The Artist as Essential Witness in War: Anna Vallée’s Review of Yuliia Iliukha’s My Women

My Women
Yuliia Iliukha, translated by Hanna Leliv
128 LIT, 2024
84 pp.

When the war between Ukraine and Russia began, journalists mobilized to count the dead, track territorial lines, and speculate on strategy. But facts are not enough. Artists also serve as essential witnesses during war, and a worthy artist-witness digs below surface-level facts to reveal the deeper emotional and psychological truths about a conflict.

In My Women, Yuliia Iliukha seeks to do just that. Published almost two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, My Women is a series of forty vignettes, each fewer than 500 words, which offer glimpses into the daily lives of Ukrainian women during the war.

Iliukha’s work emerged in parallel to the conflict. After Russia’s invasion in 2022, she fled to Austria with her son and began chronicling her experiences on Facebook. She also began posting her flash fiction, which caught the attention of translator Hanna Leliv. The two women collaborated, and Leliv helped place the stories in literary magazines, including newcomer 128 LIT. The work grew, winning 128 LIT’s International Chapbook Prize, and the small press published the volume in the fall of 2024. My Women is 128 LIT’s first story collection after only two issues (their first issue winning a CLMP’s “Best Debut/Magazine Award) – a sign of their ambition.

Each vignette in My Women begins by introducing the woman at the center of the short story in one sentence. Although the women have subtle age markers, hair colors, or clothing styles, their identities are dictated by the war. Similarly, Iliukha does not use names. Instead, she describes her characters as “the woman who…” followed by an essential detail – for example, the woman who “gave shelter to wounded soldiers” and the woman who “betrayed her husband.”

Each story takes up no more than two pages – just long enough to deliver a message before it's gone. Reading feels like inhaling and exhaling. The brevity and the thematic consistency of each scene invokes Nathalie Sarrote’s Tropisms. Unlike the quietness of Tropisms, however, My Women is urgent and sometimes violent. The prose is taut, lean, and unflinching.

Some narratives end in tragedy, others in triumph. Many more end in ambiguity. The collection ends not with any definitive victory or defeat but with a woman on an evacuation train leaving the station: “She heard her roots snap and crack, breaking free from the soil.”

Fictional storytelling usually requires characters to have agency, but what agency does any isolated character have during war? Sometimes, Iliukha’s women have the ability to make an important choice. For example, one woman chooses to leave Ukraine. Another chooses to stay. Both women grapple with the guilt they feel about their choice. Other characters exercise smaller acts of agency. One woman decides to wear bright red lipstick to work. Another, expecting death any minute, dresses up in “the most festive clothes” and “most expensive, laciest lingerie.” Even during war, many women are subjected to societal pressures and judgments about their appearances.

The stories do not attempt to make sense of the war, its politics, or its sequence. Instead, a more apt comparison might be to Henri Barbusse’s 1916 novel Le Feu (Under Fire: The Story of a Squad), which was released at the midpoint of World War I and won the Prix Goncourt in France. Like Iliukha’s writing, Barbusse’s account is more like a series of scenes that closely follow those impacted. Books like My Women and Le Feu question the relevance of plots or narrative arcs in war stories. Plot relies on a sense of fate or meaning – one action that leads to the next – but most good writing about war emphasizes its randomness, its chaotic and cruel twists. Iliukha and Barbusse manage to retain form and style without the need for traditional or epic arcs.

There will undoubtedly be another fictional book that tries to make sense of the war between Russia and Ukraine. Perhaps the story will try to infuse a sense of meaning or purposefulness – this battle led to this victory etc. But what a more cohesive narrative lacks, just like standard journalistic reports, is the confusion and loss that lingers for those affected. Even after the rest of the world has made sense of the war, civilians and soldiers will still struggle to find the greater meaning behind their suffering.

Anna Vallée is a fiction writer, creative writing instructor, and MFA student at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She received her Ed.M from Harvard University. Her short fiction won a Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award in 2023. She has worked for the fiction and development teams at Consequence Forum, a literary magazine focused on war. Anna lives in Medford, MA with her family and is currently working on a novel.