Into kin-regions with Horysvit vesnianyi (excerpts)
What follows are the excerpts from Iryna’s essay “Into kin-regions with Horytsvit vesnianyi” (part of forthcoming “Terra Invicta: Ukrainian wartime reimaginings for a habitable Earth” edited collection) in which she thinks with the plant Adonis vernalis – Horytsvit vesnianyi – of what home-place, kin-place mean for the ways we love, research, defend and mend our kin-regions of birth or of choice. Earlier version of this work was published in south/south dialogues.
THIS PLACE I AM WRITING ABOUT
THIS PLACE I AM WRITING ABOUT
This place I am writing about, the place I drift to when I search for Horytsvit vesnianyi, is located over vast reserves of a yellowish substance: uranium. Kirovohrad region and the entire Ukrainian Shield, or Ukrainian Crystalline Massif, are places with a lot of uranium ore.
This place evades me, as every dream does when you try to capture it, but there are things I can vaguely see silhouettes of: the ruins of the typewriter factory down the street; the rusty human-sized letters of a clichéd Soviet slogan "Miru – Mir!” (“Peace to the World!,” a joke I am not laughing at today) on top of a former communal apartment building; the shiny new black block of the crypto-currency mine1 whose ownership is hard to trace, though it seems to be a China-registered, Brazilian-owned venture; an ice-skating rink; a franchised supermarket; a furniture shop; a cemetery with a new section for those who died defending us and this land; a field stretching out behind it, perhaps with some Adonis vernalis; another cemetery where my grandparents lie. The future-nuclear creatures, gleaming a few kilometers down beneath the surface that changed from steppes to fields of sunflower to fields of rapeseed. The steppe-home of horytsvit turned into a territory. Édouard Glissant reminds me that territory is not compatible with liberation: in Poetics of Relation, he writes that we must resist “territories” and defend land from any form of alienation for that reason.2 If these dreams are all that ever happened and all that ever could happen, are the yellow glow of horytsvit petals a distant echo of uranium? When you dream of me, do I show up as a sepia-tinted figure flickering in dimmed, bio-fueled electricity?
The place I drift to when I think about horytsvit is caught up between two imaginaries: of the steppe and of the field. I grew up under the illusion that around me was the steppe. The vast, rolling flats, stretching in all directions, nothing obstructing the view of the horizon as soon as you leave the town. It took me a while to realize it wasn’t steppe at all that I grew up in. It was vast, rolling flats of agricultural fields – corn, sunflowers, and more recently, rapeseed. Something in my young imagination conflated agricultural fields with steppe grasslands. Perhaps it was a lack of ecological knowledge. Perhaps not paying attention. I don’t recall caring that much anyway: it was vastness, flatness, something to drive through, transitory, between-cities space to pass and let my gaze roll over, like perekotypole, tumbleweed, whose Ukrainian name literally translates as “roll-through-the-field”. My inability to tell the two apart haunted me; they are the only thing I want to write about now.
The confusion about the steppe is a historic one, and one to reckon with today. Growing up in central Ukraine in its early years of independence means living in the legacy of the imperial imaginary of the steppe as an empty void that needs to be cultivated into productive agricultural land in order to have any value. Value, defined by the growing empire needing to sustain itself. Darya Tsymbalyuk writes about the steppes a few hundred kilometres east of the place I’m writing about, Donbas steppes.3 Darya reminds us the steppe was never empty: there were nomadic people making homes across it, and Cossacks, and of course ecosystems in their own right. It was made empty through the Russian empire’s expansion south, hungry for more “resources” to put at the service of empire-building.
COMPLICATING KIN & LAND
At first horytsvit was a conductor into the steppe for me. But then it turned into something larger: a home, a kin. I’ve been living away from my hometown of Kropyvnytskyi for 15 years now, making homes elsewhere, sporadically coming to stay there for a month at a time at most, before my parents fled the war. And yet I feel a strong desire to connect with it, to understand it, to renarrate it for myself.
In Ukrainian there’s a way to describe your home-place as kin-place, ridnyi krai. It’s similar, but different to the notion of motherland, fatherland, homeland, different to “native” land or “ancestral” land. There’s a sense of wider kin, rid: a kin that extends far beyond blood connections. In Scotland, where I am living now, people sometimes use the Gaelic word dùthchas to describe this complex connection between people and land; it is the closest concept I know of to ridnyi krai. Krai can mean both land, edge, and region. There are no clear administrative borders to ridnyi krai. It can be a landscape, a river, an ecosystem, a town with its outskirts, a familiar corner of the forest.
Ridnyi krai lets me say, I am of this place, of this
used-to-be-steppe-turned-cracked-concrete-surface-and-wrecked-soils-yet-blossoming land.4
I am of this place, of this apricot, apple, plum, walnut, and cherry tree, of this spirea shrub, and of so much more.
