This post is part of the series “Gender and Atlantic Ocean Environments,” co-edited with Written in the Waves journal, for their special issue Soil and Sea.
As a kid, I used to find tiny shells in my grandmother’s vegetable garden. They were scattered in the black soil among patches of cauliflower, cabbage, onions, and beans, and I kept the ones that weren’t crushed. I thought the simple patterns of the shells were telling me of the sea three hundred miles away, and I wondered how they ended up here among my grandmother’s vegetables in the steppe of Eastern Ukraine. Once, I was told that the shells were there because the garden, along with my grandmother’s small fields of rye, buckwheat, and potatoes, were once an ancient sea.
In truth, the shells had simply been brought from the nearest river to make the soil less acidic, but for a long while I looked at my grandmother’s garden and saw the primordial ocean. Oddly, two decades later, I am now standing on the opposite shore from what I’ve always known as home, and I can’t help but think of my grandmother’s garden when I look at the cold and endless Atlantic Ocean between us.
Everywhere I go in Halifax, the harbour city, I feel the breath of the ocean on the back of my neck. I catch a glimpse of it at the end of each side street I pass on my way to work. With time, as I find it more difficult to picture my grandmother’s garden or remember a word in my mother tongue, I know it’s because the salt in the air is eating away at my memories. Still, when I look at the ocean, I think about what I can remember.
You see, I was born on the shore of the Sea of Azov, but I have never learned how to swim. Shortly after my birth, we left Kerch—a city in Crimea, founded about 2,600 years ago as the Greek colony of Pantikapaion, meaning “fish route” in Scythian—for mainland Ukraine. My relatives there tried to teach me to swim in the lakes and rivers, but I always struggled to stay afloat. I seemed to lack whatever instinct allowed my peers pick up a dog paddle or frog kick within days.
We visited the Sea of Azov a couple of times during my early years, but I was too young to remember much. The only memory I have is of the seaweed washed ashore. I was no older than three, and I couldn’t bring myself to walk on it—ominously dark green, smelly, and moving underwater like the fur of an animal. Twenty years later, when I saw the seaweed on Conrad’s Beach in Nova Scotia, I realized there must have been a moment when, as a child, I looked at the Sea of Azov for the last time. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, I could no longer visit my hometown. I don’t remember the sea much, so it must be unfair to say I miss it.
In the summer, while my classmates travelled to the sea in Turkey or Bulgaria, I stayed home or went to my grandmother’s village. Many poets have compared kovyla, the native feather grass of the Ukrainian steppe, to sea waves, but I never saw it growing in my grandparents’ area. The land in Ukraine’s former steppe regions has been farmed so intensively for export monocultures like sunflower, corn, or wheat that kovyla has become highly endangered. A wheat field looked enough like the sea to me when I visited my grandmother.
Large parts of southern Ukraine are now occupied and have suffered significant ecological damage from fires, landmines, and trenches, including conservation areas where kovyla still grows. On December 15, 2024, two Russian tankers transporting oil despite sanctions collided in the Kerch Strait, spilling between 2,500 and 4,500 tons of heavy-grade fuel oil into the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The pollution affected about 1,000 square kilometres, including my hometown.1 The beaches were covered with the carcasses of thousands of dead cetaceans and birds.
Time and time again, I think about how I haven’t had the chance to visit the fields of grass that look like the sea. I didn’t see the real steppe, and I don’t remember the sea I was born nearby, either. As Darya Tsymbalyuk writes, the episteme of death is when we learn about something only after it has already disappeared or become severely damaged,2 and both the steppe and the sea have paid the price behind my back while I was taking time to turn around. Now, thousands of miles away, it must be too late, and the Atlantic breeze carries my thoughts to the landscapes I know and love, and to the ones I never had the chance to know at all.
