AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Hiding Between the Loaves

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Hiding Between the Loaves.

I like to think of myself as reasonably well informed. I read history books and bits and bobs of news from around the world. But I often end up feeling none the wiser for it. So I go to poems, to novels, to find what I’ve been missing—the human soul, that “nightmare of nuances.” That’s how the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich puts it. Alexievich is a Nobel Prize-winning, genre-crossing historian. And the kind of history she’s interested in is “the everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains.”

I recently sat down with two compatriots of hers, Belarusian writers who like to dig around in the dustbin of history for what’s been overlooked: Julia Cimafiejeva and Valzhyna Mort. They recently collaborated on a collection titled, Motherfield, with poems that Julia wrote and Valzhyna translated, as well as fragments from Julia’s protest diary against the stolen elections in 2020. You’ll hear from Julia in the second part, but first, Valzhyna. We started by talking about history, actually. Because when Valzhyna was still in school, the Soviet Union collapsed. And with that, her history classes were never the same.

Valzhyna Mort: You know, I do remember the lessons in the history of Belarus very vividly. They begin in fifth grade, so I was in my early teens, and we were one of the first generations of schoolchildren to be taught the Belarusian history. The idea that we, our country, had history that went beyond the Soviet Empire, that was big news. And I remember the books that were so hastily printed and how they had no pictures, no maps, (LAUGHS) and how they were written by scholars, I don’t think that in a language suitable for children. But it was our history. And I remember the whole wave of names as it sounded foreign to us, yet they were actually Belarusian names. They were the names of our historical figures that, to us, sounded utterly foreign.

Helena de Groot: What is like a name that really rings in your ear?

Valzhyna Mort: (LAUGHS) Well, many, many. Rogneda and Rogvolod, for instance. You know, of course, nobody around me was named Rogneda and Rogvolod. We were all Katyas and, you know, Mishas. And I loved pronouncing those names. And I remember that I had a history teacher who had very, very beautiful, soft lips. And she also spat a lot when she spoke. And I loved watching her mouth as she was pronouncing those names.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Valzhyna Mort: (LAUGHS) But then at home, I had my grandmother, who told me stories of her life every day. They were the stories of her childhood of the ’30s, of her teenagehood during World War II, in the ’40s, and then of her being a young mother, an uneducated woman who became a single mother very fast during the Soviet Union. So there was always that very private, very lyrical narrative as a trend along those wonderful history books in school and the propaganda that started later. But also during the time of Lukashenko’s reign, a lot of historians and scholars have been working tirelessly on historical scholarship, but it is very complicated. Our historical scholarship is relatively young, and a lot of it has been done under tremendous threat and despite great limitations that are put forward by our government, our state. But the reason why Belarusian history is so complicated is because it consists of many competing narratives. Belarusian lands historically have been in the middle of great empires that moved their borders and competed for the borderland. So the complication of Belarusian history is that it’s told often not by Belarusians, unfortunately. Our history installed by Poles, by Lithuanians, by Ukrainians, by Russians. There is a history of Belarusian Jews, there is a history of Belarusian Tatars. And for too long, Belarusians themselves had very little space to speak for themselves.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Valzhyna Mort: But it is very complicated. Belarusian history is very complicated. And today it’s very easy to start a big argument by just throwing in what to you seems like a fact (LAUGHS) into the

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Valzhyna Mort: into the Belarusian Facebook, and immediately you will have a huge blowout argument.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Valzhyna Mort: And we are overwhelmed by too much history. So, constantly you have to ask yourself, “Who am I?” But I have an answer to that as a poet, I’m Valzhyna Mort, and, you know (LAUGHS) I write from inside myself. I do not write from some kind of outside history.

Helena de Groot: Yes. It’s so interesting because it’s, you know, there is, of course, overlap between, you know, memory, what comes from you, and history, which comes from supposedly outside. And you know, I think the Belarusian writer who most foreigners know is probably Svetlana Alexievich, who really does that. I mean, she writes history, but through the memories of the people she interviews. And you know, she won the Nobel Prize for literature. So I don’t know if she’s seen as a historian or as a novelist, but it doesn’t matter. What she makes is literature, I think. And so I’m wondering for you, as a poet who is interested in history, what does a poem allow you to do that you could never in, say, an academic text or a journalistic article that has to do with history?

