Motherfield
SynopsisPlot
Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poet’s diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet’s struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile.
Story
About this book
Julia Cimafiejeva grew up in rural Belarus, in a area that was reclassified as a Chernobyl zone during her childhood. Her poetry collection Motherfield opens with a diary section tracking events in Belarus after the disputed 2020 presidential election. The entries record protests, encounters with police, and the poet's responses to the detention of people close to her. Fear, guilt, and despair run through these pages alongside a persistent will to act and to speak.
The poems connect personal experience to wider patterns of authoritarian control and ecological damage. Cimafiejeva writes about patriarchal structures and state power as forces that shape daily life in concrete, physical ways. The collection also addresses questions of language, readership, and what it means to insist on self-determination when the space for it is shrinking. The book follows the poet toward a decision to leave Belarus and continue writing from exile.
Motherfield sits at the intersection of political witness and private record. The rural landscape marked by nuclear fallout and the urban landscape marked by state violence become linked territories in the collection, each bearing consequences that outlast any single political moment.
