A useful translation – Чай, будешь? = Do you want tea?
“Чай, будешь?” My host mother asks me in the morning at breakfast. “Чай, будешь?” My host sister asks when I return from school at 2:30. “Чай, будешь?” Asks my other host sister as we sit down for dinner. “Чай, будешь?” I hear a knock on my door before bed. I can hear the electric kettle switch on and start aggressively boiling water in the other room.
As a person from the United States who has traveled across the globe to live in Kazakhstan for a time, one of the most prominent cultural differences that I have experienced is the ever presence of tea. While in Kazakhstan I have almost exclusively drank black tea, in my brief excursion to Uzbekistan, green tea was the main offering. I’m sure that if I were to travel around Europe and Asia or even just visit Kyrgyzstan or Turkey, I would find many ways of drinking tea and various traditions along with it.
Way over in the United Kingdom, where they are also hooked on tea, an art installation opened at the Hayward Gallery in London. The installation, which opened in 2021, is called Slavs and Tatars and includes a larger than life samovar lodged into the side of the building. This art exhibition aims to start a new discussion about the history of tea and its deep connections with colonialism.
The museum invited a Kazakhstani poet by the name of Anuar Duisenbinov to compile a poetic response to the exhibit. In turn, Duisenbinov called on other Kazakhstani artists with various ethnic backgrounds (Tatar, Kazakh, Korean, Russian, Dugan, and Uighur) to share their experiences with tea as part of his piece. All together the collection, “Testimonies about Tea,” paints a detailed picture of the way tea is thought of in Kazakhstan and around Central Asia.
The artist invited to lead this project, Anuar Duisenbinov, co-founded the poetry-musical collection Bakhash Dreams and published his first book of poetry, Ruhani Kangaroo, in 2022. Duisenbinov is a queer Kazakhstani poet, artist, translator, and activist. He graduated from the Eurasian National University in Nur-Sultan (now Astana) and studied at the Open Literary School in Almaty. What makes him a particularly special artist is the way he illustrates his own struggles with personal and national identity in his poems. As a young, queer person in Astana, he feels and relates to the rapid modernization of the country while simultaneously feeling himself drift away from his traditional Kazakh ancestry. He also conveys a sense of isolation as formal and traditional culture marginalize him for his sexual identity.
He writes poetry in both Russian and Kazakh, forming a much needed bridge between literature in the two most prominent languages in Kazakhstan. While Russian and Kazakh are both national languages in Kazakhstan and spatially very interactive, poetry and literature are not always able to cross the language barrier. Duisenbinov skillfully combines Russian and Kazakh in his poetry, which solidifies his works as distinctly Kazakhstani.
In the case of Testimonies for Tea, the poems are written out in both Russian and English. As a person learning Russian, this was immensely helpful in my reading of the book. In my opinion, the translation was quite good. It was very engaging to be able to read the lines in both languages side by side. The poem that Duisenbinov wrote for the collection is titled, “A spectral path into the azure or testimonies about tea.” His writing is nostalgic and grounded while portraying a tension between his modern identity and his cultural identity. He weaves his personal experiences together with the broader journey of tea throughout history. I found his poem to be eye-opening and artfully intersectional. A line that I believe particularly illustrates Duisenbinov’s ability to connect changing personal and national identity is as follows,
“I transition from the carbonized plant life
to the daily compromise
of a cup of tea from a teabag”
While Anuar Duisenbinov’s relationship with tea is fascinating, the collection’s following poetic testimonies encompass varying emotions, histories, and traditions surrounding tea.
Whether you are a tea drinker or not, this collection provides insight into much more than a few people’s tea drinking habits. The collection’s greatest strength is the beautiful and relatively simple way that it introduces the reader to culture, tradition, and history. It is an approachable work that invites the reader in and gently guides them along. I recommend picking up this collection and exploring some of the testimonies. It is the kind of literature that I would choose to read while sipping black tea on a summer morning, although if you prefer green tea, that is perfectly acceptable too.
