Praising Native Languages in a Post-Imperial World with Dinara Rasuleva

In this episode of Yurt Jurt, host Diana Kudaibergen speaks with Dinara Rasuleva - a Tatar poetess, writer, artist, and musician whose work sits at the crossroads of decolonial writing, experimental performance art, and multilingual expression. Until 2022, Dinara wrote exclusively in Russian. That shift became a turning point: she began to work consciously across languages, questioning the imperial connotations embedded in dominant literary forms and searching for new ways to write that feel ethically and politically grounded. Her recent Lostlingual project Travmagochi marks this transition - a work shaped by rupture, memory, and linguistic choice. Together, Diana and Dinara reflect on what it means to praise and preserve native languages in contexts shaped by empire and erasure. They discuss the emotional and political weight of returning to a mother tongue, the challenges of passing native languages on to future generations, and the freedom and responsibility of writing in Russian, Tatar, English, and German. This conversation is about language as inheritance, resistance, and creative experimentation - and about choosing to write in ways that refuse silence, hierarchy, and linguistic loss.