From Illegal Constitutions to Silent Care of Smaller Lives

In an empty café downtown Stuttgart, close to an open window from which the drops of a typical lazy summer rain still reach me out leaving their temporary traces on the book pages, I am reading Hanna Yankuta’s »Constitution«. The brick-red volume with a contour of the shell on the cover looks inconspicuously boring. Noticing something similar in a kiosk, hardly would I be curious to flip through it. The outer case of the mollusk, however, is misleading–and so is the title of the poetic collection in Belarusian. 130 pages, despite meticulously quoting 63 Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of Belarus, have no juridic dimension.

 

Due to the changes fraudulently introduced to the Constitution by the country’s ruler Lukashenko already from the first decade of his office in the mid-1990s, today we have no grounds to describe the actual document as a supreme legal one. Self-granting in 1996 the authority to dissolve parliament, appoint judges, and issue decrees with the force of law and in 2022–immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office, Lukashenko formed in the geographical center of Europe a hereditary monarchy with a Soviet twist and silenced critical voices (more than 1,400 Belarusians are now officially recognized as political prisoners, but their actual number is thought to be much higher).

Heavily edited Articles written in the neutrally abstract vocabulary declare the rule of people and respect of law only on paper–to a much larger extent serving to consolidate power in the hands of one individual. Since 1994, the current self-proclaimed leader, praised by the military and supported by the powerful neighboring empire of Russia, has been exercising literally endless life-long benefits of the post he has intention to concede. But how could such an overt abuse of the legality become an inspiration for a collection of poems and which role does the empty promise of the constitution play here?

 

At first, I saw this project as related to language only, comments Hanna herself. I reflected on the ways of turning the bureaucratese [bureaucratic language] into poetry and wondered what such a text–written stylistically as poetic–would look like in general. Any red-tapism per se is an absolute evil to me, and, unfortunately, in Belarus I find numerous examples when linguistic formalism is presented as »high style«.

 

Using this thesis as a conceptual premise, I continued playing with the idea and soon developed new dimensions around it. I thought it would be good to find a »key« for each Article of the Constitution and, by adding there more of myself, that is of my own experience of living in the authoritarian society, write a »Constitution of Everything.« I wanted to create an ecopoetic document balanced around three layers: that of the language, ecopoetics and my personal story.

Pairing the personal–human and non-human, meaning more alive as poetic–and the formal, both bureaucratic and fake, sovietically kafkaesque,immediately creates a profound effect, casting a shadow of fair doubt on societal organization as such.

 

Who is here to decide? Whose law is essentially supreme? On which grounds does the humanity appropriate the right of controlling the nature and other living forms and impose on them its own logic?

 

In her laconic symbolism resembling the imagery of the American Walt Whitman and–more recent–Belarusian Ales Rasanau, Hanna Yankuta sounds universal and at the same time scaringly relevant.

Without naming specific episodes of violent deaths during the crackdown on peaceful protests in Belarus in 2020, the poet addresses the topics still painful to the Belarusians. Readers unfamiliar with the local context would nevertheless feel anxiety and worry–the blood of a wounded Minsker is compared to the protoblood of the extinct marrella splendens. Shifting the focus from the political, temporary, here and now moment, Hanna reflects on blood as a physiological fluid with its own chemical composition which knows neither time nor space.

 

The entire tragedy, thus, is actually depicted as universal: time does not exist and, according to the laws of the Constitution of Everything, no death of a living creature is superior in importance. Jumping from the metro in august 2020, one can really find herself in the Cambrian.

Another thing that catches the eye in Hanna’s language is the emphasis on action verbs–a pecularity that reveals itself in the stark opposition between the emptiness of the impersonal, blurred, agency of the verbal organization of the legal document’s red-tapism. The protagonist of her poems, like the wandering poet of Whitman’s or the thinker of Rasanau’s, performs all the actions herself, consequently taking up the responsibility for the process and its outcomes–steps that look as naturally made, in accordance with law larger than life.

 

…all I possess,

fractured by the prism

into emotions,

all I grow from,

bones, stones, cracks,

antiques –

what saves me

shall with me remain.

(from Article 19)

 

Other examples of the protagonist’s agency are as follows: I walk (write history with feet or clouds), I draw (the territories I discovered stretch above what the eye seems to notice and I draw them–forests, cities, lakes–in their actual size), I know, I look at, I speak, etc. But the omnipotence one might assume after reading these lines is only illusionary–agency comes with humble acceptance of limitations:

 

I am only the dust under God’s desk.

(from Article 7)

 

…this power of mine knows no sources,

I take it from nowhere,

adjusting as I wish,

my power over my idle hours,

plans, fantasies,

meals I cook for lunch,

my power over home plants,

this kingdom of cacti and pelargonia…

(from Article 6)

 

…I am unable to see that is to come,

but neither can I see what is already here,

a blink of an eye in the sequence of small events.

(from Article 5)

 

Hanna also has her own explanation of this conscious linguistic decision,

 

I believe that passive constructions we hear everywhere, like »Doors will be closed automatically« lead to the subject’s distancing from the declared action. That is, the subject gets alienated from the reality–in a way similar to what Arendt used to write of, stressing that those who give criminal orders don’t see their results. The same happens with the bureaucratese that blurs everything due to this linguistic distancing, and to confront it I have chosen radically different tools.

To call the collection of the alternative unconstitutionalarticles a breath of fresh air in Belarusian emigrant poetic scene would be too simple. Contrary to the current prevailing trend of angry, bitter often masochistic poems, Yankuta’s »Constitution«, without being simplistic or too naive, promises hope. To me, the carefully curated timeless world she feels and cherishes through her words and actions resonates with this too shall pass philosophic formula. It is beautiful, it is universal, it gives force to step into the new day–fight learned helplessness imposed on our people for decades, write our own laws basing them on those that have always been and will always remain. Those of bones, stones, cracks, and antiques.

 

Text, translation of the poems, Dall-E images generation: Olga Bubich