Kalyna’s Song (review)

Kalyna’s Song is Lisa Grekul’s first novel. It began its life as Grekul’s Master’s thesis, and she subsequently revised it for publication while working simultaneously on her doctorate. Both Kalyna’s Song and Grekul’s academic work examine how members of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada use the arts to represent and shape an understanding of what it means to claim to be Ukrainian here, often generations after the initial moment of immigration. As a descendent of Ukrainian immigrants who homesteaded on the Canadian prairie, this topic hits close to home for Grekul, and much of the novel appears to be autobiographical. Its protagonist, Colleen Lutzak, whose grandparents arrived in Canada from Ukraine, lives in small-town Alberta and studies abroad in Africa, mirroring Grekul’s own early life. But the story is much more than a memoir of Grekul’s adolescence. Rather, it offers an ethnic coming-of-age story in two parts: the first section follows Colleen through her final years of high school as she struggles to understand what being Ukrainian is, despite neither speaking Ukrainian nor ever travelling to Ukraine; the second section sees Colleen travel to Swaziland, where her ethnic concerns are set against a backdrop of global race relations.

Colleen is a talented musician, and, not surprisingly, music, and the arts more broadly, function as vehicles through which she makes sense of her ethnic identity. During the first section of the book, set during the 1980s heyday of multiculturalism, Colleen begins to grapple with two very different kinds of Ukrainianness: contextual folk customs and historicized classical culture. The folk culture that has been the sum total of her childhood ideas about what it means and feels to be Ukrainian is personified in Colleen’s cousin, Kalyna. The simple Kalyna loves Ukrainian folk music as the link to a culture that she has forgotten, evoking Colleen’s own juvenile ideas about what Ukrainianness entails. After meeting a new music teacher, Sister Maria, however, Colleen begins to see that there is more to Ukrainian identity than simple folk arts, and she is introduced to the works of Ukrainian composers and Ukraine’s history. Under Sister Maria’s tutelage, Colleen learns that Kalyna’s type of Ukrainianness, one locked in a past accessed through half-forgotten folk customs, is incomplete.

Colleen’s understanding of Ukrainianness through Ukrainian folk music and Ukrainian classical music gets further complicated when she travels to Swaziland to study for a year. Repeatedly she fails to make her Ukrainianness comprehensible to her international schoolmates. How can she be Ukrainian when she does not speak the language? How can she be Ukrainian when she has never been to Ukraine? How can she be Ukrainian when she is ignorant of Ukraine’s history and politics? She has no answers to these questions, and struggles to find them in this new environment, where race relations are much more volatile in comparison to Colleen’s relatively privileged Canadian experiences.

While Colleen is in southern Africa, Nelson Mandela is freed from prison, and her entire school breaks into celebration. Feeling excluded, Colleen makes friends with another outsider, Rosa Richardson. Colleen is a musician and Rosa is a visual artist, obsessed with drawing and painting embryos, an image of beginnings unburdened by the past. Just as Kalyna represents Ukrainian folk culture, and Sister Maria represents Ukrainian classical culture, Rosa represents culture as an embryonic tabula rasa.

In the end, Colleen moves beyond the ethnic models represented by these three women. By the close of the novel, Kalyna, Sister Maria, and Rosa are all dead. Their deaths serve not only as narrative touchstones that give shape to the story, but also to demonstrate a symbolic rejection of the kinds of ethnicity they embody. Kalyna’s folk arts are too superficial; Sister Maria’s classical music is too rarefied; and Rosa’s obsession with embryos, evincing her idea that cultural traditions and history do not matter, is unthinkingly naive.

As Colleen returns to Canada and works on her original...