Motherfield: Poems and Belarusian Protest Diary

I will never write in this language. 
If you are reading this poem, 
you are not my reader.

In “Negative Linguistic Capability” from Julia Cimafiejeva’s Motherfield, we are asked to imagine being addressed in neither the poet’s native Belarusian, nor English, but in a language for which “there are no dictionaries, / no agreed upon rules.” Elsewhere, “rain stops midsentence, as suddenly as it began,” and in “MSCRRDG” (a play on miscarriage), staccato line breaks and fragmentation gesture at inexpressible loss: 

ain’t a tad
pole

was supposed
but didn’t
support

was supposed
to be what
tadpo-
poppy

Motherfield is a forceful diptych pairing the poet’s protest diary (spanning the period from Belarus’ 2020 presidential election to March 2021, after the poet has settled in Austria) with poems flowing from days full of fear and hope. During “the biggest protest in the history of Belarus,” the speaker wonders: “When was I so happy last time? Maybe when we started dating?” While the diary contains many poetic moments, there is also a neat circularity to opening a diary on “August 7, two days until the election:” where we learn the poet wants “to join this angry choir” of protesters but instead goes home to write “My European Poem,” which closes the collection: 

I still believe I have a right for a hope,
That beaten hope that builds its nest
On my roof and sings
In Belarusian
(Not in Russian).

Everywhere in Motherfield, language(s) fail to convey what is experienced (“I tried to express my fear and to find in a foreign language the hope I lacked in my own.”) and this inability to convey fruitful meaning turns metaphorical in “In the City of Great Grandmothers”:

Sow, girl!
I’m so for it. I farm.
But in my field grow only
red grass,
green grief
that reek of guilt and shame and gray verses.

English functions here as a language of refuge, but at a remove, something useful as the globally dominant language, yet inevitably not quite right, and, especially when the translations sang in my ear, I craved a translators’ note that could help me better understand the translators’ processes and collaboration.