When the massive protests erupted in Belarus in August 2020, as we have seen, many cultural figures and theatre workers joined their fellow protestors— demanding change: fair elections, the release of political prisoners, and an end to the violent, oppressive rule of the regime. Kureichik, members of the Belarus Free Theatre, the Contemporary Art Theatre, the Belarusian Army Drama Theatre, and many others across Belarus looked for various ways to express their opposition.3 Members of the elite, state-funded Yanka Kupala National Academic Theatre in Minsk also showed solidarity with the protesters, in spite of strict policies against political activity in their employment contracts and a decades-long culture of self-censorship.4 Like so many of their counterparts, most of the company members who stood up against the regime ended up in exile. Their stature could not shield them from the regime's reckless reaction to the growing opposition and near-total shutdown of civil society, independent media, and the arts. In spite of the loss of their jobs, their stage, and eventually their homes, members of the Kupala reformed as the “Free Kupalautsy,” using the digital space as their new creative home. Over the next few years, the company members who left the theatre regrouped, reclaiming their identity as “the national theatre” and found new ways to form a community, promote Belarusian culture and language, agitate for political prisoners, remember, and mourn. Although most of their productions have been adaptations rather than documentary or verbatim plays, by depicting the act of filming, the use of parallel texts and everyday actions like letter writing, and the use of costumes and props to signal the representation of contemporary events in Belarus acted in a similar manner.

On August 9, 2020, Belarus held a presidential election. The outcome was predetermined, as usual in the post-Soviet country where Aliaksandr Lukashenka held power since being elected to the presidency in 1994. Over time, Lukashenka had slowly increased and concentrated power in the presidency and assured he would remain uncontested by controlling the information space and eliminating opposition. In 2020, Lukashenka detained or forced major political rivals into exile prior to the election. His administration oversaw the election commission and vote counting. In the evening of election day, the commission announced that Lukashenka had received 80.1% of the vote. This was not surprising. This is how the four elections between 1994 and 2020 had gone, and why Belarusians were often cynical about the potential for change. What was surprising was the mass mobilization of the opposition—the largest in the 26 years of Lukashenka's rule—and the size and duration of peaceful protests that followed the election.

The regime “responded with unjustified, disproportionate, and often arbitrary force.” For a time, this display of brute force by the State further encouraged the resistance and destabilized the notion that Lukashenka had the support of the majority of Belarusians. Eventually, with the aid of Russian authorities, dissent was suppressed through thousands of detentions and the use of torture; the closure of all independent media, arts venues, and independent nongovernmental organizations; show trials; propaganda; firings; and forced exile. Nevertheless, as Alyena Batura has written, the 2020 civic mobilization “transformed an apathetic populace into active citizens” and “led to the creation of networks of solidarity and mutual support.” This book looks at how several theatre artists and filmmakers joined the opposition and used their own precarious bodies and artforms to help mobilize communities, oppose the State's propaganda narratives, agitate for political prisoners, collectively mourn, and “preserve the face of violence for the distant future.”

On October 30, 2023, Kupalautsy actress Krystsina Drobysh posted photos on her social media accounts of a forgotten production that had taken place in 1991 and was subsequently removed from public records. The photos are of an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning Belarusian author Sviatlana Aleksievich's oral history, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, at the Yanka Kupala National Theatre in Minsk, Belarus. Due to controversy around the production, which was televised in 1992, and a lawsuit against Aleksievich by mothers who objected to the dark portrayal of their soldier sons, the production was removed from the stage and most records of it disappeared. Due to her own sleuthing and contacts, Drobysh recovered documents and memories of the production, directed by Valery Raevsky, with a cast that included most of the troupe at the time. Drobysh told Kamunikat.org, the Belarusian Internet Library, why she wanted to recuperate the historical event:

Following the impulse of Belarusian theatre artists to document their experiences and work in 2020, the book aims foremost to create a public record of the performances of these artists in a time of crisis. Through historical description and dramaturgical analysis, photographs, and a vital interview with a key figure, this account attempts to capture various forms of preservation.

As we have seen, Belarusian theatre artists were key players in the resistance movement in Belarus, helping to mobilize the resistance, bringing international attention to the crisis, shaping counternarratives to the regime's propaganda, and providing spaces—both digital and physical—to mourn and grieve those who were murdered or forced into exile. Documentary theatre, film, and digital performance became a substantial way to respond to the crisis, building on historical evidence, phenomenological detail, and lived experience.

Late in the documentary film Courage directed by Aliaksei Paluyan, actor Pavel Haradnizky, who has been cleaning his apartment and contemplating emigration, thinks about the role of theatre in the midst of the political protests that erupted in Belarus following the 2020 Presidential elections. He considers the state of Belarus, saying it is no longer just a dictatorship, but a “complete tyranny.”

