Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia [1st ed.] 9783030586843, 9783030586850

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Introduction: Making Culture in (Post) Socialist Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang (Ananda Breed, Ali Iğmen)....Pages 1-12
‘The Kara Kirghiz Must Develop Separately’: Ishenaaly Arabaev (1881–1933) and His Project of the Kyrgyz Nation (Jipar Duishembieva)....Pages 13-46
Liminal States: Personal Dreams and Performance in Kyrgyzstan During and After the Soviet Era (Ali Iğmen)....Pages 47-64
Epic Performances in Central Asia (Ananda Breed)....Pages 65-86
Poets of the People: Learning to Make Culture in Kazakhstan (Eva-Marie Dubuisson)....Pages 87-113
Lament in an Affluent Era: Cultural Politics of Kazakh Life Cycle Songs in Xinjiang (Guldana Salimjan)....Pages 115-140
Conclusion: Interweaving Texts (Eva-Marie Dubuisson)....Pages 141-149
Back Matter ....Pages 151-157

Citation preview

Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia Edited by Ananda Breed Eva-Marie Dubuisson Ali Iğmen

Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia

Ananda Breed · Eva-Marie Dubuisson · Ali I˘gmen Editors

Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia

Editors Ananda Breed College of Arts University of Lincoln Lincoln, UK

Eva-Marie Dubuisson Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature Nazarbayev University Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan

Ali I˘gmen Department of History California State University Long Beach, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-58684-3 ISBN 978-3-030-58685-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

2

3

Introduction: Making Culture in (Post) Socialist Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang Ananda Breed and Ali I˘gmen ‘The Kara Kirghiz Must Develop Separately’: Ishenaaly Arabaev (1881–1933) and His Project of the Kyrgyz Nation Jipar Duishembieva Liminal States: Personal Dreams and Performance in Kyrgyzstan During and After the Soviet Era Ali I˘gmen

4

Epic Performances in Central Asia Ananda Breed

5

Poets of the People: Learning to Make Culture in Kazakhstan Eva-Marie Dubuisson

1

13

47

65

87

v

vi

CONTENTS

6

Lament in an Affluent Era: Cultural Politics of Kazakh Life Cycle Songs in Xinjiang Guldana Salimjan

7

Conclusion: Interweaving Texts Eva-Marie Dubuisson

Index

115

141

151

Notes on Contributors

Ananda Breed is Professor of Theatre at University of Lincoln, United Kingdom. She is author of Performing the Nation: Genocide, Justice, Reconciliation (Seagull Books, 2014) and co-editor of Performance and Civic Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance, Volume One and Volume Two (Routledge, 2020). She is Principal Investigator of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) Informing the National Curriculum and Youth Policy for Peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia and Nepal (2020–2024); and Co-Investigator of AHRC GCRF project Changing the Story: Building Inclusive Societies with and for Young People in Five Post-Conflict Countries (2017–2021). She served as a lead consultant for IREX and UNICEF in Kyrgyzstan for project Youth Theatre for Peace (2010–2014). Breed was a research fellow at the International Research Centre Interweaving Performance Cultures at Freie University (2013–2014). Eva-Marie Dubuisson is a linguistic anthropologist who researches the politics of oral tradition and expressive culture, as well as discourses of ancestry, sacred geography, and ecological protection and change in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Her book Living Language: The Dialogic Emergence of an Ancestral Worldview was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017, and her work has also been published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Central Asian Survey, and other collected vii

viii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

volumes. Her research and writing has been supported by grants and fellowships from Fulbright, Wenner-Gren, the Social Science Research Council Eurasia Program, the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission (Marie Curie CIG), the Science Academy, Turkey, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. She currently teaches in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Jipar Duishembieva (Ph.D. 2015, University of Washington) researches the cultural and social history of imperial and early-Soviet Central Asia. Her doctoral dissertation, Visions of Community: Literary Culture and Social Change Among the Northern Kyrgyz, 1856–1924, examines the transformations of Kyrgyz society and culture set in motion by the Russian imperial conquest of the mid-nineteenth century. Most recently, she has been conducting research on the revolt of 1916 in Central Asia. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the International Research and Exchanges Board, American Councils Title VIII Research Scholar Program, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Ali I˘gmen is Professor of Central Asian History, the Director of the Oral History Program at the California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and past President of Central Eurasian Studies Society (2018– 2019). His book Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan has been published by the Central Asia in Context Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2012, and was a finalist for the Best Book Prize of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. He works on the history of Soviet culture and gender politics in Central Eurasia, currently writing his second book on four Kyrgyz actresses whose lives and work reflect Soviet gender and cultural policies of the 1950s to 1980s. He received his doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle, and taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Kyrgyz National University in Bishkek, Osh State University in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, and Bo˘gaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. A significant number of awards such as FulbrightHays, SSRC, Mellon Slavic Studies Initiative Grant and FLAS helped him support his research on Kyrgyzstan. Guldana Salimjan is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department at Simon Fraser University. Guldana’s current book project focuses on intersections of

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ix

gender, memory, and history of Kazakhs in Northern Xinjiang against the backdrop of the Mao era socialist revolution and reform era grassland policies. Her other projects include the cultural politics of Kazakh genealogical publications and the discourse of the Chinese state project of “ecological civilization” in pastoral regions of Xinjiang. She has published works on women’s narrative strategies in Kazakh oral tradition of aytis and the material culture of tus kiiz. Guldana also researches and writes about the ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang under the pen-name Yi Xiaocuo. She is the co-director of the Xinjiang Documentation Project and the founder of the multi-media art project Camp Album.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Making Culture in (Post) Socialist Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang Ananda Breed and Ali I˘gmen

Abstract In this volume, we introduce specific contexts of historical and contemporary negotiation around the categories of ‘culture’ and ‘performance’ in Kyrgyz and Kazakh cultural environments in Central Asia. How are cultural forms imagined, created, and performed—as a mechanism to both perform sovereignty and to reimagine traditional forms in the socialist and postsocialist periods? The relationships, institutional conditions, and creative labor required to generate or maintain particular forms of culture (literature, education, oral tradition, performance) are referred to here as ‘culture work,’ and theorized as a form of liminal interweaving. How and why do processes of culture work occur? What is the specific content of what might be promoted or allowed as ‘culture’ in highly

A. Breed College of Arts, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. I˘gmen (B) Department of History, California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_1

1

2

˘ A. BREED AND A. IGMEN

ideologized contexts, following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as instances of nation-building and identity formation, or as a mode of cultural survival under cultural assimilation and violence in China today? Keywords Soviet Post-Soviet Central Asia · China · Socialist multiculturalism · Liminality · Cultural subjectivity · Cultural traditions

In this book, authors present specific contexts of historical and contemporary negotiations around the categories of ‘culture’ and ‘performance’ in Kyrgyz and Kazakh cultural environments in Central Asia. Together, our authors aim to address a current lack of scholarship regarding the use of culture work—the ways in which cultural forms are imagined, created, and performed—as a mechanism to both perform sovereignty and to reimagine traditional forms in the socialist and postsocialist periods. The contributing chapters will analyze how and why these processes of work occur, as well as the specific content of what might be performed, following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as instances of nation building and identity formation, and as a mode of cultural survival under cultural assimilation and violence in China today. Since cultural forms in Central Asia have been largely under-researched within the fields of Performance Studies, Anthropology, Literary Studies, Area Studies, and History, the co-editors and contributors of this volume will provide a cross-disciplinary approach to provide some of the key concepts, practices and contexts. In particular, there will be an emphasis on what social and political factors informed the cultural forms at different stages of history. All of the new independent states of post-Soviet Central Asia, in particular Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, have inherited mechanisms of national celebration, as well as its object: the ‘nation’ itself defined largely in linguistic, cultural, and territorial terms. However, while newly national states have inherited a strong institutional and ideological legacy in the sphere of cultural production, this cannot be viewed as a simple case of post-Soviet reproduction (Adams 2010: 6). The Central Asian states such as Uzbekistan lack not only the underlying hard power of the previous system, but also even the organizational and ideological commitment to soft power resources such as mass spectacle (Ibid.: 5–6). That means that within the institutions of cultural production, there is plenty of space for actors to—whether intentionally or unintentionally—subvert the aims of stated projects (Ibid.), which were largely geared toward the celebration and memorialization of national identity and culture within each

1

INTRODUCTION: MAKING CULTURE IN (POST) SOCIALIST …

3

former republic. As Adams rightly noted, though we can say in the case of contemporary Uzbekistan that the state maintains a certain dominance over cultural discourses in the country, ultimately that ‘state’ is a ‘collectivity of actors who were in the process of making difficult decisions about the future of their country and their culture’ (5). The chapters presented in this collection speak to the heart of this argument, and challenge one of its assumptions: given the flexibility we see in cultural production today, perhaps we could conjecture that such practical and ideological ‘wiggle room’ was actually always a fundamental feature of the system, even in the strong power days of the Soviet period. While Soviet discourses of shared, recognizable national cultural forms were certainly predominant and highly active, it is important to recognize that these were not ultimately totalizing in their scope, nor defined top-down. Kudaibergenova (2017) has similarly argued that titular ethnic intellectuals and authors in the Soviet period, though highly constrained, certainly managed to insert their own conversations and images of ethnicity and history in the ‘national’ canon of Soviet Kazakhstan. Similarly, papers from the contemporary period emphasize that though cultural organization and performances may draw on existing structural forms, the vision and content of those projects is one not predetermined, but rather perpetually ‘coming into being.’ We hope the analyzes presented here will generate the potential to learn from past and present articulations of culture within the inbetweenness or liminal space of performance, in order to better articulate the embodiment of culture as a negotiating factor of identities, cultures, and countries in transition. What kind of social and political interventions have been negotiated through culture? What are some of the artistic adaptations of cultural forms for new and emerging purposes? How might cultural forms serve as a microcosm of the macrocosm of current global movements? How do the examples provided in this volume respond to overarching challenges or innovations in the interdisciplinary crossover between performance, politics and culture? The Soviet discourse and practice of ‘culturedness’ (kul’turnost ’) became an established political and cultural form during the Stalinist era in Soviet Central Asia, just as all other regions of the Soviet Union.1 The ‘cultured’ Soviet citizen in the region needed to be well-versed in literature, music, theatre, and other artistic fields, all within the bounds

1 For the application of ‘culturedness’ in the Kyrgyz SSR, see I˘ gmen (2012).

4

˘ A. BREED AND A. IGMEN

of the Marxist–Leninist ideology. In urban centres such as Tashkent and other capital cities of the Soviet Socialist Republics, the state opera, ballet, theatre, and philharmonia carried out the state-sanctioned cultural activities in larger scale. The nomadic Kyrgyz and Kazakh populations, and those in smaller rural regions came into contact with Soviet ‘culturedness’ mostly in Lenin’s Corners in factories and collective farms, and in Red Clubs and other Houses of Culture. First, being ‘cultured’ required the improvement of traditional forms of art with modern, namely Western forms of art. For example, modern stage productions were to replace traditional performances of the akyn (bards). Gradually, however, indigenous cultural forms found their way into Soviet literature, theatre and film. The Soviet policy, supported by the slogan ‘national in form, socialist in content’ encouraged talented writers such as the Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov to forge a Soviet artistic tradition that blended indigenous and Soviet forms of cultural productions. During the first half of the Soviet era most Soviet authors, artists, actors and other people of the arts learned to assert themselves within the limitations of the official Soviet cultural forms. This delicate and often dangerous assertion took place in a liminal space, in which professional artists found various ways to stay ‘national in form, socialist in content,’2 a dictum guiding the research and understanding of every performative sphere of life from art (Tagangaeva 2016) to music (Harris 2008) to language (Shelestyuk 2019); one could even understand the very category or notion of tribal identity itself in this new way, as Edgar (2004) has well-described in the case of Turkmenistan. The two-sided notion of a specifically socialist multiculturalism was experienced throughout the former Soviet Union and China over the twentieth century and tended to follow relatively specific patterning linking categories of ethnic and performative identity. For example, in her exposition of the establishment and development of Soviet national art in Buryatia, Tagangaeva (2016) explains how ‘a specific visual aesthetic and discourse [was] formed, based on the close link between art and ethnicity. National art was tied to the development of Soviet ethnography, which enabled the naturalization of art through geographic and ethnic essentialist attributes’ (393). Ethnographic and academic research 2 For a general overview of this two-sided mode of socialist nationality building in the Soviet Union, see Slezkine (1994), Martin (2001), Suny and Martin (2001), and Hirsch (2005).

1

INTRODUCTION: MAKING CULTURE IN (POST) SOCIALIST …

5

on ‘folk’ and artistic traditions led to a typology of nations defined in cultural terms, all which in turn orbited, and were still oriented toward, the cultural center of Russian modernism, and thus the Soviet institutionalization of art can be understood also as the colonization of cultural form (Ibid.: 397–399). In Buryatia, for example, artists working in the Soviet framework confronted the category of the ‘national’ as clichéd orientalism (Ibid.: 405–406). In China at the same time, comparable demarcations of cultural form led further, for example, to the canonization of ‘national musical traditions’ of ethnic minorities like the Uyghur Shashmuqam (Harris 2008). Although the artistic outcome of such endeavours often created bland and propaganda laden productions, many individuals dedicated themselves to improving the quality of their work. Many took pride in their education in art institutes and higher education institutions while not abandoning their ethnic, regional, and national ways of seeing and being in the world. In our contributions to this volume, we wish to foreground the work and activity of individuals and groups in the establishment, maintenance, and performance of cultural traditions across Central Asia. Here we view ‘culture’ not as a given, but as a space continually (re)claimed by those working creatively within environments of political socialism and nationalism including indigenous performative and intellectual traditions. In formulating our approach to this special collection of essays and to best articulate the ‘coming into being’ of varied cultural forms and performatives, we bring together key concepts and terms that are derived from our varied disciplines and theoretical frameworks including: interweaving, liminality, dwelling, and affective sovereignty, which we explain briefly here. Additionally, throughout our research articles we explore how other cultural and linguistically specific terms that connote a specific definition within Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Russian, Tajik, or Kazak, might contribute a deeper understanding of how our theoretical terminology might apply in other contexts or across cultures as well. The terminology provides a weblike structure that links between the articles in this volume to generate new thought processes that potentially provides alternative points of access or lenses between disciplines, our own form of border crossing or liminality. Anthropologist Victor Turner has described liminality as ‘a fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities, not by any means a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structure, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to and anticipating

6

˘ A. BREED AND A. IGMEN

postliminal existence’ (1990: 12). The articles here explore the Kyrgyz thinker Arabaev’s and Kyrgyz actresses’ development as influential intellectuals in their own liminal spaces where they were confronted by changing times and changing modes of literary and artistic expression. The contributions here also examine the ways in which treasured traditions such as the Kyrgyz epic Manas, and the Kazakh oral traditions of aitys, wedding songs, and elegy performed by elderly ethnic Kazakh women in China experienced new forms and structures in changing political landscapes where national and linguistic identities thrived to emerge in a postliminal existence. The concept of interweaving comes from the study of textuality: ‘A text is a tissue of words.’ The term comes from the Latin texere, meaning literally to weave, join together, plait or braid; and therefore, to construct, fabricate, build or compose (Barber 2007: 2). In our study we examine the performative traditions as woven texts, as those forms which are overlain in social history, where we may locate the ‘social relations, ideas, values [of] the cultures that produce them,’ (Ibid.). Performance theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte et al. uses the term interweaving as opposed to intercultural to oppose the binary between Western and non-Western forms, and notions of authenticity to situate the historic use of performance as a mediating factor between cultures to decontextualize, appropriate, and adapt to fit other goals (2014: 2). Fischer-Lichte affirms her usage of interweaving in relation to the application of cultural forms to new social realities: Interweaving functions on several levels: Many strands are plied into a thread; many such threads are then woven into a piece of cloth, which thus consists of diverse strands and threads…seen within an ‘as well’ logic, that is, the interconnectedness, as suggested by the metaphor of threads woven into cloth…Performances in general take on a paradigmatic role in society: All that occurs publicly in them – both between the performers and between the performers and spectators – may reflect, condemn, or negate the surrounding social conditions and/or anticipate future ones … By permanently probing the emergence, stabilization, and destabilization of cultural identities, these performances can transfer their participants into states of in-betweenness, which allow them to anticipate a future wherein the journey itself, the permanence of transition, and the state of liminality is indeed constitutive of their experience … The interweaving of performance

1

INTRODUCTION: MAKING CULTURE IN (POST) SOCIALIST …

7

cultures can be thus described as an aesthetic Vor-Schein, as the philosopher Ernst Bloch put it: the anticipation in and by the arts of something that will become social reality much later, if at all. (Ibid. 11–12)

The concept of interweaving is applied to ascribe aesthetic experiences as those ‘in between’ the static categories of society and culture. In this way, the authors in this volume also apply the notion of interweaving as a liminal experience, through which the personal and contingent spaces in which cultural and performative traditions themselves come into being. In forms of ‘counterideology’ and ‘mobilization’ under difficult political circumstances, how can we foreground the emergence of cultural subjectivities (Biehl and Locke 2017: 21)? Similarly describing the state of inbetweenness or the state of becoming, in his analysis of the unfolding of social life, anthropologist Tim Ingold emphasizes dwelling, or ‘the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings (Ingold 2011: 186).’ In our own historical and ethnographic analyzes, and in our engagement with the life of cultural construction, we extend Ingold’s understanding of ‘dwelling’ in the spaces of society and the everyday, toward the inhabitation and building of sites of history. Such an engagement moves away from static categories and toward an emphasis on the biographies and experiences of those individuals and communities involved in the (re) construction of an indigenous cultural commons through the performances of oral traditions and the institutionalization of indigenous intellectual spaces. All the chapters in this collection rightly point toward what David Gullette and John Heathershaw (2015) have called an ‘affective politics of sovereignty’ in the formation of national consciousness in the early Soviet republics, the ways in which identity and belonging structure historical and political consciousness, and the strong role played by cultural formations in doing this work of history-making. As socialist logic prescribed culture as belonging to the category of ethnicity, those ethnic groups granted semi-independent republic or provincial status under Soviet or Chinese state socialism were in a position to articulate cultural forms, while the dynamics of transnational shared culture, or ethnic and cultural minorities without access to state resources were largely ignored. Across Central Asia, we argue that ‘culture’ itself cannot be taken for granted; rather, cultural products are the deep investments of families, collectives,

8

˘ A. BREED AND A. IGMEN

and storied individuals who carry and promote oral and performative traditions to become a part of—and to be maintained as—indigenous ‘culture’ under the larger projects of state socialism and nationalism. The authors examine various types of social and political interventions by several individuals and groups, beginning with the late nineteenth century, and ending with the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The contributions in this volume provide various examples of cultural assertion and survival in multiple ways. The narratives begin at the end of the nineteenth century when intellectuals such as Kyrgyz thinker Ishenaaly Arabaev’s life, intellectual pursuits, and personal decisions were shaped by the historical conditions in Central Asia, as presented in the first chapter here. Arabaev’s interactions with the empire’s Muslim intellectuals, and his exposure to the ideas of Muslim cultural reform through medrese study and the print media, made him aware of the plight of his ‘own’ people, the Kyrgyz, and allowed him to conceive of his community as extending beyond his Sarybaghysh tribe. Arabaev was born into and raised in a culture with a strong oral tradition. He was familiar with the poetic repertoire of the oral poets of his country (qyns and zhomoqchus ); he valued their art highly and it had a tremendous influence on how he came to imagine being Kyrgyz. Throughout his career, Arabaev had tried to navigate and reconcile his multilayered—ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural identities. His close collaboration with Kazakh intellectuals and his tendency to intermingle Kyrgyz and Kazakh affairs added another dimension to his identity. His cultural alliances with Kazakh intellectuals during the late imperial period later led to political alliances that played an integral role in shaping the choices he made after the demise of the Russian empire. The second chapter on the Kyrgyz actresses of the Soviet era conveys the strength of the sense of belonging. The cultural policies of the Soviet era, and the responses of the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz to these policies place the consequences described above in historical context. During the first half of the twentieth century, in the Kyrgyz SSR, by asserting particular ways of conduct on and offstage authoritative women upheld what they saw as traditional gender roles. They upheld nomadism and reverence for the elderly and the environment as their indigenous values. Although, the Soviet rhetoric placed these women in a liminal space, they did not see themselves marginalized. Ironically, the Kyrgyz women in this study played traditional gender roles on stage such as the wife of their national

1

INTRODUCTION: MAKING CULTURE IN (POST) SOCIALIST …

9

hero Manas, Kanykei to perpetuate the image of an idealized Kyrgyz woman. Their successors, the generation of the early twenty-first century, approached traditions in new ways. The examples of Sakhna Nomadic Theatre and Osh Uzbek Theatre presented in the third chapter, illuminate the use of Manas as an interweaving text that can be adapted, rewritten, and expanded to nurture artistic explorations. Here, there are some contradictions and tensions between how Manas can serve on a local level through its flexible application to a specific community and how Manas has been performed and implemented on a national level in terms of political ideology and notions of sovereignty. It is the duality between the local and national levels that demonstrates the tension between the fluidity of Manas as a form that can be improvised according to its audiences and contexts and the use of Manas toward nationalism. These two stories, one from the early twentieth century, another from the twentyfirst, expose that there are various potential ways that Manas and other cultural forms more broadly can be used as an interweaving text between ancient traditions and histories and contemporary social, cultural, and political contexts. The fourth chapter on the Kazakh poetry shows that the powerful connections between the Kazakh oral tradition and modern nationalism in the twentieth century are still apparent today, as the power of nationalism itself lies not in its fixity, but in its ambivalence as seen in the oral tradition of aitys in Kazakhstan in the twenty-first century. The poetry and the shaping of poets within this tradition confers both pride and grief, not only for the suffering of Kazakhs under Soviet rule in the past, but perhaps more importantly for the struggle to maintain language and tradition in the national present. While aitys was intentionally coopted as a ‘folklore genre’ by the Soviet state, and while the art form is still very much constrained by government censorship, the oral tradition is still nonetheless seen as a vehicle of cultural continuity by its supporters. There is a retraditionalized ‘nation,’ invoked and lauded in aitys performances. Kazakh language becomes metaphorically important in that context as evidence of the existence of Kazakh culture. In this ideological and political economy of performance, Kazakh language becomes a central key: more than anything else, linguistic acumen symbolizes knowledge of history and culture, a culture always under threat in the reality of post-Soviet politics in Kazakhstan.

10

˘ A. BREED AND A. IGMEN

As an alternative to state nationalism in Central Asia, Chinese Kazakhs’ cultural sentiments are expressed differently, due to the historical precedence of ‘local nationalism’ denounced as counterrevolutionary in the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘Directive on the Rectification Movement’ in 1957. However, instead of resonating with China and Kazakhstan’s national visions, Chinese Kazakhs tell stories that are grounded in where they have a sense of belonging to sustain communal solidarity. It is imperative to note the disjuncture between the post-Soviet Central Asian cultural experience, and that of ethnic and religious minority populations in Xinjiang, the semi-autonomous western region of China. While the former Soviet republics are building a national politics, Central Asians in China are facing extreme and increasing measures of oppression and control, most recently in the form of mandatory ‘re-education centers’ where hundreds of thousands have been detained (see for example articles by Smith-Finley [2019] or Zenz [2019]). The fifth chapter describes the experience of Kazakhs living in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China, and shows that the narratives and cultural politics around oral traditions such as wedding songs and funeral elegies, traditionally sung by elder women, can shed light on traumatic political transformations from a feminist perspective. The older generation has faced not only the cultural revolution of the Maoist era, but also the continued repression and violence of the current era. Connections among family, cultural traditions, and pastoral lifeways have been deeply challenged by state efforts at ideological ‘reform’ and ‘modernization,’ as well as urbanization. The sentimental depth of elders’ lament indicates the continuous reproduction of space and social networks, a way to interact [with] others and with their changing environment. Therefore, understanding the way that women’s oral traditions function in families and communities among Kazakhs in Xinjiang helps us to see why and how people are responding to life changes in a cultural way. Women’s words are a shared and resonating soundscape of lament connecting modern families to the histories that came before them, and to the traditions being lost. The framework of lament shows us that people are grieving for something greater: the mourning and memory of elders allows the ‘death’ of Islamic cultural identity, pastoral lifeways, and gendered traditional knowledge, to be said out loud. In bringing together this collection of articles, we wish to illustrate and emphasize ‘culture’ itself as a space of assertion and erasure, of

1

INTRODUCTION: MAKING CULTURE IN (POST) SOCIALIST …

11

collaboration and coming into being, a performative space in which individuals and communities assert a vision of history and claim an affective and sovereign space in the present. While the formation of a national ethnic consciousness has often been foregrounded in the literature on socialist nation-building, this is often given as a top-down and deterministic project. But how do local artists and intellectuals work from within to shape and form ‘cultural’ traditions through time? How are spaces of ‘tradition’ used as creative commentary on the very processes of socialization and history-making of which they are part? How do emic understandings of language, spirituality, environment, come to be an active model of cultural education across different cultural spaces? What is the role of poetry, performance, and oral tradition, in social and political life? Finally, while we emphasize the role of cultural assertion, ultimately, we must also honor the conditions of historical trauma and displacement in which cultural creativity cannot always be a form of survival. Cultural traditions also stand as a testament to that which has been lost, or what might be lost, in the social fabric of history. Indeed, such an acknowledgment becomes a raison d’etre of many indigenous performative and intellectual traditions; these traditions become a space of pedagogy not only about ‘national consciousness,’ but also about efforts to sustain such an identity in the face of cultural colonialism. Liminality—the life of the in-between—itself becomes a creative means of sustenance and collaboration, in the face of cultural and physical displacements in socialist and nationalist environments.

References Adams, L. (2010). The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barber, K. (2007). The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biehl, J. and Locke, P. eds. (2017). Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press. Edgar, A. (2004). Tribal Nation, the Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Erika Fischer-Lichte, E., Jost, T., and Jain, S. I. eds. (2014). The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge.

12

˘ A. BREED AND A. IGMEN

Gullette, D. and Heathershaw, J. (2015). The Affective Politics of Sovereignty: Reflecting on the 2010 Conflict in Kyrgyzstan. Nationalities Papers 43 (1): 122–139. Harris, R. (2008). The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam. Oxon and New York: Routledge (Ashgate). Hirsch, F. (2005). Empire of Nations, Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. I˘gmen, A. (2012). Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. Ingold, T. (2011). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Kudaibergenova, D. (2017). Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature: Elites and Narratives. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Martin, T. (2001). Affirmative Action Empire, Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shelestyuk, E. (2019). National in Form, Socialist in Content: USSR National and Language Policies in the Early Period. SHS Web of Conferences 69. Slezkine, Y. (1994). The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism. Slavic Review 53 (2): 414–452. Smith-Finely, J. (2019). Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang: Has PRC Counter-Terrorism Evolved into State Terror? Central Asian Survey 38 (1): 1–26. Suny, R. G. and Martin, T. (2001). A State of Nations, Empire and NationMaking in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tagangaeva, M. (2016). ‘Socialist in Content, National in Form’: The Making of Soviet National Art and the Case of Buryatia. Nationalities Papers 45 (3): 393–409. Turner, V. (1990). Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama? In: Schener, R. and Appel, W. eds. By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zenz, A. (2019). ‘Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude’: China’s Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang. Central Asian Survey 38 (1): 102–128.

CHAPTER 2

‘The Kara Kirghiz Must Develop Separately’: Ishenaaly Arabaev (1881–1933) and His Project of the Kyrgyz Nation Jipar Duishembieva

Abstract This chapter revisits the historical circumstances under which the notion of Kyrgyzness developed and further solidified into the concept of the modern Kyrgyz nation. It does so through the example of the Central Asian Kyrgyz intellectual Ishenaaly Arabaev. The chapter reveals that early twentieth-century Kyrgyz nationalism emerged alongside a Kazakh nationalist discourse, which had a significant influence on Kyrgyz intellectuals’ conception(s) of the nation. Furthermore, it outlines how the idea of the Kyrgyz national territorial autonomy was formed in the early 1920s, after a period of shock and recovery from the devastation of the revolt of 1916, the revolutions of 1917 and the fall of the Russian imperial regime. Through it all came new efforts to redefine what it meant to be Kyrgyz, encouraged by the changing political and cultural climate of the early 1920s and enforced by various political alliances.

J. Duishembieva (B) University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_2

13

14

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

Keywords Ishenaaly Arabaev · Intellectual history · Soviet Kyrgyz nationality · Kara Kirghiz · Islamic education · Russian imperialism in Central Asia

In March 1924, Ishenaaly Arabaev, a prominent Kyrgyz intellectual, writer, and educator, found himself in Tashkent speaking in front of the members of the Central Asian Bureau to justify the creation of the Kara Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast (KKAO): If an Uzbek is speaking, he begins with Ferghana and Samarkand and immediately passes to Aulie Ata through Tashkent, forgetting to touch upon the Kara Kirghiz. And if another Kirghiz [Kazakh] has his turn, he speaks of Jeti Suu and Syr-Dar’ia, and absolutely fails to mention the Kara Kirghiz of Jeti Suu. I recently have said that along with [the Uzbek, Turkmen and Kazakh] nationalities, it is necessary to promote two more nationalities: the Kara Kirghiz and Tajik, so that there are five nationalities.1

Arabaev did not always hold the above-mentioned opinion. Before the 1920s, he saw himself as part of the Kazakh-Kyrgyz intellectual milieu and accepted the possibility of a Kyrgyz and Kazakh cultural and political unity.2 Prior to 1917, Arabaev published on the pages of Ay Qap and Qazaq and wrote a primer for Kazakh and Kyrgyz children. He later became a founding member of the Alash party’s branch in Pishpek. 1 Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (henceforth RGASPI). F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. L. 97. 2 Prior to 1925, terms such as Kara-Kirghiz and Wild Mountain (dikokamennye) Kirghiz were used to designate present-day Kyrgyz. Meanwhile, terms such as Kirghiz and KaisakKirghiz/Kirghiz-Kaisak were used for present-day Kazakhs. It is difficult to speculate what the reason was for this kind of confusion in the use of these terms, but it is important to note that Kyrgyz and Kazakhs have always called themselves only Kyrgyz and Kazakhs, respectively. In April of 1925, the Sredazbiuro (Central Asian Bureau) TsK RKP (b) decided to discard the term Kara Kirghiz and to use the term ‘Kirghiz’ to designate Kyrgyz and the term ‘Kazakh’ to designate Kazakhs (RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 183. Ll. 35–36 ob.). Until 1991, Kirghiz/Kyrgyz was spelled KIRGIZ in Russian and KYRGYZ in Kyrgyz. In 1991, the Kyrgyz government decided to use the spelling KYRGYZ in both Russian and Kyrgyz languages, and since then, it is spelled ‘Kyrgyz’ in English. I only use the term Kirghiz whenever it is used by the contemporary political activists and intellectuals themselves, in all other instances I use the term Kyrgyz.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

15

Arabaev grew up immersed in a culture with rich oral tradition from which he took a constant inspiration, but he also received a traditional Islamic education and was able to write and read, a skill that was not widespread among the nomadic Kyrgyz and Kazakhs of the early twentieth century. He actively participated in the developments of the period between 1910 and 1914 which marked a critical transition in the history of northern Kyrgyz literary culture, when the traditional system of knowledge based on orality gave way to new modes of learning. This period witnessed a rise in the number of educated Kyrgyz, who later, during the early Soviet period, came to dominate the political, cultural, and literary scene. Knowingly, and sometimes unknowingly, they participated in the discussions on what it was to be Kyrgyz and how their Kyrgyzness distinguished them from the rest of the population of Central Asia.3 They listed nomadic lifestyle and oral tradition as one of the distinct markers of their identity, while knowledge and awareness of their genealogy—the ability to trace their beginnings to a single ancestor—also played a major role in defining Kyrgyzness. Arabaev was one of these intellectuals who, prior to 1916, contributed to the discourse of the nation with his works on language, culture, and literature. He held a unique position among his contemporaries, for he had a first-hand experience of both oral and written/print cultures. On the example of Arabaev’s experiences as a cultural and political figure of the late imperial and early Soviet periods, this paper aims to revisit the historical circumstances under which the notion of Kyrgyzness developed and further solidified into the concept of the modern Kyrgyz nation. It reveals that early twentieth-century Kyrgyz nationalism emerged alongside a Kazakh nationalist discourse, which had a significant

3 I discuss this in my Ph.D. dissertation. See, Jipar Duishembieva. Visions of Community: Literary Culture and Social Change among the Northern Kyrgyz, 1856–1924/Ph.D. dissertation; University of Washington, 2015.

16

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

influence on Kyrgyz intellectuals’ conception(s) of the nation.4 Furthermore, it outlines how the idea of the Kyrgyz national territorial autonomy was formed in the early 1920s, after a period of shock and recovery from the devastation of the revolt of 1916,5 the revolutions of 1917 and the fall of the imperial regime. Through it all came new efforts to redefine what it meant to be Kyrgyz, encouraged by the changing political and cultural climate of the early 1920s and enforced by various political alliances.

Ishenaaly Arabaev: Early Life and Intellectual Pursuits The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the modernizing Kyrgyz intellectuals, who were well-versed in the oral tradition of their ancestors in addition to being exposed to concepts and attitudes of modernity through travel and education in the reformed Muslim religious institutions of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Although they were limited in number, their activities spurred further development of

4 On the process of nation-building in Central Asia in early Soviet period see Adrienne

Lynn Edgar. Tribal Nation: The Making of the Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton University Press, 2005; Marianne Kamp. The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism. University of Washington Press, 2006; Ali I˘gmen. Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012; Sergei Abashin. Natsionalizmy v Srednei Azii, v poiskakh identichnosti. Aleteiia, 2007. Some of the earlier and most influential studies on the Soviet nationality policy include Yuri Slezkine. (1994). ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.’ Slavic Review. Vol. 53. pp. 414–452; Ronald Grigor Suny. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford University Press, 1993. Works on the Soviet nationality policy and its implementation include Terry Martin. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Cornell University Press, 2001; Francine Hirsch. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell University Press, 2005. 5 In the summer of 1916, the population of Central Asia revolted against the Russian imperial regime. The revolt was a result of the decree of the labor conscription which called up the entire male population of Central Asia between the ages of 18 and 43 for service in non-combatant roles. It had resulted in many deaths and was ruthlessly put down by the imperial army. On the revolt of 1916 see Daniel Brower. Kyrgyz Nomads, and Russian Pioneers: Colonization and Ethnic Conflict in the Turkestan Revolt of 1916; Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas. 1996. Bd. 44. pp. 41–53; Jörn Happel. Nomadische lebenswelten und zarische politik: der Aufstand in Zentralasien 1916. Stuttgart, 2010.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

17

the notions of Kyrgyzness. This section concentrates on Arabaev’s formation as an intellectual and discusses his efforts in the spheres of education, press and publishing. Ishenaaly Arabaev was born in 1881 in Qyzyl Tuu volost of Pishpek uezd of Semirech’e region. He lost his father when he was two years old and was raised by his mother. At the age of ten, Arabaev hired himself out to a Kyrgyz bai 6 for a period of two years. Subsequently, he worked until he was eighteen for a local mullah, with whom he learned to read and write. By the end of the nineteenth century, lessons with a hired mullah were becoming common among the Kyrgyz nomads, and the majority of the first generation of Kyrgyz intellectuals had a basic mekteb training, as well as exposure to the informal learning networks of the Kyrgyz oral poets and bards, the aqyns 7 and jomoqchus .8 By the beginning of the twentieth century however, knowledge based on oral transmission and pure memorization was not enough to keep up with the demands of a changing society. Arabaev and many of his contemporaries understood this well. They grew dissatisfied with the quality of education provided by the local mullahs; and those who could afford it moved to uezd centers such as Toqmoq and Przheval’sk, which contained large communities of Muslims from Russia and Central Asia, including many Tatars, as well as Kazakhs and Sarts.9 Upon graduation, these students returned to 6 A man of considerable wealth. 7 Oral poets among the northern Kyrgyz. 8 The process of knowledge acquisition among the nomadic northern Kyrgyz is poorly

recorded until the second half of the nineteenth century. Apart from a selection of texts located at the Manuscripts Collection of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences that were collected from the territory of the present-day Kyrgyz Republic and date back to the early nineteenth century, which document the circulation of religious texts at that time, there are few sources that shed light on the methods of learning and knowledge transmission among the Kyrgyz nomads. Reading, and especially writing, were privileges restricted to only a few individuals from the higher strata of nomadic society. Among those rare Kyrgyz who came from noble families and had leisure to devote to literary pursuits were the Kyrgyz aqyns Qalyghul, Arstanbek, and later Moldo Qylych. All of them also studied with mullahs, a fact that would have a lasting impact in popular memory. jomoqchu is a man (in rare instances a woman), who is skilled in telling or singing tales. 9 TsGA PD KR, f. 10, op. 15, d. 188. New-method schools, as they came to be known among the public, emerged as an answer to the perceived cultural backwardness of the Muslims of the Russian empire. These schools were organized on the model established by the Crimean Tatar intellectual Ismail Gasprinskii (1851–1914), who was an ardent

18

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

their own villages to teach village children. Arabaev continued his studies at a new-method (jadid) mekteb in Przheval’sk, under the supervision of a Tatar mullah, who later helped him secure funding from a local benevolent society to go to Orenburg for further education.10 Arabaev’s road to Orenburg was circuitous. Initially he failed the entrance exams to the madrasa in Orenburg, and instead entered a Turkish gymnasium in Istanbul. After six months of study there, Arabaev travelled for a year and a half around the Middle East. Little is known about this period of his life. In a ‘personal file’ [lichnoe delo] he mentioned having visited Izmir, Beirut, Mecca, and Medina during this time, but his writings contain no description of the cities or account of his experiences there.11 This biographical gap is curious, but it seems most likely that he went on a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, via Izmir and Beirut. Upon returning to Istanbul, in Arabaev’s words, he began to ‘attract the attention of Ottoman government officials’ for receiving newspapers containing revolutionary content from Saint-Petersburg, so he decided to return to Orenburg.12 In Orenburg, Arabaev entered the Huseyniye madrasa, and after a summer of teaching, he was able to save up the money to continue his studies at the Ghaliya madrasa in Ufa in 1909 where he studied for three years.13

advocate of modern education. The term ‘jadidism’ itself came from the new phonetic method (usul-i jadid) of teaching the Arabic alphabet in the 1880s. By the late nineteenth century, Gasprinskii’s method spread widely among the Tatars of the Volga and the Crimea regions, and in the early twentieth century it became a popular way of teaching among the northern Kyrgyz nomads. The method itself, however, was not limited to teaching Arabic by using this new method. It also involved the introduction of secular subjects into mekteb and madrasa curricula, and transforming traditional ways of teaching by organizing the educational process according to modern methods of instruction. 10 TsGA PD KR, f. 10, op. 15, d. 188. 11 TsGA PD KR, f. 10, op. 15, d. 188. 12 TsGA PD KR, f. 10, op. 15, d. 188, ll. 8–10. 13 Ufa, the capital of the Ufa Governorate, today is the capital of the Republic Bashko-

rtostan, Russia. Madrasa Ghaliya had been founded by Ziya Kamali (1873–1942), a prominent Tatar thinker, intellectual, and educator, and was famous for its progressive educational content and methods. From the end of the nineteenth century, reformed madrasas like Ghaliya had begun to open in the Volga-Ural region, supported by wealthy Muslim merchants and intellectuals from the area. They differed from the old-style madrasas mainly in their curriculum, which, along with religious studies, included such subjects as psychology, pedagogy, chemistry, history, and Russian. The revised curriculum in these reformed madrasas also allowed students to complete their training more quickly,

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

19

It is likely that Arabaev began to think of his community as a distinct nation during his studies in Ghaliya, aided by his membership in the Kazakh-Kyrgyz student association and participation in the amateur madrasa newspaper Sadaq.14 Arabaev’s social and political views were formed through his interactions with teachers and students of the madrasa, and exposure to their varied ethnic and social backgrounds.15 In addition to the official subjects in the madrasa curriculum, students participated in a rich extracurricular program. The majority of the students of the madrasa wrote poetry, which was encouraged by the teachers, and many graduates went on to contribute to the development of the print media in the region as poets, writers or journalists.16 Students of Ghaliya madrasa also put together plays and published their works in madrasa newspapers. Arabaev’s time in Ufa and Kazan coincided with the period following the revolution of 1905 in the Russian empire, a time marked by heightened national sentiment among the empire’s non-Russian population, and greater activity by national movements in the imperial borderlands. The revolution of 1905 was sparked off by the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ of January 9 in St. Petersburg. Social and economic problems which spilled over into the unrest of the workers and peasants were the underlying causes of the revolution.17 The revolution resulted in the October

usually over a period of ten to fifteen years. Besides Ghaliya, some of the most prominent reformed madrasas were Bubiy, Hüseyiniye, Usmaniye and Mukhammediye. These madrasas, and particularly Ghaliya, would go on to host many Kazakh and Kyrgyz students. Neither Arabaev’s, nor any of the other known ‘Kyrgyz’ shagirds ’ [students’] names are mentioned in the lists of Ghaliya madrasa in the file pertaining to Ghaliya at the Central State Historical Archive of the Republic of Bashkortostan (henceforth TsGIA RB). 14 The Tatar-Bashkir student association also published a newspaper, Parlaq. See Tursynbek Kekishev. Sadaq. Almaty, 1986. p. 58. 15 On madrasa Ghaliya, see Liliia Tuzbekova. Madrasa ‘Galiia—vysshee musul’ manskoe uchebnoe zavedenie na territorii Bashkortostana (1906–1919): 100 letiiu so dnia osnovaniia. Ufa, 2006. 16 Collection of the madrasa Ghaliya at TsGIA RB in Ufa contains a wealth of information about the madrasa graduates’ future paths. TsGIA RB, f. R-4767, op. 1, d. 1. 17 Severe famines in 1891–1892, and again in 1897–1898, in the Russian countryside dispelled Russian peasants’ illusions about the state’s ability to alleviate their problems. The peasants’ main demand under these circumstances was land, universal free education, and fair taxation. Russia’s rapid embrace of industrialization at the end of the 1880s, reflected

20

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

Manifesto which limited the tsar’s autocratic powers, guaranteed the population of the empire civil rights, allowed for the election of the legislative assembly, and granted freedom of religion, speech, and association to the population of Russia.18 Muslims of the Russian empire used 1905 concessions to start their own political movements. The first All-Russian Muslim congress met illegally in August of 1905 in Nizhnii Novgorod on a boat on the Oka River, and it was attended by such Tatar and Azeri intellectuals as Ismail Gasprinskii, Yusuf Akchura, Ghalimjan Ibragimov, and Alimardan Topchibashev.19 The idea of creating the Ittifaq [Union of the Muslims of Russia] party was brought up by Gasprinskii during that congress.20 The party pursued cultural, political, and economic unification of Russian Muslims, freedom of press and publishing, development of Muslim schools, and legal equality for Muslims and Russians.21 The period of 1905–1907 saw an increase in the number of newspapers and magazines in Turkic and Persian languages written in Arabic script.22 These contemporary periodicals witnessed intense debates among Tatar, Kazakh, Azeri, and Central Asian intellectuals, regarding the future of their nation and their place within the empire.23 Such newspapers as Tarjuman [Translator], Yulduz [The Star], Bayanul-khaq [Messenger of Justice], Idel [Volga] and Shuro [Council ], published in the cities across the Russian empire, provided a public forum in which Tatar and Central

poorly on the workers’ conditions. They demanded betterment of working conditions, shorter work hours, and greater participation in the affairs of the state. See Orlando Figes. A People’s Tragedy. New York, 1997. pp. 157–186; Geoffrey Hosking. Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917. Cambridge, 1997. pp. 402–423. 18 Andreas Kappeler. The Russian Empire: A Multi-ethnic History. Harlow, 2001. p. 338. 19 Salavat Iskhakov. Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i musul’mane Rossiiskoi imperii.

