Speaking of war (Knowledge production)

What happens with a place whose name imploded and now, for much of the world, it just means: this war?

And what is there to say about this war in Ukraine? People are being killed. Saying less is insane. Saying more, you complicate it, and that means you simplify.

Ukraine is a noun that cloaks me these days, wherever I go. Friends and colleagues avert their eyes, knowing that I returned recently, or I am about to go back. They don’t want to ask, but they are compelled to, so they fidget. They feel guilty for asking the wrong thing, guilty for avoiding asking anything, guilty that they forgot about the war since they last saw me. I don’t have to say anything to remind them, my presence is nothing but an exclamation mark.

The question they can’t help asking is trivial: when will it be over? I wish they asked: how are the people you know? What have they lived through?

I am fed up divinations and endings. Instead, my mind keeps creeping back to the past, when the big fat lie of the normal world ended for me.

My friend Magda was part of the monitoring mission in the Donbas in those years when the war went by another name. I visited her, and she drove us to Slovyansk. The mission’s job was to keep an eye on the Minsk agreement that had cooled down the fighting. She wanted to show me the place where it all started, where the militias first stormed the government buildings.

It was two years into the war and Magda had already seen too much by then. When she was on duty, sporting her blue uniform, her helmet and bulletproof vest, she looked like a plumber who came to fix broken pipes, leakages.

Her job was to drive between the checkpoints, get through the grey zone, drive into the so-called people’s republics. Document the corpses when someone violated the agreement. She would see pensioners on their way out from the puppet republics, queuing at makeshift bridges, travelling to access their pension. Kids playing football on deserted roads. Thugs playing state.

She was there to perform impartiality, and to turn some of what she sees into dispassionate reports. Into documents people in corridors of power might read.

In her sector this was called human dimension work. She shifted between anger and relief admitting how pointless she felt it was. All this human dimension stuff was a puzzle piece in a vast infrastructure, a meticulous, bureaucratic exercise of knowledge production, as it is often called.

You mince raw reality, like sausage, into knowledge for distant others. It is meant to inform, to govern, to regulate. Its cries and warnings are so coded, you need years of initiation to know how to read them.

Magda’s uniform set her apart from the locals, as the work itself did, and the pay. The bullet proof vest marked her body as precious, untouchable. But each day when her shift was over, she took it off and lived in East Ukraine, went to bars or the swimming pool, made friends, slept with lovers. Later, she raised a child, for whom Ukraine was the only home.

The bridge we drove to was broken; its mutilated body reached midway over the narrow river. Large white letters were sprayed on the grey concrete. They read: тут был русский мир. The Russian world was here. In Russian, world and peace are the same world. The joke, of course, lies in the collapsed meanings: this world of theirs, this peace they brought, is war.

Seven years later, having left Ukraine at the start full-scale war, Magda will struggle with insomnia. One of those long nights we spend together binging the news, she will stare into her wine glass and conclude she has no right to be shaken. In the next room, her daughter will sleep. All her toys still back in Kyiv, in that flat they will never return to.

She has no right to grieve, Magda will repeat, I should just look at her bank account. What has she lost, really? Other than some naïve stupidity. Still, Ukraine was most of her adult life, and the Donbas was where she made home, where she came of age guarding that non-peace, counting neck wounds, Uragan rocket-launchers and characters in field reports.

You can grieve, Magda, I want to tell her. But she grits her teeth and shakes her head. Compared to anyone, she has not lost much.

Neither have I.

I think of her often. The patrols, the reports, the double speak. In the mirror of her life and work, I see my own awkward face. I am an anthropologist. I too, arrived in Ukraine after the first shock of the Donbas war, and my every step was cushioned by bureaucracy.

Anthropologists think a lot about their ancestors, the colonial administrators of long-gone empires. But when it comes to the present, we like to believe we are lone wolves who side with locals.

Very nice. Yet, before I was cleared to leave for Ukraine for the first time, I had to pass a string of medical examinations. A stern, forty-something woman saw me at the Clinic for Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine.

After learning where my field trip would take place, she started rummaging through the computer. Rabies, cholera, meningitis, hepatitis A and B, MMR, tetanus, she listed. While checking which of these I had, she explained who I should report to, if I got infected during my field trip. She clearly liked the word field trip, which she used at every possible opportunity. When we were finished, she looked me in the eye. She was required to give me some information about related risks, she declared. Was I planning to go into their homes? Was there a possibility I would come into contact with their saliva? Before I could even formulate my answer, she launched into a long speech about the HIV epidemic raging through Ukraine. Not only did she not advise any form of sexual contact with them, she suggested that I avoid sharing their cups and cutlery too.

She lifted her immaculate body from the chair, and we shook hands. I expect she washed them as soon as I shut the door.

Their houses, their bodies, their saliva. Had I had any intention of following the doctor’s orders, I would have failed on my first day. I would have been alone all these years. Or, like some esteemed colleagues, I could have talked to everyone over zoom calls, no saliva, no drones, no regrets.

Magda, the humanitarian workers, UN staffers or myself, we all find the world of risk assessment, transparency, and ethics committees absurd. We think it is a meek attempt to isolate, manage, and mitigate the risk, trauma, and the general unknown from the rest of reality. Isolation, management, and mitigation share one key thing: control. But control can only ever make sense in a world governed by predictable, fundamentally stable routines. It speaks of class – and of peace.

Very nice. But does it make any difference whether we hate and disregard it? I will not write any reports anymore, Magda told me a few years ago. She will analyse satellite data instead. She was giddy, relieved, as if the mute exactness of this new task saved her. And I can see why.

In our world of knowledge production, words are made to do so much, they lost the ability to just be. We stretched them so far, abused them so much, they are hollow. However hard you try, pain, grief, jokes just elude them.

Justice is our only offer for the dead.

When I am asked about Ukraine, instead of the war I still think of the warm sea. I think of swaying night trains where strangers snore a concert around you. I think of night gatherings that start with hard liquor and finish with fresh grapes and tea, of kiosks and billboards and kebab stalls, of long walks in shabby old towns or desolate suburbs. I think of shopping malls with made-up women clutching small purses and smaller dogs. Of being fed too much and then given some more to take home. I think of markets that smell of dill and apples. I think of people who will joke no matter what, argue no matter what, and who end up answering all my questions with family history. I think of a language whose lilt I have come to recognise after the first syllable.

At the end of my visit, Magda gave me a piece of chocolate. I never found the appetite to eat it. There was no list of ingredients, but on the back, it said: Made in the Donetsk People’s Republic. It was obviously intended as a souvenir, produced for us and us only. Resident aliens, correspondents, war- and press photographers, community managers and harbingers of democracy, folks at monitoring missions, missionaries, research consultants, academics, doctors without borders, reporters without borders, architects, engineers without borders. Us no-border people crowding around, oh well, borders. So-called.