Growing up as a naive schoolboy in the 1990s, I was surrounded by the Belarusian language and Belarusian culture. Like many of my generation I saw this as something quite normal, drenched as we were by a wave of hasty Belarusification.

We read in our history textbooks and were told in literature lessons about how the Belarusian people had lived and suffered, how wretched their lives had been, how they had risen up and fought, only to be clapped in irons, how they had hit back and rebelled, again and again… These stories worked until, as a young teenager, you started making contact with the ‘people’ outside the family, school and group of kids you played with in the yards surrounding your block of flats. You suddenly caught yourself thinking: are these really the people who threw off their chains and strove for freedom? Something wasn’t quite right. After all, your everyday reality wasn’t all that free, at least not according to the independent press that was sold in kiosks all over the city during the 1990s and the 2000s.

Nor was Belarus at all like what the founding fathers of our nation had envisaged in the first third of the twentieth century. There was no hiding the fact that we had a Belarus that was Russian through and through. And if you looked closer at the social aspect and questions of wellbeing, to me as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy it was apparent that the popular struggle was not over, and that victory was something you could only dream of. But how many people were actually concerned by this, and where were they?

It was then that a terrible doubt pierced your fragile young mind: Did our people ever rise up at any point in their history? Did they ever desire anything else, did they ever achieve anything together as a nation? Before 2020, reality persisted in trying to convince you that no one here had ever thought of themselves as a member of a community, that there was no nation as such, merely a random collection of people who after the collapse of the Soviet Union found themselves within the borders of the former Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Whether I wanted to or not, that is what I came to believe in and actually saw.

That’s how, over the years, together with your mates, acquaintances and comrades, you came to inflate a bubble of your own devising – a slightly romantic one maybe, but certainly not boring – and over the years to pad it out comfortably. This is precisely why the events of 2020 came as such a shock for many.

Suddenly it turned out that a community really did exist, that people can mobilise – when the stars are aligned, when each individual, by contributing in some small way, can join the common cause. It was not so much that they could join, but that they actually did join without invitation or having to be enticed. An all-embracing hope, inspiration and a desire ‘to be called human’ – as the Belarusian poet, Janka Kupala, put it over one hundred years ago – magically transformed into action.

I don’t know if our classic Belarusian writers, the fathers (or their precursors) of the nation, ever witnessed anything like that, if they ever saw the fruits of their labour, or if they were writing not for their contemporaries but for us, blindly placing their faith in a people they would never see. Whatever the answer, it was in 2020 that I learned for myself the real meaning of the phrase: ‘the people will rise up’.

A few days after the ‘elections’ I was talking to an elderly lady. Around us the whole of Miensk[1] was buzzing. The city resounded with explosions, was drowned in the hooting of cars, brooded angrily as people surged the blocked streets. A spectacle both magnificent and scary. It had made a deep impression on her. With tears in her eyes and a lump in her throat she said, ‘This is it, this is what we were waiting for throughout the ’90s.’

Elation and pain, a sense of shock almost impossible to control. Right before your eyes is something you had stopped hoping for. You had lost all faith, you had consciously crushed your hopes, you had deliberately averted your eyes so as not to behold yet another disappointment. According to your previous logic, what you see now ought not to be happening, simply ought not to be. But here it is. You are dazzled by the very fact of its existence. You hold your breath. You want to hurl yourself headfirst into the maelstrom of events, and at the same time freeze and stand stock still in order not to jinx it.

These events have led me to believe in the possibility of the whole of our national myth: from Bahuševič to Karatkievič, from Ciotka to Nina Bahinskaja[2]. For me hope is no longer an abstract concept; I have seen its physical incarnation, I know its scent, I know what it feels like. What should not have happened did happen, and that means it will be possible again.

We cannot know today what form the Second Coming will take. A new chance, a window of opportunity – call it what you like. Those who bring it about and those for whom it is intended may be completely different. They will be young, they may be people I don’t like, they may be completely unaware of the ruins of everything Belarusian on which they grew up, and how long ago it became entangled with the poison ivy of the rússkiy mir. However, I believe in the life force and power of the young; in their ability strike their own sparks and burn down the grievance of Janka Kupala’s poem – and then Truth and Justice will come forth into the world.

