My mother tongue Is your mother tongue something you take for granted? Well, for me it has been a fight – a fight against history, politics, society and myself. Yet something guided me through it. I don't know what you heard about my native land, Belarus. For most of the world, it is a new country, as four centuries of severe Russian assimilation have devastated Belarusian culture. But some managed to survive, mainly in the villages. It shaped my biography. Although I was born in a town in the western Belarusian SSR1, I spent the first six years of my life in a village with my grandparents. I remember the old artificial wooden gate leading into the orchard. I remember the sounds of storks on the roofs of houses and the croaking of frogs in the evening. I remember the whistling sounds "ts", "dz", "ch", "r", "dzh" that people made when speaking. “Volya…” I heard my great-grandparents and I felt proud because this word also meant “freedom”. All these sounds seemed to come from nature, creating a feeling of harmony and peace. At the age of six, like thousands of other children from the 16 republics of the Soviet Union, I entered a school in my hometown, Brest. It was at school that I noticed that I spoke a different dialect than the other children. They said I had bad grammar and pronounced words in a strange, “village” way, a way they used to correct. I was ashamed because of my lack of education. In those Soviet 80s, for city dwellers, “village” was almost a derogatory word. Little by little, I learned to speak correctly. But during the holidays, I returned to the village, and the world there functioned in other sounds, in another language. I would no longer accept this language as it represents a... middle of paper ... culture, I can afford to, as I am out of the country most of the year. My parents themselves use Belarusian in the city when I am in Belarus. As for strangers, I chose to surprise them, sometimes encountering resistance or anger, sometimes receiving thanks and acclamations. It's a battle every time I leave my apartment in Brest. It's hard to get used to it. But sometimes that's what it takes to be who you are. When I visit my grandmother, she laughs: “Remember, when you were a child, you corrected me when I said “stork” in Belarusian for “stork” in Russian, saying that now you knew how to say it correctly. I also know something about life." ENDNOTES: I use a different spelling of Belarus and Belarusian when referring to the Soviet era, because before 1991 the country's name was translated from Russian to English by "Belarus" or "Belarusian SSR".."