INTERVIEW: Myrna Kostash on multiculturalism, reconciliation

The following is the second part of an interview with Myrna Kostash, a Canadian writer of Ukrainian background whose term as chairman of the Canadian Writers' Union will expire on May 15th. In the past year, debate over Canada's multiculturalism policy has intensified, with some wishing to eliminate it entirely, and others claiming that it is not benefitting visible minorities in the country.

Ms. Kostash's most recent book, "Bloodlines: A Journey Into Eastern Europe," (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1993), has been met with critical acclaim and heated discussion in some circles. The hardback run sold out, and the paperback is available in bookstores in Canada and by contacting the publisher. Other works include "All of Baba's Children" (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1977); "No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls" (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987); "Long Way From Home" (Toronto: Lorimar, 1980); the screen-play for the National Film Board production "Teach Me to Dance" (1978); and a number of works for the stage. A member of PEN International, the Writers' Guild of Alberta and an editorial member of numerous publications, Ms. Kostash has also taught journalism and writing at various institutions in Canada and the U.S.

The interview was conducted in Toronto by Andrij Wynnyckyj.

Q: You mentioned your distress about the lack of a role played by "your generation" in society. But on a more personal level, particularly in Canada, many of you have arrived - you're the chairman of the Writer's Union of Canada, for instance.

A: You're right, my generation in Canada has gone on to do all kinds of things. Here I am, chair of the Writers' Union. It's a "I wish my baba were alive to see this," kind of thing. I think it's actually quite stunning that a Ukrainian Canadian has the vote of confidence of her peers of all backgrounds to run one of the largest cultural organizations in the country.

Hard work. Unpaid, not like in Ukraine.

I was talking to a fellow from Ukraine the other day, and he was astonished to see the position isn't salaried and how relatively shabby the offices on Ryerson Street are here in Toronto.

Q: However, that extends to the whole profession of writing in the West doesn't it?

A: There's a real crisis in literary publishing in Canada because of the difficulty in generating sufficient sales, and many of the locally-based houses that supported local writers are piling up huge deficits, cutting Canadian titles and so on. The audience is increasingly fragmented, readers are much more oriented to "American" material.

Q: How do you address the problem in Canadian publishing from your position?

A: We, that is, the Union, work on various fronts. We lobby along with the Canadian Booksellers Association, various publishing houses, etc., to obtain certain subsidies from various levels of government so that the playing field is somewhat more even.

That's the only way when contending with the larger U.S. publishing conglomerates with their massive distribution networks, huge advertising budgets and so on.

But this is not just a Canadian problem. Business leaders gloat that the "market is becoming global," but this places great pressures on local grass roots cultural institutions everywhere. Small presses in the U.S. are facing very similar difficulties.

Of course, we're going to see the same problem in the liberated countries of eastern Europe, the loss of market to American "product." It's a well known story.

Q: Perhaps, but not always well articulated...

A: Well, what I find dangerous is an emergent trend in eastern Europe to consider government subsidy of culture a pernicious thing. I understand that this is based on their immediate historical experience, where you had this malevolent intervention of the state in cultural activity. But to now say the only healthy response is to remove government entirely is ill-advised. Perhaps they don't understand how soon they're going to find themselves absolutely awash in culture that's not of their own making.

Q: The vacuum will be filled...

A: Right. I imagine they're taking notice of what's happening in France and the fight that's being put up by that country's film industry, but it's difficult to determine if they have any kind of strategy.

Individual artists from Ukraine, for example, are terribly out of touch with how things are produced in the outside world. I remember this one guy who came over in 1991 with the idea that he would make a film of [Ukrainian Canadian writer] Illia Kiriak's "Sons of the Earth."

It was very depressing, partly because it gave a very clear picture of the overwhelming lack of resources they face - at the most basic level - they lack reliable telephone lines, they have to rely on hand-delivered mail. What was also crippling was his total naivete about what was possible if you had a Western partner.

