Language Dance Act Four: Biełaruskaja
In pure Belarusian, we code switch so hard that we have two Wikipedias. These days I use the traditional taraškievica orthography in private text messaging and narkamaŭka in official communiqués. There are multiple conflicting versions of orthography with Latin alphabet. Everyday Belarusian clashes with bureaucratic Russian on government forms.
I have been asked many times by foreigners about the linguistic similarity of Belarusian to Russian, and about its political and social status. I grew up absorbing this subtle interplay, but explaining it is surprisingly hard. Many times, I tried to come up with comparative metaphors using other languages. But in quest for accuracy, metaphors of other nations can't help.
I was not too fond of learning Belarusian in school in the 2000s. It felt too disconnected from the life around, too contrived, too grammatically similar to the Russian from the next class period. It felt unnecessary, неабавязковай, in a country rapidly sterilized from any alternative thought. But as teenage hormones and anxieties started kicking in the latter half of that decade, I was looking for an outlet, an escape, an expression of anger. What helped me through, what never let me down is Belarusian rock music.
Rock has always been the music of protest. Several bands persevering since the late 1980s wanted to say things straight and wanted to do it in the language they deserved to use precisely because they claimed to deserve it. The protest in a not-allowed language hits harder. Their anger and aggression were forged into music but came from many sources: failing economy and low salaries, drugs and alcohol, failed or thriving romance, everyday idiocy of the bureaucratic state, and the eternal yearning for freedom. Unsurprisingly, the most outspoken bands got blacklisted from radio and concert venues for years and years on end, in 1980s and 2010s alike. Like a lot of other Belarusian culture, they were resigned to perform outside the border - often just outside the border in Vilnius or Białystok. Or in my mp3 player.
I spent very little time in Belarus in the 2010s as I was living abroad and only came back for brief vacations. Each time I came back, something shifted bit by bit, at least in the bohemian, post-industrial parts of central Minsk. An ecosystem of tech companies fueled by outsource contracts produced a sizeable class of young professionals with a large disposable income and a global mindset. They drove the demand for craft beer, food trucks, restaurants with tasting menus, barbershops, nightlife, Teslas. As any hipsters, they wanted to make the uncool cool. Like Mexican hipsters rebranded mezcal for the public, these people created again a demand for Belarusian culture and cuisine. And with those, Belarusian language. Books were published and sold in the open. Free Belarusian classes were held for the public. Someone called this era hipster nationalism.
The Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevič was free to present his books during hipster nationalism; he returned from first emigration because of that. But he knew what was the undercurrent, the dirty underbelly behind the façade. In his opus magnum Sabaki Eŭropy (Dogs of Europe) which took me two years to read he goes into the past and predicts the future across an array of interleaved stories. In 2016 he was thinking about 1914 or 1939, when something was about to happen. He and others knew the fate of Belarusian language, Belarusian people as they disperse abroad, and the great wall separating Belarus from Europe. I cannot call myself a European. Every time I want to go to Europe, I have to beg for a visa and provide a certificate that I am not a camel.
The 2010s ran their course. Hipster nationalism folded in months. The hipsters themselves were folded thirty apiece into a jail cell designed for four. Hipster or not, mostly not, Belarusian people emigrated en masse. Two, three hundred thousand people in just a year. Nobody left to eat, drink, and be merry in a building of exposed red bricks that served me a pizza with eel and oyster sauce along with the cocktail #2 (mezcal and prosecco).
The events of 2020 could not have escaped the attention of the artists. Young singers were literally yelling from the rooftops of how exhausted they were of being cute. The main theater of Belarus, named after the classic poet and playwright Janka Kupala, was decimated a month before its 100th anniversary as all actors who supported the protest got fired. Forming an independent theater group Kupalaŭcy, the actors returned to the stage with their never withering classic, a hundred year old Janka Kupala's play Tutejšyja ("The Locals"). The Locals are the people trying to define themselves at the intersection of interests of Russia and Poland as the wars of 1910s keep rolling over them in both directions. Hundred years later, Belarusians are not much closer to self-definition, independence, and freedom. Classics never die, even when they fall off stairs.
But I met people I can speak Belarusian with. Since we code switch every day, it was not hard to add another code to the mix. The language was right there, all along, latent, dormant, surviving on a diet of subway announcements and dated rock music, with a rare epic novel. Since our jobs cannot be performed in Belarusian, and we are scientists and not artists, we started looking to do a science thing. The Complexity Explained website and booklet were first published in English and translated by the original group of authors into their native languages. There was nothing Slavic or Cyrillic just yet. This was an opening.
How do you say "emergence" in Belarusian? "Interdependence"? How do you translate the famous Ed Lorenz quote "Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future."? How do you talk about self-organization and leaderless movements like those happening in the Belarusian streets? We cross-checked terminology everywhere: two Wikipedias, media usage, translations and rephrasings in other languages, technical dictionaries published during the last Belarusian Renaissance of the 1920s, and the latest revisions to the neoclassical orthography of 2005. Twenty pages took us half a year.
The liberal Renaissance of the 1920s turned into the bloodbath of the 1930s. Taraškievica was censored and Russified into narkamaŭka. The hipster nationalism of 2010s turned into a mess of pestilence and war we are living through and will only make sense of years later. Duolingo axed a community project to offer a Belarusian class, along with the forum where it was discussed. They prefer teaching real languages, like Klingon and High Valyrian.
The dynamics of modern Belarusian adoption are unusual, chronicled in the studies of Curt Woolhiser, an American professor who has been conducting interviews and surveys in Belarus for the past few decades. Many young, educated, urban people are taking it up, having grown up in Russian-speaking families much like myself, but switching to Belarusian with their friends, their partners, their children. In other language revitalization projects such speakers meet backlash from the original, "authentic", rural, legacy speakers. But the new Belarusian speakers mostly face issues from the authorities, from the passerby Russian speakers, or even from fellow speakers on the other side of the taraškievica/narkamaŭka divide. Some of such speakers turn activists, pestering local governments to use this overlooked constitutional language to sign rental agreements and sell train tickets, with considerable success. So long as they are on the run around the country.
Belarusian language is still alive. People are reading, writing, singing, chanting. Some are calling for unilateral "switch" into Belarusian language lifestyle. That can't be my story. If you are reading this, you are reading Act Four. I am not sure which languages my life will consist of, but I'm sure there will be many. Belarusian will stand proudly among them, because if we don't declare that we are here, in this world, nobody will. I could write press releases about my papers in Russian. Але ж гэта неабавязкова.