The building of the People’s
Commissariat of Heavy
Industry, A. Vesnin, V,
Vesnin, S. Lyaschenko. 1934
Building of the People’s
Commissariat of Heavy
Industry. I. Fomin, P.
Abrosimov, M. Minkus. 1934
I/32
It began as an apocalyptic moniker: Rome had
Two Romes have fallen. The third stands.
fallen to Catholicism, Constantinople had
There shall be no fourth. —Filofei of Pskov.
fallen to the Muslims, and Moscow saw itself
as the last stand against the heretics, that is
both Muslims and Catholics.
Like those old impersonations of
Michael Jackson, with one side of the
performer painted white and the other black,
playing consistently in profile, never frontally,
Russia pulls itself in two opposite directions:
between the East and the West in a devastating
minuet.
And so it is even with the name, The
Third Rome, Moscow’s most compelling and
enigmatic epithet. One side evokes a sense of
religious orthodoxy while the other deflates it
with an equally orthodox taste for its antithesis:
decadence. A city with such staggering amounts
of wealth, alcohol, and sex cannot be so holy.
WHEN IN THE THIRD ROME, DO AS
THE THIRD ROMANS.
“Russia: We know it. They
don’t. But they’ll find out.” 1
II/32
History hasn’t been kind to Alexander
Herzen. He has been doubly condemned.
Force-fed to every Russian school-child
during Communism, Herzen suffers from an
unjustified, if understandable, resistance to
his work within his home country. Outside
Russia, the situation is not much better:
he has been almost entirely eclipsed by his
contemporary–Marx–whose categorical
and highly structural thought has been
more actionable than Herzen’s preference for
subtlety, sophistication, and contradiction.
If you’ve got an MBA, Marx is your man.
PhD holders, turn to Herzen.
Few things are more attractive than a
person who is of his time, who lives thoroughly
his epoch, who is commensurate with it.
It is one thing to live such a life, and a rarer
thing still to document it. Herzen did both
and his My Past and Thoughts, an 8-volume
autobiography, has become a quiet benchmark
of the art of recollection. The differing scale
of tragedy–whether his son’s premature
death or the failure of the 1848 revolutions–
is not approached with pincers or shelved but
explored intimately, with a sense of urgency in
his very language. There are few sound bytes
but much to chew on.
While American universities still
struggle to differentiate between Marxist,
Marxian and Marxesque, we turn to Herzen’s
humanism and swim in its complexity, hoping
one day we can all be Herzian.
1. Stoppard, Tom. “The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck” (New
York: Grove Press, 2002)
WAR AND PEACE
In our Dictionary of Forced Synonyms: under slavophile reads an
equally dusty bibliophile. Between the Berlin Wall and the Urals, books
used to be contraband, and the more one travels east, the more books
become so rarified, so monumental, that they compete not with other
books but rather with buildings. This Russian sense of scale–of books
with an edifice complex as it were–is perhaps best found in War and
Peace. Although it seems never to have been read in full by anyone, it is
understood by all that “to read War and Peace” is to commit to a yearslong project, to be particularly compulsive, to be a masochist, to be
eremitic.
It would seem that to translate War and Peace as two is
commitment enough to eclipse any less important nuptial concerns;
married to begin with, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
released a new translation of the novel in 2007. We have purchased
the edition—and had difficulty bringing it home—but have not
deluded ourselves into thinking we will ever get through it per se,
the goal being as much to schlep the object around indefinitely, to have
it forever open to whatever page we’ve managed to crawl to. Bring
War and Peace on the airplane (to their credit, it was the only object that
El Al’s security did not inspect at the Israeli border) and read it at bus
stops: its beauty is as much in the sheer brutality of having to transport
it, of having to eternally “be reading it”, dwelling within its pages
rather than necessarily turning them. Bring dates to Bondarchuk’s
marathon film adaptation, commit them to 484 minutes, or 8 hours,
of viewing, including a massive gesture of collective excess: 120,000
soldiers commissioned as extras to reenact the Battle of Borodino.
It’s the best way to redeem that that tired idiom of staying power –
“going all night” – and bring it back from the ledge of pop promiscuity,
to the safer shores of Napoleonic defeat.
