-victimizing and territorializing, risks failing to bridge this transition, succumbing again to the cycle of trauma and re-enacting colonial aggressions against itself. Oksana makes the mistake of seeing in Mykola life-giving energy: “I should have figured this out sooner: bringing things back to life is not your métier” (Zabuzhko 2011: 97). Oksana and Mykola’s break-up is not only a personal tragedy, but an example of how post-socialist bodies struggle to negotiate the transition from imprisonment to freedom, often failing to transcend the specter of coloniality. Despite Oksana’s desire to give birth to a child whose body will transcend intergenerational trauma, hers and Mykola’s relationship and their intimate life together engages in exactly the “pitfalls of violent resistance and subaltern self-victimization” that Tlostanova warns any post-socialist studies against (Tlostanova 2012: 138). To avoid such traps of coloniality, Tlostanova suggests Adolfo Alban Achinte’s concept of re-existence “as a model of positive (re)creating of worlds, lives, and subjectivities” (ibid.). Re-existence is rooted not in self-victimizing or violence, but rather in creating an alternative to existing models of coloniality on which to structure discourse (ibid.). Despite seeking re-existence for the Ukrainian body via a child, Oksana errs in sacrificing her own body to Ukraine’s national trauma as doing so only re-enacts the cycle of victimization and violence on the space of her body. Rather than a decolonial rebirth, her body experiences yet another postcolonial death.

PART THREE: LANGUAGE – WORD TO FLESH

“She hungered for her language terribly, physically, like a thirsty man for water, just to hear it.” ~ Oksana Zabuzhko, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, p. 58

In Fieldwork, Oksana makes an explicit link between language and the body. In this chapter, I will examine how this connection between body and language is constructed in view of postcolonial theory, imagery, and biblical references. While not necessarily a decision of Zabuzhko’s, the cover of the Ukrainian and English versions of the novel encapsulates this interconnectedness of language, body, and text. On the cover, a piece of paper on which is printed Ukrainian text is bent in such a way that it resembles a woman’s body from the waist down to the knees. The Ukrainian language is quite literally imprinted onto a woman’s body: the female body is portrayed as a page on which language is inscribed. It is also significant that the female body’s groin is the focal point of the cover, emphasizing the centrality of sex and the female experience of sex as the meeting point between language and the body. Such meeting points are embedded throughout the text of Fieldwork, meeting points which can be identified when considering either postcolonial theory, imagery, or biblical references.

Language as active and material space

Language functions in Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex on multiple, intersecting planes. The Ukrainian language itself is framed as a space subjugated, like the Ukrainian people, to the Soviet Union’s ideological scheme. The territorialization and depreciation of the Ukrainian language by the Soviet Union has contributed to Ukraine’s ongoing cultural trauma. Both Zabuzhko, the author, and Oksana, the protagonist, not only express concern over the state of the Ukrainian language and literature, but – as writers and members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia – use language itself as a means of framing and reterritorializing Ukrainian to the status of a literary and scholarly discourse. For Oksana, language also plays a vital role in her Dabulskis 45 relationship with Mykola, rooting them in the same mother tongue and cultural traumas. And it is with language that Oksana frames her relationship with Mykola, using imagery that inscribes upon their relationship a narrative of impending doom. Language is not merely text in Fieldwork, but another body that acts upon the novel’s characters, inscribing physical sensations on them. The spoken and written word is, for Oksana, not passive space, but rather an active agent in shaping national and personal histories, creating material realities that define human action.

