Over the last 12 years, I can’t count the number of times people back in Britain have asked “Where’s that?” when I told them I lived in Ukraine – or, incredulously, “Why?”
Working as a staff journalist at the Kyiv Post long before the Orange Revolution, we used to joke that the only stories picked up by the international press were the ones featuring Chornobyl, sex, or bizarre disasters and fatalities. Some came in combination, such as the story of the foreigner bumped off by his Odesan mail-order bride. No wonder my grandmother was convinced I was living in some radioactive mafiosi capital of sleaze.
It’s more a reflection of media laziness than of life in Ukraine. And, as a journalist rarely having the time or page space to cover all sides of a story, I probably helped spread such stereotypes. Meanwhile, I got quite tired of telling Ukrainians that no, English people don’t really always eat porridge for breakfast, nor are they ludicrously polite to each other all the time. The stereotypes do work both ways.
I started writing a novel in order to get the page space to really tell a story, if not a license to make things up. I wanted to put in it the things I love about Ukraine – folktales and holidays, trolleybuses and villages and markets; as well as the things that bothered but fascinated me: gangsters driving expensive cars while grannies begged in subways, children left behind by their mothers working illegally abroad. It all got mixed together in “Riding Icarus,” an urban fairytale for children blending folklore and magic with cc.
Ukrainians are sensitive about how they’re portrayed in the media and in literature, perhaps because of the kind of coverage their country used to get. Now that “Riding Icarus” has been published – although only in English as yet – I’m nervously awaiting their reaction to this story of a small girl who lives in an abandoned trolleybus while her mother works abroad and her mafia uncle pursues her in his Mercedes.
Many things have changed in the 12 years I’ve been in Ukraine – these days it’s not just gangsters who drive top-of-the-line foreign cars. Other things stay the same. Homeless children like those I wrote about a decade ago in the Kyiv Post still roam the streets, frequently deprived of the most basic care. Ukraine is much better known internationally, thanks to the Orange Revolution, the Eurovision song contest, books like “Death and the Penguin” and “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.” People in Britain no longer ask: “Where’s that?”
They do ask “Who are they?” when I mention Crimean Tatars, the subject of my second novel. Even Tatars themselves, despite their pride in their history and culture, seem a bit perplexed as to why I wanted to write a book about them. I’d written several news articles on the land rights issue in Crimea, and had the opportunity to spend some time with Crimean Tatars whose tales of exile and return I found very inspiring. So when publisher Walker sent me a brief for a new series of novels to be endorsed by Amnesty International, which would introduce British children to other cultures and human rights issues, I wrote “Dream Land,” which tells through the eyes of a young girl the story of one Tatar family that came back to Crimea in the 1990s.
“Dream Land” came out in September this year, a few weeks after Russia and Georgia clashed in South Ossetia. Suddenly, Crimea was in the international news as Western journalists speculated whether it would be next on Russia’s list of disputed territories.
In all the articles I read (outside the local and Russian press), not one mentioned Crimean Tatars. You could be forgiven for thinking that Crimea’s population is solely Ukrainian and Russian, as if Stalin’s ethnic-cleansing policies in the 1940s were still in operation. I was reminded of the tourism fair held a couple of months ago in Kyiv, when all regions of Ukraine presented their history and culture – and there was no sign anywhere of the country’s several non-Ukrainian minorities. It’s great to see Ukrainian culture reviving after decades of repression, but it would be a pity if in the process the other nationalities living here were edited out to create a simpler, more stereotyped image.
The reality of any country is more complex than its national or international image. A Ukrainian friend complained to me a few years ago that when she went to a London exhibition of photos of Earth from the air, the only picture of Ukraine shown was of Chornobyl. This weekend I went to a photo exhibition in the London Southbank Centre to find Ukraine featured prominently – as a dismal, dead-end source country of trafficked slave labor.
Not to show these images would be to deny the truth. But they are still only one small facet of life in Ukraine in all its wonder, difficulty, banality and delight.
“Riding Icarus” and “Dream Land” by Lily Hyde are both published in Britain by Walker. They’re available online from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com, or in Kyiv from the Globe bookstore in Metrograd. Let the author know what you think of her portrayal of Ukraine at www.lilyhyde.com.