In Chinese folk wisdom, Alice Mah writes, a soul is believed to travel only at walking speed.3 I am certain that, when I boarded the plane to Canada, my soul must have stayed behind in Europe and then began its slow marathon to catch up with my body, only to be lost somewhere in the Atlantic currents.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Atlantic Ocean has carried over five major waves of Ukrainian immigrants to the Canadian shore. After the prairie pioneers, war refugees from the First and Second World Wars, and individuals seeking economic stability with the collapse of the Soviet Union, I belong to the last wave of 300,000, whose souls haven’t caught up with them yet, who left because of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022.4
Natalia Khanenko-Friesen writes about Ukrainian folk songs in the old country and among diasporic communities abroad, including in Canada. Drawing on Van Gennep and Victor Turner, she understands transatlantic migration as a ritual transition from one world to another, in which those who cross are stripped of power and agency as they undergo a kind of initiation. Some folk songs reflect this liminal state of having left home but not yet reached a new identity, caught in a breath between two sung verses. In Ukrainian folk culture, the motif of crossing water is fundamental to ritual lore about death, and emigration songs in Ukraine use it to understand what happens when people cross to the other side of the Atlantic.5 In a way, that makes me a resident of the afterlife, at least where my old country is concerned. A coping mechanism of folk culture has made me into a ghost.
The letters exchanged over many years between Ukrainians abroad and those who stayed in the old country document the inevitable changes in the identities on both ends.6 I’m afraid that by the time my letter reaches my grandmother’s garden, I’ll be a different person altogether—if the garden is still even there.
I still haven’t told you everything. There was a real sea once where the steppe used to be, where old people’s vegetable gardens used to be, where now there are monocultures or trenches. It was called the Tethys Ocean in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, and it preceded the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. As the European mountains grew—the Alps, the Carpathians, the Elburz—the Paratethys Sea split off from the Tethys, becoming the largest inland sea ever known. It kept growing shallower and shallower, until all that was left was the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.7
Maybe, when I was fascinated by the shells in my grandmother’s garden, I could sense some feeling of respect for the Paratethys Sea, as I held them in my hand. More than by any real sea or ocean, I was fascinated by the idea that I was standing where an ocean once was. As landscapes continue to change, so much so that they no longer resemble their former selves, I think of how people change too, until we no longer recognize them. One may call me romantic (and some have) for believing that land remembers what it once was, but I’d love some reassurance that my own essence won’t be washed away, that I’ll not only stay myself, but stay a self I’d still recognize.
After four years in Nova Scotia, I feel it would be hard for me to abandon living near the ocean, to go deeper into the continent, say. When I head inland, I feel the ocean’s absence immediately. I’d rather keep foaming at the edges, repeating: “See, see, I haven’t forgotten yet.” I want to stand closer to the precipice. I want to stay closer to home so that I remember. Then, when I look at the ocean I crossed, I can remind myself of who I am and where I came from.
Featured image: Feather grass (kovyla), Brandushkin Yar, Ukraine. Photo by Dmytro Balkhovitin, Creative Commons.
[1] Eugene Simonov, “Military Oil Spill: How the Kerch Strait Tanker Disaster Is Linked to Russia’s ‘Shadow Fleet’ Oil Exports,” Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group, January 18, 2025, https://uwecworkgroup.info/military-oil-spill-how-the-kerch-strait-tanker-disaster-is-linked-to-russias-shadow-fleet-oil-exports/.
[2] Darya Tsymbalyuk, Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity, 2025).
[3] Alice Mah, Red Pockets (Bond Street Books, 2025).
[4] Government of Canada, “Ukraine Immigration Measures: Key Figures,” Government of Canada, March 30, 2022, https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/ukraine-measures/key-figures.html
[5] Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland, and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 1.
[6] Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland, and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century, 4.
[7] Mathias Harzhauser et al., “The Central Paratethys Sea—Rise and Demise of a Miocene European Marine Biodiversity Hotspot,” Scientific Reports 14, no. 1 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-67370-6.
Kateryna Rudenko
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