We tried to impress upon him the struggle involved with independent film production in Canada, but he just didn't want to hear about it. It was "well, you're from the West, you'll bring dollars." Not just naive, unprofessional; he didn't even have rights to the book. Of course, because we're in the West, we're supposed to go get the lawyers and get this done.

Q: In a recent Chairman's Report to the Canadian Writers' Union, you wrote about the transformation of the concept of multiculturalism in Canada.

A: Right. To illustrate, as the writer of "All of Baba's Children" and "Bloodlines," I'm no longer considered a part of the multicultural discourse. It's not about me. It's not about third generation European ethnics. It's about "people of color."

I'm finding that I've had to rethink many notions that I had in my first book of what my kind of people can bring to bear on this topic of plurality of identities and so on.

There's a ferment going on among native writers and writers of color. As I wrote "All of Baba's Children," I took very seriously the idea put forth by multicultural activists of the time, particularly those who had emerged from the new left and the women's movement, that one's status as a member of an ethnic minority could be a kind of protest against or critique of the dominant, muffling Disneyland culture.

But I no longer have the assurance that's the case. A challenge is being issued by racial minority activists that I'm not part of the solution, but part of the problem. That my identification with "European" values is crippling to my vision.

Q: Aren't you agonizing overmuch? You've just been saying that you've come to recognize the historical suffering of Ukrainians, which, in terms of serfdom of various stripes and the victimization by the Ottomans, was quite comparable to slavery. For about 100 years, French Canadians in Quebec were considered "the White Niggers of America." Take the Irish when they arrived, or the experience of the Chinese coolies.

For one reason or another, humans are not very imaginative when it comes to oppression of "different" peoples. Can you get the minorities to understand that you're all talking about the same thing, particularly if many of them are leftists?

A: Well, all of this seems to be up for grabs again. What you're saying is historically true, but I think it will be a long time before minority activists will agree on a common ground like that.

They do not want to hear someone like me get up and say "my people were persecuted too." That's not what the present moment is about. However, what I looking forward to is the moment when the third and fourth generation ethnics will be able to articulate a sense of belonging to a multicultural society along with people of color.

What I've conjured up in my mind is a kind of "time zone" map of Canada that places people in the country according to how long they've been here. We all live together in the same historical moment, but in fact we live in different times in relation to our community's history and experience.

Let me give a concrete example. I was recently part of a panel on national radio, for which the topic was Sikhs wearing turbans in Canadian Legion halls. A fifth or sixth generation Anglo Canadian was deploring the loss or disappearance of what he called "Canadian" values that led to things such as the topic under discussion.

I thought to myself that surely the speaker must realize that what he now considers as benchmark "Canadian" has changed considerably since my ancestors arrived in the country, and that after the Sikhs gained a certain amount of acceptance, newer generations of immigrants would be arriving into an entirely different context again. But each group would be using its own "arrival" as a point of departure in their thinking. That's what I mean when I say that everyone lives in "different times."

The problem is that there's deep confusion between questions of ethnicity and questions of immigration, and the two of them have become collapsed into the questions of multiculturalism, often for political reasons.

As I understand multiculturalism, and as I made use of it as a third generation Ukrainian Canadian, this is a means by which I can take my experiences out of the private realm into the cultural mainstream of the society to which I belong.

It took me out of my church basement, out of my frustration and out of my instilled feeling of inferiority about being Ukrainian Canadian, and made it part of the public discourse. It made it important for everybody.

That's a very different phenomenon to the challenge that first nations and immigrant people represent. They can pass much more quickly to positions of entitlement in the society in a way that our grandparents didn't, in part because of the gains we've made. Because the society has become more liberal and participatory.

Naturally, different pressures be brought to bear on the social body, but you can't put things in a historical deep freeze. That is even more of a violent distortion to the society in the long run anyway.