Valzhyna Mort: I think that she’s a poet. She uses the devices of a poet in her work. She’s a stylist. She relies a lot on estrangement and repetition when she crafts her interviews. And I recognize them, these devices as I read her. And in fact, I assign some of her books to my poetry students to see how poetic devices are used by this phenomenal stylist who works kind of between the genres with very difficult historical material. So, I mean, let me stay a little bit in this, maybe not in the shadow, but in Svetlana Alexievich’s body warmth (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Valzhyna Mort: and say that I, too, am interested to what happens to a human heart. How does a human experience history? Because I think that there is something very conclusive in the numbers and lists of reasons, consequences in analysis. But I don’t believe that there could be any conclusion to the past, to violent, traumatic past. And it’s very important to, at least for me, to think about a singular human experience and how a human being like my grandmother or my mother or I, how we experience historical events that we do not choose.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I’m wondering if we can read a poem from your collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected. And it’s quite a long one, so would you be okay with excerpting it?

Valzhyna Mort: Yeah, absolutely.

Helena de Groot: The poem is titled “Baba Bronya.” And I was wondering if you wanted to read the first three pages.

Valzhyna Mort: Okay. Okay, let’s do that.

(READS POEM)

Baba Bronya

On Pravda Avenue, four women protect 60 square meters of our family Pravda. In the apartment building that stretches for two bus stops, I am a test-child exposed to the burning reactor of my grandmother’s memory. In the first decade of my life, I receive a full dose of her—your—pravda [truth] as a daily injection.

When, in the winter dark they complain about having to go to school, you bring up 1941: you have just finished fourth grade in a Minsk orphanage. The first day of war puts an end to your education. “What would have become of me if not for war?” It is impossible to imagine you is anything else but a pravda-teller of your life.

As I eat my lunch, you talk, with gusto, about hunger. When I complain about my unfashionable clothes, you laugh remembering your wedding—you borrowed a white robe from a nurse to wear as a wedding dress. When I beg for privacy, you ask: “Did I tell you about the day the Bolsheviks came to take the roof off our farmhouse?” Or worse: “Did I tell you about the house where my mother died right after sending my brothers and me to an orphanage?” “Did I tell you about how Uncle Kazik died?” “Did I tell you how the Soviets took my father twice, and since he did return after the first time, I didn’t cry a bit when they took him the second time?”

(Later you did cry abundantly when Stalin died.)

You remember the names of all our dead relatives and know the distances between the burned-down villages. You remember childhood rhymes and the exact dates of non-consequential occurrences (a bee stung your great-uncle Leopold in the eye on July 11). But you never remember that you have already told me these stories before.

“Have I ever told you about my life?” you’d say at night from your bed.

Three of us share one bedroom: my sister, you and I. My parents sleep on a sofabed in the living room. I’ve never set foot inside our second bedroom.

When I feel unwell, you talk about your leg that doesn’t bend in the knee. A stick instead of a leg! Right before the war you are scheduled for a kneecap surgery, but the bombings cancel all plans and for five years the knee rots. It is a miracle that in the end the leg doesn’t have to be amputated. In the first months after the war, waiting for the surgery, you sit in the garden of Aunt Viktya’s house, when a soldier on his long way home stops by the fence. “Beautiful. Would you pick me a flower?” he asks.

All your stories feature this moment—whether it is a story of hunger, bombing, exile, sickness or death—somebody always stops by to tell you how pretty you are.

Unable to walk by yourself, silently, you keep to your seat. Before leaving, the man says (in your most dramatic voice): “Your eyes will haunt my dreams.” “I was ashamed to reveal that I was an invalid,” you explain, daily.

For me, your stories [pravdas] replace real life. These stories keep me inside them like a circle of fire. As I grow older, you make sure I stay chained to a listening chair with an accordion. You help fasten a large red Weltmeister on my skinny shoulders like a stone sinker. I sit on the bottom of your stories with an accordion holding me down.

Helena de Groot: I have a question about, about detail. Because I think, you know, you write about your Baba, your grandmother, “You remember childhood rhymes and the exact dates of non-consequential occurrences (a bee stung your great-uncle Leopold in the eye on July 11).” And I thought it was so funny because of course, that’s how memory works. You know, we remember all kinds of nonsense without consequence. And I feel like a lot of history writing is about deciding what is important and what is not. You know, what to include and what not. And memory, of course, is a lot less structured like that. Like, it’s not conscious, you know, you don’t make a decision. And so I’m wondering, when you write a poem that has a strong historical theme, how do you decide what is an important detail to include and what is not?

