Shifting perspectives
Awkward Stumbles and Fuzzy Memories is the memoir of a young woman from small-town Wisconsin who leaves home for the first time ever — for a two-year Peace Corps stint in the newly post-Soviet Ukraine of the 1990s. The culture shock is real, and author Kathy Ivchenko's younger self navigates everything from water and power cuts, to cultural stereotypes, to struggling to learn languages, to finding love in this honest and ultimately uplifting account of one woman's realization of the amazing power of travel to shift one's own perspective.
The events of the book take place in the 90s, but the audiobook was recorded and released in 2022 — during a war in Ukraine that has the global community on edge and the media world obsessing over place names.
Throughout its history, Ukraine has been controlled by various states, finally declaring independence in 1917, only to be taken over by the USSR in 1922. It regained independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But since 2014 has been in conflict with its neighbor, Russia, which first took Crimea and then launched a full scale invasion in 2022.
The Ukrainian language and cultural identity began to really emerge and flourish around the 16th century, and so, lest the people get their own ideas of governance, was also constantly under attack by various occupiers who shut down centers of learning, forced people to speak state-sanctioned languages, cracked down on publications, and more. But somehow Ukrainians persisted. Through the roller-coaster of the Soviet era, which alternately celebrated and vilified the Ukrainian language and culture, people in Ukraine spoke both Ukrainian and Russian because it was what they had always known, because it was how they identified, and because it was necessary to survive.
All of this brings us to Kyiv. Or Kiev. Or Kyiw, Kyïv, Kyjiv, or Kyyiv. Neither Russian nor Ukrainian, of course, use a Romanized alphabet, so all of these spellings for Ukraine's capital city are approximate, regardless of which language you start with. The one we have been used to seeing in English for the last several decades, "Kiev," is derived from the Russian "Киев," not from the Ukrainian "Київ," whence Kyiv. In 1995 the Ukrainian government passed a law about transliteration to officially endorse the Ukrainian-derived spellings and try to get the international community to convert as well. But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs found the most success with a social media campaign #KyivNotKiev, where they called out various international news outlets for the old spellings and thousands of Ukrainian citizens would pile on to repeat their requests for change. That, alongside the ongoing conflict with Russia since 2014, finally convinced many anglophone news outlets — and state departments, airports, etc. — to make the switch.
By 2022, the spelling and pronunciation of Kyiv was part of mainstream chatter in America, especially in progressive circles, with news radio outlet NPR making a point of switching their pronunciation to be more in line with the Ukrainian language. If you wrote "Kiev" or said "kee-EV" you were speaking the language of the oppressor. So I was terribly conscious of this when I went to record Kathy's book. Her book takes place in the 90s, mind you, and she uses the spelling "Kiev" throughout. But...how should I pronounce it? I speak neither Russian nor Ukrainian, so any attempt I would make would still sound — let's be honest — wrong to a native speaker. I listened to recordings of native speakers. I consulted dictionaries and videos and official guides. We decided to go with "KEE-yiv" which still has two syllables (emphasis on the first), unlike the NPR-favored alternate pronunciation "KEEV." Still, when I sent the book to my audio engineer for proofing, editing, and mastering (and with a key to pronunciation of various place names), her first question to me was, "So, how are we handling Kyiv?"
Voice and speech coach Amanda Quaid talks about how learning a dialect can be scary because it's effectively like infiltrating a tribe. It's astonishing how much power language has over humans — to unite or divide. As storytellers we like to play up the power of language (and thus the influence and importance of stories) and you'll often find us espousing opinions about the strength of words anywhere on a spectrum between "they influence thoughts and ideas" and "they cast unbreakable magical spells." But the other thing about them is that they're never fixed. Even if you're inhabiting a realm where you're speaking your native language in your native dialect, the meaning of individual words is still constantly evolving, and one word may not mean the same thing to you — or sound exactly the same way spoken aloud — as it does to the person next to you. Factor in dialects, translations, languages, inequality, economics, globalization, artistic license, and legal considerations and the permutations and possibilities are endless.
Humans speak words. Words have power. And humans are complicated, flawed, constantly changing. Did I lose a little sleep over the pronunciation of a single word? I did. Did it create trepidation in my mind? A little. Do I think it was unmerited, this deep thinking about words and meaning and morality? On the contrary, I think it was vital. I plan to keep speaking words aloud, knowing they have power, knowing I might not always know the full extent of their influence, knowing that a hundred people may perceive them two hundred different ways, and also knowing that stories are an intrinsic part of our shared human experience and any word that inspires thought is worth sharing.
Check out the audiobook of Awkward Stumbles and Fuzzy Memories by Kathy Ivchenko on Audible.