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- Convenors:
-
Azhar Dyussekenova
(University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Alexey Shvyrkov (Columbia University)
Assel Uvaliyeva (USC)
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- Chairs:
-
Christopher Fort
(American University of Central Asia)
Gabriel McGuire (Nazarbayev University)
- Discussant:
-
Ismael Biyashev
(University of Illinois at Chicago)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Literature
- Location:
- Hall of Turan civilization (Floor 1)
- Sessions:
- Friday 7 June, -
Time zone: Asia/Almaty
Abstract:
This cluster is dedicated to literary representations of Central Asian Ecocatastrophes. In our comparative approach to Czech and Kazakh authors, the panel addresses potential challenges and limitations within their narratives. We first discuss how European writing depicts the environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea. By deconstructing temporality and geography depicted in Bianca Bellová’s debut novel Jezero (The Lake), the first paper interrogates the relationship between European orientalist tropes and Soviet modernization. The coming-of-age genre of the novel is viewed as central not only to the construction of individual characters in the text, but a larger dichotomy between the Soviet “East” and Moscow. We then turn to the Kazakhstani artistic accounts of the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing and its effects on the native population in the works of Keshrim Boztayev, Roza Mukanova, and Satybaldy Narymbertov. Building on selective nostalgias and the function of individual in the grand Soviet narrative, the next two panel presenters attempt to locate the role of eyewitness and firsthand account within the collective memory surrounding the history of the polygon. Finally, by highlighting the differences between documentary writing, autobiography, fiction novellas, and cinema, the papers locate the effects of genre and medium on these firsthand and secondhand accounts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 7 June, 2024, -Abstract:
Bianca Bellová’s debut novel Jezero (The Lake) was published in 2016 and won several prestigious European literary awards, including the EU Prize for Literature. The narrative of The Lake is laid in an imaginary kolkhoz by the dying lake in an indeterminate time period. From the episodic references, it becomes clear that the narrative is taking place in an imagined collective Central Asian country shortly before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bellová, I contend, constructs the image of the Central Asian Orient by reproducing the trope of arrested development of colonial subjects. Even though the novel is structured as a coming-of-age story, Nami, a boy protagonist, is never destined to grow up. Nami’s inability to grow up is connected to sexual inhibition caused by his witnessing a Russian soldier raping Zaza, a girl Nami is in love with. Nami’s arrested development is juxtaposed with the environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea. Shown not as a result of the Soviet “modernization” efforts, but rather connected to the Sea Spirit that demands sacrifices, this novel solidifies the idea of the Soviet “East” as backward, savage, and mystical. As Russians left the country, everything is dead and gone. The imagined geography that Bellová constructs produces an infantile colonial subject who is left with with no alternative to the empire. Thus, Czech “escapist” writers, like Bianca Bellová, by placing their characters in “exotic” settings continue the European orientalist radiation and strive through literature to reinscribe themselves into a larger European history of colonial expansion.
Abstract:
This paper focuses on Keshrim Boztayev’s works, Semipalatinsk Polygon and 28th of August that recount his own individual and collective struggle to shutdown the nuclear test site. As Barbara Foley (1986) maintains, documentary narratives represent reality by conventions of fictionality, while grounding itself in empirical evidence. The fictional elements assert the legitimacy of the individual experience in regards to the historical context and inscribe it in a historical dialectic. Boztayev presented his account of events as an oppositional force to the grand Soviet narrative. What his novels also do is they continually create a community of solidarity as he assembled and reassembled his story, producing altogether four documentary novels. This paper attempts to show how a marginal literary work authenticates collective trauma.
Abstract:
In 1991, a writer named Roza Mukanova was attending a photo exhibition dedicated to the victims of the Semipalatinsk Testing Site, where the first Soviet Union’s nuclear bomb was detonated. A native of Eastern Kazakhstan herself, Mukanova was deeply affected by a photo of a fourteen-year-old girl, to whom she dedicated a novella titled Mäńgilik bala beyne (eng. “the eternal face of a child”). The text attracted the interest of a famous Kazakhstani film director Satybaldy Narymbetov, who then turned the novella into Qızjilağan (2002) (eng. “girl cried/about whom a girl cried”) - one of the first post-independence films about the effects of the Soviet bomb on the population of a nearby village, Degelen. In a Tarkovskian manner, the last scene of the movie poses Leila as Benoit’s Young Madonna. With a baby in her tiny hands, the girl prays for the salvation of her village. While preserving major elements of Mukanova’s plot, Narymbetov introduces additional characters and portrays Leila’s home as a microcosm of Soviet Internationalism. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the novella and the film; building on the notion of selective nostalgia, I argue that the two mediums achieve drastically different effects primarily through two distinct depictions of collective suffering.