Ukraine’s coming of age
When you watch any film described as a ‘coming of age story’ you always are faced with a passionate, powerful, sometimes shy character who is a bit lost or in the process of growing up and understanding itself better. I think many remember the scene in the film ‘Lady Bird’ as the main character in a moment of pure fury jumps out of a moving car.
When I moved to Poland, I met for the first time Ukrainians of my generation who had come to Poland to work and study and find opportunities that their homeland could not offer in comparison to the EU. They did not particularly dream in their beds as children of Warsaw, but rather of this grand idea of what the EU could provide for their future and who they could be here. As such, when many were finally here, I met a series of overachievers and ambitious people, who excelled in university and often moved on to the other EU countries, working in some of the best companies and organizations across our continent. However, I remember that many hesitated to bring to our attention their identity as Ukrainians and the story of their country, this was something they reserved for intimate conversations with their friends and colleagues from Ukraine. I often felt they were focus on their future, they wanted to be Europeans in their own right.
I remember the morning of February 24th, I was sick in my bed when I opened my phone to see a photo from an Italian newspaper, announced that Kyiv had been bombed, as well as many other places in Ukraine, unfulfilling the expectations of many that the capital would remain untouched by this violence. The next days were a blur for me, both because I was so ill and because there was nobody who could separate me from CNN and other international news channels.
This painful and still ongoing series of events started a process that I believe many would have found unexpected: Ukrainians coming of age. While many Ukrainians were deeply proud of where they came from, their story of fighting for freedom and independence and beautiful traditions that were unknown to me before, the full-scale war and its pretext coming from putin lead to many across the world to want to speak their truth, be recognised and heard as a proud Ukrainian. This coming of age was so powerful that now you always associate blue and yellow as the colours of Ukraine, you know their national soup, you recognise the embroidery, which is unique of seamstresses in Ukraine, you know about the hunger that killed so many Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933, their beautiful and melodic anthem and you see them don’t you? Ukrainians have left the margins of conversations to become the centre of it and now they are not just freedom, passionate and brave fighters, they became an indispensable thread of the tapestry of Europe which has now grown to rich and stronger proportions.