Moscow, 2007. p. 163. 20 Ibid. 169. 21 Azade-Ayse Rorlich. The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience. Stanford,

1986. p. 111. 22 Kappeler. The Russian Empire. p. 338. 23 Steven Sabol. Russian Colonization and the Genesis of Kazakh National Consciousness.

Basingstoke, 2003; Adeeb Khalid. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley, 1998.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

21

Asian intellectuals could share and spread their political views among the population.24 Arabaev’s first known writing, a foreword to Qissa-i Zelzeleh [A Story of an Earthquake], a poem by a well-known poet of the time Moldo Qylych, appeared under these historical circumstances.25 The foreword is brief, but it tells much about Arabaev’s sorrows and aspirations. It is a celebration of the accomplishments of the ‘Kyrgyz’ poet, but also reads as a complaint. In it, Arabaev recalled that Moldo Qylych had been writing poetry for the past twenty years, and that Qylych himself had worked actively to distribute his poems by copying and reciting them. This was necessary, Arabaev wrote, because none of ‘our Kyrgyz’ [bizdin qïrgïzdan] had ever seen a publishing house. Arabaev expressed his wish that if God Almighty [quday taala] ever let him see the outside world,

24 Khalid. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. p. 79. Although none of the northern Kyrgyz participated in the All-Russian Muslim congresses organized by Tatar intellectuals of the Volga and Crimea regions, following the concessions they did petition the state on the ‘needs of the Kirghiz and Kara Kirghiz of Semirech’e oblast on the questions of confession, education, and land.’ They designated Shabdan, the manap of the Sarybaghysh volost, to petition on their behalf in St. Petersburg. They requested several things in their petition including the establishment of the Muslim Spiritual Administration for the ‘Muslim Kara Kirghiz of Turkestan region and Kirghiz-Kaisaks of Semirech’e oblast.’ In addition, they asked for permission to build mosques, mektebs and madrasas, and professional schools which would be directly subordinated to the Spiritual Administration; they requested the state’s permission to establish waqfs (an endowment, in the form of cash, building, or a plot of land, made to a Muslim charitable cause); and asked to allow printing and free distribution of newspapers and journals in Kirghiz and Tatar languages within the empire. See ‘Petitsiia ot kirgizskogo i kazakhskogo naseleniia Semirechenskoi oblasti v Komitet ministrov o ego nuzhdakh v voprosakh very, obrazovaniia, zemledeliia i dr.’ 6 iiunia, 1905 in Zhangyl Adbyldabek kyzy (Ed.). Shabdan baatyr: epokha i lichnost. Bishkek, 1999. pp. 109–111. The Decree on Religious Toleration was signed by the tsar already in April of 1905, before the October Manifesto. Hence the date of the petitions as June, 1905. See Elena Campbell. The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance. Bloomington, 2015. p. 145. On the use of the term manap among the northern Kyrgyz see Daniel Prior, ‘High Rank and Power among the Northern Kirghiz: Terms and Their Problems, 1845–1864,’ in Paolo Sartori (Ed.). Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia (19th—Early 20th Century). Brill’s Inner Asian Library 29; Leiden/Boston: Brill. pp. 137–179. 25 Ishenaaly Arabaev, ‘Alghï s¯ uz’ (Foreword) in Moldo Qylych Turekeldin. Qissa-i Zelzeleh. Kazan, 1911.

22

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

he would print Qylych’s other collection of poems on social issues, Zar zaman, and spread it among the people.26 Like other reform-minded Central Asian intellectuals of the period, Arabaev was greatly concerned with the inadequacies of the educational opportunities available to his people, and with how these hindered their development. In his foreword to Zelzeleh, he not only decried the common practice of rote memorization, but also advocated strongly for the modernized madrasa education, in which children learned Russian, as well as science and Arabic language comprehension. Arabaev especially feared for the plight of Kazakh and Kyrgyz children from poor families that could not afford to send them to school. He begged his ‘Kazakh and Kyrgyz brothers and sisters [qaryndas, or siblings]’ to give their children to madrasas so that they would become a ‘shining candle when they go on to the next world.’27 These concerns spurred him to publish two primers for school children. In Ufa in 1911 he published the primer Alifb¯ a y¯ aki tote oqu, which he had co-authored with a Kazakh fellow student of the Ghaliya madrasa, Khafiz Sarsekeev, and then in Orenburg in 1912 published his own Jazu ornekteri.28 Both books were designed for teaching grammar to Kazakh and Kyrgyz children, and were written in a Kazakh-Kyrgyz hybrid language. Tote oqu consists of seventy-four lessons, thirty-five devoted to the alphabet and the rest to simple words pertaining to Kazakh and Kyrgyz life, short stories of a didactic nature (Jalqoo bala menen isker bala, Jaksy bala, Jaman bala, etc.), folktales, and texts explaining the meaning of religious terms. Arabaev built Jazu ornekteri on his Tote oqu by adding readings of greater complexity.29 26 Moldo Qylych’s Zelzeleh is listed in the censorship journals for 1912, among the books that were allowed for publication. Natsional’nyi Arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan (henceforth NA RT), f. 420, op. 1, d. 195, l. 77. It is in the files of the Vremennoi Komitet po delam pechati, which included M. N. Pinegin (Head), A. V. Frolov (inspector of the Russian language publications), N. I. Ashmarin and N. F. Katanov (inspectors of inorodcheskii publications). It is not entirely clear why Zelzeleh was published in preference to Zar zaman, which was a more complex and potentially more significant work. It may have been because the earthquake of 1911, recounted in Zelzeleh, was a recent event of such great local importance and public interest. Or perhaps it was because Zar zaman was highly critical of tsarist policies, and therefore unlikely to pass the watchful eyes of the state censors. 27 Aiqap. 1912. (Date unknown). p. 17. 28 Ishenaaly Arabaev and Khafiz Sarsekeev. Alifb¯ a y¯ aki tote oqu. Ufa, 1911. 29 Scholars of modern Kyrgyz, informed by present-day nationalist perspectives, have

criticized Arabaev’s language for imprecise adherence to Kyrgyz phonetics and grammar

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

23

During his time in Ufa, Arabaev became closely connected with Kazakh intellectuals. Because of the strong cultural, historical, and linguistic connections between the two people, the cultural and literary activities of northern Kyrgyz intellectuals in the early twentieth century were interwoven with those of their Kazakh counterparts. The Kazakhs had been exposed to Russian-native education much earlier than the Kyrgyz, as a result of their earlier incorporation into the Russian empire. From the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian state had begun to accept and train Kazakh children for service as scribes, translators, and guides.30 The members of the first generation of modern Kazakh intellectuals, such as Choqan Valikhanov, Ibrai Altynsarin, and Abai Kunanbaev, were the product of this imperial policy, and they not only learned to speak the language of the empire, but also came to enjoy privileges, titles and a certain degree of status within imperial circles.31 They were ardent advocates of Russian culture and education, and believed that in order for their own Kazakh society to advance, it had to embrace a sedentary lifestyle and secular education. By the early twentieth century, a new generation of politically active Kazakh intellectuals emerged to voice criticism of the state’s treatment of its non-Russian population in the pages of contemporary Kazakh-language periodicals. Among them were Alikhan Bokeikhanov, Akhmet Baitursynov, Mirzhaqyp Dulatov and Mukhametzhan Seralin. In 1911 they began to publish the first Kazakh-language

and for the use of Kazakh and Tatar words. D. Maanaev and A. Osmonkulov. E. Arabaev— Kyrgyz elinin algachky agartuuchu-okumushtuusu jana saiasii-koomduk ishmeri. Bishkek, 2002. pp. 85–86. 30 One such student was Choqan Valikhanov, who graduated from the Cadet Corps in

Omsk (established in 1846). See, Sabol. Genesis of Kazakh National Consciousness. p. 56. In addition to the Omsk Cadet Corps, a Russian-Kazakh school was opened in Orenburg in 1850. By contrast, the first Russian-native school in the territories of the northern Kyrgyz opened in the village of Karakonguz in Toqmoq uezd in 1884. Twenty Dungans and a mere three Kyrgyz students attended it. See Sovetbek Baighaziev. Ala-Toodogu agartuunun tarykhynyn kyskacha ocherkteri, XVII kylymdan 1917-zhylga chein. Bishkek, 2005. p. 24. Russian-native schools were to gain popularity among the Kyrgyz only in the first decade of the twentieth century. 31 Peter Rottier. Creating the Kazakh Nation: The Intelligentsia’s Quest for Acceptance in the Russian Empire, 1905–1920/Ph. D. dissertation; University of Wisconsin, 2005. pp. 48–108.

24

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

journal, Aiqap,32 in Troitsk.33 Mukhametzhan Seralin served as the journal’s editor, and the majority of its contributors were Kazakh intellectuals. Published monthly, it included foreign news, essays pertaining to Islam, literary works, letters to the editor, issues concerning Muslim education, history and language, and book reviews.34 Arabaev, whose interests also spanned history, literature, and education, was a regular reader and contributor of Aiqap. In 1911, he published a short appeal to ‘those Kyrgyz who came and stayed among the Kazakhs,’ to write and let him know when they had settled among the Kazakhs and which clan [uruq] they came from.35 He wrote with an eye toward publishing the shezhire, or genealogy [sanzhyra in Kyrgyz], of the Kyrgyz. He had already collected the shezhire of ‘our own Kyrgyz,’ and now needed material about those who lived among Kazakhs. In 1912 Arabaev published one of his longest essays for Aiqap, entitled Orynburdan Tashkengacha [From Orenburg to Tashkent ]. In this piece, he wrote about his visit with the Kazakh intellectual, political activist, and educator Alikhan Bokeikhanov, while at the same time highlighting his own interest in Kyrgyz and Kazakh history.36 Arabaev was captivated by the depth of Bokeikhanov’s knowledge, and spent many hours discussing topics with him which ranged across religion, mathematics, history, and philosophy.37 The visit was prompted in large part by the urgings of Arabaev’s fellow Kazakh and Kyrgyz students, who wished to find out whether Bokeikhanov was planning to write a Kazakh shezhire. Bokeikhanov expressed his willingness to assist in such a project, but given his busy schedule he suggested the students take up the task of writing

32 Aiqap taken separately as ‘Ai, qap!’ means ‘Oh, if only!’. 33 The journal was published as a separate collection. See U. Subkhanberdina, et al.

(Eds.). Aiqap. Almaty, 1995. 34 Subkhanberdina. Aiqap. pp. 24–44. 35 Aiqap. 1911. No. 12. (Page unknown). 36 Ishenaaly Arabaev. Orynburdan Tashkengacha; Aiqap. 1912. No. 1–2. This essay was published in the first two issues of Aiqap in 1912. My discussion is based on the first part of the essay and the first page of the second part (p. 26). The second issue of Aiqap was missing pages 27 through 30, and I was not able to locate it anywhere. All issues of Aiqap are stored in the Rare Books Collection of the National Library of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Almaty. On Bokeikhanov see Membet Qoigeldiev. Alikhan Bokeikhanov; Ibid. (Ed.). Alikhan Bokeikhanov: Shygharmalar. Almaty, 1994. pp. 5–94. 37 Arabaev. Orynburdan Tashkengacha; Aiqap. 1912. p. 18.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

25

the shezhere themselves. Despite his preparatory work, Arabaev did not ultimately publish a history and genealogy of the Kyrgyz. But in 1913, Osmonaaly Sydykov, another Kyrgyz from the Sarybaghysh tribe who studied at the Ghaliya madrasa at the same time as Arabaev, did publish a small booklet, Mukhstasar-i t¯ arikh-i qïrghïziya [A Brief History of the Kyrgyz], which traced the genealogy of the Kyrgyz tribes. It is very likely that Arabaev contributed to Sydykov’s work by sharing the genealogical information he had collected. In 1913 Arabaev returned to Semirech’e, to Przheval’sk uezd and became a new-method mekteb instructor, and in 1914 had opened a new school in the village of Törtkül at the invitation of a Kyrgyz manap where he taught until the beginning of the revolt in Central Asia in 1916.38 The revolt was sparked by the labor conscription decree issued by Nicholas II on June 25, 1916, according to which the entire male population of Central Asia between the ages of 18 and 43 was to serve in the war in non-combatant roles. Its causes, however, were rooted in economic hardships suffered by the local population as a result of a halfcentury of Russian colonization. The imperial decree appeared in regional newspapers at the beginning of July, and immediately provoked a violent response from the natives of Central Asia, directed at native and Russian imperial officials and at Slavic peasant settlers. Among the northern Kyrgyz, the anger inspired by labor conscription quickly transformed into

38 Tölöbek Abdrakhmanov, et al. (Eds.). Eki door insany Ishenaaly Arabaev. Bishkek, 2013. p. 100. Despite the government’s anxieties, the number of jadid schools with Tatar instructors continued to grow in southern Semirech’e. Government reports indicated a major jump in the number of schools in Przheval’sk and Pishpek uezds between 1900 and 1913, and the tone of the reports changed accordingly. Thus in 1901, the pristav of Przheval’sk reported to the head of Przheval’sk uezd that only one person, Gainutdin Ishmukhamedov, was teaching using the new method, and that he had only two students. The pristav added that the mindset of the local population remained unchanged. Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Respubliki Kazakhstan (henceforth TsGA RK). F. 44. Op. 1. D. 20752. L. 41 ob. Documents from the same year from Pishpek uezd display similar calm attitude: ‘…propoveduiushchikh novoe myshleniie v Pishpekskom uezde ne okazalos ’… mezhdu kirgizami, sartami, dunganami i tatarami nikakikh izmenenii v oborote mysli i obraze zhizni ne zamecheno.’ TsGA RK. F. 44. Op. 1. D. 20752. L. 77 ob. But in 1913, in a letter to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Semirech’e oblast administration [pravlenie] reported that ‘many new-method schools had appeared [poiavilos’ mnogo novometodnykh shkol ],’ and went on to list the changes in the disposition of Semirech’e’s Muslims, and the measures planned to prevent the further spread of ideas of Muslim unity. TsGA RK. F. 44. Op. 1. D. 15893. L. 1; 2 ob., 3 ob.

26

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

rage against the region’s Slavic settlers, resulting in widespread attacks, looting, and killings. The people of Pishpek and Przheval’sk uezds in Semirech’e oblast , native peoples and settlers alike, endured tremendous violence and privation during the revolt. The imperial administration retaliated by killing the insurgents indiscriminately, executing their leaders, and driving the Kyrgyz people off their lands and across the Chinese border. The devastation the Kyrgyz experienced during and after the revolt would continue to be felt for years to come; thousands of Kyrgyz died in the fighting itself, and many more perished while trying to escape the Russian army. Those who made it to the cities of Kashgar, Uch Turfan, and Qulzha [Ghulja] in Chinese Turkestan were extremely impoverished, and had to sell themselves, their children, and their belongings to the locals there in order to survive. Along with many other Kyrgyz, Arabaev also escaped to the Chinese border, to the city of Uch Turfan from where he returned in 1917.39

Recovery Efforts After the Revolt of 1916 The February revolution may have ‘arrived in Turkestan by telegram,’ but the news left the lives of the northern Kyrgyz untouched.40 The Kyrgyz were reeling from disease, poverty, and malnutrition as a result of the 1916 revolt. Nearly 200,000 Kazakhs and Kyrgyz were still displaced, living in remote mountain areas or Chinese territory.41 Although some were beginning to return to their lands, they continued to fear punishment by the empire and death at the hands of angry Slavic settlers. In southern Semirech’e, political activity following both the February and October revolutions was largely the province of workers’ unions. The membership of these unions was predominantly Russian, with Kyrgyz

39 Abdrakhmanov, et al. (Eds.). Eki door insany. p. 101. On the revolt of 1916 see, Chokobaeva A., Drieu C., Morrison A. (Eds.). The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A Collapsing Empire in the Age of War and Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 40 Khalid. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. p. 245. 41 Kappeler. The Russian Empire. p. 352.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

27

participation limited to a small number of intellectuals, former native officials, and some members of the Kyrgyz tribal elite.42 Most Kyrgyz were too busy surviving and rebuilding to pay much attention to imperial politics, and too politically unsophisticated to grasp the full significance of the events that were unfolding. In June 1917, Arabaev’s letter ‘Don’t Forget Your Poor Kyrgyz Relatives’ was published in the newspaper Qazaq.43 In it, he told of two young Kyrgyz men, Maksüt Toltoev and Qasymbay Teltaev, who had arrived from Almaty, gathered together the Kyrgyz of six volosts from Przheval’sk uezd, and explained to them the ‘current situation,’ that is, the recent political changes in Russia.44 He expressed his gratitude toward the men for doing everything they could to help their dying people, as well as his hope that efforts to save the Kyrgyz would continue. The issue also contained personal details on Arabaev: The author of this letter is Ishenaaly Arabaev, a Kyrgyz. He is an exemplary jigit [young man], who, having finished at the Ghaliya madrasa in Ufa, returned to his people and opened a madrasa, hired instructors as knowledgeable as himself, and began to spread the light of knowledge to the ignorant Kyrgyz people. The destructive order of June 25 of last year brought the Kyrgyz into chaos, drove them to the lands of China, and threatened them with starvation. Ishenaaly’s friend, Isqaq Qanatov, who studied with him at the Ghaliya madrasa, was executed by hanging during the time of the brutal government.45 A young man of Alash! Do you hear? He [Arabaev] says that they ask for help with tears in their eyes, while staring death in the face. If you do not have a heart of stone [boor, literally a liver of stone], then hurry up! Have compassion, be generous!46

By 1916, Arabaev was an established and well-known intellectual in Kyrgyz and Kazakh cultural circles. He was connected with the Kazakh intellectual milieu through his studies at Ghaliya, his publishing efforts,

42 Zainidin Kurmanov. Politicheskaia bor’ba v Kyrgyzstane: 20-e gody. Bishkek, 1997. p. 44. 43 Ibid., 141. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find this particular issue of Qazaq. 44 Ibid., 183. Qasymbay Teltaev was a Przheval’sk uezd translator. 45 Isqaq Qanatov was Qanat Abukin’s son, and was mentioned in Sydykov’s work as one of the Kyrgyz who studied at the Ghaliya madrasa. 46 Abdyrakhmanov. Eki door insany. p. 184.

28

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

and his frequent contributions to Kazakh periodicals. He used his connections to rally Kazakhs in support of the Kyrgyz cause.47 Arabaev was involved in the committee assisting Kyrgyz refugees in Przheval’sk uezd. In 1920, Arabaev, along with a group of Kyrgyz activists that included the poet Isak Shaibekov and Isametdin Shabdanov, a son of Shabdan, an influential Kyrgyz manap of the early twentieth century, co-authored a letter addressed ‘personally to comrade V. I. Lenin,’ which expressed their concerns about the plight of the Kyrgyz. The letter began, ‘If anybody asks us whether the Kyrgyz of Semirech’e oblast enjoy the freedom bestowed by the class [soslovnyi] revolution, we would say that we do not enjoy the freedom and in fact do not have it as such.’48 They complained about the lack of schools for Kyrgyz children, about the revolt of 1916, the flight to China, and about peasant resettlement and land shortages. They asked the Soviet government to offer financial aid to the refugees, allowing them to return from China and resettle on their own lands, as well as to guarantee their protection from Russian peasants.49 Lenin received the letter, and Mikhail Kamenskii readdressed it to the People’s Committee on Nationalities [Narkomnats ], asking them to get involved in addressing the situation.50 Ultimately the plea was not in vain, for with the approval of the Politburo and KPT, the Ninth Congress of Soviets in

47 Similar reports of the desperate state of the Kyrgyz in China also appeared on the pages of the Qazaq newspaper. Mirzhaqyp Dulatov, whose book Oian Qazaq! [Wake up, Kazakh!] had been banned by imperial censors in 1911, announced that he was selling 1000 copies that he had hidden away, and donating all the proceeds to benefit Kyrgyz ‘orphans and widows [jetim-jesir].’ Mirzhaqyp Dulatov. Oian, Qazaq! (Bosqyn qyrghyz baurlaryma arnadym); U. Subkhanberdina, et al. (Eds.). ‘Qazaq’ gazeti: Alash azamattarynyng rukhyna baghyshtalady. Almaty, 1998. p. 394. Another piece in Qazaq reported that at Alikhan Bokeikhanov’s request, Mukhametzhan Tynyshpaev had received 200,000 rubles from the Provisional Government to aid the returning Kyrgyz. ‘Bosqyn qyrghyzdarga 200 myng.’; Subkhanberdina. ‘Qazaq’ gazeti. p. 398. Mukhametzhan Tynyshpaev was a Kazakh engineer who toured Semirech’e with A. Kuropatkin, and wrote a report (based on his deposition in court in Vernyi on February 6−24, 1917) on the ‘short history of Russian power [vlast ’] toward the Kirghiz in relation to the events of 1916.’ Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki (henceforth TsGA KR). F. 75. Op. 1. D. 46. Ll. 118−146. See L. V. Lesnaia and T. Ryskulov (Eds.). Vosstanie 1916 goda v Kirgizstane: dokumenty i materialy. Moskva, 1937. pp. 132−149. 48 Svetlana Ploskikh. Repressirovannaia kul’tura Kyrgyzstana, maloizuchennye stranitsy istorii. Bishkek, 2002. p. 179. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

29

Turkestan took away the privileges of the Slavic settlers, and restored all lands seized from Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads before the revolt of 1916.51 For the most part, however, Arabaev’s energies were focused on culture and education. He organized preparatory schools to educate Kyrgyz children using the new method in Przheval’sk uezd. In 1919, he attended the Turkestan teachers’ regional assembly in Tashkent. All the while he continued to contribute opinion pieces to the Kazakh-Kyrgyz language newspapers Ak jol and Sholpan.52 In one article in Ak jol, Arabaev told of his conversations with Kyrgyz students studying at the Kazakh-Kyrgyz institute in Tashkent. He expressed his delight that these students were planning to return to their native villages during the summer break, and combine entertainment with education by staging plays, reading literary works to the people, and helping to explain to them the policies of the Soviet government. Arabaev wrote, ‘My hope was renewed, that the Kyrgyz spirit, which had survived the calamities of 1916–1917, would someday reach parity with the neighboring nations.’53 51 Benjamin Loring. Building Socialism in Kyrgyzstan: Nation-Making, Rural Devel-

opment, and Social Change, 1921–1932/Ph.D. dissertation; Brandeis University, 2008. p. 40. According to 1917 statistics, the population of the Naryn Mountain raion was 94% Kyrgyz, 5% Russian, and 1% ‘indigenous’ [tuzemnoe]; The population of Pishpek raion in 1920 was 64% Kyrgyz, 32% Russian, and 4% ‘indigenous.’ Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (henceforth GARF). F. 6892. Op. 1. D. 32. Ll. 10, 12. By April 1921, Soviet authorities had removed 14 European villages in Przheval’sk uezd, 12 villages in Pishpek uezd, and 1 village and 10 homesteads in Vernyi uezd. These liquidations freed up 18,000 desiatinas (48,345 acres, 197 sq. km.) of land for 1186 Kyrgyz and Kazakh households. By June of the same year, 32 villages and 54 homesteads were liquidated in Pishpek and Przheval’sk uezds, displacing over 14,000 people. The European population of the Naryn district was grouped into a single settlement, Kochkor. See Loring. Building Socialism. p. 47. Kh. Karasaev, who returned with his family to settle in Isyk Kul in a former Slavic settlement, wrote in his memoir: ‘I was astonished when I saw the village of Taldy Suu [in Przheval’sk district] in 1921. Their [Russian] houses were built of karagai, and there had been rose bushes and fruit trees in every yard. When I returned after a few years—the village was unrecognizable. The walls were falling down. People, who never lived in a house all their lives could not get used to living a sedentary life right away. I suppose several years of preparatory work and training would have been needed [for them to get used to it].’ Khusein Karasaev. Khusein naama: bashtan ötköndör. Bishkek, 2001. pp. 185–186. Another group of Kyrgyz, appealed to Turkestan Central Executive Committee (TsIK) on January 27, 1920, requesting aid for the Kyrgyz refugees: ‘V presidium Turtsika ot Semirechenskikh delegatov,’ TsGA KR. F. 75. Op. 1. D. 43. Ll. 14–18. 52 Abdrakhmanov. Eki door insany. p. 113. 53 Abdrakhmanov. Eki door insany. pp. 203–204.

30

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

Arabaev remained politically active following the revolt and revolution, and was one of the most well-established figures among the Kyrgyz cultural elite, with political views and convictions rooted in the pre-1916 era. However, his training and education in Islamic institutions had not prepared him to navigate the party antagonisms that animated the post1917 public sphere. As Arabaev struggled to establish a Pishpek branch of the Alash party under these conditions, he entered into a partnership with a complementary figure, Abdykerim Sydykov, who possessed the political skills Arabaev lacked.54 This was a collaboration which would have important consequences for the future of the Kyrgyz nation.

The Alash Party Experience The rise of the Alash party was closely connected with the Kazakh national movement and its leader, Alikhan Bokeikhanov.55 As Andreas Kappeler notes, the February revolution spurred a number of national movements in different parts of the empire.56 Emboldened by the Provisional Government’s laws on freedom of speech, assembly and the press, the empire’s non-Russian elites began to draw up plans for the development of their respective nations. In mid-1917, Kazakh elites organized a series of regional congresses in Orenburg, Vernyi, Ural’sk, and Omsk.57 The issues discussed at these congresses pertained to all aspects of Kyrgyz and Kazakh life, including education, religion, local governance, as well as the conditions in Semirech’e, which was recognized as the region worst affected by the 1916 revolt. One burning question on the political agenda

54 On Abdykerim Sydykov see Zainidin Kurmanov. Abdykerim Sydykov: lichnost’ i istoriia. Bishkek, 2002. 55 For a detailed history of Alash Orda see Dina Amanzholova. Na izlome: Alash v etnopoliticheskoi istorii Kazakhstana. Almaty, 2009; Ibid. Kazakhskii avtonomism i Rossiia. Moscow, 1994; T.K Zhurtbai, Dvizhenie Alash: sbornik materialov sudebnykh protsessov nad alashevtsami. Almaty, 2011; G. Enes, et al. (Eds.). Alash. Alashorda: Entsiklopediia. Almaty, 2009. Articles in Qazaq reflect the political and social views of the party’s members. See Subkhanberdina. ‘Qazaq’ gazeti. 56 Kappeler. The Russian Empire. p. 355. 57 Amanzholova. Kazakhskii avtonomism. p. 25. The number of attendees in each city

speaks to the regional situation at the time. The congress in Orenburg was attended by 300 delegates, that in Ural’sk by 800, and the event in Omsk by 150. By contrast, the Semirech’e congress in Vernyi was attended by only 81 delegates, a number that was depressed by the lingering effects of the 1916 crisis.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

31

of the Kazakh elite was the distribution of land. The delegates sought to curb the resettlement administration’s practice of allocating lands once belonging to Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads to Russian peasants.58 This issue was especially important to the delegates from southern Semirech’e, where settler land appropriations made at the expense of the Kyrgyz nomads had already resulted in the impoverishment of the Kyrgyz and a rise in inter-ethnic clashes before 1914. In December 1917, Alash organized one of several all-Kazakh congresses in Orenburg, where it declared the establishment of a quasistate called the Alash Orda Autonomy.59 Arabaev received a ‘special invitation’ to the conference, along with members from other regional branches of the Alash Party.60 He supported the creation of the Alash Orda Autonomy, but voted with the leading Kazakh intellectuals, including A. Baitursynov, A. Bokeikhanov, M. Dulatov, and M. Zhumabaev, to defer announcing it. This group wanted the announcement to be made by the official people’s council, after the autonomy’s militia units had mobilized, and negotiations with the Kazakhs of Turkestan and other regions had been completed.61 They took this cautious approach because they feared that declaring Alash Autonomy before the Kazakh military was formed would provoke Slavic settlers and reignite inter-ethnic conflict.62 The post-February period witnessed the proliferation of various Muslim parties, driven by different goals, in Tashkent, Kokand, Andijan, and Samarkand. The main struggle in Turkestan was between radical

58 The programs of these congresses can be found in N. Martynenko (Ed.). Alash orda,

sbornik dokumentov. Alma-Ata, 1992. 59 ‘Protokol zasedaniia obshchekirgizskogo s’ezda v Orenburge, 5–13 dekabria 1917 goda,’ in Martynenko. Alash Orda. p. 69. The creation of Alash Orda followed the Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd in November. The leaders of the Alash party resolved to create a territorial-national autonomy which would curb ‘the anarchy that was spreading in Kazakh and Kirghiz territories, and threatening the lives and property of the KazakhKirghiz population.’ The autonomy was to include the territory of the Bukei Horde; Ural, Turgai, Aqmola, Semipalatinsk, Semirech’e, and Syr-Dar’ia oblasts; and the Kirghiz (Kazakh) uezds of Ferghana, Samarkand and Transcaucasus oblasts and Amu-Dar’ia okrug. 60 Ibid. p. 64. 61 Members from Ural and Syr-Dar’ia oblasts and the Bukei Horde resisted the idea of

delay and threatened to join the Turkestan autonomy instead. This was unacceptable to the leaders of Alash party, and as a compromise they resolved to make the announcement within one month. Martynenko. Alash Orda. p. 70. 62 Amanzholova. Na izlome. p. 190.

32

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

Muslim clerics from the ‘ulema,’ and reform-minded Muslim intellectuals.63 In Tashkent, the clerical Ulema Jamiyati party won the majority of votes in elections to the city Duma.64 A week before the establishment of the Alash Orda Autonomy, another group of Central Asian Muslims from Syr-Dar’ia, Samarkand and Ferghana oblasts and the Emirate of Bukhara met in Kokand under the leadership of Alash party members Mustafa Choqaev and Mukhametzhan Tynyshpaev. After much deliberation about what Choqaev called the ‘absence of government in Russia today,’ the congress declared the establishment of a provisional government of Turkestan.65 M. Choqaev, M. Tynyshpaev, Sh. Lapin, and U. Khojaev were elected to lead what later became known as the Kokand Autonomy. These declarations of autonomy resulted from the power vacuum and chaos created in the region by the Bolshevik takeover. This situation would not last long, however. By January 1918, the Bolsheviks had strengthened their position, and in February the Kokand Autonomy was crushed by the Tashkent Soviet.66 As for the Alash Orda Autonomy, after considering various options, the leaders of Alash joined the Bolsheviks at the end of 1919,67 lured by the promise that Kazakh autonomy would be allowed to develop within the Russian federal state.68 Whatever its longer term possibilities, the union with the Bolsheviks meant the abandonment of the Alash Orda government. The emergence of various national movements in Central Asia at this time raises the question of the absence of a Kyrgyz national movement among them. Why did the Kyrgyz intellectual elites not create their own parties, and fight for autonomy during this period of relative freedom and experimentation that followed the demise of the Russian empire? Part of the answer lies in the difficult economic and social conditions the Kyrgyz then faced. At meetings of their various parties in Turkestan and the Steppe region, Muslim leaders consistently touched upon the

63 Ibid. pp. 245–274. 64 Ibid. p. 260. 65 Ibid. p. 275. 66 Ibid. p. 279. 67 The western branch of Alash Orda, under Baitursynov, joined the Bolsheviks earlier, in December 1918. 68 On the negotiations between Sovnarkom and the leaders of Alash Orda, see Amanzholova. Na izlome. p. 192.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

33

hardships suffered by the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in Semirech’e, the dangers posed to them by the Slavic population, and the need to supply them with food. The question of Semirech’e was on the agenda of every all-Kirghiz congress, and the Kazakh leadership did their best to raise public awareness of the tragedy. Meanwhile the Muslims of Turkestan took to the streets on August 18, 1917 to call for action by the Provisional Government against the bloodshed in Semirech’e.69 They demanded that the weapons Aleksey Kuropatkin, who was appointed Governor-General of Turkestan in July 1916, had distributed to Slavic settlers be collected, and the refugees returning from China be allowed to resettle on their own lands.70 These facts illustrate how critical the situation in southern Semirech’e was during this period, and help to explain why northern Kyrgyz participation in regional politics was limited to the handful of intellectuals able to attend the Kazakh congresses. Describing the revolt and its aftermath in Pishpek and Przheval’sk uezds, Marco Buttino writes, ‘[D]eprived of help and driven out of their territories, the Kyrgyz tribes, it seemed, were destined to turn into a half-starving, scattered people.’ 71 For the moment, at least, the northern Kyrgyz had been silenced by the devastating consequences of the revolt. These conditions were exacerbated by the dispersal of the Kyrgyz people. While Kazakh and Turkestani Muslim national elites were mobilizing to organize political parties in the spring of 1917, the northern Kyrgyz were still divided between Chinese and Russian territory. Their eventual reunification was a slow process. In early 1918, Chinese authorities began to press the refugees to return to their former territories, arguing that their continued presence in China posed a threat to the area’s economic and social stability. As a result, large numbers of Kyrgyz and Kazakhs began migrating back to their own lands. The newly established Bolshevik administration in Vernyi was unprepared to deal with this huge wave of migrants, and the winter and spring of 1918 proved disastrous for the nomads, who endured famine as well as the threat of typhus.72 Meanwhile the return migration went on, eventually stretching out over the

69 Marko Buttino. Revoliutsiia naoborot: Sredniaia Aziia mezhdu padeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem SSSR. Moscow, 2007. p. 173. 70 Khalid. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. p. 272. 71 Buttino. Revoliutsiia naoborot. p. 81. 72 Ibid. pp. 236–238.

