While the entire world seems to be going through an unsettling period that future generations will probably define as decisive, historical, or, as a singer poetically put it not long ago, ‘the time of changes’, Belarus is facing a specific problem of its own. Its last USSR-born generation, now in their late 30s to early 40s, having witnessed the brief euphoria of the 2020 protests – swiftly replaced by the PTSD of the years that followed – is struggling not to lose its identity in exile.
The dysfunctional legal system, pervasive violence and unceasing repression of any dissent have forced around half a million Belarusians to leave the country. Often separated from their loved ones, facing the need to navigate unfamiliar bureaucratic systems, rebuild professional networks and learn yet another foreign language, we inevitably find ourselves reflecting on our past. What is it about our childhood, spent under Soviet flags, with young Lenin badges pinned to our ill-fitting standard-issue brown school uniforms, that has shaped us into who we are today?
Can nostalgia, cultivated in mass and social media and aggressively promoted by Putin and his administration, feed unhealthy patriotism? How could this critical memory inventory, shared through books and art, prevent history from repeating? Is it really able to do so in the first place?
Volha Hapeyeva is a Belarusian author whose voice in prose and poetry can definitely be considered as unique in the last Soviet generation. Having reached the age that allows (and invites) a critical retrospective look, she wrote Camel Travel – a piece of deconstructed autofiction first published in her native Belarusian in 2019 (Halijafy, Belarus) and then in Thomas Weiler’s German translation three years later (Droschl, Germany). The exotic title immediately opens up the space for interpretations and questions. Whose journey is the novel documenting? What is a camel doing in the Soviet Belarus of the 1980s? And probably the central one – why does any of it matter at all?
The book Camel Travel by Volha Hapeyeva in Belarusian and German (Halijafy, 2019 and Droschl, 2021).
After reading the first chapters one realises that things are not so simple. ‘This is Belarus, baby!’, as our ironic generation used to say, dropping this phrase as a pseudo-explanation for everyday absurdities. All is not what it appears to be. Camels do live in the childhood memories of the dwellers of this landlocked country ‘somewhere between Poland and Russia’, but it is probably the very idea of incompatibility, silent questioning that matters. The inner dialogue between an adult woman and a little Soviet girl posing for a photo on the desert animal’s back reveals much more than the nostalgia the reader could initially sense in Hapeyeva’s writing. Her nostalgia is not ‘rosy retrospection’, its colour is peculiar: neither grey as the sky above Munich where the writer now lives nor red as the Victory Day parade flags.
With the care of an attentive psychologist, Hapeyeva lists sad, funny and strange episodes from her young years, full of adventures, joys, doubts and small acts of rebellion, and weaves the links between the decades of the distant ‘then’ and the ambiguous ‘now’. In the conclusions that delicately sum up each chapter, we see acceptance and gratitude for the strength the writer finds in herself. Despite the Soviet reality pressuring her to fit in, she stays true to herself and grows into what she is now. Still reluctant to jump on the bandwagon or force herself to ‘be liked’, independent and never one to say ‘no’ to new experiences, she believes in the power of words to change reality – something many politicians ignore today giving preference to military aggression.
A group photograph of Volha’s class, 1989, Minsk, the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. She is the only girl wearing a black apron and black ribbons in her hair (Volha Hapeyeva’s personal archive).
Certainly, the journey Hapeyeva takes us on is not going to be the same for different readers. Those like me, born and raised in the Soviet Union, could be triggered by the linguistic and cultural deconstruction she performs, finding themselves on an emotional ride through the spaces of distant recollections. Foreign readers might be more intrigued by the exoticism of the camel and surprised at the things totally natural for us ‘insiders’. ‘Refreshingly different!’ Dierk Wolters, a Frankfurter Neue Presse reviewer, exclaims indeed. With an invisible wall dividing Europe into two large zones of interest in the 1980s (and now?), stories about a Soviet childhood could come across as our language tricks, rituals, myths and survival strategies to deal with the shortages of consumer goods. But what about the values and aspirations that underlay them? Are we really so far, so alien… so exotic? The reasons behind our choices were probably not the same, but weren’t all of us, in a way, children thrilled by a camel ride? And maybe the animal Volha uses as her novel’s central metaphor is not a camel at all, but life itself – large, mysterious, unlike anything we have seen or felt before.
Turning the last pages of Camel Travel, I think of this memoir as an open invitation. Looking at these 20 chapters as a story of one person’s Soviet past would be one approach – a rather obvious one, I should say. But I would rather read it as a universal story of acceptance. In the world that promotes divisiveness and polarisation, to label anything and anyone unaccustomed as different, suspicious, ‘exotically’ alien is the road to a potentially very dark future. Another way is possible, Volha Hapeyeva shows, one of embracing fragility, questioning ready-made answers, learning to listen and hear both yourself and others. Maybe the little girl who believed in the power of words to change reality was right – words can actually protect us. Because it is poetry that brings us closer to one another, not hashtags. We all carry our exotic camels in us and it is to our own childhood that we need to travel first of all, to name all the pains, doubts and hopes, become whole humans at peace with ourselves. And to move on.
Belarusian essayist, photobooks maker and reviewer, translator, photographer, lecturer, and curator.
Born in 1980 in Minsk, Belarus. Graduated from Minsk State Linguistic University, English Faculty, majoring in English, Italian and English, American and Italian literature (1997–2002), have BA and MA (2002–2004). Worked on the Ph.D. thesis in Pedagogy. As a freelance journalist collaborated with Belarusian, Ukranian, Russian, British, Georgian, German, US and Swedish online and paper-based media. Has taken part in more than 20 solo and group exhibitions. Is the author of two photobooks related to the issue of memory and 'counter-memory' art activism. Personal site: bubich.by.
