I studied silence in Ukraine, but moving to Montreal made me truly understand it
When Anna Lyhina moved from Ukraine to Quebec, she realized immigration can produce its own form of silence — not because anyone forbade her to speak. Learning a new language was about becoming herself again.
For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I wanted to say but could not say it
Anna Lyhina · for CBC First Person
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This First Person is the experience of Anna Lyhina, who lives in Montreal. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
I've always enjoyed spending more time immersed in literature than in the real world. The magic of reading is co-creation. A writer chooses what to say, but also what to leave unsaid. And each of us as readers fills those gaps with our own memories, fears, knowledge or prejudice.
Maybe that was why I became so interested in silence. Not as the absence of meaning, but the place where meaning takes its final shape.
I spent years studying silence as part of my PhD in Ukrainian literature. My thesis was about Hrytsko Chubai, an underground Ukrainian poet who wrote about things that could not always be said openly in a totalitarian state, but also about the limits of language itself and the things that words cannot fully express.
Then the war began between Russia and Ukraine. Many talented, strong people found their voices and spoke up through their journalism, human rights advocacy or writing. But I lost mine. I finally understood my grandmother's reaction when I would ask her about her experience during the Second World War. She always said it was bad but didn't elaborate. Not because she didn't remember. She said it was just hard to explain.
With the invasion of Russia, I felt the same. Words were no longer enough and I had nothing else. I didn't want to explore what that silence hid.
Shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Lyhina built a snowman armed with a stick with her dad. (Submitted by Anna Lyhina)
I just ran away from it, leaving my PhD with only four months left, and bought a one-way ticket to Montreal. At the time, I thought a major war in Europe was inevitable. It made little sense to me to build a life in Poland or Germany if Russian tanks might reach them in a few years. North America felt farther away, so Canada was a logical choice.
People often talk about immigration as a movement, but it felt more like disappearance.
I arrived in Montreal with one backpack, about $100 and no French.
For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I wanted to say but could not say it.
People often describe learning a new language as learning new words. I experienced it as recovering my ability to exist socially.
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At first, I could only communicate needs.
I need a SIM card.
I need a bank account.
I need an apartment.
I thought the problem was vocabulary.
It wasn't.
Lyhina in Montreal in 2024. She was interested in reading what people had scratched onto the metal railing at Mount Royal. (Submitted by Anna Lyhina)
I left the language in which I could think without effort. I left the people who understood my jokes before I finished them. I left my university and my work. The version of myself that other people knew disappeared. At home, I could shape how I was perceived through language — through intonation, word choice, the structure of a sentence. People could hear that I was educated, ironic, perhaps a little arrogant.
In a foreign language, I lost that control. I knew what I wanted to say, but not how to make it sound like me. Actually it wasn't a bad thing; it made me more sincere.
My humour was still there. My memories. My education. My way of thinking. My ability to write.
None of them had disappeared.
They had simply become inaccessible to everyone except me.
Immigration changed my language. The silence came from what I believed that change meant.
So I postponed conversations. I rewrote simple messages over and over. I apologized before expressing an opinion. I waited until I could describe precisely to justify taking someone else's attention.
I believed I had to earn the right to speak again — and that started while I was volunteering with Montrealers experiencing homelessness.
People often asked me about my life. Much more rarely did they tell me about theirs, and I didn't ask because I didn't want to be intrusive.
Then, months later, one person casually mentioned he used to repair airplanes in Moldova. Someone else had walked across half the country. Another wrote songs. One man had such an incredible memory for history that we spent hours playing the same game: he would tell me a fact, and I would check it out and get impressed.
I would ask why they had never told me before.
The answers were surprisingly familiar.
"I didn't think you'd be interested."
"I didn't think you'd care."
"I didn't think anyone would listen."
I was always surprised. Of course I wanted to hear it.
Then I suddenly recognized I had been saying exactly the same thing to myself. I thought I had nothing worth saying, so better I shut up and learn to communicate without mistakes first.
That day I understood something I never reached in my thesis.
Silence is not always the absence of words.
Sometimes it is the conviction that your words have no place in another person's world.
Sometimes that silence is imposed politically. But sometimes it is created by poverty. Sometimes people are simply misheard or ignored. Sometimes it comes from the language barrier. Sometimes it's created by our own fears.
Lyhina is learning who she is in a new language and city. In this case, she was trying to remember the word for apple in French. (Submitted by Anna Lyhina)
From outside it looks remarkably similar.
It took me a long time to understand that nobody was actually keeping me silent. I started speaking before I felt ready because there was no moment when the old version of me would suddenly return. My voice is something I have to use. And even if it's not perfect, I'm here now, in this version of me living in Canada.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Lyhina has a master's of literature from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. She is a Ukrainian writer who came to Montreal from Kharkiv during the war.
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