“Yellow Eye” by Andrea Mozarowski
The woman with one yellow eye entered the narrative decades ago, following my first trip to Ukraine, post-Perestroika. She first takes the form of a Romani woman, who barges into a scene set in Portobello Market and disrupts a drama triangle that includes the female and male protagonists, post-war Ukrainian refugees. Since then, she has abided in me, until recently, without my realizing it. Only after a workshop with Natasha Pulley did I more fully comprehend that this mysterious figure is unambiguously the one who brings the magic with her, who comes from far away and challenges the social order. The woman with one yellow eye was necessitated by the gaps in my conscious knowledge and longing for storytelling coherence. Just as Pulley explains, she is benign but doesn’t appear to be benign. In the narrative’s resolution, as Baba Yaga, she initiates the “I” character into fierce sight and knowing.
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Andrea Mozarowski Artist Statement:
In Ukraine’s post-Perestroika period, Andrea L. Mozarowski began independent work, study, and travel to understand the hidden, repressed narratives of her parents’ generation.
Her fiction and memoir writing explores revolutionary spaces of survival for characters drawn from the lived experiences of Ukrainians born after the October Revolution of 1917, who survived war on the Eastern Front: the six percent who narrowly escaped Soviet repatriation, immigrating as refugees to western democracies, including England, Canada, and the United States, when World War II ended.