34

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

course of several years. Khusein Karasaev, a prominent Kyrgyz linguist, recalled in his memoir that his family and several other tribes did not return to their homeland near Przheval’sk until 1921.73 Under these circumstances, Pishpek and Przheval’sk uezds of southern Semirech’e oblast , the core territories of the northern Kyrgyz, could not resist being drawn into the whirlwind of Kazakh politics. Among those who attended the all-Kazakh congresses after having remained in Russia during the revolt were Abdykerim Sydykov, and Imanaly Zhainakov, both translators for the imperial administration, and Dür Sooronbaev, a volost administrator who had also spurned the revolt. Arabaev, meanwhile, lingered in China until mid-1917 and then returned to Vernyi at the head of a group of refugees. He came to Orenburg for the congress and, in his own words, ‘addressed the congress asking for help for the starving, half-naked refugees.’74 Even had they not been scattered and destitute, the Kyrgyz still would have felt the absence of their own politicized national leadership, national movement, and press. Without these basic building blocks for political activism, Kyrgyz intellectual elites had little choice but to participate in the Kazakh national movement, which was considerably larger and more powerful. The cultural and linguistic affinities between the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, their long-standing social and economic ties, and their intellectual partnership during the late imperial period, disposed Kyrgyz intellectual elites to imagine the development of their nation as bound up with that of the Kazakhs. Kyrgyz nationalism, in this sense, developed alongside the Kazakh nationalist movement, and Kyrgyz leaders expected their mutual relationship to endure. In the mid-1920s, however, this assumption would be discarded. Although the role of Kyrgyz national elites in the creation of the Alash party and the Alash Orda Autonomy was marginal, the experience they gained by participating in the all-Kazakh congresses and assisting in the creation of the Alash Orda Autonomy would prove invaluable. In its program, the Alash party stressed the need to publish books in Kazakh and educate children in their own language; it endorsed the separation of church and state; it tackled the practical challenges of effective

73 Karasaev. Khusein naama. pp. 175–185. 74 Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Politicheskoi Dokumentatsii Kyrgyzskoi Respub-

liki (henceforth TsGA PD KR). F. 10. Op. 15. D. 188. Ll. 8–9.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

35

administration and finance; and it experimented with the formation of self-governing units. In its brief existence, the Alash Orda Autonomy provided a unique training opportunity for Ishenaaly Arabaev and the rest of the Kyrgyz intellectuals, and they would put all the experience they gained there to good use when they contemplated the creation of the Kyrgyz Mountain Oblast in 1922.

From Alash Orda to the Kyrgyz Mountain Oblast With the dissolution of the Alash Orda Autonomy and the establishment of the Kirghiz [Kazakh] ASSR in 1920, the focus of Kazakh intellectual activity shifted to Orenburg, while Vernyi and Tashkent served as cultural and political centers for the Kazakh and Kyrgyz intellectuals of Semirech’e, which remained a part of the Turkestan ASSR. When the Kirghiz ASSR was created, much of the Kazakh population remained within the Turkestan ASSR, but it was decided that they would be transferred gradually to the Kirghiz ASSR, based on their own expressed desire to switch.75 By 1922, the delimitation of the Turkestan and Kirghiz ASSRs was a burning issue for the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities [Narkomnats ], prompting it to reach out to TsK KPT and the Kirghiz regional committee of RKP(b) for input. The Kirghiz ASSR requested authority over Semirech’e and Syr-Dar’ia oblasts of Turkestan ASSR, and their population made up largely of nomadic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz. Kyrgyz intellectuals were divided over this issue; some of them, including Sydykov and Arabaev, were against the realignment, seeing it as the end of Kyrgyz autonomy; whereas others, headed by Rakhmankul Khudaikulov, saw no objection to combining the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs in the Kirghiz ASSR.76 It was in response to this disagreement that the idea arose to create the Mountain Kyrgyz Oblast within the RSFSR. The effort was championed by a group of Kyrgyz political and cultural leaders, led by Sydykov, who was now a chair of the Semirech’e regional executive

75 Kurmanov. Abdykerim Sydykov. p. 58. 76 Rakhmankul Khudaikulov (1885–1930(?)) was born into a family of a mullah in the

Sarybaghysh tribe. Khudaikulov participated actively in the revolt of 1916, and joined the Bolshevik party in 1918. From 1921 to 1924, Khudaikulov was head of the Semirech’e Oblast Koshchu Union. In 1925 and 1926, he chaired the Koshchu Union of KKAO, and served as a member of the KKAO Executive Committee. Subsequently he worked for various agricultural departments. See Kurmanov. Natsional’naia intelligentsia. p. 359.

36

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

committee [oblispolkom], and Arabaev, who headed one of the departments in the Semirech’e oblispolkom.77 As in 1917, the pair were once again combining their talents and energies in a political cause—this time to promote territorial autonomy for the Kyrgyz. In March 1922, Sydykov presented the idea of the Kyrgyz Mountain Oblast to the Turkestan Executive Committee. According to his plan, this future oblast for the Kyrgyz was to consist of Pishpek, Przheval’sk, and Naryn uezds, along with the mountainous districts of Aulie Ata uezd (the Talas region in present-day Kyrgyzstan).78 The question of integrating the mountainous areas of the Ferghana valley inhabited by the Kyrgyz tribes was postponed until the basmachi rebellion was put off in the region.79 The capital of the future oblast would be Kochkor, which had been settled by the Russians driven out of Naryn uezd in 1920 and 1921.80 At the end of March, the TsK KPT and the Executive Committee of Turkestan approved Sydykov’s plan, and preparations began to organize a congress of the Kara Kyrgyz.81 The congress convened on June 4, 1922 under the working title ‘The First Historical Preparatory Congress of the Working Masses of the Kara Kirghiz People on the Creation of the Mountain Oblast within Turkestan Republic with Attendance of the Representatives from National Minorities of this Territory.’ More than four-hundred people attended, including Russian, Jewish, Kazakh, Dungan, Ukrainian, Tatar, and Uighur representatives of the region’s ‘national minorities.’82

77 ‘Sozyv s’ezda po obrazovaniiu gornoi kara-kirgizskoi obasti v Turkestanskoi respublike v 1922 g.’ in Dzh. Dzhunushaliev et al. (Eds.). Iusup Abdrakhmanov: izbrannye trudy. Bishkek, 2001. p. 263. 78 Kurmanov. Politicheskaia bor’ba. p. 126; Dzhunushaliev. Iusup Abdrakhmanov. pp. 263–277. 79 Dzhunushaliev. Iusup Abdrakhmanov. p. 263. The basmachi movement, directed against the establishment of the Soviet rule in the Ferghana valley, ravaged the region until the mid-1920s. On the basmachi activities in the Ferghana valley see Loring. Building Socialism. 80 See footnote 50. 81 Here, Kara Kyrgyz implies modern day Kyrgyz. 82 Kurmanov. Politicheskaia bor’ba. pp.134, 140.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

37

The majority of delegates voted in favor of creating the Kyrgyz Mountain Oblast, and the congress passed thirteen resolutions supporting the formation of the Kyrgyz autonomous oblast within the Turkestan ASSR.83 Hopes for Kyrgyz autonomy were short-lived, however. On June 13, 1922, the Turkestan Bureau (later renamed Sredazbiuro, or Central Asian Bureau) in Tashkent received a telegram from Joseph Stalin, then General Secretary and People’s Commissar on Nationalities, which expressed the central government’s bewilderment about the congress in Pishpek on Kara Kyrgyz autonomy. He asked that TsK RKP(b) be informed immediately as to who authorized the congress, who the organizers were, and the nature of the congress.84 The telegram put an end to the creation of the Kyrgyz Mountain Oblast; political leaders in Tashkent and Vernyi were reprimanded, and Sydykov was transferred to the Commissariat of Agriculture [Narkomzem] in Tashkent.85 The first attempt to establish Kyrgyz autonomy proved unsuccessful, with several factors playing into its failure. First, the Kyrgyz political elites were not united in their demand for autonomy; instead they were caught up in personal disputes and divided in their vision for the future development of the Kyrgyz as a nation. Second, they did not persuasively justify the need for the Kyrgyz autonomy. In the end, their evidence for Kazakh and Kyrgyz difference was insufficient to convince the center. But third and most important, in the early 1920s the Soviet leadership itself was not yet ready to create ethnically homogenous territorial entities in Turkestan. Although discussions of national delimitation in Central Asia had begun in the Central Committee in 1920, no specific plan had yet been developed.86 In addition to Turkestan, the center had to deal with administrative and economic problems in the People’s Republics of Khorezm and Bukhara, 83 RGASPI. F. 17. Op. 33. D. 141. Ll. 11–12. For a detailed description of how the events unfolded at the congress see Kurmanov. Politicheskaka bor’ba. pp. 132–137. 84 Kurmanov. Politicheskaka bor’ba. p. 138. 85 Ibid. p. 141. 86 By 1920, in order to deal with growing ‘pan-Turkic’ sentiments among the Central Asian elite, Soviet leadership in Moscow had decided to divide Turkestan into three major republics. Pan-Turkism, the idea of uniting all the Turkic people of Central Asia, regardless of their ethnic background, came from Turar Ryskulov, a Kazakh intellectual and political activist who later served as the chair of the Sovnarkom in the Turkestan ASSR. See Sergei Abashin. Istoriia zarozhdeniia i sovremennoe sostoianie sredneaziatskikh natsionalizmov; S. V. Cheshko (Ed.). Natsionalizmy v Srednei Azii, v poiskakh idenitichnosti. SanktPeterburg, 2007. pp. 177–206.

38

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

while trying to develop a more or less viable plan for the administrativeterritorial division of Central Asia as a whole.87 Seen in this light, it is clear that the initiative of the Kyrgyz elite had been premature. Not until two more years had passed would conditions become more favorable.

‘The Kara Kyrgyz Must Develop Separately’: The Meeting on National Delimitation The project of the TsK RKP(b) for national delimitation in Central Asia was finalized on June 12, 1924, eventually leading to the creation of the five Central Asian national republics. That day marked the beginning of a long process of drawing up borders, dividing the population of Central Asia, and creating and managing its national elite.88 The state relied on the ‘academic cultural technologies of rule’ collected by imperial and Soviet ethnographers, as well as local elites.89 A centerpiece of the project was the policy of indigenization [korenizatsiia], which for a time, at least, gave preference to the development of indigenous languages and leaders.90 But most importantly, the Soviet nationalities policy, worked out by Lenin and Stalin in the late imperial period, guided the Soviet nation-building.91 The policy was approved at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923 and at a Central Committee conference

87 For a discussion of the political situation in Bukhara and Khorezm, and the challenges their administration posed, see Shoshana Keller. To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941. Westport, 2001. pp. 69–80. 88 In the Kyrgyz case, the Kara Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast was established in 1924. In 1925, it was renamed the Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast; in 1926, it became the Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and finally, in 1936 it was titled the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, existing under that name until 1991. 89 Francine Hirsch. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, 2005. In the 1920s, Soviet ethnographers were responsible for delineating Central Asian identities and studying ‘tribal and clan divisions’ [plemennoe i rodovoe delenie] of the population of Central Asia. The Soviet state encouraged and rewarded the works of ‘orientalists’—the commission on delimitation listed a monetary reward [gonorar] of 300 rubles per work on each nationality [narodnost ’]. These nationalities included Uzbek, Tajik, Kirgiz, Kara Kirgiz, Turkmen, and Karakalpak, with ‘other’ as the seventh nationality. GARF. F. 6892. Op. 1. D. 32. Ll. 58–61. 90 Terry Martin. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, 2001. 91 Ibid. p. 3.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

39

on nationalities policy in June 1923.92 Four national forms were to be supported according to the Soviet nationalities policy—national territories, national languages, national elites, and national cultures—as long as they did not interfere with a central state.93 Struggles among the national elites of these newly created states over material resources, land and cultural institutions would continue for years. Earlier studies had suggested that Moscow was the major political actor behind the process of national delimitation of Central Asia. Recent research, however, has offered a more balanced picture, by including the voices of local political and cultural elites during the process. These studies have argued convincingly that the opinions of local elites did matter and were taken into consideration during the debates on delimitation.94 The example of the Kyrgyz elite here supports the existing view. In early 1924, the Central Committee of the RKP(b) raised the question of the delimitation of Central Asia in earnest. Several factors encouraged the Central Committee to pursue delimitation, but one of the major concerns in Moscow was the existence of ongoing conflicts between the various ethnic groups of the Turkestan ASSR, the Bukharan People’s Republic, and the People’s Republic of Khorezm, over the distribution of resources. The Central Asian Bureau, a major governing body of the Central Committee of the RKP(b) in Turkestan, was put in charge of overseeing the delimitation.95 In March 1924, members of the TsK KPT and TsKK, members of Sredazbiuro of TsK RKP(b), 92 Ibid. p. 9. 93 Ibid. p. 10. 94 Among these, Adrienne Edgar’s study offers a detailed account of the ‘making’ of the Turkmen nation, and along with the role of the state during the process, she does an excellent job in stressing the role of native Turkmen intellectuals in negotiating with the state what it meant to be Turkmen (the meaning of Turkmen-ness). Her argument follows in the footsteps of other recent scholarship on nation formation and national delimitation in the Soviet Union. However she excels by bringing actual native voices into the narrative, and by providing extensive information on native political figures active before and during the process of delimitation. See Adrienne Lynn Edgar. Tribal Nation: The Making of the Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton, 2005. Arne Haugen argues that national delimitation of Central Asia was not driven by any ideological goal, but by the center’s attempt to efficiently implement its project of modernization. Arne Haugen. The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia. Basingstoke, 2003. 95 On the Central Asian Bureau, see Shoshana Keller. The Central Asian Bureau, an Essential Tool in Governing Turkestan; Central Asian Survey. 2003. Vol. 22 (2/3). pp. 281–297.

40

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

and members of the Turkestan’s central executive committee met in Tashkent. There was only one item on the agenda—the national delimitation of Turkestan.96 Ishenaaly Arabaev was joined at the meeting by Zhusup Abdrakhmanov97 as members representing the ‘Kara Kirghiz.’ The discussion began by evaluating the pros and cons of national delimitation in Central Asia. A. Rakhimbaev, a member of Sredazbiuro, stressed the necessity of dividing Central Asia along national lines. If one did not take steps to create homogenous national republics, he stated, the result would be constant ‘national debates’ over the distribution of resources.98 The creation of national republics, by contrast, would further the cause of socialism, Rakhimbaev maintained. ‘[I]f the Uzbek poor fights with the Uzbek kulak, the Turkmen poor with the Turkmen, and the Kirghiz with the Kirghiz, then our class struggle won’t be overshadowed by national moments.’99 One immediate obstacle for delimitation was posed by ‘the Kirghiz (Kazakh) part of Turkestan,’ or Syr-Dar’ia and Semirech’e oblasts , which were populated largely by Kazakhs and Kyrgyz. To Rakhimbaev, uniting these oblasts with the Kirghiz [Kazakh] ASSR was not an option, for this would increase the territory of the Kirghiz ASSR, and tip the regional balance in favor of the Kazakhs. Therefore, he suggested they be united into a single republic, which would remain under the authority of Turkestan.100 Rakhimbaev’s plan would therefore provide national territories only for the Kazakhs, Turkmen, and Uzbeks. This proposal

96 Protokol no. 1, soveshchaniia chlenov i kandidatov v TsK KPT, TsKK, chlenov Sredazbiuro TsK RKP (b), chlenov Prezidiuma Turtsika i otvetrabotnikov g. Tashkenta. RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. L. 7. 97 Zhusup (Iusup) Abdrakhmanov (1901–1938) was born in a village near Przheval’sk. From 1910 to 1916 he studied in the Russian-native school in Sazanovka. In 1916 he lost his parents and fled to China. He served in the Red Army between 1918 and 1919, and from 1920 to 1924 he was involved in various district-level party committees. He became executive secretary of the Turkestan TsIK in 1924, while working in different capacities in the oblast and state committees. Abdrakhmanov was executed in 1938 for participating in the Alash Orda organization. On Abdrakhmanov see Dzh. Dzhunushaliev and I. E. Semenov. Vernyi syn naroda; Iusup Abdrakhmanov. Izbrannye Trudy Bishkek, 2001. pp. 74–76; Ibid. 1916. Dnevniki. Pis’ma Stalinu. Frunze, 1991. 98 RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. L. 10. 99 RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. L. 12. 100 RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. L. 13.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

41

was countered by S. Khodzhanov, then a People’s Commissar of Agriculture in the Turkestan ASSR, supported by other Kazakh activists from the Turkestan executive committee.101 Khodzhanov was convinced that economic, rather than national, problems were at the root of the conflicts in the Turkestan ASSR, and suggested that the state focus on improving the economic conditions for any given nationality, rather than heeding the ‘national longings [vozhdeleniia]’ of their elites.102 Although Khodzhanov did not present a concrete plan for delimitation, his assessment reflected the views of many Kazakh and Kyrgyz leaders, who feared Uzbek cultural and economic domination within the Turkestan ASSR. Arabaev acted as the major spokesperson for Kyrgyz interests at the meeting in March, 1924. Although there was no ‘Kara Kirghiz’ autonomy at that time, Arabaev started out by expressing his dissatisfaction that Rakhimbaev failed to mention ‘Kara Kirgiziia’ in his speech on delimitation. He then continued to say: When creating the government and the TurTsIK, the interests of Kara Kirgiziia are also being neglected. The Kara Kirghiz differ from the Kazakh Kirghiz in their language and other characteristics. Therefore, the Kara Kyrgyz question has to be reviewed independent of the Kirghiz [Kazakh] question, and independent of whether Semirech’e oblast will be merged with the Kirghiz [Kazakh] ASSR or not. As for the Kara Kirghiz, they must stay within Turkestan. …[T]he language of the Kara Kirghiz is different from the Kirghiz [Kazakh] language, therefore, for us, the Kirghiz [Kazakh] textbooks are not textbooks with which one can teach children. The Kara Kirghiz must develop separately. The Ferghana Kyrgyz have economic commonalities with the Kyrgyz of Semirech’e, they also have some relations. Therefore, it is necessary to separate the Kara Kirghiz.103

In this statement, Arabaev made two key points. First, just as the supporters of the Kyrgyz Mountain Oblast had done in 1922, Arabaev and the Kyrgyz delegation highlighted their differences from the Kazakhs 101 According to Haugen, the Kazakh communist leadership of Turkestan was against

merging with the Kirghiz ASSR for fear of being marginalized. They felt a strong affinity with Turkestan, which would be jeopardized if they were to become part of the Kirghiz ASSR with its center in Orenburg. Haugen. The Establishment of National Republics. p. 117. 102 RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. L. 26. 103 RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. Ll. 40–41.

42

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

and their own national distinctiveness. This statement might have sounded strange coming from Arabaev, who as recently as 1911 had joined with a Kazakh peer at the Ghaliya madrasa to write a primer for Kyrgyz and Kazakh children.104 Back then, his text had been widely used to teach Kyrgyz children the basics of reading and writing.105 But now, little more than a decade later, Arabaev clearly saw his own people and their relationship to the Kazakhs in a very different light. Second, although Kyrgyz intellectuals like Arabaev perceived a significant distinction between the Kyrgyz and the Kazakhs, they also well understood that in the political climate of 1924, that alone would not be sufficient to justify Kyrgyz autonomy. This awareness prompted Arabaev’s second line of argument, which was to emphasize the importance of the Kyrgyz in the Ferghana valley, and their cultural, economic, and historic ties to the Kyrgyz of Semirech’e.106 As someone in a leadership position, who travelled extensively within the region, Arabaev saw the Kyrgyz in Fergana as being ‘oppressed’ by the Uzbek majority. He recognized that this was the time to use the language of ‘oppression and backwardness’ and to attempt to bring the Fergana Kyrgyz into the fold. During the course of the meeting, both Arabaev, as well as Abdrakhmanov, brought up the problem of the lack of newspapers and 104 Arabaev’s cultural flexibility was noted by S. Khodzhanov, the Chair of the Central Executive Committee of the Turkestan ASSR, at the meeting on national delimitation, who said the following about Arabaev: ‘During this school year, comrade Arabaev is chair of the Kirghiz [Kazakh] Scholarly Commission, and we consider him a representative of both the Kara Kirghiz and the Kirghiz [Kazakhs]. The Kirghiz [Kazakh] portion of the workers agree to him being the chair, and one cannot say that anybody is preventing him from doing his job. On the contrary, the Kirghiz [Kazakhs] would never renounce such a worker as comrade Arabaev. In the sphere of enlightenment he can represent both, the Kirghiz [Kazakhs] and the Kara Kirghiz.’ RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. L. 110. 105 Karasaev. Khusein Naama. p. 75. 106 From 1917 to 1924, the Ferghana valley was within the Turkestan ASSR. Admin-

istratively, it was divided between Ferghana and Samarkand oblasts. It consisted of Khodzhent, Namangan, Andijan, Ferghana, Kokand, and Osh uezds. The Ferghana valley was, and still is, one of the most complex regions in Central Asia in terms of ethno-linguistic and social composition. On the ethnic composition of the Ferghana valley see Sergey Abashin. Naselenie Ferganskoi doliny (k stanovleniiu etnograficheskoi nomenklatury v kontse XIX-nachale XX veka); S. N. Abashin and V. I. Bushkov (Eds.). Ferganskaia dolina: etnichnost’, etnicheskie protsessy, etnicheskie konflikty. Moskva, 2004. On the territorial delimitation of the Ferghana valley, see Arslan Koichiev. Natsional’no-territorial’noe razmezhevanie v Ferganskoi doline (1924–1927). Bishkek, 2001.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

43

brochures in Kyrgyz, and the subsequent missed opportunities to spread ‘Soviet ideas and the ideas of the party in Kara Kirghiz villages.’107 They were worried that the lack of newspapers and brochures in Kyrgyz would impede the distribution of the Soviet ideas among the Kara Kyrgyz masses. Their demands were perfectly in line with Stalin’s mission of the Soviet power in the ‘east,’ which was ‘to raise the cultural level of [its] backward peoples, to build a broad system of schools and educational institutions, and to conduct …Soviet agitation, oral and printed, in the language that is native to and understood by the surrounding laboring population.’108 By giving Kyrgyz territorial autonomy, Bolsheviks realized that their power would be strengthened among the Kyrgyz.109 By 1924, Kyrgyz had most of the components to be called a nation according to Stalin’s definition. They were a ‘historically constituted community of people’ who came to be formed from various tribes; they inhabited a certain territory for a lengthy period of time; they had an ‘internal economic bond’ due to their integration into the Russian empire in the second half of the nineteenth century; finally, they differed from other people in ‘spiritual complexion, which manifests itself in peculiarities of national culture.’110 Whereas, the first three components came after the Russian imperial conquest and consolidation of the northern Kyrgyz tribes over the last fifty years as a result of the Russian administration of the region. That the main peculiarity of the national culture and character of the Kyrgyz was ‘love of poetry and their ability to eloquently express their thoughts,’111 which resulted in highly developed and rich

107 RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. Ll. 102–103. 108 Quoted in Adeeb Khalid. Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet

Central Asia in Comparative Perspective; Slavic Review. 2006. Vol. 65/2. p. 238. 109 On the example of the Khakass, Francine Hirsch illustrates similar goals pursued by the Soviet state officials. See Francine Hirsch. Toward an Empire of Nations: BorderMaking and the Formation of Soviet National Identities; Russian Review. 2000. Vol. 59/2. p. 213. 110 Joseph Stalin. Marxism and the National Question: Selected Writings and Speeches. New York, 1942. pp. 9–12. All of these points were clearly articulated by Sydykov in his earlier cited article ‘A Short Sketch on the History of the Kara Kyrgyz People.’ See Abdykerim Sydykov. Kratkii ocherk istorii razvitiia kirgizskogo naroda; Krasnoe Utro, June 1, 1922. I was not able to get hold of the original publication. The text I used was reprinted in Zainidin Kurmanov, et al. Abdykerim Sydykov—natsional’nyi lider. Bishkek, 1992. 111 Sydykov. Kratkii ocherk. p. 79.

44

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

oral poetry, was an irrefutable fact. This last component was mostly the work of Kyrgyz aqyns and intellectuals of the late imperial period. The existence of a particular Kyrgyz literary culture left no doubt in the minds of those who attended the meeting on national delimitation. And yet, there was one major component which left Kyrgyz short of being qualified as a nation, and it was a language. Kyrgyz did not have their own press prior to 1924, they had very few published literary works, and Kyrgyz intellectuals often contributed to the development of the Kazakh literary language and published on the pages of the Kazakh newspapers. Very few publications in ‘Kyrgyz’ in Arabic script made it hard to discern any signs of ‘pure’ Kyrgyz language. As a result, Arabaev’s efforts at the meeting were directed to proving the existence of the particular ‘Kara Kyrgyz’ language. He made a conscious choice to ‘become and speak the language’ of the Kara Kirghiz and to make a case for unintelligibility of the Kazakh for the common Kyrgyz folk. Thus, the discussions of the Kyrgyz delegation revolved around the questions of ‘distortion,’ or Kazakhification, of the Kyrgyz language. Arabaev went as far as to say that even if a Kara Kirghiz was to read the newspaper published in Kirghiz, he would not be able to understand anything.112 This stance was baldly hypocritical, but the tactic would ultimately pay off, when Sredazbiuro resolved the delimitation debate in favor of the Kara Kyrgyz.113

Conclusion Such was the discourse of the day—in order to promote the national autonomy of their respective nations, the Central Asian elites had to quickly learn, on the spot, the political jargon and the rhetoric crucial in the debates with their peers, as well as the ways to craft political strategies. The language of the Kyrgyz cultural elite of the 1920s drastically differed from their language of the imperial period, and naturally, their definition of Kyrgyzness shifted as well. Being Kyrgyz at home, in southern

112 RGASPI f. 62, op. 2, d. 101, ll. 96–97. 113 In addition to the lack of educational facilities and supplies, both Arabaev, as well as

Abdrakhmanov, brought up the problem of the lack of print materials in Kyrgyz, which could become carriers of ‘the soviet ideas and the ideas of the party in Kara Kirghiz villages.’ They were worried that the lack of newspapers and brochures in Kyrgyz would impede the distribution of soviet ideas among the Kara Kirghiz masses. RGASPI f. 62, op. 2, d. 101, ll. 102–103.

2

‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ …

45

Semirech’e, was different from being Kyrgyz in Tashkent, in the cultural and political institutions of the 1920s, in the atmosphere of seemingly clear-cut national identities. Here, Kyrgyzness defined by lifestyle, traditions, customs, and rich oral literature was not enough to secure the Kyrgyz their territorial autonomy. Arabaev and other Kyrgyz cultural and political activists of the early twentieth century were fully aware of this fact. Their lives and intellectual pursuits were shaped by the historical conditions in Central Asia at the end of the nineteenth century. In Arabaev’s case, socioeconomic changes introduced into the region by Russian imperial expansion made it possible for him to study in the centers of Islamic learning in the Russian empire. His interactions with the empire’s Muslim intellectuals, and his exposure to the ideas of Muslim cultural reform through madrasa study and the print media, made him aware of the plight of his ‘own’ people, the Kyrgyz, and allowed him to conceive of his community as extending beyond his Sarybaghysh tribe. Arabaev was born into and raised in a culture with a strong oral tradition. He was familiar with the poetic repertoire of the aqyns and jomoqchus ; he valued their art highly and it had a tremendous influence on how he came to imagine being Kyrgyz. But there were many ways to imagine the nation in the ethnically, confessionally, linguistically, and culturally diverse landscape of early twentieth-century Central Asia.114 Throughout his career, Arabaev had tried to navigate and reconcile these various identities. In his village, he was a Sarybaghysh from Qochqor volost ; in Ufa, he was a Kyrgyz from southern Semirech’e region; and while travelling the Middle East, he was a Muslim from Turkestan. His close collaboration with Kazakh intellectuals and his tendency to intermingle Kyrgyz and Kazakh affairs added yet another dimension to his identity. His cultural alliances with Kazakh intellectuals during the late imperial period later led to political alliances that played an integral role in shaping the choices he made after the demise of the Russian empire. In the 1920s, however, this existing cultural notion of Kyrgyzness became politicized; it had to be fashioned and presented in an aggrieved state, lacking cultural and educational institutions, print and publishing facilities, and literate masses. Kyrgyz had their ‘pure’ language and literature, but they were a ‘backward’ nation and did not have the resources

114 Khalid. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. pp. 186–187.

46

J. DUISHEMBIEVA

to develop further. Under such circumstances, only territorial autonomy could guarantee the Kyrgyz their proper chance to develop as a nation. This was the card that the Kyrgyz and many other Central Asian elites played during the debate on national delimitation in Central Asia. On May 5, 1924, the Kirghiz and Kara Kyrgyz commission under the national delimitation commission of Sredazbiuro of TsK RKP(b) resolved to create the Kara Kyrgyz Autonomy consisting of the Mountain and Ferghana okrugs.115 The resolution was approved by the Central Committee, and on October 14, 1924 the Kara Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast officially came into existence.

115 The Mountain okrug was comprised of Pishpek, Naryn, and Karakol uezds, and Zhaiyl and Talkan volosts of Aulie Ata uezd in Syr-Dar’ia oblast (the present-day Talas region). The Ferghana okrug consisted of Osh uezd, the right bank of the Kara Dar’ia river in Andijan uezd, all the mountainous areas of Namangan uezd, and the mountainous areas of Aulie Ata uezd of Syr-Dar’ia oblast. Pishpek became the okrug center for the Mountain okrug, and Jalal Abad the center for the Ferghana okrug. RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. L. 55.

CHAPTER 3

Liminal States: Personal Dreams and Performance in Kyrgyzstan During and After the Soviet Era Ali I˘gmen

Abstract This chapter explores the endeavors of Kyrgyz citizens to create a space for their indigenous culture within the official Soviet framework. The article is concerned about the liminal space that incorporated preIslamic, nomadic aesthetics such as reverence for the environment and indigenous spirituality, and the promotion of tolerance. It relies on oral interviews, biographies and other archival sources, and artistic expression and performances to traces and analyze the endeavors of Kyrgyz citizens to create a space for their indigenous culture within the official Soviet framework. During and after the 1950s, there emerged a liminal space that incorporated pre-Islamic, nomadic aesthetics such as reverence for the environment and indigenous spirituality. Kyrgyz writers, actors, directors and other artists of the Soviet Union worked hard at devising strategies to maintain their traditional ways without challenging the gradually transpiring Soviet norms. Ultimately, they contributed to

A. I˘gmen (B) Department of History, California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_3

47

48

˘ A. IGMEN

constructing what artistic forms became ‘Soviet’ in their republic. My goal is to demonstrate how biographers, other ‘official’ purveyors of information, and several relatives of some of these intellectuals and “‘people’s heroes’ construct, or imagine spaces today—both actual and liminal. Keywords Kyrgyzstan · Kyrgyz theatre · Soviet theatre · Women · Gender · Liminality

Soviet Power Meets Artistic Expression in Mid-Twentieth Century Kyrgyzstan This essay explores the notion of liminality in regards to social and political positions and identities in Kyrgyzstan. It traces and analyzes the endeavors of Kyrgyz citizens to create a space for their indigenous culture within the official Soviet framework. It is concerned about the liminal space that incorporated pre-Islamic, nomadic aesthetics such as reverence for the elders, environment and indigenous spirituality, and the promotion of tolerance. It uses oral interviews, archival sources, and artistic expression and performances to substantiate my claims, and examines intervention in cultural practices both top-down and bottom-up, both coming from artistic/spiritual individuals and the agents of the state by way of analyzing sources of authority and scrutinizing the role of these interventions in negotiating local and regional power relations. Both Arnold Van Gennep’s pioneering analysis on rites of passage, and Victor Turner’s work that expanded on van Gennep’s understanding of liminality influence my approach to the ways in which the Kyrgyz individuals featured in this article remembered and conveyed their professional and personal lives.1 As I rely on these two anthropologists when I analyze liminality, I also learn from Farha Ghannam’s work on mobility and liminality in Egyptian cities.2 Ghannam pointed out that individuals, especially newcomers are transformed in various ways while they encounter urban life. Van Gennep’s argument that societies establish rites 1 Van Gennep, A. (2006) The Rites of Passage. Monika Vizedom and Gabriella Cafee (trans. from French). Routledge. 2 Ghannam, F. (2011) Mobility, Liminality, and Embodiment in Urban Egypt. American Ethnologist 38 (4): 790−800.

3

LIMINAL STATES: PERSONAL DREAMS AND PERFORMANCE …

49

to demarcate transitions applies to the study of the theatre professional who came up with their rites of passage from indigenous understanding of their culture to what the Soviets set out to construct. ‘Liminality makes sense only within social dramas as they unfold,’ wrote Bjørn Thomassen, which reflects the social dramas, on and off stage in Kyrgyzstan, especially when one considers the imagined and applied identification with ecology and nomadism in being Kyrgyz, again on and off stage.3 Furthermore, the conspicuous yet precarious space of and for women in Soviet theatre in Kyrgyzstan exposes that liminality is a powerful but ambiguous signifier of identity, which proves to be a fluid, and often a disruptive factor for these communities. The endeavors of Kyrgyz citizens to create a space for their indigenous culture within the official Soviet framework are the central concerns of this essay. During and after the 1950s, there emerged a liminal space that incorporated aesthetics that preceded Islam, Russian and Soviet influence. Kyrgyz writers, actors, directors, and other artists of the Soviet Union worked hard at devising strategies to maintain their traditional ways without challenging the gradually transformative Soviet norms. Ultimately, they contributed to constructing what artistic forms became ‘Soviet’ in their republic. Arnold van Gennep described three stages of rites of passage: rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation. The liminal rites are those in the middle when an individual or a society makes a transition from a certain status to a new one.4 This essay argues that the firstgeneration Soviet theatre professionals in Kyrgyzstan lived through the liminal stage between the 1920s and the 1960s. Their successors, namely their students and younger fellow theatre professionals incorporated the rites and ways of knowing and living into their work and lives until the end of the Soviet era, and continue to do so after the fall of the USSR. Women in Kyrgyz Theatre stand out because of they challenged the existing social norms, which often resulted in these women’s isolation. While they occupied a liminal space in between the so-called traditional and modern, they became known figures in theatre. Victor Turner described this space both as betwixt and between, meaning they were neither fully incorporated to

3 Thomassen, B. (2009) The Uses and Meanings of Liminality. International Political Anthropology 2 (1): 13. 4 Van Gennep. The Rights of Passage.

50

˘ A. IGMEN

what modern theatre was to become nor to abandon the traditional.5 Farha Ghannam argues that liminality must be studied by bringing the spatial and temporal together.6 I argue that the emotional liminality must be added to the spatial and temporal. The interviews in this essay show that not only these individuals found themselves in a liminal space, both spatially and temporally, but also emotionally. This essay analyzes this threshold of emotional transition from imagined Kyrgyz traditions to idealized Soviet modernity. It demonstrated how the actresses I was able to interview and whose lives I was able to examine made this liminal space work for them. The purpose of this analysis is to show how biographers, other official purveyors of information, and several relatives of some of these intellectuals and people’s heroes constructed, or imagined spaces—both actual and liminal. My analysis takes on three features of liminality: the significance of ecology, the place of womanhood, and the construction of modernity. Inherent in all three of these features is the nomadic background, inseparable from being Kyrgyz. I begin with a story from the life of Saira Kiyizbaeva’s (a leading Kyrgyz/Soviet opera singer and motion picture actress). Saira (1917– 1988) had a major roadblock toward finding a modern artistic expression: her father who did not want his daughter to sing in public. This opera singer from the village called Tököldösh outside of Frunze had to push her way into Soviet modernity despite her father. In her biography, the emphasis on her defiance against her father’s traditional ways is noteworthy. Young Saira, at age ten (1927) satirized the Central Asian tradition of kalyng (Russified as kalym), or bride price, at a school function. Her father reacted by not speaking to her for a month. This is at a school where the language of education was still written in Arabic alphabet, but the Soviet propaganda began to be employed.7 Remarkably, young Saira emerged from this seemingly hybrid culture as an active participant and a future authority of opera and theatre.

5 Turner, V. (1994) Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage. In Louise Carus Mahdi, et al. Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation. La Salle, IL: Open Court. 6 Ghannam. 792. 7 Kuznecov, A. G. (1994) Saa Kiizbaeva: Oqerk izni i Tvorqestva.

Bixkek.

3

LIMINAL STATES: PERSONAL DREAMS AND PERFORMANCE …

51

In contrast to Kiyizbaeva’s childhood experience Darkul Kuiukova who was also born in Tököldösh into a large and poor rural family (1919– 1997)—one of eleven children—was chosen to be trained as an actress at age fourteen when the Youth Theatre Selection Committee visited her school in 1933 from Frunze, the capital.8 Darkul’s story is also about finding a place on the threshold of modernity. Standing out among eleven siblings in a poor family was not a small feat. The extraordinary result of such background was an actress and a powerful figure in Soviet Theatre and Film in Kyrgyzstan who not only educated her own children but also adopted her young students to be future leaders in the arts. According to her published interviews, and my interviews with her relatives, Darkul had a close ally: Baken Kydykeeva, another little girl turned a famous actress from this small town. Like her best friend Darkul, Baken Kydykeeva (1923–1993), a theatre and film actress, had it easier than Saira, the opera singer. As it was common among Kyrgyz families, an aunt (Aibobok) raised Baken in Tököldösh. Both the biographers and her relatives begin to tell Baken’s story by pointing out that ‘she learned the ways and traditions of Kyrgyz’ from her aunt.9 She also grew up listening to Turkic/nomadic tales from her father Kydyke who was a teacher. Baken made sure that interviewers and audiences understood that she not only learned Kyrgyz traditions early on but enjoyed them even as a little girl. These traditions included listening to the komuz players and learning to sing along traditional folk songs. But, one of her early childhood experiences bridged the ‘traditional’ with the ‘modern’: her father shaved her head and took her everywhere as if she were a boy. According to all the theatre professionals I interviewed Young Baken’s admiration of her Kyrgyz culture translated into her depiction of it ‘so perfectly’ in the modern medium of theatre. In the eyes of the interviewees, Baken set the standard of a perfect Kyrgyz actress who managed to combine the traditional ways with the new Soviet norms. Like her other three colleagues, she was responsible in defining what it meant to be a modern woman in Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Baken’s experience mirrored Sabira Kümüshalieva’s early childhood. Sabira, yet another ‘daughter’ of Tököldösh who outlived (1917–2007) the other three actresses from this small but fortunate town was an only

8 unuxov, A. (1980) Darkul Kuukova. Frunze. 9 Syrymbetov, A. (1976) Baken Kydykeeva. Frunze.

