Between „Sharing“ and „Participating“

In 1943, Hannah Arendt writes an essay ‘We refugees’. What preceded this text was almost ten years of forced exile and wandering, first in France, where Arendt fled with her mother in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution. In 1940, in anticipation of the German invasion, France would intern all German refugees in a special camp, Gurs, for ‘enemy aliens’, which Arendt would then flee to go to Portugal and then to the United States. In France she was learning French and in New York she was staying with an American family for several months to improve her English under a migrant support programme.
‘We Refugees’ is a text about a complex, fluid identity of a Jewish woman of German origin, ‘changed so frequently that nobody can find out who we actually are’. In France, these people became ‘boches’ (an offensive name for Germans used in the countries of anti-Hitler coalition). Then they were ‘prisonniers volontaires’, who were still forbidden to leave their houses after eight o’clock in the evening. Finally, they were labelled ‘unfriendly aliens’ in the United States.
Keeping in mind the inappropriateness of historical analogies and the fact that the very notion of ‘fascism’ has again become widely used in discourse¹, the forms of life described by Arendt, ‘where you have to be sort of politically minded when you buy your food’, bring back the relevance of tension between the level of self-determination and national identity.
The big democratic world briefly opened ‘a window to Europe’ for Belarusians during peaceful protests in 2020–2021. ‘Evropaket’ is a popular name for the vacuum-type windows that came with capitalism to replace the leaky wooden frames. The window through which Western European viewers watched what was happening in the streets of Belarus at the time had the shape of a television screen. The magic of montage showed women in white protesting with flowers, young people taking off their shoes to stand on a park bench, an elderly woman (Nina Bahinskaja) walking with a white-red-white flag down the streets of Minsk, whom even the riot police were afraid to approach. As of today, Nina Bahinskaja is under house arrest and subjected to compulsory psychiatric treatment; the women with flowers are in special regime penal colonies with one roll of toilet paper for eight people for hygiene products; the young people, if not imprisoned, have fled to Lithuania, Poland, Georgia or Germany, with no possibility to return to Belarus even for the funerals of their relatives.
Inspiring scenes of the newsreels have given way to images familiar since 1996: protests, beatings, jails, ‘deep concerns’ of the European Union, and military occupation of Belarus by Russian troops and the use of its territories as a base of operations for attacks on Ukraine as a climax on 24 February 2022.
The ‘Evropaket’ window has slammed shut for us with all the soundproofing and air tightness properties only a reliable item made in Germany can offer for comfortable living.
The new context of realpolitik during wartime forces us to constantly express and justify our own identity. It’s not about anti-war slogans on your Facebook user picture. I assume, that any living person is, by definition, against war, violence, imperial chauvinism and genocide but the reality proves the opposite. The sort of politically motivated self-determination that is expected of us as Belarusians today is based on a binary logic of ‘Realpolitik’ (falsely blaming Belarusians for supposedly supporting Putin’s war), resulting in a ‘not our fault’ attitude, Stockholm syndrome and a sense of defeatism in our internal struggle against the dictatorship. The latter, by the way, was supported for decades not only by Russia but also by neighbouring countries (including Ukraine)², where we would often hear, ‘Give us your Lukashenka to clean up this mess’, while crossing the border.
For years, I and my colleagues from Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan have been applying for various European programmes to undertake internships or go to residencies in Germany, Austria, France or Switzerland, and only in rare cases have we favoured our neighbours to get to know them instead of the privileged Other. This gap in understanding each other has now made us even more separated. Each country – Armenia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus – is fighting the Russian empire on its own borders alone.

