Aleksandr Lukashenka<\/a>, President of Belarus<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
As a child, a three-month stay in a village in Polesia turned me into a Belarusian speaker. Back in Minsk, with its gladiolus spears, sandpaper-rough school uniforms and my classmates\u2019 foul-mouthed newspeak, I did manage to surprise friends with my trasianka<\/em> \u2013 a mixture of Belarusian and Russian \u2013 for a while. But the Belarusian soon slipped away, like sand through a sieve. It went back where it came from \u2013 into the earth. Russian always won. Though, in truth, what kind of Russian was it in those Soviet days? A language of school primers, political slogans, songs about \u2018friendship between peoples\u2019, the Mother-Rodina<\/em> and the Great Patriotic War fought by our forefathers \u2013 all redolent of wishful thinking, enforced forgetting, cultural annihilation.<\/p>\nAway from the Polesian village, I would occasionally hear Belarusian from my father. He would switch to his mother-tongue during alcoholic creative phases, when he allowed himself to dream of becoming a writer, slipping into mova<\/em> in the company of authors, whose autographs he proudly displayed in a beautifully maintained collection. Mova<\/em> would come stumbling into our apartment after midnight, as drunk as the family\u2019s almost-writer, tripping over the doorstep, hurting itself against the armrest in the hallway, once, getting stuck in the bathroom, unable to figure out how to unlock the door.<\/p>\nSpeaking mova<\/em> made my father feel more like a writer, bearing fragments of unfinished debates, jokes, and stories about the past and future of the country and its culture. The link formed in early childhood between Belarusian and the creative process was so strong that even now, when I hear someone speak beautiful high<\/em>-Belarusian, I instinctively expect them to hand me down a modest book of poetry or a collection of short stories. Mova<\/em> is all about aspiration and ambition \u2013 though I\u2019ve heard frequent warnings against confusing the two.<\/p>\nMy mother never seemed much affected by father\u2019s artistic ambitions or his monologues. I cannot remember ever hearing her speak Belarusian. Dad\u2019s second wife was also Russian-speaking. She was in fact, quite simply, Russian with her picturesque stacks of buttery blini<\/em>, litres of tea, and a glass-fronted bookshelf displaying Russian classics in their spacious zal.<\/em><\/p>\n\u2018\u201cZal<\/em>\u201d is the seating area of a theatre, Olya. The proper word is \u201cbolshaya komnata<\/em>\u201d (the big room),\u2019 she would say, correcting me in her didactic tone and reminding that \u2013 in the world of Russian language and culture \u2013 I was not native.<\/p>\nShe treated Belarusian words like sweets from a dodgy, back-alley factory. She would examine the wrapper politely and might even keep one in her mouth for a moment, but then she\u2019d spit it out as something foreign. Though, in my father\u2019s eyes, mova<\/em> was the language of writers, his new Russian wife never found a place for it in her \u2018big room\u2019. Mova <\/em>was permitted only as far as the threshold, where it was left cooling its heels, waiting for slippers that fit \u2013 very much like me, frequently introduced as the \u2018daughter from a first marriage\u2019 to cultured guests over those Russian pancakes.<\/p>\nAfter visiting the world of \u2018big rooms\u2019, with its Volgas of tea and Hermitages of blini<\/em>, I always longed to return to \u2018the earth\u2019. In my Polesie village, no one cared what language you spoke. My grandmother could neither read nor write \u2013 in her old Soviet passport, a cross served as her signature. But what a good listener she was!<\/p>\nAnd my mother? Her family was \u2018multicultural\u2019, as people would say nowadays. Some of her relatives came from Tambov \u2013 something my father incessantly joked about, reminding everyone of the popular expression \u2018a Tambov wolf is your comrade\u2019 (a sarcastic way of rebuffing a false show of camaraderie), dropping hints about who was in cahoots with whom. Another part of Mum\u2019s family was originally from the ever-shifting border of Western Belarus. What language did her father speak? I\u2019ve no idea. Grandpa Stanislav was a slow, old man with the beery-sounding surname Kozel,<\/em> meaning \u2018billy goat\u2019, which my mother inherited as her maiden name (a fact my father also liked to mock). My grandfather was ill with cancer by the time I met him, shuffling like an exhausted steam engine down the hallway of a tiny apartment in Stolbtsy, coughing, smoking, and coughing again as he sank deeper into the inner horizon of a silent past. It took me decades to discover the terrifying details of his early life, so common to the darker side of Soviet history.