Lisa Grekul - Unbound: Ukrainian Canadians Writing Home

WERONIKA SUCHACKA

Its 2006; I am sitting in a Ukrainian Canadian literature classroom. Let me be clear: I am not Canadian; I am not Ukrainian; I am not Ukrainian Canadian for that matter, and I do not live in Canada. I am a Polish girl studying at a German university, but I listen avidly, even impatiently, to a Ukrainian Canadian voice, the first I have ever heard. It is beautiful and powerful in its message. With other Polish and German students, I listen to a visiting professor, Janice Kulyk Keefer. I am entranced not only by the content of her talk: her sense of history, a sense that a part of official European history has been connected to the official history of North America by the personal histories and stories of Ukrainian immigrants and their offspring; or her sense of identity, a sense that these official and private accounts are expressive of complicated as well as complex experience and existence. I am also enchanted by the way the nature of Ukrainian-ness in Canada is revealed to me; I am enchanted by Kulyk Keefers use of language, its poetic melody and the heightened sensitivity that each of her utterances displays. The writer becomes to me the embodiment of poetry and each class a journey into a completely unknown world, its past and present.

At the time, I also develop a deep fascination with Kulyk Keefers writings. It is in her class that I read The Green Library, a novel that continues to impress me whenever I reread it. But thanks to the author, I also learn about other Ukrainian Canadian writers/artists and their works: Myrna Kostashs non-fiction, William Kureleks paintings, and John Paskievichs documentary. It is also in this class that I hear such names as Marusya Bociurkiw, Mary Borsky, and Lisa Grekul for the first time. I virtually devour every piece of information I am provided with and I read every text assigned, but eager for more I spend hours in libraries and online in front of my computer, seeking more about Ukrainian Canadian literature. Later, when I do my MA and then PhD research, I experience how difficult it is to hunt down Ukrainian Canadian texts in Europe. Although German university libraries are wonderfully equipped, Ukrainian Canadian books are rarely available, and thus the only option left to me is ordering books from North America. The arrival of long-awaited books is a great experience on its own, and each book is treated by me as treasure. I am deeply grateful for my past scholarships and present fellowship, thanks to which I can afford those books. At that point, I would never have expected that discovering Ukrainian Canadian voices would take me to Canada, where I could literally hear those voices.

In 2009 I went to Toronto and Edmonton for my PhD research trip. I met Ukrainian Canadian writers and scholars in person, and each encounter became one of the most exhilarating moments of my life. Every scholar who is enthusiastic about the field she is working in will understand my excitement when I met with people whose work I so much admire. What was even more stimulating about these meetings was that each of them opened the door to my meetings with other Ukrainian Canadian writers. I was honoured with Janice Kulyk Keefer and her familys hospitality; I also had the pleasure of listening to her inspiring ideas about identity and literature and of being guided by her through questions about Ukrainian Canadian literature, which only multiplied for me. Thanks to her, I was able to meet a wonderful young scholar and writer, Lindy Ledohowski, whose work strongly influenced my PhD thesis after my return to Europe. I was inspired by our exchange of ideas but also by the information I received from her about authors like Elizabeth Bachinsky and Daria Salamon, whose works I was unfamiliar with at that time; I was about to explore them, having returned from Canada. It was through Ledohowski that I met Jars Balan in Edmonton. And it was only much later that I learned of the young adult fiction of Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch; I had been unfamiliar with her genre, but hers is a voice worth hearing.