III/32
We brake. Into fits of frenzy, intellectual rigor
or pathos. If to be broken is Slav, Tatar, or
Finno-Ugric, then to brake is WASP and Jute.
The first Democratically elected
leader in Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq is a
stalwart of our Pantheon of Broken Men and
Women. Mossadeq is best known for having
nationalized the rapacious Anglo-Iranian
Oil Company, whose current manifestation
is no less a giant than British Petroleum,
shortly after coming to power in 1951.
For years, Anglo-Iranian had enjoyed revenue
sharing schemes of 90% British–10% Iranian.
Mossadeq set out to change this—with the
delicacy of a bulldozer. In the end, he was
defeated twice, the first through a CIAMI6 sponsored coup d’état and the second
through a conviction of High Treason, 3 yrs
of solitary confinement and house arrest until
his death, handed down by a kangaroo court.
Defeat alone, though, is not enough to
crush a man of this stature. The knowledge
that it only costs the English and the
Americans $1M to buy over a nation to
which one has dedicated one’s life might very
well be.
Pantheon of Broken
Men and Women.
IV/32
During a break at the
preliminary tribunal in
Saltanat Abad.
Mossadeq entering the
courtroom.
Pretending to be asleep,
finding refuge on the
shoulder of Colonel
Shahgholi.
Leningrad,1928. Spartak
Physical Culture Society.
Beam exercises. Photograph
by Semen Magaziner
Leningrad, 1926. Spartak
Physical Culture Society at
the Volodarsky factory. Rope
exercises. Photograph by
Semen Magaziner
V/32
NAME THY CHILD
GENGHIS
VI/32
If history is written by the victors, then for
Slavs and Tatars—whose area spans nearly an
entire continent, from Berlin to Beijing–that
history is conflicted. Victors live near the
defeated, drink tea and vodka with them,
and depending on the decade, sometimes go so
far as dressing up in their adversary’s clothes,
essentially playing political masquerade.
The heady 1990s – a decade that witnessed
the demise of one large narrative (called
Communism) and the ascent of several smaller
ones – recedes like a seductive tease in the
sunset of the West. Winners and losers are not
defined socio-economically but with the large
brush stroke of Great Games in Great Places.
A lack of visibility, both on the horizon
and behind our backs as it were, keeps us
constantly shifting not only gears but scales.
At micro moments of intimacy–the naming
of a child for example–we invite the macro
elephants of geopolitics or historicity,
through the back door of convention. Rarely
do we come across toddlers named Adolf,
be’smellah: regardless of your ideology or
ability to swallow revisionism, he did not
win anything. There are names, however,
those of victors, that we wish to see more
in pre-schools and soccer fields around the
Occident: namely Genghis, or for the more
indie-minded, Attila. While for WASPS and
Jutes he may be a symbol of ruthless brutality,
let us not forget that Genghis Khan is
responsible for people of an otherwise “fairer
complexion” having distinguished cheek
bones and almond eyes, as demonstrated by the
Slavs. Recent years have seen a rehabilitation
of Genghis, as best-sellers try to outstrip one
another on his benevolent rule, but none dare
give the gift of Genghis to their progeny.
He might be your enemy, but he remains
a hero to an area spanning from the Balkans
to China, where the name can take the form
of Chingiz or Jenghiz. Not to mention that,
given the rise of the East, it would not be such
a bad idea to start hedging one’s bets now…
For most, Marco Polo has become a
caricature—that jolly I-talian in bloomers
who changed the course of history by bringing
pasta to Italy—or abstracted into what is
essentially a game of hide-and-seek in a small
body of chlorinated water, otherwise known
as a swimming pool. His adventures in the
East, or visits to Tartary, do no better on dry
land.
We turn to Polo as our secular patron
saint of travel, when stuck in traffic or on
a severely delayed flight. Not for the seismic
shifts in knowledge between east and west
sparked by his travels, nor for his contribution
to Europe’s hitherto bland palate of herbs and
spices. But rather for his exceptional sense
of scale, both in time and space. Niccolò and
Marco Polo’s trips to the kingdom of Kublai
Khan took 17 and 24 years, respectively.