Ukrainian as Other

In Fieldwork, cultural trauma manifests itself in Oksana’s relationship to the Ukrainian language and the narrative that she actively constructs with it. For Oksana, the Ukrainian language is an intrinsic part of her cultural and personal identity as a Ukrainian writer. While reading her Ukrainian text to a foreign audience, Oksana indulges in a performative and sensual reading to her uncomprehending spectators, immersing herself in the sensuality of her language, and experiencing Ukrainian as a sanctuary and revelatory space: “your language, even though nobody understood it, in full view of the public it had concentrated around you in to a clear, sparkling sphere of the most refined, crafted glass inside which magic was happening” (Zabuzhko 2011: 11). The full weight and significance of this public and sensual experience of Oksana’s mother tongue can only be understood in the context of the Soviet Union’s effectual depreciation of Ukrainian as a literary language. Ukrainian, for Oksana, is not merely her mother tongue but part of her cultural and personal identity – an identity fractured by Soviet repression and in a state of limbo amidst the disjunction of post-Soviet Ukraine. As quoted in Part One, Sztompka asserts, “An identity crisis and the struggle to re- establish, reshape, or construct anew a collective identity may be the most empirically salient variety of cultural trauma” (Sztompka 2001: 459). Ukraine’s cultural trauma manifests itself in the ideological conflict over language which is, in effect, a struggle to establish a collective identity. What, exactly, that collective identity is, is a source of tension between Ukrainophones and Russophones. For Oksana, the Ukrainian language is in crisis, reeling from the Soviet regime’s concentrated efforts to diminish the language to a charming but provincial dialect. In Fieldwork, the Ukrainian language is both a space and a tool with which Oksana hopes to re- establish a collective Ukrainian identity. Dabulskis 46

Oksana is dogged by the provincial character associated with the Ukrainian language. She addresses, with sarcasm, the anticipated condescension towards Ukrainian that she encounters at an academic symposium, “demonstrating yet again to grinning Western intellectuals that, see, Ukrainians also speak sentences with subordinate clauses” (Zabuzhko 2011: 93). Volodymyr Dibrova discusses the impact of the Holodomor and the Soviet regime’s reframing of Ukrainian as a language subsidiary to the Soviet scheme. “It is true,” Dibrova writes, “that the Ukrainian language, which was and still remains a sort of ethno-consolidating factor, was never explicitly banned. But it was reduced to a strictly ornamental role. […] The message was clear: It was fine to be a Ukrainian as long as one behaved like a stereotypical khokhol – a lowbrow face character, a cunning peasant who worms his way into a cultured Russian city but can never get rid of his redneck ways and his accent” (Dibrova 2008: 266). It is this image that Oksana, as a Ukrainophone intellectual, battles against. Though she rejects, on a conscious level, this provincial association projected onto her language, it is clear that Oksana (to her chagrin) has internalized the othering of her own language. In his article, Mykola Ryabchuk writes that postcolonial studies observe that “the colonized group gradually accepts and internalizes the negative self-image imposed upon it by the colonizers” (Ryabchuk 2010: 10). Ryabchuk makes clear that Ukraine, of course, is different than colonized societies in Asia, Africa, or the Americas because Ukrainians’ distinguishing difference from Russians is not race, but language: “Ukrainians were alleged to speak a ‘wrong,’ ‘uncultured’ language of kolkhoz slaves. The Ukrainian language was their ‘black’ skin that could be relatively easily changed for ‘white’ skin, i.e., respectable Russian” (Ryabchuk 2010: 10). Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex confronts not only the Russophone world’s depreciation of the Ukrainian language, but also Oksana’s internalized perceptions of her own language as Other. Oksana wants to reclaim the Ukrainian language for Ukrainians on an elevated cultural and intellectual level as a language of literature and discourse – to deterritorialize and reclaim that Otherness to which it has been regulated.

Language as Home

Oksana thinks that she has found a home in her relationship with Mykola because they share the same language. As a Ukrainophone and as a writer, Oksana finds Mykola’s fluidity in Ukrainian doubly magnetic, as it allows her to experience her own language fully, with all its nuances. She is rapturous: Dabulskis 47

It was as easy to talk as to breathe and to dream, and that’s why the conversation was drunk eagerly with parched, dry lips, the intoxication ever more dizzying, ah this never-before experienced total freedom to be yourself, this four-hands piano playing, at last, across the entire keyboard, inspiration and improvisation, so many sparks, laughter, and energy suddenly released, when each note – ironic hint, nuance, wit, touch – resonates at once […] a language that drastically shortened your path toward one another, you recognized him: he’s one of yours, yours – in everything, a beast of the same species! – and in that language there was everything, everything of which there would later be nothing between you in bed. (Zabuzhko 2011: 31-32)

