ARTICLE: The Stones of Our Homes Turned into Stardust

On July 3, 2000, three years before his death Edward Said – a prolific Palestinian writer and academic professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University visited Lebanon  ^1  1  See his video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g1ooTNkMQ4&ab_channel=ChristopherSykes ↩︎ with his son. The land where he spent his childhood, where his family owned a house and ran a business, which was all lost when they fled to the United States. Standing near the Blue Line of Lebanese-Israeli Border his image captured by a photographer from Agency France-Press, throwing a stone toward the border fence to express his solidarity with the Lebanese people invaded and intensively bombed by the Israeli Army over the last 15 years (1985-2000). Stone throwing has a deep historical and cultural meaning for the people of that region grounded in the archaic time of rural slinging stones of herders guarding sheep. The symbolism of stone throwing is connected with the idea of how the weak could resist the strong, referring to the myth of David and Goliath. Used for centuries, stone throwing can be considered a stronghold of Palestinian identity and history, counting back thousands of years.

Unsurprisingly, following after his symbolic act Said has since been known as the “professor of terror” – a name that was given to him by a New York-based magazine published by the far-right Jewish Defense League  ^2  2  Same Organisation, that organised a huge demonstrations and physical attacks in New York in 1969 against Soviet representatives with the aim to draw attention to the discrimination of millions of Jews in the Soviet Union. See, https://www.wrmea.org/1999-july-august/jewish-defense-league-unleashes-campaign-of-violence-in-america.html ↩︎ (JDL) of the ‘80s. After his action, Said was banned by many Universities. In 2001 the Freud Society in Austria cancelled his planned lecture, and he faced a huge bullying campaign in American media.

Explaining his symbolic gesture Said told:

“We have nothing to defend ourselves with.” Stone-throwing must suffice, he said. “We can’t take an M-16 and kill every settler. All we have are those stones. A bullet can kill you instantly. A little stone won’t do much. But at least I’m sending a message”  ^3  3  David M. Halbfinger, Adam Rasgon, ‘Life Under Occupation:The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict,’ New York Times 22 May 2021 ↩︎

The stone throwing in the context of disproportion of forces keeps the fundamental role of power asymmetry. The famous quote of King Solomon from the Book of Ekklisia: “time to gather stones and a time to scatter”. Despite the many subsequent interpretations, the process of scattering stones is associated, among other things, with making the soil ignoble, and unsuitable for growing grain. Everybody who visited once that biblical land could imagine the complexity of the agriculture due to the stoning soil there. Thus, the stone is deeply connected with the idea of life, not less than other archaic symbols like water, sun or soil.

The year 1987 was proclaimed by UNESCO as the year of Marc Chagall. By that time the artist, who was born in a Jewish family in Vitsebsk (the northern Belarusian city which was a part of the Russian Empire at that time), had been internationally recognised, living between New York and Paris, and since he left his hometown in 1922 never returned to Vitsebsk again. On the day of his death in 1985 the main soviet newspaper “Pravda” published a short-noted article. The late ‘80s for the Soviet Union is frequently seen and named as the times of thaw (“оттепель”) and many cultural figures (artists, writers, musicians) who were abandoned before, came back into the public discourse. But the name of Chagall could not be found among them. Despite that, in June 1973 his first solo show at Tretyakov Gallery was officially opened under the patronage of the Soviet Ministry of Culture. For the first time after 50 years, Chagall returned to his homeland. But not to Vitsebsk. According to the soviet security restrictions a person with a “western passport” was not allowed to visit so-called provincial cities, but only big ones (mostly Moscow and Leningrad).

Paradoxically, while considered to be a holder of a “Western passport”, Chagall was actually stateless like the countless refugees who fled the Russian Empire after the October Revolution of 1917. He received his French citizenship only after living with a Nansen Passport for 15 years (between 1922 and 1937).