The beauty of multiculturalism is that it allows people into the discourse. People are so afraid that it's about separation and people living in their little ghettos. It's the opposite! It's not about separatism, cultural or political. After all, it was introduced as the Trudeau government's antidote to Quebec separatism, so that shouldn't surprise anyone.

Q: Let's touch on feminism and your perception of where it stands in Ukraine.

A: Ah, feminism. In 1991 I gave a lecture at the Institute of Literature in Kyyiv, with six people attending - Solomea Pavlychko, some of her friends, plus Viktor Neborak.

Q: Representing the crypto-feminists...

A: Yeah, right. Actually, I had already been in touch with him in order to get him to Canada in the fall of 1992, on behalf of the Alberta Council and the Ukrainian Centennial Commission, so I'm sure he decided it was politic to show up at his patron's lecture.

At any rate, I gave this lecture to six people about the main ideas of Western feminism. There was a great deal of interest at the meeting, and we immediately began discussing the prospects for a conference with the Edmonton chapter of Third Wreath.

But after I got back, it just fizzled. We tried to kick start it with a series of letters, they wrote back that yes, yes, they were interested, but nothing came of it. That's pretty typical of the movement there. Both in terms of attendance at the lecture, and the follow through of our suggestions.

Q: In "Bloodlines" the figure of Marketa appears in your section on Czechoslovakia. She is seen as deliberately turning away from a position of a feminist activist towards that of a housewife because of the overwrought and false rhetoric of the regime. Is that something you found to be widespread?

A: That's quite ironic because right after Czecho-Slovak independence was proclaimed, she was named ambassador to Poland, so I don't know what happened to her and her "cocooning."

At any rate, in terms of her dealing with the old society, yeah, she saw living at home and raising children as a much more humane activity than being sent out to factories or acting as one of the regime's agitators or something.

Now, I don't know, we can only speculate. But I imagine she's having the experience encountered by feminists when they built the movement in the 1970s. After you use your talents to build yourself a material base, you are better able to present a feminist critique to the society you live in.

I think that the Marketas of the post-socialist world will get access to these resources: interesting work, access to other feminists and their ideas. Women like her will then get on with it, and the "dream of the domestic alternative" will probably recede as they see the possibility of doing good as an independent woman in the society at large.

I don't really see a massive social base for a women's movement in Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine, at this point. During the travels that formed the basis for this book, women told me that there is no ground for a feminist movement, because both women and men live in the same conditions of extreme deprivation. They had the same fight: against the state.

And I saw their point. There was no real argument against that. But I thought to myself, just you wait, when the pressure of the oppressive state is lifted off, the sexist attitudes that are so prevalent will soon strike you as quite a thorny obstacle.

Q: You mention that in a passage in the Poland section about WiP, when a man tells a woman: "you do the typing."

A: Right, right. And she says, "well, I'm good at it because I have the most experience." The irony of this is, particularly in Ukraine, is that economic conditions are still just as bad, so the right atmosphere for improvement is still not there.

The possibility for women to name their particular oppression is not there, despite the efforts of Ms. Pavlychko, because of the overwhelming difficulties everyone faces. The only way these ideas will arise there through intellectual contact. As women intellectuals from Ukraine travel and read, which will be far more readily done now, they will become exposed to these ideas, but I don't see how that would be particularly useful to the women in Ukrainian society as a whole, particularly working class women.

Q: One of these "women intellectuals" is Dr. Pavlychko, whose "Letters from Kiev" you translated. What were your impressions of having worked on that project, as a feminist and writer?

A: As a feminist, I was glad to add to the literature from East Europe about the politics of the era, because if you scan the canon even casually, you notice that most titles were written by men.

It was also very educational, and gave me an emotional grounding for the events that led up to the great changes in Ukraine, culminating in independence. Bohdan Krawchenko [Dr. Pavlychko's correspondent] first showed me one of the letters, and I rendered it in English for our circle of women readers and activists in Edmonton. So I was quite excited when I was asked to tackle the project as a full-length book.

It also proved to be a nice interlude for me, as I had been immersed in writing "Bloodlines" for too long without a break at that point.