Valzhyna Mort: Yeah, I think that nothing is unimportant for a poet. And in many ways, poetry makes insignificant significant. So it’s true that my grandmother told me about her father’s conscription. Her father was a farmer who liked music and played instruments and sang. So he was conscripted and was killed very fast. He was not much of a soldier. But telling the story, my grandmother didn’t know what he was fighting for. Who conscripted him and what was the military action happening. What bothered her is that when he was taken, she believed that she would be back. And so she did not put up a big scene. Right? She did not cry, and she did not kind of manifest the separation anxiety the way that she felt she should have and she could have if perhaps she knew that he would never come back. She was convinced that he was coming back. And so she didn’t cry. And that for her, that fact of not crying, mattered. And that was something historical, personal to souls. Not the fact of, Why was he conscripted? For what reason? For what motive, for what ideology and for whose agenda? In whose name did he die? Not in the name of his children. Not in the name of the lot of land that he was cultivating, not in the name of the songs that he was singing. And so, for her it was very personal. So to come back to what I said in the very beginning, answering this question, I think that nothing is insignificant. In fact, a poet is a little bit like a detective who comes to a scene after the historians have left. So the historians have left the scene, and this rogue detective poet comes and walks and should find whatever was left unobserved and unnoticed. So, when you read a good detective story, right, the pleasure of reading a detective story, which I love, is that no detail is unimportant, because you know that every detail is a possible clue that will solve the murder mystery at the end. Yeah, all of them are strategically placed this details. And I think that poetic thinking is such a thinking in which every little insignificant detail is in fact a sign.

Helena de Groot: That is so beautiful. And I feel like it leads us into another poem of yours, “Little Songs.” It’s so rich with images like signs for you to follow and for you to connect. And so I’m wondering if you can read that poem and then we can talk about it a little bit.

Valzhyna Mort: Yes.

(READS POEM)

Little Songs

Over these houses

like a dead man’s hands

the roofs are folded.

*

“A train?” “Dogs

rattle chains.”

Windowsills, snowed over

with weary flies.

*

Amelia drinks thick coffee.

Yanina shares utensils like playing cards.

Yuzefa, after loud, theatrical farewells,

is dead.

*

Youssef crunches members

of broken households, she budgets

children and relatives, subtracts the dead,

carries over the missing.

It is a math problem

she buries with herself.

*

All windows in bride-white, a step-

house with step-inhabitants.

born in this kitchen, back three times a day

to have a meal in the place of their birth.

Yet none is buried anywhere close.

*

Yanina shovels snow piles of flies.

Like a manly tear, a bird glides across the air.

*

Chains follow dogs as if chains were discharged

like slime.

*

Justice has turned out to be

more terrifying

than injustice.

Yanina falls like dust onto her bed.

*

To look healthy? Leave that

to animals.

Once a tank drives through a street here.

Like an elephant,

it waves its trunk

from right to left.

An elephant in our village!

Instead of hiding, women run to look.

*

Since then, many birds are shed

across the air.

The dents on cups gag many thirsty mouths.

What has been done to us is muddled with the fears

of what could have been done.

Our famous skills

in tank production

have been redirected

at students and journalists.

But under that roof, folded

like a dead man’s hands over the house,

we still live.

*

But under that roof, folded

like dead man’s hands over the house,

we still live

carrying buckets between a tree and a beast.

And instead of evening prayers

I plead

with myself

to just leave you

be, my dear, my

undear Lord.

Helena de Groot: Valzhyna, seriously. It’s just wonderful. I’m so struck by your use of images throughout your collection. I mean, in this poem, you know, “roofs like dead man’s hands.” Then there’s Youssef, you know, who is, like, accounting for the dead in her family like you balance a checkbook, you know, “Youssef crunches members / of broken households, she budgets / children and relatives, subtracts the dead, / carries over the missing.” And then there’s like these ominous animal images. You know, there are dogs with chains like slime. There’s a snow pile of weary flies, a tank like an elephant. And even the sky is shedding tears in the shape of birds. And I’m very interested in your use of image and metaphor. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Valzhyna Mort: Yeah. Thank you so much for the beautiful reading of the poem that you offered. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Valzhyna Mort: Images are the most important element of a poem for me. And images, metaphor, and repetition are my main devices. Images are kind of my ideology, right? I have nothing to prove. There is no sociopolitical agenda. There is no historical narrative that I want to tell. There’s no idea that I’m expressing and that I’m conveying to my readers, whether historical, political or personal or cultural, nothing like that. My ideology is images. So I think that images stand at different points in one’s life. They kind of leak new ideas, right? (LAUGHS) They allow for a lot of productive uncertainty and for multiplicity of meaning. And they invite me to think, to continue thinking year after year. And the poem, as I see it, moves from an image to an image. That’s its story, is the movement from an image to an image. And metaphor is extremely important because I like to think of metaphor as a device of people who come from poverty, who have the desire to multiply (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Valzhyna Mort: certain things or to utilize a single object for many purposes, and to open a thing into another thing, therefore increasing, enlarging space. I think metaphor is also the device of the instrument through which we transform objects, again, from insignificant to significant, yes, from mundane into magic. So it’s a device of transformation, of that kind of instability and fluidity, that’s metaphor. It’s fluid, like the landscape I comes from. So landscape in general, the natural images here, the sky, the trees, the animals, I think that when you come from a place that is marked by historical trauma and silence and propaganda, you rely a lot on these inanimate things or non-verbal creatures as key areas of certain knowledge and as witnesses that are incorruptible because they do not use human language. And so, in the political landscape where preservation of knowledge is made so difficult, natural landscape becomes this archive of knowledge, becomes this place of witness.

