Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border
by Marina Sonkina
Guernica Editions
100 pages
$20
Journalist Marina Sonkina’s Ukrainian Portraits is a timely collection documenting her experiences at the Ukraine-Poland border in the spring of 2022. Sonkina, herself a refugee from then-Soviet Russia, compassionately draws a series of portraits of Ukrainian refugees who she met while volunteering as a translator at an evacuation centre.
Sonkina’s use of portraiture is effective in creating some understanding of the lives of civilians caught up in a war. It’s the small moments that are tremendously affecting: the woman with no teeth, unable to pick up her new dentures in Moscow; the American dancers performing for a bewildered group of refugees; the Holocaust survivor who calmly muses, “I’ve started my life with one war. And now I’m ending it with another. Does it matter to me where I die?”
Sonkina’s simple prose and pointed phrasing effectively captures the strangeness of wartime: “[T]he war had laid bare what was usually concealed from the eyes of a stranger: human attachments and loves, support for one another and acts of kindness. But also, the seismic faults running through so many families; their discontents, their arguments, and the way they deal with them in a time of crisis.”
What the refugees she met needed, “was to talk about what they had gone through,” Sonkina writes. Sonkina dutifully reports the messiness of her experiences on the ground, from disagreements with other volunteers, to those who slip through gaps in the system, to her own conflicted internal monologue.
At times, though, the text has less reflexivity. The narrator speaks glowingly of a “large, worldwide effort” to help: “the countries of [the] European Union have opened their doors and hearts to Ukrainian refugees,” she writes. Assertions of the empathetic, humanitarian nature of Western nations ring hollow, especially reading the book now in early December of 2023—two months into the full-scale genocidal attack launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip. Amid these atrocities, the Canadian government has made little to no movement toward helping civilians under attack. “Canada has always welcomed immigrants. Syrian refugees, the most recent example,” Sonkina writes. But the woman she entreats to return with her to B.C. disappears the next day. The reader can never know what she thought of the invitation.
Meanwhile, Russia’s occupation of Ukraine continues to claim and displace more lives. Sonkina’s book feels like a necessary one, particularly for those of us who are only able to glimpse the tragedy of war through the pan of a news camera, shaky cellphone footage, and reporting that trickles through closed borders and propaganda machines. In contrast, Sonkina’s work is complicated, heartfelt, and a study in detail and emotion—in short, human.
