Password Has Not Changed
- 25.04.2025, 19:30
We have Belarus, they have "yabatki".
Recently, friends from Minsk sent me a photo from a large shopping center. There, near a coffee shop on the first floor, there was an advertising stand that said: "If you've been running around shopping at full speed all day, it's time to stop by for a cup of coffee." First thought: our people are in town! Second: are our people still in town? Third: why are they doing this, it's dangerous.
No citizen of any other country who sees this sign will understand a damn thing and will think that this is just ordinary advertising with a little show-off. But we immediately react as if five years haven't passed. We remember what the words "running around at full speed" really mean. We haven't forgotten anything.
A few years ago, I was terribly irritated by the general enthusiasm for tomatoes with sour cream. Remember engineer Anatol Shalkovich? When he was detained, on the police video, when asked why he needed all these white-red-white flags, he answered: I like the combination of white and red colors - for example, tomatoes with sour cream. For this combination, Anatol spent two months in the Akrestsin Street detention center. Moreover, when he was moved from one cell to another, his new neighbors greeted him with the words "so you like tomatoes with sour cream?" At that very time, Belarusians filled their social media feeds with photos of plates with tomatoes and sour cream and admiration for what a great guy this man was, because he got out of it so cleverly. I didn't like this at all. Tomatoes are just tomatoes, not a symbol of protests, and in general, an usurper should be called an usurper, and a murderer - a murderer. To be honest, I still don't really like all this "it smells of thyme" instead of "long live Belarus!" But Belarusians have become connoisseurs and masters of the Aesopian language. They speak it perfectly. Moreover, this is an integral part of not only the cultural code, but also the system of recognizing "friend or foe". To run around at full speed - only we will understand this. A stranger will never understand, and an enemy will never say such a thing. "It smells of thyme" is no longer just a poem by Piatruś Broǔka, but a secret signal. And we already have dozens, if not hundreds, of such signals. Let alone thyme - the simple phrase "I'm walking" instantly evokes the same association in everyone: autumn, the street and the beautiful Nina with a flag. Even interjections in our secret language are filled with special meaning. Can any stranger understand that "hey, la-la-la-lay!" is not a set of sounds, not a battle cry, not a scream after jumping into an ice hole and not even a cheerful refrain, but very important words? They can't. This is only for us, for our own people. So once, in the century before last and at the beginning of the last century, professional communities created their secret languages with words that only their own people could understand. Zmicier Bartosik in his book "Byǔ u pana vierabiejka havaruščy" quoted a poem written in the language of the Drybin capolins. "Lubžać jaruchi šymskije škorni" - this simply means "women love good felt boots". But no one except that capolin from Drybin would have understood this. So it is with us, only without specially invented words. Independently formed combinations of ordinary words in the context of Belarus acquire a special sound, understandable only to us.
However, we did not even invent all this. Perhaps these secret codes are from the rebels of Kalinouski. Well, what is so special, it would seem, in the dialogue "Who do you love?" - "I love Belarus"? But there’s everything in it. Resistance, underground, uprising, and death for the motherland. A century and a half has passed, but the password has not changed. It is also part of our secret language. Or from Yakub Kolas, who, teaching in an underground Belarusian school before the revolution, told his students that the time would come when all children would study in large, beautiful schools and would no longer wear bast shoes. He clearly did not mean the Bolsheviks. And the poem "Piat strukoǔ piercu" by Uladzimir Karatkevich, written about the Turkish sultan who came to enslave the Caucasus, sounds as if it were about the occupation of Belarus. It is worth carefully reading any Belarusian work written during the times of censorship - whether tsarist, Bolshevik, or Lukashenka’s - and the secret language will appear on the pages, like sympathetic ink. Lukashists, by the way, are also trying to keep up and create their own language by which they will recognize each other. But they only come up with "yabatki". Imagination is not enough for more.
Iryna Khalip, exclusively for Charter97.org