The author of the viral poem 'We Lived Happily Through the War' on the Ukrainian sense of humor and resistance.
As for the poem—”We Lived Happily During the War” is not a piece of journalism or philosophy, where one might go into facts or questions of ethics. In a poem, one hopes to create an experience in the reader: in this case, the hope of the poem is to help the reader see their own complicity.
The poem doesn’t want to be a pronouncement. The poem is a warning. This is what happens when half-measures take place. “We lived happily during the war,” the poem begins, and it ends with the same words. But by the time it gets to its final line, one hopes the reader might find the horrific irony in that fact of repetition. How many wars can we live through, happily? One hopes the reader sees the critique of this “we” and what it has done. By the time you get to the repetition of “our country of money” and then to “our great country of money”—one questions the word “great.” That is what art hopes to do: It doesn’t shout at the reader “You must change!” Instead, the reader is changed via the act of reading.imagines a town’s sharp resistance to an occupying force. We’re now seeing citizens of Ukraine engaging in active resistance to the Russian invasion. What do you see in the response from non-Ukrainian observers to this resistance? What can we learn from theI was 16 when I left Odessa, a deaf kid who heard the USSR fall apart with my eyes. Odessa architecture is scaled down, “human sized,” and there was an opera house before there was potable water. Odessa loves art, and it loves to party. In the summer, huge cages of watermelons sit on every corner. You break them on the sidewalk and eat them with friends. The city has an especial affinity for literature. There are more monuments to writers than in any other city I have ever visited. When they ran out of writers, they began putting up monuments for fictional characters.The most important holiday in Odessa isn’t Christmas, it is April 1, April Fool’s Day, which we call Humorina. Thousands of people come to the street and celebrate what they call the day of kind humor. All of Ukraine has a sense of humor—think of the man who offered to tow the Russian tank which had run out of gas back to Russia. Humor is part of our resilience. But alas Ukraine is not a perfect country. There is corruption and a lot of crime, especially among political figures. There are oligarchs. Although the Ukrainian president is Jewish, there is still antisemitism in daily life . But what gives me hope is the new generation of Ukrainians, people who grew up after the fall of USSR. They are free—probably more free than Americans or Europeans. They have respect for freedom because the mindset of corporations hasn’t yet entered Ukraine the way it has the West. They believe in culture. There are festivals all over the place. In Odessa, for example, they had an event when people created a human chain across the city, and each person read a favorite passage from a book to a person standing next to them. I have hope in that generation.
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