Still anonymous a few months ago, Anastasia Ivahenko, a young Ukrainian established in Poland, made a dazzling breakthrough in the world of Polish music. Under the pseudonym “This Ukrainian” (Ta Ukrainka), she sings of the disappointments that marked her journey as an immigrant.
In a few months, she went from completely anonymous to a rising star on the Polish music scene. The one who, not long ago, dared not think of a career as a singer can, after three successful singles, announce the release of her first album in the spring and its line-up at the Soundrive Festival in Gdansk, which is held every summer on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
Behind this meteoric rise, Anastasia Ivahenko, a young Ukrainian living in Poland for six years. Her stage name, Ta Ukrainka (“This Ukrainian”), like her flagship title, released in November, titled Polish Dream – Doloresis inspired by the disappointments that marked her career as an immigrant.
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“I imagined Poland as a tolerant country”
Born in a village in central Ukraine, 200 kilometers east of Kiev, she thinks of starting a new life in the West, in a country she sees as a new California. “I imagined Poland as a tolerant country, yes, like in the United States, where you can walk the streets with your hair dyed green without attracting remarks”, she tells the liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza, who devotes a portrait to him.
Once she arrives, she must quickly become disillusioned. Forced to work illegally in a chain of supermarkets, she knows economic exploitation. She suffers the rejection of those who, deducing her origin from her singing accent, enjoin her to return to her country. “It had become daily, she remembers. More than once, I wanted to drop everything. I felt that nothing good was waiting for me in Poland.”
From these stigmas, she made the main fuel of her artistic creation, as the lyrics of her flagship song show:
Gone west for a fistful of dollars/They told me I’d find a free people there/I believed it blindly […] But believe me it’s not a country for foreigners/Don’t kid yourself/This is what the Polish dream looks like […] It is not an El Dorado.”
A touching testimony in which a good part of the large million Ukrainian citizens living in Poland can be found, for whom these vexations are commonplace. Despite the title’s disrespect for “the legendary Polish hospitality”, as ironically noted Gazeta Wyborczaits success suggests it resonates beyond this narrow audience.
Source
“The Electoral Gazette”, founded by Adam Michnik in May 1989, is the largest daily newspaper in Poland in terms of circulation, excluding tabloids. Open to different sensitivities on economic issues, it promotes major societal choices
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