Helena de Groot: It’s really beautiful that you describe the landscape in a context of a country, you know, with a, with a traumatic history that you describe the landscape as dependable, as innocent, in that sense, you know? It reminds me of—I’m blanking on her name, for which I feel terrible, but who is the German speaking Romanian writer?

Valzhyna Mort: Herta Müller.

Helena de Groot: Ah, Herta Müller, there we go. (LAUGHS)

Valzhyna Mort: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: So Herta Müller, you know, she writes, I feel like she reaches the opposite conclusion from you. You know, like at some point she writes about being suspect or angry with the sun because the sun would shine on Ceaușescu’s private beaches and give him the satisfaction of a beautiful, sunny day, despite all the horrors that he inflicts on his people. So, yeah, I’m just curious about that.

Valzhyna Mort: Yeah, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear, but that’s exactly what I was also speaking about, is that the landscape carries all this trauma, that it is not innocent of it, but because it does not speak a human language, it’s more reliable in what it remembers. Yeah, but I think it is for me exactly alike for Herta Müller. Everything is marked with violence. Absolutely everything is marked with violence. Every field, every house, every patch of forest. The very idea of a forest patch gives me shivers. (LAUGHS) Yeah, so.

Helena de Groot: Because of what is buried underneath?

Valzhyna Mort: Yeah, because of what is buried underneath. Yes, because there is not, there is not one place that has not witnessed violence. And language is another place that witnessed all that violence. And I also should say that, of course, that’s not something specifically Belarusian, but I think that there is not a country that is not built on bones. There is not a language that in the name of which violence was not perpetrated. So how do we think about a tree in the American South, for example? How can we not think of lynching immediately? The strange fruit. That’s American agriculture, yeah? So I think that landscape and violence and trauma are connected now in a bond absolutely everywhere.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: That a landscape is imprinted with violence is something Julia Cimafiejeva has known almost her entire life. When she was four, a nuclear reactor exploded, and suddenly her home, in a rural part of Belarus, became a Chernobyl zone. A few years later, when she was nine, the Soviet Union collapsed. A few years after that, Aleksandr Lukashenko came to power. By the time she was at university, Julia would go demonstrating against stolen elections, but nothing ever changed. But then 2020 came around. This time, several opposition candidates had managed to create huge excitement. Even after they were arrested, their wives simply carried the torch, and Lukashenko so criminally underestimates women that he couldn’t imagine a little housewife would form much of a threat. For the first time in almost three decades, change seemed possible.

But once again, Lukashenko fudged the numbers, and put himself in the presidential seat for a sixth term. Hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters carrying balloons and ribbons took to the streets, but the crackdown started almost immediately. Over the next several months, more than 27,000 people were thrown in prison—doctors, scientists, professors, workers, students, young people, old people—and they were stuffed in a cell with so many that people had to sleep standing, often for days. Many were severely beaten.

Eventually, Julia and her husband, who’s also a writer, fled the country. She’s now living and writing in Austria, where she received a residency as a writer in exile. Her collection Motherfield, which just came out, includes not just poems, but diary entries from the days of the protests.

But before we got to those, I wanted to know, besides these exciting opposition candidates, why was 2020 the year that so many Belarusians took to the streets? Here’s Julia.

Julia Cimafiejeva: Well, for us, there were several factors. One of them was that maybe a generation of people was raised that was ready for this protest. It’s interesting then that there were no protests in 2015, just after the elections, everything was calm. And, you know, at the beginning of the year of 2020, we were ready for the same scenario, that there would not be any protest of something. But a new generation of young people who were waiting for the changes, who also had been abroad for many times, you know, in previous years, Belarus was the champion of the world for the number of Schengen visas for the percentage of population.

