Overcoming Silence
Maya Harbuzyuk*
Abstract
To quantify the dynamics of the processes that took place in Ukrainian drama and theatre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the article proposes to use the term “index of silence,” coined specifically for this paper, a key concept in decolonial studies, since it is linked to trauma, subordination, the public discourse of power and, of course, epistemic injustice. The “index of silence,” the author explains, is the number of years separating the collective historical trauma of Ukrainian society from the moment of its cultural representation in the public space.
Keywords: Ukrainian drama, war, trauma, silence, representation, Grain Depot, Glory to the Heroes, Grandma Prisya
The concept of silence or speech is one of the key concepts in decolonial studies. It is linked to trauma, subordination, the public discourse of power and, of course, epistemic injustice. Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Katie Carut, Johannes Schwalina and other researchers have written about silence as a sign of trauma in a variety of contexts.
The Polish researcher Agnieszka Matusiak titled her latest monograph Breaking the Silence. The Decolonial Struggle of 21st Century Ukrainian Culture and Literature with Post-Totalitarian Trauma. But to understand the phenomenon of contemporary Ukrainian drama that emerged after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we need to look back and trace how this breaking of the silence took place.
An important indicator of the epistemic freedom of a society is the speed with which its culture and its art respond to collective traumas. Important elements of this are the speed and quality of the transformation of the historical trauma, which is located in a specific space and time (Dominick LaCapra), into a cultural trauma that can unite society and influence the formation of its new identity (Jeffrey C. Alexander).
The construction of a cultural trauma involves the search for a language that is appropriate to the manifestation of an irrational traumatic experience. Therefore, the work with the discourse of trauma shifts the artistic language, and this is usually a transition from a rational, positivist picture of the world to a non-linear, paradoxical, irrational vision. The same thing happened in European history, when drama and theatre at different times explored the traumatic experience of the loss of statehood (Romanticism in Poland) or the worldview crises of the First and Second World Wars.
As a person who experienced the shock of the first weeks of a full-scale invasion, and as a theatre scholar, I would like to address the question of how Ukrainian drama responds to the traumatic experience of society, or rather, how quickly the discourse of trauma has been and is being shaped in the public space through drama. According to Kai T. Erikson, “trauma can create society,” the silencing of traumatic experiences, the tabooing of crises and the enforcement of collective amnesia (Paul Connerton) are key signs of epistemic violence. Breaking the silence is therefore both a mechanism for overcoming collective/individual trauma and a means of overcoming epistemic injustice.
Since in a short speech we can only outline the main points of this issue, I propose to take a more formal approach and use numbers. In order to quantify the dynamics of the processes that took place in Ukrainian drama and theatre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I propose to use the term “index of silence.” Coined specifically for this paper, I believe it will help to better summarise the results of my observations.
In my proposal, the “index of silence” is the number of years separating the collective historical trauma of Ukrainian society from the moment of its cultural representation in the public space. It refers to both the appearance of a play and the date of its first stage premiere as evidence of the viability of a playwright’s work.
In the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ukraine experienced at least five historical traumas: the Holodomor of 1932–33 (now recognised by many countries of the world as the genocide of the Ukrainian people), the Second World War (1939–45), the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the Revolution of Dignity and the beginning of the Russian war in Ukraine (2013–14), and the full-scale Russian war in Ukraine that began in 2022.
The three aforementioned traumatic events (the Holodomor, the Second World War and Chernobyl) took place when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. The totalitarian-colonial authorities imposed a total ban on many attempts to mention the themes of the Holodomor. With regard to the Second World War and Chernobyl, the only possible discourses on these issues were ideologically distorted narratives. They aimed to hide the truth and to avoid mentioning anything related to the trauma. The silence was determined by the power of state discourse, and it wasn’t just a silence—it was rather a silencing, an instrument of epistemic violence.
After gaining its independence in 1991, Ukraine was in a period of transition for a long time, as Tamara Hundorova has pointed out. The inertia of silence in Ukrainian drama was so strong that during the first two decades of independence, there were only isolated attempts to dramatise historical traumas. But these attempts did not translate into a public discourse and had no impact on society. Finally, post-independence Ukrainian society itself has not yet formed a demand for cultural practices of working with collective traumas.
Qualitative changes began in the late 2000s, with the emergence of a new generation of playwrights and the development of theatre festivals. In the space of a few years, a number of plays have been produced that have enabled the discourse on trauma to be gradually shaped through the theatre.
The first play about the Holodomor, written from the point of view of a tragic individual and group experience, was created only in 2009. The playwright Natalka Vorozhbyt wrote Grain Depot at the request of the Shakespeare Royal Theatre, and it was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre. The author based the plot on the stories she heard from her grandmother, who survived the Holodomor. Seventy-seven years have passed between the traumatic event and the play about it. The play was staged only six years later, in 2015. Since then, it has gained popularity and is now part of the repertoire of several theatres in Ukraine.
Therefore, the “silence index” is 83 years, almost a century.
