Valzyhna Mort, assistant professor of English, has an article in The Baffler entitled, "Come on Now, Boys," about the political prisoner Maxim Znak, a leading member of the Belarus opposition council:
"I have lost sleep thinking about a man you do not know. In plain daylight, he was kidnapped in the cleanest city in Europe. Not the old, je ne sais quoi kind of city, but the bombed-down-and-rebuilt-from-the-ground kind, the leave-your-human-rights-at-home kind of European city. He was kidnapped five days after his thirty-ninth birthday, on September 9, by men whose faces were concealed under black ski masks. Since then, he has been held in jail without a trial. Of course, all Belarusians live inside a prison anyway. But inside this open prison, like a Russian matryoshka doll, there are actual prisons with small cells. This is where Maxim Znak is at present."
Znak was also the captain of Mort's school history team.
Read the full article here.
Valzhyna Mort’s new book of poetry, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, is out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian.