52

˘ A. IGMEN

child of an ethnic Kipchak family whose father also dressed her (like Baken’s father) as a boy.10 Young Sabira became a tour-de-force, both as an actress and a leader in the field of theatre and film, both during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras whose portrait graced a postage stamp in 2008, after her death a year earlier. These two stories of girls posing as boys reminds us of the childhood experience of another significant cultural icon from another country in the midst of a modernization project: Egypt and Umm Kulth¯um’s childhood.11 The legendary singer and powerhouse (both cultural and political) Umm Kulth¯um toured with her father in boy’s clothes.12 These three fathers, two in Kyrgyzstan and one in Egypt were products of the postimperial era in two faraway provinces of two neighboring empires, during which they needed to keep up with the changes without abandoning their traditional ways. They recognized their daughter’s talents while they could not transition to the modern ways of putting them on stage right away. These experiences with modernity offer more nuance and food for thought on gender, ethnicity, race, religion, and class than about simply moving from the countryside to the big city. The narrative that emerges on Saira’s early childhood during the early years of Soviet Central Asia, for example, provides an insight into how the changing cultural, political, and social landscape shaped lives. The Soviet state representatives such as youth activists, e.g., Komsomol , teachers, youth theatre recruiters sought young talents to initiate into the larger Soviet project of modernity. In Central Asia, this project encompassed more than converting people into Bolsheviks, Communists and Soviets. Especially when analyzing women’s lives in Kyrgyzstan, we note that Soviet state representatives were at the threshold of several transitions that they aimed to initiate: first, there needed to be a head-on confrontation with nomadic lifestyles; second, Islam, no matter how unorthodox it was practiced in Kyrgyzstan had to be discredited and diminished; third, women needed to be brought to the twentieth century without veils, without sister-wives, and without 10 unuxov. A. (1985) Cabira Kymyxalieva Qygarmaqylyk portret. Frunze. 11 Danielson, V. (1998) The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 12 Lohman, L. (2010) Umm Kulth¯ um: Artistic Agency and the Shaping of an Arab Legend, 1967−2007 . Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

3

LIMINAL STATES: PERSONAL DREAMS AND PERFORMANCE …

53

limitations to their self-improvement; fourth, Kyrgyz national bourgeois sentiments needed to be eradicated along with any other national sentiment; and finally fifth, there needed to be a proletariat to represent the new ideology against the old, corrupt, and colonial ways. This was a tall order that faced the Soviet administrators, those who came from outside of Central Asia, and who were indigenous to the region. These representatives of the Soviet state included Kyrgyz and other Central Asians beginning with korenizatsiia (indigenization, or ‘going to the roots’ era of the 1920s and less so afterward) such as the teachers and relatives of these young girls and other young Kyrgyz. Most significant for our story, however, for these four women these changes offered opportunities, which they made sure to take. The ‘Daughters of Tököldösh’ contributed to the korenizatsiia in their own ways, even before it was no longer in use, as they also participated in the multilayered Soviet project of creating a modern Soviet citizen. All four of these women were ‘discovered’ at a young age. The Youth Theatre Committee (Youth Theatre Studio, 1936) administrators, many of them Kyrgyz nationals, noticed and recruited them while in school, or during regional singing competitions (Baken and Saira at the Alamudin competition in 1936). In both Saira and Baken’s cases, the patriarch of their families rejected the possibility of their daughters moving to the big city and working with strangers, mostly men unfamiliar to their families. Here these young women faced several dimensions that the Soviet state deemed backwards, and they fought their own families with the help of the state representatives: first, women should not be showcased on stage according to the tradition—both nomadic and Muslim; second, they should not be immodest, even if they end up on the stage; but the third aspect caused more of a complication: bourgeois nationalism. The plays that included these women needed to avoid Kyrgyz nationalist overtones. This last aspect went beyond the families’ control or their concerns. This brings us to the liminality of these women’s position, and the place of theatre in general in Soviet Central Asia. Theatre began to take shape in the late 1920s in Kyrgyzstan, mostly in Lenin’s Corners in factories, schools, Houses of Culture and other Soviet Clubs. Kyrgyz youth learned to write one-act plays that were imbued in Marxist-Leninist ideology. Therefore, at its very inauguration, theatre represented change, or a break from tradition. As Kyrgyz did not have the tradition of sitting silently and watching actors depict a story, this was a new cultural territory and experience to them. What is contradictory here is the most

54

˘ A. IGMEN

interesting part of this story: the plays they wrote, and the plays they staged later in the Kyrgyz National Theatre told stories of Kyrgyz countryside, albeit from a Bolshevik point of view. So, the Kyrgyz feature of the national theatre never managed to be constructed, and later shed its indigenous character. Similarly, these women played roles that were in line with Kyrgyz characteristics, at least as the way these characteristics were perceived. Although the plays, especially the first two, staged such as Kaigyluu Kakey (Unhappy Kakey), (1926, M. Tokobayev) and Karachach (Black-haired Girl ) (1926, K. Jantoshev) were to provide Bolshevik propaganda, they elevated Kyrgyz women’s struggle to heroic positions.13 They essentially depicted the women’s struggle before the Bolshevik Revolution and their liberation afterward. The seemingly antipatriarchy message still showcased Kyrgyz rural life and culture. The actors were to play what was seen as genuine Kyrgyz. In one of the interviews, a younger actress pointed out that a more experienced mentor told her ‘Kyrgyz girls do not walk like that, you need to pay attention to true behavior of your people.’14 This pattern of both staging the authentic and the modern was constant in theatre, for the playwrights, directors, and actors. These actresses constructed what it meant to be modern: applying methods of theatre on stage—foreign and novel, and not being afraid to take on leadership roles off stage. There is another noteworthy part to this story of liminality, however. In the 1930s and 1940s Kyrgyz actors began to take roles in European, Russian, and other foreign-origin plays. They were expected to act as other ethnicities and nationalities. Their training by the celebrated Konstantin Stanislavsky, either directly or by his protégés, gave many of the Kyrgyz theatre professionals a new worldview. Stanislavsky was a revolutionary who influenced theatre training not only in Russia/USSR, but also in the West. Kyrgyz theatre directors and actors who were working in the national theatre took part in plays by Western playwrights, learning to adopt European body language and manners. In their interviews, actresses such as Sabira Kümüshalieva pointed out the impact of Stanislavsky’s methods, even quoting from his teachings.15 They shaped their stage

13 I˘ gmen, A. (2012) Speaking Soviet with and Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 14 Membetova, N. interview by author, Bishkek, June 26, 2016. 15 Kümüshalieva, S. interview by author, Bishkek, July 19, 2002.

3

LIMINAL STATES: PERSONAL DREAMS AND PERFORMANCE …

55

preparations in such a way that took them out of their own reality. Of course, it is a given that actors become someone else on stage, but in this particular case, Kyrgyz actresses had to find entirely new personas. When they went from Shakespeare to Jantoshev, they learned to straddle different worlds. This was their liminality that was not required of many Russian and other European-origin Soviet actors the same way. Kyrgyz actresses needed to adjust to a world that rejected their nomadic and Islamic ways of being and living. The strength of these women is noteworthy because of the double duty, some might call it burden, for these women to take on. These women’s personae as actresses were shaped by their youth, gender, ethnicity, and admiration for ‘liberated’ and strong actresses, both Kyrgyz and foreign who came before them. Women like them became the symbols of modernity and ‘culturedness.’ They were enthusiastic overachievers who wanted to prove to the rest of the Central Asian women that young and ordinary Kyrgyz girls like them were capable of changing the cultural landscape. To be sure, they wanted to convey to female audiences that ordinary girls represented change and prosperity by rejecting their male-dominated and old-world traditions. Kümüshalieva expressed it this way: ‘this could only be done by opening up to the embracing aspects of the outside world, such as Russian and European theatre.’16 These Kyrgyz girls, who became part of the Soviet elite, learned early on to mold their Kyrgyz past into their new Soviet communities. In the meantime, however, according to Kümüshalieva they ‘lived through extreme economic hardships to maintain their dignity.’17 Her brief stint as a teacher and her first experience with theatre occurred in 1931, when she was fourteen years of old. It was at this time that an influential theatre director, visiting her ail (Kyrgyz village, formerly nomadic encampment), discovered her and opened the door for her to become a ‘Soviet Hero.’ Ironically, Kümüshalieva discovered the promise for a better life in the capital city and in theatre while her people were enduring one of the worst experiences of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s policy of collectivization had already begun in 1930. Ail administrators forced the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz to gather their livestock in collective barns. Many of the Kazakhs resisted and slaughtered their animals rather than handing them

16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.

56

˘ A. IGMEN

over to the state administrators. This behavior resulted in costly consequences for the Kazakhs: almost half of the population, an estimated four million people either perished from starvation or fled the country. Young Kümüshalieva experienced the trauma of the Kazakhs first hand: It was 1934, the year of starvation. Kazakhs were suffering a lot at this time. Maldybaev, a great actor, and his wife came and asked, “Can you gather all your children? We are in a hurry; we will give them a concert and leave.” They gave free concerts at that time. So, they gave their concert. After the concert, we fried some corn and served them with some tea. (Now, of course, they have vodka.) After having tea, they started singing. Everybody sang. They asked me to sing. I sang one song. They asked me to sing more. I sang another one. “You have a nice voice, why are you teaching? Come to the theatre,” they said. I said, “What if they expel me as a daughter of a kulak?” “No, nobody will expel you” they said.18

Inspired by this encounter, Kümüshalieva braved her way to the capital to break into the world of art and culture. In the capital, Kümüshalieva’s identity—like that of the other women in theatre—as a recently urbanized rural girl merged into her stage persona as a Soviet actress. They were exposed to the non-Kyrgyz population of the capital, and honed their art under the tutelage of non-Kyrgyz directors and producers. They were both confronted by, and took advantage of their own liminality, in terms of actual space, and their intellectual, mental, and emotional space. To Kümüshalieva—the only one of the four I had the privilege to interview—being cultured meant applying Soviet education to her life without necessarily compromising her own way of knowing herself. She reflected on the invaluable contributions of Soviet education in every level on her society as a positive improvement. It is impossible to dismiss, at least for this author, such reflections as products of propaganda, especially because these women were dynamic participants of this transformative education. What about the generation that followed these four women? Jamal Seidakhmatova, a living legend of the Kyrgyz Theatre who was born in 1936 was one of the young actresses whom Kümüshalieva and her generation raised. Seidakhmatova pointed out to me in a 2016 interview that without the acting instructions and more importantly instruction on everyday conduct from these pioneering women, her generation would

18 Ibid.

3

LIMINAL STATES: PERSONAL DREAMS AND PERFORMANCE …

57

have been lost. She expressed in most generous terms that she became who she is because of these women, not only as an actress, but also as a person.19 In 2016, Seidakhmatova celebrated her sixtieth year in theatre. Yet, her life was anything but glorious. She, too, resided in a liminal space between the stage high above the audience, and the dark backstage. This liminality was not just actual physical space, but also an intellectual and emotional state. One glaring example was the moment when she decided to leave her official state position after ‘thirty years because the Ministry of Culture would always dictate us what to perform.’20 She pointed out that they staged the same shows over and over again to commemorate Leonid Brezhnev, or the Communist Party. As a Laureate of the State, and a National Artist of the Soviet Union, she felt that there was nothing left in the State Theatre for her. ‘People thought I lost my mind. Twelve artists followed me when left. We had no money, no space.’21 She remembered that the Secretary of the Central Committee Sherimkulov told her that she would end up with nothing. During the time of perestroika, she said, they built their theatre from scratch. They worked day and night to raise money to buy a tour bus. They made their own stage decorations, made their own costumes, and even appealed to international organizations to raise money to feed their cast and crew. And, only a few years after independence, in 1996, they went to Egypt to attend an international theatre festival with the money she secured from the Soros Foundation. She indicated that she received a great deal of support from outside sources to keep her theatre company alive. She referred to the actors in her troupe as her kids who performed in iconic sites in Egypt and sixteen other counties after their first international trip. It was thrilling for ‘her kids’ to stage Kyrgyz plays such as Tears of the Queen and Kurmanjan Datka for foreign audiences from Iran to China. They won the Grand Prix in Ufa, Bashkiria. Like her predecessors, Seidakhmatova took her mentorship seriously. She, too, conveyed that as a woman in theatre she was called upon to play multiple roles, both on and off stage. She had to find a place for herself both as a student and

19 Seidakhmatova, J. interview by author. Bishkek, July 2, 2012. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.

58

˘ A. IGMEN

teacher of theatre, in a space between the cracks of established state institutions.22 It is undeniable that individuals like Seidakhmatova took on leadership roles in this difficult endeavor to keep performing arts alive during the hard times the post-Soviet era brought. Gulshara Duulatova, another master of the stage, was born in 1930 who expressed similar sentiments. After graduating from the Uzbek Theatre in Tashkent with fourteen other students from the Kyrgyz SSR, she was ‘taken to our own academic theatre at once.’23 There existed some hierarchical liminality for Kyrgyz actresses; primarily because of their ethnicity, secondarily because of their gender. Many studied in Tashkent with other students from other republics where Uzbek students did not always see them as their equals. As women, their physical appearance mattered, just as it would have mattered elsewhere in the world. Duulatova pointed out: ‘Baken Kydykeeva looked like a European type. She was not like me, an ordinary-looking woman, she was brilliant, stately woman.’24 Duulatova knew that they would never cast her for leading roles in the Russian classics. She remarked admiringly, perhaps enviously: ‘those Russian costumes were meant for her,’ referring to Kydykeeva. Several well-known actresses of Duulatova and Seidakhmatova’s generation, and the generation after them subtly implied how beautiful and ‘European-type’ actresses could even be cast with Russian actors. They were keenly aware that they were measured by their looks, and occasionally whether they looked ‘European’ enough. Ethnicity mattered in theatre. Duulatova recalled one specific experience that exemplified how much their ethnicity mattered on stage, without directly referring to Kyrgyz physical features. She played a Ukrainian woman in a play called Ashpozchu Ayalda (Striapuhany, The Female Cook). She remembered that ‘a theatre critic from Moscow named Kritivitskii came to see the play, and asked me ‘so, Duulatova, have you ever been to Ukraine, or to Kuban?’ I said, no!’ Apparently, the critic was impressed that she came across like a Ukrainian in the part. Duulatova remembered that it was Sabira Kümüshalieva who prepared her to act like a Ukrainian woman. As young actors and actresses, they needed to learn to ‘act Russian’ or ‘look European.’ She continued:

22 Seidakhmatova, J. interview by author. Bishkek, July 5, 2016 23 Duulatova, G. interview by author. Bishkek, May 7, 2015. 24 Ibid.

3

LIMINAL STATES: PERSONAL DREAMS AND PERFORMANCE …

59

You see, Russian audience is different from ours. They are more educated than we are. They read all the plays of those writers, and when those plays are staged the people come to see how that or this actor or actress plays a certain character, how they deliver those images to the audience…you cannot cheat Russian audiences.25

The Stalin years with several dekady (ten-day festivals that staged each Soviet Republic’s talent in Moscow) stand out for several actors and actresses as milestones. Each one of the fifteen republics showcased their most talented artists in these dekady between 1935, and before and after the Second World War. In 1939, Kirghizia (Kyrgyz SSR) had its chance. Several interviewees brought up how uplifting it was for them (or their parents) to witness Kyrgyz artists being received by Stalin, and receiving the Lenin Order (actress Anvar Kuttubaeva) at these dekady. Duulatova remembered fondly: ‘I attended the dekady in 1958 and 1965 or 1967.’ She recalled the moment Saira Kiyizbaeva was recognized as one of the honorable artists of the USSR, and received the Banner of Red Labor. However, in a most striking statement, Duulatova said: ‘Russians used to say that she [Kiyizbaeva] had a truly European voice. There is no such a voice nowadays.’ The appreciation of the Kyrgyz opera singers meant more if they sounded ‘European.’26 It seems according to Duulatova and many other interviewees European sound or appearance meant modern, which these actors and actresses took on willingly or not to be able to advance in their careers. Although this connection between the European appearance and modernity is questionable that requires more analysis, the interviews revealed that they saw a direct connection between the two. During and after the Great Patriotic War the lives of theatre professionals became even harder, although their resources were limited to begin with during the peacetime. Duulatova pointed out in 1946 when she was a sixteen-year-old actress, the Director of the Kyrgyz State Philharmonic, ‘Adenov used to treat me like my father. He would go to the storeroom and bring me cotton cloth to pattern two dresses, and would say, “take it home and sew yourself a dress.”’ The young actresses like her were expected to do more than acting. Their relationship with their elders in theatre placed them in a deferential position, although they often portrayed these relationships in cozy familial terms. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.

60

˘ A. IGMEN

Their liminality seemed to have expanded during and immediately after the war as explored below. Occasionally, the actresses I interviewed talked about other limitations placed on them. A case in point was Duulatova’s description of Sabira Kümüshalieva’s complaints to her that she was not allowed to be funny on stage. Duulatova remembered that Kümüshalieva had a great sense of humor, but often her directors asked her to shorten her dialogues if she wanted to improvise to add humor to them. Character actresses like Kümüshalieva did not receive roles that allowed them to develop their parts until she became an elder, respectable Kyrgyz matriarch. It seems the typecasting of actresses happened right at the threshold of becoming fully developed performers. One actor named Egemberdi Bekboliev (b. 1955) who assisted Darkul Kuiukova during a seventy-five-day tour summed up the precarious position these four remarkable women called ‘Four Daughters of Tököldösh’ occupied. Bekboliev remembered that Kuiukova worked tirelessly with very little sleep to manage her troupe, while playing some of the leading roles. She treated the young actors like her own children, like a good Kyrgyz mother, while asserting a Western work ethic (in this case, Russian) in their duties.27 Finally, she applied her feminine sensibility and risky humor whenever she could, both on and off stage. Although for women the odds were stacked toward success in many ways, they opened the path for the generations that followed them to the third stage of rites of passage, Arnold van Gennep called incorporation.28 These actresses integrated what it meant to be nomadic Kyrgyz and modern Soviet for their successors in theatre. Both nomadism and reverence to the environment, of course, fell into a liminal space because the modernizing Soviet state had patience or respect for either. Yet, despite the official Soviet contempt for the nomadic lifestyle and indigenous rituals to show respect for the environment, the golden child of Soviet Literature, Chingiz Aitmatov, wrote novellas and novels successfully and beautifully inserting both of these themes. Aitmatov’s works became the most respected and popular plays that these actresses and their fellow actors staged. One prime example was Aitmatov’s play Mother Earth (Materinskoe Pole), which made many an

27 Egemberdi Bekboliev. Interview by Baktybek Isakov. Bishkek, July 31, 2009. 28 Van Gennep, The Rights of Passage.

3

LIMINAL STATES: PERSONAL DREAMS AND PERFORMANCE …

61

actress a star in the eyes of the Kyrgyz audiences. The interviews consistently suggest that the actresses who played the main character Tolgonai, a selfless peasant woman who consults with Mother Earth when her world challenges her, demonstrated the strong ties between Kyrgyz people and their environment. Like Tolgonai, several protagonists of Aitmatov stories that became plays and films display the inseparable connection of Kyrgyz people to their environment.29 The liminality of a nomad’s life and a nomad’s ties to nature have been apparent since the imperial times. Nomadic lifestyle closely linked to climate and physical environment has been seen as backward by the imperial administration since the earliest conquest of the region. Sedentarization attempts began under Catherine the Great during the eighteenth century, and later in 1832 under Mikhail Speranskii’s Digest of Laws.30 Furthermore, Kyrgyz people were continuously told that they would never be civilized unless they sedentarized under the Soviet regime. Similarly, nomadic Kazakhs whose intellectuals pushed back against the marginalization of their nomadic lives and reverence to nature. Late nineteenth-century Kazakh Zar Zaman poets and writers, and Kazakh intellectual Shokan Valikhanov argued, despite the need to modernize Kazakhs should not abandon their appreciation of the natural environment.31 The official Soviet view of nomadism is unmistakable in the documents in regards to Houses of Culture this author examined. The backwardness seemed only one of the problems for the Soviet officials. The perceived idleness of the nomads posed a greater threat to the image of the new and modern man and women that the Soviet administrators aimed to forge. Their oneness with the environment as nomads translated into idleness in the eyes of Soviet officials, including those who were Kyrgyz. Modernity meant sedentarization, urbanization, collectivization, and industrialization. The very requirement of a theatre or opera necessitated grand structures to house them in an urban environment in a new city such as Frunze (Bishkek). Tynara Abdrazaeva, a theatre actress who has been working in the Kyrgyz National Theatre since 1979 remarked that ‘she was just a farmer’s

29 Riordan, J. trans. (1989) Mother Earth and Other Stories, Chingiz Aitmatov. London & Boston: Faber & Faber Ltd. 11. 30 I˘ gmen. Speaking Soviet with an Accent. 13. 31 Ibid., 17.

62

˘ A. IGMEN

daughter who grew up in the mountains, drinking kymyz and eating meat.’32 With her first words in the interview Abrazaeva identified herself as a daughter of the mountains. She made a direct connection between her upbringing in the mountains and her career on stage. She reminisced that Baken Kydykeeva taught her how to convey her spiritual connection with the motherland when Abrazaeva played the part of Aichürök, ‘when Aichürök turned into a swan and flew away’ (Aichürök meant ‘Lunar Beauty,’ first staged in 1939). Abrazaeva also remembered, after each performance during a tour the hosting town slaughtered a lamb on their honor. Darkul Kuiukova who led them during these tours insisted that Kyrgyz traditions must not be forgotten. In addition to feasting on freshly slaughtered lamb, they sang ‘old Kyrgyz songs, and not modern songs about love and suffering.’ Kuiukova, as their brigadier (manager and mentor), even dictated how they wore their hair. She insisted that they did not cut their hair short, as Kyrgyz women should not. The proper behavior of Kyrgyz girls and women was in the minds of these seasoned actresses who mentored their young students. Sabira Kümüshalieva who also toured with these young actors and actresses made sure that they espoused Kyrgyz traditions. Abrazaeva pointed out that she learned from Kümüshalieva to bring kalpaks (traditional hats for men) and zhooluks (traditional headscarves for women) to present their hosts during their tours. She said: I am older now too. I do the same things now, and why only others have to pay respect to us? We should thank our audience too. I always say that Sabira ezhe used to say that zhooluk is sacred. That is why, to show my gratitude, I always bring zhooluks and kalpaks.33

By asserting particular ways of conduct on and off stage these authoritative women like Kydykeeva and Kuiukova upheld what they saw as traditional gender roles. Consequently, nomadism and reverence for the elderly and the environment went hand-in-hand. Although, the Soviet rhetoric placed these women in a liminal space, they did not see themselves marginalized. I came away from my interviews with Kümüshalieva with an understanding that she and many other of her generation saw themselves as agents of change and modern education. 32 Abrazaeva, T. Interview by author. Bishkek, July 6, 2016. 33 Ibid.

3

LIMINAL STATES: PERSONAL DREAMS AND PERFORMANCE …

63

There is a cruel twist to this story, however. A universal threat applied to these actresses too: they were getting too old to get the leading roles, especially those who were considered attractive, such as Baken Kydykeeva. A veteran makeup artist, Gulnar Suranchieva who worked in the Kyrgyz National Theatre since 1975 remembered how Kydykeeva regretted getting old once while Suranchieva was applying eye makeup on her. Kydykeeva was preparing for the role of Kanykei (the wife of Kyrgyz national hero Manas , which was a coveted part for any actress) in her fifties. According to Suranchieva, the veteran actress ‘cursed her old age.’34 The most revealing part of this interview with Suranchieva emerged at the end when she compared the reaction of Kydykeeva to aging with that of an ordinary woman from an ail . She argued that a typical woman from an ail would respond to aging differently: I work with artists [actresses] a lot, and when I think of an ordinary woman who get older in ails, they seem to be proud of having grandchildren, going to various family events, becoming older kelin (bride). Meanwhile, when actresses who are used to being on stage in front of people, young and beautiful, get a second wrinkle, they become disappointed. They try not to show it while burning inside. This is not comparable to getting old in an ail .35

The anecdote Suranchieva conveyed reveals that liminality was, and still is gendered in this context, that these actresses see themselves as professionals while their own society may place them in the margins. They are respected as actresses, but not necessarily as women who keep up the gender norms. Ironically, they play these traditional gender roles on stage to perpetuate the image of an idealized Kyrgyz woman. They were once again in a liminal place between tradition and modernity, between Kyrgyz identity and Sovietness. After all, theatre and film were, are modern Soviet vehicles toward modernity. Yet, these women worked to assert Kyrgyz character into the Soviet mold. Despite the liminal space they occupied, these women did their jobs gracefully as actresses, authoritatively as brigadiers, and doggedly as Soviet citizens. They were much more than 34 Suranchieva, G. Interview by author. Bishkek, July 7, 2016. 35 Ibid.

64

˘ A. IGMEN

marginal individuals despite the ungenerous portrayal historians afforded to them. It is not a stretch at all to conclude that the four daughters of Tököldösh were forces to reckon with, both individually and collectively.

CHAPTER 4

Epic Performances in Central Asia Ananda Breed

Abstract This essay provides an overview of a unique performance style and oral epic tradition from Central Asia known as Manas that both serves as the name of a legendary warrior or Khan from Kyrgyzstan who united tribes and the name of an epic that is said to contain a larger number of verses than any other epic poem including the Mahabarata and the Iliad and Odyssey. My main argument is based on the use and distribution of Manas when considering cultural forms as a highly codified system of embodied knowledge. Cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1981) notes the importance of culture as a signifying system through which a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored. Throughout my analysis, I examine the use of cultural forms and how they have been produced for varied purposes and audiences alongside the content of the form itself. In this way, exploring the cultural form of Manas alongside theatrical representations of Manas in relation to varied historic, cultural, and political contexts.

A. Breed (B) School of Fine and Performing Arts, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_4

65

66

A. BREED

Keywords Manas · Cultural forms · Theatre · Performance · Central Asia · Kyrgyzstan

Introduction: The Manas Epic as a Cultural Form This essay provides an overview of a unique performance style and oral epic tradition from Central Asia known as Manas that both serves as the name of a legendary warrior or Khan from Kyrgyzstan who united tribes and the name of an epic that is said to contain a larger number of verses than any other epic poem including the Mahabarata and the Iliad and Odyssey (van der Heide 2015).1 The Manas encompasses more than half a million lines and sixty-five known oral variations said to originate from the tenth century, which also range into neighboring Central Asian countries including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Manas can be read as a negotiating and mediating factor between the East and the West in terms of its literary and performance traditions that link between the epics of Greece, from which Western performance traditions emerge, and the epics of Central Asia that are rooted in the delivery of Manas by the tellers or Manaschi of Kyrgyzstan alongside Akyn or bards who traveled between settlements of encampments to recite epics (I˘gmen 2017, personal communication).2 My main argument is based on the use and distribution of Manas as a highly codified system of embodied knowledge. Cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1991) notes the importance of culture as a signifying system through which a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored. Throughout my analysis, I examine the use of cultural forms and how they have been produced for varied purposes and audiences alongside the content of the form itself. In this way, exploring the cultural form of Manas alongside theatrical representations of Manas in relation to varied historic, cultural, and political contexts. According to anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Keith Howard and

1 See Nienke Van der Heide. Spirited Performance: The Manas Epic and Society in Kyrgyzstan. Bremen, 2015. 2 Email communication with Ali I˘ gmen, 31 October 2017.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

67

Manaschi Saparbek Kasmambetov, there is a huge gap in Manas scholarship when it comes to performance: ‘…such as how the epic was performed, the context of individual traits, audience impact and interaction and so on’ (2011: 111).3 I will address this gap in scholarship by first providing an overview of Manas as a cultural form, followed by the use of Manas as a dramaturgical tool within the work of Sakhna Nomadic Theatre alongside an overview of theatre houses in Kyrgyzstan, culminating with a production of the Manas epic, Semetei, produced by the Osh Uzbek Theatre in 2014. The research methodologies used for data collection generation included participant observation working with Sakhna Nomadic Theatre, interviews with theatre directors and Manaschi, or tellers of Manas , attendance at theatrical performances, and observation of both formal and informal Manas recitals. My analysis was also informed by empirical research as lead consultant and facilitator for a project entitled Youth Theatre for Peace that worked with cultural artists, young people and educators alongside Foundation for Tolerance International (FTI) in Kyrgyzstan; adapting cultural forms for dialogic purposes with the aim of providing peacebuilding approaches in educational contexts (2010– 2014).4 This essay provides a space for the intersection between artsbased research methods (Leavy 2015) and the adaptation of cultural forms. Here, I want to emphasize the interplay between artists and cultural production ‘to engage individuals and communities in transforming consciousness, building relationships and reimaginging the future’ (Cohen 2020: 2).

Soviet Cultural Reform Laura Adams (2005) in her seminal work related to the performativity of the State of Uzbekistan, provides an example of how theatre can be instrumental in the examination of cultural production and cultural content to argue that Soviet institutions acted to preserve traditional culture even as they transformed it. Cultural modernization in Soviet Union Uzbekistan emphasized internationalism in the arts. Postindependence, Adams articulates a process of normalization through a 3 Keith Howard and Saparbek Kasmambetov. Singing the Kyrgyz Manas: Saparbek Kasmambetov’s Recitations of Epic Poetry. Kent, 2011, p. 111. 4 See Ananda Breed. ‘Environmental Aesthetics, Social Engagement and Aesthetic Experiences in Central Asia.’ Research in Drama Education, 20 (1), 87–99.

68

A. BREED

discourse of a return to the past, or emphasis on national traditions, establishing global norms or universal human values, and a postcolonial discourse (2005: 342). Likewise, musicologist and cultural anthropologist Razia Sultanova remarks that Soviet cultural reform in Kazakhstan was used as a vehicle for new ideas and a new way of life. A part of the reform was establishing mass amateur art clubs to organize and edify young people within the Socialist Movement (Sultanova 2011: 10). These threads of influence between pre and post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan resonate with the use of cultural forms in pre and post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan; illustrating the migration of forms and values across borders. During the Soviet era, ails or Red Yurts that were established throughout Kyrgyzstan, provided a community meeting space for Manas , trickster tales, theatre and the performing arts to flourish—but also a space in which these forms and the messages that they condoned had to be negotiated between administrative powers and ideological and cultural beliefs (I˘gmen 2012).5 In this way, cultural forms that had been a part of nomadic traditions became solidified into the houses of culture. The use of the ails , then, were primarily used to negotiate cultures between varied ethnic identities, Soviet ideologies, western cultural influences, and traditional Kyrgyz culture. In most ails , or Soviet clubs, the akin or minstrels would serve as respected leaders to promote Soviet ideology as was common of the amateur art clubs noted by Sultanova (2011). However, their cultural inclination to use folktales and Manas to highlight disparities within society would naturally provide ambiguous portrayals of the old and new when altering oral traditions. Ails became the center for ethnic integration and cultural promotion. The establishment of clubs during the 1920s and 1930s attempted to facilitate significant changes in the social structure of ails and to create new everyday practices with both regional (Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and other) and revolutionary features. The negotiation between state powers and local constituents were often brokered by the most influential and powerful individuals in Kyrgyzstan—the Manaschi or oral tradition performers—thus messages were often mediated and ‘performed.’ The Manas epic was historically performed as an oral tradition until the twenty-first century when Manas extended to other forms, both 5 See Ali I˘ gmen. Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, 2012.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

69

physical (books, paintings, statues) and verbal (narration, spiritual invocation, political speeches, performances). Although surrounding literature on Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan more specifically focuses on how international powers vie for local resources and play out both political and social imaginaries regarding the war on terror, post cold war politics and transitional states and economies, there is sparse research conducted on how these tensions and politics play out through performance.6 The Manas as an oral form records, translates, and embodies both local and international discourses in nuanced ways. This essay aims to explore some of these varied nuances through an exploration of Manas as a cultural form to consider how the form itself shapes knowledge production and then how this form was activated toward achieving varied cultural, social and political aims. In relation to the use of Manas as a cultural form, how is the form negotiated, constructed, and communicated? What new meanings are codified within the contemporary production and reproduction of Manas ? How might the telling of Manas through ensemble or artistic processes function as a cultural tool? For what purposes or audiences?

The Cultural Form of Manas English-language translations of the Manas epic include The Manas of Wilhelm Radlovv by Arthur Hatto (1990), the most recent translation by Walter May entitled Manas (2004), and the nineteenth-century poems collected by Radloff and Shokan Valikhanov, translated by linguist Arthur Hatto. In their book Singing the Kyrgyz Manas, ethnomusicologist Keith Howard and reciter Saparbek Kasmambetov note: ‘At the turn of the new millennium it (Manas ) was appointed a UNESCO “Masterpiece in the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”, signaling its global significance….while the Manas has long been considered important by European and American scholars researching epics, the difficulty of access to Kyrgyz lands during the Soviet period meant that it featured only marginally in the classic works of Milman Parry and Albert Lord’ (2011: ix).7 Scholars have noted the limited scholarship and analysis concerning

6 Ibid. See chapter 5: ‘Soviet Theater in Kyrgyzstan in the 1930s’. 7 Keith Howard and Saparbek Kasmambetov. Singing the Kyrgyz Manas: Saparbek

Kasmambetov’s Recitations of Epic Poetry. Kent, 2011, p. ix.

70

A. BREED

the performance or performativity of Manas.8 Here, I make an intervention as a performance studies scholar to attribute the varied cultural, social, and political capital of Manas . I use the concept of performativity, or bringing something into being through speech acts, to provide an analysis of how performative utterances are connected to campaigns of nation-building.9 The construction of Manas as a national symbol and ideology to replace the Soviet Union and communism remains a substantial political and cultural project. Manas is taught as part of the school curriculum from the fifth to eleventh grades and it is considered a primary source of cultural information about Kyrgyzstan. Howard and Kasmambetov state: ‘To the Kyrgyz, the Manas has a distinct and deeply respected significance, as a repository of national heritage’ (2011: ix).10 Manas is referenced as an historic record of Kyrgyz culture, customs, values, and traditions. Due to the historical and improvisatory nature of Manas , it continues to be used as a prominent cultural form that provides historical and cultural references while encompassing the old with the new through varied styles of telling and incorporation of adaptations for local (ceremonies and community events) to national and international events (National Manas Epic Day and World Nomad Games). The epic contains three parts: the first contains the story of Manas, the second contains the story of his son Semetei, and the third contains the story of his grandson Seitek. The epic is told in rhythmic verse by tellers or Manaschi. The telling is always in the present tense, as if the events are unfolding before one’s very eyes as confirmed by Arthur Hatto who writes: ‘Shamans conveyed their Otherworld experiences in the first person, a first person in which the lyric, epic and dramatic modes were undifferentiated’ (1970: 2).11 There are shamanistic elements of the Manas , as it is believed that the Manas attract spirits from the supernatural and are often performed to bring good luck through events

8 See Nienke van der Heide concerning her indepth study of Manaschi. Spirited Performance. Bremen, 2015. 9 Linguist John Langshaw Austin (1962) used ‘performative utterances’ to describe

speech acts that create a subject (i.e., the matrimonial speech act ‘I do’ creates the subjects ‘husband’ and ‘wife’) that was reinterpreted as performativity by Judith Butler (2000) as discourse having reiterative power to produce what it names. 10 Howard and Kasmambetov. Singing the Kyrgyz Manas, p. ix. 11 Arthur Thomas Hatto. Foundation Day Lecture: Shamanism and Epic Poetry in

Northern Asia. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1970, p. 2.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

71

like marriage celebrations, births, or at community gatherings. Hatto continues: Shamanistic elements are not hard to find in Manas …Kirgiz bards were acknowledged to be the most frenzied of all Turkic speaking poetimprovisers. Their heroic songs were delivered with spell-binding swiftness and eloquence in a veritable ecstasy… Like shamans, Kirgiz heroic bards received their summons from on high. Like shamans they refused the call at their peril.12 (1970: 17)

Howard and Kasmambetov likewise note the shamanistic power of Manaschi stating: ‘A legend about the nineteenth-century bard Keldibek retains the idea of shamanistic power: when he sang it is said that the yurt he was in shook, the wind rose to hurricane force and a storm blew in; in the center of that storm, Manas and his warriors could be seen, their horses’ hooves making the ground tremble (Auezov 1962: 18; Rahmatullin 1968: 94)’ (2011: 109)13 Manaschi distinguish between when they are performing and when the spirit of Manas moves through them. Here, I give thick description from an observation of a Manas recital performed by several esteemed Manaschi for public television in celebration of Manas Day on 23 May 2014: The event was conducted inside a traditional yurt with eagles perched outside. Inside, shyrdaks (felt tapestries) were stacked in the back and a full display of food and Manas symbols were laid out on the floor. There were bowls of ghee (yellow oil), bread, and kumis (fermented horse milk). At the foot of the blanket with assorted food was a bow with arrows and a horse saddle. The audience consisted of eagle trainers, akyn (improvisatory poets and singers), Manaschi trainees and individuals who came to listen to Manas. In one corner of the room, there was a television screen that broadcast the Manas recitals as they were performed in Talas, Osh, Bishkek, and Yssykul, switching from one location of Kyrgyzstan to another at the end of each recital. For the recital in Bishkek, there were two Manaschi reciting: Ulan Ismailov and Yrysbaev Isakov. The Manaschi sat at the very back of the yurt in the place of respect and honour. Both Manaschi started out slowly, working towards a slight sway or rocking that went from the left to right, with a slight roll of the buttocks. Sometimes, swaying forward or using hands for emphasis.

12 Ibid., p. 17. 13 Howard and Kasmambetov. Singing the Kyrgyz Manas, p. 109.

72

A. BREED

As the recital gained momentum, the Manaschi would add hand gestures mid-way through the air and the eyes seemed to get more clouded over and energy/attention seemed to go inward and outward at the same time. There was no warm-up or preparation prior to the recitals except for a moment of stillness. Isakov stated: ‘The only warm-up is “eeeeee” then you go with the story from there.14 There is no way to prepare, as you do not know what you are going to say. It is not memorized.’ Similarly, as soon as they finished the recital, they were quick to transition back into chatting easily with others in the room. It seemed that there was no getting into and out of character. Nor any kind of warm-up or preparation for the recital.

During an interview that I conducted with Yrysbaev Isakov he stated: ‘When I am in trance and reciting, I often cannot distinguish between the past and the present. The two are mixed. Even when I am walking down the street sometimes, I still see the ancient world.’ Here, Isakov notes the confluence between the worlds of the ancient and the new. He went on to note that at public events when the Manaschi perform for under one hour, that Manaschi are aware of themselves performing. However, if they are reciting for over two hours and the conditions are right, Manas will move through the Manaschi and they no longer have control of the telling. In this state, the Manaschi often do not remember what they have recited and the telling comes from inspiration.15 Each Manaschi provided an overview of their vocational dream, when they were selected by Manas or one of his knights to serve as a Manaschi. Interviews that I conducted with Manaschi confirmed the personal connection between the Manaschi and the spirit of Manas as a central component of the telling; thus making the differentiation between Manaschi who are the chosen orators that carry the spirit of Manas in the telling and those who recite Manas . Anthropologist Nienke van der Heide emphasizes four distinctive features of the Manas epic in post (Soviet) Kyrgyzstan within her study entitled Spirited Performance: The Manas epic and society in Kyrgyzstan including: (1) Manas as a living and lively improvisatory oral tradition; (2) length counting more than half a million verses to surpass the Odyssey and Iliad; (3) close affiliation with 14 For examples of Manaschi performing Manas, see the excellent collection of sixtyseven-hour video recordings by fourteen Manaschi presenting from the epic trilogy (Manas, Semetei, Manas, Seitek). Example of recitation ‘Manas defeats the guardsmen of Esenkan’ by Manaschi Rysbi Isakov: https://aigine.kg/?p=13711&lang=en. 15 Interview with Yrysbaev Isakov.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

73

the supernatural; and (4) political currency. According to van der Heide, every Manaschi has his or her own versions of the story, and each recital is a product of improvisation. Every performance, then, is unique. The spirit (arbak) of Manas, his relatives and companions are seen to have an important influence on the way the epic is recited. The spirits (arbaktar) are the ones who call the Manaschis to their profession. Manas recitals are therefore more than artistic expressions that entertain and pass on information, they are also a way of making contact with the supernatural world (van der Heide 2015: 18). Isakov stated: In Manas telling, there are no rules or structures. It is based on your feelings, based on your mood. Sometimes, you speed up or slow down. In general, the mood of the telling depends on what Manaschi tells. This is improvisational, that comes in the process of telling. Manas is a kind of gift. It is impossible to learn. Telling Manas is not how you sing a song. It is something you live with; you live with those events. You are a part of those events. When you tell the events, you live there, in those moments. If a Manaschi is good, he also takes the audience to that place; to that life. It is difficult to explain with words. Telling Manas also heals sick people. Manas telling should be considered the highest level of the vocal arts; the highest level of poetry that goes into the soul of people. Manas telling is when people can tell big events in the moment.

