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By Jennifer Wilson
Growing up in Minsk in the 1980s, the poet Valzhyna Mort spoke Russian at home and studied Belarusian at school. He has now written a collection of poems, “Music for the Dead and Risen. “However, Mort insists that he knows nothing. ” Fortunately, I cling very much to the concept that poecheck out comes not from language, but from the unspeakable, from the untranslatable,” he told the Guardian last year. “It only makes sense for me to check it out for a language, in any language, in which I know that in the end I will fail.
That a bard of the unspeakable emerges from Belarus is not an accident. Given the repression of artists and intellectuals under Stalin in the 1930s, and the existing censorship of hounds under President Alexander Loukachenka, Belarusians were warned for much of a century not to tell anything. Mort recalls that, as a child, he heard his grandmother tell stories about his development in the elegance of affluent farmers, the koulaks, who were forsate by force during the Soviet regime. Mom reminded him, “Valzhyna, you can’t tell anyone. “Mort entrusted his first published collection of poetry in the United States, “Factory of Tears”, from 2008, to his grandmother.
Visitors to Belarus compare entering the country with entering the past. Although the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the economy remains largely state-owned, with the government controlling much of broadcasting, land ownership, banking, and manufacturing. Lukashenka fought against efforts to destroy Soviet-era monuments and even installed new ones: a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, an architect of the Secret Police and the Red Terror, was inaugurated in Minsk in 2006. During this time, the government continues to wash . Stalin’s crimes.
And then the poetry of writers like Mort, himself an ardent critic of Lukashenka, will have to suffice. Mort, 39, rose to fame in the 2000s when he began giving electrifying performances on the poetry festival circuit in Europe. The excitement intensified with the publication of ‘Factory of Tears’, which the magazine called’ argumentative ‘, adding:’ Mort, a young Belarusian poet living in America, seeks to be an envoy for his local country, writing with a maximum alarming vehemence. . the struggle to identify a transparent identity for Belarus and its language. The e-book included Mort’s original Belarusian poems, placed alongside the English translations, which were ready through Mort in collaboration with Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pulitzer Laureate Poet Franz Wright. Mort once compared the translation of his paintings to “cutting your hair with a kitchen knife. ” Language policy is unclear in Belarus, where Belarusian was suppressed for most of the Soviet era and Russian remains the norm in public life. But Mort insists that his resolve to write in Belarusian was artistic, not political. When she was a child, she sang in the choir of the Minsk Opera, and she thought the Belarusian sounded more musical. Writing in that language, he told the Irish Times, “has become my attempt at composing music than writing poetry. “
This would possibly be the name “Music for the Dead and Risen”. The e-book offers a melodic memorial to the other people who lost Belarus and the calamities it suffered: the Stalinist purges of the 1930s; the Second Global War, in which more than a quarter of the country’s population perished; the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant across the border from Ukraine; and the horrors of life under Loukachenka. In doing so, Mort presents a surprising examination of what Belarus can teach the world about state violence, collective reminiscence, and the role of poetry in the fight against tyranny.
In 1988, a massive cemetery was discovered in a forested domain on the outskirts of Minsk. Buried people had been executed through N. K. V. D. officers, who oversized normal law enforcement and secret police activities from 1937 to 1941 during Stalin’s purges. debates in Belarus on how to commemorate those who suffered Stalinist repression. In April 2019, Belarusian officials dismantled seventy high wooden crossings that activists had set up near the graves and arrested protesters who had accumulated there.
“Music for the Dead and Risen” begins with a poem encouraged through Kurapaty. The poem is titled “InAntigone, a Dispatch” after the heroine of Sophocles, who was imprisoned for giving her brother a correct burial. In the play, Antigone’s sister, Ismene, refuses to help her. In the poem, Mort gives himself in Ismene’s position: “Get me for sister, Antigone. / In this suspicious country / I have a shiny shovel face”. In another poem, “Song for a Pocket Knife,” Mort writes about the exercise adventure of a Belarusian woman taken north to a labor camp: “Outside, always red pines. / Exercise hits, hits, hits, hits. ” Death is known for its functional style, marked by a kind of combative vitality; when he recites the poem, his rhythm mimics the roar of an exercise and the dark and heavy cadences recommend the nature of fate.
For Mort, reminiscence will have to be enshrined, and the lack of a monument in places like Kurapaty is an ethical and aesthetic concern. In a 2017 interview with the Cornell Chronicle, he asks, “How do you get through this silence?” He continues to recommend poetry as a remedy, a way that uses a sharp and direct economy of the word to break down the ambiguities of bureaucrats. The poetic form “does not tolerate approximate semantics,” he says, “but requires sharp words to delve into the very core of things. ” His poems are occasionally barbed wire, eager to get straight to the point. In “Bus stop: Ars Poetica”, he writes, “the streets were presented / with names of nationals / murderers”. As for forgotten victims, Death makes the transitory a distinctive feature. Your verse, like the war itself, can suddenly replace tone and direction, even within a singles line. In ‘Oda a Branca’ we get this: ‘You can drink water from any well / or jump and drown. / You can hang from one of the branches of the lawn / or pick up a half-rotten apple. / Bless this privileged landscape, transparent like a transparent night. “
This kind of candor is a tonic, especially now that Belarus is entering a new era of unrest. Lukashenka, in force since 1994, is the first and only president to have met the country. (The name did not exist before). His recent top re-election, in August, which he claims to have won by an overwhelming majority, was e wrapped up in allegations of fraud. Protests broke out across the country and the government responded with brutal repressions against protesters and the press. In a series of violent clashes, more than 17,000 people have been arrested and 8 are believed to have been killed, either in police custody or in clashes with the inhabitants. (The figure can be much higher, as dozens of protesters are officially missing. )Lukashenka has also targeted the country’s leading intellectuals, adding Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, who said she was summoned. to be interviewed this summer. These movements make Death’s poem “Little Songs” unsettlingly prophetic: “Our remarkable skills / in tank production / have been redirected / to academics and journalists”.
In writing about these facts, in the Times, Mort expressed his help to the protesters: “What is happening in Belarus is a massive improvisation with dignity, a motion opposed to dehumanization and invisibility. His ebook is part of this motion, and captures, through language, the contours of dissent. Soviet monuments stand in Minsk as concrete odes to terror, repression and silence. And yet “Music for the Dead and Risen” resembles its own monument, not only for Belarusians, but also for those suffering from state violence around the world. They will know exactly what Death means when he writes, in “Little Songs,” that “justice has proven to be/scarier/than injustice. “
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