498 Slashes by Olga Bubich
498 slashes. Faces – ambitiously proud or, writer-like, slightly distracted – book titles, poetry collections, slams, readings, festivals, childhoods (one line), busy university youths (two lines), lists of successes, prizes, praises, and awards (up to the entire paragraph dotted with brackets and years), destinies, deaths – shortened into standard biographies with a personal preset start and an inevitable universal finish.
Lives put into words, words joined into sentences, sentences linked into beads of meaningful narratives, where each chapter smoothly follows the previous one, eventually leading to its unique line carefully numbered by my Excel spreadsheet.
On the apparently endless list of creatives brought together throughout 25 years of the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin, there is one character that catches my attention – a humble, misleadingly storiless sign disguised as a typographic symbol and used to denote writers’ countries of origin. A simple, slightly slanting stroke that starts from the bottom left of the line, similar to a tree branch that departs from the trunk at an angle, or a person who walks uphill carrying something heavy on their back. This sign marks the countries the authors left behind moving to new ones – in many cases due to wars, repressions, and other uncontrollable hatred-driven events.
Syria/Germany
Afghanistan/UK
Ukraine/USA
Belarus/Poland
What does this fast, thoughtless stroke actually mean for those forced into exile? A slash, or a stroke, or a solidus, widely applied in writing, computing, and mathematics to separate words, numbers, and opinions, indicate alternatives, or represent fractions. On my list, however, a slash stands for something else. It stands for the barbed fences of the state borders that separate childhood memories, ancestral homes, bombed cities, erased languages, graves of close ones, of those who failed to live to hug again, of those killed in drone attacks, of those still serving unlawful prison sentences for being outspoken, for showing they cared, for standing against fences, walls, and barbed wires. These slashes mark a dividing line: between then and now, between hard but somehow once livable pasts and blurred futures. They separate the citizen from the “forever outsider” – choices one hardly chooses to make.
The slash originates from the virgula, meaning “little rod” or “twig”, a small diagonal line used in Medieval Latin manuscripts to indicate pauses in texts before the development of modern punctuation. Another of its ancient names is virgula suspensive, with the adjective literally translated as “suspended,” or “hanging,” hinting that the speaker who reads a verse aloud could take a brief break – to breathe in.
How many of the authors on my list could have the possibility of a break when crossing to the other side of their newly walled reality? How many succeeded in learning to talk, write, and dream in a new language, to fully climb this fence over, without getting stuck on top looking at the landscape of uncertainty on both sides, in the limbo of unarticulated non-belonging? They inhale deeply but never fully exhale – unable to step into the stanza of a world not of their choosing.
In the 15th century, after the invention of the printing press, the slash acquired another meaning also present in today’s punctuation. In this capacity, it stands for an “and/or” marker – the privilege of democratic states (once) built on the idea of having both the will and right to choose among the suggested options, to choose life paths, schools, hobbies, partners, jobs, country leaders. In the country where I was born, as kids, we could not even choose ice cream flavors. We knew it was milk-sweet and white, a rare treat for holidays. And sometimes to get our waffle cup, we had to endure long queues under the scorching sun, our heads baking. “Stakanchik” (ein Becher), as we called it in the language of the empire that preached the friendship of nations but left no room for public use of any language apart from Russian – the language my grandmother, whom I was named after, neither spoke nor wrote. And it was also this passive indifferent waiting that empires made us learn. So we did learn it well in the end.
“We are Waiting for Changes,” an underground song composed by the grandson of a Korean forcefully deported from the Far East to Kazakhstan, became a part of my people’s recent history, returning to our backyards and streets as an unofficial hymn of the Belarusians’ 2020 protest against three decades of dictatorship. I remember the euphoric crowds chanting the lines of the young Soviet Korean, written back in 1986, that sounded strikingly in place. Dying in a tragic road accident, Viktor Tsoi never saw the collapse of the USSR or the changes he had longed so much to witness. In his biography for the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin, there would probably be a slash between his stolen and borrowed motherlands: Korea/USSR/Russia.
Five years have passed since our failed attempt to push for changes in Belarus – and we are still waiting. Waiting for changes, for our friends and colleagues to return from prisons, for peace in Ukraine, for our safe return home, for sitting down to a holiday meal together, for visiting the graves of those waiting together with us, despite us. And I wish I were back in that ice-cream queue near the cement-colored supermarket of my childhood. At least that queue was moving.
If choice is a privilege, and movement an opportunity, slash is a sign of what happens when both are denied. It is the symbol of the suspended state – half here, half elsewhere – where identity cannot be seamlessly written on either side. It interrupts the flow of biography, intrudes into syntax, arrests chronology. The 498 slashes on the list of the Literaturfestival Berlin’s participants do not stand for mere punctuation: resisting data generalization, on the one hand, these border, culture, and language crossings are also paradoxically universal. Each requiring an individual approach, every writer’s story still pinning up some common timeless space of in-betweenness. 498 voices to listen to, mine now being one of them.
Slash – a permission for a poet to pause while reading. A divider, but also a promise of choices. Promise, permission, patience we have been taught for decades to grow in ourselves, waiting for changes, waiting to be changed, to change, dreaming of the future instead of writing it – here and now, using any language we have at our disposal. Looking at the slash between the two countries I’ve lived in since leaving Belarus four years ago, I prefer seeing in it a scaffolding I am ready to climb. A vertical bridge into new meanings – a bridge not yet walked.
Belarus/Georgia/Germany
2025