I’m a new immigrant all over again

Twenty-five years after emigrating from Ukraine as a child, I thought I passed as Canadian. At least, passed in the narrowly traditional sense: white, no accent and with mastery of something my family calls the “Canadian voice.” The Canadian voice is cheerful and high, rather than our chesty Slavic bass, which here sounds brusque. The Canadian voice also cloaks direct orders and questions, which are frowned upon, in grammatically complex layers of politeness.

In the turbulent post-Soviet collapse of the 1990s, Ukraine was a place to leave while Canada was the place to start over. Growing up, I identified more with the Canadian flag than the Ukrainian one. The blue sky and yellow field represented in the latter seemed to me barren, existential — you could keep walking that field forever, weighed down by that solid sky, yet not get anywhere.

Conversations with family and friends during visits back to Ukraine sometimes felt this way, too — heavy, on both the political and personal level. (And shockingly blunt: once, a family friend stared at my thick glasses and asked, “My God, how bad is your vision?”)

I was a fervent believer of the Anglo-Saxon approach of Canadians who’ve been here multiple generations. When in company, best to swallow any unsightly thing brewing in your life and put on your best smile, like one puts on one’s most polished outfit. While my life was going well, this attitude seemed to me pragmatic. Why bring down the collective mood, ruin a perfectly good meal?

After Russian bombs began falling on Ukraine, I made the mistake of attending a dinner party. At the time, my uncle’s family was trying to escape besieged Kyiv while my relatives in Kherson were sheltering in their bathrooms and cellars. Soldiers’ bodies lay on the bridge we used to cross to get to the dacha.

After a week of running on adrenalin, I doubt I looked my best.

My friends didn’t know what to say and seemed to shrink away from me, as if I’d coughed or sneezed in public. I figured they didn’t want to intrude. By the end of the night, I wondered if I was going insane. All these smiling, laughing people wrapped in wrinkle-free fabrics — maybe there was no war? Maybe it was all in my head? I missed the bluntness of my birth land: You look like death. Tell me more.

I’ve since come to understand that in social situations, it’s up to me to bring up the topic so as not to leave it hanging over the room the rest of the night. I launch right into it at the perfunctory how-are-yous — whether my relatives are safe, the newest, cruelest ways the Russian army terrorizes the population.

But I have my doubts about this approach, the discomfort it causes — the blank faces, the silences. Do I sound deranged? Am I being a downer, a town crier nobody asked for? As the war drags on, maybe people want to move on with their lives instead of hearing about the merits of Javelins vs. NLAW antitank missiles.

Not knowing how to speak and act, unable to understand those around me, I’m a new immigrant all over again. I love this country, yet its flag rippling in the breeze reminds me of the shimmering pool of water you see at the end of a road on a sunny day. Drive on and it disappears. Just out of reach, never mine.

Canadians have been amazing supporters of Ukraine through military and humanitarian aid as well as the welcoming of refugees, yet on the interpersonal front it’s been like talking to a wall. To many of those who’ve lived here for generations, war is an abstract concept, something that happens to other people. Whether well-founded or not, this sense of security is what draws many to immigrate to Canada, hoping that their children will grow up thinking themselves immune, too.

Yet in one shape or another, cataclysm comes for us all. We fall ill, we divorce, we lose someone we love, our world as we know it ends. These traumatic events are often cloaked in the same silence. By allowing ourselves to buy into the myth of geopolitical security, by passing over our cataclysms in silence, we deprive ourselves of an invaluable coping mechanism: each other. If we unite in celebration for happy events such as births and weddings, we can unite for tragic ones, too. A redeeming part about grief: it’s a shared fate. MARIA REVA IS A UKRAINIAN-CANADIAN WRITER WHOSE SHORT STORY COLLECTION, “GOOD CITIZENS NEED NOT FEAR,” WAS A FINALIST FOR THE 2020 ROGERS WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION