‘The fight for justice is what drives us now’: Oksana Lutsyshyna In Dialogue With Arundhati Roy
In order to comprehend the events of recent days, PEN Ukraine has launched a series of conversations entitled #DialoguesOnWar. On February 10, 2023, Ukrainian poet and writer Oksana Lutsyshyna held a conversation with the Indian writer Arundhati Roy. This is a transcription of key moments from their conversation.
This conversation is suppoerted by the US Embassy in Ukraine.
By PEN Ukraine with Arundhati Roy and Oksana Lutsyshna
Photo: Tobias Reich/Unsplash
Arundhati Roy: I would like to ask Oksana to give us an update. What is happening in Ukraine right now, after almost a year since the war started? A lot of the conversations I saw about it were held between Ukrainian writers and either Europeans or Americans. The part of the world where I am, however, has a very different magnetic field of how things are looked at.
Oksana Lutsyshyna: I was in Ukraine in December. I visited Lviv and Uzhhorod, which is where my parents live. I did not see anything even vaguely resembling defeatist attitudes. Literally everyone, from writers and publishers to people you meet in the city, like taxi drivers, were talking about how Ukraine is standing up to Russian aggression. That is the most important thing to me.
I have also seen how much more interested people are in literature, culture, and history. Everybody is catching up on what they had not learnt at school, because many generations of Ukrainians studied the Soviet version of history, which, of course, was not covering the real dynamics between Russia and Ukraine.
All in all, Ukraine is standing strong. How does the situation look from the outside?
Arundhati Roy: When I hear Ukrainians talking about Russian colonialism, it echoes with what I hear on the streets of Kashmir.
In some ways, things are so different, even in terms of how this war is being perceived here. First of all, the country of Ukraine is being invaded by the former coloniser. On top of that, huge world powers are involved in this war.
India has a very old association with Russia, economic and otherwise. Last month, a well-known reporter from the New York Times arrived in India and came to see me. He was not familiar with the country at all, but he was going to write a piece on India’s stance on the war in Ukraine. I wondered why this particular reporter came. In the past, he has written in support of Modi. His piece turned out to be really supportive of India’s current position – India cannot afford to go against Russia. Ninety percent of the weapons we have come from Russia. Right now, India is importing many times more crude oil than it used to, refining it and then selling it to the West. There are so many business deals going on. I am interested to see where all this is going.
Oksana Lutsyshyna: That is interesting to hear. In the United States, where I live, the only perspective to look at Ukraine is, naturally, that of the West that America embodies.
In my opinion, seeing this war just as a conflict between Russia and the West is an example of a very Eurocentric, somewhat colonial thinking, which seems to dismiss that there are other parts of the world with completely different views on the situation.
In your essays, you say that India is not a country, it is a continent. It has a completely different political stance.
Arundhati Roy: Just before Covid, I went to Lviv. Meeting my publishers and translators was a wonderful experience. Like many people of my generation who grew up in India, I had never visited Eastern Europe before and never thought that I would travel there.
In Kerala, where I grew up, we had communism. I was brought up with different kinds of propaganda. Hearing about the Vietnam War, we supported the Vietnamese. One was never allowed to say anything about Stalin or what had happened when he was in power. Initially, the Communist party was furious with The God of Small Things because in this book I was talking about the caste system and how communists did not understand it.
I was wondering, do states as entities actually have values at all? I don’t know. In 2002, after the Gujarat massacre, Modi was denied entry into the US after thousands of Muslims were slaughtered on the streets. However, the Indian market is huge, so the situation changed when he became the prime minister. You could slaughter whoever you want, and you would still be welcome, and people would still hold rallies for you.
It is very important to know on the ground what is being done to Ukraine and Ukrainians, to know the history of your country. Ukraine suffered tremendously from the 1932 Holodomor famine, and it has been through so much. When all these narratives are placed on top of it, from the outside it is very hard to extract moral order from it. Other than to say that one stands with the Ukrainian resistance today.
Oksana Lutsyshyna: Absolutely, I hear you. We have been working hard all this time to dispel the propaganda. Even before the full-scale Russian invasion and the invasion in 2014 of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and the illegal annexation of Crimea. These events have been inseparable from exporting Russian culture; it was somehow engrained in it. It was very difficult to make the world see what was going on, what the empire is all about, how it stands now.
Dismantling these Russian master narratives is a huge task because it is already written as history, of literature in particular. Nowadays even those who teach and study Russian literature admit this. But then, when people say they are ready to read Ukrainian literature, we realise that a lot of it has not been translated, and some of it has been a mystery even to ourselves due to repressions in the Soviet times banning and killing the authors. In the 1930s, Stalin attacked Ukraine in all possible and impossible ways. Apart from exterminating people, he also decimated the intellectual circles. It was a simultaneous attack on everything Ukrainian.
