A piercing, intimate hybrid of protest diary and poetry from Belarus. Cimafiejeva documents the 2020 election aftermath alongside poems about Chernobyl, exile, and the act of writing as resistance.
Motherfield is one of those rare books where the personal and the political cannot be separated. Julia Cimafiejeva’s collection — half protest diary, half poetry — offers a piercing, intimate account of life in authoritarian Belarus.
The book begins with Cimafiejeva’s Protest Diary, written during the 2020 Belarusian presidential election and the mass protests that followed. Through her words, the reader is dropped directly into her world: the fear of arrest, the dread of watching friends and family detained, and the suffocating weight of living under a president you never voted for. The diary entries are raw, tense, and unforgettable.
From there, the collection shifts into poetry, seamlessly blending ecological memory, personal history, and national trauma. Cimafiejeva grew up in rural Belarus in an area later contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster, and that sense of toxic inheritance permeates the book. The “motherfield” becomes both literal and metaphorical: the poisoned farmland of her childhood, the Belarusian language that sustains her, and the cultural soil she cannot quite escape — even in exile.
What struck me most was how the collection moves between genres. At times it reads like a novel, other times like a slim yet powerful poetry volume, and still other times as a call to action. I was especially moved by the poems addressing Chernobyl, miscarriage, and displacement — subjects heavy with grief, but told with lyrical grace.
Motherfield is not just a book; it is testimony. It is record, witness, and plea. A reminder that dictatorship thrives on silence, and that breaking silence — through poems, through stories, through protest — is its own form of resistance.