10.11.2024 / With the shield, or on the shield

Yesterday I stayed home to write. I didn’t go to the funeral of a sweet young man from our Lindy Hop community in the morning. His kind face was at the top of my FB feed: Max is “on the shield” — a phrase Ukrainians use when someone has died in battle. It comes from the legend that Spartan mothers would send their sons off to war with the words, “with the shield or on the shield,” urging them to fight to the end.

In the evening my phone was alive with photos from my neighbor’s intimate wedding ceremony. He got married in uniform. Young love is so radiant and uplifting.

It seems my emotions are coming back: impatience, fury, and I cried at the theater when the hero, a young man who can’t adapt to civilian life after returning from the front explains his decision to go back to war, bathed in red light. His girlfriend in the play was so awfully immature, I would have chosen war too.

***

On Wednesday morning, after learning that Donald Trump won the election to become the 47th president of the US, I did not listen to the news. Speculation about what he might do or why we lost does not interest me. In her speech conceding the election—but not the fight—Kamala Harris looked incredibly tired.

By evening, after a day spent visiting with friends—simple, warm human contact—I too am incredibly tired. The sensation is one of release without relief.

Walking home from the metro I wonder how russia might decide to celebrate. In 1937, the Soviet authorities executed 1111 prisoners from the Solovki labor camp in the northern russian forests of Sandarmokh. Among them were hundreds of Ukrainians, including prominent artists, writers, intellectuals and public figures, today referred to as the Executed Renaissance. This mass killing between October 27–November 4 was to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution.¹

Just as I get home the air raid alarm sounds.

It’s over in 11 minutes. But the next one lasts all night. Eight hours, more than 30 russian drones shot down over five districts of Kyiv. Residential buildings, including the home of the Estonian ambassador, offices, and a medical clinic were among the structures damaged by falling debris and ensuing fires. I slept through it all. You probably did too.

***

A steady buzz of anxiety took up space in my mind in the weeks, and especially days, leading up to the US presidential election. The race was a toss-up. It was neither inevitable nor necessary that the American people should decide to throw in the towel on citizen power protected by the rule of law. It was a free choice.

It’s only vaguely reminiscent of Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election where Ukrainians freely chose Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin-friendly crook who failed to win by cheating in 2005. He fled his office in February 2014 after months of bloody protests in the Ukrainian capital. Shortly thereafter russia invaded and then illegally annexed Crimea. The world has changed a lot since then.

Listening to Harris speak after losing the election I feel like she’s addressing a group of children. Patient, loving, trying to set a good example. Playing “beloved 4th-grade teacher” does injustice to her talent as a charismatic speaker. Why didn’t she spend more time watching James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Public figures are performers: their power lies in the very act of exposure with all the risks it entails. It takes courage to stay and hold your own in the spotlight, under scrutiny, vulnerable to verbal (and physical) attack. Harris was feistier in the arena, when sharing the debate stage with her opponent Donald Trump.

We are all in the arena when we enter public space. The public sphere does not care about your private matters or even your life. We share the world with Donald Trump, we share the world with Vladimir Putin. It was and still is our job to hold them in check. We royally fucked up by granting them the overlarge power that they wield today.

But it is still our job to hold each person to a certain level of respect, decency, humanity — starting with yourself, which empowers you to demand these things of your neighbors and public servants.

***

“How do you see the war evolving — or eventually ending?” asks the thoughtful young American with Ukrainian roots sitting across from me. This leisurely conversation on Sunday afternoon is restorative after a morning translating for European volunteers who delivered 30 vehicles to units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The next morning I’ll accompany the delegation to Okhmatdyt, the children’s hospital in the center of Kyiv that was struck by a high-precision russian missile this past July, killing staff and destroying several specialized treatment facilities.

Okhmatdyt children's hospital, Kyiv, November 4, 2024

“Look,” I begin. “I don’t look too far ahead. In part because anything I’m capable of imagining based on what I see around me and past experience is so bleak. I’d rather direct that precious vital energy” — and here I gesture what I can’t explain in words — “toward refining and clarify what I’m actually doing.”

My hands move toward each other in front of my torso, but before meeting, one moves upward, the other down, as if tracing a vertical line — parallel with my body’s central axis and stretching up toward the heavens and down to the earth.

This image repeats like a refrain in the following days. When my dancer friend tells me with excitement about learning to dance in platform shoes with stiletto heels, giving her a true sense of standing firmly on the ground. And in another conversation my interlocutor uses the same exact gesture to express the vertical connecting each person to their historical heritage and to spiritual knowledge; heaven and earth communicate through each living human being, who is here, in-between for a brief time. This vital center, your pith, is the source of your power.

I have faith that if we keep coming back to this source of our humanity, orienting and acting and fighting from this place, then there is a chance we will prevail. And if we fail, then we will have died with honor and dignity.

Like Ukrainian poet Maksym Kryvtsov, who began defending his homeland from russian invasion in 2014, aged 24, and continued (with a barely three-year break) until he was killed this past January. His poem that begins “The world hurts . . .” ends:

There

was

once

a

human

here.

***

In the first months of russia’s full-scale invasion Ukraine president Zelensky and his team were holed up in a bunker deep beneath the center of Kyiv. I was a “kind of refugee” in Lviv. My days were spent helping refugees, translating for journalists, coordinating shipments of donated medical supplies from abroad. Evenings I spent at the computer communicating with my people in the US into the wee hours. Reading Simon Shuster’s wonderfully written biography of Zelensky, The Showman, I discover that the team in the bunker, between working non-stop and sleeping a few hours a night, began watching movies together to unwind. How very . . . human.

In a way, each making a more-than-maximum effort to mobilize their own particular resources, skills and talents, Zelensky and his team were doing the same thing that I and millions of other Ukrainians were doing. This is Ukraine’s superpower.

Without the hundreds of thousands of civilians who rushed to join the armed forces or perform defense-related tasks unofficially; without the millions of other Ukrainians supporting the defenders and one another in the face of russian brutality; without the millions abroad who joined Ukraine’s effort to defend its freedom, Ukraine would not have prevailed.

Zelensky’s tweet congratulating DJT on his “historic landslide victory” turns my stomach. The flattery is transparent, almost mechanical (perhaps intentionally so), but witnessing it hurts. He is the leader of a fledgling military power fighting for its life, after massive human loss and terrible destruction, being drained by the feckless policy of “too little too late” that the US and European partners have been following for nearly 1000 days . . . No, actually 11 years.

The centers of political power are shifting, but we are still here.

Kyiv skyline on Tuesday, November 5, 2024

PS My friend Mykhailo, who you may know as the author of “Ukrainian Theorem,” a long, profound reflection on Ukrainians’ relationship to their Soviet heritage, joined the AFU this fall. You can help him purchase some (intentionally unspecified) gadgets that will make his drone squad’s work more efficient: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/ADymTqpfRS

From “Ukrainian Theorem”:

“The aim of justice is to delimit evil and reestablish trust between people, without which a law-abiding society cannot exist. When evil is unbounded we all become suspects automatically. The absence of justice makes people hostages of their basic need for trust, which is transformed into ‘being nice.’ If there’s no way to punish criminals, people begin to appease them.”

1. For a more detailed account of the Soviet program to wipe out Ukraine’s distinct cultural identity by murdering its early 20th-century intelligentsia in English, including photos of arrest orders, testimonies and execution lists, see: https://zn.ua/eng/headline-the-anniversary-of-the-sandarmokh-tragedy-russias-attempts-to-denazify-ukrainians-did-not-begin-today.html