‘When women speak of war, we get to see it in a profoundly different way’

Ukrainian-Australian writer Maria Tumarkin tells Miriam Cosic about the eclectic array of artists she has assembled for a ‘women’s reckoning’ with war

A MEMORABLE PERFORMANCE at last year's Festival of Jewish Arts and Music (FOJAM), the first after a COVID hiatus, was the reading by the Ukrainian-Australian writer and cultural historian, Maria Tumarkin, of a piece she had written, called Inherited Memories. It was a memorial, not only to the Holocaust, but to all who have suffered genocide on the grounds of race or ethnicity or religion, around the world, from Bosnians at the hands of Serbs to Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

"The parade of genocides since the Holocaust," as she put it then: "Don't get comfortable". Later in the piece, she continued, "What do we mean by 'never again', when we know for a fact. it's been again and again". And "all these figures that, if we were to remember them at all times, would crush us and bury us alive."  

This year, Tumarkin has been asked to co-curate FOJAM’s event with its artistic director, Lior Albeck-Ripka, in acknowledgement of the depth and nuance of her moral thinking, as well as the impact of her spoken piece last year. It will take place this Thursday at the National Theatre in St Kilda. The title? When Women Speak of War: Artists Reckon with Wars Declared and Hidden. Since Tumarkin was asked to co-curate last year, however, her personal world has turned upside down. 

The tensions in Ukraine, which she left at the age of 15 to come here with her family, have been burbling since the start of 2014 when Russia walked into Crimea. This February, full-scale war broke out and Russia ripped the curtain away from its denied intention to absorb the whole of Ukraine "back" within its sovereignty. When we spoke, a friend of hers had just arrived, from all that way away, to seek shelter with her. 

When Tumarkin started talking to Albeck-Ripka about this year's festival last year, though, she first brought up the work of the Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, an investigative journalist who was born in Ukraine to a Ukrainian mother and Belarusian father and raised in Belarus. Writing in Russian, she was best known for her idiosyncratic books on women, called “novels of voices” by some, which were based on hundreds of interviews.

"Lior was instantly very drawn to her work on women's experiences during the Second World War in the Soviet Union," Tumarkin says, "and to her broader idea that, when women speak of war, we get to see war in a profoundly different way and that that's something we need to make a lot of space for in our and art and literature and public discourse in general.

“Something that foregrounded women, not simply as people who experience and are affected in all kinds of ways by war, but as people who speak back to war, as artists, as historians and more." 

Tumarkin’s second sense was that, because this was happening on Yom Hashoah, how do we think of commemoration? Of the Holocaust, of course, but also, at the same time, recognise the vital importance of all commemorative modes to keep all history alive.

"I think one of the things that Lior was really interested in was my response to the importance of opening up and putting our histories, particularly our histories of genocidal violence, in conversation with each other. Not in an attempt to suggest they are the same, or to equalise them, or to erase their differences, but to suggest that we cannot talk about the Holocaust in 2022 without talking about what's happening in Ukraine.

“And to think of the genocidal violence in this land, in Australia. And to think about the communities we have in this country - people from Bosnia, from Syria, from Afghanistan - who also carry histories of war and genocidal violence."

So she set out to commission work that opened up "the importance of these different contexts to each other and not throwing comfortable slogans around about common humanity - because that's all bullshit. It should be about the importance of collaboration and commemoration as an act of putting things in conversation and an act of keeping things alive, looking at the present, not just the past."

Tumarkin's ideas have come alive in a program across multiple art forms, with Victoria Bilogan, Tony Birch, Alex Burkoy, Elise Hearst, Evelyn Krape, Sarah Krasnostein, Anita Lester, Emily Lubitz, Saray Iluminado Femme, Rita Satch, Nela Trifkovic, Billie Tumarkin, Jacki Tut and Dženana Vucic.

Thursday’s event will feature collaborations between the spoken word, Sephardic Jewish Romance music, contemporary writing, folk music with cellist accompaniment, classical Ukrainian folksongs, original music by a local hip hop artist, Yiddish folk music with multimedia projections with the traditional folk music from Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

The eclectic line-up reflects the unusual breath of Tumarkin's knowledge and sympathies, which we know from her books and her essays, and which emerge in the warmth and clarity and patience of her conversation in person. 

When Women Speak of War: Artists Reckon with Wars Declared and Hidden is at the National Theatre, St Kilda, Victoria, on Thursday April 29 

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Photo: Maria Tumarkin