21/12/2023
“It’s a photo of Grandma with all her children posing against the same lilac bushes in blossom. Not quite the same though: the lilac bushes grew denser. The look is the same on Grandma’s face. She will keep it until her death. The girls are wearing light-coloured dresses, the boys are wearing white shirts. Grandma has a checkered suit on. I would dress seven dolls and five pupsiks in Belarusian folk clothes. Which they never wore. And I regret they did not.”
T.S., a Belarusian writer hiding under the pseudonym T.S. tells family stories and shows archive photos. For her, memories serve as a method which provides her with the strength to cope with everyday life in contemporary Belarus. Her essays are a kind of game with the past, where she metaphorically dresses and feeds the ghosts of her ancestors.
[Links to texts in Belarusian and Russian can be found in the first comment.]
On the eve of the unknown the Belarusian writer is playing with the past