Here, there is emphasis that the telling is not in past tense, but in present tense as if the event is happening in the here and now. Time becomes ephemeral. Ingold states: ‘The notion that we can stand aside and observe the passage of time is founded upon an illusion of disembodiment…Thus the present is not marked off from a past that it has replaced or a future that will, in turn, replace it; it rather gathers the past and future into itself, like refractions on a crystal ball’ (Ingold 2000: 197).16 Next, I will consider how the Manas epic and recitation by Manaschi has been explored through the artistic practices of various theatre organizations in Kyrgyzstan.

16 Ingold. The Perception of the Environment, p. 197.

74

A. BREED

Performance as a Cultural Form I switch now, from the reading of Manas as an oral tradition to the adaptation of Manas as a contemporary performance form based on the work of Sakhna Ethnographic Theatre located in Northern Kyrgyzstan in the capital Bishkek. The director of Sakhna, Nurlan Asanbekov, founded Sakhna in 2002 to perform traditional oral Manas through a mixture of nomadic cultural forms and contemporary performance practices influenced by Soviet and post-Soviet conventions. He noted the significance of culture for connecting cultures and promoting internationalism mirroring similar sentiments by Adams (2010) stating: The basis of Sakhna Theatre is to perform the epics. It is a mystical theatre that explores the art of telling. It includes modern with traditional elements. To create tolerance, we need to raise the spirit and cultural level of people in Kyrgyzstan. Also, for artists to experiment with the cultural works of different countries. In this way, we create tolerance and understanding between countries. During the time of the Soviet Union, we had the houses of culture. Associations and theatres should make these former houses of culture come alive again. I think the main goal of theatre is to educate and to promote tolerance.17

In this way, the contemporary adaptation of Manas as a theatrical form contains traces of the previous houses of culture to instill values and ideology, however, with the noted goals to educate and to promote tolerance. Core to the pedagogy and practice of Sakhna was the elemental use of nature to inform characterization, staging, and presence. Asanbekov stated that the work emerged from 40 eposes—or smaller renditions of the epic Manas —claiming that the reconstruction of identity in Kyrgyzstan required creating a new theatrical system, thus there originated the idea of establishing the format for what he calls nomadic theatre. He commented on the powerful energy of the melodies and rhythm of verses including the amplitude and range of vocal vibrations.18

17 Interview with Nurlan Asanbekov. Interview conducted by author. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 31 May 2014. 18 See Nurlan Asanbekov: Stage director is the one who wants to exhibit his theatre before the world. http://www.imhoart.uz/en/being-there/1787-nurlan-asanbe kov-stage-director-is-the-one-who-wants-to-exhibit-his-theatre-before-the-world.html. Last visit: October 21, 2013.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

75

The embodiment of histories, memories and landscapes within the art form itself—whether due to the relation of nature to the Kyrgyz art form, an historic nomadic past, or the transformational characteristics of the oral tradition—inherently develops a unique environmental aesthetic. As part of their workshops, Sakhna focused on how to perceive the natural environment within the performance space. Sakhna performed a section of the Manas based on Manas’ battle with female warrior Kyz Saikal . Asanbekov described the artistic process of linking the theatrical form to the traditional delivery of Manas epics: We understood that in order to perform Manas, we must consult with Manaschi and understand the Manas as Music Drama. We began to research each musical phrase and variations in rhythm, tempo and tone. The Manas musical phrase became our core material from which all improvisations would emerge. We tried to understand this form and how the musical phrase would allow for improvisation and a trance-like incorporation of spirit. There are points in which phrases repeat, spiral and change in terms of sound. We tried to develop a theatrical technique based on Manas that allows for being immediately involved in the present moment. I wanted our actors to be able to get into and out of a scene within five minutes. The Stanislavsky system and many Western acting methodologies focus on the psychological, which I feel is damaging to the health of actors and takes the performer away from being present in the moment. By the time the evening performance takes place, most actors who follow this kind of methodology are already exhausted, and they are not within the moment. We train to break habits. Even in our performances, we can start in different ways and our actors can respond to the scene however he or she feels moved. Like a river, the actor must move along without fighting against the current. Like the wind, you cannot control the direction. After the performance, the actor should feel comfortable and relaxed. It is a new form that we call nomadic theatre.19

In reference to previous assertions about transcendentalism and environmentalism, here there is an emphasis on breaking habits and to be in the moment. Thus, a confluence between the structure of Manas (rhythm, tempo, tone) and the improvisatory art of Manas that relies on presence and feeling. Asanbekov described the dramaturgical consideration of the Manas to inform their artistic and creative processes as 19 Ibid.

76

A. BREED

a new cultural form. In terms of cultural production, the material was divided into sections and the company explored ritual functions and actions within each section. The use of the term ritual emphasized a spiritual connection to the action and a meditative approach to the work. All actors remained on stage from the beginning of the performance until the end; to stay in the action and to each be a part of the energy and aesthetic of the piece. Asanbekov emphasized the need to understand the core of the Manas, not just to represent or to mimic, but to use the theatre as a transformative and ritualistic space: I think our nomadic theatre is the real national theatre. There are performances like in the Kyrgyz State Drama Theatre where the Manas epics are performed with men wearing long beards. These performances are a farce, a souvenir of the past. The presentations might be pretty, but there is nothing from the soul. The epics must use nomadic cultural traditions. There are connections between the Greek epics and the Manas epic. The Manaschi perform the Manas as the composer, the director, and the actor, all in one. The most important aspect of the Manas is to somehow translate the vision, emotion and action of the events to the audience as if it is happening in the present. We try to do this with the way we have adapted Manas to the stage. The Manaschi believe in spirits and we too must incorporate these beliefs, animal totems and links to the supernatural within our performances. For tolerance, we should make festivals of epics from different nations and use them in theatre.20

Here, Asanbekov describes the artistic process of reading, adapting, and applying Manas to the contemporary stage. The emphasis within the rehearsal space is to identify key qualities or characteristics of Manas as a cultural form to be performed with the intended goal of promoting tolerance. The ritual-like translation of Manas through the durational process of staying within the tone, rhythm and presence of the traditional or oral telling of Manas as told by a Manschi into the telling through an ensemble is note worthy. Aigine Cultural Research Centre in Kyrgyzstan has been studying, documenting, safeguarding and promoting cultural heritage incuding an inventory of 1075 sacred sites and recordings of the epic trilogy (Manas, Semetey, and Seitek). The research center

20 Ibid.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

77

created a sixty-seven-hour video compilation of epic recitation by fourteen Manaschi.21

Kyrgyz National Theatre The following section will provide an introduction to some of the national and state theatres in Kyrgyzstan to consider cultural production including the Kyrgyz National Opera and Ballet, Philharmonia and independently run theatre company Tunguch followed by the Osh Uzbek Theatre. Theatre and Performance Studies scholar Sruti Bala cites Williams’s proposal of culture as a form of material production, ‘in which the artistic practice interacts with or intervenes in a given social environment, or in the mode of navigating the boundaries between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, the artistic and the quitodian’ (Bala 2018: 18). The Kyrgyz Opera and Ballet22 was officially given this title in 1944. In 1937 the first drama theatre was produced, Altyn Kyz (Golden Girl) by three Russian dramatists.23 In 1939 Aychuirek was directed by Abdylas Maldybaev, one of the most acclaimed theatre directors in Kyrgyz history. Now, this performance, alongside one ballet Cholpon and another opera Manas is produced annually. These three productions are particularly rooted in Kyrgyz traditions and cultural forms. The Director of the Oper, Salmatov Timur, stated: There are a lot of influences of Kyrgyz art. Komuz is closer to Western art because of the construction of the music (the director was a Komuz musician and pianist). Thus, easier for Kyrgyz to listen to Western music. Our music is not similar to the Chinese, Indian, nor Arabic. For years, Kyrgyz were oriented to Russia and Europe under the Soviet system. It is easy for Kyrgyz music to be influenced. There is a difference between the North and the South of Kyrgyzstan. The South is more influenced by Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Iran. Kyrgyz art isn’t isolated, but keeps an open identity. For example, musical instruments like the Kriatz/Komuz/Jyot instruments are developing well. Currently, it is popular for the performances of epics.

21 See https://ichcourier.unesco-ichcap.org/article/aigine-cultural-research-center-kyr gyzstan. Last visited: May 28, 2020. 22 See https://medium.com/@kymbat1095/kyrgyz-national-opera-and-ballet-theatredd501ec30598. Last visited: August 21, 2018. 23 Rafis Abazov. Culture and Customs of the Central Asian Republics. Westport, CT, 2007.

78

A. BREED

Cholpon, Aychuirek, and Manas are all performances based on Manas and the eposes.

Here, Timur notes some of the regional differences and influences of cultural forms from the North and South of Kyrgyzstan and emphasizes the popularity of Manas as both a contemporary and traditional form. Similarly, Sultanova links Soviet appropriation of cultural forms for ideological purposes in the 1930s stating: ‘The new cultural policy favored mass art on a large scale, in keeping with modern life, ‘taken out of the narrow national confines and opened to boundless internationalism.’ That was achieved by encouraging amateur art—large companies of amateur musicians, sometimes reinforced with a few professionals, performing new genres’ (Sultanova 2011: 8). On 23 May 2014 the Philharmonia produced a concert in honor of Akyn Aaly Tokombaev. Tokombaev was imprisoned in Siberia, alongside other Akyn, for using improvisatory poetry for the resistance against the Soviet Union. An Akyn is an improvising poet or singer who is usually accompanied by an instrument like the komuz which is a traditional fretless string instrument often made to sound like the footsteps of horses. Sultanova states: ‘New conditions demanded an adaptation of the most venerated ancient Asian genre—the art of improviser-poets…A Kazakh improviser-poet usually freely adapts a stock of pre-set motifs to fit any current situation. The newspapers and magazines of the 1930s reveal that akyns were given literary secretaries, or consultants, who were supposed to document the singers’ improvisations (Sultanova 2011: 14). There are similarities and difference between the Akyn and the Manaschi: while both could be noted as containing an improvisational quality of telling, the Akyn use shorter poems and often perform for comedic affect while the Manaschi are tellers of the larger renditions of the Manas trilogy and are said to be divine orators of Manas and his legendary companions. The performance was skillfully and artfully staged to move between songs, dances, and music staged during Soviet times to the integration of traditional Kyrgyz music and dance as staged through a revolving red yurt that would spin between one art form, culture or period to another. The performance crossed between Soviet, Russian and Kyrgyz Culture with a mix of Eastern and Western European musical influences emphasizing internationalism and the link between old and new.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

79

This same awareness of the work of ensemble and emphasis on amateur art clubs was mirrored in the work of youth theatre company Tunguch that produced a piece of movement-theatre entitled Simul; originally produced and performed in October 2013. In contrast to the government funded theatre houses, Tunguch is the only privately owned and operated youth theatre in Kyrgyzstan, with an international reputation, being invited to several international festivals and performing in Iran, China, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Columbia, and Germany. The artistic director, Jamal Seidakhmatova, is a well-known actor in Kyrgyzstan. Seidakhmatova stated that the reason she opted to run a privately funded theatre was so that she would have freedom from the government. One particular production, Love’s Beginning, was about how the government was selling land to China. The government threatened her when the production was performed, but she did not close the show. Seidakhmatova stated: ‘When you work for state theatre, they have a plan and you have to do what they want. Here, I can do whatever my heart desires. I am currently working on Romeo and Juliet in the Chui Oblast where Juliet is an Uzbek and Romeo is a Kyrgz.’ The company performed scenes from Simul in their theatre located in Bishkek; a renovated space with high molded ceilings with a net roof covered with leaves. There was a wood center run-way with raised platforms on either end and a proscenium arch stage. The following description is derived from notes taken during the performance: The room darkened and one could hear the sound of water. Figures on stage were illuminated to reveal white deer-like creatures symbolizing Bug ene, the mother of all Kyrgyz, growing from a stationary position to standing and walking with the elegance and grace of elk in the forest – legs strutting high into the air, arms protruding out as if dashing through long grass. Deer, monkeys and lions rolled, somersaulted, jumped and paced over and around each other. Each animal had his or her own distinguishable sound and movement. At one point, a lone deer is struck by a gun and falls to the ground. Other animals are also shot down and the animals begin to follow the same movements. The last animal shot down was the lion. Another artist linked the symbolization of the lion to Manas. There is then a resurrection of the initial lone female deer who takes her blood (in the form of a red scarf) and moves across the room to rub the other animals. This action was used to symbolize the cultural tradition of washing with blood to bring new life.

80

A. BREED

During a post-show question and answer session, youth performers emphasized the interconnection between conflict as an evolution between the destruction of environment, animals, and humans. Seidakhmatova stated the problems that they stage are about global problems, ‘[t]he necessity to bring things into balance.’ Tunguch was founded in 1990, one-year prior to the fall of the Soviet Union; while the youth theatre was established in 2010. Seidakhmatova published an advertisement for company members through the local newspaper. Instead of auditioning the youth, she accepted the first ones who applied. Seidakhmatova stated: ‘[m]any of the youth are from poor backgrounds and might not even demonstrate noted talent. However, they have all risen to a professional standard of performance.’ Four years ago, they produced a rendition of a bard or Manaschi. Tunguch pride themselves in working with experimental techniques. Seidakhmatova noted that everyday they work with their bodies and voices until the performers are like elastic, flexible and able to respond easily. The former Minister of Culture who attended the production, Sultan Raev, stated: ‘You can see in how they move. They have nature and the environment in their bodies already.’ The three examples of Houses of Culture or theatres in Kyrgyzstan illustrate the integration of Manas and traditional forms like Akyn. In addition, there is the prevalence and importance of nature and the use of cultural forms to ‘bring things into balance.’ I will explore the use of theatre to address conflict as noted in some of the examples of how Akyn were used as resistance during the Soviet era and as a mediating factor to bring things into balance using the example of the Osh Uzbek Theatre.

Osh Uzbek Theatre The Osh Uzbek Theatre24 was the first theatre to be established in Kyrgyzstan, officially founded in 1914. The Director of Osh Uzbek Theatre, Rohmonov Lutsulla, provided a brief history of the theatre, noting that the inaugural production was Pader Kush. The theatre ensemble would devise and direct the productions together, in contrast to assigning a directorial role. Later in 1919, Manzu Uighur was the first official director of the theatre who directed the production Turkestan Healer. Women were not allowed to perform with the theatre troupe until 1920. 24 Liu Morgan provides an insightful reflection on urban ethnic Uzbek’s in Osh in his monograph Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

81

During an interview with the Director of Semetei, Mamadjenov Nebidjou, he noted that following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 the mission of the theatre was to create a bridge between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz community. He stated: ‘This performance demonstrates that nations in Central Asia are very close to each other. By producing Semetei, we are sending a message that we should respect each other because we are similar.’ This same emphasis was noted in a few interviews; that Uzbeks and Kyrgyz live together closely in the same community and that there are many similarities. Nebidjou continued: ‘It would be different if an Uzbek came directly from Uzbekistan, but for us, many of our families have been in Kyrgyzstan for generations (probably even before it was called Kyrgyzstan and claimed as Kyrgyz territory) and our cultures have naturally had elements of integration and assimilation that make us more similar than different.’ Although the Osh Uzbek Theatre produced and performed Semetei, the artists were clear that the epic was from Kyrgyzstan, but that the epic illustrated crosscultural and cross-regional friendship ties as Semetei spent his childhood as a refugee in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Nebidjou stated: ‘Manas belongs purely to the Kyrgyz people. But, Manas called on people to be friendly with other nations and to strengthen friendship ties.’ In this way, the Uzbek Theatre is following the guidance and directive of Manas as part of a national and political ideology. According to Nebidjou, the first President of independent Kyrgyzstan Askar Akayev (who presided from 1990 to 2005) developed a seven principal approach to instill Kyrgyz nationalism25 : 1. The undividable unity of all the people, its head in one collar, its arm in one sleeve. 2. Accord, friendship and cooperation between nationalities. 3. Ethnic pride and clear conscience. 4. Through relentless work and advanced industry and science, wellbeing and prosperity are aspired. 5. Humanism, nobility, and forgiveness. 6. Having a sweet relation with nature.

25 See https:www.academia.edu/379832/A_State_of_Passion_The_Use_of_Ethnogene sis_in_Kyrgyzstan. Last visited: June 5, 2014.

82

A. BREED

7. Strengthening the Kyrgyz government and guarding her like an eye’s pupil.26 Here, the seven principals emphasise accord, friendship and cooperation between nationalities. The production Semetei fused Uzbek culture with the Kyrgyz epic. The production was performed by Uzbek performers in the Uzbek language with Uzbek dances and Uzbek doyra drum. Nebidjou stated that they added the komuz instrument as a symbol of Kyrgyz people. The scenery contained text that extoled virtues related to dialogue and friendship. Nebidjou reflected that there was no resistance from the general audience that Uzbek actors were performing the Manas, nor that that Manas was staged at an Uzbek theatre. He stated: ‘Since our Uzbek actors live with Kyrgyz, we know the Kyrgyz culture and customs. We know them. We are Kyrgyz Uzbeks. We have a mission to tell the Manas story in the language of theatre for Uzbek schools. There are twenty-two Uzbek schools in Osh. Through this performance, Uzbek children will learn a little bit about Manas.’ He notes that Manas will be taught through the ‘language of theatre,’ emphasizing perhaps an alternative and mediating factor to communicate between Kyrgyz and Uzbek cultures. Beyond the metaphorical concept of the ‘language of theatre’ the performance of Semetei was performed in Uzbek. Nebidjou continued: ‘We haven’t yet produced Manas (part one of the three parts: Manas, Semetei, and Seitek). But, it is our intention to perform Manas in four years for the 100th anniversary of the theatre.’ Amidst some of the prominent political and artistic audience members who attended the premiere on 29 May was the wife and son of a famous Kyryz dramaturg Jelil Sodynov who originally wrote Semetei: ‘He has since passed away, but his wife and son attended the performance yesterday. They cried and expressed how well the production had been staged and expressed their deep gratitude.’ Thirty years later, Nebidjou directed the very production in which he had previously performed Semetei as a young and inexperienced actor. He states: ‘When I was performing, I felt like I had a great responsibility. The director worked hard to prepare me.’ The production was a part of the repertoire for ten years played by various actors. ‘Now, I prepared another actor as Semetei. The actor had never played such a big role. Kanikaa is a new actor as well. I wanted the actors to open themselves so

26 Translation by Nienke van der Heide. Email communication, 31 October 2017.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

83

that they would get pleasure from playing. As an actor and as a director, I wanted to show the Kyrgyz spirit and lifestyle. What I observed from the Kyrgyz audience, was that they had great pleasure from the production and were satisfied.’ In the production that I attended on 30 May, the mixed Kyrgyz and Uzbek audience often made exclamations during the production and cheered when Semetei entered through the audience to return to his homeland Talas. In an interview with the actors who played Kanykei and Semetei, they reflected upon their roles in relation to overarching social and political issues. The actress playing Kanykei stated: ‘The character of Kanykei is powerful. There are few such women like this today.’ There are several prominent women in Kyrgyz history, including Kurmanjan Datka who presided as the Khan of Kyrgyzstan after her husband’s reign was forfeited due to foul play. Alongside the use of Manas to uphold values like mutual understanding and tolerance, the emphasis of gender is addressed beyond the conflicts related to ethnicity. She continued: ‘There are many important lessons in the production. My character, Kanykei desires to kill herself after the murder of Manas, but decides to live for Semetei. She gives him to her brother to hide his true identity. These are forms of sacrifice for her son to return to Kyrgyzstan and to continue the work of Manas.’ The actor playing Semetei extended the importance of his character to unite the Kyrgyz tribes that were divided again after Manas’ death. In this way, the Uzbek Theatre produced and performed Semetei, often revered as the spirit of Kyrgyzstan, to emphasis the multi-ethnic and cross border alliances that were necessary for the success of Manas, Semetei, and Seitek. When asked about the response to the Osh Riots primarily targeted against Uzbeks in June 2020 that resulted in the theatre being largely burned down, Nebidjou stated: ‘The government and international donors rebuilt our stage and audience seating. It is brand new. We had old dysfunctional equipment before. Now, the technical equipment like the lighting and revolving stage is brand new and was donated by the Japanese government. The president at the time, Rosa Otunbayeva, helped the theatre. Seeing this support from the government of Kyrgyzstan and internationally, inspired our actors.’ Nebidjou stated that there was no difference between the theatre pre-2010 events and after 2010 events. Although the rhetoric of the artistic staff from the Uzbek Theatre is clearly one that focuses on how to work together with an ideological reconstruction of Manas , the fact that the production was performed by Uzbek performers in the Uzbek language with primarily Uzbek cultural

84

A. BREED

forms is inherently a deeply political act since Manas has increasingly been garnered as a Kyrgyz cultural form to strengthen Kyrgyz nationalism.

Conclusion: Manas as an Interweaving Text The examples of productions staged within the government and nongovernment houses of culture both illustrate the representation of culture, but also how culture might manifest as the signifying system through which a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored. Sakhna Nomadic Theatre and Osh Uzbek Theatre demonstrated the use of Manas as an interweaving text that can be adapted, re-written and expanded to nurture inter-ethnic and artistic explorations. Here, there are some contradictions and tensions between how Manas can serve on a local level through its flexible application to a specific community and how Manas has been performed and implemented on a national level in terms of political ideology and notions of sovereignty. Howard and Kasmambetov state: ‘Arguably, too, while the seven principles make the epic the main source of spiritual guidance for [the] reborn nation, isolating them and separating them as single principles threatens the organic, all-encompassing nature of the epic.’27 It is the duality between the local and national levels that demonstrates the tension between the fluidity of Manas as a form that can be improvised according to its audiences and contexts and the use of Manas toward nationalism. I would extend the potential to think with performance as a vehicle to explore the nuanced perceptions of environment by ‘moving about in it, exploring it, attending to it, ever alert to the signs by which it is revealed’ through an embodied sense of place and space articulated through cultural forms.28 I close with a quote from Asanbekov that highlights the association between form and nature stating: ‘In nature, the perfection and artistry is already in the form, like patterns of frost on glass.’ Manas inherently interweaves across boundaries and ethnicities; the perfection and artistry is already in the cultural form.29 The examples provided illustrate the Manas epic as an improvisatory form that illuminates past and present

27 Howard and Kasmambetov. Singing the Kyrgyz Manas, p. 112. 28 Ingold. The Perception of the Environment, p. 55. 29 Ibid., p. 57.

4

EPIC PERFORMANCES IN CENTRAL ASIA

85

landscapes as noted by Isakov, permeates performance with the ritual of telling through rhythmic verses as noted by Asanbekov and reconsiders social relations as noted by Nebidjou. This chapter has highlighted some of the potential ways that Manas and cultural forms more broadly can be used as an interweaving text between ancient traditions and histories and contemporary social, cultural, and political contexts.

References Abazov, R. (2007). Culture and Customs of the Central Asian Republics. Westport: Greenwood Press. Adams, L. L. (2005). Modernity, Postcolonialism, and Theatrical Form in Uzbekistan. Slavic Review 64(2): 333–354. Adams, L. L. (2010). The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan (Politics, History, and Culture). Durham: Duke University Press. Bala, S. (2018). The Gestures of Participatory Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Breed, A. (2015). Environmental Aesthetics, Social Engagement and Aesthetic Experiences in Central Asia. Research in Drama Education 20(1): 87–99. Cohen, C. (2020). Reimagining Transitional Justice. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 14: 1–13. Gullette, D. and Heathershaw, J. (2015). The Affective Politics of Sovereignty: Reflecting on the 2010 Conflict in Kyrgyzstan. Nationalities Papers 43(1): 122–139. Howard, K. and Kasmambetov, S. (2011). Singing the Kygyz Manas: Saparbek Kasmambetov’s recitation of epic poetry. Kent: Global Oriental. Huntington, S. P. (1997). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd. I˘gmen, A. (2012). Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London and New York: Routledge. Leavy, P. (2015). Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. Guilford Press. Liu, M. Y. (2012). Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. May, W. (2004). Manas: The Kyrgyz Heroic Epos in Four Parts. Raritet. Sepänmaa, Y. (1986). The Beauty of Environment: A General Model for Environmental Aesthetics. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeaka-Temia. Sultanova, R. (2011). From Shamanism to Sufism: Women, Islam and Culture in Central Asia. London: I.B. Tauris.

86

A. BREED

van der Heide, N. (2015). Spirited Performance: The Manas Epic and Society in Kyrgyzstan. Bremen: EHV Academicpress. Williams, R. (1981). The Sociology of Culture. New York: Schocken Books.

CHAPTER 5

Poets of the People: Learning to Make Culture in Kazakhstan Eva-Marie Dubuisson

Abstract This chapter presents an ethnography of the performance tradition of aitys (oral improvisational poetry) as it is realized in Kazakhstan today. Together with other narrative and musical cultural forms, aitys was nationalized as Kazakh culture in the socialist republican model of the Soviet system, and has transitioned to become a major symbol of ethnicized identity and heritage, promoted by a nationalist state. However, such promotion proves somewhat superficial, as the legacy of Russian cultural and linguistic hegemony continues to compete with efforts to valorize a more specifically Kazakh identity today. Despite the rhetoric of Kazakh nation-branding, there are many institutional and ideological obstacles, to the promotion of cultural forms which may now be considered ‘folkloric’ or non-contemporary. Centering on the perspectives of aitys teachers and poets, as well as rural villagers, regional offices of cultural affairs, and elite patrons alike, this chapter outlines the practical efforts and challenges facing

E.-M. Dubuisson (B) Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_5

87

88

E.-M. DUBUISSON

the broad community of people in Kazakhstan who actively work to maintain aitys poetry (and by extension, Kazakh language) as a living tradition, rather than a cultural legacy of the past. Keywords Aitys poetry · Oral tradition · Kazakh language · Language ideology · Post-colonial nation-building · Cultural nationalism

In Kazakhstan’s recent decades of independence, prominent symbolic showcasing of Kazakh cultural forms as a fundament of nation-branding (Marat 2009; cf Cummings 2010; Laruelle 2016a) sometimes disguises a lack of real support for Kazakh language and culture at the level of the everyday or even of politics, where ideologies and infrastructures from the Soviet period remain. The effort it takes to maintain local language and cultural traditions in the face of continuing Russian political hegemony in the region requires further interrogation. In this paper, I describe the relationships and structures of educational and social support within the community of improvisational aitys poetry (verbal dueling) in Kazakhstan. This performance art form, which presents poets in elaborate ethnic dress playing traditional instruments, is showcased at national holidays and celebrations across the country, and is therefore often associated with a Kazakh nationalism. Such national performances may well be considered a ‘mode or tool’ of nation-building—something which can ‘exist both empirically … and analytically… as a vantage point to explore changing dynamics and [the] social context of nation-building’ in Kazakhstan’ (Isaacs and Polesee 2016: 3; cf Adams and Rustemova 2009). In my ethnography of the teaching relationships and cultural organization, as well as the perception of this oral tradition and its (post) Soviet history among villagers, I aim to explain the complexities of language ideology and ethnic identity in a contemporary political and cultural environment, and the struggle to maintain these traditions.1

1 The material for this article is drawn from three years of doctoral research in Kaza-

khstan (2004–2006), supported by a Fulbright Award (2004), a Wenner-Gren fellowship (2006). I also gratefully acknowledge the support of a Eurasia Dissertation Writing Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council (2008–2009), and a Graduate Student Fellowship from the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities (2008–2009). This article is dedicated to the poet Orazaly and his soul-friends.

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

89

Aitys is an oral tradition found across an historic Turkic-Mongol geography in Eurasia; like many other musical and poetic traditions in other republics, it was partially coopted as a cultural tradition in the Soviet period for the purposes of nationality building in Kazakhstan, but has re-emerged across the region in the post-Soviet era as a semi-independent performance tradition, led by a series of regional and national cultural organizers. The contemporary world of aitys could helpfully be considered a ‘field’ in two basic ways: it is a ‘relational mode of cultural production,’ and it is ‘part of broader systems of exchange’ (Bourdieu 1993). Aitys is a sphere where one can see the production, circulation, and consumption of poetic expertise as a form of ‘symbolic goods’ (ibid.), and where success is equivalent to prestige founded on the dialectic of knowledge and recognition—a cultural competence that could potentially also translate into involvement in a political economy.2 Poets collude with cultural organizers and with political patrons in order to stage performances and to generate a mutualizing form of dialogic authority legitimated by a firm attachment to culture and history (Dubuisson 2013). The trajectory of each poet, from local to national, through the ladder of regional performances, mirrors the model of the previously Soviet system for cultural development.3 Through this trajectory, poets come to stand not only as successful performers, but also as models of a certain cultural ideal—reflected in their knowledge of history, language, costume, and even gendered comportment. This ‘ethnographic’ model of culture is one of Soviet nationalities ideology and policy (Hirsch 2005), but today is also deeply national: the cultural face of a young nation that has struggled to define itself beyond the legacy of the Soviet past and Russian cultural imperialism. Pride and grief function as two sides of the performance coin in this contemporary oral tradition. The poetic and musical traditions bring pride and satisfaction to artists, cultural organizers, and 2 On the category of cultural production under socialism see Verdery, K. (1995). National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press. For the comparative case of contemporary Uzbekistan, see Adams, L. (2010). The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 3 On the institutionalization and practices of Soviet ideological ‘culture-making’ at the local level, please see Grant, B. 1995. In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. For the comparative case in Kyrgyzstan, please see I˘gmen, A. 2012. Speaking Soviet With an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

90

E.-M. DUBUISSON

audiences. But the emotional unity of this community is also formed by a shared grief, the recognition that these traditions may have been partially lost or suppressed in the past. The periods of Russian and Soviet rule were described to me explicitly by practitioners and supporters as ‘colonial,’ and they therefore characterized the ongoing struggle to genuinely value Kazakh language and culture as a complexity of the postcolonial national present. However, the idea of the postcolonial nation in Kazakhstan is not quite so simple. The newly national government has made a concerted effort to establish a concretely ‘post-Soviet’ and newly national identity, and has put forth not only rhetoric but funds to support cultural projects ranging from monumentalization (Fauve 2015) to film (Isaacs 2018). However, as many analysts have noted, these projects often become spaces of contestation over the content of the ‘national’ because there are always underlying competing discourses of what and who the ‘nation’ is to be in Kazakhstan—an ethnic majority, a multicultural plurality, or a transnational cosmopolitan (Laruelle 2016b). Each of those categories in turn, seems to be connected to a temporal logic– unified past, civic present, global future. These disjunctures are the specific heritage of the Soviet nationalities framework—not only its failure to match local realities, but as well the deep irony that ‘the construction and promotion of ethnicized national identities as the foundation of the multi-ethnic state was detrimental to a strictly political identity of the Soviet state’ (Omelicheva 2014: xiv). By definition, the ‘nation’ was loyal to a cultural center of power in Moscow. That cleavage—between national and socialist identity—has created gaps and inconsistencies, which are exploited by government leaders in the newly national context. Kazakhstan’s regional and national governments and the ruling elites are by no means a homogenous group. There are not only fractures along linguistic lines (Russian and Kazakh speaking), or between civic and ethnic models of nation-building, but within the very category of ethnic nationalism itself. 4 However, of all these positions, it is the 4 On the relationship between language and modes of nationhood see Sharipova, D. et al. (2017). ‘The Determinants of Civic and Ethnic Nationalisms in Kazakhstan: Evidence from the Grass-Roots Level.’ Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 23:2, 203–226, where the authors argue, ‘Some Kazakh nationalist groups, often- times referred as ‘national-patriots’ in the domestic political discourse, have argued that usage of the Kazakh language should be expanded and criticized the government on many occasions for not being persistent enough in its efforts to promote the Kazakh language. At the same time,

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

91

Kazakh nation-patriots (yltshylar) who find themselves most silenced, needing to act in covert ways to promote their goal of restoring the Kazakh language and achieving statehood. Cultural sociologist Diana Kudaibergenova argues that is precisely because those leaders modeling a postcolonial ethnic nationalism cannot actually speak openly that we can see the ‘deep political insecurity intrinsic to … these narratives’ (2016: 923). There is a profound irony here, that ‘Kazakhstan’s political postcoloniality is defined precisely by the elites’ inability to openly react against the former colonising regime’ (ibid.) Rather, the national government—in its use and appropriation of ethnic national symbols and performances, has both coopted and somewhat watered down the discourse of postcolonialism, into the ‘recovery’ and celebration of some form of culture, without political change. The contemporary field of cultural production is mired precisely inside these forms of structural and institutional irony. The oral poetic tradition of aitys could be seen as folklore coopted by the state. However, in modern performances poets themselves are exploiting the very category of ‘folklore’ in which they have been cast, in order to ‘conceptualize [it as a] mode of knowledge and expression’ (Fabian 1990: 271–273). In so doing, performers capitalize upon the very power of folklore to typify, decontextualize, and even to reduce complexity, ‘especially where folklore comes to symbolize ethnicity;’ herein the people of the nation are conferred an authenticity (ibid.) Singing exclusively in the Kazakh language and using a rich repertoire of cultural and historical metaphor and reference, poets are the bearers of an ‘authoritative language style’ (Bourdieu 1991: 58) that is markedly consequential in a fractured post-Soviet national political environment. It is important here to pay attention to ‘who’ is speaking in aitys performances; ultimately, by the time poets reach the level of (inter)national competition, they have trained for many years, and give voice not only as themselves, but they speak also as and for a variety of relationships built through time, working toward representing the whole of ‘the people’ (in Kazakh yel ). In a post-Soviet national context where Kazakh language and culture are simultaneously valorized and marginalized, performances

many other groups, primarily Russophone non-Kazakh minorities, see the expansion of Kazakh as a potential threat to the Russian language and, hence, to their status and role in the country’ (209).

92

E.-M. DUBUISSON

reflect the defiant optimism that aitys is and will continue to be meaningful not as a folkloric relic, but as a living tradition. Ultimately, the power of performance is not only to reflect some reality, but to change the categories of meaning in the world itself (Turner 1987).

Poets’ Coming-Into-Being One of the most well-known poets on the national circuit at the time of my research (2004–2006)5 was Orazaly Dosbosynov from Almaty, whose experiences of coming to be part of the aitys community were quite typical of many poets. In 1989, as the government acted to mediate rising waves of ethnic nationalistic activity, the Central Education Committee sent an order that aitys were to be included in school curricula countrywide. Orazaly was in fifth grade in a village (in Kazakh aul ) near Taldykorgan at the time. He had a reputation as a prankster, and his classmates put him up to participate in the school’s first aitys. He was so nervous about it that he did not tell anyone he’d been invited, and on the Sunday of the competition, he ran out to the field to walk with the sheep. One of his classmates came to find him there, frantic: ‘The competition’s starting! You have to go!!’ So Orazaly went to his mother to ask permission. ‘If you can improvise,’ she told him, ‘why on earth aren’t you already [at the competition]?!’ Orazaly won that day, and the next aitys, and the next. He went to regionals and won that, too. His first entry to the national scene was at a republican aitys for the 175th anniversary of the aitys akhyn Suyinbai the following year.6 His win there confirmed his reputation, and he had been performing at that highest level ever since, traveling to Kyrgyzstan and even to Russia to represent aitys in Kazakhstan. At the Kazakh National University where he was teaching journalism, Orazaly also started an aitys program, in which he mentored a group of ten students. He trained them to conceive of knowledge in the form

5 As a part of my research I attended dozens of performances across Kazakhstan (as well as Kyrgyzstan and Russia) and interviewed poets, cultural organizers, and sponsors (politicians and businessmen). I was a participant-observer in local offices of cultural affairs in three different regions of the country, as well as in a school for the artistically gifted for several months. 6 Suyinbai Aronoly was a nineteenth-century Kazakh poet, who is seen to be part of a line of poets in his family and region, and whose shrine site is now a national memorial.

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

93

of poetry, quite literally at first by repeating information in the form of rhyme. The second major skill in aitys is to learn to play in front of an audience, something which you have to learn just by doing it. Orazaly, who has throngs of ardent fans (Kaz: zhankuierler) in Almaty, describes his relationship to his audience as being like friends. ‘It’s fun,’ he said urgently to me at the café where we had our first interview. ‘Your soul is on fire. If people like your words they go crazy, people’s reaction shows if they accept your words. If you’re boring people don’t even clap.’ Orazaly, like most of the poets I met, feels a huge responsibility in front of people, not only to entertain them or to represent them, but also to establish this deeper kind of ‘friendship’ with them. The knowledge for aitys does come from literature and history, Orazaly thinks, not always from universities, but also from the people themselves, and particularly from Ak Sakaldar (white-beards, elders) around the country. ‘They’re like a living encyclopedia of language and history! There are certain people who keep the knowledge and poems of the last centuries and pass them to the new generation. One of these was the poet Kolmambet Bulekbaev in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who was famous for singing against the Russian government.’7 When Orazaly performs, he always refers to himself as ‘the foal of Kolmambet,’ which is a way of locating himself as a Kazakh nationalist in the contemporary post-Soviet political landscape. This metaphoric kinship is also a way to tie himself to his home region, which he also represents in every performance. Typical of aitys poets, Orazaly believes his talent to be genetic.8 But poets must, he thinks, cultivate this talent by becoming deeply socialized within the communities of learning in the aitys tradition, which they can then claim together with their ancestry. Toward the end of my first year of research, after I had interviewed Orazaly and many other poets, attended their performances, and even traveled with them, I went to visit the family of friends in their village in Orazaly’s hometown region. Unbeknownst to me, in honor of my visit,

7 According to public biography, Kolmambet Bulekbaev born in Almaty in 1877, served in the Soviet army but was arrested in 1937 during the waves of political repression. 8 Orazaly has poets in both his mother’s and father’s lineage. One of his father’s brothers was a sure akhyn, meaning a poet who was able to sing for an exceptionally long duration. Orazaly’s talent is in improvisational and verbal dueling; in the aitys form, where he and an opponent sing back and forth to one another for a few minutes at a time, and must respond to one another and create their poetry in the moment.

