This text has the aim to show how the kazakh poetic landscape comes to life through remembering lived history and inventing myths that break up the colonial past of the peoples of Kazakhstan.
Here poetry means not the poetical texts which have been read and as conclusion meditated by the author, but the poetry oft nature itself, a nature that stays in interaction with historical events and cultural processes.
One text is a good example for living memory, especially for the capacy of our mind to go beyond boundaries which don’t allow to remember our past and the histoty of the last generations. Here I speak about Mukhamets Šayakhmetovs book „The Silent Steppe“, „a fascinating, tragic forgotten story of the Kazakh nomads of Central Asie under Stlain’s brutal rule – an unusual and special book.“
The second text i work with in my abstract is the book „Black star“, written bei Bahytžan Momyšuly and Jurij Serebrjanskij (a novel-fairytale). The main hero of the book is a prince named Kara Žoldos, who was born with a black ponit on his back with the form of a star. His ways leads him to different worlds; during his adventures he is protected by two wolfs. Each world makes him understand something about his surrounding nature and his inner world. Traditonal pictures and allegories, invented by Momyšuly and the metaphorical thoughts made my Serebrjanskij show how colourful and bright the fantastic world is.
Both textes have an inner compass. The first Text takes us in the past, in the period of collectivization. This text is a pladoyer for living memory, for living culture, for knowing historical facts and treating them with responsibility. The second text on the opposite takes the reader in different mythological worlds that we can imagine as clear future of our world hopefully.
Šayakhmetovs main figure of the text is a young boy (the story is told by him as an adult) who lives with his parents in the vast steppe. The next sentences reflect the kƟšpendilers (nomads) attitude towards his animals: „For as long as anyone could remember, a stock-breeder’s entire life in the steppe had been bound up with animals. Our people always looked after them with great care, because they were our main livelihood, and we knew just about everything there was to know about treating them.“ (The Silent Steppe, Šayakhmetov, p.3)
Isn’t it an regardful attitude, our modern world can learn from? When we think today about the landscape of Kazakhstan, there are not only the empty steppes and sublime mountains, no, there are also the big cities like Nur Sultan, Karaganda and Almaty, that are full of movement, dynamics and possibilities, especially in the cultural sense.[1] But is there really a meaning of speaking about a centre of Kazakhstan? Even if the new capital seems to be an economical centre, does it not make sense to see Almaty as centre of historical, cultural and literal sphere? Almaty promises to borrow a voice for them who where not heared, who are not heared and who hopefully be heared one day. A postcolonial voice that positions oneself as Europes‘ neighbour and an equal speaker of the European-Eurasian continent.
The way of a careful enlightment can be a base for a dialogue like Momyšuly imagines it. His main figure Kara Žoldos won’t go the way of a warrior, but of a pilgrim who will find out the truths of the human soul: „I esli tvoi deti i vnuki besstrašny v bitvah s vragom, to etot vnuk tvoj budet otvažen v ešše bolee velikoj bitve – v sraženie s samim soboj“, were the words of Karas grandmother. (Kara Žoldos, Momyšuly/Serebrjanskj p .11)
Kara Žoldos represents the courage of people everywhere over the world. For example the people living at the Tobol river, traders of vegetables and fruits at the market of Taras, tourists visiting the Šahristans[2] and the Džambul monument, all the representants of indigene cultures of the earth and so on.
This courage means the insight and understanding of ones own history as a part of the world history, in a manner of reading or looking between the lines. To look at the world that surrounds us depends on our „reading perspective“ or „reading habitus“. Do we compare ourselves with others during the reading process, do we reflect ourselves during it? How do we deal with our recognizion of the allready read? Ho do we interlace it in our daily life?
Let’s take a look on a nomad woman wandering with her family and livestock from one pasture land to another. A happy coincidence, her nephew bought the book from a local trader, Khalil Gibrans novel „The Prophet“ gets in her hands. Sitting on a kepeše in front of a yourt, she holds the book in her hands and let her eyes follow the lines. There is one crucial part in the book which lets the woman think deeply about it, namely the lines in wich Gibran talks about the adults‘ responsibility let the childish mind develop in freedom and not be sorrowful by the toughts of ist parents or grandparents.
