Reaching Across the Distance: An Autoethnography of Ukrainian Landscapes in the Liminal Space

Abstract

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has intensified human displacement and environmental damage. Having lost my home in Ukraine and moved to Canada, I found myself in a liminal space, disconnected from my homeland. In this posthumanist autoethnography, I explore how I could engage with the Ukrainian landscapes from afar. To answer this question, I wrote an autobiographical timeline, in which I described the most important landscapes of my life. I combined it with the stories from six conversations about home with people from my personal network. What I learnt about myself and others enabled me to describe an inanimate agency, the Eerie, that hinders my connection with the Ukrainian land. I outlined the key elements of the Eerie: ambivalent feelings toward my family, postcolonial haunting, landscape loss due to war, internalized colonialism, and voicelessness. I found ways to counter each component and engage with my home landscapes beyond distance and destruction: through a persisting emotional bond, growing love for the new places, by imagining my way into the landscape’s way of being, sharing stories about landscapes, and listening to my body. This study offers a perspective on the presence of the Eerie in the postcolonial experience of displacement and invites story-sharing about landscapes we cherish to foster relationships between people.