The next time you pine for more than a long
weekend, imagine a trip so long that it takes
a third of one’s life. A date of return so far into
the future that one forgets the bedrock of one’s
past, one’s mother tongue.
VII/32
Marco Polo and map of his
journey to Far East
Rob Shone © Dorling
Kindersley
The Caucuses in the
Caucases.
Where, fittingly, the only discussions of ethanol
revolve around the kind that is only 40 proof.
The House Majority Caucus
Room.
Das Kapital Hill, of the Seven
Posters series
VIII/32
Instead of Des Moines and Cedar Rapids,
Baku and Tbilissi. Instead of Paper Mill
Closures, Pipeline Overtures. Instead of
pancakes with maple syrup, latkes with
smetana. The sitar not the guitar.
We believe the next US presidential
elections would benefit considerably from
having the preliminary caucuses not in Iowa,
but rather in Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia. In an area of the world historically
club-sandwiched between great powers–
Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Europe—the world’s
major religions, not to mention natural
resources, are just some of the issues on the
table. If Edwards would like to talk about
poverty, let him address Abkhazia; if Obama
is the candidate of hope, let him bring the
Armenians and Azeris together on NagornoKarabakh. Hillary can even use her extensive
foreign policy experience and post-nuptial
network to break the deadlock between Russia
and Georgia. It would be the first-ever win/
win caucus in election history.
Dear Junior,
Because for the last 12 months, we have been pulled to the past, mapping
an inventory of grievances that would make our bureaucratic forefathers
proud, we dedicate these 32 days to the future, with equal fervor.
We admit to being prone to flights of polemic indulgence when naming
our children (cf. Day VI). Fortunately, the patronymic–the second
name, in masculine or feminine form, of the father’s first name (Tikhon
Nikolayevich Khrennikov being the son of Nikolai, Lilya Yuryevna
Brik being the daughter of Yuri)–reigns us in.
We enjoy being linguistically tied to our grandparents: for it is they who
named our fathers. Surely this is an invaluable in an era where the very
notion of a generation has become splintered to the point of irrelevance.
To be reminded of grandpa and grandma, dyedushka and babushka,
every time we present our identity papers–our documents–is a worthy tie
of nostalgic importance in today’s amnesiac climate.
Beyond the Berlin Wall, one must leave the one-name wonder behind.
Yours,
Ovich and Ovna.
IX/32
Had they a place to
stand upon, they might
raise the world.
S&T HEARTS KURDS
A Nation without a nation is a remarkably
moving thing. Instead of passports, a UN seat,
or an Olympic team, one trades in another
type of gold, silver, and copper: that of pathos,
of a more embedded sense of tradition brought
by a culture under siege, and of a hardened
nobility only delicate urgency can offer.
One would think a nation that tried to wrestle
itself recognition–which, alas, requires more
nowadays then to simply be declared–three
times over the last century would somehow
stick in peoples’ minds. At the very least, it
would lend this nation a sense of inevitability.
But no.
We have always had a soft spot for the
Kurds, the most secular people in a region
consumed by fits of religiosity. Whether for
reasons of shared grievances, as in Iraq, or
for a cultural and ethnic affinity, as in Iran,
the predominantly Sunni Kurds are often
closer to their Shiite compatriots than their
Sunni brothers. Their shalwars–baggy trousers
that would look as good on the runways
of Belgium as the streets of Baghdad–and
deep moustaches make them stand out as
the sartorial standard bearers in the region.
And their anthem–Ey Raqib! (Hey, Enemy!)–
demonstrates a unique capacity for enmity that
is productive, foundational, and warm, unlike
the nihilist breed running so beloved through
their neighbors.
The Kingdom of Kurdistan
1921-1924
The Republic of Ararat 19271931
The Komarî Mehabad / The
Republic of Mahabad 19461947
X/32
On rare occasions, we sit up late at night, sipping very black tea infused with
thyme, and vacillate back and forth, on the question of Turkey. It is the
white elephant in our Slav and Tatar cosmology: while it squarely sits as an
adversary for so many of our beloved, Turkic peoples populate the majority
of the area between the Caspian and China. Inevitably, with our thoughts no
clearer, we resort to that spurious practice so beloved by therapists: we make
two columns.
