what is Kazakh literature?
As it is generally understood, Kazakh literature, although not entirely ignorant of various systems of writing, is to be seen primarily as literature of bards, professional performers transmitting a body of centuries-old oral texts often attributed to historical figures of earlier bards, such as Shalkiz and Asan Qayghı (15th c.), Er Shoban (16th/17th c.), and so on. This patrimony started to be written down only in the second half of the 19th century. A parenthesis should be opened in this place to add a couple of things on the language. Kazakh is a Turkic tongue, related to Kyrgyz and other (Nogai, Karakalpak); just like them, it was written in the Old Turkic alphabet, so called Orkhon script or "Turkic runes". Writing in Arabic characters was in use till 1929. Later on, the Soviets introduced a Latin-based transcription, and then Cyrillic. This is why, just like in many other cultural contexts, it is not appropriate to believe that Kazakhs did not write their literature, because they did not know how to write; the reasons are more complex, connected rather to the performative status of the text and the high value attributed to improvisation.
There are two types of bards: the zhıraw and the aqın. The first one performs such genres as zhır (epos), tolgaw (elegy) and the didactic terme to high ranking public, such as the court of sultan or khan; the latter is related to various clans and their private ceremonies, such as weddings; he competes with the aqıns of other clans, improvising songs. The poetry of the Kazakh bards is rarely religious. Rather, it transmits a secular kind of wisdom on such matters as the appropriate behaviour and attitude in one's stage of life or social class, contrasting basic human values such as strength and weakness, bravery and cowardice, success and failure. Even if the Kazakh way of life was under pressure of Russian culture, there were still bards in the 19th and early 20th century, namely the celebrated Bazar Zhıraw and Zhambul Zhalayev, who died as a very old man in 1945.
After the Russian conquest of Kazakhstan in mid-19th century, the local aristocracy started to collect and write down their patrimony, perhaps as a warrant of cultural survival under symbolic oppression, but also as a response to new cultural triggers. This is why, arguably, the contact with Russian culture was also the beginning of modern literary creation. Various names of Kazakh writers emerge already in the second half of the 19th century; there is Chokan Valikanov, Abay Qunanbaev, and others, friends and readers of Dostoyevsky, receiving Russian-speaking education, although they were also, like Qunanbaev, Central Asian polyglots, speaking Persian and Chagatai (literary Turkic language). Nonetheless, after 1905, the use of Kazakh was restricted. So seriously and severely that in 1939 Stalin condemned one of the local poets to death for having translated Persian poetry into Kazakh.
But the things sketched above form only one streak of narration concerning Kazakh culture. Quite a different one should be told about the Kazakh in the Islamicate context. Especially, one figure cannot be missed: the great Islamic philosopher and polymath, Al-Farabi, that was regarded, in the Middle Ages, as a second Aristoteles. Later on, there is also a Sufi Kazakh story to be told. A quite unique site related to this tradition is Akmeshit, a legendary underground mosque, related to miraculous cures. In general, the existence of cave mosques is quite surprising, a sign of the cultural peculiarity of the Silk Road country and its spirituality, to which more than one strand of tradition had contributed.
There are two types of bards: the zhıraw and the aqın. The first one performs such genres as zhır (epos), tolgaw (elegy) and the didactic terme to high ranking public, such as the court of sultan or khan; the latter is related to various clans and their private ceremonies, such as weddings; he competes with the aqıns of other clans, improvising songs. The poetry of the Kazakh bards is rarely religious. Rather, it transmits a secular kind of wisdom on such matters as the appropriate behaviour and attitude in one's stage of life or social class, contrasting basic human values such as strength and weakness, bravery and cowardice, success and failure. Even if the Kazakh way of life was under pressure of Russian culture, there were still bards in the 19th and early 20th century, namely the celebrated Bazar Zhıraw and Zhambul Zhalayev, who died as a very old man in 1945.
After the Russian conquest of Kazakhstan in mid-19th century, the local aristocracy started to collect and write down their patrimony, perhaps as a warrant of cultural survival under symbolic oppression, but also as a response to new cultural triggers. This is why, arguably, the contact with Russian culture was also the beginning of modern literary creation. Various names of Kazakh writers emerge already in the second half of the 19th century; there is Chokan Valikanov, Abay Qunanbaev, and others, friends and readers of Dostoyevsky, receiving Russian-speaking education, although they were also, like Qunanbaev, Central Asian polyglots, speaking Persian and Chagatai (literary Turkic language). Nonetheless, after 1905, the use of Kazakh was restricted. So seriously and severely that in 1939 Stalin condemned one of the local poets to death for having translated Persian poetry into Kazakh.
But the things sketched above form only one streak of narration concerning Kazakh culture. Quite a different one should be told about the Kazakh in the Islamicate context. Especially, one figure cannot be missed: the great Islamic philosopher and polymath, Al-Farabi, that was regarded, in the Middle Ages, as a second Aristoteles. Later on, there is also a Sufi Kazakh story to be told. A quite unique site related to this tradition is Akmeshit, a legendary underground mosque, related to miraculous cures. In general, the existence of cave mosques is quite surprising, a sign of the cultural peculiarity of the Silk Road country and its spirituality, to which more than one strand of tradition had contributed.
I have read... nothing ...
|
Vertical Divider
|
I have written... nothing ...
|
an eagle and an initiatic journey |
|
Vertical Divider
|
What comes to me from Kazakhstan usually has to do with falconry. So does the Eagle Hunter's Son, a movie directed by René Bo Hansen (2009). I suppose it offers to any viewer a first meaningful insight into the culture of Kazakhstan, a country on which we usually have little or no information. Against lonely landscapes of sublime beauty, the millennial conundrums are depicted: those of the two sons of the nomad, equally dissatisfied with the traditional role distribution. Nomadic lifestyles are only possible if demographic density remains very low; this is why only the younger son is allowed to continue with the herd, while the older is to migrate to the city in search of work. Apparently brilliant destiny, especially if we only know it from a photograph he sends home; the reality of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan may be quite gruesome, and not only for the spectral aspect of half-finished blocks of flats falling slowly into ruin; enough to say that the older brother is to work in a mine, under the conditions that are largely left to the viewer's imagination.
What we actually see on the movie is the story of the younger son, Bazarbai, along his way in search of the missing brother. Guided, as it could not be otherwise, by the family's tame eagle. He is to encounter many things during this initiation journey: bad people who catch birds of prey for sale, and who do not hesitate to enslave a girl as well. One of the aspects of growing up in a closed traditional community is that one can actually ignore what the real evil is; Bazarbai is yet to discover the abuse of both, non-human and human animals. On the other hand, there is also the richness and diversity of the country's heritage that he confronts, as the escaped couple (Bazarbai and the slave girl) come to a Buddhist monastery for help. The eagle saves lives on more than one occasion. Against wolves, which is easy enough to comprehend. But in the end, the eagle helps to find the missing brother - after an accident in the mine. Such a happy ending may be seen as a fruit of some extravagant imagination. Yet eagles collaborate with human hunters precisely for a very similar kind of task. They are to catch the prey flushed out of a burrow by the human partner. And what a mine really is, if not a large burrow? Spotting men busying themselves at one entrance of it, the eagle patiently waits at another one. Indicating the access to forgotten, disused mine shaft, the bird enables the rescue of the miners. 
At a falconry festival in Abu Dhabi, 2014.
|