94

E.-M. DUBUISSON

the family had invited the aul’s Kazakh teacher to have tea with us one afternoon, so that he could teach me about aitys. Upon meeting him, I hurried to retrieve my notebook and pen, listening and writing while he talked; several neighbors and friends had also gathered in the living room to hear what he would say. An older, large friendly man wearing a suit and a Kazakh hat, our visitor drank tea propped up on a small stool with pillows, while the rest of us sat around the room on padded mats (Kaz: kurpeler). This Ak Sakal (elder, literally ‘white beard’) told us that aitys had ‘survived’ the Soviet times, coming to the present day: ‘There was a time when the country slept, but now more traditional things are coming back… people’s oral traditions were strong, passed down generation to generation—rhetorical devices and sayings (makal mætel’ ) were also passed down. Not everybody could use this kind of language, there were gifted individuals who passed along this knowledge together with aitys. The goal was to pass it down the line to the seventh generation— let’s say there was a poet [in one generation]—his talent could appear later down the line, because being a poet can be passed through the generations, and can even skip a few generations.’ At this point our hostess joked that when a poet is born and his or her talent becomes obvious, only a mother knows for sure where it might have come from! She smiled broadly and winked, making the Ak Sakal laugh. But he also noted, ‘If a child socializes with other artists and musicians, then a poetic talent could [also] come from that.’ For example, in the past performers traveled around the villages (Kaz: auldar) singing, together with other entertainers, and these groups passed along news from other regions—and in that group, there was always a leader, someone that others in the group would try to support, to amplify his talent. Similarly, if a child somewhere in a village shows talent, if he has potential and is strong, then he too should be separated out and supported—who knows, that talent might be greater than the original leader: here is the new leader. These were the people’s poets, they were free (not like the palace poets who worked only for the khan)—and these people’s poets were the ones who stayed in history.’ I was struck by this description, because Orazaly had told me something very similar about performing today: poets talk about politics, but the role of a poet is not like that of a journalist, not to ‘report’ news. Rather, Orazaly contends that poets should gather the goings-on from around the country, and in talking

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

95

about them in performance they are ‘expressing an attitude, the people’s attitude about that information.’9 Here a young unmarried brother in the family, who worked in the city, interrupted the old man’s narrative to ask a question in Russian: is it possible to translate these poems? Because he’s heard that Kazakh is such a ‘rich language’ and it’s too difficult for people to understand? The old man shook his head in frustration, answering that ‘city folks don’t understand—they don’t always pay attention to aitys. But the poets who participate in aitys, even the ones we see on TV—they’re all from the aul, and that’s why they know Kazakh!’ His statement created a small bit of tension, because in our small audience was a mixed group of speakers, ranging from monolingual Kazakh (some of the smaller children and men, who had worked in the village their whole lives) to bilingual (most of the women, who had returned to the village to marry after college in the city), to dominantly Russian speakers, like the younger brother who had asked the question. Tension was quickly broken though, upon the arrival of another neighbor and her daughter, who had come over to listen and to have tea and a cookie, and everyone went to greet them. When they entered our room, the Ak Sakal joked, ‘Look at all Eva’s writing about me!’ and the mother said to her daughter, ‘Yes, you can be proud to say, ‘I am Kazakh!’

Language and Ideology The concern about language, translation, and urban and rural audiences expressed by the Ak Sakal in the ethnographic fragment above is indicative of a discrepancy in attitudes toward Kazakh language and culture versus that of Russian in a divided post-Soviet context. The Kazakh language has millions of speakers and is of course also deeply ‘transnational,’ both in the sense that it is historically related to other Turkic languages spoken across Inner Asia from Turkey to Xinjiang, but also quite literally in that hundreds of thousands of speakers live outside Kazakhstan 9 Personal interview, 28 April 2004; Both Orazaly and later the Ak Sakal in the village stressed to me that not all aitys is political—there is aitys at a wedding—for example if the wife is coming from a different aul, they might bring a poet to compete with one from the husband’s aul; or to sing ‘zhar zhar,’ which comes from ‘zar zar,’ the sad feelings that the bride’s family has when they give bridewwealth and their daughter goes to live with her husband’s family. He also mentions ‘crying songs’ (Kaz: syngsu), when a new bride sings for her aul and for her childhood, she sings quietly and asks forgiveness for leaving.

96

E.-M. DUBUISSON

itself. Nonetheless, in the symbolic economy of language and culture, where different ways of speaking give speakers social and political ‘capital,’ (Bourdieu 1991), knowing the Kazakh language is not always seen to enable speakers or to provide a global upward mobility in the way that Russian can. In the decades since independence, it has been the case that many Kazakhs, particularly urban youth, have seen Kazakh language as rural, tied deeply to family; the language that grandparents speak at home. Russian, by contrast, has been practical to operate in everyday urban spaces, to have an upwardly mobile job, and of course, to link to the entire former Soviet Union—a language ideology obviously tied to continued Russian political and economic influence in the post-Soviet period.10 However, an increasing nationalist trend both at the regional and national levels has meant that rhetoric about Kazakh language and culture are growing as the Kazakh ethnic population grows, and the discrepancy between ‘Russian urban’ and ‘Kazakh rural’ spaces begins to diminish. National education projects are typically multilingual, usually including English as well. Different segments of the population (including government leaders) are frankly divided on whether there is a future associated with Kazakh language and cultural traditions, given the country’s increasingly strategic geopolitical position and role.11 When I asked young urban Kazakhs why they were not interested in aitys performances, the overwhelming answer was that aitys is old fashioned, or too difficult to understand. That answer is multilayered. These

10 Russian-language schools in Kazakhstan were markedly better equipped with books and materials in Kazakhstan through the mid post-Soviet period, while Kazakh languageschools remained largely rural and underserved, angering Kazakh nationalists (Fierman 2006). It is important to note that Kazakhstan has since adopted a new trilingual language policy, including English now as an official language for schooling, which has created another wave of projects and transformations, to varying degrees of success (see for example Moldagazinova 2019 and Zhilbaev et al. 2019). On the relationship of linguistic affiliation to contemporary discourses of civic and ethnic nationalism, see Sharipova et al. (2017). 11 It is important to note that, unlike other Soviet republics in the Baltics and even in Central Asia, the territory of Kazakhstan housed huge population transfers of other nationalities, including those deported (Westren 2012) from the Caucasus and eastern regions of the Soviet Union (Koreans) as well as large numbers of ethnic Russians, coming to work in the space, nuclear, and other industrial programs. Kazakhstan thus experienced a different demographic and affective reality in the Soviet and post-Soviet period, than even some of its closest neighbors.

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

97

are insults or backhanded compliments: people would explain to me that the metaphors poets use are so rich and complicated, so deeply imbued with ‘special’ cultural and historical understanding, that ‘ordinary people’ cannot follow. ‘Our grandparents like that kind of thing better,’ said several students in the city when I chatted with them informally. The understanding of aitys something historic, or the attribution of exceptional knowledge to poets, again deflect attention away from the fact that at the heart of the matter is knowledge of Kazakh language and culture. To say that aitys itself is somehow inherently ‘too old or too difficult’ displaces the responsibility for fun and comprehension to poets rather than the admission that, if one does not speak Kazakh well, of course the performances will be more difficult to follow or appreciate. When I worked with aitys poets, including Orazaly, they were happy that I had come to research Kazakh poetry, but they were understandably disappointed that I spoke Russian better than Kazakh—Orazaly at one point even grew a bit angry with me. When I explained to them that when I wrote about their words and performances, I would have to translate to English, the poets were relatively comfortable with that, as long as I myself had a poetic sensibility and help in the process. However, most poets were distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of their poetry being translated into the Russian language, to make it more accessible to Russian-speaking Kazakhs. A cultural organizer (one of those responsible for the scheduling and staging of poetry performances) explained to me that it is not possible to translate this poetry into Russian: ‘The meaning is lost because [the translation] is too simple and lacks quality. But in Kazakh it is wonderful—there is a specialness to the language—its rhythm—and in translation it doesn’t work.’12 Genres of oral, epic, and musical traditions in Central Asia were classified as cultural ‘folklore’ during the Soviet period, and modified versions were inducted into the canon of Soviet nationalities performance in each republic.13 Such forms were at once necessary but devalued in the twofaced cultural nation of the ‘core’ of Soviet citizenship, just as Kazakh language and education became underfunded and marginalized) in the face of Soviet Russian-language schools, oriented toward the cultural 12 Personal interview, 21 February 2006. 13 In the Kazakh SSR, the category of aitys in was famously documented by folklorist

Mukhtar Auezov, who has since become a national hero in his own right. He authored a multitude of volumes on Kazakh oral literature, including specifically on aitys (e.g., 1964).

98

E.-M. DUBUISSON

center of Moscow.14 The complicated and painful legacy of this nationality construction in Kazakhstan—the partialness and absence that it bears, as well as its performative nature –is the inheritance of artists, cultural organizers, and audiences in Kazakhstan today. The very strong sentiment and argument that poetry like aitys is ‘necessary’ for ‘ordinary people’ must be understood in the history of extended Russian cultural imperialism in Central Asia. This is a condition which persists in the present despite the heavy rhetoric of ethnic nationalism from the post-Soviet government, and it is this form of historical grief that is now embodied in claims about language. The claim that language in aitys poetry (or other oral traditions such as epic song) is ‘extraordinary,’ or that it ‘cannot be translated,’ is a real reflection of the specific architecture of song features like rhythm and rhyme in an agglutinative language. It is also true that most poets are well-educated and their metaphors are multilayered and well-practiced. But I see ‘the impossibility of translation’ also very much as a classic political claim in any nationalist context: nationalists argue that indigenous languages are inseparable from their cultural worlds, and both are to be valued and respected, rather than cast aside as backwardness or folklore in the face of the colonial civilization or culture. The shunning of Russian translation reflects practical or technical difficulty, but also belies an ideology of postcolonial rejection and internal freedom. In subverting the prescribed formula of ‘generic folklore’ performance, perhaps in this case it is accurate to say that the empire is ‘singing back.’15

Poetry for the People Because aitys poets are seen to voice ‘the truth of the people’ and because there is political content and criticism possible in different genres of aitys, this improvisatory poetry is often referred to by artists and audiences alike as ‘the democracy of the steppe,’ a description which invokes not only cultural heritage, but also a living tradition of political participation 14 Omelicheva (2014, p. xiv). On nation-building in the former Soviet Union and the double bind of cultural and socialist citizenship and the logic of inter-republican division in the Soviet Union, see Hirsch (2005), Martin (2001), Slezkine (1994), and Suny (1998). 15 Here I am playing on the classic title of Ashcroft, et al., eds. (1989) The Empire Writes Back. On performance as a mode of the articulation and subversion of power in a postcolonial context, see also Fabian (1990).

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

99

and cultural sovereignty (Dubuisson 2010). These values are threatened by the diminishment of cultural performance. Back in the village living room with my friends’ family and neighbors, the elder Kazakh teacher explained the stakes of this tradition: ‘In Soviet times ‘freedom of speech’ didn’t exist—you weren’t raising the family or the Kazakh people, but rather the communist party. People were focused on different heroes— heroes of work and labor. In the 1980s and 1990s, freedom of speech increased, and led back to the kind of aitys we see today.’ From my work with national aitys organizers and historians in Kazakhstan, I know that they worked explicitly to encourage the inclusion of social and political commentary in contemporary aitys, as they see this as part of the true heritage of the oral tradition, in addition to sharing news, genealogies, and jokes or witty insults. Here the younger brother in the household jumped into interrupt again, saying that probably people in the city think that aitys is just a show and so they dismiss it—poets are in it just to win prizes, for the money or the fame. But the Ak Sakal was emphatic: ‘Aitys today is necessary for ordinary people. It is not for the fancy people in power, because they don’t care. Poets tell the truth and about what is going on for people in the aul; they talk about how things really are.’ The Ak Sakal spoke rhetorically to his young urban relative: ‘Who is going to judge the worth of performances today? Practically speaking, it will be the president, or the parliament, or the cultural organizers. Poets won’t say ‘no’ to prizes— who can afford to turn down a car or a new apartment? But honestly,’ the teacher concluded, ‘in the end we need to value the opinion of the people. That is most valuable, because people know who has had a good performance, they can judge who’s doing well. The most important thing is ordinary people.’ In this stretch of conversation, this Kazakh elder is reflecting not only on the division between urban and rural, but also in the increasingly divided classes of the newly wealthy, versus those who are less well-todo; his description of how aitys performances are judged is also a veiled criticism of post-Soviet elites who have power but who are out of touch with the experience and needs of ‘ordinary people.’ Poets may take some money from wealthy sponsors, but ultimately in this division they are firmly on the side of ‘the people.’ Speaking with national organizers of aitys, I often heard them echo the same sentiments, despite the fact that they are themselves directly connected to wealthy sponsors including parliament members and party leaders. They would agree with the Ak

100

E.-M. DUBUISSON

Sakal, who argued, ‘The ordinary people can’t say anything—nobody’s listening to them! But poets gather information and their voice goes out like a newspaper. Aitys brings information and upbringing; if we don’t educate people, they will forget their history. We’ve had seventy years of a certain mentality—aitys represents a chance to do things democratically and openly, and to criticize [those in] power.’ Oral tradition and expressive culture provide spaces to express multiple agencies and criticism of the social order, be they in a public political oration or private lament. The formulaic language of poetry or epic narrative—as well as other repertoires of verbal art—signals the beginning or ‘keys’ a performance framework, and represents the potential for the expression of shared—even universal—experience (Bauman 1984).16 This is the ‘power’ of poets—these performers are cultural ‘insiders,’ poetry is the expression of interior spaces of a cultural world and logic, the precondition for belonging, and even for nationalism itself (Caton 1990). Though state actors may mimic, coopt, or essentialize such symbolic repertoires, ultimately they are of and for ordinary citizens (Herzfeld 2005). In projects of postcolonial nation building, the genealogy of oral tradition can structure the very making of history itself.17 In the eyes of all of the cultural mentors and older poets with whom I spoke over my years of research, ‘education’ within the sphere of oral tradition is two-fold: first, poets should be trained in every subject from history to philosophy to geography. Second, while poets have a gift from God (passed through genetic inheritance), they still need to train in performance so that they can teach and inspire their audiences without being ‘long and boring’—in the case of aitys this would be training in improvisation. One organizer reflected that poets’ work is ultimately a form of affective history. Poets, he said, ‘need to know events in history like Zheltoksan, the pain of this, the people understand. They tell the stories of heroes (Kaz: batyrlar) so that people will remember. Even 16 In her classic study of oral poetry among Bedouin women in Egypt, anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod also describes how the formula of language bestows the ‘universality of experience;’ poetry does not just exist for its own sake, but to influence those who hear or become aware of it: ‘Like all communication, poetry is not merely expressive but persuasive. Just as people’s actions and words in everyday social interactions are always directed toward others, so their poetic productions are directed toward an audience’ (1986: 241). 17 On the role of genealogy in the structuring of history in Central Asia, see Jacquesson (2016); Light (2011).

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

101

in the face of tragedy, a poet must be an orator of the highest level. Orators convey feelings—they should pay attention to the audience and find themes that are interesting for them; this is ‘soul work.’ We can earn a lot of money [doing something else]—but what if we’re rich and empty inside? What if the only place it said ‘Kazakh’ was on your passport, but not in your heart?’ Reflecting on the importance of the Aitys tradition, the organizer specifically referenced ‘Zheltoksan,’ one of the most significant moments in Kazakhstan’s recent political history: the uprisings of December 1986 in Almaty, when thousands of ethnic Kazakhs gathered to protest the appointment of a Russian head of state in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.18 This protest was highly unprecedented and was violently repressed (and indeed has not been matched since for that reason), and for many who watched and participated, marked the awakening of ethnic consciousness in the face of Russian and Soviet rule, which has continued and changed as a wave of Kazakh nationalism through the early periods of independence and into the present day.19 Within that space of nationalist memorialization, the anniversary of Zheltoksan is marked every year, often with aitys performances that tend to highlight the struggle for sovereignty in Kazakh history.20 But Zheltoksan is more than a national(ist) story: it is a symbol of postcolonial ethnic recognition that is also shared by Kazakhstan’s neighboring countries. For those involved in the perpetuation of oral and epic traditions in Central Asia, the stakes are high: the articulation of a past in which the suffering of the people under external rule, as well as the reclamation of cultural heritage in a national present. Older artists and cultural organizers worry that the younger generation does not understand or value this connection, and that the youth will lose their traditions and history. ‘It’s a big problem,’ said one organizer. ‘That’s why we have to work to save this culture and art.’ Creating performance frameworks where

18 On the December events see Aitbaioly (1992). 19 The year 2016 marked the 25th anniversary of those events, and was widely

commemorated across the country; for popular news coverage see for example http:// theopenasia.net/articles/detail/kak-ya-provel-etot-den-vospominaniya-almatintsev-o-dek abrskikh-sobytiyakh-1986/. 20 Neighboring Kyrgyzstan has had a succession of public protests and even political revolution in its own post-Soviet history, in which aitys poets also played a public role, in disseminating news and information. For an ethnography of aitys in Kyrgyzstan, see Coskun (2016).

102

E.-M. DUBUISSON

poets and teachers can come together is an essential aspect of this cultural maintenance and recovery; the process of education is one of socialization into a performance family, a space of encouragement and support. Aitys funds and programs at the national level are very successful and generously sponsored in Kazakhstan, but the real problem is early education, the cultivation of talent among youth at the local and regional level. In this case, local poets and teachers often create their own circles of mentorship, while the regional offices of cultural affairs (an institution and structure carried over from the Soviet period) plays an integral role, in gaining public recognition for young poets, so that they can work toward a livelihood in the sphere of the arts and cultural production.

Regional Schools and Offices of Cultural Affairs While many poets enter the ranks of competition and performance through their secondary schools and universities, throughout the country many young aitys performers come from modest rural and linguistically Kazakh-dominant backgrounds, and are also channeled into performance networks through the local offices of cultural affairs. Mentors and teachers in these networks—themselves both personally and ideologically invested in the celebration of Kazakh language and culture—provide the training and emotional support necessary for their young students’ future careers. However, at the regional level, there is a fundamental problem: the annual program of public performances is decided by the local governor’s office (Kaz: akimat ), where money is channeled from the state budget through to local municipal accounts. Local teachers and cultural affairs staff fulfill, rather than decide, what every year’s program will be, and they struggle to give their young students enough opportunities to perform. The priorities for ‘cultural development’ at the regional level do include a regular aitys performance—but it is typically done for Nauryz,21 the Kazakh New Year, in March, or for the celebration (as described earlier) for Zheltoksan, at least in part because these are both events clearly related to a Kazakh nationalism which could be seen as antiSoviet rather than anti-Russian, and are thus appropriate Kazakh holidays. However, the state budget does not typically ever include funds for extra performances, which runs counter to the basic demand for aitys (and

21 Nauryz comes from the Persian Novroz, a holiday to mark the first day of spring.

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

103

other poetic and musical) performances around the country. This demand comes of course from audiences, but also from the nature of the poetry and the poets themselves: it is to aitysu, to engage *one another.* There is no way to become proficient in aitys without constant exposure to and competition with other peers (and preferably mentors). As one frustrated organizer explained to me, poets come or call to her offices year-round, wondering when the next aitys will be, who will be invited, and she has nothing to tell them, nothing to offer them. She knows they suffer as a result and she feels terrible. She does not, however, feel responsible. She knows whom to blame: ‘those Russiaphiles (Russ: russochniki) in the regional administration, they know nothing about our traditions, they don’t prioritize or support them, they don’t know what it’s like for [poets].’ Soon after I arrived in one regional capital to work with students, teachers, and cultural organizers, it was announced that there would be held a regional youth aitys, in honor of Zheltoksan and also recognizing the famous Kazakh poet Zhambyl.22 At a local school, young poets assembled to hear a lecture about these topics given by the poet and teacher Karima Oralova, who was herself a well-regarded performer on the national circuit—an idol for most of her students. She talked about the December 1986 events, and told the biography of the poet Zhambyl—about his life, the region where he lived, his achievements, his poetry, and the poets with whom he had aitys. All the students then set about working this information into their own poems, which Karima reviewed critically. The young hopefuls practiced remembering lines from previous aitys performances by repeating them and then elaborating with a partner (Kaz: kaiym aitysy). For this exercise Karima used some of the school’s few textbooks, including a volume on oratory art and a volume of contemporary aitys performances published by the organizers of the national performance circuit. This proved very difficult for the students, but was essential practice for the next step, which was when students would compose their own poems about these topics, transforming their

22 Zhambyl Zhabayev was a late nineteenth and early twentieth century Kazakh poet, whose town and region have been renamed after him, and whose home has been turned into a museum and national shrine site.

104

E.-M. DUBUISSON

knowledge to oral rhetoric. Karima encouraged her students to be both original and inspiring.23 Many of the young poets from Karima’s class performed on stage at the regional competition along with other young poets from the southern region. Our entire class went to support them and spent the whole day at the competition together. On the jury sat another famous poet and professor of Kazakh literature, Marzhan Yeszhanova. The school’s students did not perform exceptionally well, and certainly faltered. But that did not deter their huge crowd of friend-supporters from the school from wildly yelling their enthusiastic support. It was an induction into aitys, the first performance of many, the beginning of exposure to wider audiences and potential sponsors.24 The local organizers from the regional office of cultural affairs were thrilled with how the event had turned out that year; their office had done a great deal, to make this happen.25 The head of the office was relieved when she talked to me

23 As young poets, the balance is tipped toward preparation rather than improvisation. All of them had either forgotten or didn’t know how to include one of the three subjects (poet, uprising, independence) and so their day of aitys provided examples. The students improvised with Karima’s help and her corrections of phrase endings—she encouraged them to use adjectives, and suggested that they always address their opponents directly, describing them as ‘sen’ like you’ in order to regularize case endings and increase the possibilities for rhyming. 24 For performances usually held in the theater of the regional capital, audiences typically range from 300 to 500 persons and tend to be comprised of adults and elders. Audiences respond audibly to poets in real-time, applauding and vocalizing their (dis)approval. Performances are also usually televised. Most audience members with whom I sat and spoke come to feel proud of their culture and to support their favorite poets—whether because of shared regional background, style, or bravery. 25 In addition to getting the event approved by the regional administration, the office of cultural affairs is responsible for giving out invitations and advertising the events, so they work with the local newspaper (who’s offices are right downstairs). They also make a prize list (like TVs and rugs), prepare the stage scenery, coordinate with the tech folks in the theatre. And then they create a jury and a program for each event. They make diplomas for the winners. For the jury, they create a list of about fifteen candidates who they are considering—poets, writers, teachers—then the mayor chooses seven from that list and they make the calls and arrangements, making substitutions as necessary. On the day of the performance, organizers got prize certificates ready, dealt with tickets, wrote the protocol for the day, discussed with the jury who might do well at republican aitys, gave some moral support to poets to encourage confidence, and set up huge posterboards set up with poets’ pictures and descriptions.

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

105

about it afterward: ‘It’s one thing to organize, it’s another for it to be a success!’26 She was pleased to see so many young people attend. Reflecting on their work, head organizer noted that while poetic talent for poetry passes from generation to generation in families, the tradition actually survives with some help by the regional cultural affairs offices work with cultural clubs in the villages to find and support promising young poets by bringing them to the city centers and giving them opportunities to join contests. As stated explicitly in the official government document (Russ: upravlenie) issued by the office of cultural affairs, the goal of youth aitys is to ‘raise active citizens of society; to instill in society the feelings of virtue, good upbringing, wise thinking, [as well as] the necessity of education, through the unique and original culture of the aitys genre.’ These words may be formulaic, but in my experience with cultural organizers across multiple regions, they take their mission quite seriously, and feel a great sense of reward when things go well for artists and audiences, including themselves: ‘When you listen [to the poets] you forget about wealth and power, and you enter a different world. The beautiful costumes inspire patriotism.’ Our conversation was interrupted twice that day; once by a young poet asking when the next aitys would be and how he should get ready, and second by the new director of the office, a young Kazakh man who was the latest in a series of regularly rotated external appointments with whom the local staff has to contend. Our interview was cut short; I was disappointed and she was slightly annoyed, not by the interruption but also by the recently arrived young director, who seemed to have a ‘new direction’ for their office the staff didn’t really understand, she said. ‘You know what I mean?’ she asked me. ‘What am I supposed to tell [the young poets]? Sometimes there just isn’t another aitys, because some officials (Russ: chenovniki)27 are Russian-speaking and they don’t understand, [they ask] ‘why do you need two or three aitys?’ And of course it’s hurtful.’ We stood up to leave then and she smiled at me. ‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘but when it goes well, it’s amazing.’

26 Personal interview, 21 February 2006. 27 In colloquial usage in Kazakhstan, the Russian term ‘chenovnik’ (official) is markedly

an insult, which implies dirty or corrupt.

106

E.-M. DUBUISSON

(Post) Colonial Audience: Aitys Goes to Moscow One of the major goals of cultural organizers, and mentorship networks at the local level is to help facilitate young artists’ exposure and entrance to national and international level performances28 in which poets and musicians meet their peers from other countries and regions of Kazakhstan. Wider public recognition and fame tend to come when performers reach the (inter)national level; for the aitys tradition in Kazakhstan, this is the series of ‘Republican Aitys’ competitions run by a high-powered and elite group of organizers and sponsors outside the domain of government cultural affairs. For poets, national performance brings recognition and a chance to meet ‘the best of the best,’ but for sponsors also, aitys provides a cultural and political framework in which to meet and network, in the form of ethnic nationalism. Despite critics’ speculation about poets who perform only for prizes (as I have heard many times and as voiced by a young man in the village conversation I related earlier in this paper), poets do not become rich, even at the national level. Most poets are supporting their families, and have to have another fulltime job to make ends meet, most often as a professor or teacher, and sometimes as a journalist or tamada (MC).29 The poets about whom I have written here, Orazaly from the southeast and Karima from the south, are both also teachers. These two poets both performed regularly on the national circuit (although to my knowledge they never competed against one another). Both were chosen to travel with the ‘Republican Aitys’ network as cultural ambassadors for a special aitys performance commemorating the Year of Kazakhstan in Russia in 2004.30 My research assistant and I also went along on this trip together with a small group of journalists; the trip entailed a three-day train ride to Moscow and back. Our sizeable group stayed in the Kazakhstan Embassy in the center of the city at the special 28 (Inter)national performances are either held in the grandest state theatres in capital cities, or outdoor stages at large festivals organized for state holidays, where crowds range from the hundreds to thousands. 29 For any large celebration (toi) a family may choose to invite a host, whose job is to run the event and to be lively and funny. As this requires improvisatory skills, aitys poets are sometimes a good fit for the job; this work is looked down upon by other poets as too mundane or pedestrian. 30 Russia honored Kazakhstan in this way because the two countries established bilateral energy, trade, and security agreements that year (Zabortseva 2016).

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

107

invitation of the Ambassador. While our group was given red-carpet treatment, and was linked in an immediate way to transnational social and political elites, I was well-aware of the Soviet tradition of cultural envoys traveling to perform their ‘folk’ traditions in the center, often in a parade of nationalities meant to showcase the diversity and friendship of Soviet peoples. After a year of nationalistic and political performances hosted by this elite sponsorship network in Kazakhstan, I was intrigued to see what the dynamics would be like among Kazakhs living in Russia. As it turned out, organizers in Moscow warned poets explicitly against criticizing either their audience or Russia, and so performances centered heavily on themes like joking about Kazakh and Russian bilingualism, or lamenting the Kazakh soldiers who lost their lives in Moscow fighting for the Soviet Union. These topics appealed to Kazakh audiences in Moscow, who could locate themselves in this circumscribed version of a shared history performed onstage. As a result however, here the talents of poets like Orazaly and Karima—a combination of Kazakhstani nationalism, extensive knowledge of Kazakh history, and even a sense of humor relying on knowledge of Kazakh culture and daily life—did not work particularly well; in fact Orazaly was suffering from personal problems and was not able to finish his performance, and Karima was not chosen by the jury to win. The political work of postcolonial nationalism in this context was, interestingly, taken up more explicitly by sponsors and organizers themselves, who assembled regularly for elaborate events at the embassy to give speeches and have public conversations that young poets and their entourage were ratified to ‘overhear’ (Goffman 1981: 132).31 Head organizers talked with politicians, doing the context-appropriate work of praising sponsors from both countries, and mentioning their names loudly so that everyone would be aware of their patronage and good works. Contemporary supporters of aitys assembled at the embassy—and in the Moscow audience—were lauded as Kazakh nationalist heroes and ‘true’ Kazakhs. This oral tradition, presented by organizers as ‘authentic culture’—something Kazakhs ostensibly share no matter what country they live in—provided the necessary common ground for dialogue and cooperation. While this rhetoric certainly repeated sentiments I had become used to hearing in Kazakhstan,

31 For another example of Goffman’s participant frameworks model in the context of community oral tradition, see Irvine (1993).

108

E.-M. DUBUISSON

somehow they sounded a bit hollow in the real politik of the former colonial center, given that Kazakhstan is still firmly within Russia’s political and economic sphere of ‘influence.’ After the trip on the three-day train trip back home, some poets reflected privately to me that they were not actually very comfortable in Moscow, where they were entertainment on demand, restricted, and where they did not know their audience. They could not assume the linguistic fluency, knowledge of culture and history, or even sense of humor that they could with their ‘soul friends’ (Kaz: zhandostar) at home. Thinking about these dynamics, I reflected on the words of one of the cultural producers I had met that year, who was working hard to maintain aitys on Kazakhstani television, even live-streaming performances, giving them extra uncensored potential in an atmosphere of media restriction. This cultural producer also traveled to different regions with a film crew, documenting oral and musical traditions for TV. He believed deeply in the power of musical and poetic culture to influence audiences. ‘The process of artistic creation [in aitys] has two sides,’ he told me, ‘poet and spectator, and these two sides are equal. This is what creates a certain level of culture; people don’t go to aitys to be amazed by impressiveness, they go for the artistic value, which lies in how a poet says something. This is emotion, co-creation: each person is connected to a poet and is proud of them, roots for them, hurts for them, compassion. Without this, aitys would not exist.’ In the aitys tradition, poets draw on history to make sense of the present, constantly reminding audiences not only of the heroism of a (mythic) sovereign ancestral past, but also of the much more recent history of cultural imperialism.32 The television producer elaborated this point; among aitys audiences ‘there are different views from all different sides, but there is [also] a psychology stemming from colonialism, shared by society… it all depends on personal feelings, how much a person inside carries that culture… Kazakhs need time to understand. The most important [thing is] that a person keeps inside himself what his grandfather witnessed, experienced—that life is with him, is real for him. Aitys is strength of spirit, it makes a person as he should be—it is a genre that expresses our nature. A person at once comes to know the world, and himself in that world; these two things cannot be separated. Our life is 32 For extended examples of the invocation of Kazakh ancestors in the contemporary political critique of aitys poets, please see Dubuisson (2017).

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

109

alive and globalized—eventually people will come around and have pride in being Kazakh, just like any other nationality.’ Ultimately, he thinks, we ‘have to relate to aitys not like art, but like family.’ The strangeness of the trip to Russia was compounded by grief, when the poet Orazaly suffered a terrible car accident a short while after our return to Kazakhstan, and passed away. He was not even thirty years old. It was rumored that he had composed his last poem as he lay dying in the arms of his best friend at the scene of the accident. Orazaly’s family was large but poor (he had been supporting a large number of people on his combined income from performing and teaching.) The family could not afford the lavish funeral befitting a famous akhyn, and so the responsibility was taken up by the head of the Republican Aitys network and by the rector of Orazaly’s university. On the day of the funeral, Orazaly’s body was brought not to a relative’s house but to the Writers’ Union in central Almaty, and hundreds of visitors—family, fellow poets, students, and fans—packed into the building to circle the casket and pay their respects. There several poets read their poem-eulogies for him. They praised him as a poet, as a Kazakh, and they grieved the loss for the people. The obituary in the paper published by the union read: ‘Yes, the earth for you will be soft. / Forgive, foal of Kolmambet!/ May you be headed for heaven!’33 His own mother, at the wake, grieved not for her loss but for the loss of ‘the people.’

Conclusion The power of nationalism itself lies not in its fixity, but in its ambivalence; the oral tradition of aitys in Kazakhstan today is precisely one of those ‘complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that function in the name of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ and make them the immanent subjects and objects of a range of social and literary narratives’ (Bhabha 1990: 292).34 The poetry and the shaping of poets within this tradition confers both pride and grief: pride, in the sense of an ethnic unity and shared cultural history, and grief—not only for the suffering of Kazakhs under Soviet rule in the past, but perhaps more importantly for the struggle to maintain language and tradition in the national present.

33 Kazakh Adibieti No. 11(27): 5 November 2004. 34 On the role of literary canon in the Soviet history of nation-building in Kazakhstan,

see Kudaibergenova (2017).

110

E.-M. DUBUISSON

While aitys was intentionally coopted as a genre of folklore by the Soviet state, and while the art form is still very much constrained by government structure, aitys is still seen strongly as a vehicle of cultural continuity by its supporters. The contemporary community of cultural production tends to focus on the ‘gift’ of poets, their training in mentorship networks, and their successful creation of ‘friendships from the heart’ with supportive audiences all over the country. In the ongoing dialogue taking place between poets and their people, ‘meaning’ is a ‘cooperative achievement’ (Duranti 1993: 41). Specifically within the context of Kazakh nationalism, the goal of cultural production is to valorize a vision of Kazakh culture rooted to ancestry, to land, and to language. There is a re-traditionalized ‘nation,’ invoked and lauded in aitys performances. The Kazakh language becomes metaphorically important in that context as evidence of the existence of Kazakh culture. As new students begin to participate in aitys, typically in schools or universities, they are indoctrinated into this vision of the Kazakh nation; the attributes of the Kazakh language as ancestral and rich and representative of that nation come to structure poets’ cominginto-being. As Orazaly explained, it is imperative for each poet to display ancestral talent, but also to claim a regional home and kinship within aitys communities of learning and performance, in order to truly voice the contemporary oral tradition for audiences, and to make a livelihood for themselves and their own families. In this ideological and political economy of performance, Kazakh language becomes a lynchpin, in that more than anything else, linguistic acumen symbolizes knowledge of history and culture, a culture always under threat in the reality of post-Soviet politics.

References Abu-Lughod, L. (1986). Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Village. Berkeley: University of California Press. Adams, L. (2010). The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Adams, L. and Rustemova, A. (2009). Mass Spectacle and Styles of Governmentality in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Europe-Asia Studies 61 (7): 1249–1276. Aitbaioly, T. (1992). Almaty 1986 Zheltoksan. Almaty: Shabyt Press (Union of Writers of Kazakhstan). Ashcroft, B. (1989). The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge.

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

111

Auezov, M. (1964 [1959]). Aitys. In: M. Auezov, ed. Almaty: Kazakh Adebietining Tarixy. Bauman, R. (1984 [1977]). Verbal Art as Performance. Longrove, IL: Waveland Press. Bhabha, H. (1990). DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation. Abingdon: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Blackwell. ———. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press. Caton, S. (1990). ‘Peaks of Yemen I Summon’: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coskun, M. (2016). Improvising the Voice of Ancestors: A Historical Ethnography of Oral Poetry Performances Among the Kyrgyz. Ph.D. dissertation; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Cummings, S. (2010). Symbolism and Power in Central Asia: Politics of the Spectacular. New York: Routledge. Dubuisson, E.M. (2010). Confrontation in and Through the Nation in Kazakh Aitys Poetry. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20: 101–115. ———. (2013). Dialogic Authority: Kazakh Aitys Poets and Their Patrons. In: J. Rasanayagam, M. Reeves, and J. Beyer, eds., Doing Politics, Performing States: Perspectives from Central Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2017). Living Language in Kazakhstan: The Dialogic Emergence of an Ancestral Worldview. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Duranti, A. (1993). Intentions, Self, and Responsibility: An Essay in Samoan Ethnopragmatics. In: J.H. Hill and J.T. Irvine, eds., Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fabian, J. (1990). Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Fauve, A. (2015). A Tale of Two Statues in Astana: The Fuzzy Process of Nationalistic City-Making. Nationalities Papers 43(3): 383–398. Fierman, W. (2006). Language and Education in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan: Kazakh-Medium Instruction in Urban Schools. The Russian Review 65: 98–116. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Grant, B. (1995). In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Herzfeld, M. (2005). Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge. Hirsch, F. (2005). Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

112

E.-M. DUBUISSON

I˘gmen, A. (2012). Speaking Soviet With an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Irvine, J.T. (1993). Insult and Responsibility: Verbal Abuse in a Wolof village. In: J.H. Hill and J.T. Irvine, eds., Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Isaacs, R. (2018). Film and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture in Central Asia. London: I.B. Tauris. Isaacs, R. and Polese, A. (2016). Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Space: Old, New, and Changing Tools. In: R. Isaacs and A. Polese, eds., Nation-Building and Identity in the Post-Soviet Space: New Tools and Approaches. London: Routledge. Jacquesson, S. (2016). Genealogies as Craft: The Search for ‘Truth’ and Authority in Contemporary Kyrgyzstan. In: S. Jacquesson, ed., History Making in Central and Northern Eurasia. Wiesbaden-Dotzheim: Reichart. Kudaibergenova, D.T. (2016). The Use and Abuse of Postcolonial Discourses in Post-independent Kazakhstan. Europe-Asia Studies 68(5): 917–935. ———. (2017). Re-Writing the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature. Lanham, KY: Lexington Books. Laruelle, M. (2016a). Kazakhstan in the Making: Legitimacy, Symbols, and Social Changes. Lanham, NY: Lexington Books. ———. (2016b). The Three Discursive Paradigms of State Identity in Kazakhstan: Kazakhness, Kazakhstanness, and Transnationalism. In: M.Y. Omelicheva, ed., Nationalism and Identity Construction in Central Asia. Lanham, KY: Lexington Books. Light, N. (2011). Genealogy, History, Nation. Nationalities Papers 39(1): 33– 53. Marat, E. (2009). Nation Branding in Central Asia: A New Campaign to Present Ideas About the State and the Nation. Europe-Asia Studies 61(7): 1123–1136. Martin, T. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Moldagazinova, Z. (2019). Trilingual Education in Kazakhstan: What to Expect. Central Asia Program Working Papers 218. Omelicheva, M.Y. (2014). Introduction. In: M.Y. Omelicheva, ed., Nationalism and Identity Construction in Central Asia. Lanham, KY: Lexington Books. Sharipova, D., Burkhanov, A., and Alpeissova, A. (2017). The Determinants of Civic and Ethnic Nationalisms in Kazakhstan: Evidence from the Grass-Roots Level. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 23(2): 203–226. Slezkine, Y. (1994). The USSR as Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism. Slavic Review 53: 414–452. Suny, R.G. (1998). The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the U.S.S.R., and the Successor States. New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, V. (1987). The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications.

5

POETS OF THE PEOPLE: LEARNING TO MAKE …

113

Verdery, K. (1995). National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press. Westren, M. (2012). Nations in Exile: ‘The Punished Peoples’ in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1941–1961. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago. Zabortseva, Y.N. (2016). Russia’s Relations with Kazakhstan: Rethinking ExSoviet Transitions in the Emerging World System. Abingdon: Routledge. Zhilbaev, Z., Syrymbetova, L.S., Mukasheva, M.Y., Zhetpisbayeva, B.A., and Smagulova, G.T. (2019). Promotion of Trilingual Education in Kazakhstan Schools: Online Monitoring Results. Journal of Siberian Federal University 12(2): 285–301.