In his 2012 play Glory to the Heroes?, Pavlo Arie deconstructed the post-Soviet narrative of the Second World War. The playwright was the first to break the silence about the presence of Ukrainians on both sides of the front: in the Soviet army and in the detachments of the National Liberation Army. At the centre of the play, he places two antagonists—veterans of that war, who are going through the traumatic experience of the past in different ways. [At the same time, the playwright proposed a model of forgiveness and acceptance as an ethical template for the country’s future]. The premiere took place in two Ukrainian theatres in 2016 and was extremely popular, as it fully represented the voices of the opposing parties.
So, the “silence index” is 75 years.
The next play created by Arie in 2013 was dedicated to the Chernobyl disaster. It became known as Grandma Prisya after the first performance (2015). The playwright wrote it on the basis of his mother’s experience of overcoming the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. He combined historical accuracy and social issues with elements of folk mythology and mysticism, creating an apocalyptic version of the death of a family left behind in the Chernobyl forests. It was the first play in Ukrainian theatre about the irrationality and tragic paradox of the experience of the victims of the Chernobyl disaster.
The “silence index” in this case is 29 years.
These plays: Grain Depot, Glory to the Heroes? and Grandma Prisya were created between 2009 and 2013, but they did not find a stage life on the Ukrainian scene. An attempt to stage Grain Depot in one of the Ukrainian theatres ended in a ban by the authorities.[1]
In 2014, another traumatic historical event took place—the Revolution of Dignity, with the death of the Heavenly Hundred heroes on the Maidan Square, and then the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine. There was a strong public demand to discuss this traumatic experience in the public space, including the artistic one.
Although Natalka Vorozhbyt and Andriy Mai created a documentary play called The Maidan Diaries, this did not solve the problem. In the autumn of 2014, actors from Lviv theatres turned to Sarah Kane’s play Blasted to discuss their current traumatic situation, as there was no corresponding text in Ukrainian drama. Another theatre, the National Theatre in Ivano-Frankivsk, chose an ode by Ivan Kotliarevsky, a classic of late eighteenth-century Ukrainian literature, for the same purpose.
For Ukrainian drama, however, it took only a year to manifest the trauma of the Revolution of Dignity and the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2014. In 2015, Natalka Vorozhbyt wrote the play Sasha, Take Out the Garbage!. At the same time, the circle of authors writing about the war expanded radically. Since 2015, the Theatre of the Displaced (Teatr Pereselentsia), PostPlayTheatre and other dramatic and theatrical initiatives have emerged, rapidly expanding cultural work with actual trauma.
The “silence index” in this case was only one year.
The trauma of Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2014 revealed an urgent need for society to talk about trauma in the public space. In 2015–2016, all the aforementioned plays were performed in Ukrainian theatres: Grain Depot, Glory to the Heroes and Grandma Prisya. This testifies to the “mastery” of one’s own voice, the growth of the subjectivity of Ukrainian drama and the implementation of a decolonial revolution in Ukrainian culture and art.
Against this background, the Ukrainian drama of the last year and a half is indeed a phenomenon—because the manifestation of the traumatic experience began a month after the beginning of a full-scale war and is now becoming more and more powerful. The time for transforming the experience of collective or individual trauma into a cultural one has been reduced to a minimum, and the response of drama and art has become almost immediate. The uniqueness of our experience is that we work with trauma while continuing to be in it. As one of the actresses said at the premiere of Natalka Vorozhbyt’s recent play Green Corridors, “It’s so unusual and interesting to play something you haven’t had time to think about.”[2]
As you can see, the “silence index” in Ukrainian drama and theatre has fallen sharply in the last 15 years, from 83 to zero. It indicates significant changes in the communication of drama, theatre and society, as well as changes in society itself. During this period, Ukrainian dramaturgy has not only unfolded the discourse of old historical traumas, but it has also mastered working with a traumatic experience in real-time, here and now, in non-stop mode. This makes Ukrainian drama stronger than ever, proves its absolute subjectivity and testifies to the overcoming of epistemic injustice.
If, according to Kai Erikson, “trauma can create a society,” then Ukrainian drama is doing this now, embracing the most painful traumatic experience of the war and influencing the formation of a new identity of Ukrainians that cannot exist outside this experience.
Endnotes
[1] This fact indicates a radical change in cultural and memory policy under the pro-Russian fourth President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.
[2] Авторка п’єси «Зелені коридори»: «Українські автори виявилися конкурентноздатними у світі, і спільна робота, я сподіваюся, продовжиться»
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*Maya Harbuzyuk was a PhD, Associate Professor of the Department of Theatre Studies and Drama, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv; Editor-in-chief of the theatre magazine Proscenium; honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, College of Arts and Law, Birmingham; author of over 100 articles and interviews on the history, theory and practice of modern theatre, as well as educational programs. Her research interests include postcolonial and trauma studies, Ukrainian-Polish theatre relations and Shakespeare studies. She is also the author of the monograph The Image of Ukraine in the Polish Theatrical Discourse of the 19th Century: Strategies and Forms of Representation (Lviv 2018).
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