As Oksana indicates at the end of the above passage, it is in language that she and Mykola truly connect – but any connection in language, she finds, falls apart in sex. Mykola is not only physically abusive to Oksana in lovemaking, but linguistically as well. Just as Mykola colonizes Oksana’s body, enacting his post-socialist trauma upon her, so too does he enact a linguistic colonization through language. Mykola refers to Oksana’s sex organs in the third person, objectifying her most intimate spaces with distant and coarse language, to which Oksana reacts by closing down emotionally:

When they say to you, and that’s the only way that man said it – “Open ‘her’ up,” all your senses are immediately transported to the gynecologist’s stirrups – because it’s not “she,” it’s you that’s opening up – or in this case, rather, locking down with a dead bolt. (Zabuzhko 2011: 8)

Language and the body thus become two different spaces leveled on the same plane, on which Mykola enacts a colonial and abusive territorialization of not only Oksana’s body, but in language itself. Mykola’s usurpation of Ukrainian to use against Oksana in sex is an upending of Oksana’s perception of Ukrainian as a sanctuary – not to mention, a fissure in the bedrock of their relationship. That the greatest linguistic violence inflicted against Oksana comes from her Ukrainian lover undermines her perceived sensation of freedom to be herself, to own her identity as Ukrainian and as a Ukrainian writer. To make matters worse, Mykola shows no interest in Oksana’s poetry: “he couldn’t care less about her poetry, just like he couldn’t care less about anything anywhere and always” (Zabuzhko 2011: 65). Despite being a Ukrainophone, Mykola plays the antagonist to Oksana’s calling to repair the division in Ukrainian collective identity via language and literature. Oksana realizes that home does not exist in her relationship to Mykola, but instead in the linguistic space of Ukrainian itself. It is in her own words in which Oksana attempts to deterritorialize Russian that she finds a home. Dabulskis 48

Recounting her rapturous experience of reading her work in Ukrainian, Oksana notes: “now that would have been the time to realize that your home is your language, […] it would always be with you, like a snail’s shell, and there would not be another, non-portable home for you, girl, ever, no matter what you do” (Zabuzhko 2011: 11). Unlike Mykola, her own writing in Ukrainian is a site of safety and strength. The very fact that Fieldwork – the novel and lecture – is written in Ukrainian is an act of rectification. Oksana is unabashedly brandishing her depreciated language in literary form and exorcising that which colonizes it. The novel, as a Ukrainian language and text, is itself a home for Oksana, a home that she cannot find in Ukraine, colonized by the Russian language, nor in the United States, where English dominates. Sywenky explains this particular spatial orientation of language in the context of Fieldwork: “The peripherality and secondariness of Ukraine on the global map, its nonexistence […] translates into the narrating subject’s searching for other meaningful spaces of belonging. Thus, the narrator’s writing in her mother tongue is a self-reflexive project which, for all its fragmented, disjointed, and chaotic nature, is conceptualized as both a space of homecoming and a point of destination” (Sywenky 2015: 203). However, if the Ukrainian language is her home, it is a space for which Oksana has an ambivalent relationship. Oksana feels the weight of her role as cultural carrier, and yet is unable to abandon her language: “a curse has been placed on you to be faithful to all those who have died, all those who could have switched languages just as easily as you – Russian, Polish, some even German, and could have lived entirely different lives, but instead hurled themselves like firelogs into the dying embers of the Ukrainian with nothing to fucking show for it but mangled destinies and unread books” (Zabuzhko 2011: 37). As Riabchuk explains, Soviet language policies were largely successful, apparently supporting Ukrainian language learning while depreciating the language in the public sphere: Russian was the language of higher education and professional institutions, theatre performances were tools of Soviet propaganda, and any Ukrainian books that were published had to adhere to Soviet ideology (Riabchuk 2015: 345). In other words, as long as Ukrainian was divorced from the nationalist scheme and the upper echelons of intellectual and political life, it was acceptable. Additionally, in the 1930’s, the first attempts were made to “doctor” the Ukrainian language to closer similarity to Russian (Riabchuk 2015: 346). In post-1991 Ukraine, the time period in which Fieldwork was written and is set, a laissez-faire language policy further disadvantaged Ukrainian, which remained subsidiary to Russian on both institutional and structural levels (Riabchuk 216: 347). “The laissez-faire policy,” writes Riabchuk, “clearly benefited the Russophones as stronger players Dabulskis 49 and exasperated the Ukrainophones, who increasingly complained about the de facto ‘Creole’ character of the Ukrainian state, which was largely alien to the ‘aborigines’” (ibid.). Riabchuk quotes philosopher and publicist Serhy Hrabovsky: “the print of Ukrainian publications is miserable. Ukrainian books are virtually absent in book stores […] For a long time, if not eternally, the Ukrainophones will remain a social and cultural minority in the Ukrainian state” (Riabchuk 2016: 348). It is in this environment that Oksana attempts to revive and spread Ukrainian literature, with an understandable amount of frustration: “the language is failing, failing, and don’t try to fool us with that ‘literature-in-exile’ stuff!” (Zabuzhko 2011: 61). Despite her self-deprecating attitude towards her role as the “Pied Piper” for Ukrainian literature, Zabuzhko’s commitment to the Ukrainian language is unflinching, if cynical (Zabuzhko 2011: 107). The Ukrainian language not only carries the safety of home, but home’s traumas and burdens.