Following the Eternal Path

In 1921, on the wave of the Belarusian National Revival – a movement which united thousands of Belarusian intellectuals, most of whom would later be shot or die in Stalin’s camps – Ihnat Kančeŭski (pen-name Abdziralovič) published an essay titled ‘Adviečnym Šliacham’ (Following the Eternal Path) in the Vilnia printing house (present-day Lithuania). The author analyses the borderline (pamežnaje) state of the Belarusian identity, which finds itself between East and West, and experiences both the pressure and influence of European imperialism and Slavophilic violence.
“East did not accept us as Belarusians, but demanded that we should adopt their eastern identity, so that ‘the Slavic streams will merge into the Russian sea’.”³
“We expected that our liberation, our salvation from the coercion of East would come from West, which was walking towards us with a pleasant smile and a kind look; but that did not mean that a Westerner making a pleasant gesture would not also do a nasty thing.”⁴
The West, primarily represented by Poland, introduced, according to Abdziralovič, humanistic, liberal and democratic ideas, but at the same time it brought economic exploitation, religious, linguistic and cultural repression.
Large-scale Russification was followed by Polonisation, and vice versa. Former Catholic churches became Orthodox churches, to become Palaces of Culture during the Soviet times and then turned into churches again.
That symbolic “in-between state” of Belarus, ‘ot morya do morya’ and ‘od morza do morza’ (from sea to sea in Russian and Polish spelling) described by Ihnat Kančeŭski, could be referred to the very concrete area, so called the Belarusian ‘Sea of Herodotus’. It is the only ‘sea’ Belarus has nowadays. It was formed thousands of years ago by retreating glaciers, and is roughly the size of Hungary’s Lake Balaton. The border of this sea-lake ran along the south-western part of Belarus, and it was this region that Herodotus mentioned 2,500 years ago. We call it Paliessie. A site of numerous rivers (the largest of which is the Prypiat, linking Belarus and Ukraine) and marshes. Every spring, the Prypiat River flood cuts off a part of Pinsk Paliessie from the mainland, and the only means of transport is by boat. Being completely cut off from civilisation, as they have been for thousands of years, the Paliešuki (inhabitants of Paliessie) begin a new cycle of life. The Prypiat River spring floods have a greater influence on the life of these people than domestic political events in Belarus. The recurring cycle of a new spring, on the one hand, constitutes a certain isolationism and even escapism, fixing the most archaic forms of life (sowing, reaping, fishing) in the frozen Belarusian time. On the other hand, it shapes a special type of identity, the intentionality of which is not so much directed towards neighbours (friends or conquerors), but towards the forests, water and marshes, from which the inhabitants of Paliessie cannot be separated.
In many discussions that have intensified in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the ‘national question’ is a particular source of tension. Russian propaganda continues to make up stories about children crucified by Ukrainian right-wing nationalists, Lukashenka has for decades repeatedly called the Belarusian political opposition nationalists, and any ‘national question’ debate in the cross-cultural field of the German-speaking world understandably, but still causes internal tension and quickly fades out.
Whereas for Belarus the issue of national identity finds its timeless cyclical character and recurrence as the springtime Prypiat floods in the Sea of Herodotus. It escalates within the Belarusian cultural field whenever the Kremlin speaks of a fraternity of ‘big and small nations’, and Lukashenka declares Russian the native language for all Belarusians. However, it has never disappeared from the historical discourse since the 18th century and the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Meetings with neighbours from the countries bordering Belarus (Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Poland) often end with questions about why Belarusians do not speak Belarusian, do not stop Russian tanks with their bare hands, or come out with pitchforks against the regime. With the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, some Belarusians have switched to the Belarusian language in their everyday communication, among other things, to express their anti-war stance and support for the Ukrainians. It turned out that people who had used Russian for years and had grown up in a Russian-speaking environment did not need linguistic courses or dictionaries to trigger their genetic memory. The language, which has been subjected to Russification for centuries and was purposely eliminated from public discourse by the current Belarusian authorities, has demonstrated its natural vitality even in the face of the repressive Belarusian system, which usually favours the neutral-Soviet way over the strongly pronounced national one.