During the opening ceremony of his show M.Chagall said:
“I am sincerely grateful to you for the invitation after 50 years of separation…You do not see my tears, for, strangely enough, I lived far away from my Motherland and the Homeland of my ancestors…Like a tree uprooted, I seemed to hang in the air… You can say whatever you want about me – I’m a big artist or a small artist, but I remained the faithful son of my parents from Vitsebsk…  ^4  4  http://m-chagall.ru/library/rodina-mark-shagal-v-vitebske20.html ↩︎”

But his name hardly sounded frequently in 1973 in Vitsebsk. In 1985, after the artist’s death the representatives of Belarusian literature intelligence Ales Adamovich and Vasil Bykau, together with local Vitsebsk intellectuals, initiated the campaign to return the name and heritage of M.Chagall to Vitsebsk. Soviet poet Andrey Voznesenky, while visiting Vitsebsk said in the interview that the city needs the Museum of Marc Chagall. But nobody could predict that it could cause a severe bullying campaign against the passed artist. In 1986 in numerous newspapers and publications, many articles dedicated to the impossibility of a Chagall Museum in Vitsebsk appeared – some of them with clearly antisemitic tones, like here:

“Vitsebsk is occupied by Chagallo-mania…It’s not enough to say that Chagall lived in Vitsebsk, what’s more important is what he did there! Meanwhile, the truth is that the UNOVIS, which he created and directed, had exclusively negative aspects… Deserters, speculators and other dark personalities (mostly Jews) found refuge in the institute, receiving generous food rations…The traffic lights of morality have gone out completely  ^5  5  V. Begun “The Stolen Lantern of Glasnost” // http://m-chagall.ru/library/rodina-mark-shagal-v-vitebske20.html ↩︎”.

Among the irreconcilable fighters against Chagall was one of the key figures in Belarusian post second world war art history, a prominent soviet realism artist Michael Savitski – a survivor of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. In 1987 he wrote:
“Chagall is a formalist, he is not a great artist, he is just a wealthy Jew who fled abroad during a difficult time for his homeland  ^6  6  Quoted by https://moc.media/ru/oneofus_04/ ↩︎“.

On November 2023 one of the most famous paintings by Marc Chagall “Above the City” (1914-1918) where he depicted himself and his wife Bella Chagall-Rozenfeld flying over the rooftops of Vitsebsk, appeared among the lots at Sothebey’s auction with the estimated price 12-18 mln$. Belarus still doesn’t have paintings of Chagall. A man, who was among others the initiator of returning Chagall pieces and so-called artists of the “Paris School” to Belarus Viktor Babariko, a former candidate for the presidential position in the elections of 2020 is imprisoned and sentenced to 14 years.

At Documenta 15 in 2022 in Kassel an homage of Palestinian artist Mohammad Al Hawajri “Above the city” was exhibited among other works that raised a new wave of discussions in Germany under the umbrella term “antisemitism.”

The artist introduced his version of lovers flying above the city of Gaza, cut by a huge wall. In the interview titled “Art as Response, Not Escape” Mohammad Al Hawajri said:

“Gaza does not have the elements of artistic life. There is no theatre, no cinema, no galleries, no museums, no art institutions, and no support from the government for art. However, I understand that there are priorities in Gaza. The most important of these priorities is to provide a decent life for people. Despite this, there is no decent life for people. We have a travel ban. For more than 15 years, we have been living under a stifling siege, which has made us lose many opportunities and made us very weak in many ways  ^7  7  Art as Response, Not Escape: A Conversation With Palestinian Artist Mohammed al-Hawajri in Gaza April 26, 2021 in Democracy In Exile​​https://dawnmena.org/art-as-response-not-escape-a-conversation-with-palestinian-artist-mohammed-al-hawajri-in-gaza/ ↩︎”.

The stones of the ancient land that were used for centuries to build homes had become the materials for building the wall, the borders, the prisons, and cutting the land from the people who belong to it and to whom that land belonged. That multilayered and more complex than citizenship process of belonging could not be revealed by juggling propagandistic idioms like “there had never been such a state as” or “destroying the terrorist nest”. The cornerstone turned into the throwing stone – the last silent and solid statement to remind you that you are still alive.  

