It is next to impossible to find a Belarusian who has never heard Sveta Ben performing, or at least heard of her. A poet, a puppet theatre director, an actress and a musician with solo and tandem-based projects ranging from Brecht-inspired cabaret to bold experimental electronic music. However, across this wide variety of genres, Sveta’s poetic voice remains consistent and recognisable: her lyrics are always about basic human values, empathy, fragility of everything alive, the need for mutual care, and admiration for beauty unexpectedly found in universal everydayness. And last year – inexcusably late, one might say – after more than 20 years of professional stage career, Ben’s first poetic collection saw the light of day.
Sveta Ben: Iz Jamki Zemljanoi (‘From a Little Hole in the Ground’). Babel Books Publishing House, 2024 (Photo by Olga Bubich).
Iz Jamki Zemljanoi (‘From a Little Hole in the Ground’) comprises poems written over a span of seven years interrupted with the pivotal event of the violent suppression of 2020 protests in Belarus. Its mood gradually changes from naïve curiosity about the secrets of the natural world to anger, despair and helplessness that reflect, like cyanotype prints, the great shifts in a small country’s history.
The collection owes its title to a line from an untitled poem that dates from the autumn of 2020. Its central image is the female narrator who struggles to hide her hands and herself in a little hole in the garden attacked by something large, inexplicably brutal and unknown. Other verses from the same period reinforce the heavy feelings of fatality and the unavoidability of the dead end.
However, before the clash with the dark forces begins, Sveta Ben takes time to guide us through the lush garden of her personal Eden, populated with talking animals, birds and plants. She introduces us to the pike, her drinking companion, the grasshopper and the ladybird she seeks support from, and the family of displaced squirrels, forced into exile ‘on another, foreign, pine tree.’ Freely moving up and down the ladder of abstraction, from the ordinary, small, visible and tactile towards the cosmos-wide, the unperceivable and timeless, Ben proceeds much like Henri Rousseau: hers is the kingdom of equality and respect for all living things. Each living creature has their own name, voice and a story to tell.
Criticising human banality and genuinely admiring the wisdom and grandeur of the universe, the poet preaches humble acceptance.
As is evident from these fragments, Sveta’s language is naïve. Her rhymes seem to be borrowed from children’s alliterative counting-out games, but she uses them, however, to pose serious philosophical (largely rhetorical) questions. There is thus a striking contrast between this apparent formal simplicity and the depth of reflection that makes this Belarusian poet’s voice unique.
The final chapter of the book comprises only seven verses written in the summer of 2023, when the poet was already in exile, and the metaphors in them are rather pithy and sharp. Almost every poem contains the image of death which seems to have entered not only our everyday vocabulary but also the physical and emotional reality of anyone born in our part of the world. Sveta, like many other Belarusians, loses home, friends, colleagues and neighbours: in the prisons, in the war that broke out south of our country in Ukraine, and in deadly accidents like the one which unexpectedly happened to Alyaksei Strelnikov – a prominent young researcher, critic and independent curator of the new theatre of Belarus. The hole in the ground Sveta is trying to hide her hands in grows and threatens to turn into a black hole that could swallow anything too weak and helpless to see the next day. Stray dogs – another powerful metaphor in this section – travel from verse to verse hinting at the hundreds of thousands of Belarusians forced into exile to flee the repression.
However, despite this apparently depressive finale, the Sveta every Belarusian knows and will remember as a ray of light illuminating the reality of the three decades of Lukashenko’s rule firmly believes that the good will prevail.
‘Now it’s important to find hope… or hope to hope… in the midst of all the hopelessness that surrounds us. But at the same time, I see a lot of really wonderful people who, despite everything, continue to channel extremely, desperately humanistic ideals, and I am really thankful to them for doing this. I am grateful that such people exist,’ she admits in her recent interview for Stuttgart-based online magazine ‘PlatformB’. And her debut collection of poems likewise promises this glimmer of hope.
In the last verse, the singular voice of the first-person narrator that accompanies the reader across more than 100 pages of questions and reflections meets a companion and blends into a ‘we’. And this hurt and lonely duo suddenly decide not to take the subway (to hide in the little hole), saying, ‘No, let’s take a bus instead, I don’t want to go underground.’ They look up at the starry night sky with constellations that remind them of the deceased ‘far away, near by’ and say,
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.