I dream of finding myself in the same spot as that elderly lady, to be able to see and repeat: ‘This is it, this is what we were waiting for in 2020.’ And I dream of living to see it.

These are just dreams, unfortunately. I held out in Belarus until the middle of 2023, then fate carried me off to Poland. The banal story of an average statistic. It doesn’t matter how many of us there are, one hundred thousand or half a million. We too exist, whether or not we are noticed in the countries in which we found refuge, and whether or not we are remembered in our homeland.

By taking advantage of the achievements of the modern world, this wave of new emigration is trying to deceive time and space. We aren’t completely absent from the RB,[3] but our presence within the frontiers of the new states is only fragmentary. It’s as though a group photo of us all, taken hurriedly on a Polaroid camera, is slowly fading, while the photo of us in our new place is not yet fully developed, however much you shake it.

There is someone who left almost five years ago, who sold his property and took his family with him: you can barely make out his profile. Then there are those who keep in touch with the homeland and receive guests from there. And there are those who risk everything to visit Belarus, a country half-occupied by Russia.

The other day, over a cup of coffee, a friend of mine quoted a mutual acquaintance, who said that it was time for us to take a close look at the local cemeteries and decide where we want to be buried, be it Warsaw, Vilnius, Berlin...

I immediately recalled Natallia Hardzijenka’s and Liavon Jurevič’s A Book of Cemeteries; Belarusian Burials in the World. It was published at the end of 2023 with the support of the Belarusian Institute of the Sciences and the Arts, an organisation founded in the 1950s in the USA by members of the postwar Belarusian emigration. People who knew they would die in a foreign land.

The 600-page encyclopaedia compiles colour photographs of motley Belarusian graves from thirteen countries with headstones in a variety of languages: from Australia and Chile to Great Britain and Sweden. The illustrations are accompanied by the biographies of those buried, some just a few lines long, others consisting of several paragraphs. There’s nothing in the book about Poland, Lithuania and Russia, yet it is in these countries’ soil where most of us probably rest. I’ve no idea if it would be realistic to try to describe and count all the Belarusians who were thrown out of their country and now lie scattered all over the world, alone in the last 100 to 150 years.

And now, here we are, casually chatting about how we should start choosing ourselves a cemetery.

By the end we had the impression that by no means all Belarusian emigres wish to lie in a foreign land, and that if they had the choice, they would choose to be buried in their own country. It isn’t just that their relatives and friends live in Belarus, or that they wish to lie alongside their ancestors, but that they simply wish ‘to lie at home’. To a good number of emigres this question will seem of no particular significance, but they are who researchers and encyclopaedists will occupy themselves with when they get around to compiling the fifth or the tenth volume of The Book of Cemeteries.

That’s why, whenever I am asked whether there is any hope for emigres (primarily political) to be able to return, I always answer with absolute certainty that yes, there is. On this point I am full of optimism.

Previously it was virtually impossible to return a body to its native land; it was either too expensive, or it took too long and there was no way of doing it. And anyway, the borders were closes; the hatches of the submarine known as the USSR were battened down. For that reason, most people had no means of knowing whether there was still anywhere to take the body to, if there were still village burial grounds or cemeteries attached to churches that hadn’t been wrecked by war or simply ploughed up.

These days, however, it is perfectly realistic to think of repatriating a body to Belarus. True, it’s cheaper to send a body off on its last journey from some country close by, like Poland or Lithuania. But anything is possible. Just set aside a thousand euros or so. If necessary, ask your relatives and neighbours to have a whip round.

The question of where I wanted to be buried turned out to be a matter of principle. I had never thought of the subject before, and the fact that I thought of it took me by surprise. It had always seemed natural and obvious that I would be laid to rest somewhere in the expanses of my blue-eyed[4] homeland, that flying above me there would be a honking goose, and that the wind would be moaning eerily, but still be close to my heart.[5]

It isn’t a question of where I will actually be buried. It would not be a bad idea, of course, to pile on the pathos and find a fine spot for my mortal remains. The Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko wrote in his poem ‘Testament’ that, ‘When I die, then make my grave/High on an ancient mound,/In my own beloved Ukraine’. The poem also mentions the steppe and the ‘blustering river’ Dnipro.