Arundhati Roy: When I first came to Lviv and then to Poland, I was so taken away by the angle against the Soviet Union and communism. I personally do not call myself a communist at all, but the left has done some good work in India. In your case, however, this aversion was not a matter of policy. For you, communism is a piece of old legacy you want nothing to do with.
Since you are in the US, I would like to ask you this: do you see Trump coming back to power? If he does, how will it affect things in Ukraine?
Oksana Lutsyshyna: I hope not. I am afraid to even think about it. I think it will have bad consequences for Ukraine because of Trump’s ties to Putin. Every day a new scandal is unearthed about another highly placed official being somehow connected to the Russian power circle. It looks like this corruption has reached an unprecedented scale.
I know about Trump’s ties to the Indian circle too. I think he visited India, didn’t he?
Arundhati Roy: And put his arms around Modi, while Muslims were slaughtered in the streets of my city. But even during World War Two, when England and Germany were at war, businessmen were still making money.
Sometimes I watch Fox News and other right-wing channels; I read Kissinger and Jeffrey Saks. These people, whom you need to watch carefully, have been speaking about how the war in Ukraine cannot be won, that it needs to have a negotiated settlement. What do you think about that?
Oksana Lutsyshyna: Sometimes I hear it even from my friends who come from other countries.
I don’t think I am ready to negotiate, and neither is Ukraine. Any negotiations will come after victory, so we say. I wanted to quote Serhiy Zhadan here, a Ukrainian writer, who said ‘Without victory there is no justice’. I agree with that. I know that this fight for justice can be a somewhat idealist, and some might even say unobtainable, idea. But the fight for justice is what drives us now. We are not ready to consider any negotiations.
‘There is no peace without justice’, Zhadan adds, and I agree with that too. The conversations about peace are often masking the same view on Ukraine that has been around for centuries. You are a smaller country, you have to let go because you are not going to win, Russia is too big and too powerful. And that is not something that is on our agenda right now.
Arundhati Roy: When in 2002 the Gudjrat massacre took place under Modi’s administration, I used to think that if you just tell people, if you describe how women were slaughtered, how pregnant women had foetuses taken out, how people were burned, chopped up, and killed, everybody would get so shocked that they would do something politically. In fact, since then we have seen the opposite happening. People have rallied behind the murderers.
When you look at people in Kashmir… You know how the Japanese started growing square melons so that it is easier to stack them? The Indian government is doing that to human beings at gunpoint. There is no press, no Facebook, nobody can say anything. And most people in India don’t even want to. Anyone who dares to speak gets put into jail or lynched on the streets.
Just like you, we say that whatever happens, we will not be on that side. We may go down, but we do so on our terms. So I hear what you are saying.
Can you tell me how Ukrainian refugees are doing in the various countries they are in?
Oksana Lutsyshyna: Well, here we see the issue of women’s rights. Women are thrown into supporting their kids on their own. Whatever career or aspirations they have, all of it has to be put aside. That is what I see among my friends.
I know that lots of people are in Poland. I visited some of my writer friends there on my way to Ukraine. They are reasonably okay, but their husbands are in Ukraine. Many people have their loved ones on the frontline, and they worry about them constantly. In the meantime, these women dedicate themselves to their kids. They have to sacrifice progress in other areas because they have to take care of their immediate family.
In other countries, some Ukrainians are having trouble trying to explain to the locals what is going on. And people do not necessarily understand them – Russian propaganda is still strong. They want to help Ukraine, but still seem to be unsure of what is going on.
I was actually present at your talk in Lviv that you mentioned. I have read your books and I admire your trajectory as a writer. In times like this, what are the prospects of fiction? Do we have to employ other forms of writing?
Arundhati Roy: I am someone who tries not to generalise and tell other writers what they should do or how they should do it. In my case, when I wrote the Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a large part of it was about Kashmir – a place where you cannot tell the truth, except in fiction.
Right now, I keep telling myself that I should not talk about what is going on in India because that is not the point of this conversation. But it is all just so traumatic. You said that I keep writing about war: here, in India, peace is war.
Writing is the only thing you can do to stay sane. That is the only valuable motivation for me.
Oksana Lutsyshyna: That is true. For this last year, I have not done any kind of writing that would qualify as fiction. It just wasn’t possible.
Edited by Cammie McAtee
Photo: Tetiana Shyshkina/Unsplash