Haśka Szyjan (Ukraine) – poetry

H a ś k a S z y j a n

Haśka Szyjan (1980) – Ukrainian writer, poet and translator. She lives in Lvov and Kiev. One third of her debut novel, “Hunt, Doctor, Hunt”, was written on a mobile phone. Her second novel, “Za spynoju”, published in 2019, was the first Ukrainian novel to be given the European Union Literature Award and it also won prizes in Ukraine: the Espresso television readers’ award and the LitAccent of the Year award. She translated DBC Pierre’s “Lights out in Wonderland”. Szyjan also created the ‘Batrachomiomachia Art Project. Her poetry has been published in Poland in Babiniec Literacki and Slaska Strefa Gender, translated by Aneta Kaminska. Slippers on high heels at the humanitarian post by the borderline, amongst children’s clothes and hardly worn UGGs, standing, the last ones in the line, so inadequate and lost, as if they were listening to the distant echo of interrupted shelling and want to escape but lack the courage – perhaps it’s right here, just like the fortune-telling on St. Andrew’s Day: the first across the threshold should be ready to get married. They are as inadequate as human sensuality, locked within monastery walls, where every opportunity to focus on yourself is a sin. Like a summer job as a cashier at a public toilet, a girl – a teenager, with the looks for a Vogue photoshoot. She licks her fingers, counts the banknotes that a while ago fell to the floor and looks, like a frog-like dame she adjusts the band in front of the mirror, licking her fingers again, the same that dropped the banknotes and picked them up. She lost her golden earrings on her birthday, of all days – she suspects it was a relative, although in fact the children accidentally wrapped them in a napkin and threw them in the rubbish bin. An old man plays the Lambada on his violin, accompanying this inadequateness, underlining that in the modern world it is easy to combine a kippah and wireless headphones, a Ukraine t-shirt and a taped forehead, a girl in a uniform and a civilian boy. However, here the slippers have no idea what to stick to, to cover the eyes with an arm, a watch on the wrist, and then the ears because they don’t know whether behind the door to which they so desperately want to run there’ll be barking dogs, if people argue, whether the noise is from dust cars, ice rinks, or military equipment.