Helena de Groot: Huh.

Julia Cimafiejeva: So a lot of Belarusians went to Poland, went to Lithuania, went to Germany, and to different countries in Europe, that they did not only had their holidays there, but also, they went for a walk and so on and so forth. And so maybe that was one of the factors. Another one was, of course, coronavirus. Because at the beginning of the year, Lukashenko was, you know, all this talking about tractors and vodka that are curing coronavirus or he was humiliating the first people who died of Covid. And people were protesting against that. And they started discussing all the things in the social media. They started raising money for Belarusian medical workers, for medical supplies, for the uniform, you know, the special ones for mask and so on and so forth. And this solidarity that worked, actually, as Belarusian hospitals accepted that help. It showed that we can just live on without this crazy president. We can do our business ourselves. And Belarusians believed that they can do something together, so I guess many people believed that we could change something. I believed it as well, and my husband, a writer Alhierd Bacharevič, came to the voting stations together. And of course, we were excited, but it was prohibited for the independent observers and independent exit polls to be held at the voting stations. So people made up a symbol. So you had to have a white ribbon on your hand to show that you are for the changes. And then the independent observers could somehow count the number of people who were for Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

Helena de Groot: The opposition candidate, right?

Julia Cimafiejeva: Yes. And that’s why when we went to vote, we could see people who were for the changes. And there were a lot of them, their whole families, and we exchanged smiles. But there were a lot of prohibitions. For example, it was not allowed to make the photo of your ballot, but that was also one of the ideas to see how many people voted for Tsikhanouskaya, or at least to show that there were much more than the official results stated. And there were no curtains around these boxes. So it was also explained like it was some Covid measures or something like that. So it was a bit tricky and I felt, of course nervous when I took the phone in and made the photo, but no one stopped me. So I made my photo.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Julia Cimafiejeva: And yes, and I voted as I wanted to. But I read on Facebook that some of my Facebook friends could not do that, for example. I mean, to make the photo of their ballots.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Julia Cimafiejeva: And then at the end of the day, there was idea to, for people to come together to their voting stations and to wait for the results. And when my husband and me came to that voting station, there were a lot of people already, and it was dark. It was around 9:00 in the evening. And we’ve been waiting and waiting. And then at some moment, a bus came from the darkness, from some side street, it appeared. And we were a bit afraid as we read on the news that there were in these buses, some special forces would come. And at some voting stations, people were just packed into these buses and just detained for being there by the voting stations. And you can imagine that these voting stations mostly were organized in schools, and the election committee consisted of teachers. So, those who should teach children how to be polite, how to be kind, and how to be honest as well. And for example, the election committee at our voting station did not show any results. They just came out of the school and they took that bus and went away under the protection of police. And we could not see any results at all. Yeah, so that was the day of the election.

Helena de Groot: Wow. Okay, so I was wondering if we can get to a little excerpt from your diaries. And before you read that, can you tell me, you know, do you always keep a diary? You know, if not, why did you start keeping a diary? And like, what was your decision to want to publish that? Can you tell me a little bit about your protest diaries?

Julia Cimafiejeva: I do keep a diary about my life, but I was not writing anything about the elections as there were too many things going on and we were on emotional rollercoaster and I could not find time to do that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Julia Cimafiejeva: But then an editor at Financial Times addressed me and they wanted an essay about the protests, about the demonstrations, and it had to be in a kind of diary form. So I wrote the first text for the Financial Times. And then when I came to Graz, my husband, Alhierd Bacharevič, a writer, and me, we got a residence here, writers in exile residence, and I went on working on that diary, and I made it bigger.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. Okay. So I was wondering if we can get to an excerpt. It’s the one on page 25.

Julia Cimafiejeva: Okay.

(READS EXCERPT)

October 11.

We have to be on alert all the time. We have already been running today with others on the wet grass and muddy tracks in the old central neighborhood. It felt like in a cheap horror movie or a bad dream. Now we are hiding in a big mall “Corona”. Under the dazzling lights of the shopping center I recover my breath and phone my brother to learn the news. While calling I look at the bright and colourful advertisements with huge half-naked women, relaxed and smiling. Their gazes invite us to stay in this gleaming, dry and safe paradise, to smell perfumes, to order pizza or at least to get dry. But we uninterestedly walk through the mall to the door on the opposite side and find ourselves in front of the immense demonstration marching along.