Ukrainophilia

Zabuzhko and Oksana both write from the position of Ukrainian nationalists, whose aim is to revive Ukrainian literature and culture. This revival, however, often equates to a desire to “purify” the Ukrainian language. This desire to exorcise Ukrainian from any Russian influences fits into the post-socialist and decolonial framework, as described by Tlostanova (Tlostanova 2015: 34). Fieldwork not only confronts the dominance of Russian by being written in Ukrainian, but confronts these Russian influences. The problem for Oksana, of course, is that this particular confrontation does not lead to healing, but destruction. For Zabuzhko and the novel itself, however, is a conscious confrontation and questioning of Russian’s dominance over the Ukrainian language. Problematic, however, in terms of cultural trauma, is that such a confrontation can lead to a vilification of the Russian language that only further exacerbates Ukrainians’ fractured national identity. Many ethnic Ukrainians speak Russian as their native tongue, a reality that Oksana excludes from her vision of reviving Ukrainian culture. Furthermore, Oksana does not hide her resentment of the Russian language: “you were sick to death of their ‘Russian’ even then” (Zabuzhko 2011: 11). Riabchuk explains that while in post-Soviet Ukraine, not adhering to the “language switch-rule” (changing from Ukrainian to Russian in deference to a Russophone, regardless of the hierarchy of each speaker’s social position), does not result in legal or physical violence, it does result in symbolic violence (Riabchuk 2016: 349). “To be Dabulskis 50 sure,” writes Riabchuk, “symbolic violence is possible from both sides. However, its strength, and effect, and awareness of it are very different for the dominant group and the subaltern” (Riabchuk 2016: 350). In other words, Oksana’s resentment for the Russian language originates from Ukrainian’s conditioned, subaltern position. The Ukrainian language is a space that continues to be subjugated in post-Soviet space, relegated to the perpetual position as subaltern despite the fall of the Soviet regime and Ukrainian independence. Ukrainophones have internalized this position of subordination to the “worldliness” and dominance of the Russian language – and it is this internalization that Oksana battles against in Fieldwork. Oksana is also antagonistic towards Russophones’ attempts to speak Ukrainian, sarcastically critiquing the accent of an art critic who, observing one of Mykola’s drawings, deigns to speak to him in Ukrainian: “‘So, Mykola, so what does all of this mean?’ whined an ‘art expert’ who, like yourself, had come up here from Kyiv, moistly sliding over her badly pronounced Ukrainian sibilants, though not slipping into Russian ‘out of respect for the guest of honor’” (Zabuzhko 2011: 51-52). Natalie Paoli explains that Ukrainophilia, a movement led by a group of Ukrainian intellectuals, including Zabuzhko, to elevate the Ukrainian language, becomes problematic when preoccupied with “purism” (Paoli 2015: 167). Purism marginalizes Russophones who identify as ethnic Ukrainians, as well as Ukrainians who speak surzhyk, a hybrid sociolect of Ukrainian and Russian (ibid.). However understandable Oksana’s frustration with the Russian language and its dominance in the context of Ukrainian history and post-Soviet Ukraine, her exclusion of Russophones from the conversation is an example of ongoing cultural trauma, and, arguably, an unproductive coping method of continued self-victimization and subsequent exclusion. Indeed, Ukrainian as a language – particularly in central and eastern Ukraine – operates as a colonized space, therefore symbolic violence against the Ukrainian language is more violent than the reverse. However, a complete vilification of Russian and its influences on the Ukrainian language will only continue to exacerbate cultural trauma. It is on this issue that we can clearly see Fieldwork positioned clearly on one side of the struggle to frame Ukraine’s cultural trauma. However, it is not just Russian that Oksana views as invading the purity of her language. While having moved to the United States in the hopes of escaping the influence of Russian and finding new artistic inspiration, Oksana is confronted with the challenge of maintaining a connection to Ukrainian, surrounded as she is by English:

This foreign country is doing you no good – it’s clogging up your brain, your nose, with the lint, down, and powder of foreign words and phrases, clogging all the pores and rudely Dabulskis 51

shoving them into your hand even when you’re alone with yourself, and before you realize it, you’re beginning to speak ‘half this, half that,’ in other words, the same thing that happens at home […] with the Russian: it seeps in from the outside in tiny droplets, becomes dried and cemented, and you are obligated – to either continuously conduct a cleansing, synchronic translation in your head, which sounds forced and unnatural – or else to role-play like we all do using your voice to take the foreign words into quotation marks, place a kind of clownish- ironic stress on them like they were a citation. (Zabuzhko 2011: 29)

Oksana is, as Sywenky notes, suspended between two worlds, neither of which allows the space of the Ukrainian language to flourish without subjugation to either Russian or English (Sywenky 2015: 204). However, Oksana’s relationship to English is less aggressive. She is defensive towards English only to the extent that it encroaches on the “purity” of her Ukrainian. Surrounded by English, Oksana fears that her facility with Ukrainian will disintegrate (Zabuzhko 2011: 29). Thus, despite her fair chances at winning a grant to extend her stay in the United States, Oksana chooses to return to Ukraine: “I will return, come crawling back to die like a wounded dog, tied to the leash of a language that nobody knows” (Zabuzhko 2011: 107; 45-46). Oksana portrays her relationship to her language as alternatively self-sacrificingly resentful and passionately euphoric (“your language […] had concentrated around you into a clear, sparkling sphere”), a dynamic that closely resembles her relationship with Mykola (Zabuzhko 2011: 11). Unlike her relationship with Mykola, however, and despite her frustrations, Oksana never doubts that her home is her language.

Imagery

While not feeding directly into post-socialist theory or cultural trauma, the imagery in Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is a vital thread that runs throughout the novel. However, we might find some links when we consider the supernatural imagery that Oksana associates with herself and Mykola. We might recall Smelser’s positioning of cultural carriers within the context of cultural trauma: “A claim of traumatic cultural damage (i.e., destruction of or threat to cultural values, outlooks, norms, or, for that matter, the culture as a whole, must be established by deliberate efforts on the part of cultural carriers – cultural specialists such as priests, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, moral entrepreneurs, and leaders of social movements” (Smelser 2004: 38). As has already been emphasized, Oksana is acutely aware of her role and responsibility as a cultural carrier, and has vested interest in framing traumatic events in Dabulskis 52