Let’s imagine the same situation with the same woman, that lives in a modernized world, propably in a microrajon in a kazakh city. She has a flat with white walls and a piano, that belongs the daughter. Let’s imagine, that the same woman reads the same lines of „The Prophet“ from Gibran.
What is the difference between this two situations? Sponatneously we would say it is the surrounding: The first woman lives in a natural world, that she shares with her livestock, the plants, the sky and the stars. The second woman has propably a view from her window on a mountain panorama, but her habitat ist he city. The conclusion is: both woman can understand the sentences in one manner. The only obstruction is the role of the state, the woman lives in. Even if the second woman has the possibility to read Gibran in a modernized world, the fact, that when she would live in a totalitarian state, where the freedom of thinking is dangerous, she would understand Gibrans lines propably in another manner than the woman which lives in freedom in a yourt in the vast steppes of Kazakhstan.
And here the selfrecognition through „lived history“ plays a crucial role. The sowjet dictatorship was the reason, why many themes where forbidden in kazakh literature: for example to speak about the forced labour and the kasakh famine, the so called Ašaršylyk.
What do these conslusions have to do with the topic of the text –landscape protection and survival? Let us imagine landscape protection as sphere connected to the spiritual life of peoples of Kazakhstan as a little experiment of imagination. Far away from syncrestistic perceptions of the world, there are ways to take part in a meeting with the landscape in ritualized forms. For our imagination of a higher spiritual sphere we need to focus on objects that transform free ways of thinking and preservation, that let us maintain silence not to risk lack of understanding or even persecution. Natural objects like felt mats, used for prayers, or icons that let us visualize the holy ones let us sustain the silence. So there is a possibility to construct a portable church/mosque, which can protect our inner world from destruction and reflect the result on our treatment with our surrounding.
„Šim ši“ steppe-glass matting, from Semipalatinsk region
Someone may ask about our right to overcome silence and speak openminded as person or group about inner world protection as basic element to protect our outword surrounding. If we look at the poetical tradition oft he sowjet era, we can copy from it in a form that contacts not the collective but each individual person. So the figure of Džambul Džambaev can resurrect as a voice of a young generation with an open mind towards the „healing“ of their natural reservats. It doesn’t matter how this new figure look like. We can imagine Džabaev as Punkshaman, as juggler, as imposter or just as Saiga-Antelope as symbol for a ecological movement.
If we follow Dagmar Schreibers collected information about the position of enviroment protectoin we can understand, that there are many fields the ecological movement in kazakhstan in the future has to deal with. First of all there should be constructed a room for a dialogue and the turn to a cultural-ecological Discourse which enables the creation of specific oases in the cities and the metropole of Kazakhstan. Places like insect hotels, lagoons for frogs and dragonflies and incubators for birds and their children can be constructed, diversity discourses can be introduces and in international communication that engages for climate protection can be started. There are several ways to overcome the individual voicelessness.
The preservation of creation can also mean going backward to the roots and here an understanding of ones history is very essential. The reanimation of memory is a process in which not only textes, but also sounds in closely interaction with the textes play a role. Memory means not only the conservation oft he past but also an openminded attitude towards the future. And here not the rush into a unkown future is the key, but an abidance in the moment as celebrating the waiting for the future. The meditative escape into poetry can help. The following poem, written by Ajgerim Tazhi and translated by J. Kates, shows that the present can really be like a cloude with a collapsing sky underneath, but it’s our decision how we accept this situation:
„You are standing in the edge of a cloud,
underneath
the sky collapses, ruining the skyline.
In the depth of field the ocean ebbs
Into a narrow aperture.
From the opening something whistles.
In the frame a room out of focus.
