To Obama, From Ukraine (With Love)
Joy and homesickness in the Peace Corps
I woke at 5 a.m., for once beating Olha to rise. I gathered my long tubes of wallpaper, needed for the day’s English lessons because we made all our posters on the backs of mellow-toned prints. I dressed very nicely in a skirt and pearls and high heels. We were obliged to dress up whenever we taught at school.
I filled a plastic container with some of Olha’s grapes, it being custom in Ukraine to bring food to your hosts. I buttoned my coat and walked across the street to Liudmyla Viktorivna’s apartment. My hands were full.
I knew nothing.
I went in, shedded coat and wallpaper and grapes, saw Christie in the hall holding a plate of toast.
“Liudmyla found a toaster!” she announced. They were serving a real American breakfast. After reciting all my customary Ukrainian greetings, I asked in English, “How’s it going?”
Christie answered, “Amazing.”
I walked into the room where everyone else was: the three other volunteers in my village, the five from nearby Baryshivka, the TV which boasted BBC World and thus earned the honor of hosting us that morning. I was prepared to sit with them for the next hour, holding my breath and counting. But before I said hello my eyes went to the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, where next to the name “Obama” was a number I don’t remember but had three digits and started with a 3, and the next thing I knew my heels had left the floor and a yelp had left my throat and Christie’s toast had been flung from her plate.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
But everyone laughed. I felt terrible about the toast. I felt amazing.
A little over a month we’d been living in the Ukrainian village of Korzhi, too small to be found on any map. We were the first Americans ever to stay there. We were training to be Peace Corps Volunteers. We spent our days studying the language and teaching English lessons at the school and socializing with our Ukrainian host families. All nine of us, in Korzhi and Baryshivka, shared the same political prejudices and our hopes for that morning were united. We had all contrived ways to get our votes counted on time — some had their ballots sent to their homes so their parents could vote for them, some e-mailed PDF attachments to their county clerks, and others, like me, walked with their sealed sacred envelopes to the local post office and said in timid Ukrainian, “I need to send my ballot to America, please.”
I was 21, and it was my first vote cast in a presidential election.
“The map, the map!”
We all started to cry. It rapidly set in that there would be no tenseness, no sucked-in breath, and all that was left was laughter and camaraderie and giddy early-morning joy. We disapproved of the British network’s graphics. We wanted to know how the states had gone.
“Where’s the goddamn map?”
There was dull footage of cheering Chicago crowds and an inexplicable interview with Gore Vidal. When at last our color-coded country emblazoned the screen, we sent up a hearty American cheer. My own Michigan, a swing state, had gone blue. I felt in my heart that my ballot had gotten there. We saw the results of the Senate races. More cheering. I called my mother, all happy and crying and missing me.
“He’s like our very own Jed Bartlet,” she said, referencing the hero of our beloved TV show The West Wing. “Except better, because he’s black!”
Our cheering and laughter hushed as the British anchors announced that the man was going to speak. I was sitting on my knees in Liudmyla Viktorivna’s living room, my toast finished, legs tucked under my skirt. The mayor of Korzhi, Iryna Viktorivna, who was Liudmyla’s sister, had arrived. We listened. Barack Obama gave his speech. Unexpected tears got into my eyes.
I had admired Obama, true. Four years before I’d gone to the counter-inaugural protests in DC, and we’d yelled “Obama O-Eight!” below the bleachers where Republican ladies in fur coats observed the solemnities. But they didn’t believe us and we didn’t believe us, and when the primaries came four years later I backed Clinton, though I was ready enough to support either her or Obama. Still, I distrusted the hero worship so many liberals succumbed to then. I distrusted the term “post-racial” and Obama’s claims that America could somehow escape and transcend its scarred history; I distrusted the imperialism the office of Presidency had assumed, and the assumption of many Americans that this itself was not the danger, but only the man who occupied that office. I couldn’t follow media coverage of the elections. I could hardly read anything about democracy if it wasn’t written by Tocqueville or Arendt or James Baldwin. I was college-ruined, arrogant, disheartened. To complete my alienation from American politics, I had moved to a remote Ukrainian village.
Then, Iryna Viktorivna got out glasses and a bottle of champagne. She spoke no English. Though mayor of the village, she had made a firm point with us that she was no politician. From all we understood, Ukrainians had no great faith in politics. She poured the champagne and raised a toast to the novyi prezydent. Tears had got in her eyes too.
You want to be in America on Election Day. You want to wait in line at the polls of a Detroit public elementary school, you want to see the red-and-blue map graphic on the evening news, you want to witness the dance parties on Woodward Avenue when the people elect a black man President for the first time. It hurts behind your ribs. It’s loneliness.
Iryna Viktorivna raised a toast, and I wanted to be nowhere else in the world but where I was.
They loved him because we loved him.
“He believes in peace,” the mayor and some others told us. The night before, my host mother Olha and her daughter-in-law Ira asked me who I supported.
“Barack Obama,” I answered promptly.
“The niher?” said Olha.
“The dark one?” amended Ira, seeing my face. Ukraine has not had its language shaped by bloody white supremacy — no memory of race riots, lynch mobs, slavery. They did not see the ghosts we saw when Obama walked out onstage. They did not feel the rapture of witnessing a miracle; the frustration of this miracle being too little too late.
But they had their own memories of violence, of victory and its aftermath. Our teacher Vika was wistful and guarded as she watched the elated crowds. The Orange Revolution was fresh in her mind, as were the failures of so many of its promises.
“I hope it goes better for you,” she said.
Something special and holy filled the packed living room in Korzhi that morning. Some spirit of togetherness and renewal, of community and gladness, breathed itself into each of us and took us grinning to our English lessons, which we led with Olympian energy. It followed us home that evening, when Olha and Ira and Ira’s son came through the door hoisting a bouquet of purple flowers. They brought down the jar of samhon, Olha’s home-made vodka. Christie came over and we squeezed around the kitchen table, drinking and feasting in the Ukrainian style. I was thrilled, at once, to be American and to not be in America. I was both homesick and triumphant. I knew I would need to temper my jubilation with the skepticism that kept me grounded in my principles, but temperance could come tomorrow.
It was time to raise another toast.
That was the election of Barack Obama, when I was 21, in the rural village of Korzhi, Ukraine, surrounded by love.
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