Once I was very lucky to meet Ebru Nihan Celkan, a dramaturg from Istanbul, and read the text she wrote in 2021, the year she fled from Turkey because of political reasons and tried to settle in Berlin. I guess for anyone who remembers winter in Berlin during the covid pandemic, it was triggering memories. Gloomy grey, cold, vein drugs in U8, total loneliness and bottomless sorrow. Not an easy thing to cope with even for well-social protected “google-gurus” or “old money kids”. A nightmare for new-coming migrants, who lost the soil under their feet and tried to feel the new one, but it feels like running in a dream – when you want to run and try as you might to begin moving, but feel nothing, no grip on the surface.

In her essay  ^8  8  Celkan, Ebru Nihan. Das Herz Berlins. https://www.boell.de/de/2021/09/10/das-herz-berlins?dimension1=ds_anwerbe60 ↩︎, Ebru described the day when after many days passing through the Alawite Cemetery in Berlin she finally decided to enter. The cemetery is located between Neukölln and Kreuzberg, one of the most non-German community districts of Berlin. A piece of land where several generations of people left their homes in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘90s and a couple of years ago found the last stop of their journey, finally feeling another land with all their bodies.

Meeting an Alawite family who came to the cemetery with their kids for a farewell ceremony, Ebru joined them for a moment, being invited to share a piece of Lokma and a sip of Ayran. Sharing another’s loss and grief warmed and healed her own.

“Time,” said one of the women, “with time everything will be better.”

“Roots,” said a man, “once they take, new shoots appear.”

Never having had a strong identity with her Alawite roots, Ebru was surprised that in the Alawite cemetery with unknown people her trauma and pain of exile was starting to heal. At the place where people who have been always stigmatised as “foreigners”, “migrants” or “gastarbeiters” finally found peace on the tiny piece of “belonging” to that foreign land.

The cemetery is a kind of “third place” according to M. Foucault, that interrupts the usual order of things, that has different time and space framing and, in a way, could be described as a liminal place. The space of transfer, the space of exile and the last residence.

A close friend of mine, Emrah Gökdemir, is an Alawite too. He was born in Antakya, a beautiful ancient antiochian land, that was totally destroyed with the earthquake in 2023 (for the 8th time in its history). Preparing for the exhibition together we watched his new piece, called “What Do the Birds Say” – a touching and sad story of a Syrian refugee, who came to Antakya after the war of 2011-2012, and started to depict little birds accompanied by some quotes from Koran in public places in exchange of some food or symbolic money. When Emrah first saw that little bird depiction he started to chase them, trying to meet the artist. He asked people who allowed him to make a wall-drawing, who is that man, and everyone he asked described him differently. Some – as a bagger, some – as an old artist, some – as an Alawite migrant. Emrah collected more than 600 photos, containing the places where the birds were depicted, but had never met the artist in person. When in 2023 the earthquake happened, Antakya was 90% destroyed. Thousands of people died or got lost.

When I asked Emrah, why some people in the film look unfriendly or even irritated describing that naive and sincere man, not demanding anything, but proposing a fair and quite archaic exchange: everything he has – his art – for a piece of bread.

The answer was unexpected: that most people of Antakya are Alawites, even Bashar Asad, the president of Syria, is also an Alawite, who are the minority in Syria. That’s why many people in Antakya are really proud to have the Alewitian representative in the highest political hierarchy position. Therefore, they could hardly understand why people fled the country.

That was similar to the questions I was frequently asked.

• Why did you leave Belarus, you have such clean streets?
• You haven’t seen our prisons.

When I came to Germany in late November 2020, it was the time when I frequently walked in Berlin through numerous “Friedhof” (cemeteries), which remained the only open and accessible for walking public places. In Belarus I just lost my grandfather, who was the most important and beloved person to me, and my biggest fear alongside with the grief was never to come back to Minsk again to visit his grave.

That was the common nightmare for many Belarusians who left the country and couldn’t return. Their parents or beloved ones are dying, but they couldn’t come for the last goodbye. They stayed within that double sorrow: the emptiness of the loss and the emptiness of absence of the place where one could go through the grief.

