Flesh-witnessing and the testimonial imagination: Ukrainian women’s poetry and diaries in wartime
Flesh-witnessing and the testimonial imagination: Ukrainian women’s poetry and diaries in wartime

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the emergence of a distinct testimonial poetics in contemporary Ukrainian women’s writing during the Russia–Ukraine war. Drawing on Yuval Noah Harari’s concept of flesh-witnessing and recent scholarship on citizen media, I argue that Ukrainian women poets and diarists have developed a literary mode that fuses embodied experience, civic participation, and documentary precision. Their work – circulating in print, online platforms, and volunteer networks – constitutes a vernacular archive of wartime life grounded in affective states, sensory immediacy, and the ethical imperative to bear witness. Through close readings of poems, diaries, and digital testimonies produced since 2014 and especially after the full-scale invasion of February 24, 2022, the article demonstrates how women writers have assumed the role of citizen-participants who chronicle war in real time. This testimonial poetics departs from prewar metaphorical abstraction, foregrounding concrete imagery, emotional lexicons, and the phenomenology of survival. I propose a theoretical framework for understanding these texts as epistemological instruments that resist cultural era-sure, preserve memory, and articulate the lived experience of war.

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