Maria Tumarkin-Reflections on Ukraine

Traumascapes, Western Elites, Complex Identities: Reflections on Ukraine.
Maria Tumarkin, in conversation with Olesya Khromeychuk on trauma, western indifference, and the value of culture. 21 September 2023, in partnership with the European Parliament's Liaison Office in the UK.
Ukrainian-Jewish-Australian writer and cultural historian, Maria Tumarkin, brings her insights into traumascapes as places of undeniable power and vast cultural (and transcultural) significance to this discussion of Ukraine’s present and future. In a far-ranging conversation with Olesya Khromeychuk, Tumarkin talk about Ukraine as a traumascape, the inextinguishable diasporic guilt, fraught identities, the silence of Western cultural elites, and how sites of trauma can become sites of conscience and help lay foundations for Ukraine’s rebuilding.
SPEAKER
Maria Tumarkin
Maria Tumarkin was born and raised in Kharkiv. She is the author of four books of ideas, including Traumascapes and Otherland. Her most recent book, Axiomatic, won the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award and was named a New Yorker top ten book of 2019.
Tumarkin is a recipient of the 2020 Windham Campbell Prize in the nonfiction category. She collaborates with musicians and visual artists, and writes pieces for performance and radio. Tumarkin’s work on sites of trauma has influenced researchers and artists worldwide. She is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Melbourne. www.mariatumarkin.com/
MODERATOR
Olesya Khromeychuk
Olesya Khromeychuk is the Director of the Ukrainian Institute London. She is a historian and writer. She has taught the history of East-Central Europe at several British universities, and has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Der Spiegel, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Prospect. Khromeychuk is the author of The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister (2022) and “Undetermined" Ukrainians. Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS "Galicia" Division (2013).
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[@marathonx3]

Thank you Olesya and Maria for these insights!

[@kj1483]

"Killed by shrapnel as he served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Olesya Khromeychuk's brother Volodymyr died on the frontline in eastern Ukraine. As Olesya tries to come to terms with losing her brother, she also tries to process the Russian invasion of Ukraine: as an immigrant living far from the frontline, as a historian of war and how societies respond to them, and as a woman, a civilian, and a sister. In this timely blend of memoir and essay, Olesya Khromeychuk tells the story of her brother - the wiser older sibling, the artist and the soldier - and of his death. Deeply moving and thoughtful, The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister picks apart the ways political violence shapes everyone and everything it touches and depicts with extraordinary intimacy the singular and complicated bond between a brother and sister. 'Soon before he died, my brother said he had become a warrior. Why would a thinker, an artist, wish to become a soldier? Perhaps I didn't appreciate what it meant to be a thinker and an artist, or, maybe, what it meant to be a soldier."-- words of the Publisher. The moderator of this video is Olesya Khromeychuk; author of The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister (2022)

[@kj1483]

My homeland is fighting for its survival following Russia’s invasion and criminal targeting of civilians. I write books, essays, pieces for performance and radio; I collaborate with sound and visual artists and have had my work carved into dockside tiles. I am the author of four books of ideas.....I am a Ukrainian-Jewish-Australian writer born in Kharkiv. " Please can you help this video; just trying to get comments section started under the video to help viewer numbers" .....3 lines above are what i copied from her own website by Maria Tumarkin ...

[@t.d.straszheim]

How about posting a version that uses the microphone audio

[@mariamichael1669]

Although extremely sad what’s happening in Ukraine but we must not forget Ukraine’s role in poking the bear. It was agreed that Ukraine would not join NATO yet with the encouragement of the US went against every treaty. Although Putin is not innocent he is not the villain.

[@katerynayushchenko8459]

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, Ukraine was officially neutral and NATO membership was not even on the agenda. Putin made it clear, the goal was to destroy the Ukrainian state and identity, not NATO.

[@marathonx3]

Maria, there never existed a treaty regarding NATO's future in any form with the russian federation. And I profoundly disagree about putin. He is a villian, not just in Ukraine but, in seizing and occupying Moldovan territory in 1991 well before any Eastward NATO expansion and invading the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in 1999 after his treaty granted them national sovereignty, killing 160,000 Chechen citizens. NATO had zero plans to include Ichkeria. putin was a villain then, is a villain now!