Tea is the most polarizing drink around the world. This drink, best served hot, that some consider “dirty water,” is powerful in ways only seen before in Earth’s greatest empires. Tea has changed the course of history in the Near and the Far East, the Americas, and Enlightenment-era Europe. She has brought democracy, dictatorship, colonialism, and solidarity across various populations fighting for their rights around the world. Whether called “chai,” “tea,” or something else, the herbs, berries, and dried leaves put in a cup (which has many names itself) of hot water are universal and spark a sense of interconnectedness with nature and neighbors. That metaphysical component of this magical drink is what Aunar Duisenbinov explored in his 2021 project Testimonies About Tea. Duisenbinov, a queer Kazakhstani poet, activist, and artist, was commissioned to poetically respond to the Hayward Gallery’s Slavs and Tatars exhibition that explored the legacy of tea and “questions the role of tea” in colonial and colonized nations.
Duisenbinov’s response consists of two powerful parts that coincide and complement each other to form a complete body of poetry that imagines and illustrates the historical repercussions of tea, and its current faculties to evoke robust and poignant emotions. He first begins with a composition of his own. Setting the general tone of his response, the poem is a memory. Though it is distinctly his own as we learn later in the poem, it is written in second person, as if it was the reader’s memory. The universality of his experience (at least in Central Asia), is important here as it outlines the solidarity generated by tea and its memory, and each and everyone’s relationship with it. The reader is immediately drawn into the story. Even more so if reading from Kazakhstan — as Duisenbinov intersperses Kazakh words into the poem, such as “piala” and “dastarqan.” Emphasizing the traditional nature of tea and the scene he sets, Kazakh the traditional language of the Steppe and the modern Kazakh countryside, he unifies the Kazakh world with all others who have had experiences like it. He bypasses the awkwardness of national borders through his poetic world building and vivid, yet universal descriptions. As if he were mimicking the metaphysicality of tea, his words carry rhymes heard across the nations.
“While kids were running underfoot, in the garden/you feel the heat from fried dough, baursak, in your palms/the incarnation of human warmth/from heart to dough, and into one more tiny body/everything comes from one enormous substance/the hot spring of miracles”
Duisenbinov captures the sentiment that drinking tea isn’t just a way to replenish the human needs of refreshment, but a call back to traditions, a distant memory in itself, and even a medium for déjà vu. Running around a courtyard during a family cookout isn’t a universal experience for all kids, but it certainly embodies the childhood dream of worrylessness, excitement, and endless energy.
In the second part of his work, Duisenbinov transcribed and poetry-ified (turned into poetry) his interviews with various people across Asia — Kazakhs, Russians, Uighurs, Dungans, Tatars, and Koreans. He asked about their experiences with tea. Each had their own unique taste — some preferred coffee to tea, others had preferences about green, black, or herbal tea, but all had their individual opinions to tell that left an impression on Duisenbinov. Across all the stories, Duisenbinov highlights how tea can be polarizing while still invoke solidarity across different swaths of life.
“When I come home after a difficult day/when I am sick/crying/laughing —/I always make myself some tea”
“All the cool things in my childhood happened with tea/and that was because my grandma made lots of varieties of tea with milk”
However, Duisenbinov contrasts these stories with the dark side of the story of tea; one might say black tea. Tea is awkward. It holds a colonial position in history too that often is forgotten in the West. In these stories, and in Duisenbinov’s poem, this history is highlighted. He writes “was ever a compromise like this offered to the Indians/in whose country the British laid out tea plantations…would it be possible to feel/less alone?/to stop to stop being/a black monolith on the steppe?” Referencing his disgraced place in the formal Kazakh political environment, he ties in and alludes to the disgrace of the Indian nation under colonial rule. The Dutch and English East India Companies both held monopolies over certain sectors of agricultural production in India, including tea. They created a devastating environment for tea harvesters and tea drinkers — most of the country. Duisenbinov highlights that though here too, in Central Asia tea is drinken with every meal, the history (inherited through China and Korea here) is somber, but certainly not unique. The main takeaway of this exhibit is up to the reader, however while drinking tea it is impossible to ignore its solidarity, its power, and its colonialism.
