As twilight was drawing to a close, I sat on the floor of the living room with a poet, a professor and eleven students. The poet talked in the gathering dark. His smile was surprisingly big, a little crooked like my own, his hair was surprisingly long, and he wore all black. I watched him from the side as he spoke in Russian.
– Modern Qazaqstan, of course, it’s not the happiest place, ‘happiest’ also in the sense that, naturally, a lot of injustice happens. But at the very same time many kinds of cultural shifts are happening, paradigm shifts. That is, everything is simultaneous…
It’s customary to condemn the state, and authority, and life, and so on, and at the very same time you just see a flowering of all ideas, art, and certain kinds of thought, and you see how people are changing on the street, how they’ve already started to look different, you see children, who are totally different… Everything rolls on, and I mostly just like to do my part…
His words, like any good writer’s, took the vague thoughts churning in my head and laid them out clearly. Everything is changing, everything feels fluid. The capital is a blank slate, students are getting involved in protests, Russia and the West are both demanding signs of affiliation, and the alphabet has been (officially) changed. If there’s been a theme to my posts, this is it. I’m sorely tempted to put my hand into the current, and try to change where it flows. I have all these ideas, these dreams of where this country could go, but it is not my country to dream about.
– Do you have any dreams?
– Dreams?
– Yes.
– If I’m being honest, that’s a very complex question for me. It’s like I don’t dream. I don’t have any clear projections of the future. I just have a sense of direction. That’s it. I don’t know where I’ll be… But at the same time I have hope for the future… I don’t know. I’m for some reason like a fool.
– It’s good to be like that.
Maybe he has to be like that. Qazaqstan is moving fast, but where it’s going is as clear as the water in the canal on Abay after it rains.
The water in question
In another post, about another waterway, I mentioned how Qazaqstan is searching for a direction–forward or back? It’s good that he knows which way he’s headed, I think to myself. The skyscrapers of Astana’s left bank beckon.
– When I arrive there, I always feel a little bit strange.
– In Astana?
– In Astana, yeah. I don’t know why… How can I explain? Yeah, a little strange.
– It’s the strangest city I’ve seen in my life.
– It is very, yeah, it’s very interesting in that it’s somehow very… like specifically ‘weird’.
Here, he used the English word. English always seems to do this, showing up unannounced, and often I don’t get it because my brain is in Russian mode and the pronunciation is wrong. This time it clicks. Astana is weird.
– But you’ve been there a long time?
– I lived there for 15 years. Basically since the time the city, well, wasn’t there. Yeah, I saw all this construction, how they made it all…
– And there wasn’t anything, right?
– There was basically nothing, there was no left bank then… I liked it, as if you’re living in a city, which is being built before your eyes, and in this there’s a lot of energy, a lot of some kind of… A lot of some kind of hope, yeah.
[…]
There, I always liked the energy of something new, something done from scratch… There are some people, and you do something together, and everything you finish, it immediately bears fruit, because there’s nothing there, and you can just touch a finger to something, and everything blooms right away.
He read his poem “Mengilik Jel” to us. The winding Ishim river and Astana’s eternal wind bloomed in our minds as he spoke. Last time I wrote about the city, I said it “feels like they took the steppe and paved concrete over it, and now they are planting buildings instead of grass. There is life there, and life will grow”. I know who ‘they’ are now: poets like Anuar Duisenbinov.
The interview ended, the poem session finished, books were passed around for signatures, and people gathered to leave. I cleared the table of tea cups, half out of a genuine desire to help out, half because I was daring myself to stay a little longer. My classmates one by one went out the door, and I nervously stood behind, unsure if the implication was that I should leave too. There is a saying: “ал енді өзіміз нормально шәй ішейік” (“and then we will normally drink tea”, blend of Qazaq and Russian), which Qazaqs say after all the guests leave. I acted like I knew what I was doing and sat down at the table again, pouring myself a cup of herbal tea. A famous poet sat across from me. My professor sat next to me on one side, and on the other were two of her former students. Like I often discover with these things, I needn’t have worried. I felt welcome, interesting to them and interested in them. Chai and chocolate were consumed, conversation passed by in Russlish about Uzbekistan, university gossip, and space (my favorite), until my eyes were closing and I stood up to leave. I will miss this place, I thought, as I walked down Panfilov Street back home.