Offstage a clown is laughing.“[3]
Naurzbaev, Kh. I., and Mendikulov, M.M. Monument to Džambul Džabaev. 1971 Alma-Ata
Let’s return to the poetical or mythological landscape and have a view in „Kara Žoldos“ again. The young pilgrim starts his way with two woolves, carrying for him, on his site. His father blesses him before his son leafes the house and speaks about the force of the ancestors who are still present in the memory of the family: „Pust‘ doroga tvoja budet svetloj! Pust‘ vysokie duhi svjaššenyh predkov oberegajut i podderživajut tebja v stranstvijah!“ (Momyšuly/Serebrjanskij, Kara Žoldos, p. 18) During the way through the desert one of the woolves, the female one, speaks about the power of the holy one, who is above all, she calls him „the great Dangru“. (p. 19)
The fragments of the landscape become fragments of memory. The wandering of Kara Žoldos is though of a spiritual nature. He does not need to flee from one side to another, but he is part of a mythological nature, a figure in the centre of ghosts, gods and speaking animals. Momyšuly and Serebrjanski create a mythological narrative that feed the reader with moral attitudes towards our nature. We can reflect our nature from a caleidoscopic view, but in a quite demure way.
If we pay attention to the books of Šayakhmetov and Momyšsuly/Serebrjanskij, we can make the conslusion that, how Donna Hareway writes in her „Manuscript for companions“, that all of us inherit a different history, but our world, so Hareway, needs an absolutely shared futures. (S. 14)
So let‘ share our future by storytelling and enlace our told stories with them of all world inhabitants.
Here stories of hapiness and freedom have the same value like the stories of suffering and sadness. The last can remind us on our community as people to be responsible for each other. Listening to the story of Šayakhmetov we get to know about his childhood, whose family was dispossessed as kulaks and whose father was deported. During his wandering through the steppe in search of something to eat, he is invited by some wealthy people: „Wes sat down at the table. A boy of my age in tattered clothes, who was obviously from another family, came in carrying a steaming samovar, placed it next to a low, round table, and sat down nearby.“ (Šayakhmetov, The Silent Steppe, p. 212)
Sharing tea rituals together in a manner of sharing a collective memory, let us notice our „world-neighbours“ like the same inhabitants oft he earth as we are. To be neighbours in the same world means sharing diverse views on our world. Here Yong Xiang Lis (1991) queer perspective on social power structures to spatial constellations plays an interesting role. In his show in the STUDIO Li presents his work „8 chairs (Adolescent Fabrications)“ a group of eight wooden panels arranged to a sculptural painting. The panels are folded at hinge points so that they appear to stand in the space as imitations of chairs on the octagonal base. They thus enable a walk-around experience of painting to differ from the usual frontal experience. The painted landscapes and architectures are transformed into decorative furniture – something that Li describes as „utilitarian drag.“
Lis art shows that our individual stories are intertwined with each other. So the „8 chairs“ can be thought as reflection of a cultural object like the yourt or like a spiritual one like the heaven. Let’s imagine how the chairs orbit the yourt beneath the blue sky. The people sitting on the chairs look in the direction of a steppe with a vast horizont. The same view can include different visions of the same world. Propably one of them sees a book exchange in front of his eyes and shares a book with his neighbour, another one plays the Dombra, other participants of t he ritual just talk rubbish or speak about philosophical theories. Another woman sees a noble eagle flyiing in the sky. And another man catches sight of a guest, visiting the yourt with his horse.
Some things are only beautiful because we know that they one day go to an end. But the inner circle of the nomadic life exists also in the present days. There are also nomadic diasporas who have representatives of spirutual aesthetic worlds: herdsmen with long earrings made of little mosaic stones put from the mosques and mausoleums oft the kazakh lands wander throuh areas which lay outside Kazakhstan. Let us give them a voice. Let us raise our voice for these people who are not heared anymore!!!
Yong Xiang Li: 8 chairs (Adolescent Fabrications)“
[1] Here Donna Haraways attitude plays a certain role in an understanding of our earth as a nonbinary world. Haraway also refers to Goldsworthys art projects. For him the landscape is full of history and contains diverse relationships between men and women, animals, earths, waters and mountains. (Ein Manifest für Gefährten, Haraway p. 29)
[2] Šahristans are places in front of mosques in oriental Cities
[3] Poems by Aigerim Tazhi: Paper-Thin Skin
Jablonja 