Do You Want a Checker Pattern or to Drive?

Don't disturb the dawn.

Yes, it is difficult, unbearable and frightening to read every day the news about another arrest, conviction and search. Listening to the car outdoors, stopped in the middle of the night, wondering if one arrived to arrest you or your neighbor, just like in 1937. To endlessly, like a common raccoon, clean the correspondence on your phone, delete Telegram before you go outdoors and clean the floors every night, just in case they come to search you and your floors are filthy. To hate and cry from the powerlessness and dream of summer, knowing only firmly that it will be stuffy. Whether it will bring fresh air - who knows. There is no more certainty. Play on repeat that the darkest hour is before dawn.

Now let's stop and think about these simple words that help better than antidepressants. We cling to the dawn, even though the main thing is the dark hour. This is the subject. The dawn, on the other hand, is the object in this statement. A simple school parsing is enough to calm down and see that all that is happening now is only the logical end of a dictatorship creeping toward its destination. After all, all you need for the dawn to come is the night falling and the darkness closing down. We are not, after all, in Kolyma, where the sun doesn't set at all in the summer. In our latitudes, the night is dark. For decades, we have been trying to create some kind of twilight and pretend as if that's the way it should be.

Many people (let's be honest: most people) have had a pretty good time in this twilight. Art spaces and coffee shops were open, restaurants and food courts opened, and Zybitskaya and Oktyabrskaya streets pulsated. There were cinema, commercial and gastro fests, as well as hackathons, autumn salons and jazz at the City Hall. Pale-faced from the endless twilight and slow from conformism, people were glad to be allowed to dance behind the police fence and sing in chorus on the anniversary of the BPR. They felt like twilight was all about ordinary life and that it was the only thing they needed.

Those who cried out that it was not normal life were considered outcasts and urban madmen. Nina Baginskaya would not be allowed into these art spaces and coffeehouses. What kind of strange woman with an obscure flag wanders around the city, does she have nothing better to do? She should have organized her life as we do, successful people. She could have gone skiing in winter and not been wandering around with a flag. Those very successful fellow citizens looked at Maksim Vinyarsky with regret. While we were at universities and building up our careers, he was running around at demonstrations and spent his time in jail. Now he has no chances to prosper, and the question is, why did he ruin his life? No, as for the "meetings" - that's the mistake because the meeting in former twilight Belarus is just a meeting.

I remember last year the publisher of a glossy magazine wistfully recalled on social networks the previous years. He wrote that everything was fine then. The business was booming, the city was friendly, and it was a great time for professionals. And then August 20th came, and now this whole professional conglomerate is trying to be driven back into the Soviet system. He's a clever good person, this publisher. He was sincere in his suffering for the old city. Unfortunately, that city never existed. Twilight simply distorted consciousness, and many people believed that it was a city of dreams - cosy, developing, full of opportunities and entertainment, and, of course, absolutely safe. It was the inhabitants of the twilight zone who preserved the regime all these years, not Karpenkov and Balaba. The food courts and festivals, not the riot police and the GUBOPiK. A good face, not a bad game.

This city of dreams will appear in the same place where it was invented. But only at dawn, which comes after a real dark night. Or it might have come sooner if there had not been this glossy artificial lighting.

There's no need to wring your hands and suffer because the film festival Listopad has been taken away from its longtime organizers or the play has been closed. If everyone has finally woken up in 2020 and realized that the rally is not just a meeting and Nina Baginskaya is not the town madwoman, but a heroine, then it makes no sense to suffer for the lost premieres and vernissages. After all, do you want a checker pattern or do you want to drive?

Drive, of course. You drive towards the dawn, which surely comes. You can use the checker pattern to decorate paddy wagons later, before scrapping them. You'll be able to do that as part of the festival, somewhere in the art space with a subsequent vernissage and buffet. Right at dawn.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

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