CHAPTER 6

Lament in an Affluent Era: Cultural Politics of Kazakh Life Cycle Songs in Xinjiang Guldana Salimjan

Abstract This article examines the politics of memory in the songs performed at Kazakh life cycle events in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, and contextualizes these practices in three layers of power struggle: (1) gender, generation, and class differences in the cultural economy of weddings; (2) everyday maintenance of ethnic identity under the watchful eye of Chinese state surveillance; and (3) reconciliation with a violent past while navigating the neoliberal present. I argue that rural elderly women’s performances constitute a politics of nostalgia at the interstices of state cultural heritage and Kazakh ethnonational discourse. This narrative strategy is an act of remembering Mao era political persecutions in an atmosphere of state amnesia as well as lamenting the Kazakh lifeways that have disappeared as the expense of China’s development projects in Xinjiang.

G. Salimjan (B) Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_6

115

116

G. SALIMJAN

Keywords China · Xinjiang · Kazakh · Life cycle · Gender · Memory · History

Introduction From 2015 to 2016, I conducted fieldwork in my own community— Kazakh regions in Altay and Tarbagatai in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), China. The elderly women I talked to were in their late 70~80s and were mostly former employees of socialist state ranches and farms in their youth. They often described their entire lives as japakesh, which means hardship, or painstaking toil in Turkic languages. Seeing me as a young unmarried woman at the time, the elders often liked to give me teachings on marriage: ‘Once you get married and go to a faraway place, you need to take on whatever hardships are in front of you (jat jurtiqqa bir jerge barghannan keyin, qanday qyinshiliq bolsada shidaw kerek).’ This expression is not simply an education of gender roles, but also channels their moral subjectivities and untold histories as Kazakh women after a lifetime of political shifts and turmoil in China. Similar to its stance toward Tibet, the Chinese state uses economic development as the long-term solution for national unity and stability in Xinjiang, simultaneously obliterating histories of political violence and anticolonial resistance in local collective memories through the state sanctioned ‘folklore’ (民俗minsu) and ‘cultural heritage’ (文化遗产wenhua yichan) projects.1 With such omnipresent control and censorship, familial, communal life was often one of few places where ethnic minorities had more autonomy for cultural production and memory-making. After over three decades of socialist collectivization, the pastoral reform in the 1980s led to a series of structural shifts of grassland tenure and state sponsored sedentarization campaigns (see Zukosky 2007). Ethnic Kazakhs were forced to give up on traditional mobile pastoralism, and to adapt to a new economic production mode in an increasingly Chinese-dominant cultural and language environment. As more grasslands became fenced up and converted into private pastures, conservation and tourism projects by 1 China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage protection project was launched in 2005, following the mandate of the World Heritage list and UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention. The China State Council has issued four lists of National Intangible Cultural Heritage, in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2014.

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

117

the state enterprises, more Kazakhs migrated to the counties and urban areas where they then strived to keep up with the pace of modernization. Although the reform era prosperity and pluralist policies in the late 1990s and early 2000s boosted vibrant ethnic cultural development, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, intensified resource extraction and Han immigration in the region had agitated interethnic strife and conflicts. The following decade saw the state responding to civil disobedience with more assimilationist policies and heavy-handed counterterrorism measures. My own research aims to foreground Kazakh women’s lived experiences, subjectivities, and agencies in these changing political contexts. In Maoist times, the socialist state employed gender equality and class struggle to reengineer nomadic Kazakhs into submissive, property-less subjects. In the post-socialist reform era, with traditional pastoral livelihood diminishing under state development policies, ethnonational identity politics again put great demands on women to perform cultural authenticity. Meanwhile, as Chinese official discourse emphasized ‘positive energy’ (正能量zheng nengliang ) and ‘gratitude’ (感恩gan’en) toward the party state (Sorace 2017) as a means of stability maintenance, social memories of political violence in minority regions have become generally regarded non-events and tabooed topics. Under state control in neoliberal China, Kazakh elders—both women and men—have been silenced and have begun to lose their previously held communal authority and their revered status as a symbol of past and tradition. However, as historian of China Prasenjit Duara states, women can also ‘deploy the tensions between citizenship and authenticity to their advantage’ (1998: 306). Female Kazakh elders make themselves heard by engaging in a cultural politics of nostalgia to compare past and present. As feminist scholars Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith point out, ‘Nostalgic narratives are often dismissed as inherently conservative, if not reactionary and escapist… however, nostalgia mediates narratives and rituals that evolve out of gendered historical experiences’ (2002: 9). The elders’ life narratives of the Mao era and act of witnessing in the neoliberal present is political and worth examining in the context of silenced socialist history in Xinjiang. By contextualizing Kazakh life cycle songs and rituals in women’s narratives and the politics in Xinjiang, this chapter analyzes the interplay of gender and colonialism that shape these narratives, as well as how patriarchal or ethnonationalist practices that have authorized and silenced them.

118

G. SALIMJAN

Weddings as a Cultural Economy The increasing urbanization of the Kazakh population in Northern Xinjiang means that consumptive competitions (baseke) grew, and rural/urban wealth disparities intensified. Life cycle events such as weddings, circumcisions, and funerals became a major platform to promote Kazakh ethnonational, nomadic, and Islamic identities. In recent decades, more events were also added for the secular occasions in life: going to high school in inner China, going to college, getting a job, studying abroad, and so on. After 2000, weddings became more ostentatious. As family’s total disposable income increased on average, various customs were reinvented and became more luxurious, such as matchmaking (qudalasu chai), gift exchanging of in-laws (qorjin), dowry display (qizding juk shigharu), pre-wedding planning (masilet chai), feast hosted by the bride’s side (uzatu toi), feast hosted by the groom’s side (uylenu toi), and so on. The more elaborated the wedding process is and the longer it takes, and the higher the family’s social status and respectability are.2 Rural Kazakhs struggled to catch up with these standards, even though they were crippled by unfavorable economic policies, and unprotected by the stable income and social benefits enjoyed by urbanites. Some took out loans to host decent feasts and ended up in debt due to the huge costs on wedding gifts, rental, catering, venue, and new house renovations. Many were frustrated by the rising standard of bride price and gift money but to stop attending would further alienate them from the social networks and resources that are so important for navigating urbanization. The negative sentiment and criticism for consumptive competition is evident in this popular proverb, ‘Everyone wants to keep up with the rich, and the rich want to keep up with God’ (Kz: Bari baygha jetem, bay qudaygha jetem deydi). There is a more simplified wedding style nicknamed domalaq (meaning round shaped), which combines all the procedures in one big feast. However, this economic wedding later became associated with facesaving ‘shotgun weddings.’ A young woman explained this way, ‘If people do domalaq, others will gossip that the bride’s virginity is questionable, as the ceremonies are carried out in a hurry.’ Whether it is in urban or rural

2 On the importance of life cycle ritual rituals like weddings and their central role in a social economy across Central Asian communities, see for example Isabaeva (2012) and Roche and Hohmann (2011).

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

119

areas, young women are expected to take on the traditional gender roles of modesty and purity, while also possess qualities for upward mobility such as higher education and state employment. The retraditionalization of Kazakh weddings in contemporary Xinjiang can be considered a patriarchal project, one that emphasizes patrilocal residence and social prestige marked by wealth. For example, compared to the feast hosted by the bride’s side (uzatu toi), the feast hosted by the groom’s family (uylenu toi) is considered the main venue for various extravaganzas and cultural performances, and the latter symbolizes the family’s acquisition of a bride after a hefty bride price. The two major rites of passage include the bride’s farewell at the uzatu toi and the veil lifting ritual at the uylenu toi. The former is usually relatively brief, compared to the other drawn-out wedding customs; however, it is also powerfully affective as a women’s space to share common gendered sentiments among daughters, daughters-in-law, wives, and mothers. The family and the bride bid a symbolic farewell witnessed by their friends and relatives. Afterwards, the bride is repeatedly told not to look back, and her unwillingness and sorrow upon leaving is seen as a sign of chastity and modesty. As a strong contrast, the veiling lifting ritual (betashar) held at the uylenu toi is often the highlight of the feast spectacle and well attended. A folk singer would introduce the bride in poetic verses with nomadic cultural elements, marking her acceptance into the family and instructing her roles as a wife and daughter-in-law. As this ritual formally signals the bride’s marital transition and pushes the celebration to a climax, the singer is usually generously rewarded by the groom’s family with money. Contrary to the masculinizing wedding traditions in Kazakh society, the Chinese state representation of minority life is rather feminizing and infantilizing. This is reflected in folklore projects’ decontextualized collection and translation of minority oral traditions, feminized objectification of minority folk songs and dances on national stages along with deliberate removal of Islamic contents. For instance, state publications including the bridal farewell songs often emphasize women’s passivity in arranged marriages, implying that women’s liberation and marriage freedom is achieved under the rightful leadership of Communist Party of China. While the masculinized wedding culture exacerbates class and rural/urban disparities in Kazakh society, the femininized state representations not only objectify women as a single category but also justify the colonial legitimacy of the Chinese state in Xinjiang. In the following section, I

120

G. SALIMJAN

will illustrate how the elderly women utilize the politics of nostalgia to voice their rejection of both trends.

Politics of Nostalgia in the Wedding Space On a summer day in Ürümchi in 2015, I attended an Islamic wedding ritual (neke oqw)3 held at the bride’s home in an urban high-rise building. The bride was told to cover her bare arms before neke, so she put on a long sleeve shirt and tied her hair up in the back. The married women also hurried to fetch their headscarves from their purses in order to cover their hair properly. To abide by state regulations on Islam in Xinjiang, the mullah made sure that the couple had obtained a government-issued marriage certificate before he announced them man and wife. After neke, the bride and groom would have the major wedding celebration in a luxurious hotel plaza later that afternoon. Upon their departure, the bride’s family and relatives gathered at the door to see her off. She cried and hugged them for a while, then finally left in tears following the groom and his entourage. I sat with several of the bride’s elderly relatives from rural Altay. The tears had begun to dry on their faces as they turned to share opinions over milk tea, such as, ‘men should cup their hands lower when praying, not in front of their faces like women do.’ They laughed while commenting on how times have changed, ‘Nowadays we make tea for kelin (daughter-inlaw), completely the opposite from our times!’ When the bride’s mother, an urban civil servant in her late 50s, poked fun at her daughter who said she would come home to pick up her stuff the next day, all the elderly women roared in laughter. According to the tradition, it is inappropriate for a kelin to return to her natal home after the wedding, as she is supposed to stay with her in-laws for at least a year before she is invited to visit by her natal family. The bride’s great aunt in her 70s, granny Zeha, dominated the conversation: In the past, the girl’s parents would advise their daughter about her roles before they gave her to the in-laws. These [koris ] (farewell songs) are all aqil ‘soz (words of wisdom). Everyone in the family, old or young, the

3 Islamic wedding contract nikah (neke in Kazakh) hosted by an Imam is observed as a prerequisite ritual to the celebratory wedding feast (toi).

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

121

entire village4 will do koris. We didn’t do koris just now! We didn’t say goodbye properly. It is said that now is a developed era. People say, ‘let’s not have her leave in tears.’ I was ready to [sing koris ] as soon as tears ran out of my eyes! … Alas, we just stood there as if our tongues were cut! ‘A bride at that time will do koris to her father, mother, and brother.’ According to the real custom, the bride’s jezde (sister’s husband) will help her get on the horse, and he will personally see her off till her village people can’t see them anymore. Her jenge (brother’s wife) will walk behind to catch up with them and do one more koris there. Then they will let her go. After a year, her natal family (‘torkin)5 can invite her to visit home. The bride will sing:

qizdida balam demender, satwgha shiqqan bul eken. Tughar toqim bul eken, uyding bir korki qiz eken.

Don’t call a girl your child, if you sell her for a piece of cloth. Though a girl is the beauty of a household, her worth is no more than a piece of cloth.

‘The girl sings koris to her jenge, her younger brother, her mother, and her father, it’s all different.’ For example, a girl will sing this to her mother:

tur degende turmaw shem, kosilgen ayaq jymaw shem; anashim sening arqangda, qaynaghan shaydi quymaw shem.

I didn’t have I didn’t have Mother, with I didn’t have

to get up early, to put away my feet; you by my side, to pour tea for people.

4 The original wording is awil: Kz. awil is the most basic unit of Kazakh social structure in mobile pastoralism. It is usually composed of several families herding and migrating on relatively fixed patterns, maintaining specific pastures within those migration routes and herding together. Nowadays, awil usually means hometown, rural areas, or countryside. 5 ‘torkin in Kazakh means a woman’s natal home, where she was born as well as her family, relatives, and neighbors. When she returns to her ‘torkin from her patrilocal residence after marriage, she is welcomed and treated as a guest to her natal home and people.

122

G. SALIMJAN

To her father, she will sing:

aynalayim kar akem, qadiring jurtqa bar akem; aldinga jilap men keldim, iqlas bata ber akem.

My dear father, my old father, you have respect from people, I cry and come to you, Please give me your best wishes.

In the past, girls would even sing koris to their yurt (uy)… they would hold onto the yurt’s bosagha (door post) and mangdaysha (yurt door header) when they sing this:

‘Bosanghang byik boz uyim, bozdamay qaytim shighayin; engsesi biyik ‘oz uyim, engiremey qaytim shighayin.

My dear how can My dear how can

yurt with steady door posts, I leave without crying? yurt with a high skylight, I leave without tears?

Because she will go live in another yurt in the future, do you understand? That’s how Kazakh girls sing koris to their own home. It was hard for them to leave. The final koris is for her people and hometown:

esikting aldi sar bel, aldimnan shighar qaling el; qaling eldi qayteyin, artimda qaldi twghan el.

Hill tops in front of my yurt, all my people came to see me off. What can I do about them? Except leaving them behind.

‘That’s how she sang farewell to her people. Our Kazakh girls at that time were amazing! She sang different things to her brother and sister, brother and sister-in-law, mother and father, and so on, and they would sing to her.’ So, these are all wise words, nothing else! A girl leaves her hometown like that, and the whole village cry for her as well. For example, they say this to the girl:

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

aman bol balam aman bol, aman jur degen jaqsi jol. Jat jurttiqqa kettip barasing, aqilgha suyep adam bol.’

123

Please take care my child, take care, Wellbeing is a good path in life. You are going to a foreign place, Be a good person and use your wisdom.”

Zeha’s rectification of koris as respectable is profound in meaning. This episode captures a sense of alienation resulted from the rural/urban divide and the family hierarchies that have deeply impacted rural elders. The markers of Chinese modernity—desire for mobility, consumptive pleasure, and Mandarin proficiency—clashed with the world the elders were familiar with. For them, the koris was meant to create sacredness and humility among the participants of a wedding ceremony, especially for the bride. But for the urban mother and daughter, these gendered moral teachings are not compatible with their neoliberal sense of personal freedom. In recent decades, state goals of modernization and rapid development have drastically changed the norms of patrilocal residence and filiality nationwide (Yan 2016; Harrell and Santos 2016). Zeha hinted that she had received instructions from the family to not perform koris there, ‘It is said that now is a developed era. People say, “let’s not have her leave in tears.”’ This remark implies a new ‘social drama’ in Victor Turner’s terminology—one that stems from the social and communal conflicts that come from encountering ‘modernity.’ For rural elders who were having a negative experience of modernization and urbanization, a politics of nostalgia allowed them to regain a sense of authority over moral discourse via their knowledge of tradition. The fading koris became associated with the loss of communal mutual dependency due to rapid urbanization. As another elderly woman from rural Altay puts it, as the society develops… people do not devote themselves to each other anymore. In the past, when a girl in the neighborhood is getting married and leaving her family, we feel pity for her, and all go sing koris for her. Now we don’t do it anymore.

In this comment, the koris ritual as a way to experience shared emotion and identity to the community is now an object of nostalgic reminiscence. The masculinized space of the Kazakh wedding now has come to be associated with national belonging and identity, rather than embodying and

124

G. SALIMJAN

performing a microcosm of community and culture; as a result, women’s practices that weaved communal fabric in these ceremonies have been marginalized. Additionally, beyond a moral discourse, critique on language loss is another theme in the elders’ politics of nostalgia. Granny Zeha and other older women adored the intense emotions in between the poetic lines of koris . They commented that young people today would not comprehend and fully engage with the sentiments in the poems because their Kazakh is insufficient. This rings true for younger generation of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang who were born after 1980. Before 1980, school subjects were taught in the ethnic minorities’ native tongues in Xinjiang. In 1992, XUAR education bureau experimented with partly Mandarin partly native tongue educational mode at elementary and middle schools, marking a transitional period called ‘Bilingual education mode.’ From 2001, the XUAR Party Committee called for educational administrators to hasten the merge between ethnic minority schools and Han Chinese schools. In 2004, the Party Committee started to promote a full implementation of so-called ‘bilingual education mode’ (双语教学) in all of Xinjiang. This policy required all ethnic minority elementary schools to hold Mandarin class from grade one, and conduct ‘bilingual experimental classes’ (双语实验班) in ethnic middle schools. From then on, courses that were taught in Uyghur or Kazakh languages must be taught in Mandarin Chinese (Dong 2009). As a strong contrast to the vignette I described earlier, the atmosphere at the feast hosted by the groom’s side (uylenu toi) in that evening was incredibly lively. The groom’s family were in upper middle class with rich social networks in urban Ürümchi, so the wedding was a topnotch display of the finest Kazakh cultural capital with literary and cultural authenticity. A famous Kazakh intellectual and writer was invited to give the blessing (bata), and a well-known singer who always appears on Xinjiang Kazakh TV performed his hit song. For the veil lifting ritual (betashar), a multiple award-winning aqin (oral poet) was invited to do the honor. The host summoned the elders, the groom’s parents, relatives, and the groom’s friends to sit on the chairs lined up in front of the standing bride and groom, bride maid and best man. As soon as the aqin plucked his dombra (two-stringed plucked instrument)6 and cleared his throat, the crowds

6 Dombra the most iconic, popular Kazakh music instrument.

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

125

started to cheer and whistle excitedly. Everyone listened carefully to what he sang: O o o o betashar basi bismillah, Bismillah kiler ming jil da, Az osyet aytayin, Jiyilghan qalqim soz tingda. Jiyilghan qalqim soz tingda…

Bizmillah sozim aniqti, Sharighat sozi jariqti, Payghamgar qizin patima, Qaly taqsir alipti, Solardan qalip bul miras, Jelegin basqa jawipti-aw Jelegin basqa jawinda…! Kelin bop minda sen kelding, Betashargha men keldim. Yibali bol kelinjan, Bir uyli jandi men keldim, Bir uyli jandi men keldim…

Minip bir tusting jorghagha, Kestelep tikken dorbagha, Yibali bol kelinjan, Kezikting ulken ordargha, Kezikting ulken ordargha… Yibali bol kelinjan, Ayirip aq pen qarani, Ayirip aq pen qarani…

Sen kelip qongghan shangiraq, Berekeli jangiraq, Merekeli jangiraq, Qara ormanday qalqingdi, El ertetin shangiraq,

Betashar begins with bismillah, Bismillah comes for a thousand years, I’m here to speak my testimony, Now listen to me, my people gathering here, Now listen to me, my people gathering here…

My words are clear, bismillah, The holy words of are bright, The daughter of the prophet—Fatima, is married to Sir Qali, This heritage is left by them, and she was covered by jelek, She was covered by jelek! You came here as a kelin, I came here for betashar. Dear kelin, you should be modest, I came to bring light to a family, I came to bring light to a family…

I ride an ambler at one time, carrying a parcel covered in embroidery, Dear kelin, you should be elegant, You have arrived at a big palace, You have arrived at a big palace… Dear kelin, you should be modest, You should be able to discern true and false, You should be able to discern true and false…

The shangiraq you came to live in, is a united shangiraq, is a happy shangiraq, With your people standing together like a forest, It is a shangiraq that can lead a nation, (continued)

126

G. SALIMJAN

(continued) Aweli yilip salem ber, Shangiraqqa bir salem!

Endi aytayin atasin, Atasi uzaq jasasin, Qutti kelin tusirip, Bersin jaqsi batasin, Kuz kelgende bayterek, Ozdiginen soladi, Akeng joq jerdi endigi, Oz akengdey boladi, Ataningizgha bir salem, Ataningizgha bir salem…

This is what you should greet first, One bow to the shangiraq!

Now I speak of her ata (father-in-law), May her ata live a long life, Congratulate on acquiring a blessed kelin, Let him give the best bata to you, Even the tallest tree will wither, Naturally in the autumn, When your own father is not around, He will be like your own father, One bow to your ata, One bow to your ata…

(the crowd clapped and cheered loudly) Munaw kelgen aq kelin, Sawusqanan saq kelin, Erte turip qizmet qil, Ata-enenge jaq kelin, Ata-enenge jaq kelin…

Tiresken kokpen tobesi, Batirding ‘otkir jebesi, Qutti kelin tusirip, Terezesi elmen tengesti, Aq juregi korinip, Aq shashuwi togilip, Janedi yilip salem bir, Ana turghan enenge, Qay enenge bir salem!

Nurjan sen qaladan,

Here comes our snow white kelin, Here comes our kelin like a brisk magpie, You should get up early and work, Be dear to your ata and ene, Be dear to your ata and ene…

The sharp arrow of the hero, is so long it pierces the sky, Congratulate on acquiring a kelin, This is a perfect matchmaking, She has nothing but the purest heart for you, She has the best gifts to shower on you, Please bow one more for her, Your ene (mother-in-law) is sitting there, One bow to your ene!

When your husband Nurjan comes from the city, (continued)

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

127

(continued) Ne bolmasa daladan, Shapshanq turup shay qaynat, Tuspey jatip shanadan, Ulkendi sylap qurmette, Uylalip tur aghadan, Uylalip tur aghadan…

Endi aytayin qaynaghang, Minggirtip malin aydaghan, Bosaghanga akelip, Bir toghizin baylaghan, Qaynaghanga bir salem!

Or when he comes from outside, You should get up quickly and prepare tea, Before he comes down from the snow sledge, Respect the elders with your best courtesy, Be modest in front of your brother-in-law, Be modest in front your brother-in-law…

Now I speak of your brother-in-law, He led his numerous livestock, Over here to the front of your bosagha, He brings gifts to you from your in-laws, One bow to your brother-in-law!

(the crowd clapped and cheered loudly) Endi aytayin absin, Absinning algha qarmisin, Endigi jerdi otirar, Bolip jep manggi shirkin-aw, Aghayinning tabisin, Absindi sylap qurmete aw, Absiningning alshi-aw alghisin! Absindargha bir salem!

Asiqti jilik ‘tosin al, Shershewinen kesip al, Betashar qilghan buyrabas qayda dep, Sonda meni esinge al, Ozimede bir salem! Kelistirip turip kane, Ozimede bir salem!

Now I speak of your absin (sister-in-law), Say your greetings to your absin, Now you can share with each other, Share together as always, What your husbands have brought around, Respect your absin, And gain her appreciation, One bow to your absin!

Offer the best parts of sheep to the guests, Lamb and breast bone cut from the cartilage, Where is that curly haired betashar singer? you say, Please remember me when you recall, One bow to myself! Do it right, here, One bow to myself!

128

G. SALIMJAN

Jaqsi sozdi aytiningiz, Jaman sozdi tartiningiz, Yibali bolsang kelinjan, Qadirlep turar qalqingiz, Jurisingnen korinsin, Yibalik pen yeptilik, Bir baghasin beredi-aw, Osi otirghan kopshilik, Kopshilikke bir salem!

Speak the good words, And hold your bad words, Dear kelin, if you are modest, People visit you will always respect you, They will notice from your behavior, Be elegant and modest, They would give you a good judgement, To all the people sitting here, One bow to the audience!

Kelin keldi kelingiz, Ayday nurin koringiz, Ala qula demey-aq, Korimdigin beriningiz, Soz marjanin tereyin, Til men jaqti kezeyin, Ruqsat bolsa kopshilik, Jelektetip kelining, Bettin aship bereyin, Bettin aship bereyin!

Kelin is here, welcome, Please see her moonlight face, Don’t say she is not pretty, Then not give me my reward, I have let my tongue and palate wander, In speaking the pearl and gem of words, If everyone allows here, Here’s our fully veiled kelin, Let me lift her veil for you, Let me lift her veil for you!

After the betashar, the entourage cheered the groom’s name loudly and lifted him up in the air. The elders and relatives were pleased with the respect and honor brought by the betashar performance. Later that night I learned that this betashar singer made 3000 RMB (about 500 USD) from this single performance.

Gender of Memory, Trauma of Revolution The skyrocketing bride price, extravagant gift-giving, and mushrooming new customs (salt-sana) of the present day contrasted sharply with the material scarcity and social insecurity the elders had experienced in their early life. Their oral history of the socialist period channels comments toward the present, but also expresses a gendered dimension of state dispossession that is often silenced in China as well as the Kazakh ethnonationalist discourse. Maoist new China in the 1950s employed gender equality and class struggle in taming nomadic Kazakhs into state

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

129

subjects.7 In the wake of Great Leap Forward and People’s Communes (1958–1962), private or familial consumption and ceremonial sacrifice of animals was disallowed, as pastures and livestock were collectivized as commune property. The Socialist Education Movement (1963) and Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) further purged the herd lord classes and Islamic authority figures. The state socialist remodeling not only disrupted the Kazakh socio-political system maintained through marriage alliances, but also led to a material and symbolic dispossession that forcefully removed women from their communities to become commune laborers. Many elders spoke of material devastation in their youth, strongly contrasted to the wedding extravaganza they observed today. Mao era policies had called for simplification of ritual celebrations as the state inserted itself even in the most remote villages via marriage reform. One woman could not remember the year when she got married, but clearly recalled the time when she joined Altay state ranch with her husband in 1958. During the Cultural Revolution, there wasn’t any toi. People only knew about who married whom from hearsay. Girls left their hometown taking a headscarf as well as their nopus 8 to another village. There wasn’t qudalasu like today, no toi, no neke, not even a pot of tea… My father saw us off, kissed me on my forehead, wished us well and left. It was just like that in that era. I had a qizil qaghaz (“red paper,” state-issued marriage certificate), that’s all. Many young people got married that way.

Recurring themes in women’s narratives illustrate a gendered dispossession marked by the loss of material wealth and the humiliation from state apparatus. At the height of class struggle, the communist cadres organized Kazakhs to denounce elite, aristocratic rulers

7 On the dual emphases of gender equality and class struggle in Maoist China, see for example Yang and Yan (2017). 8 nopus in Arabic means population; Kazakhs in China use this word to refer to the household registration system in China, also called hukou system (Ch. 户口).It is a social control mechanism to prevent free flow of the population with a stress on preserving resources in urban areas. China’s central planning sets jobs and services contingent on a residency limit for individuals living in the area. The hukou system has perpetuated rural urban segregation, unequal development, and regional discrimination (Cheng and Seldon 1994).

130

G. SALIMJAN

as the class enemies, while the categories such as ‘middle and poor herder’ (贫下中牧) and ‘peasant’ (贫下中农) became desirable political identities for local populations, because they came with better political rights for getting education and employment. Many young girls from elite backgrounds such as rich herd lord families or the hereditary nobilities were forced to marry middle or old aged bachelors who could not marry before. A female elder of a Tore clan of Chinggisid lineage9 remembered that young Kazakh girls’ long braids were cut short ‘like Han, women, short on the side, and their earrings were confiscated.’ When she was only sixteen, she was pushed from behind by the Red Guards into a poor man’s household. There was no wedding, and her family property had been looted by the Red Guards because they were deemed ‘Four Olds’ (四旧si jiu).10 Her aunt secretly visited her in the middle of the night and gave her a wedding gift in tears. ‘It was 1968,’ she said quietly, ‘in this village there were a few other women who were also forced into marriage like me.’ Another elder attributed her current poverty to the state looting during Mao’s campaign. Because her grandfather was a zanggi 11 (an official title prior to the 1950s), her entire youth was spent on the backbreaking labor on the state farm: In 1958, I was in the fifth grade. I was kicked out of school because I was from a rich family. I cried for three days. My uncle gave me a book to read. I was always driven to the field to work alongside with the adults. If I were educated, I would not be here today. Everything we owned was taken away… I wasn’t allowed to go to school, now I have become a peasant.

The state power the elders experienced in the past continued to haunt them in the present, as the dominating official discourse of ‘ethnic unity’ (民族团结minzu tuanjie) and ‘stability’ (稳定wending ) in Xinjiang 9 Chinggisid originates from Mongol name Chinggis with an English suffix -id (indicating a sect, or followers of a person, or cult). Chinggisid can be understood as the descendants of Chinggis Khan, who were the noble ruling class among Mongols, Kazakhs, and other people of Inner Asia. It conferred political legitimacy on people in areas previously under Mongol authority. 10 ‘Four Olds’ refer to Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. ‘Destroying the Four Olds’ was one of the stated goals of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution in China starting from 1966 to 1976. 11 This official title was originally in Manchu janggin, a secretary in various government organs, or adjutant of banner.

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

131

shapes their subjectivity. As a result, Kazakh elders have adopted a unique narrative pattern to enable their condemnation of the Mao era policies. First, in between remembering the disastrous past, from time to time they stepped back to express gratitude and loyalty to the state for allowing them to practice and preserve their cultural heritage. They routinely uttered phrases such as ‘this is a developed, affluent era’ (‘azir damughan, jaqsi zaman) and ‘thank the Party’ (partyagha rahmet ), even though the ruling regime then and now is the same Communist Party. Second, the recent policies of intangible cultural heritage development provided a legitimacy to compare with a time when cultural practices were banned. An elder from rural Altay described the socialist assimilationist past using life cycle rituals as a mnemonic device: We followed Janazah procedures until the People’s Communes were established. After that, when my father-in-law died, we were told not to cry. We didn’t sing koris . Same for my mother-in-law. People just passed on news to one another. At that time, mullahs were sent to labor camps, even crescents on the tombstones were knocked down.

Fragments of life cycle rituals and songs sometimes surface in people’s narratives to mark certain politically inflicted, unnatural deaths in the Mao era. Anthropologist of China Rubie Watson points out that when the state power labels certain people as ‘nonpersons’ and their deaths as ‘nonevents,’ public mourning can be political (1994: 83). Family members who died without any records and proper mourning were remembered through orally transmitted elegies. I learned about my maternal great uncle’s death during the Cultural Revolution through a family album photo of him as well as my grandmother’s elegy (joqtaw).12 Due to his former military service to the Republican army, he was persecuted and battered to death by Mao’s Red Guards. This generational trauma was passed down to me via my mother’s witnessing and remembrance of the elegy in her family. My maternal grandmother ignored the ban on the ‘Four Olds’ and lamented for him, while also condemning people who have turned against each other and collaborated with the state power. As a result, some onlookers reported on her for alluding to people as

12 In Kyrgyz language, the practice is called koshok, or joktoo, with the most famous from Kyrgyz national epic Manas (Levin et al. 2011).

132

G. SALIMJAN

‘enemies’ (dushman)—a term that has been radicalized to dehumanize people who were in unwanted revolutionary categories. shemuner boyin qistadim, qayghingning shoghing ustadim, dos kuyiner is boldi, suysindi meken dushmaning.

Shemuner is my winter pasture, I only have my sorrow left. Your friends who care will cry for you, yet your enemies are laughing.

Memory, Place, and Elegy under Chinese Development The vast pastoral regions in Northern Xinjiang have long been a target for Sino-Kazakhstan border reinforcement since the 1950s, as well as for land reclamation led by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (XPCC). In the Reform era, the ecologically unconscious developmentalism gradually led to declining pasture quality (Chen 2015; Humphery and Sneath 1999; Ptackova 2012; Williams 1996, 2002). The state accused herders of overloading the grassland capacity and issued a sedentarization project to relocate them, even though the XPCC agricultural monocropping and mining projects made more intensive demands for water and land and caused more pollution (Hruska et al. 2017: 286–287; Zhou et al. 2017). The loss of land and traditional livelihood had a deep impact on Kazakh rural communities. There has been a steady outflow of younger generations looking for jobs and opportunities elsewhere, as well as children studying in nearby counties and cities because village schools were closed for not meeting the state’s standard of ‘bilingual education.’ In recent decades, almost every Kazakh family has had some male rural relative struggling with alcoholism, psychological ailments, or other illnesses, revealing the structural violence of development and settler colonialism. In 2015, when I visited my extended family in rural Tarbagatai, I attended the 40-day anniversary of a young man’s death with my parents, another life-cycle ritual. The deceased was a son of my father’s neighbor in that village. Following a dry and dusty trail out in the countryside, we passed several neighbors’ mud-brick houses and their livestock corrals. The village was quite empty and desolate, as most young people had left, and children were at schools in other towns. The rest of the villagers had

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

133

gone to pick saffron in the adjacent fields for the Chinese bosses who rented the land. My father was born here in the 1950s, and he was the first college student from this village. While we were walking together, occasionally he would point at the deserted houses around which he used to play when he was a little boy, or at a tree and tell us that such-and-such person used to live there with this tree in the middle of their courtyard. I noticed how memories flooded in vividly for him as he was walking through this place, but I could only try to imagine what it looked like from the bits and pieces of clues from the conversations and descriptions I had heard about the place. The village is called Almali because the mountain valley nearby used to be full of apple trees with red apples hanging heavy from the top (alma means apple in Kazakh). But now, the mountain ridge was rugged and zigzagged. Chromium was found there so the place had been dynamited since. Decades later, all the Chromium was dug out, factories were closed, workers were laid off, water dried up, and there was nothing left. The neighbor was expecting our arrival, as several middle-aged and elderly women of the household were already singing the elegy and crying. They wore dark colored headscarves and held towels against their crying faces, the sound of wailing and sobbing rose and fell and filled the air with deep sorrow. My father hugged them one by one, and my mother followed, her eyes filled with tears already. He said to them softly, ‘be calm, be patient (sabir bol ) … what can you do… it’s all decided by Allah…’ My mother sobbed and comforted them too, ‘It’s all Allah’s arrangement… what can we do?’ I also hugged each one of them, and felt their hot tears and bodies trembling in grief. Slowly, the singing and weeping weakened. They whispered faintly, gradually recovering from the painful mourning. We were then invited to sit on the guest seats. It was only after this ritual of grieving together that they started to greet each other formally. Echoing each other’s comments on fate and this treacherous world, their sighing converged and fell into silence slowly. The kelin (daughter-in-law) of the family passed bowls of milk tea to us one by one. In between the silence and speaking, they sighed and whispered again and again, ‘He was so young… leaving like this…’. From their conversation, I slowly learned that the young man died from a motorcycle accident. Motorcycles have become a more popular mode of transportation than horses among rural young men since 2000.

134

G. SALIMJAN

They are faster and more compatible for both urban and rural road conditions. In wedding gifting culture, the groom’s family used to give the bride’s youngest brother a horse, now they give him a motorcycle instead. By Kazakh cultural protocol, people who missed the funeral should visit the mourning family and give consolation, and women of the mourning household should wait at home and perform an elegy. This ritual of communal grieving serves to animate and refresh the participants’ collective identity and memories belonging to that place. For my father, he perceived and interacted with the place through his memories of childhood and youth in the village. He knew the place through the rustling sounds of the tree leaves, the smells of the burning firewood and cow patties he helped to collect, or cheese curds his neighbor stuffed into his pockets, and so on. These all constituted the place and what it meant for him. For the mourning women, the elegy was dedicated to the spirits of the departed son and this village where he was born and raised and we the living came to pay our respects. The elderly women left behind in deserted Kazakh villages remain as the linchpins of the scattered families and communities spread out in the sprawling urbanization and modernization. Their cultural memories are embodied in these ritual gestures and soundscapes, resonating with the unspeakable abandonment and alienation that are the symptoms of Chinese development. As part of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative started in 2013, Xinjiang became a strategic transportation hub for connecting China to Central Asia. Altay and Tarbagatai in Northern Xinjiang were undergoing a major infrastructure construction project named ‘Tiˇegongj¯ı’ (铁 公机), which means railway, highway, and airport, in some place also dam construction. The state claimed that more investment opportunities and tourism revenue would follow this massive project, neglecting the continued marginalization and disintegration of natural Kazakh villages and livelihood. In rural Altay, I met an elder who received a little compensation when the railway project took a tract of land in the middle of her inherited property. During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, granny Hanikey was a labor model and even worked in the field the day before she gave birth to babies. Now she retired and lived with her daughter in a small village. She spent the compensation money on preparing for weddings for her grandchildren and her own medical bills. Our conversation went from Mao era labors, political study meetings, marriage, family, illness, to deaths all around us—often an unavoidable topic with the elders. Comparing with

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

135

the un-mourned deaths she witnessed in Maoist times, she brought up her sister-in-law’s funeral in her natal home village. In 2014, she passed away. I went back to Burultoghay, my hometown, and attended her funeral.’ It has been seven years that I haven’t been back. The relatives all came from different places, they were singing koris for her. When they were done, I started:

Jurmising aman juraghat, Allahgha janing amanat. Jiladi dep sokpender, Otirmin mine saw salamat.

How are you my dear relatives? May Allah protect your spirits. Please don’t mock me for crying, I am here to say my greetings.

‘They all listened carefully.’ I did koris for a long time. Not many elders are left in this family.

Altayding sawi qulama, Qulaqqa salghan burama. Jiladi dep sokpender, Ulkennen ishkim qalmadi, Qayghimdi aytip sura ma.

The Altay mountains are high in the sky, I wear my coiled earrings on my ears. Please don’t mock me for crying, there’s no one left among the elders, don’t ask me about my sorrow.

[Her voice changed] ‘then I sing’:

Altay men Sawir mekenim, Jel menen jangbir jetegim. Jaylawding joli asw bar, Jel detip tuman basilday. Ayel bolsada aydager, Jengem-ay topiraq jasirday.

Altay and Sawir mountain are my hometown, the wind and rain gently stroke my dress. The mountain paths lead to our summer pasture, the fog is cleared away by the blowing wind. Though a woman she is the most outstanding, now grass has grown on top of her grave.

136

G. SALIMJAN

Bazargha barsam manat joq, Ushayin desem qanat joq. Jiladi dep sokpender, Ay, mening jengeme qabat joq. Jilqi ishinde seterim, Jalghan bildim bekerin. Agha jengeden ayirlip, Ulkening aldi boldi, kishning arti boldi, Armandap jalghiz otermin.

I go to the bazaar but there is no cloth, I want to fly but I don’t have wings. Please don’t mock me for crying, alas, my jenge, no one can blame her. I used to be a champion stallion, now I see through this illusory world. I have lost my agha and jenge, she passed earlier than the elders, and left the youngsters behind, I am all alone in remembrance of her.