Ukrainian history to support her Ukrainian nationalist perspective. However, despite her influential position in society, Oksana is still operating as Other, on the fringes of the Russophone power center. Thus, the cultural framing that Oksana offers is an alternative version to the Russophone or Russian-oriented elements (they needn’t be the same) in mainstream Ukrainian society. Thus, that Oksana casts herself and Mykola as supernatural figures serves as an appropriate metaphor for how Oksana perceives her role in society: an alternative perspective, often misunderstood, despite the best of her intentions. Oksana views herself as a witch, and Mykola alternatively as a cat or as her “sorcerer-brother” (Zabuzhko 2011: 9, 42, 50-51). Most overtly, Oksana’s casting of her and Mykola in roles of witch and sorcerer-brother is a metaphor for the simultaneously mesmerizing and threatening tone of their relationship, a relationship that has the potential to bring out the worst in each other. However, we could also view Oksana’s self-framing as a witch in light of her role as a cultural carrier. Witches, in society and literature, offer an alternative orientation to the world and established institutions. By identifying herself as a witch and Mykola as a sorcerer, Oksana creates a metaphor for their roles as cultural carriers offering an alternative structure for Ukrainian society. Instead of a Russophone or Russian-oriented construction of cultural trauma, Oksana gives a Ukrainophone and Ukrainian alternative. Thus, in Mykola, Oksana sees a worthy partner not only in romance, but in shaping Ukrainian national identity: “My sorcerer-brother / Where art thou now?” (Zabuzhko 2011: 50). She depicts herself as having sensed Mykola in her poetry before he having met him: “lines in which a ‘sorcerer-brother’ peeked out here and there unexpectedly, lifted to the surface by some submerged force” (Zabuzhko 2011: 50). Oksana seeks her own strength and ambition in a partner, and Mykola is able to match her in both and beyond – a fierce, if nefarious, force driving him and his artwork. Oksana is impressed by Mykola’s artwork; in particular, a compilation of drawing that depicts a grotesque scene of a witches’ meeting. The drawings do not merely impress Oksana with Mykola’s daring to explore darker subject matter, a theme that resonates within herself, but also because they evidence his ability to dig even deeper than herself into the darkness. Not only in the Ukrainian language, but in artistic language, Oksana recognizes the “sorcerer-brother” she has sensed:

I did recognize him – the minute I saw that series of witches’ drawings […] – what are they doing, plowing a circle around the village to avert the plague? No, something darker, riskier […] that far I myself have never ventured: perhaps walked up close to it, but always backed away quickly fearing insanity […] – better than me: deeper, more powerfully, and damn, just Dabulskis 53

plan fearlessly […] my God, how truly wonderful it is to see someone stronger than you! (Zabuzhko 2011: 51)

Oksana perceives not only a man who explores the same artistic terrain as she does (and better than she does, she believes), but a man who is also operating on the fringes of the society, creating new territory. It is significant that the “art expert” (parentheses in original) who enquires about the painting is a Russophone who deigns to speak Ukrainian in “badly pronounced Ukrainian sibilants” (Zabuzhko 2011: 51-52). Oksana is irritated by the woman’s inane comments, her pronunciation, and her interest in Mykola. When Mykola chooses not to answer the woman’s question about the depicted ritual, Oksana is satisfied, viewing herself and Mykola as in a secret pact of understanding the painting: “yes, brother, precisely, you can’t, it’s our secret, yours and mine – a seal on our lips like a dry kiss: turn the lock, hide the key, silence)” (Zabuzhko 2011: 52). Whatever is depicted in the painting can only be understood by outsiders, the misunderstood, the Others – in other words, by Mykola and Oksana, as Ukrainophone artists and intellectuals, who have a deeper understanding of what it is to be Other. Oksana views herself and Mykola as exceptional, if bordering the boundary between good and evil. “You know,” Oksana says to Mykola, “it seems to me that you’re open to evil” (Zabuzhko 2011: 124). Oksana begins to sense that Mykola’s Otherness does not align necessarily with her own, determined as she is to use her abilities to revive Ukrainian literature and culture. She realizes that the “fierce, hungry force [that] stormed out from his painting and from [her] poems” is not one and the same (Zabuzhko 2011: 18). Hauntingly, Oksana compares Mykola to a cat (“teeth incisors”; “feral cat”; “cat-eyes gleaming in the dark”; “cat-like eyes glowing”), who is bemused to discover that his Chinese horoscope is the cat, and she the mouse (Zabuzhko 2011: 9, 10, 12, 53, 68). Whatever force is in Mykola, Oksana begins to realize, it is one that is destructive towards her and her hopes of breaking out of Ukraine’s cultural trauma. Mykola might be a cultural carrier, but not one whose interests align with Oksana’s. She indicates that she believes Mykola will not only hurt her, but will drag her deeper into darkness rather than out of it: “Fear, so thoughtlessly dismissed by me earlier, appeared out of nowhere, planted itself inside my body and grew: my body sensed something in this man that I could not – meantime I turned myself into a witch, a castrating Megaera with a vice in my loins: ever hear of ‘no’?! – and that’s when the bellowing of the trapped male would commence” (Zabuzhko 2011: 42). While not directly related to cultural trauma and the post-socialist body, such supernatural imagery offers a Dabulskis 54 metaphorical portrait of how Oksana views hers and Mykola’s roles as cultural carriers in post-Soviet Ukrainian society. They digress, she finds, in what they use their darker explorations of humanity for. While they might operate from the same traumatized cultural background, Oksana depicts herself as wanting to use her alternative artistic outlook so as to overcome cultural trauma and frame a future for herself and Ukraine. Meanwhile, she perceives Mykola as her “sorcerer-brother” gone astray – he does not want catharsis, but to dig deeper into the darkness.