Q: Did it provide a kind of focus for your section on Ukraine in "Bloodlines?

A: Not really, because the events and scenes I dealt with in my book predated those in the letters.

However, it was a fascinating exercise in matching voices. When you translate, it's really not a matter of reproducing the original in another language, but more an adaptation to the register of the language you're translating to, and an adaptation to your own style.

You don't really appropriate it, but you do have to find what is similar in your voice and that of the original's author.

Q: Back to feminism. You were one of the first lecturers at the University of Toronto's Women's Studies program, right?

A: Yeah. They called me in to fill a gap actually, and I was freelancing for Chatelaine... Well, let's backtrack a bit.

I did an MA in Russian literature at the University of Toronto in 1968. In 1969-1971, I was in Europe and decided that I wanted to be a writer. During that time I began writing for Canadian magazines, who published my stuff while I was still over there. I returned to Toronto in 1971 and began freelancing in earnest.

One of the magazines that took my stuff, since my name was already out and about, was Miss Chatelaine. So one of my first assignments of this period was to cover the classes of this program being set up at New College.

I was so intrigued and excited by it that I applied to teach it for the next year. And you know, back then, you went before a collective who asked you all these questions. Later, I found out that although I was accepted, some examiners had reservations about me because I wore eye make-up.

Q: Not militant enough, eh?

A: Little did they know. So I went in for two years of team teaching and stuff like that. I did one course on "Images of Women in Literature," and then I think even "Ethnic Women in Literature."

Then, in 1975, I applied to Canada Council (their programs were known as "Explorations"), and I got to do a book. And so, as an established magazine writer I embarked on what became "All of Baba's Children."

It was originally supposed to be about three generations in one town, but it became a much more socio-historical study. I could never keep my ideas simple, I always got carried away.

And so when I went to Two Hills [Alberta] to do the research, I thought I would be back in Toronto because that's where I worked and lived and had cut myself off from the past. But I never did come back.

Q: That's why we're doing this interview here, in Toronto, where you've been living for a year, right?

A: Well, that's an entirely different question. Where do I want to live for the rest of my life? Maybe I do want to get back to the big city. I really do feel that with "Bloodlines" I've closed something that I opened with "All of Baba's Children."

Q: In a recent interview with Kontakt-TV, you struck a strange note of apology for having become divorced from things Ukrainian. It started sounding like Jane Fonda recanting, "I was divorced from my roots, I didn't embrace these political causes, I was in the left..." But after re-reading "All of Baba's Children" [first published in 1977], I really don't see what you had to apologize for. What are you apologizing for?

A: For not taking the pain of the Ukrainian people seriously. It took me a very long time to get around to it.

Q: All right. Now that you've written "Bloodlines," has that guilt been expiated?

A: Oh yes, absolutely. If anybody has any complaints to make, I guess they're just full of beans. I feel that I've done the suffering justice.

Q: For instance, the section of the "Ukraine" chapter dealing with the famine is as strong as anything in Miron Dolot's "Execution by Hunger" or Robert Conquest's "Harvest of Sorrow."

A: The other thing about the famine section is that it is exactly where I make my apology for...

Well, maybe you're right, not so much an apology as that's where I make my peace. I make my peace with the ghosts of all those Ukrainians who suffered in this century through the famine story.

And the person who gets me there is Leonid Pliushch.

Q: You give the connection between the two of you some play, when you mention that Pliushch said you were both from the same village." The identification between you and Pliushch is interesting because you have both been made out to be pariahs in the diaspora.

Perhaps another identification could be made that both of you are from the same city while the rest of the society is still lagging in the village and you're both trying to bring them out.

A: That's interesting, I hadn't thought of that. But my initial attraction to Pliushch was not this village thing, but his continued loyalty to Marxist ideas, at that time. He came to Edmonton [in 1977] to give a public lecture at St. Joseph's Catholic Cathedral, to which all kinds of people from the Ukrainian community came out.