The Identity of the Borderland

The question of any identity depends on the logic of similarity. ‘Identitas’ in the meaning of the same requires the subject to constantly relate himself/herself to some linear event of the past in order to confirm the existence of an identity. Otherwise, the subject is not framed. The accusations of a missing or weak identity of Belarusians exploit the linear similarity scheme described above. It is something that has been passed down through generations, recorded in canonical texts, has the status of Holly or uses the ‘since time immemorial’ argument. Linear identities are easily constructed when multiple reference objects are available. These are not only architectural monuments, corpus of texts in national languages, but also family albums, traditions and everything that then becomes an integral part of social life, embodied in the lives of specific individuals. Belarus, in this sense, is, as the philosopher Ihar Bakaŭ put it, a space of ruins. We do not have the object of reference; it is a sign itself which is addressed (referenced) by another sign. This forms what Babkoŭ calls ‘ethics of pamiežža’ (borderland)⁵, an alternative to the binary European ontology that relies not so much on the duality of self and other, of centre and periphery, but on the eventuality and autonomy and credibility of the boundary itself. Pamiežža (Borderland) that never coincides with ethnographic, geopolitical or even cultural boundaries.
The 15th–16th century saw the appearance of Kitabs, unique books of a commentary nature, hand-written by Tatars who primarily settled mostly in Iŭje and other Belarusian towns. On the one hand, being Muslim among the predominantly Christian population of 99%, the Tatars sought to preserve their cultural and religious identity. On the other hand, they were willing to assimilate into the new Belarusian-speaking social environment. This cross-border intercultural and religious interaction resulted in creation of the Kitabs, written in the Belarussian language with Arabic script in 15–16th century. Today, these written monuments allow us to hear the sound of the Belarusian phonemes before Russification.
If language is regarded as a fundamental part of national identity (at least, in classic models of nations of the modern era), the body of the Belarusian language is not monolithic: whether we are talking about the language of Kitabs, Belarusian Latin script before the Kremlin-imposed Russification reform, which transformed the Belarusian alphabet into Cyrillic, or the trasianka⁶ of Paliessie, which even Belarusians themselves sometimes fail to comprehend.
Belarusian identity is difficult to fit into linear forms. Our identitas has never been the same, in the sense of an absolute homogeneity and overlap of its elements, but took its beginnings from a ‘mismatch’. Such an identity fits Derrida’s definition of the Gift rather than Cartesian subjectivity. The asymmetry, eventuality and uniqueness of the Gift leads to a situation when my ‘Belarusian-ness’ can neither fit in with the expectations of the democratic forces of Belarus⁷, nor with the demonstration of my active Belarusian nationalism expected of me by my Ukrainian colleagues, or with what my German partners are bewildered by when I say that we have never existed for Europe other than as a puppet show of Europe’s last dictatorship to be aired in the news reports.
The Gift Derrida talks about, in its Levinasian finitude as ‘the Gift of Death’, is a form of ultimate responsibility before someone who grants this death by being a transcendental entity. In this sense, a gift cannot be interchangeable; Self cannot die for another (in their place) but Self can only give (life, resources, support), because only mortal beings are endowed with the gift of giving.
In this sense, the interaction between Self and the Other unfolds in a non-binary way. The Gift is asymmetrical; the Gift is superior to both the giver and the giver. The Gift implies its most extreme form (death), which is greater than the binarity of Self and the Other, because it is taken beyond the duality of the world. The way in which Belarus has been perceived by the European world as the Other for decades is the way in which the world cannot be shared (teilen), because the Other itself is simply not allowed to participate (teilnehmen) in the shared eventuality of that world. As the Other, we had no formalised subjectivity or strict and clear identity for the European actor. We were somehow stuck in the midst of the not yet fully collapsed Soviet and Russian world.
Our own vision of identity (and here I can of course only speak for myself) is the relationship of the Gift with the subject and that ruined space in which the Herodotus Sea was spilled 2,500 years ago. Deprived of a linear and conventionally constructed identity, it is difficult to share anything with us, because we can never become common to the European world. While Europe is laying railways connecting one part of the world with another, we travel in a wooden boat in cycles from one shore of Paliessie to the other. I am not romanticizing this archaic mythological nature of the Belarusian model of identity here, but I just want to point out that the Belarusian cultural space has not been constructed in the form of a binary code when only one side is demanded to have the dominance, and another is at the state of obey. For us there were no ‘barbarians and Greeks’, because our Others were the dualities of the Russian Empire or the Rzeczpospolita, opposing each other. And keeping the position in between of them, we realised that we did not fit into any. In this sense, we also had no claim to other territories or a colonial sentiment. We simply found ourselves at a certain point in history (under Poland, under Russia or occupied by Germany), in one place or another, believing that we belonged here and identifying ourselves as ‘tutejšyja’⁸. Hence the much closer connection to the earth, water, forest and marshes common to the Belarusian than to historically fixed models of the national self.
Belarusian poet Maryja Martysievič has written a poem called Sarmatyja which is written on behalf of a female about a mythical country that every Belarusian dreams of, a country that existed in reality, stretching ‘from sea to sea’, and was home to privileged Sarmatian warriors. This poem is addressed to us all; it’s sympathetic, as well as condemning and ironic at the same time. Because escaping into the myth of a great beautiful land of Sarmatyja may have been what helped us survive all the hell of the socio-political repressive machine during the long years of dictatorship, and still dream that we do not have to clarify our identity and political beliefs while ‘shopping for milk and bread’ (Arendt).