Since 2020 I am living between Germany and Poland, still feel a bit more at home in Warsaw or Podlasie, but I still not feel rooted enough to “sprout new shoots”. Visiting “Russische Friedhof” or “Russische Kirche” in Leipzig I face again and again that unaltered imperial unification of all orthodox as Russians. The only Orthodox church in Leipzig was built in 1913 after the triumphal victory of common military German and Russian Empire forces against Napoleon in 1813. Inside the church there are many commemorative signs mentioning all regiments fought, among them are Vilensky and Smolensky. One could not be a historian to prove that Vilnia and Smolensk were mostly ethnically Belarusian cities. But it is “Russische Kirche” and Russian victory in a way.

When I am in Warsaw, I come to Liturgy at St. Mary Cathedral, the main orthodox metropolia in Poland. And we all pray for freedom of Ukrainian land, but never for Belarusian one.

One of the biggest migration waves of the 20th century was the resettlement of people from Belarus, Ukraine and Poland to the United States and Canada. Most of them had Polish documents, because the nearest western travel way was through Poland. And most of them not only changed their names and surnames to sound more “west-ish”. They were also registered as “Polish”, due to their Catholic religion.

That’s how one could be appropriated by one of the most powerful institutions: church and citizenship. That is how the Louis Althusser mechanism of interpellation works. When not you introduce yourself, but somebody else gives you a name: a migrant, an Arab, an extremist, whoever else. The mechanism of interpellation demands a person to respond, to turn around, when the voice of power is addressed. That forms a memory to that “given name”.

When Edward Said already lived in the United States and the time to change his passport came, he went to the municipal office, filled out all necessary papers and in the column “place of birth” in the application form he wrote “Jerusalem, Palestine”.

After a couple of weeks when Said came to pick up his new passport he opened it and saw “Place of Birth – Jerusalem, Israel”. He returned to the municipal office and asked to correct it as erroneous data. They refused, explaining that there is no such state as Palestine.

But when I was born, said Said, there was no such state as Israel.

(Edward Said was born in Jerusalem, where almost 5 generations of his family lived before 1935, when the city was under the British Mandate (1920-1948)).

So back and forth he finally got his US passport where the column “Place of birth” stated “Jerusalem” without any country state listed  ^9  9  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g1ooTNkMQ4&ab_channel=ChristopherSykes ↩︎.

Exile relates to migration but is never limited to “place of residence”. This much more complex dynamics of being “in and out”, of belonging and seeking, which is relevant to Novali’s definition for philosophy as “homesickness” – the urge to be home everywhere.

In his essays on exiles  ^10  10  Edward Said, Reflexions on Exile and other Essays. Granta Books, 2000 ↩︎, Edward Said criticised the understanding of exile as “narcissistic masochism”, which is a kind of fetish or commodity of exile. On the contrary, he proposed to think about it in terms of scrupulous (not indulgent or silky) subjectivity. Exile could be a form of musical “contrapuntal” – the ability to keep simultaneously more than two or more voices together. This notion of exile goes beyond the flat binary understanding of replacement or losing one’s home. Because it’s not about the place, it’s about the dynamic of “seeking” the way of changeability, instability, loss and openness to continue. One could experience that kind of exile dynamic being in one’s own homeland.

In 1997, Belarusian philosopher Valiantsin Akudovich published a text for the 50th birthday anniversary of poet Ales Razanau (1947-2021). The text was titled: “Біце нашы вітрыны, Паэт!” (“Smash our windows, Poet”).

To understand all the revolutionary gestures of such greeting, one should keep in mind the social and political context of that time. In 1994 Lukashenko won his first and last fair presidential election and started to change the whole governmental system toward the dictatorship. In 1996, a huge protest took place all over the country, but especially in Minsk as a reaction on the so-called Referendum, used by Lukashenko to change the Constitution, adding the point of unlimited president powers as well as the status of Russian language as the governmental alongside Belarusian and the course for integration with Russia. That caused a wave of civil protests. But the scenario for coping with them was already settled: beaten civil population, tortured, imprisoned, and killed opponents. All dissenting institutions or mass-media must be urgently closed.

