Artur Kamaroŭski – Я і ёсць забаронены сцяг (I am the forbidden flag myself)
Illustration: Nadzia Sajapina
hochroth Minsk
Berlin, 2023
ISBN 978-3-949850-27-1
Language: Belarusian
How should a person feel in a society whose emblem is the line: “he wanted to own you / we held on”? Especially when the results of this “owning” and “holding on” are already obvious, because the universe, social and personal, has died.
One of the answers to these questions is the book of poems by Artur Kamaroŭski “I am the forbidden flag myself”. It reflects complex relations with reality, become extremely corrupted under the influence of social circumstances. The book raises the urgent problem of the rejection of “others”, that is, those who are different in some way, not fitting in with “our own”. The reason for such distinction makes no difference. There are the leitmotifs of violence and the fragility of the body, the attempts to find a foothold in the world after August 2020. All this puts the book by Kamaroŭski into the context of protest lyrics, while preserving the originality of the poetic world.
Artur Kamaroŭski was born on March 22, 1991 in Mir, Belarus. Poet, performer. Graduated from the School of Young Writers at the Union of Belarusian Writers (2013, 2020). His texts were published in a number of Belarusian magazines (“Дзеяслоў”, “Маладосць”, etc.), on many obline portals (“Taubin”, “Двоеточие”, “Полутона”, etc.), as well as in the collective issues “Вот они, а вот мы” (“Here they are, and here we are”, 2021) and “На языке тишины” (“In a language of silence”, 2021). Poems were translated into Ukrainian, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Estonian and English. Kamaroŭski translates from Ukrainian, Polish and Swedish. He is the laureate of the Maksim Bahdanovič “Debut” award (2021) for the first book of poems “Вада пачынае жыць” (“The Water begins to live”). Editor of the online magazine of modern Belarusian poetry, “Taubin”. Participant of international festivals of performance and art “Ребра Евы”, “Performensk”, “Carbonarium”, “NOW”. Member of the musical band “Красный Борщевик”.