Filmed amidst the turmoil surrounding the elections, the documentary captures the shifting emotional states and trauma of alienation through the eyes of three actors of the Belarus Free Theatre. Despite Haradnizky's skepticism about the usefulness of performance and art in such a crisis, the film itself makes the case for the power and value of such work. Throughout the unnarrated film, built on a series of fragmented scenes of daily life and footage from scenes of mass protest, Paluyan also depicts segments from Belarus Free Theatre performances. Glimpses of these plays, themselves built on documentary events of the Belarusian past, reveal the ways in which these performances invited audiences to commune, remain engaged, remember, mourn, and heal. While the performances help mobilize communities, they also make lives grievable that the State otherwise designates as disposable. The film and the performances it features strip away romantic notions of revolution while portraying the ongoing struggle for human rights, dignity, and democracy in Belarus. This chapter analyzes both the film and the theatre performances it captures as part of documenting the resistance. Looking both at the documentary material depicted along with the aesthetic choices of presentation in their historical contexts, the chapter reinforces the particular value of theatre in a time of crisis.

As events were still unfolding in Belarus, playwright Andrei Kureichik turned to documentary theatre following the 2020 fraudulent election and vicious crackdown against protestors in an effort to share the story and compel an international community to press for action against Aliaksandr Lukashenka's regime. As a member of the Coordination Council created by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to publicly challenge the election results and hold Lukashenka's government accountable for unlawful actions, Kureichik left Belarus when he was called before an investigative committee shortly after the election. On August 20, 2020, according to the BBC, the Prosecutor General of Belarus opened a criminal case against the Coordination Council, a representative body made up of a core group of 110 Belarusian leaders in a range of disciplines organized by Tsikhanouskaya and her team, for its efforts to “seize power” and harm national security. Kureichik was advised to leave immediately or face indefinite imprisonment.3 Despite what he felt were absurd allegations, he knew there was no rule of law in Belarus and left his home on August 21, 2020.

In exile, still in shock from the severity of Lukashenka's violence toward the opposition, Kureichik immediately went to work using the only tools at his disposal—his playwriting skills and network of theatre workers. In September 2020, he wrote the play Insulted. Belarus., which directly represents the clash between Lukashenka's regime and the pro-democracy resistance in 2020, using real names and verbatim texts along with fictional, metaphorical material that captures the feelings, as he experienced it, of the August events. The following year, Kureichik wrote the play Voices of the New Belarus, an entirely verbatim piece based on the real texts of real political prisoners in Belarus.

Finding a ‘Voice’ as an Italian-Canadian Woman

Gianna Patriarca is one of the major voices in Italian-Canadian literature. The term refers to a body of literature produced by over one hundred authors of Italian background living in Canada; some of them were born in Italy and moved to Canada afterwards, while others were born in Canada to Italian parents. Their literary products show two main features. Firstly, they principally deal with the phenomenon of migration and its related issues; secondly, their works are characterised by an extensive multilingualism, which constitutes ‘one of the distinctive features of the literatures of the Italian emigration’ (Loriggio 2021, 805). Their texts are written in Italian, French, English and regional dialects. Alongside the extensive use of CS, several Italian-Canadian writers also practise self-translation; for instance, Mario Duliani translated his French novel La ville sans femmes (1945) into the Italian La città senza donne (1946). Likewise, the Quebec author Marco Micone selftranslated Gens du silence (1996) into the Italian Non era per noi (2004).

The beginning of Italian-Canadian writing dates to 1978, thanks to the writer Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, who was also editor of the literary magazine Books in Canada. He was the first to realise the existence of an impressive literary production that attempted to express itself and be recognised alongside the official Canadian literature in English and French. To this end, in 1978, he published Roman Candles, an anthology of literary works produced by seventeen Italian-Canadian writers. Moreover, in 1978, D’Alfonso, one of the most influential figures in the group, founded Guernica Editions, the publishing house that played a key role in promoting Italian-Canadian writers. The date therefore marks the birth of Italian-Canadian writing as an officially recognised body of literature. It also marks the emergence of an increasing self-awareness and self-consciousness about the relevance and importance of these works; as the writer and academic Joseph Pivato claimed, ‘[…] we had discovered a literature about ourselves, and the great responsibility which this entailed’ (1998, 13). These writers became aware that they had created a set of writings that required and deserved the same space of expression and accreditation as mainstream literary productions written in English and French.

Growing Up in a Cavarzeran Community in Montréal

Licia Canton is another representative of the Italian-Canadian literary movement. Her story retraces the steps followed by Gianna Patriarca and Dôre Michelut, and it echoes the stories of many other Italian-Canadian migrants. She was born in Cavarzere, a small town in the province of Venice. In 1967, when she was four years old, she moved to Montréal with her family. Being forced to leave her native land and start a new life in a new territory was a painful and distressing experience, which has thenceforth marked her personal and professional lives. In the essay ‘Writing Canadian Narratives with Italian Accents: The Pink House and Other Stories’, she writes that, while she used to be a talkative child in Italy, in Canada she became shy and did not speak much (2019, 60). The experience of being voiceless, which is common among Italian-Canadian authors, especially female ones, triggered her need and desire to retrieve her voice, which subsequently inclined her to write. Indeed, in the same essay, she declares that she was able to find her voice only when she began writing (2019, 60).

