19. god of missed connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky
I’ve been reading, but not posting, and now have to play catch up a little.
At the end of Feb or beginning of March I read Elizabeth Bachinsky’s god of missed connections, a lyrical exploration into Bachinsky’s Ukrainian heritage which struck me in a deep and personal place because, as anyone who visits my Facebook page knows, I share that Ukrainian heritage, a heritage which is as rife with sorrow and tragedy as that of any ethnicity or peasanthood.
She charts Holodomor, also known as Stalin’s forced famine, the immigration from the Old Country (I never heard my Baba or great-Baba or great-Dido or aunts and uncles say Ukraine they only ever mentioned The Old Country), and the internment camps into which Ukrainian immigrants were forced during WWI, an incident for which the Canadian government has not yet apologized. (The reason is that they were considered to be Austrian, because Austria controlled the area at the time, and North America was at war with Austria.) My own relatives were in Canada then, but I have no idea if they were forced into the camps or not. No one ever spoke of it. This is what happened to the Ukrainians, they assimilated, were Anglicized, inter-married, and their culture slid further and further away.
But it remains in the skin and the bones.
“From the ankles, from under the ankles.
From the middle of the feet, from under the middle of the feet.
From the toes, from under the toes.”
Bachinsky speaks of the red Ukrainian dance boots worn by her mother, and her mother’s “Tips for Performing”: “Hair off your face for starters. Red./Bright red lipstick….Take time to connect./Your are a performer. You belong here.”
And I remember those beautiful knee-high leather boots from my own internment in Ukrainian dancing. I hated the dancing, hated the company, was stuck in an age-classed group of girls and was therefore trapped with kids several grades and multiple maturities younger and couldn’t stick it out till I got to the senior levels but those red boots! Oh I coveted those red boots. I dream of them still.
Bachinsky also writes of an ancestor, Michael Baczynski (how the names all had to be Anglicized, how my Vasylciw became Wasylow) who works in a labour camp in Banff. Who “took a knife and carved a hole into his gut, but he didn’t die./He crawled beneath his bunk and slit his neck.” And I think of my Baba’s Dido who tried to kill himself, and how his failed suicide was written up in the Ukrainian-language newspaper in Saskatoon, and the next time she saw him she reproached him for the embarrassment. And my Dido’s uncle John whose wife left him, and he holed up in a hole in his parent’s back yard (probably actually a sod house) for a year with nothing but the Bible for company. He would later die with one leg in a men’s boarding house in Calgary.
This is my people. We’ve been filthy and haunted for centuries. I can’t write objectively or theoretically about this book; it touches me in the marrow, in the skin, in the bones and the dust and the ash of the Pontic Steppes from centuries past.
-Nikki
