The excerpt below originates in Belarusian scholar Sasha Razor‘s in depth interview of Joanna Stingray.

Many Cold War narratives in the West feature a great deal of objectification and exoticism. Your book is entirely different, and you seem to understand and genuinely fit into that time and place. What do you think enabled you to be so open to a foreign culture and develop this genuine connection?

I am just an ordinary person who ended up in an extraordinary place with extraordinary people, and, through that, I did something extraordinary. Everything that I did was because of the extraordinary people around me. […] As to why, I don’t have an answer to this day. I didn’t have exceptional talent. I was an okay singer, I was an okay lyricist when I first came there, and I wasn’t a great musician. But all of them found something in me, as if they could look into my soul better than I myself could, and they saw some magic that I could not see. I don’t think it was because I was a Westerner. There is this quote by C. S. Lewis that I like: “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing.” And my book turned out the way it did because I was standing there. All I can say to what is going on in the world right now, here and in Russia, is for people to go stand somewhere else. It is important because you are going to see and hear something different. I was lucky to be standing in that place at that time.

Read the rest of the interview here.