Reframing, Re-potting, Rerouting
A few months before I moved to London, my mum bought me a monstera plant. She told me that taking care of a plant is a good reminder to take care of yourself. If the plant is slowly dying, perhaps you are too. I kept my plant alive, on the windowsill of my dimly-lit living room. I watered it once a week, re-potted it before leaving Glasgow, cut off the wilting leaves. Since moving to London, my monstera has had all the sunlight it could need, but I often forget to water it, and the roots are so tightly packed within its pot that I’m surprised it’s hanging on. I can never quite bring myself to pay the £20 for a bigger plant pot. Sometimes I see the monstera dying, and I know it needs more space; more water, more soil. But the thought is gone before I can act on it.
On Saturday I walked through Hackney, on an expedition to an Eastern European shop to practice my Ukrainian. Everywhere I went, I saw plant shops. When I finally took the bait and stepped into one, I was not drawn in by the plants themselves, but by the pots they grew in. A purple pot caught my eye, too small for my monstera, shimmering in the dappled sunlight through the windows. The jungle of leaves around me was reminiscent of Glasgow Botanic Gardens, and I was transported to a different era, a time in my life where I, too, needed to be re-potted. I looked at the leaves, the soil, the ceramics, and I thought about how both plants and clay come from the ground. The clay is dug up from the earth, shaped, fired, painted, and becomes a vessel for plants that are equally uprooted. What does it mean that they find each other again, in spite of the changes they have been through?
Last week, I attended an East European Studies conference. The final panel I went to was on Ukrainian literature. I learned about a 20th century Ukrainian travel writer, Sofia Yablonska. She travelled to Morocco and China and many more locations, and was the first Ukrainian woman to write about these countries, one of the first female documentary cinematographers in the world. She was obsessed with earth and clay. Yablonska eventually settled down in France, where she built a house, and served her guests Ukrainian borshch in Chinese bowls. Again, I thought about mobility and rootedness, and the vessels we create to hold these parts of ourselves. The countries I have travelled to, the parts of me that were shaped by those experiences. My love of black ryebread, my never-ending supply of anecdotes beginning with “when I was in Estonia…”. The choice of it all. The freedom to run towards something rather than the necessity of flight. Lately all I seem to think about is the vessels we create. The ones we shape with our hands, from clay, from dough, and the ones we shape from words, with questions, arguments, dissertations. The more I release the hold the English language has on my brain, and let myself fall into the arms of Ukrainian, the more I understand language as a boundary, language as a vessel, language as the frame that defines the pictures we see.
At the conference, I was surrounded by Ukrainians. Immersed in the Ukrainian language in a way I never had been before. It’s one thing to go to a Ukrainian café and hear the language for an hour, or listen to podcasts specifically designed for language learners. But spending five days surrounded by people talking amongst themselves in Ukrainian was beautiful. I didn’t think I would get that kind of language immersion at this point in my learning. When the conference ended, I found the thing I missed most wasn’t just the panels or the people, but the Ukrainian language itself. Its softness, its rhythm, its melody, the space my brain holds for it even when English is louder. For someone whose great love is writing, there is such a unique beauty to falling in love with a foreign language. Especially a language that is less well-known, less romanticised than the languages people typically learn. I wonder what it would be like to reach a level of fluency in Ukrainian where I can write as freely as I do in English. The Ukrainian word for “fluent” directly translates to “free”. I have loved the English language for my whole life, but these days it feels like a swollen, roaring river, bursting its banks and flooding the fields around it. In English I have too many words, and in Ukrainian I have too few. Ukrainian is a vessel I am still learning to fill, but English is a plant pot too small for my tangled roots. Learning to hold two languages in my brain has taught me that I myself am the vessel, the drawer of boundaries. Both the plant and the person who forgets to water it, who procrastinates buying a plant pot that will match its size.
The most useful critique my PhD supervisors have given me this year is that my writing needs reframing, that I can’t cover everything. When they told me to reframe my literature review, I drew myself a picture. I sketched out a photo frame, wrote “gender and forced migration” over and over within the lines of the frame, creating a thematic border. Outside of the frame, I wrote topics such as “gender in sociology” “queer migration studies” and all the themes that were too broad for this section. Within the confines of the frame, I wrote all the topics that were relevant to my literature review. Gender and refugees, gender and Ukraine, etc, etc. I don’t know if drawing a picture improved my writing, but drawing boundaries did. I created a visual vessel for the ideas that were relevant, and was able to drown out all the noise of the broader context and themes. Yet the real improvement in my writing came from the dissolution of mental boundaries. When I stopped compartmentalising, and let myself feel the full extent of my compassion, my horror, my sense of justice, that was when I wrote something that made sense. As a researcher, my role is to be a vessel. My role is to hold space for the people whose experiences I will document. Committing to my research requires an abdication of self, a temporary hollowing out of the space in my heart and mind to let someone else occupy it. The more I become such a vessel, the more I feel like myself.
I am in a transitional phase, within myself and within my research. Within the past year I have outgrown so much. A city, a relationship, an identity, a way of inhabiting the world. I look at my monstera plant, cramped in its pot, and see myself in my current flat. I know I will be moving in September, just as I know I will re-pot my monstera eventually. I tell us both to hang on, that something bigger and more comfortable is out there. That one day it will have the space to expand, as will I. I am patiently waiting for this period of becoming, yet I know that when I have the space to flourish, I will become someone I can still barely conceive of.
My research, too, has outgrown its initial limitations. It happened when I realised that I am never “off the clock”, so to speak. I can draw boundaries such as not doing PhD work on weekends, but I can’t switch off my caring. I can’t switch off understanding Ukrainian. I can’t switch off reading the news and feeling my heart break. So I stopped trying, and let myself feel it all. At the end of June, I shifted the paradigm I had been working with. I stopped viewing my PhD as essentially a job, and let it become everything to me. The boundaries I had built to keep the feelings out changed form, became a warm embrace, a hand to cradle the emotions. I built a new vessel, and found a sense of purpose I have so rarely felt before. I also found anger, and an increasing sense of frustration. The more I learn about my PhD topic, the more I befriend Ukrainians and hear their stories, the harder it is to talk to people who repeat misinformation without questioning it. This anger is changing me too. Where I once would have stayed quiet, doubted my own authority, I am learning to argue, learning to educate. Doing a PhD means becoming an expert, and what is the point of becoming an expert if you do not use your expertise to advocate for the people or causes you care about?
I believe that any extended creative or academic project is an act of devotion. To spend years of your life learning about a topic in detail, writing about the minutiae of it, requires a relationship to the work that goes beyond ego and status. The devotion I feel towards my PhD has reached newfound depths this month. It is transformative, it is pure, it is beautiful. Yet it brings with it a feeling of alienation. For the first nine months of my PhD, my relationship to the work was shaped by my day-to-day life. My PhD was the experience of being a PhD student. PhDs are lonely endeavours, but there is a sense of companionship in the day-to-day challenges, because I know my colleagues are navigating those too. But my research topic itself is vastly different from the things my colleagues are researching, as is common in an interdisciplinary Area Studies programme. I am surrounded by historians and political scientists and literature scholars. My research may have been theoretical this year, but in a few months, I will be working directly with traumatised people. That is not a relatable experience. I read that researchers who interview refugees often experience vicarious trauma. I don’t know what to make of that, because this is something I’m entering into willingly. Any discomfort I may experience doesn’t feel like something I can complain about. Yet I think about this possibility often these days. On Saturday I read the parliament proceedings from the debate about the extension of the Ukraine Visa Schemes. As MPs described the ways their Ukrainian constituents are suffering from temporal uncertainty over their ability to stay in the UK, I had tears in my eyes. They referenced a child who has the same name as a Ukrainian friend of mine, and I was fully sobbing. I’m doing an excellent job of being a vessel for other people’s emotions, clearly. I tell myself that when it comes to conducting my interviews, I will be able to leave my own feelings at the door, as if I don’t cry at the drop of a hat.
Before I started my PhD, I thought I knew who I needed to be to do this work. I thought I had to be this idealised version of myself at the start. I wasn’t her. I don’t even know if I have become her now, almost a year in. I am someone else entirely. Being the right researcher for this project isn’t about being perfect. It’s not about being fluent in Ukrainian, or being the picture of professionalism, or knowing how to network. The specific angles of my research project are a product of my specific way of looking at the world. There are plenty of academics researching Ukrainian refugees, but the questions my research asks are unique to me. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about being committed to the work, and understanding why it is necessary.
The truth is, I don’t know what impact my research will have. Perhaps it will become a book that only two people will read. Perhaps it will have some meaningful impact on government policy. But at the very least, I hope it will give people a space to tell their stories and feel seen and heard. I hope it will provide people with catharsis. My research is itself a vessel. It is a vessel through which Ukrainian refugees can discuss their experiences in the UK, it is a vessel for conceptualising and understanding broader trends in British migration and refugee policy. And it’s a vessel for my own growth as an academic, and as a person. The more I try to dismiss my own personhood in the process, the more I learn the necessity of being a person here. I am not a fly on the wall; I am not an objective observer. I am a person who feels deeply, I am a person who is motivated by love and friendship and interpersonal connections. Letting those parts of myself inform my research is a necessity.