Poet Volha Hapeyeva: Poetry as Home

"There is war in the neighboring country": When the poet Volha Hapeyeva from Belarus captured this line in her poem "Black Apple Tree" in 2017, the armed struggle of pro-Russian separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine had entered its fourth year.

And Hapeyeva, her poem is about this, as a translator dealt with letters in which relatives search for missing people.

It is about their tormenting uncertainty, which finally, with the confirmation of the identification of a corpse, transforms from a hovering, a haze into the black apple tree that gives the work its title.

Anyone who visualizes the image of the dead plant – clawing at the earth as if it were at the sky, frozen as if distorted in pain – will immediately appreciate its poetic power.

Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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This is not the time for poetry: With this reason, an editor refused to publish a conversation about her new book of poetry that Volha Hapeyeva had given to his online magazine in the summer of 2020.

Belarus was preparing for the presidential elections.

The pressure on the opposition was immense, and protests broke out with extreme violence after the announcement of the allegedly falsified result, which confirmed Alexandr Lukashenko in office.

For the poet, who was the city clerk in Graz at the time, a return was out of the question.

As a guest author in Feldafing, as a scholarship holder at the Blutenburg Children’s and Youth Library in Munich, in Krems and since last year as a

Since then, Volha Hapeyeva has been living in uncertainty at the German PEN Center.

In her essay "The Defense of Poetry in Times of Permanent Exile" she only touches on her personal fate in passing.

From the quoted statement by the editor, the linguist, who has a doctorate, comes to the relationship between language and violence, to the possibilities of using language to incite and suppress, to exclude and humiliate, to cover up and justify atrocities, to the abusive relationship of a despot his people.

No, the phrase sometimes heard from writers in exile that their home is the language cannot apply to Hapeyeva.

Your time is now

In general: What kind of home and what kind of language?

Minsk, the city of her birth, has long since ceased to belong to the people, writes the poet, who already felt in exile in Belarus and at the same time admits her tendency to call a hotel room or a guest room with friends home.

In the meantime - "I'm no longer sure which language I'm writing in" - her Belarusian has traits of German, and of course Belarusian can be found in the excellent German of the language artist, who was born in 1982 and is responsible for "The Defense of Poetry in Times of Permanent Exile". This Wednesday, the Crespo Foundation's 35,000-euro Speaking Literature Prize for critical short texts was awarded.

In her essay, Volha Hapeyeva talks about a friend who was imprisoned in Belarus before the riots, just for selling books.

This friend was not a poet lover, but in his first letter from prison he asked for poems: "That helped him to survive there." Countless people may have had it and still have it: anyone who has delved into poetry knows for the support she is able to give.

Poetry, Volha Hapeyeva comes up with in her moving text, she can call her home.

And not only the war in their former neighbor country, which was also waged using language, shows that the time is now.

Volha Hapeyeva's volume of poetry "Mutantengarten" was published in June 2020 by Edition Thanhäuser, has 140 pages and costs 24 euros.

Her novel "Camel Travel" was published by Literaturverlag Droschl in 2021, has 128 pages and costs 18 euros.

The essay "The Defense of Poetry in Times of Permanent Exile" is to be published by Verrichter Verlag in June.