We are walking in the roadway of the Pushkin Avenue, when I begin to sense something sinister in the air. We’ve marched enough, you are sick, we’ve got soaked through, maybe it’s time to go home? We climb over the metal fence that divides the road into two lanes. It’s quite low, you just have to lift the leg, but your jeans are too tight, you could tear them. Crossing the lane, I suddenly look back and see that the demonstrators are running from the roadway into the courtyards. We run and everybody around us runs: young and old, women and men, workers and students, doctors and programmers. It doesn’t matter who you are, the most important thing is how fast you can run from the police, across the playgrounds, across the parking lots, between the apartment blocks with the doorways open by their compassionate dwellers who invite strangers inside their flats. Even a small apartment can become a shelter for up to thirty people. It reminds me of the WWII stories about saving Jews. But you and I don’t need to hide and find shelter now, we need to get home.

When it seems that the danger is over and at last, we can catch our breath, behind the trees we notice another group of the protesters running toward us, and we start running again. Suddenly you stop. You cannot run anymore. We have to hide somewhere, and you suggest a grocery store. We enter quickly, take a shopping basket, and stop in the bread section as if we were normal customers. It is clear that we are not. We are soaking wet, water dripping from our hair, our faces are red from running, our eyes are the wild eyes of animals. We are trying to regulate our breathing over the bread loaves.

I dry my face and hair with a paper napkin bending over the refrigerator full of dumplings, I try to calm down. There are no more police in sight, just customers wandering among the food shelves or demonstrators pretending to be customers, who knows. Finally, holding a shopping basket with wine and food for dinner, we go to the cashier. I have my backpack on and we usually try to be ecological refusing the plastic bag but not this time. This time we need an alibi.

Through the store windows we see that people are still marching. The store manager has already closed the door and is shouting at anyone twitching the handle from the outside. “Go away!” she cries at them, and “We are closed!” She lets us out and closes the glass door behind our backs.

Heading home you suggest not to go through the courtyards as there could be a police ambush waiting for the protesters. On Pushkin Avenue, we walk as slowly and calmly as we can, pretending to be a young family: you are holding a white plastic bag full of groceries, and I press close to you. Military vehicles leisurely drive by. 

At home we learn that two Belarusian philosophers, a young family like us, has been detained today near Niamiha street.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. I think what makes it so arresting is that there are so many little details that are completely from normal life. Like you’re in the mall and there are these ads with like, you know, half-naked women. And then you’re in the store and there’s just loaves of bread. And then at the cashier, there’s that mention that you usually bring your own bags to be ecological, you know? But now you need proof. And I think it’s those little details that made it feel so close, you know, like this could happen to any of us in the midst of the lives that we have, you know? And I’m wondering, since you were from the beginning writing for an audience of outsiders, I’m wondering what that did to your writing.

Julia Cimafiejeva: You know, maybe the reason why I wrote that book was because I could found that language how to write about what happened to us in the English language. So at that time, and even now, I think I could not write that in my own, in the Belarusian language. The English language gave me this distance from what was going on to me. So it was not like me. It was like someone else. I was like, watching a film. I was like, writing a script for some horror film or some social drama, maybe, political drama, maybe. But after the book was finished and after I decided—so last year, I decided that this book should be also in Belarusian language, that I should translate myself. And, you know, it was also quite complicated for me as I had nervous breakdowns. So I was crying. I could not reread these texts. And to be retraumatized, remembering all these things and writing about them.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And do you feel like that there’s something about writing or thinking about this stuff in your mother tongue that makes it harder to handle?

Julia Cimafiejeva: Yes, because maybe the Julia Cimafiejeva, the tried and true Belarusian is closer to, to, to my real self maybe than this Julia Cimafiejeva writing in English language. It’s a kind of mask, maybe. Or a kind of, I don’t know, gloves that protect my hands while writing. I don’t know which metaphor to take, but Belarusian, I feel it’s blood.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Julia Cimafiejeva: You know, I didn’t finish the translation of the book into Belarusian language, as there is another problem. The problem is that this book can be dangerous to me, but also for those people who I write about. And some of them are still in Belarus. And people go to jail for taking part in the protests. And maybe Belarusian authorities do not read so eagerly in German or in English, or in the Dutch language, but they do read in Belarusian. So I stopped doing that, and I’m not going to publish it now, in the recent time.

Helena de Groot: Of course. Yeah. I was wondering if we can get to another poem. It’s “Negative Linguistic Capability.”

Julia Cimafiejeva: Okay. I have it.

(STARTS READING IN BELARUSIAN)

(BELARUSIAN READING FADES INTO BACKGROUND)

(READS IN ENGLISH)

Negative Linguistic Capability

The language I can speak

is not my language.