Canton shows a great interest in migration and minority literature, with a sharp focus on Italian-Canadian literature. She has explored this theme in both critical and creative writing. Among the critical texts are Writing Our Way Home (2013), Conspicuous Accents (2014), Writing Cultural Difference (2015), and Writing Beyond History: an Antholog y of Prose and Poetry (2006). These anthologies collect the literary creations (both prose and poetry) of several Italian- Canadian authors. Among the literary texts that investigate migration from a less academic perspective is Almond Wine and Fertility (2008), where the author portrays the encounter between Italian and Canadian culture, and The Pink House and Other Stories, a collection of 15 short stories.

Among her many achievements, Canton was the recipient of the Premio Italia nel Mondo, that celebrates Italian excellence in the world. This award started in New York in 1994, when the famous Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti was awarded.

Identity and Migration

In her book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, Yasemin Yildiz introduces the notion of the monolingual paradigm (2012, 2).1 This paradigm establishes that people possess one language only: their mother tongue. The relationship with the mother tongue is believed to set the boundaries defining who we are. It links us to a well-defined and exclusive ethnicity and culture, affecting the way we operate and function within a specific community (2012, 2). This paradigm does not exist in nature; rather, it is a sociopolitical construct that emerged in the eighteenth century, and which reminds us that this world ‘is not one but is ruled as one’ (Ponzanesi and Merolla 2005, 6). As a matter of fact, the monolingual paradigm serves the purpose of organising our world, defining individuals and communities on both a personal and a collective level (Yildiz 2012, 2). Despite the attempts at imposing this paradigm on individuals and society, Yildiz claims that multilingual practices nonetheless continued to exist and survive. She defines them as postmonolingual, a term which describes their ‘struggle against the monolingual paradigm’ (Yildiz 2012, 4).

As mentioned in the Introduction, this struggle has become particularly evident in contemporary societies, where people are constantly on the move, crossing and inhabiting multiple linguistic, physical and cultural spaces. Their movements trigger a rethinking of the relation between individuals, place and language. Indeed, ‘traditional representations based on the supposed unity of people, culture and territory do not hold’ (Wilson 2020, 214). The alleged unity of people and language is also challenged. Constituting a movement to a different linguistic environment, migration breaks the constitutive relation between language and identity. It disrupts the grounding of the self in the mother tongue, forcing migrants to renegotiate and redefine their selfhood and rethink taken-for-granted concepts, such as home and belonging. For this reason, migrants have often been defined as ‘translated beings’ (Cronin 2006, Polezzi 2012). In order to function within the new community, the way they perceive and relate to reality has to be redefined and transferred from one linguistic and cultural dimension to another:

The present book has explored the connection between migrating, writing and self-translating within transmigratory contexts, specifically investigating how transmigrant authors use language to negotiate and reframe their identity against the backdrop of the monolingual paradigm. Starting from the premise that writing and translating are not only linguistic and cultural processes but also self-reflexive practices, they have been examined in conjunction with a process of redefinition of the self.

To this end, I selected a corpus of four transmigrant authors of Italian origins, who moved to English-speaking countries. The aim was to work with a language pair, that to date, has been mainly neglected. Indeed, while the relation between English and Italian in writing and translating has been investigated in several articles, so far it has not been the focus of any specific volume. The decision to work with Italian and English was not only connected to a personal interest (as I am an Italian speaker who lives and works in the UK). The focus on Italian and English also allowed me to investigate the subversive power of the former and the role played by multilingual practices in reshaping the borders and dynamics between dominant and dominated languages. By juxtaposing Italian and English on the page, or writing in both, the authors in this volume rewrite the borders between linguistic systems, challenging the norms that dictate language dynamics and redefining whether and how languages assert themselves within the context of globalisation.

The choice to focus on Italian was also connected to its specific connotation with respect to the monolingual paradigm. Like mentioned in Chapter 1, the concept of a mother tongue acquires an interesting value within the Italian context, where dialects, standard and regional Italian coexist. Given this connotation, the Italian language perfectly allows an examination of multilingual practices as postmonolingual, a point that has been put forward in this volume. The writing and self-translating performances of the authors can be considered postomonolingual, ‘as they survive, exist and emerge’, against the monolingual paradigm. Indeed, all the writers in this corpus were never fully included in the monolingual paradigm, yet they conceived of themselves as monolinguals and attempted to establish relations with a unique mother tongue.