Writing about kin, as a Ukrainian researcher, is not a straightforward task. The so-called “kinship turn” in anthropological and geographic scholarship has been reorienting academics towards land and relationality over the past couple of decades. However much of it remains within a binary of indigenous researchers writing/thinking with all their relations, and Western/white/settler-colonists adopting the concept while practicing varied degrees of good faith – anything from duly credited, ethical knowledge production to downright co-option and appropriation. As an independent Ukrainian researcher and artist with no institutional affiliation, this leaves me in a confusing place in relation to kin: I claim neither indigeneity, nor “westernness.” There must be another place to write from. This place is of someone who became attuned to the concept of kin because of my exposure to the relational thinking of Indigenous as well as western scholars and creatives: Matika Wilbur, Adrienne Keene, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ariel Salleh, Deborah Bird Rose, Max Liboiron, who in multiple brilliant ways resituate the human, the relations, and the environment to offer critique of the oppressive structures and discourses and never fail to propose viable alternatives, remaking the foundations from which we grapple with the world within and around us. I am indebted to them in my understanding of environmental relations.
But my personal affinities are with the Indigenous scholars, who also write from a place that is in the process of re-stitching itself together, raging, repairing the hollowness left behind by years of imperial, colonial erasure resulting in a dire state of archives; by the internalized inferiority complex. I see you and I hear you. The Ukrainian notion of rid/kin that I am writing about here has nothing to do with either indigeneity nor westernness. I don’t think it does, anyway. There is no academic or publicist work that I can cite to offer any genealogy of how the term kin has emerged in the Ukrainian context, or how it came to be such a linguistically slippery concept, effortlessly gliding between human and more-than-human worlds. This does not diminish the fact that, in Ukrainian, I am able to think about kin in relation to the human and the more-than-human simultaneously.
What I’m after is the idea of transnational solidarities, allegiances beyond nation states. I am hardly alone or novel here: bioregions, localities, spaces, places, territories, lands have all been shaped and articulated well before me and all with various degrees of commitment to re-narrating a relationship with patches of the more-than-human worlds with which we have intimate relations. It is, after all, a question of scale: the scale at which we grapple with these worlds, at which we seek wisdom, clarity of thought, intensity of encounter, to fix what is broken and grieve what is lost, to determine what to include into our moral realm and what to designate as disposable and exploitable. There is naïveté and ahistoricity in the ways these less-than-state units have been deployed as analytical lenses, misconstrued as perfect little utopias disconnected from global supply chains. The kind of kin-regioning I am after is one that opens up rather than closes down political possibilities for life to flourish here and elsewhere, holding together the geographical, ontological, and epistemological hypostases of the kin-regions.
Writing about land is another ambivalent enterprise. In Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron points out that there is nothing inherently good about land relations.5 I recognize this as I think about Russian colonial rhetoric, which propagates a coercive kinship: the brotherhood (sic) of nations. Less popular two years into the full-scale war, the narrative of Ukrainians and Russians as brothers has for decades been force-fed to anyone willing to swallow it. “Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood,” “historical kin peoples,” and other imperial clichés manipulate the notion of supposed affinity to construct a justification for erasing difference, erasing Ukraine as an independent country, erasing our account of history, our intellectual and political tradition, our sovereignty. We must therefore learn to tell good and bad kinship apart, and, when needed, to do the vital work of de-kinning.
Kinship and land-relations can be an even more treacherous ground if we stay alert to their fascist counterparts: land, as blood and soil, has been weaponized to wage genocides against entire places and societies, by drawing misconstrued parallels between society and its affiliation to land, romanticizing the rurality under auspices of development and progress, and sacrificing ecosystems and women’s bodies in the service of production, growth, and expansion.
None of that, please, in the land relations I am after. Thinking land as a Ukrainian not subscribing to a homogenous definition of Ukrainianness, thinking from the periphery in relation to imperial cores, I now have others I lean on when I think about land: Kateryna Hrushevska, Olha Kobylianska, Maik Yohansen, Darya Tsymbalyuk, Tanya Richardson, Anna Olenenko, Svitlana Matviyenko, Asia Bazdyrieva, Yullia Kishchuk, Kateryna Iakovlenko, my late grandmother. Each of them generously, intentionally and coincidentally, keep me from slipping into the abstract "land,” help me stay with the scale that I persist on thinking with: horytsvit scale. Locating ourselves in relation to our ridnyi krais – without cherry-picking the comfortable bits of the story, without starry-eyed idealism about land or kin relations, staying truly grounded in the political commitments of multiplying possibilities for life and justice – this is the work that the present and presents-to-come demand from us, over and over.
1 “Криптовалютна шахта згори уранової” (вірш, 2022).
2 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 151.
3 Darya Tsymbalyuk, “Radiant Absences,” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, no. issue 61: Earthly Mattering, 2023 https://www.academia.edu/105318690/Radiant_absences.
4 “ЛОЗИ, СТОВБУРИ, КОРІННЯ” (вірш, 2021).
5 Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021).