The language I wish to speak

isn’t contained in words

I know,

isn’t contained in images

I see.

For my language there are no dictionaries,

no agreed upon rules.

It’s a language for my own self,

language for reading and mistakes,

because there is no one to correct me.

I will never write in this language.

If you are reading this poem,

you are not my reader.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Thank you. It’s so great, like the way that you’re simultaneously kind of denying yourself the use of this language as you’re using it.

Julia Cimafiejeva: Of course, the language we have inside of us is not the language we can speak with, as everyone has its individual language. And what we have (LAUGHS) is what we have. So I speak English, yeah, I make a lot of mistakes and of course it’s not received as I wish it to be made. So, yeah, especially if we speak about foreign language. Of course it was meant about your inner language, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Right, right, right.

Julia Cimafiejeva: But I can feel it double, yeah, this double meaning of that poem at the moment. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Absolutely. Like you’re translating twice, in a way. Like you’re inner language to Belarusian and then Belarusian to English.

Julia Cimafiejeva: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I mean, it’s also like what you said earlier that there are just certain things that you can’t even say in Belarusian because it just hurts too much. And, you know, I think every poet struggles with the fundamental inadequacy of language. And so I’m wondering, like, what pushes you to keep trying to use language to transcend language?

Julia Cimafiejeva: Well, you know, I started writing poetry, I mean, after translating poetry. So I translated several authors, American ones, but not only. So I translated Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, William Carlos Williams. And that was very interesting for me to find the Belarusian equivalent for their works in the Belarusian lan—not only the Belarusian language, but, you know, the poetic language in Belarusian. Because the tradition of Belarusian free verse is not so long. I wouldn’t say so many names that write in free verse. For example, Valzhyna Mort, Aleś Razanaŭ , and several others. But even now, people, young people, even young poems do rhyme in Belarusian language.

Helena de Groot: Interesting.

Julia Cimafiejeva: And while looking for that language, for the translation, for an adequate translation, I got interested in that language I found, and I just wanted to go on in that myself without the help of these American classics, and go the direction I wanted. So maybe this interest in language pushes me, interest in Belarusian language pushes me maybe to, to go on. But of course, I have—I guess every person has its own story he or she can tell or wants to tell. And I want also to tell my story. And I started telling my story. I mean, my family story, the language story. And I’m moving on in that language that I found and, and I go, yeah, there.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. Interesting. So it’s almost like it allows you to keep walking because you have now a new, I don’t know, new boots or something.

Julia Cimafiejeva: Yeah, that can be true. And also, when I, when I can’t find these words, when I, for example, when the war in Ukraine started by Russia, I could not find any words. And I started translating Ukrainian poets into Belarusian language. So, translation gives me that language that I lack at the moment. So I’m using translation also as a way to express myself in the periods when I do not know what to say, but I know how.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I’m wondering if you want to read one last excerpt from your diaries, a tiny little excerpt. It’s at the bottom of page 20. So all the way at the bottom of the page.

Julia Cimafiejeva: I will try to find that. Mm-hmm, I see. Yeah.

(READS EXCERPT)

A friend of mine, the poet and musician Uladz, was detained in September, during a protest over the arrest of opposition leader Maria Kalesnikava. There is a famous photo taken some minutes before his arrest: he and other men are being shielded by rows of women, both frightened and fierce, as a militiaman watches on. Together, they sang the mournful folk song “Kupalinka.”

At his court hearing three days later, Uladz was asked about the purpose of his singing. He answered: “Because when you sing, you are not afraid.” He was sentenced to six days in jail.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah. Across your diaries, you write a lot about how the regime, like, scrubs society of all, you know, beauty, in a sense, of all art, you know, like this singing is a cause for arrest. And there are a lot of scenes in the book where people are, you know, for instance, putting flowers down as a tribute, I say, to someone who was killed during the protests, or there are people drawing murals and the regime just paints them over, and then the people paint it again and again it’s painted over. And it seemed from what you write, that creativity and beauty and joy is seen as suspect, you know, even smiling, is seen as suspect. And I’m wondering, like, for a poet like yourself, who organizes her whole life around creativity and beauty as kind of an organizing principle, what does it mean to do that work in a society that punishes that work?

