Authors

Alana Felton¹;  ¹ Yale University, United States

Discussion

This paper will examine the Belarusian avant-garde literary and performance movement, Bum-Bam-Lit, which emerged in the mid-1990s and was active until the early 2000s. The movement was founded by seven artists and writers, referred to as the group’s “pillars.” In several of their earliest writings, public performances, and readings as a movement, several of the pillars proclaimed that Africa is their homeland and the birthplace of the metal washbasin which became the group’s talisman, symbol, and a central feature of many of their performances. Although the idea of Bum-Bam-Lit’s African roots originated in the poet Zmitser Vishneu’s writing, other members of the group took it up. The movement’s so-called “godfather,” the writer, philosopher, and editor, Valiantsin Akudovich, has also addressed the group’s claims to “African” heritage as part of their postmodern approach.

This paper will engage in close readings of the movement’s writings and performances about their proclaimed “African” roots, looking in particular at the individual manifestos authored by the pillars and their first publication, Tazik Belarsuki (The Belarusian Basin, 1998). I will read these primary sources alongside Akudovich’s essays interpreting and contextualizing their so-called Africanism as postmodern. I will also consult several of the pillars’ reflections on the group and their participation in it published years later, including Alhierd Baharevic’s Mae dzevianostyia (My Nineties, 2018) and the late Serzh Minskevich’s, Ia z Bum-Bam-Lita (I am from Bum-Bam-Lit, 2008). 

I will argue that by performatively constructing an intentionally absurd alternative, imaginary, and mythical homeland in an abstracted Africa, the Bum-Bam-Lit pillars were attempting to subvert existing national identity narratives present in Belarusian society and explored in its literature, including depictions of Belarusians as “tuteishyia” (“locals”) or of Belarus as a “nation of partisans.” Africa, for BBL, was a means of escape from nationalist tropes, a blank slate on which to create a postmodern, forward looking Belarusian artistic identity. In making this argument, however, I will also examine how the members of the movement often appealed to reductive stereotypes about Africa. I will trace the development of this African theme throughout the movement’s various stages and show how it became gradually less popular as more and more artists and writers became associated with the movement. In an attempt to grasp the movement’s and individual members’ understandings of the African narrative, I will contextualize their depictions of Africa and cooptation of a mythical and clichéd “African” identity to popular Soviet depictions of Africa with which they would have been familiar.