‘There was an old couple from Tasbastaw of Koktogay who also came to the funeral.’ Their son recently fell ill and passed away alone at home. Their kelin was a policewoman, a cadre who works in the government. She was in Altay city for some business. She came back home and found that her husband had died. Her parents-in-law scolded her for her absence. The children were left behind. I didn’t know the old couple were grieving for their son. Hearing my song, the old couple cried so sadly. Their son passed away before my jenge. They have already buried him and held his funeral, but hearing my koris , they were moved and cried so much that they couldn’t get up from their chairs. In Burultoghay, all my relatives from my natal home came for my jenge, so I sang. They cried so much. I also sang koris for a long time! I kept on singing. My jenge’s children also sang, but after they finished, I sang alone. Because I was in my own home, I sang my past here.

Surrounded by her kin in her natal home village, Hanikey’s elegy was imbued with memories of lived experience being in the place. The idyllic landscape in the poem strongly contrasts with the lonely desolate village that is about to be encircled by state railway construction project. The old couple’s grief aggravated hers and vice versa, a common sentiment resonated in the soundscape: the loss of the loved ones and abandonment in an increasingly alienating world. Anne Anlin Cheng (2000: 24) has suggested that racialized inequalities complicate melancholia. The life cycle rituals and songs produced in the context of systemic Kazakh dispossession must be deciphered through life story narratives. Hanikey spoke of the injustice that she and elder generations have endured: humiliation, harsh labor, and survival through the famine and political persecution in

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

137

Mao era. These gendered melancholia and oral traditions shed a light on both the socialist history and post-socialist everyday life in Xinjiang.

Conclusion Through a deep description of gender, age, and class within its complex entanglement with contesting histories and narratives in Xinjiang, this paper examines Kazakh memory as a field of interweaving sentiments. As anthropologist Ralph Litzinger puts it, the issues of gender in China ‘must be interpreted in the context of particular histories, agendas, experiences, and desires of social actors as they operate and maneuver in differing contexts’ (2000: 12). This is particularly true for the peoples in relationships with a state that the Communist Party of China has built through their endless broken promises in the past and present. As Muslim minority women, Kazakh elders in Xinjiang center their narrations on japakesh (hardship and toil) such as commune labor, family tragedies, and political persecution, utterly different from the state’s narrative of women’s liberation and the ethnonationalist folkloric representation of timeless, ‘authentic’ Kazakh women. Surviving socialist collectivization is so vivid in their memories that mutual dependency was a matter of life and death, which is why politics of nostalgia and the emphasis on communal integrity repeatedly occurred. As anthropologist Leslie Robertson puts it, ‘social memory is embedded in political processes shaped by variable tides of power and by the more urgent necessities of present reality’ (2012: 51). Kazakh elders reworked tradition as a symbol of power prior to the arrival of Communist Party in 1950s, by selectively forgetting its inherent gender and class hierarchies. This selective remembering and forgetting comes from their present predicament facing reversed family hierarchy, class disparity, and capitalist land grabs. Under the watchful eyes of the state power that requires their constant gratitude toward the Party, the elders told stories as survivors of political turmoil, as strong women who have fulfilled their moral gendered duties in their communities. These paradoxical narratives constitute a request for validation from family and state, both of whom have abandoned them as part of an irretrievable past, while also instrumentalizing elders as markers of ethnic unity and tradition and cultural preservation. This is evidenced by the physical and emotional labor women must perform in this ethnography.

138

G. SALIMJAN

While the state apparatus in Xinjiang promises stability and development, it silences a violent socialist history as the root cause for the intergenerational trauma and continued dispossession faced by the young generations. The Belt and Road Initiative as a ‘zoning technology’ (Ong 2006) connecting Xinjiang and Central Asia also constitutes a spatial and epistemic violence that normalizes the eradication of Indigenous existence on that land. Family and communal life cycle events are the last few places for dynamic reconstruction of the past as well as the restoration of a ‘sense of place’ (Riaño-Alcalá 2002). Oral traditions such as koris , betashar, and joqtaw are thus essential to identifying Kazakh memory practices that connect kin to culture and to grassland environments. Traditional knowledge is continuously shaped by and responding to the ongoing fragmentation of pastoral lands due to development projects in the post-Mao era, and it is this shared nostalgia and melancholia surrounding kinship and landscape that allows the public mourning for the loss of pastoral lifeways to be said out loud. When ethnographer Lila Abu-Lughod returned home to a half-ruined Palestine under a heavy presence of Israeli military and checkpoints, she was confronted with double-layered trauma: the loss of the past alongside its continuation as a brutal present (2011: 12). This is also the reality in Xinjiang today, for me, a destroyed home that is hard to go back to. This research is thus painfully limited to years prior to 2015, since after 2017 political control in Xinjiang has tightened drastically and taken on the tendency of cultural genocide through banning on Islamic activities, mass arrest of intellectuals, even forced interethnic marriages. In 2016, new Chinese Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo was transferred to Xinjiang in 2016 from his former position in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). On the eve of the 19th National Congress of Communist Party in October 2017, Xinjiang became engulfed in unprecedented and ubiquitous surveillance and suppression. Chen applied advanced AI technology to build a provincial police state, including a DNA database, big data analytics, phone scanning software, face-recognition technologies, and much more. Since he took office, over a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minority groups have been extrajudicially detained in so-called ‘reeducation camps’ under the pretense of counterterrorism. It is difficult to know, whether the cultural traditions I have described in this paper, will survive this new historical wave of violence and persecution, and thus my own ethnography becomes itself another form of remembering.

6

LAMENT IN AN AFFLUENT ERA: CULTURAL POLITICS …

139

References Abu-Lughod, L. (2011). Return to Half-Ruins: Fathers and Daughters, Memory and History in Palestine. In Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, 124–136. New York: Columbia University Press. Chen, X. ed. (2015). Collection of Yang Tingrui on Mobile Pastoralism. Shanghai: The Academy of Social Science Press. Cheng, A. A. (2000). Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief . Cary, NC: Oxford University Press. Cheng, T. and Selden, M. (1994). The Origins and Social Consequences of China’s Hukou System. China Quarterly 139: 644–668. Dong, J. (2009). A Summary of Thirty-Year Bilingual Education and Research in Xinjiang. Journal of Bingtuan Education Institute 19 (3): 8–13. Duara, P. (1998). The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender, and National History in Modern China. History and Theory 37(3): 287–308. Hirsch, M. and Smith, V. (2002). Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (1). Hruska, T., Huntsinger, L., Brunson, M., Li, W., Marshall, N., Oviedo, J. L., and Whitcomb, H. (2017). Rangelands as Social-Ecological Systems. In Rangeland Systems: Processes, Management and Challenges, edited by David Briske, 263–425. Springer. Humphrey, C. and Sneath, D. (1999). The End of Nomadism?: Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Isabaeva, E. (2012). Leaving to Enable Others to Remain: Remittances and New Moral Economies of Migration in Southern Kyrgyzstan. In Movement, Power, and Place in Central Asia and Beyond: Contested Trajectories, edited by M. Reeves, 165–178. Oxon: Routledge. Levin, T., Daukeyeva, S., and Kuchumkulova, E. (eds.). (2011). The Music of Central Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Litzinger, R. (2000). Questions of Gender: Ethnic Minority Representation in Post-Mao China. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 32 (4): 3–14. Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ptackova, J. (2012). Implementation of Resettlement Programmes Amongst Pastoralist Communities in Eastern Tibet. In Pastoral Practices in High Asia, edited by H. Kreutzmann, 217–234. Dordrecht: Springer. Riaño-Alcalá, P. (2002). Remembering Place: Memory and Violence in Medellin, Colombia. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 7 (1): 276–309. Robertson, L. and Kwagu’ł Gixsam Clan. (2012). Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom. Vancouver: UBC Press.

140

G. SALIMJAN

Roche, S. and Hohmann, S. (2011). Wedding Rituals and the Struggle over National Identities. Central Asian Survey 30 (1): 113–128. Santos, G. and Harrell, S. (eds.). (2016). Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-First Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sorace, C. P. (2017). Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Watson, R. S. (1994). Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism. Seattle and Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Williams, D. M. (1996). The Barbed Walls of China: A Contemporary Grassland Drama. The Journal of Asian Studies 55 (3): 665–691. ———. (2002). Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yan, Y. (2016). Intergenerational Intimacy and Descending Familism in Rural North China. American Anthropologist 118 (2): 244–257. Yang, W. and Yan, Y. (2017). The Annihilation of Femininity in Mao’s China: Gender Inequality of Sent-Down Youth During the Cultural Revolution. China Information 31 (1): 63–83. Zhou, H., Wu, B., Wang, Y., and Li, Y. (2017). Ecological Achievement of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and Its Problems and Countermeasures. Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences 32 (1): 55–63. Zukosky, M. L. (2007). Making Pastoral Settlement Visible in China. Nomadic Peoples 11 (2): 107–133.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Interweaving Texts Eva-Marie Dubuisson

Abstract In this volume we consider that cultural traditions are best read as a series of social texts interwoven through time. In this sense, the metaphor of the ‘social text’ can refer to shifting historical circumstances, emerging discourses, and even conflicts over shared identity and political futures. Specifically, we see the ways in which traditional oral and epic forms can be embodied creatively as a mechanism of dealing with current and ongoing socio-political change, and how individuals, communities, and institutions can collaborate to realize their continued performance. Rather than locating such cultural forms as relics in the past, we should consider how these continue to be made and remade anew in the present as a vehicle of creating or negotiating broader external shifts and change over a long twentieth century in (post) socialist Central Asia. Keywords Interweaving · Cultural production · State socialism · History and ethnography of Central Asia · Ethnic identity · Performance

E.-M. Dubuisson (B) Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_7

141

142

E.-M. DUBUISSON

In order to locate contemporary oral tradition and performance across a variety of historical and ethnographic contexts in Central Asia, in the introduction to this volume we have highlighted the idea of interweaving, the ways in which cultural traditions are best read as social texts braided together through time. In this sense, the metaphor of the ‘social text’ can refer to shifting historical circumstances, emerging discourses, and conflicts over shared identity and political futures. Specifically, throughout the chapters we see the ways in which traditional oral and epic forms can be embodied creatively as a mechanism of dealing with current and ongoing socio-political change. Rather than locating such cultural forms as relics in the past, each of these essays in different ways considered how these continue to be made and remade anew in the present as a vehicle of creating or negotiating broader external shifts and change over a long twentieth century in (post) socialist Central Asia. In that sense, we understand categories of language, culture, nation, or territory not as internally homogenous units, but rather as the confluence—the fabrication, the weaving together—of many different influences over time, always with the further potential to be further (un)done. Historical and ethnographic research has demonstrated that the cultural categories of socialist projects—and the rooting of ‘ethnic’ minority identity in the modernist politics of the broader state—was most often not an entirely top-down process, but rather a negotiation of central state representatives, together with regional intellectuals and leaders (see examples Battis 2015; Edgars 2005; Harris 2016). The groups and ‘cultures’ which we might now name—as well as the language categories and territories which they are seen to represent—are the result of such negotiation, but sometimes disconnected from the complicated historical negotiations over identity that actually characterized the region in the early Soviet period (Abashin 2007). It is then crucial to take into consideration the institutions and actors, who emerge as influential in such decision-making, and to explore the localized archaeology of how and why they may function to guide broadscale decision-making that will impact generations to come. This volume also combines both historical and ethnographic research, in order to demonstrate that even while certain categories of culture, performance, or oral tradition may come to be somewhat fixed under certain political or historical circumstances, in fact there are always individuals and groups who are nonetheless able to strategically utilize, circumscribe, or change those very categories, toward complicated ends.

7

CONCLUSION: INTERWEAVING TEXTS

143

The complicated ends of these stories often revolve around the idea that there are no clearly delineated notions of, for example, ‘state control and popular resistance’, or ‘modern versus traditional.’ Rather, each of the people profiled in this volume, in their own lives as ‘culture producers’ and communities, does embody many of the changing and competing notions of culture, identity, and political belonging available during their lifetimes—those which they have inherited, with which they live, and those they hope to build. Their work, activities, and private lives elucidate worldviews with varied stories, values, goals, and narratives, and it is thus that the framework of interweaving becomes a valuable resource in the comparative historical and ethnographic study of ‘culture work’—the ways in which cultural forms are imagined, created, and performed across the region. While this volume brings together work on Kyrghyz and Kazakhs, historically Turkic-Muslim communities of Central Asia, ultimately the dynamics of cultural negotiation described here—debates over ethnic, religious, linguistic, and national identity—are broadly applicable to all the peoples and territories of (post) Soviet and Chinese socialist projects, and how these debates are continued and reformed in newly national contexts. As Duishembieva clearly details in her biographical history of Ishenaaly Arabaev, the particular biography and early life of this Kyrgyz intellectual was precisely what afforded him the flexibility and adaptability to adjust to changing political circumstances later on. Coming from a childhood where literacy studies in the mekteb and lessons with the mullah blended together with the oral traditions of regional bards and poets, he then spent his young adulthood publishing plays and poems together with his own students in madrasa newspapers, and traveling to work and think together with like-minded Kazakh intellectuals in the Alash movement on notions of identity and sovereignty. Overall, Arabaev was well-positioned in the creation and recognition of cultural discourses, and well-versed in collaboration. After the horrors of violence, migration, and famine 1916–1921, by 1924 and during the delimitation of Soviet Central Asia, Arabaev was able to actually use the language of equality and modernization to advocate for an ethnic minority group within the Krygyz SSR. By arguing that this was an oppressed group, in need of education (and even linguistic development), Arabaev became one of those to help successfully establish a semi-autonomous mountain oblast’ for the Kara Kirghiz. Arabaev’s own life trajectory shows clearly how ‘being Kyrgyz’ differed greatly across time and place—from nomadic

144

E.-M. DUBUISSON

lifeways to Muslim medressas, from oral tradition to written scripts, from rural to urban, privileged or not—internal variation which he was able to strategically utilize or ignore, in his crafting of political strategy. The strategic utilization of ‘ethnic minority’ status under state socialism is a story told as well by Salimjan here in her description of Kazakh identity under Chinese communist rule in the twentieth century. The categories of Kazakh culture in that context, which had been largely noted by early Chinese ethnographers and researchers—from customs to oral traditions to language, religion, or life cycle rituals—were not only discouraged under the violence of mass campaigns for education and cultural revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, but actually forbidden. So it came to be that the performance or discussion of these traditions and forms was itself a way to challenge the hegemony of the state, and was also a form of remembering. By the 1980s, when the government reinstated the practices of ethnographic research and folkloric inscription precisely as a means to (re)identify ethnic minority culture for political purposes, there came new opportunities to perform everything from ritual to song. Salimjan calls attention to the heavily gendered nature of this culture work1 —memory, teaching, and performance alike—which fell to elder, often rural women in extended kinship groups. In contexts of family gatherings, these women could impart to others their knowledge of custom as well as guidance for the cycle of life and responsibility to younger (or urban) members of the group. However, these same women faced quite directly the literal economic and infrastructural expansion of the Chinese state, as in the example of the author’s own grandmother, who was forced to cede part of her lands to the building of a large highway through her region, that highway part of China’s massive overland push to connect to Europe across (or through) Central Asia. As Salimjan explains, these songs carry not only knowledge from past generations, but also serve as a vehicle for commentary on social and political change: even as lament songs—and the oral traditions associated with life cycle rituals—embody the carrying of cultural memory in the present, what is being lamented is also ultimately the loss of lifeways and belonging in a neocolonial present. These themes are echoed in the chapters by Dubuisson and Breed, who each provide ethnographic contextualization for the learning and performance of oral traditions in 1 On gender and oral tradition among Kazakhs in China and Kazakhstan, see also Salimjan (2017).

7

CONCLUSION: INTERWEAVING TEXTS

145

Central Asia—improvisational poetry aitys in Kazakhstan, and epic narrative Manas in Kyrgyzstan. These forms were nationalized under the Soviet system, subject to inscription and institutionalization, and as such now serve as major national systems in the independent post-Soviet republics. State-branding in the Central Asian context has typically merged the contemporary geopolitics of natural resource extraction economies with highly visible retraditionalization—narratives of ‘return’ to a glorious precolonial past. Oral traditions like aitys and Manas have been heavily valorized as representing some ancestral ‘truth’ and now serve widely as the performative cultural face of the two nations.2 It is important to recognize that the case in China differs sharply from the Soviet and post-Soviet experience in one critical aspect: increased recognization of cultural forms in western Xinjiang in recent decades has come together with increased state surveillance and political repression. Further, the general affective character of China’s public discourses is prosperity and positivity, folkloric practices which do not tend to reflect the ‘happiness’ of ethnic minority identity are downplayed; specifically, the traditions of lament songs described by Salimjan were never recognized as cultural heritage by the state, despite being nominated by the county office. Thus, the Chinese state maintains a high degree of control over what is ultimately recognized as ‘culture’ for ethnic minorities across the country, but in Xinjiang in more recent years we now see the extreme effort to divorce religious identity from notions of ethnicity or culture, as in the so-called ‘re-education camps’ where over a million Turkic Muslims are interred.3 In this extreme case, which threatens to become a form of cultural genocide, Salimjan’s point is urgent: sometimes oral traditions remain one of the only means not of articulating the customs of the past, but of recording the repressive history of the present. Even in the states like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan which valorized these forms of tradition, and where poetry and epics have reached the status of national heritage under UNESCO, it is not the case that the state supports or recognizes these performative traditions in their full complexity. While states promote oral traditions like poetry and epic 2 On the discourses and logics of ancestral authority in Kazakhstan see Dubuisson (2017). 3 On the situation in Xinjiang and the process of state securitization across that territory see for example the special collection of articles in Central Asian Survey 38(1) edited by Joanne Smith Finley (2019).

146

E.-M. DUBUISSON

precisely because they are seen to embody an idealized version of cultural identity, values, customs, and history, in practice this richness is not fully represented. Rather, the nationalist versions of these cultural forms tend to shorten or flatten content, hollowing in particular any political commentary, storylines, and figures who do not match ‘the glory of the nation state.’ Further, the state also does not always provide sufficient funding and practical infrastructure for the intensive learning and performance. Under these conditions, it is the case that local and regional culture producers—organizers, artists, and theatre directors—have taken it upon themselves to interpret and promote the traditions for contemporary audiences. What these local efforts have in common in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan is that local actors are actually mobilizing the infrastructural resources for cultural production left by the Soviet Union: it is local offices of cultural affairs and newly imagined ‘houses of culture’ which now carry much of the work to carry on these traditions.4 It is precisely such creative mobilization of actors making use of existing structures and frameworks while at the same time embodying diverse and sometimes contradictory—interwoven—values and practices, that allows for flexibility and double-valence in the negotiation of ‘culture’ under socialism but also in the contexts of nationalism today. In his article on the history of women in Kyrgyz Soviet theatrical production, I˘gmen refers to such flexibility and layering as the liminal spaces offered by cultural production. Categories of identity—from gender, to lifeway, to literacy, to modernity itself—were all up for negotiation in the transmission of performative traditions. The women who led the Kyrgyz theatre movement as artists, collaborators, teachers, and directors were all themselves questioning and considering what it might mean to embody an ideal notion of cultural femininity, for example; the theatre collective as a whole provided a space to criticize the urban settlement of Soviet modernism—and the destruction of nomadic and pastoral lifeways and a connection to the environment—as a loss, rather than just blind progress. But certain values and rhetorics—internationalism, equality, feminism and education—where held strongly by some socialist citizens and leaders alike, as positive changes for society, and embodied in the lives and practices of those individuals and groups continually recreating ideas of ‘culture’ in performance. 4 On the historical role of Soviet culture clubs in the building of Kyrgyz identity, see I˘gmen (2012).

7

CONCLUSION: INTERWEAVING TEXTS

147

Ultimately, in their tight focus on the individuals and local communities involved in the negotiation of culture—as both performance and identity—the contributions to this volume together show quite clearly that no category is monolithic or uncontested. In Kyrgyzstan, local theatre groups replicate the model of Soviet culture houses, and use their interpretive performances as a means to promote interethnic sharedness and belonging for both Kyrgyz and Uzbek groups—to create a bridge in these communities which have been historically divided and which continue to face tensions.5 In Kazakhstan, poets and cultural organizers strategically utilize their position as bearers of culture to comment upon the hypocrisy of the nationalizing state in its failure to truly move beyond a history of Russian and Soviet cultural colonialism. They are supported in these rhetorical efforts by their audiences, who champion the artistic community as voicing the will of the (disenfranchised) people. As Salimjan has noted, ultimately, making culture is a way to claim historical agency. As such, the forms of culture—from national or ethnic identity, to the customs of life cycle rituals, to the performance of oral traditions—are not the relics of the past, nor are they the static categories of the present. Rather, these are active and living modes of the reclamation of meaning in the complexity of histories interwoven across lifetimes. The chapters presented together in this volume describe the transformations of the socialist revolutions in the Sino-Soviet world, and their impact on Central Asian nations. All of the authors have emphasized the heavy-handed nature of these two socialist states’ attempts to control ideological projects linked firmly to notions of ethnic identity and practice. While socialism prescribes a certain social evolutionism, forward marching progress toward a modern future, those projects also necessarily incorporated peoples divided precisely by concepts of culture. Our volume combines historical and ethnographic research—these two approaches together deliver an understanding of how ‘culture’—as a shared value, a category of nationality or ethnicity, or as a form of performance—actually come into being over time. In real life and local circumstances, there is no completely linear transition or transformation of understanding of social identity, but rather—as we emphasize here—a more complicated 5 Ananda Breed’s broader research project ‘Between Borders’ looks at participatory performance as a means of mediating conflict in Central Asia; her previous research has centered also on the relationship between performance and reconciliatory justice in conflict zones (Breed 2014).

148

E.-M. DUBUISSON

interweaving of ideas, values, and norms, and that even as people take on some aspects of a newer lifestyle or identity, people find creative ways to embody the logics of the past in the present as well. In our understanding of the negotiations of culture throughout these chapters, we see that shifting historical circumstances create room for the braiding together or memories, ambitions, duties, and desires under the constraints of current circumstances. As this was true of the period of Sovietization, so it is true of the more recent period of nationalization. What post-Soviet Central Asia has inherited, as elsewhere throughout the FSU, is an understanding of nationality strongly linked to ancestry, land, and language; the goal of contemporary cultural production is to promote and to valorize that vision as the visible face of new states. However, identity comes from and includes all the layers not only of changing historical circumstances and shifting discourses of autonomy, but also the shifting contexts and experiences of the intellectuals involved in plotting these cultural categories (Duishembieva 2015), who are able to use the discourses and logics of ‘nationality’ and sovereignty creatively to fight within those same state structures, to promote alternative ends, and even to voice a critique of power. We must also recognize that the state certainly has no monopoly on cultural production, and several artistic organizations choose to work outside those structures precisely in order to—as Breed describes for the ethnographic theatre in Kyrgyzstan performing Manas—‘rediscover the spirit of the epics’ with more freedom of interpretation. In bringing together these historical and ethnographic vignettes, what we also wish to emphasize is the sheer amount of time and effort that it takes, to create and maintain forms that keep categories of cultural expression ‘alive’ under broader state structures that seek to flatten or diminish the actual worldview, traditions, practices, and complicated (even contradictory) beliefs that culture may hold. In the specific context of (post) socialism, institutionalized notions of culture have taken on a highly performative position strictly related to nationality; there is more need for attention in these fields of study, to the ways that performance—the actual practices of consciously embodying and visualizing culture—may serve to work against performativity. Rather than viewing these traditions as empty folklore, outdated pageantry in service of state narratives, there

7

CONCLUSION: INTERWEAVING TEXTS

149

is a strong need to describe more the individuals—from theatre directors to grandmothers—involved in this type of affective labor, as well as the members of communities who have to live with the pain and loss of shifting historical circumstances, and to recognize how very seriously they take their duties as culture bearers, the responsibility that they feel in front of audiences at both home and at a variety of public artistic events, as well as the students and future generations they themselves train. The individuals profiled in this volume are all ultimately teachers, people who seem genuinely engaged in shaping the values, mores, and even institutions, of the now, in order to create something new or better for their society to come.

References Abashin, Sergei. (2007). Natsionalizmy v Srednei Azii, v Poiskakh Identichnosti [Nationalisms in Central Asia, in Search for Identity]. Sankt Peterburg: Aleteiia. Battis, Matthias. (2015). “Soviet Orientalism and Nationalism in Central Asia: Alexander Semenov’s Vision of Tajik National Identity.” Iranian Studies 48(5): 729–745. Breed, Ananda. (2014). Performing the Nation: Genocide, Justice, Reconciliation. Chicago, IL: Seagull Books. Dubuisson, Eva-Marie. (2017). Living Language The Dialogic Emergence of an Ancestral Worldview. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Duishembieva, Jipar. (2015). Visions of Community: Literary Culture and Social Change among the Northern Kyrgyz, 1856–1924. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington. Edgar, Adrienne. (2005). Tribal Nation: The Making of the Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harris, Rachel. (2016). The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam. London and New York: Routledge. I˘gmen, Ali. (2012). Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Salimjan, Guldana. (2017). “Debating Gender and Kazakhness: Memory and Voice in Poetic Duel aytis Between China and Kazakhstan.” Central Asian Survey 36(2): 263–280.

Index

A Abdrakhmanov, Zhusup, 40, 42 Abdrazaeva, Tynara, 61 Abdykerim Sydykov, 30 Aichürök “Lunar Beauty”, 62 Aigine Cultural Research Centre, 76 Ail(s), aul(s), awil(s), 55, 63, 68, 92, 94, 95, 99, 121 Aitmatov, Chingiz, 4, 60 Akayev, Askar, 81 akin, akyn, aqin, 4, 66, 68, 71, 78, 80, 124 Ak Sakal , 94, 95, 99, 100 Alash Orda Autonomy, government, 31, 32, 34, 35 Alash party, 14, 30–32, 34 Altay, 116, 120, 123, 129, 131, 134–136 amateur art clubs, 68, 79 Ancestry/kinship, 93, 110, 138, 144, 148 Arabaev, Ishenaaly, 8, 14, 17, 27, 35, 40, 143

artists, 4, 5, 11, 49, 59, 63, 67, 74, 81, 89, 94, 98, 101, 105, 106, 146 arts-based research methods, 67 Ashpozchu Ayalda (Striapuhany, The Female Cook), 58 audience, 9, 51, 57, 59, 61, 62, 66, 67, 71, 73, 76, 82–84, 90, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 103–105, 107, 108, 110, 128, 146, 147, 149 authenticity, 6, 91, 117, 124 Ay Qap, 14

B bai, 17 Baitursynov, Akhmet, 23, 31 bards, 4, 17, 66, 71, 143 Bekboliev, Egemberdi, 60 Belt and Road Initiative, 134, 138 betashar, veil-lifting ritual, 119, 124, 128, 138 Bokeikhanov, Alikhan, 23, 24, 30 bourgeois nationalism, 53

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0

151

152

INDEX

C Catherine the Great, 61 Central Asian, 2, 10, 44, 46, 50, 53, 145, 147 Bureau, Sredazbiuro, 37 intellectuals, 20–22 Choqaev, Mustafa, 32 class, 28, 40, 52, 104, 117, 119, 124, 137 disparity or hierarchies, 137 struggle - enemies, 128, 129 colonialism, 11, 108, 117, 132 colonial legitimacy, 119 communal life, 116, 138 communism, 70 Communist Party, 57, 99, 119, 131, 137, 138 counterterrorism, 117, 138 cultural Cultural Affairs, office of, 102, 104, 105, 146 cultural artists, 67 cultural form(s), 2–6, 66, 70, 74, 84, 146 Cultural Heritage, intangible cultural heritage project, 131 cultural imperialism, 108 cultural production, 67 Cultural Revolution, 10, 129, 131, 144 Four Olds, 131 Red Guard, 131 culture, “culturedness, or kul’turnost’ ”, 3, 4, 55 D dekady, or ten-day-festivals, 59 description, 18, 60, 71, 79, 94, 98, 99, 133, 137, 144 development, developmentalism, 4, 6, 15, 16, 19, 22, 30, 34, 37, 38, 44, 116, 132, 134, 138, 143

epistemic violence, 138 structural violence, 132 dombra, 124 Dulatov, Mirzhaqyp, 23, 31

E education, 5, 11, 16, 17, 23, 24, 29, 30, 50, 97, 100, 102, 105, 116, 119, 130, 143, 144, 146 Egypt, 52, 57 Elegy, 6, 131, 133, 134, 136 joqtaw, 131 koris , 120, 122–124, 131, 135, 136, 138 embodied knowledge, 66 environmental aesthetic, 75 epic, 6, 66–70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 81, 82, 84, 97, 98, 100, 101, 142, 145 eposes, 74, 78 ethnic, 3–8, 10, 11, 19, 81, 88, 90, 101, 143 minority, 116, 124, 142–145 unity, 109, 130, 137 ethnicity, 3, 4, 7, 52, 55, 58, 83, 91, 145, 147 European, 54, 58, 59, 69

F feminizing, 119 Ferghana valley, 36, 42 folklore, 91, 97, 98, 110, 116, 119, 148 folktale(s), 22, 68 Foundation for Tolerance International (FTI), 67 funeral, 10, 109, 118, 134–136

G gender

INDEX

and class, 137 and colonialism, 117 and memory, 128 equality, 117, 128 experiences, 117 relations, 137 role(s), 8, 62, 63, 116, 119 gendered dispossession, 129 generational trauma, 131, 138 generation(s), 9, 10, 17, 23, 49, 56, 58, 60, 62, 81, 93, 94, 101, 105, 124, 132, 136, 138, 142, 144, 149 Ghaliya madrasa, 18, 19, 22, 25, 27, 42 gratitude, 27, 62, 82, 117, 131, 137 Great Leap Forward, 129, 134 Great Patriotic War (WWII), 59 Gulnar Suranchieva, 63 Gulshara Duulatova, 58 H hajj, Muslim pilgrimage, 18 heritage, 70, 76, 90, 98, 99, 101, 116, 131, 145 Houses of Culture, 4, 53, 61, 68, 74, 80, 84, 146 I Islam, 24, 49, 52, 120 J jadidism, 18 jadid(s), 18 Jelil Sodynov, 82 jenge, brother’s wife, 121, 136 jomoqchu, 17, 45 K Kaigyluu Kakey (Unhappy Kakey), 54

153

kalyng (kalym), or bride price, 50 Kanyke, or Kanykei, 63 Karachach (Black-haired Girl), 54 Kara Kyrgyz, 36, 37, 41, 43, 44, 46 Kara Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast, 14, 46 Kasmambetov, Saparbek, 67, 69–71, 84 Kazakh famine, 33, 136, 143 intellectuals, 6, 8, 14, 20, 23, 24, 27, 31, 35, 45, 61, 124, 143 language, 9, 22, 23, 29, 41, 44, 88, 90, 91, 95–97, 102, 110, 124 kelin, daughter-in-law, 120, 133, 136 Khafiz Sarsekeev, 22 Khusein Karasaev, 34 Kinship/ancestry, 93, 110, 138, 144, 148 Kirghiz [Kazakh] Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), 35, 40, 41 Kiyizbaeva, Saira, 50, 51, 59 Kochkor (Qochqor) volost, 45 Kokand Autonomy, 32 Kolmambet Bulekbaev, 93 Komsomol, or Communist Youth Organization, 52 komuz, 51, 78 korenizatsiia, policy or indigenization, 38, 53 Kuiukova, Darkul, 51, 60, 62 kulak, 40 Kulth¯ um, Umm, 52 Kümüshalieva, Sabira, 51, 54–56, 58, 60, 62 Kurmanjan Datka, 57, 83 Kuropatkin, Aleksey, 33 Kuttubaeva, Anvar, 59 Kydykeeva, Baken, 51, 58, 62, 63 kymyz, 62 Kyrgyz

154

INDEX

language, 29, 44 nation, 15, 30 Kyrgyz Mountain Oblast, 35–37, 41 Kyrgyz National Opera and Ballet, 77 Kyrgyzness, 15, 17, 44, 45 Kyrgyz or Soviet Hero, 55 Kyz Saikal , 75 L labor camps, 131 commune labor, 137 model, 134 physical and emotional labor, 137 landscape, 6, 45, 52, 55, 75, 93, 136, 138 language bilingual education, 132 Kazakh, 9, 88, 90, 91, 95–97, 102, 110, 124 Kyrgyz, 29, 44 Mandarin, 123, 124 native tongue, 124 Uyghur, 124 Uzbek, 82, 83 language ideology, 88, 96 Lenin’s Corners, 4, 53 liminality, 5, 11, 48–50, 53–58, 60, 61, 63 M madrasa, 18, 19, 22, 27, 45 manap, 25, 28 Manas , 9, 63, 66–78, 80–85, 145 Manaschi, 66–68, 70–73, 75–78 Maoism Chinese Communist Party, 10, 138 collectivization, 55, 61, 116, 137 Great Leap Forward, 129, 134 People’s Communes, 129 socialism, 117, 129, 131, 137

marriage arranged, 119 forced, 130 inter-ethnic, 138 reform, 129 masculinizing, 119 Mecca, 18 Medina, 18 mekteb or maktab, 17, 18, 25 memory collective, 116 cultural, 134, 144 mnemonic device, 131 remembering, 131, 144 remembrance, 131 social, 117, 137 mentorship, 57, 102, 106, 110 Middle East, 18, 45 Mikhail Kamenskii, 28 Mikhail Speranskii, 61 Milman Parry, 69 modernity, 16, 50–52, 55, 59, 61, 63, 123, 146 modernization, 10, 52, 67, 117, 123, 134, 143 Moldo Qylych, 21 morality, 116, 123, 124, 137 Mother Earth (Materinskoe Pole), 60 Mountain Kyrgyz Oblast, 35 mourning, 131, 134, 138 grieving, 10, 133, 134 lament, 10 Mukhstasar-i t¯ arikh-i qïrgïziya, 25 mullah, 17, 18, 120, 131, 143 N Narkomnats, or People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, 28, 35 nation, 2, 9, 15, 16, 19, 20, 34, 37, 43–45, 84, 89–91, 97, 100, 109, 110, 142, 146 national delimitation, 37–40, 44, 46

INDEX

nationalism, 5, 8–10, 15, 34, 67, 81, 84, 88, 90, 91, 98, 100–102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 146 nationality (Soviet), 98, 148 Nebidjou, Mamadjenov, 81–83, 85 neke, 120, 129 nomadic traditions, 68 nomadism, 8, 49, 60–62

O oral culture(s), 15 tradition, 6–11, 15, 16, 45, 68, 72, 74, 75, 88, 89, 94, 97–101, 107–110, 119, 137, 138, 142–145, 147 orality, 15 Orazaly Dosbosynov, 92 Orenburg, 18, 22, 30, 31, 34, 35 Osh Riots, 83 Osh Uzbek Theatre, 9, 67, 77, 80, 81, 84

P participant observation, 67 pastoral herder, 132 mobile pastoralism, 116 nomadic, 117 sedentarization, 61, 116 patriarchy, patrilocal, 119 patronage sponsors, 107 peacebuilding, 67 People’s Commune, 129 People’s Republic of Khorezm and Bukhara, 39 perestroika, 57 performance, 2–7, 9, 48, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73–82, 84, 85, 88, 89,

155

91, 93, 95–104, 106–108, 110, 119, 128, 142, 144, 146–148 performativity, 67, 70, 148 performing arts, 58, 68 Philharmonia, 4, 77, 78 Pishpek, or Frunze, or Bishkek, 14, 17, 26, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 50, 51, 61, 74 political violence, 116, 117 denounce, 10, 129 persecute, 131 postcoloniality, 91 post-Soviet, 2, 9, 52, 58, 74, 89–91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 110, 145, 148 Provisional Government, 30, 32, 33 Przheval’sk, 17, 18, 25–29, 33, 34, 36 Q Qazaq, 14, 27 Qissa-i Zelzeleh, 21 qudalasu, matchmaking, 118 R Red Yurts, 68 rehearsal, 76 representation, 66, 119, 137 research methodologies, 67 resettlement administration, 31 resistance, 78, 80, 82, 116, 143 land grabs, 137 to land reclamation, 132 to Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (XPCC), 132 revolt of 1916, or Urkun, 16, 26, 28–30 revolutions 1905, 19 1917, 16

156

INDEX

February, 26, 30 October, 26, 46 ritual life cycle, 131, 136, 144 Rosa Otunbayeva, 83 Russian empire, 8, 16, 19, 20, 23, 32, 43, 45 hegemony, 88 language, 88, 95–97 settler(s), 25

S Sadaq Newspaper, 19 Sakhna Nomadic Theatre, 9, 67, 84 Sarybaghysh tribe, 8, 25, 45 Sarybaghysh volost, 45 sedentarization, 61, 116, 132 Seidakhmatova, Jamal, 56–58, 79, 80 Seitek, 76, 82, 83 Semetei, 67, 70, 81–83 Semirech’e, 17, 25, 30, 31, 33, 35, 41, 42, 45 Semirech’e oblast , 26, 28, 34, 40, 41 Seralin, Mukhametzhan, 23 seven principal approach, 81 shamans, 70, 71 shezhire, sanzhyra, or genealogy, 24 Slavic settler(s), 25, 26, 29, 31, 33 socialism, 5, 7, 8, 40, 144, 146–148. See also Maoism, collectivization Soviet Clubs, 53, 68 history, 88, 147 institutions, 67 nationalities policy, 38, 39 nation-building, 38 Sovietness, 63 stability, 33, 116, 117, 130, 138 Stalin, Joseph, 37, 38, 43, 55, 59

Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 54, 75 Sultanova, Razia, 68, 78 Sydykov, Osmonaaly, 25

T Tarbagatai, 116, 132, 134 Tashkent, 4, 14, 29, 31, 32, 35, 37, 40, 45, 58 Tears of the Queen and Kurmanjan Datka, 57 theatre, 3, 4, 49–52, 54, 55, 57–61, 67, 68, 73–77, 79–83, 146–149 theatrical performances, 67 Tibet, 116 Tököldösh, and “Four Daughters of Tököldösh”, 60, 64 Tolgonai, 61 translation, 69, 76, 95, 97, 98, 119 Tunguch, 77, 79, 80 Turkestan, 26, 29, 31, 32, 37, 39, 40, 45 Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), 35, 37, 39, 41 Turkestan Bureau, 37

U Uch Turfan, 26 Ufa, 18, 19, 22, 23, 27, 45, 57 ulema, 32 Ulema Jamiyati party, 32 UNESCO, 69, 145 upbringing, 62, 100, 105 urbanization (rural urban divide), 10, 61, 118, 123, 134 uruq, 24 Uyghur, 124, 138 Uzbekistan, 2, 3, 66–68, 77, 81

V Valikhanov, Shokan, 61, 69

INDEX

veil and veiling, 52, 119, 124 verbal art, 100 vocational dream, 72 W wedding as cultural economy gift, 118, 130, 134 marriage, 120, 129 X Xi Jinping, 134 Xinjiang, 10, 95, 116, 117, 119, 120, 124, 130, 134, 137, 138, 145

157

Northern, 118, 132, 134

Y yel, people, 91 The Youth Theatre Committee (Youth Theatre Studio), 53 Youth Theatre for Peace, 67 yurt, 71, 78, 122

Z Zar zaman, 22, 61 Zheltoksan, 100–102