In her letters to the dead, the prizewinning poet Valzhyna Mort relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history
In Music for the Dead and Resurrected, Valzhyna Mort asks how we mourn after a century of silence and propaganda. How do we remember our history and sing after being silenced? Mort draws on intimate and paradoxical firsthand accounts of a past grandparent generation of the Soviet labor camps, redistribution of land, and massacres of World War II in Belarus. As her country is being run by a longtime dictator, the poet creates a ceremony of mythmaking for the erased history and family.
Music for the Dead and Resurrected is a space where the living and the dead can coexist, where the Belarusian woods can act as witnesses to forgotten lives, and where musical form can create a new lyric mythology and an uncompromised language of remembrance. Mort, born in Belarus and now living in America, teaches us that the remembrance of private histories has a power to confront collective, violent American myths.
