Who writes letters these days? Who takes the time to put enough words on paper, or on screen, to express their feelings to those close to them? Who still sends stamped envelopes? Postcards ? Christmas cards? Who, in short, did not give in to the siren songs of social media, clips and selfies ?
There was a time when war letters were commonplace. We even made books about it. No kidding ! Do a search on the BAnQ website and you will find many books to borrow.
Like media reports, war letters, whether written by soldiers, civilians, politicians or aid workers, remain valuable records of history in the making today. Even if this story, you will rightly observe, is not beautiful to see or hear.
Nevertheless, it seems important to us to keep traces of it to add to the memory of humanity. And it’s even better if the sources are very varied.
In this, the work of the daily journalist The duty Magdaline Boutros is remarkable for its authenticity and warmth, anger and hope, love and hatred, silence, future and devastation.
Even when the style remains very simple. Because you can see and hear that they are not all big feathers. But each of the invited authors is carried, inspired, by their history, their reality, their environment.
How can you not break down when a father writes to his daughter: “The war gave me a gift of you”? How can we disagree when a young woman committed to getting Ukrainian children out of Russian clutches writes to her fiancé who has gone to fight: “We are fighters on different fronts”? How can one not feel heartbroken when a woman writes to her American friend that “the ghosts of murdered citizens cry at the sight of their burned and destroyed houses”?
Unsurprisingly, some letters are very harsh, hateful towards the Russian enemy and make one doubt whether reconciliation is imminent. Some of the authors even write the name “Russia” without capital letters, annoyed by the behavior of this neighboring giant.
Nine letters. Nine testimonies. Nine visions. The war between Mr. and Mrs. Everyman is condensed here into a poignant collection. These words against bombs, murder, rape, hatred have their reason for being.
Extract
“War is terrible, it is not the romantic that we find in the speeches of Churchill, in the texts of Stratégie or in the songs of the British soldiers at Dunkirk. War is feet scratched by boots, the absence of water, life in the trenches under bombardment. War means the need to kill. But we must not sink into shame. »
Ivan Baidak, cybersecurity expert forced into exile, in his Letter without recipient
Who is Magdaline Boutros?
A journalist for around twenty years, Magdaline Boutros worked, among other things, at La Presse Canadienne before joining the Duty in 2018. An avid traveler and interested in social issues, she has produced reports in many countries, including Ukraine. In 2021, she and her colleague Améli Pineda were named journalists of the year at the Canadian Newspaper Awards for their reporting on domestic violence, a scourge that has intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Letters from Ukraine – Intimate stories from a country at war
All in all / Duty
144 pages
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