Language as Body

Having spent ample space on the post-socialist body, it must also be said that Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex also considers the bodied-ness of language and text. Oksana literally frames the Ukrainian language as a body capable of sensuality. When Oksana describes reading her writing in the original Ukrainian, she compares the experience to a “public orgasm” (Zabuzhko 2011: 10). She also explicitly compares Ukrainian literature to a neglected body, stating that even if she did manage to write a masterpiece in Ukrainian, the book “would only lie around the libraries unread, like an unloved woman, for who knows how many dozens of years until it began ‘cooling off’ – because untasted, unused texts unsustained by the energy of reciprocal thought gradually cool down” (Zabuzhko 2011: 36). And it is not only Ukrainian that Oksana perceives as sensual, but any language, each having its own sensory experience: “Obviously her mother tongues was the most nutritious, most healing to the senses: velvety marigold, or no, cherry (juice on lips?) strawberry blond (smell of hair?) […] she hungered for her language terribly, physically, like a thirsty man for water, just to hear it” (Zabuzhko 2011: 58). This sensual association of language with the body only further cements the intricate link that Fieldwork makes between cultural trauma and the body. For, if language itself is bodily experience, then a language in crisis will inevitably affect the body on a sensory level. Fieldwork’s linking of the body and language also references religious sources. Oksana, on the brink of suicide, considers the question of “authorial rights,” and what rights individuals have to affect their own fates (Zabuzhko 2011: 134-146). She links this discussion of authorial rights to artistic creation and thus creation itself, ultimately taking a cynical stance on artists’ claims to full authorship and complete originality: “cut a piece from here and a piece from there, glue it together and we’re all proud: we’re artists! But what about ex nihilo – have you tried that? Can’t do that? Can’t do it? That’s the point . . .” (Zabuzhko 2011: 137). Oksana’s Dabulskis 55 reference to the creation myth then calls to mind the Book of Genesis: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light [emphasis added]” (Genesis 1: 3). In other words, to say something is to make it so, an act that Oksana herself is doing in framing Ukraine’s cultural trauma. We can also find a biblical reference to the materiality of language itself in the Book of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. […] The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1: 1-14). Whether intentionally or not, Oksana’s reference to the sensuality of words parallels this biblical construction of the Word becoming flesh. However, the Word itself comes ex nihilo from God, whereas words and art to Oksana, as she describes above, are always taken from other sources that trace back from one cultural reference to another. Where does all of this fit within the framework of cultural trauma? If to speak and to write a language is to make material, to make into flesh, and if Oksana is questioning authorship itself – over one’s own life, over art – it indicates that in this moment in the novel, she is not only interrogating whether she has the right to take her own life, but human hubris itself in taking credit for creating art: “Might it not be time to stop and ponder over the question of authorial rights—over what we truly can do, and what we shouldn’t? Wanting to be an author – to create – is to raise your hand to the exclusive prerogative of God. Because none of us truly creates, ladies and gentlemen” (Zabuzhko 2011: 136). And yet, the passage develops into a manifesto in which Oksana questions the very development of art today into work that is no longer beautiful and in touch with the sacred, but as work that is merely “interesting” (Zabuzhko 2011: 139). “I’m going to reveal a terrible secret to you now: art in our times is slowly going to the dogs because – it’s afraid,” Oksana concludes (Zabuzhko 2011: 139). Fear rears its head again, and we return to Oksana’s research conclusion: “Slavery is the state of being infected by fear. And fear kills love. And without love – children, poems, paintings – all is pregnant with death” (Zabuzhko 2011: 156). The fear to create, the fear to frame and make sense of, the fear to find beauty and newness, to dare to create ex nihilo, or to exert agency in creating a new life – what else is this, except a culture that is stagnating, complacent? It is Mykola, and his paintings, which Oksana comes to resent in the United States: “He brought that thick album with his drawings and he used it for all his paintings here: all those same little men with shaved heads and sharp features […] How, based on what does he continue to paint, if the world around him is uninteresting? […] he won’t be saved, nope, he won’t” (Zabuzhko 2011: 108). Oksana and Mykola’s relationship fails not because of their shared traumatic background, but instead because of how they cope and choose to artistically frame that trauma. They might well be cultural carriers, sorcerer-brother and sister, but where Mykola wants only Dabulskis 56 to reproduce again and again the same images of Ukraine’s cultural trauma, Oksana wants her words and her body to bring new life to her country, her language, and her Ukrainian identity.

