Where Are Ukrainians Finding Their Courage?
This isn’t just about the protection of their mortal lives, but the protection of their way of life.
This is a subscriber-exclusive edition of Brooklyn, Everywhere, a newsletter where I ponder the many meanings of gentrification, and what we lose in our relentless pursuit of “the American dream.”
Like many of you, I have been watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine with a mix of horror and awe. Horror because, despite having been at war ourselves for two decades, we have not seen images like this in a long time: bustling urban centers transformed seemingly overnight into war zones, fighting and air strikes targeting civilian centers, bombed-out residential buildings, people huddled together in bunkers. And awe at the courage of the Ukrainian civilians, some of whom have quite literally taken up arms to defend their homeland.
One image in particular struck me: four middle-aged women seated together in a van, bearing guns, in attire I might see at the Prospect Park farmers’ market or outside a Saturday yoga class. On their faces the expression of fear, but also determination. One of the women, a teacher named Julia, is crying. She told The New York Times that she had just picked up a gun for the first time two days ago, and is frightened. But “I just want to live in our country,” she said.
In another interview, we meet a young man—Oleksii Palyhi—who had sought an exemption from compulsory military service but is now a part of an active civilian militia. “I was trying to avoid it,” Palyhi said. But now things are different. “We need to defend our motherland.”
Besides being extremely moved, I found myself wondering about where this courage could be summoned from. Being patriotic is one thing, but what we are witnessing is the kind of mettle one imagines is only possible from a fight-or-flight response. The one that kicks in when your life is in acute danger. And while, yes, war is happening literally all around them, running toward danger hardly seems like the best path toward self-preservation.
And then it dawned on me, something so simple it’s almost embarrassing: This is not just about the protection of their mortal lives, but what Ukranians know and understand as their way of life. Their right to exist, on their own terms. They are fighting erasure.
Parul Sehgal has defined erasure as “the practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible.” It is of course difficult to think about erasure without thinking about how it plays out in the U.S., both in practice and in discourse. But too often, when people talk about erasure in America, we confine it to rhetorical offenses. A lack of representation in history lessons, or the imbalance of media attention to the crimes and suffering of minority groups. This is problematic because it allows the concept to retreat into a catchphrase, one that locates the pain in the past and seemingly describes an offense that can easily be remedied by a curriculum change or a media vow to “do better.” It distances itself, safely, from day-to-day life.
When people say, “Erasure is violence,” it is not always just metaphorical, and it is not always just historical. We are watching it happen now in Ukraine, and we are seeing the great lengths that individuals—people just like you and me—will go to in order to stop the violence that threatens their way of life. A way of life of which they are proud.
As I write this, Ukraine is in a precarious place. Overmatched but fighting back. I pray like hell for the lives and safety of the people of Ukraine, and that it is their story of triumph that will be taught for generations to come in our history classes. In the meantime, when people say that history is written by the victors, we are witnessing in real time how the process of erasure is as viscerally violent as it is rhetorical.