He began by saying that he was still a Marxist and he had a critique of the West and Western imperialism based on these convictions. As I sat in the audience, I could not believe my good luck.

Here was a Ukrainian who represented both patriotism towards his own nation and a passion for social justice. It was as if the two parts of my self came into one whole with him. I think that's the emotional underpinning of what he characterized as our "coming from the same village."

This was his reminder to me that we shared the same sources. Sources though, not present circumstances. I'm sure Pliushch wanted to underscore that we were in quite different situations. "We come from the same village," not "we are in the same village."

But you're definitely right about my impatience with the cult of the village as the cornerstone of Ukrainian identity. And that comes out clearly in my description in "BIoodlines" of the public meeting with [painter Feodosiy] Humeniuk.

Although his works are quite visually rich, and he is of my generation, they nevertheless involve the recycling of these village motifs and topos.

I couldn't believe that there I was in Kyyiv, sitting in the Lavra [Kyyivan Cave Monastery] and listening to the same kind of discourse that dominated community meetings in Canada, Alberta, circa 1956. I even shut my eyes and found that I couldn't tell the difference.

Q: Back to your "apology." How far did you want to take this reconciliation through "Bloodlines," for yourself personally?

A: I wanted to reassert my personal responsibility for choices I made. The self that wrote "All of Baba's Children" shifted a lot of responsibility for my alienation onto elements of the Ukrainian community that I was critical of.

That self's pose was that I rejected speaking the language and going to Saturday school because of these right-wing fanatics who monopolized discourse around Ukrainian identity. Of course, that's only true to a certain extent.

This reconciliation, as you put it, is more a matter of "I'm all grown up now and I can take responsibility for what I did." I made that choice, I made that decision, and the consequences of that decision are that I severed what was the most organic connection possible to an ancestral narrative. It's a narrative that has to be central to any writer, so I actually damaged myself.

But I also want to use this opportunity to set the record straight on how I characterized the brand of Ukrainian nationalism I was opposed to. I stand by my initial alienation from the position of unrelieved anti-communism and, particularly, from Ukrainian consistency in standing by the right-wing agenda in North America.

However, the public apology that I'm making is that in their anti-communism, they were right. By the time I got to "Bloodlines," of course, I had no problem with forming a healthy approach to the reality of the Soviet bloc, and so that's why the project of "making peace with the ghosts" became part of the general project of the book.

However, my reaction to that kind of nationalism at the time I was a kid has to be understood. We have to remember who all were then. It was still a Cold War world. In North America the anti-Communists were sending people to Vietnam, and my generation had to make a choice of whether or not to go, whether or not to oppose the war.

The Cold War world influenced my consciousness and that of my generation, so I could not, if I considered myself conscious, not "be there" [for the protests]. And Ukrainian nationalists were diametrically opposed to that.

The reason I stand ashamed is that I allowed my antipathy to their right-wing politics to obscure my own view of the Ukrainian experience.

Q: How deep was the cut to that "organic connection"? Did it initially simplify your vision and enable you to concentrate on matters?

A: Well, actually I do think that it was necessary for me to set aside the Ukrainian project in order for me to become a writer. Because then I was able to return to it with all this security and self-confidence as someone who had established herself in Canadian writing.

Q: Now that you've "come home," so to speak, do you consider yourself a Ukrainian writer as well as a Canadian one?

A: No I don't, and I don't think I ever could consider myself a Ukrainian writer, because I don't write in the language. That's the only way that I believe someone can contribute to the body of literature, to inform the language.

Of course, from the sidelines I wish it all the best, and am even quite willing to help in its development. For instance, during the writing of "Bloodlines" and since, I often wrack my brains to make sure that I highlight the things that Ukraine and Ukrainians have contributed to urban culture, to the human gene pool, as it were.

But to be honest, I am a Canadian writer, English chapter.

PART I

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 15, 1994, No. 20, Vol. LXII

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