Zenia Kish

As the relevance of ethnic identity is increasingly tested for Canadian youth today, we must face this complex and politically charged notion. Speaking as a youth of Ukrainian descent born and raised in Canada, my identity is multivalent and relational. I am identified internally and externally according to different criteria and interests. Strangers have by turns labelled me Polish, Russian, Mediterranean, Egyptian, British, Irish, part AsianIve even been asked if my name is African. By integrating into a pluralistic society such as Canada, Ive been raised understanding that a face, accent, or name is endlessly open to interpretation. And so is my underlying sense of identity and cultural affiliation.

I grew up speaking English as my first language, French as my second, and Ukrainian as an undeveloped linguistic intuition. My childhood was populated by recurring icons of Ukrainian culture in the form of celebrated traditional holidays, household objects of folk art, and images and stories of my extended family in the old country. I took Ukrainian dancing lessons, attended Ukrainian school, and apprenticed to the bandura. Despite a lack of fluency in the language, my parents impressed upon me the rich and vibrant heritage that their parents and grandparents brought when they immigrated from Ukraine. I wore my culture like a badge of individuation: a duty that required many hours of hard, sometimes monotonous, work, but also as a mark of pride in front of my friends. When my mother volunteered in my public school teaching us pysaty pysanky, I acted as ambassador for that exotic and distant culture that was largely a series of symbols for me.

My valuation of Ukraine changed dramatically when my family relocated to Kyiv during my first year of secondary school. No longer could I compartmentalize and control my ethnicity; suddenly, I was confronted with the lived experience of Ukraine. During a brief and germinal stay there, I understood Ukraine through the lively theatre, ballet, and opera scene in the capital city; I absorbed the anachronistic bureaucratic stranglehold on the practical living of Ukrainians; I connected with the vast network of my near and distant relatives located in cities and villages throughout western Ukraine. I struggled with the ideological foundations of a political system that jarred with my own Canadian conceptions of freedom and justice, and fell in love with the spirit of independence determined that preserved so many elements of Ukrainian tradition. I again played the part of ambassador for a diasporic notion of Ukrainian culture, which had maintained certain rituals and practices through immigration and world wars that Communism had obliterated; my mother again taught the art of pysanky, but this time to native Ukrainians who had lost all knowledge of it. I was awed and dismayed at the marginalization of the Ukrainian language, and pondered the effect of independence in a nation that modernized the name of my street in Kyiv from Krasno Armyiska to Chervono Armiyska.

I grew up in Canada infused with an immigrants perspective on Ukraine, dependent on a historic notion of a country whose history was later rewritten by imperialist forces. I then reversed the journey of my grandparents by moving back to a Ukraine that had changed its self-conception. And now, in Canada, I have been asked numerous times what my cultural heritage means to me, and to define my role could be within an increasingly divided and aging Canadian Ukrainian community.

I can only relate to being Ukrainian insofar as it relates to my lived experience. I am not a product of Ukraine, a cultural entity homogenized through social and political processes that sought to repress the freedom of a people ravaged by foreign domination for the greater balance of its history. Nor am I fully a product of Canada, where the polyphony of ethnic expressions is vulnerable to generational dissipation. I am not an apathetic bystander, indifferent to my roots, but neither am I attracted to the structure and ideals of the Ukrainian organizations operating in Canada.

Where have all the Canadian Ukrainian youth gone? They are busy traveling the world, educating themselves in diverse fields, exploring the cultures of their classmates and coworkers as much as they pursue their own. They have not forgotten their roots, but they cannot necessarily communicate in the language of their immigrant grandparents, and more importantly, do not accept the monolithic and exclusive construction of Ukrainian-ness dictated by many older community spokespeople. Just as so many of our parents and grandparents left their Ukrainian homes to embrace what they expected would be a freer and more inclusive society, let us remember their goals and desires to expand and improve the opportunities of their offspring. Let us recognize that being Ukrainian is a multifaceted and evolving identity, both in Ukraine and abroad, not confined to the ideological, linguistic, or traditional markers of our forefathers. Although interacting with all of these features, my understanding of my culture is based on myriad symbolic and living experiences that bespeak diversity and interpretation on personal and institutional levels. Rather than answering the perplexing problem of the dissolution of many cultural youth groups, I wish rather to reframe the question: instead of asking why the youth no longer fit into preconceived Ukrainian organizations, let us ask instead how the idea of Ukrainian Canadian organizations can grow to accommodate the ideas of our youth.