<\/p>\nHis father, Ivan Frantsevich, was arrested on 23 August 1937, following an anonymous denunciation (as I discovered after a long night of research in my current place of exile, Berlin). Two months later, the 31-year-old man was executed in Slutsk prison. His card in the Memorial<\/em> archives states that an anonymous Stalinist troika found him guilty under Articles 72 and 74 of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic\u2019s Criminal Code: \u2018Agitation or propaganda containing calls to overthrow the government\u2019. The verdict was delivered in Russian, the language which my classmates and I would use half a century later to sing songs about peace, friendship between peoples, the Motherland and the Great Patriotic War fought by our forefathers.<\/p>\nIt seems absurd that a father of four young children, with no more than a basic education, should have been charged with preparing a coup. But the Soviet administration functioned according to a logic of its own. Any suspicious biographical fact could cost your freedom. Extraordinary as it may seem, a hundred years before I was born, Ivan had crossed the ocean on the British passenger liner Aquitania. <\/em>He had also seen the symbol of freedom which Belarusians still dream about today: the Statue of Liberty. That alone was enough for his Motherland to view him as a spy when he returned home.<\/p>\nA few days before my great-grandfather\u2019s execution, more than a hundred members of the Belarusian intelligentsia had shared the same fate. They were hastily buried in the Kurapaty forest near Minsk and, to this day, their bodies remain there without posthumous recognition, marking the beginning of the ethnocide of an entire culture and language. Little by little mova<\/em> disappeared from our schools, newspapers, theaters and books, cementing the status of a single language \u2013 Russian \u2013 for over two generations. Following the 2020 protests, which launched new waves of repression, many of the country\u2019s last remaining Belarusian speakers left for Ukraine, Poland, Georgia or Germany. Those who stayed settled for survival tactics used during the fascist occupation of the 1940s and went \u2018underground\u2019.<\/p>\n\u2018I want to believe that people will not accept colonization in silence,\u2019 says a friend who, until recently, lived in Minsk. \u2018Some people still speak Belarusian on a daily basis. Sadly, I\u2019m not one of them \u2013 but I try to say kali laska<\/em> (please) and dziakuj<\/em> (thank you) in shops and banks. Complete strangers often give me warm smiles in response. To some this may seem trivial, perhaps even strange. How can you possibly be afraid to speak your own native tongue? But it\u2019s important. It\u2019s my resistance, my quiet, personal contribution to the battle against ongoing Russification.\u2019<\/p>\nDoes silence have its own language, I wonder? And if it does, what is it? Is it that of benumbed Russians, lost to resurrected, wooden Soviet propaganda \u2013 forever young, forever courageous, forever successful in replacing the grim realities of Dostoevsky\u2019s world with a cheery \u2018paradiZe\u2019? Or is it mova<\/em>, lodged in the memories of a rural childhood, that once so very nearly made it in the city, academia, world-wide, that spurred my father\u2019s dream of becoming a writer \u2013 before the empire of \u2018comrades\u2019 tamed him, before he stopped speaking to me in any language at all, before my grandmother (who could neither read nor write, but knew how to listen better than all of us put together) passed away, before Belarusians started getting arrested at the border as they returned from Europe for family funerals, before books in mova<\/em> were declared extremist, before we realized that history does<\/em> repeat itself, as Karl Marx wrote, first as tragedy then as farce?<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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