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Paper short abstract

In an autoethnography, I explore the memories of key landscapes in my life in Ukraine to understand the presence of the Eerie in my experience of displacement. Through a narrative of a protagonist in a folk tale, I counter the Eerie and engage with my home landscapes beyond distance and destruction.

Paper long abstract

In a posthumanist autoethnography, I explore the memories of key landscapes in my life in Ukraine to understand the presence of the Eerie in my experience of displacement due to the escalation of Russian aggression in 2022. In Ukrainian, the word for the Eerie, Motoroshnist’, comes from the verb mutyty, meaning to stir, or disturb—a word connected to zamut (chaos, confusion), mutyshche (mud, sediment), and mutlavytsya (murky water). The Eerie is something hidden, not meant to be stirred. Yet, in my project, I deliberately disturb it and trace the elements that comprise the Eerie to see how it reveals the complexity of the displaced individual’s experience and my relationship to home landscapes. I outline the key components of the Eerie: ambivalent feelings toward my family, postcolonial haunting, landscape loss due to war, internalized colonialism, and voicelessness. Through a narrative of a folk tale protagonist who faces a chimera, I describe ways to counter each element and engage with my home landscapes beyond distance and destruction: through a persisting emotional bond to the landscapes as kin, growing love for the new places, by imagining my way into the landscape’s way of being, sharing stories about landscapes, and grounding in my body. Broadly, this study argues that overcoming the entanglements of present and inherited traumas is possible by finding kinship in landscapes.