Ukrainian writer in Montreal finds her voice after fleeing war

MONTREAL · Anna Lyhina, a Ukrainian writer who came to Montreal after Russia's invasion, says she lost her voice in the war's wake but is learning to speak again in a new language and country. Lyhina, who holds a master's of literature from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, had been studying silence in Ukrainian poetry for her PhD. Her thesis focused on Hrytsko Chubai, an underground Ukrainian poet who wrote about things that could not always be said openly in a totalitarian state. She said the full-scale invasion made words feel insufficient, echoing her grandmother's reluctance to describe the Second World War. "I finally understood my grandmother's reaction when I would ask her about her experience during the Second World War," Lyhina said. "She always said it was bad but didn't elaborate. Not because she didn't remember. She said it was just hard to explain."

With only four months left in her PhD, Lyhina left Ukraine and bought a one-way ticket to Montreal. She thought a major war in Europe was inevitable and that North America felt farther away. "It made little sense to me to build a life in Poland or Germany if Russian tanks might reach them in a few years," she said. "Canada was a logical choice." She arrived with one backpack, about $100 and no French. "People often talk about immigration as a movement, but it felt more like disappearance," she said.

Lyhina described losing the language in which she could think without effort and the people who understood her jokes. "I left the language in which I could think without effort. I left the people who understood my jokes before I finished them," she said. "In a foreign language, I lost that control. I knew what I wanted to say, but not how to make it sound like me." She said this loss of control was not entirely bad, as it made her more sincere. Her humour, memories, education and ability to write remained, she said, but "they had simply become inaccessible to everyone except me."

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She began to postpone conversations, rewrite simple messages and apologize before expressing opinions. "I believed I had to earn the right to speak again," Lyhina said. This feeling persisted while she volunteered with Montrealers experiencing homelessness, where people rarely shared their own stories. Months later, she learned one person used to repair airplanes in Moldova, another had walked across half the country and another wrote songs. One man had such an incredible memory for history that they spent hours playing a game where he would tell her a fact and she would check it. "I would ask why they had never told me before," Lyhina said. "I was always surprised. Of course I wanted to hear it."

That experience made her recognize she had been saying the same thing to herself. "I thought I had nothing worth saying, so better I shut up and learn to communicate without mistakes first," she said. Lyhina said she came to understand that silence can be imposed politically, created by poverty, or come from language barriers or personal fears. "Sometimes it is the conviction that your words have no place in another person's world," she said. "It took me a long time to understand that nobody was actually keeping me silent." Lyhina started speaking before she felt ready, realizing the old version of herself would not suddenly return. "My voice is something I have to use," she said. "And even if it's not perfect, I'm here now, in this version of me living in Canada."

With files from CBC News