Я ніколі ня бачыла іншай краіны, дзе гэтак часта пытаюцца: хто мы й куды ідзем? — і шалеюць гэтак, чуючы ад мудрацоў, што яны — дурачкі на дарозе ў канец канцоў. Вельмі часта бывае, што гэтыя мудрацы зьвінавачваюцца ў празьмерным спажываньні мацы і выганяюцца з гораду пад гарматы. На іх месца прыходзяць іншыя мудрацы, якія гавораць ім, што яны — малайцы, бо мудрэц — гэта той, хто хваліць ва ўсім сармата.

I’ve never seen another country that
so often questions what it is and where it’s at,
where people rage so much when wise men say
that they are on their way to hell, and quite insane.
And often people will accuse wise men
Of eating too much matzah, then
evict them from the city with a bang!
Their place is taken then by new wise men
Who tell the people their deeds are great – amen!
Sarmatians love to hear their praises sang.⁹

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruscism
² https://rus.lb.ua/news/2019/11/11/441953_lukashenko_vozglavil_reyting.html in 2019, according to opinion polls, Lukashenka topped the chart of the most liked foreign leaders among Ukrainians, with 66 per cent, thus beating Merkel (60 per cent), Macron (39 per cent) and Polish President Duda (48 per cent).
³ Ihnat Kančeŭski (pen-name Abdziralovič) Adviečnym Šliacham, Wilna 1921.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ See, Ihar Bablou, THE ETHICS OF THE BORDER: TRANSCULTURALITY AS A BELARUSIAN EXPERIENCE, https://knihi.com/storage/frahmenty/6babkow2.htm
⁶ Trasianka is a mix of Belarusian language with Russian, sometimes Ukrainian forms and elements, mostly spread in the borderland regions.
⁷ Read about the internal conflict between the two models of democratic identity in democratic Belarus in the article The Right Turn of Belarusian Pro-Democratic Forces https://reform.by/pravyj-povorot-belarusskih-prodemokraticheskih-sil
⁸ Tuteišyja (Polish ‘tutejsi’, Lithuanian ‘tuteišiai’) was the name that the inhabitants of Paliessie (southern Belarus) and Padliašša (western part of Belarus) used to call themselves in the 1920s. The population of this region was multicultural and polyethnic. Because the region changed hands frequently over the centuries, and the people who lived there were variously part of Poland, or Germany, or the Russian Empire, they did not understand themselves to belong to any mono-ethnic community.
⁹ Maryja Martysievič, Sarmatyja, Minsk 2018.