A couple of days back, we were coming back home, me and Hnat, and met some random stranger near our house. We helped him keep the building entrance door open for a while, or something like that, and he said to Hnat something like ‘papa would keep the door open for you now’ or something similar. I won’t really recall, but that doesn’t matter.
The old man was friendly and smiley, nothing wrong. The wing was the papa word, with the accent on the first a, pápa. Not the French papá, but Russian papa.
‘Baba?’ [The grandmother in Ukrainian] asked Hnat. ‘The fuck he means?!’ Asked he without using the literal word, fuck.
‘He means dad’ was my obvious reply. Within his five years of life, he had never heard that word, and me either, I don’t associate myself with the Russian word. It’s weird perhaps, but the two words feels very different. In Belarusian and Ukrainian languages, both words tata or tato. It’s T instead of P. Hnat calls me ‘tat’ sometimes, when it’s mentioning me.
When I heard that word as pápa my reaction is somewhat similar. The word is so distant. Perhaps the fact I didn’t have a dad, and I cannot remember me calling him (my biological father) any of that, perhaps that contributes to that. Same goes for my partially adapted father / uncle, couldn’t call him that way either. All that contributed into me having issues with you / thou, and that’s why I love languages where you have just one word, or calling you everyone is a norm, like in English.
I have issues with Russian language, but it’s not just the language. I don’t mind Russians speaking it, they aren’t able to learn anything else.
I do mind me speaking it, and people around me speaking it too. I don’t want to live in fucking Russia. It’s difficult to tolerate that language spoken by Belarusians, and especially Ukrainians. It drives me mad, what an idiot you should be to speak Russian when the very Russia wages genocide on the very you for speaking any other language, especially the native language of the land you reside in.
I’m slightly more tolerant to Belarusians for the reasons they may fail to understand Russia waged the genocide on them, and mostly succeeded circa almost a century ago. Takes some effort to recognise that. After all, they are not bombed fucking daily by the very same people the language and culture of which the idiots bring into their countries.