Julia Cimafiejeva: Well, you know, at the moment the situation is even worse as the repressions go on and a lot of creative people and a lot of poets, writers, artists, actors, singers and so on, so forth, have to leave the country, have to flee the country because they can’t work as the exhibitions are allowed only for the state-approved artists or members of the pro-state union of artists or pro-state union of writers as well. So I would say that it’s almost impossible for those who create something new to go on working in that field in the country. And that’s why they choose either to leave the country, to flee the country, or to keep silent or to hide somewhere.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Julia Cimafiejeva: But I’m not in Belarus at the moment. I’m in a free country. I’m in Austria now. And I still go on writing. I still, at least I’m translating now. I’m also writing poems. So, we still have our audience and the Belarusian state authorities, they do not have any direct influence on me, so they can’t make me silent with their repressions or something.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Julia Cimafiejeva: Another thing is that I’m writing now more about political political things, not like, so I used to write about language or being a female author, but now I write about the situation in the country as well. That’s what bothers me and hurts me. So I wouldn’t say that they can make me silent or other authors silent. But of course, we can’t go on in our writing as we used to. We can’t just close our eyes and pretend that nothing happened. So, no, all the things they changed has drastically changed our works as well, and the way we see things and the way we write about these things as well.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I mean, I’m interested in it also because I think in America, for instance, there are so many signals that literature doesn’t matter, right? Like you can’t really earn a living from it unless you’re like Stephen King or something. You know, it’s kind of seen as something that you wouldn’t want your child to pursue because, you know, they will be poor forever, you know? And if you want to make art that moves people, then you maybe would want to go into movies or something, you know? So there’s like a kind of devaluing, I think, often of literature by kind of society at large. And I think writers here, it seems like many writers wage this war within themselves also, right? Like have to convince themselves in moments when they don’t feel so self-confident, you know, they have to remind themselves over and over again like, it’s worth it, this is valuable. It’s a worthy way to spend a life, you know? But it feels like it’s hard work, you know, to convince yourself that it matters. And from what I hear you say and yeah, in the context where writers are punished so heavily for what they say and where, even if you write in exile, that your words are so important to those still in that situation and who just feel, yeah, like they have a voice because you write about it. Do you feel like—do you also struggle is what I’m trying to ask. Like, do you struggle also with like, self-confidence and like, you know, “Am I a good enough writer?” Like, or is it just overtaken by the sense that it matters?

Julia Cimafiejeva: So, you know, it’s a very complicated question because, I don’t know where to start from. Of course, I do ask myself whether I’m a good writer or not, a good poet or not, because in Belarus, we have never had a lot of literary critics.

Helena de Groot: Huh.

Julia Cimafiejeva: Or, we’ve never had a lot of literary magazines or something. And at the moment, we do not have any. And, you know, I do not have reviews from Belarus and critiques about my books. And thank God I have my books published abroad at least, so I can at least read these texts written by the Dutch literary critics, or German or, I don’t know, English, Americans, for example, yeah. So, I’m struggling all the time on the one hand, but on the other hand, in 2020 and after that, we realized how literature is important for people. So because it can give hope, it can make readers think, let’s put it so simple, yeah? So, and it’s also beautiful. And people need something beautiful amidst this violence and danger, and only bad news coming from the telegram channels. And that’s strange how people start writing, for example, in Belarusian prisons, political prisoners start reading a lot because they do not have anything to do. And sometimes in some prisons, in some detention centers, libraries are quite rich. You know, I would envy that kind of library, for example, the Volodarka detention center has. Even Michel Foucault is there, and I do not, I can’t get it in Russian translation, for example.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Julia Cimafiejeva: But also poetry, also prose, also nonfiction and so on, so forth. So people start reading more and more of it, on the one hand. But on the other hand, they start writing as well. They start writing poetry. Maybe these poems are not of a very good quality. Maybe they are not breakthrough in Belarusian literature, but it shows how important it is for people to write and to read poetry. And now also in Ukraine, we can see how many people are reading and writing poetry about the war. So maybe, God forbid, but maybe that could also be relevant to the US.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Julia Cimafiejeva: Yeah. But still, I do not believe that literature is dead or it’s not read or it’s not needed. No, it is. But the moment should come.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Julia Cimafiejeva [Цімафеева] is the author of several books of poems in Belarusian, as well as Motherfield, her first book to appear in English. She’s also translated from the Norwegian and from English, including poetry by Stephen Crane, for which she won the Carlos Sherman prize, and Walt Whitman. And she’s one of the founders and editors of the online magazine of translated literature PrajdziSviet [ПрайдзіСвет], “Pass the World.” She now lives in Graz, in Austria, as a writer in exile, at the invitation of the Kulturvermittlung Steiermark.

Valzhyna Mort is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears, Collected Body, and, most recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by The New York Times and NPR, and the winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Mort received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, and the Lannan Foundation. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation. And she teaches at Cornell University.

To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC PICKS UP AND STOPS)