A Person, a Place, a Possession: A Review of Yuliia Iliukha’s “My Women”
By Catherine Parnell
The call for humanity and an end to conflict is urgent, and nowhere is this truer than in war-torn areas – think of Ukraine, of Gaza, and every other land riddled by violence. The war horrors blacken our collective souls (Aren’t we better than this? Apparently not.), and while we’re moved, a full understanding of a country’s culture shot through by war ricochets from moment to moment, as the news works its way through the hours. We barely have time to absorb it. For the depth necessary to tie the moments together, turn to what the lasting power of books offers. Precious books that document precious lives. “My Women” by Yuliia Iliukha, translated from the Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv (128 LIT, October 2024), documents women’s lives changed by death and destruction, and the stories will rip your heart open. As they should.
The collection pulses with emotion, and the cover is a bloody Valentine – a vaguely outlined individual wearing one blue glove, holding a knife in one hand and surgical scissors in the other, snips spaghetti-like sections of arteries carrying blood out of a free-standing heart into a bowl – or is it a hole? Whatever it is, it’s a clue. We’re looking at lives cut short, cut open, chopped up and bleeding. Blood-red tears drip from an ear nestled in the letter ‘o’ in the word “women” of the title, and red lips hold space in the letter ‘e’.
War’s brute force as experienced by women is the book’s subject. Iliukha dives headfirst into the death and destruction unleashed by Putin’s war and her perspective and point of view lies in the she/hers/they/them category. The book is equally and artfully segmented, snips of a cardiogram exposing the loves and losses, fear and hatred, and the need to survive by women. One paints her nails red, one worries no more about dying without wearing her panties, a duo – one who left and one who stayed – eat themselves up for their decisions. The progression of women as they file past, dropping their stories into our lives lean into things we’d rather not think about: “a hundred of their [Russian] lives for one righteous Ukraine soldier.”
Consider these words.
The woman who had never welcomed her husband back home no longer knew what she should live for.
She put her pain in her backpack and carried it along the river where the sun had died and was reborn each day.
In the end, she meets another woman “who’d never welcomed her husband back home, either.” The segment concludes: “They would go on living for the sake of those they had never welcomed back home.” The simple repetition of the word home, coupled with welcome, evokes a way of life that existed before the war, when welcome to a home meant the only fire burning would be in the fireplace.
The force propelling each segment is brevity, and in an acknowledgment of the popularity of the flash form of writing, each vignette, each profile – for what else can we call these sketches of women – runs short on the page, and long in the ask for reflection. The cadence is clear, the background, the noise of war. The circularity of the vignettes exposes the anger. Take, for instance, the profile that begins, “The woman who sowed little tears reaped black hatred. Once, she could not cry.” – it’s clear that time is over as the vignette evokes darkness in a garden, growth, even the Bible. What causes the tears? A “lone tank” approaching the enemy, an enemy plane shot down (“Her moist eyes glistened with happiness and rage. . . “), her brother’s death. Finally,
The woman who could not cry now wept every day – with anger, with despair, with joy. Every single day she sowed her tears and nurtured hatred. Watered with tears, the hatred grew and strengthened to finally destroy everyone who made the woman cry.
To deny hate in a time of war is to deny the person, to deny what is felt, to question the reason for the “intense or passionate dislike.” Acknowledge it. Bring all the emotions forward in order to understand the culture and consequences of war. Iliukha’s anonymous women live those consequences even as they remain steadfast.
Perhaps humor – dark humor – enables them to do that. It injects feeling in the vignette profiling a woman who writes to St. Nicholas asking him to bring death to her enemies. In the end, she shoves the letter away and decides “she only believed in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, anyway.” We’re asked to put away sweet and fanciful constructs and believe in the brutal reality.
But remember, too, the sweetness of love. What it means to love and what it means to lose that love, a person, a place, a possession.
The emotional power of “My Women” will have you dropping the book in shock. The brevity of the book lays bare the ways in which we mourn and grieve while at the same time asking you – the American reader – to do something aside from sticking a “We Stand With Ukraine” sign in your yard. Start by reading the book, then ask yourself who else Putin has eyes on. Based on the 2024 presidential election results, that should be perfectly clear. And a sign in the yard won’t stop him – any of the hims out there.
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Author Bio: Catherine Parnell is an editor, educator and co-founder of MicroLit. She’s the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. Her publications include the memoir, “The Kingdom of His Will,” as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review (story and interview) Switch, Emerge (ELJ), Cult, Orca, Grande Dame, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, Barnhouse, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.