When I (re)read this with a group of Ukrainian students last year, I did so with a kind of speculative curiosity, wondering if and how they’d connect to it, whether it would be relevant to them. This time around was different, in that I had a kind of template for how they’d react, and yet — every class is different (which is part of what makes teaching so cool).
What I really noticed this time around was that though much in this text may be deeply relatable to contemporary Ukrainians, the account of borderlands identity is also in clear tension with the demands and dreams of a struggle for a specifically national liberation. This was especially clear in our conversation about language, where their expressed hopes of an entirely Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine collided with Anzaldua’s staunch insistence on multilingualism and recognizing all of her languages as valid (and moreover, as hers, even if they came saddled with violently traumatic pasts). Though the kind of multilingualism she described was totally familiar and relatable and even in many ways persuasive and desirable, yet still, the symbolic potency of the Russian language as Russian cannot be denied. It is far easier, it seems, to decolonize English. “If we were reading this 15 years ago,” said one student, “maybe. And maybe, 300 years from now, we can see it differently — but not now.”
Kasia Reads 