Ribwort — Hannah Komar

Translated from Belarusian by the author

Ribwort is a space to sit down with your pain and listen. You may think it's not helpful, like a leaf of ribwort on a bleeding wound. The pain will probably be growing more and more acute, but if you face it, if you hold space for it.

Eventually it will shrink to the size of a scratch which a leaf of ribwort can help to heal. When we have healed, we become leaves of ribwort for others, so we can sit down with their pain and listen. Listen with compassion and without fear, without getting defensive or running away.

This is what keeps us going. In the summer of 2021, Hanna Komar brought the script for this book to a publisher in Belarus. He told her his business was going to be shut down for her protest poems.

He couldn't publish them. Since then, almost all independent publishers of Belarusian books in the Belarusian language have had their business suspended or liquidated. Books have been labelled 'extremist' and people have been imprisoned for selling or owning them, while writers ha