At that time, Belarusian culture started to exist in so-called partisan mode: privately publishing books on Belarusian language, the hidden plays of “Free Theater” in Minsk garages and underground art shows.

That was the time of great poets, whatever greatness means. In case of Ales Razanau, it was that greatness that suddenly came to Belarusian literature up from above, reaching the classical themes of “воля-доля (freedom-faith)” with a range of metaphysical topics. He was a rare poet, who never wrote any sonnets, but rather invented his own forms of a “word in the world”, called it Quantems (квантэмы) and Sentence Poems (вершасказы).

As V. Akudovich stated, the metaphysics of Ales Razanau was neither a Kantian style of star sky nor any transcendental topic, but the “metaphysics of clay, stone, grain and the word itself”

“… ўся ягоная метафізіка скінутая ў анталогію, дакладней – у анталагічнае быццё беларускага слова. Гэта не метафізіка зорнага неба, астральных целаў, трансцэндэнцыі ўвогуле, а метафізіка гліны, каменя, зерня і самога слова  ^11  11  Akudovich, V. Smash our windows, Poet // Through oneself to the Universe. A book about Ales Razanau. Minsk: Technalogia, 2024. ↩︎”.

Being “A friend among foes” a life of A. Razanau could be described as a certain form of exile, because his ideas were far from, what was discussed even in so-called progressive poetical and political circles. He went always bigger and bolder, beyond the time, living in “today, that transfers to later” (as he once said). In 1969, while studying philology at the Belarusian State University, he led other students in sending a letter to Piotr Masherov (who is usually seen as the softest and most progressive national leader for Belarus) demanding the return of teaching in Belarusian language. Masherov rejected that proposal, and Ales Razanau was expelled from the University.

Razanau knew several Eastern European languages and translated poetry and texts from Macedonian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Check, Bulgarian and others, he also mastered German and Lithuanian. A very rare example in the history of Belarusian literature, when a poet wrote his works in a foreign language like his native one. Ales Razanau published several in German.

From 2000 until 2010 he mostly lived in Germany and Austria, coming with short visits to Belarus. But in 2011 he returned home forever. After his death in 2021 he was buried in Minsk.

Whenever the topic of exile appears I think about stones and poetry. The state of active listening interrupted with rare moments of precise words. A counterpoint in the art of stone balancing that returns silence.

When in my almost forties I was forced to master German language within two years to pass an exam to stay in Germany I could hardly speak any language at all. I was stuck between “colonial” Russian, poor “Belarusian”, for-everyday-survival “Polish” and working “English” trying to navigate myself into the logic of different languages and societies, even if that logic turns me to a prophetic end of “Logical-Philosophical Tractatus” of L.Wittgenstein.

That new language reality could be the main stone you constantly stumble over, repeatedly starting a new path. And silence became an intimate bond that keeps me connected with my land.

I wish I could express myself better.

TO THE END

They give me defeat in my left hand, but I manage to grab a victory with my right one.

Then they give me joy in my right hand, while I reach out with my left hand for sorrow…

They ask who I am – and want to stop me.

I keep silent and keep going.

Soul focused, I fumble for a thin line of meaning which I must follow to the end.

Ales Razanaŭ

ДАРЭШТЫ

У лeвyю pyкy мнe дaюць пapaзy, aлe ў пpaвyю я пacпявaю ўзяць пepaмoгy.

Taды ў пpaвyю pyкy мнe дaюць paдacць, aлe я пpaцягвaю лeвyю pyкy i бяpy cкpyxy… У мянe пытaюццa: xтo ты? – i xoчyць cпынiць.

Я нe aдкaзвaю i нe cпыняюcя.

3acяpoджaнaю дyшoю я нaмaцвaю дpoгкyю лiнiю cэнcy, пa якoй мyшy icцi дapэшты.

 Алесь Разанаў