Alindarka's Children

"This novel by one of the most established and renowned contemporary Belarusian writers Alhierd Bacharevič will be especially interesting for those who are bilingual or who come from a country that used to be colonised and whose native language has been at the brink of extinction. Irish and Scots are the first who come to my mind. Years ago in Minsk I watched a play Translations (the original by Brian Friel), that brings up a question of language as a political one. In it the characters speak in English and Irish, and in the Belarusian version the English speech was translated into Russian, while Irish speech was translated into Belarusian. In Alindarka’s Children, Jim Dingley and Petra Reid employed a similar technique, translating the Russian speech into English and the Belarusian parts into Scots. Alindarka’s Children, first published in 2014, is a contemporary novel about a brother and a sister interned in a camp. In the camp children are made to speak the language of the coloniser and forget their own language, for which they use drugs and surgery on the larynx. Speaking Belarusian is considered an “illness” that needs to be cured. The siblings escape and are chased, surviving through adventures, like Hansel and Gretel. Bacharevič said: I well remember what gave me the necessary push to start work. I had read that somewhere in some little town a woman in the local education authority had advised the parents of a little child to “urgently seek the help of a speech therapist. Because your kid has a strong Belarusian accent. Get it cured, before it’s too late. Know what I mean? Normal kids speak proper, they speak Russian, got it?” Language is a code, a key to the collective subconscious. It should not be used as a political tool, it should be a tool for communication. But Belarusians find themselves torn between the muted voice of genetic memory which is craving for Belarusian language, the scream going back to the urbanisation in the Soviet Union when people from Belarusian villages fled to cities where there were jobs, and where it was proper to speak Russian and one would be frowned at otherwise, it was a mark of status, and the nowadays cacophony of the voices shaming you for not speaking Belarusian mixed with those not understanding why you speak it. I come from a Russian speaking family and my whole surrounding used to be Russian speaking, so my writing for a long time was in that language, but I made a conscious decision to switch to Belarusian in my early twenties. When I started writing in Belarusian, I suddenly felt this impulse to write about all kinds of things I hadn’t written about before, I hadn’t even been aware of. Like my relationship with my parents, childhood traumas, womanhood. My poetry had become feminist before I myself did, and it’s gradually and naturally developed into a form of activism, but all this wouldn’t have happened if I kept writing in Russian, because the Belarusian language gave me a key to the genetic memory, to the collective subconscious and, consequently, to my deeper and truer self."