The philosopher and poet Ihnat Abdziralovič[6] asked to be buried not in a cemetery, but somewhere ‘by the roadside on a green hilltop…’ The poet Larysa Hieniuš,[7] a survivor of Stalin’s prison camps, wrote that she should be buried in her native oak grove ‘where all is green around’.

At school I won a prize in a competition called ‘Earth Day’, organised by the Green Cross,[8] and was lucky enough to take part in a series of writing classes. another of the participants had written a poem that began with, ‘Bury me on the banks of the Vilija river…’ This may not been how the line actually went, but that’s how it pierced my romantically-inclined adolescent body through my faux leather raincoat. It would be no bad thing, I thought, to be buried somewhere along the river Nioman; after all, that’s the region my ancestors on both sides came from. I’ve only visited the area a few times, but I still view it as the Promised Land. These childish games aside, I will be satisfied with any healthy-looking tree somewhere close to Miensk on a spot set aside for the purpose by the local authorities. To be honest, any little place on the expanses of the RB will suit me down to the ground.

This is the first part of my testament. The second part is an inalienable condition: the epitaph on the cross above my grave is to be in the Belarusian language. This is what I want, what I earnestly request, what I demand.

Dear traveller, should you chance to pass by and see an epitaph written in any other tongue, scratch it out at once with a key or write over it with a permanent marker. If you have neither key nor marker, then rip the inscription away. In short: I enjoin you under these extreme circumstances to defile my grave.

Ever since I was a schoolboy cemeteries have made me feel sad and uneasy. Not because beneath my feet the dead are whispering to each other, but because no matter who or what we were in life, we’ll all end up there. Did you like to read Alieś Razanaŭ[9] for the good of your soul? Did you speak the mix of Russian and Belarusian we call trasianka and only rarely venture out of the Kamaroŭski Market district of Miensk?[10] Did you use to switch from Russian to the local dialect on the rare occasion you went back home, so as not to annoy your family with your posh talk? Did you lecture at a university, were you a writer, historian, artist and staunch supporter of the Belarusian national revival? It doesn’t matter. All this will be erased once you get put in the local graveyard. In Belarus, Death is a priori Russophone.

When you’re dead, you still have to stand up (pardon the phrase) for your language and nationality. This is because the state undertaker sneakily exploits the grief of its Belarusian-speaking clients, who for their part consider it inappropriate and even embarrassing to put pressure on the undertaker’s employees, who do not have Belarusian letters on their computers. And so the epitaph is written in the ‘normal’ way, i.e. in Russian. ‘It’s only temporary, when you get around to putting up a headstone you can have it written in that language of yours, if that’s what you want.’ And then something that was supposed to be temporary ends up lasting for years. When the grandchildren and distant relatives of the deceased get around to paying for a headstone, they don’t even bother to think about the language. And so everything follows the standard pattern. Everyone does the same, there’s no need to be clever.

I can give you a very recent example: the geologist Radzim Harecki now lies buried in Miensk’s Northern Cemetery. He was the son of Haŭryla Harecki, one of the founders of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, a man devoted to the Belarusian Idea. A victim of Stalin’s repression in the 1930s, Harecki Snr. spent years in the Gulag and was rehabilitated only in 1958. Radzim was also a nephew of Maksim Harecki, author of many classics of Belarusian literature, shot by the NKVD in 1938. What we now have is a temporary cross adorned with Radzim’s name in Russian: Garetskiy Radim Gavrilovich. It’s important to note that in his lifetime, he insisted even in the second official state language (Russian) on using the ‘belarusified’ variant of his surname: Garetskiy. Not Goretskiy, which is how the surname of his father and grandfather was registered. This Belarusian akańnie[11] is all that is left to the deceased.

In the Siarhiej Prylucki’s recent collection of poetry Ničoha niastrašnaha (‘There’s every reason to be afraid’), a granny from Bucha in Ukraine begs everyone she meets with the words ‘I died yesterday – bury me like a human being.’ There we have it. I also wish to be buried like a human being, and to dream that in death I will be a better variant of my current self – buried at home and with an epitaph in the Belarusian language over my grave.