On the frontlines of war, this Ukrainian poet chose listening as a way to help

Ideas53:59A Dictionary of War

Poet Ostap Slyvynsky fell silent when the war in Ukraine began.

Language and words betrayed him when he needed them most — to bear witness to the horrors around him yet with no way to make sense of it all.

At the train station in Lviv, thousands of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the carnage found shelter, a meal and a guide. This is where the poet was volunteering, and here the words found him.

"You really have to choose your role in the war," Slyvynsky told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed.

"Being in wartime does not necessarily mean fighting with weapons in my hands. There are also many other demands and challenges."

Slyvynsky listened acutely to the stories people shared with him — collecting them into what he's called A Dictionary of War. 

Here is an excerpt from the conversation he had with Nahlah Ayed.

So when you did get into conversation with people, what would you ask them? 

It was very spontaneous. I understood very quickly that you have to be a psychologist while talking to people who went through a very traumatic experience. There were many topics I tried to avoid. For example, the topics regarding their past, their home, everything they had left behind, and everything that could trigger them in any way. 

Another triggering topic could be the future because no one could predict anything… the future was something very scary for them. The safest and most obvious option was to talk about the present, the very mundane things, like their food preferences, for example, something neutral.   

But inevitably, the conversation would turn toward what they had left behind. 

Yes, sometimes they were eager to share even their heaviest experiences. 

It should be their will, their decision — I never asked them about what they went through while escaping from shelled cities or from their destroyed houses, but many of them were eager to tell me about even the most cruel experiences. 

They needed someone who was a stranger. I was a completely new person. My personality did not play a decisive role in these situations. For them, it was important that I was someone who was ready to listen to them. 

And it was also important to me that they saw someone who could provide comfort, quietness and safety. I was kind of a synonym of safety for them. It was very demanding. You have to provide this feeling of safety for someone if you want a person to share their story.    

So tell me about the resulting project, which is A Dictionary of War.

This is a collection of the fragments of monologues of the displaced persons. Dictionary of War is a documentary project. But on the other hand, it's a literary project because my main goal was not to present the strictly documentary text, which would show everything of what I had heard from my interlocutors, but to choose the most powerful fragments of these stories [that] have a universal meaning and also some kind of literary value. That's why it's also literature, maybe even poetry in some sense. 

But why put it into a dictionary form? What's the message in putting it into a dictionary form? 

The reason was very simple because the dictionary means that all the entries in this book should be presented in alphabetical order, and therefore the stories and the book would be equal because it was very difficult for me to decide which story should be the first, which story was more important or less important. 

All these stories, even very short fragments, were equal from the point of view of its human value. Even very short conversations, I felt them as very meaningful, even two phrases or a couple of words. 

But the second argument comes from the idea of the whole book because it's focused on words, the meaning of words. That's why all these stories, these fragments of the monologues are presented as explanations — not in the usual dictionary meaning, but explanations with a narrative, people telling their stories.

And maybe perhaps redefine them, of course, as well. 

Yes, redefinition, because what I was noticing listening to people was the changing of meaning, people unconsciously were using other words in an unusual sense. 

In the collection Words for War,  you have a poem titled Orpheus about this lonely child who's afraid of water. And near the end you write, 'You know at what point music comes out of anger, like a butterfly emerging out of a frostbitten cocoon?' And then you end with 'how much anger can a poem hold? Just enough to drown out the sirens?' Is that part of what's driving the dictionary project? A kind of deep anger to which only art or writing has an answer.   

Yes, literature can hold a lot of anger… because we often think about the meaning of the words during wartime. It's not obvious but the war really changes the attitude to the world, of course. It changes the reality very profoundly, and therefore it also changes the language. 

And we became more attentive to the words we use. We became more careful with metaphors, with images, with imagery, because the metaphors can hold very often some unwanted meanings. For example, many of my colleagues who work with language, people of letters, let's call them, we often used some military metaphors before the full-scale invasion. One of my interlocutors confessed that he had used phrases like 'It's a bomb' and meaning that it's something very cool, very good or very intense. We can't afford using these metaphors anymore.

I think that Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian poetry in particular of the last year, can seem aggressive a little bit to someone who hasn't experienced living within the war. But there is no hatred in this poetry. I'm very sensitive to such things and I cannot accept hatred but it's not hatred, it's fury. This is the emotion I can really see in Ukrainian literature of 2022, 2023, mostly poetry, because poetry is more dynamic, it's more flexible, it's more reactive, and it reacts quicker than prose or big fiction.   

*Q&A edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Philip Coulter. Readings were by Mark Marczyk and Marichka Marczyk.