CONCLUSION

Twenty years after its first publishing, Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex remains relevant as Ukraine continues to resolve its ongoing cultural trauma. The novel does not give a clean ending, leaving Oksana ambivalent and burdened by not only the weight of her own personal traumas, but her responsibility as a cultural carrier to continue framing Ukraine’s cultural trauma so as to precipitate positive, social progress. However, despite her formidable mission and her disappointment in Mykola, Oksana takes up the task, ultimately deciding that she is best able to do so in Ukraine. The novel’s ambivalent ending would seem to indicate that Oksana knows she has only just begun to engage in Ukraine’s attempts at cultural healing. Despite scholars’ strict separation of individual and cultural traumas, Fieldwork gives us a meticulous and poetic portrayal of how individual and cultural traumas are interconnected by the link of national identity. In a culture with fractured collective identity, the individuals that compose that culture will feel the effects. Cultural trauma, according to Fieldwork, can and does manifest itself in intimate relationships and the body. Postcolonial theory and post- socialist studies support this conclusion when the body is viewed as space that has been colonized. Female bodies are the sites where the male postcolonial or post-socialist subaltern attempts to reassert his agency. Oksana frames her relationship with Mykola in such a dynamic, sacrificing her own physical well-being and sexual pleasure for Mykola’s catharsis. However, by framing her own relationship in postcolonial terms, Oksana only further victimizes herself. Instead of leading to catharsis and a child, Oksana and Mykola’s abusive relationship makes Oksana doubt her mission to revive Ukrainian national identity. In other words, instead of decolonial rebirth, the relationship results in the perpetuation of Ukraine’s traumas. However, Oksana realizes that despite her failed relationship with Mykola, her writing will always heal her, and it is through literature that she plans to revive Ukrainian literature and assert Ukraine’s existence in the world. Language is the space in which she finds her home. The interconnectedness of language and the body, as portrayed by Oksana, seems to indicate that healing individuals’ bodies will only happen once the space of Ukrainian literature is decolonized and reinvigorated. Novels such as Fieldwork have the potential to facilitate the framing of cultural trauma so that Ukrainian culture can reach the point in the traumatic sequence where it experiences the Dabulskis 58 positive effects of social change. However, Fieldwork’s uncompromising bias towards Ukrainophones does not allow space for Ukraine’s Russophones. The language division is ongoing and Ukrainophilia, while well-meaning in its purpose of reviving Ukrainian culture, often falls into the traps of self-victimization, blaming Russophones and excluding them from the conversation. While such attitudes are understandable, given the continuing dominance of Russophones at the institutional and cultural level, as well as the historic depreciation of the Ukrainian language, conversations that exclude threaten to exacerbate cultural trauma, fracturing collective identity even further and threatening negative social change. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is a portrait of such negative coping strategies that actively exclude and self- victimize – the latter of which Oksana is more than willing to admit, but the former not at all. From a feminist perspective, Oksana’s essentialist views on men and women also further entrenches them in a postcolonial paradigm, where the female body is space to be colonized. Despite these problematic elements, however, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex has the potential to effect positive social change. The novel gives an intimate portrait of female experience in Ukraine and boldly proposes a link between Ukraine’s national tragedy and its manifestation in individuals’ lives and bodies. The novel may well have the potential to further exacerbate language tensions, but it also presents its Ukrainian readers with a previously unavailable framework with which to identify potentially suppressed traumas and unhealed wounds in both their personal lives and their cultural identity.

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