Reviewing Jamilya, by Chingiz Aitmatov, is like reviewing The Brothers Karamazov. I’m 22 and I’ve written about three reviews since high school, and I am tasked with giving my thoughts on a monumental work of love, trauma, longing, regret and fear. What am I supposed to say, 9.5/10, I liked the landscape descriptions? The work is deep enough that I feel like I could live in it, and indeed, after reading it my mind has wandered into the “russet wormwood-covered steppe” (Aitmatov 1) of Kyrgyzstan often. So being tasked to review this is futile. Or it seemed that way. It turns out, Aitmatov makes it easy for us to understand what this is about. At its core, Jamilya is about the glory of self-expression.
The story starts with Seit, the main character, looking at a painting he made, describing it lovingly. It’s a tired trope, but his words form a painting themselves. Aitmatov’s deep love for the landscape is visible through text and translation, evoked by the specificity of his word choice. He writes, “a road black and damp from the recent rains, and the dry broken bushes of needle glass crowding at the roadside form the foreground. The footprints of two travelers follow a washed-out dirt road” (2). He has an image in his mind, and he is purposefully choosing words to portray the image, like strokes of a brush, just as Orwell advised. It shows us, rather than tells us, what kind of person Seit is: romantic, captivated by the fullness of life, driven to express it.
Seit dives into memories of a time when he was fifteen, working on a collective farm during wartime. He and his fellow young men shouldered burdens they were never meant to bear, because all the working-age men were off at the front, in Kursk, or Orel. All, except one–Daniyar, a young man, already a veteran, an orphan, with a wounded leg. He was an outsider in the town, but he had distant relations, so they took him in. Daniyar is portrayed as someone who “said very little,” someone who “was taken up with his own thoughts,” and as a tall, angular man with “thoughtful, dreamy eyes” (14). At first thought, one might assume he is suffering from PTSD from the war, because sometimes he “would suddenly grow alert, as though hearing something inaudible, and then his eyebrows would shoot up and his eyes would burn with a strange fire.” (14). But instead of a haunted look, there would be “a smile of joy lingering on his face for a long while after” (14). This joy is the very same joy of life that Seit feels, although nobody realizes it yet, because he remains closed to the residents of the town. Because of this, people think he is strange and unlikeable, and they play pranks on him.
Initially, this is what Jamilya does to Daniyar, too. She is the wife of Seit’s brother-in-law, a woman different from the rest, with “something masculine in her” (6), “high-spirited” (7), and still childish, occasionally “bursting out laughing loudly and happily for no reason at all” (7). Just like Daniyar, she has happiness and love inside of her, although unlike him, she is unafraid of showing it. She and Seit are best friends, although Seit has deeper feelings for her, which he cannot act on. Together, they make silly jokes at Daniyar’s expense as they drive grain from the fields to the stations. He tolerates them in silence. However, one day, they go too far, giving Daniyar a 200-pound sack of grain to carry, thinking he will just give up out of frustration, especially with his wounded leg. He did not give up, despite his knee almost getting destroyed in the process and everyone at the station screaming at him to just drop it. His honor intact, and the depth of his inner strength revealed, he remains silent the whole way back. That is, until Jamilya, ashamed and wanting to break the silence, asks if he can sing.
The song that Daniyar sings is the climax of the story, because it is what sparks Seit to paint, and causes Jamilya to fall in love with him. He sings “something that came from the soul, something capable of arousing the same emotion in another, capable of bringing to life one’s innermost thoughts” (25). His song is so beautiful, so sublime, that it makes Seit want to “lie down and embrace the earth, […] in gratitude that it was there” (27), Alyosha-Karamazov style. Somehow, the power of the song reaches through the text to give the reader the same feeling as Seit. Aitmatov has a gift for this, evoking universal human feelings, like love, wonder, awe, and shame, which it keeps us interested and makes us understand how Seit feels.
After listening, Jamilya is changed, with a “vague, dreamy smile” appearing on her lips every once in a while, instead of her usual, childlike manner. The next time he sings, Seit watches from a distance as she puts her head on his shoulder, and Daniyar’s voice becomes louder as she does, making him realize that it is a song of love he is singing. At that moment, the plot comes full circle, as he decides he will “paint them exactly as they were–lost in happiness!” (32). Daniyar’s self-expression causes Seit’s self-expression which causes this story to be written, as a memory of the painting he made.
I fell in love with Jamilya, I hugged the earth with Seit, I wanted to believe I would carry the sack like Daniyar, and now, after reading, I want to put my feelings to the page, to express myself. And yet, I fear my words will always ring empty in comparison to his. It’s a short story, and it can afford to be because every word of his is so full of meaning. My summaries do not do it justice–you must read it yourself.