What we approve
of:
• Turkey’s membership in the European
Union. But not because we believe in
the condescension of an otherwise
Christian club inviting a token Muslim
member. If Europe wants a Muslim
among its ranks so badly, it need
not stretch its poor imagination and
instead pay some attention to Albania.
• The idea of a pan-Turkic people–
extending from Hungary thru Turkey
to Central Asia and stopping at the
border of China— which is grassroots,
and not commandeered from Ankara.
(cf. Day XXIII).
• We relish the fact that the AKP,
a party unashamed of its Muslim
faith in a country known to flaunt its
secularism, is ironically (or against
regional protocol, you might say)
pushing the country away from its
opaque nationalism and towards
integration within both the EU and the
Middle East. Not an easy feat.
XI/32
What we disapprove
of:
• In nearly every instance of conflict
with one of its minorities–Armenian
or Kurd–we stand firmly on the latter’s
side.
• We do not believe the road to
modernity need pass through the
latinization of one’s alphabet.
• Turkish nationalism. It cannot be
a coincidence nor can it be all the fault
of the Ottomans that 1) the Russians
think the Turks violent and barbaric
(no small accusation when coming
from a Russian), 2) that the French
have tête de Turc, and 3) and that the
Iranians enjoy a repertoire of jokes
about the Iranian Turks (Azeris) so
rich it would make the Polaks in the
US breathe a bit easier.
As children, we are all taught to compare and
contrast. From an early age, at school, but for
some, also at home—and the inner life of the
immigrant child often differs drastically from
his outer life. While young, these differences
give us a sense of identity, of relevance. The
indigenous child uses it to become a punk,
goth, or hippie, while the immigrant uses
difference to become, say, a straight A student
and skip the third grade.
If the child with a taste for what isn’t
right is endearing, in adulthood, excessive
difference makes for an eccentric at best, at
worst, an embittered old coot. The émigré is
a case in point here, essentially comparing and
contrasting himself to irrelevance (cf. Day II).
And the more nations act like only children,
the more we’re pushed to take on the airs of the
elderly: calm, wise, and dedicated to drown the
grating noise of contrast with the smooth jazz
of comparison.
Today, there are tensions between
the Russians and Caucasians, not to
mention between the Caucasians themselves
(Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, as well as
the southern Russian regions such as Dagestan,
Chechnya, Ingushetia, etc.). But mention the
name Ahmadinejad and it’s a pretty picture of
brotherhood amongst erstwhile enemies.
Understandably, Azerbaijan and
the majority-Muslim Russian regions look
to Ahmadinejad as a populist Muslim
demagogue, a president of a Muslim theocracy,
with a facile knack for sticking a thumb
(the Iranian equivalent of the middle finger)
in the face of the “Great Satan”, not to
mention a certain weakness for revisionism.
But why would Georgia and Armenia,
Christian countries, profess adulation for such
a figure? These were among the first countries
to adopt Christianity as a state religion.
What’s more: for Georgia, Christianity
played a pivotal role in the development of its
national consciousness and culture, especially
given Persia’s dominance at the time. So while
the West looks to Ahmadinjed as a source of
instability in the region, the Near, Middle,
and somewhat Far East look to him as an
unlikely source of solidarity.
Caucasians for
I’m A Dinner Jacket.
Translation: Love, Russian
Style: or washing Maryusa’s
white legs with heavy water.
XII/32
Georgians at a protest,
November 2007.
© Shakh Aivazov/AP
XIII/32
To a certain extent, we darkies live under siege
in Russia. Or at least under a particularly
racial interpretation of martial law. Once
night falls, we do not walk the streets of
Moscow. Past a certain hour, we can no longer
afford the luxuries of the metro (NB: do not
mistake this with sarcasm, as anyone lucky
enough to have experienced it can attest to the
baroque punctuality of the Moscow Metro).
Such acute restrictions become all the more
painful when compared to the situation a
decade earlier: in the mid 1990s, we could
wander around the streets of St. Petersburg’s
projects, the noviy raiony, in the wee hours
of the morning without the slightest fear.
We comfort ourselves with the long view of
history–telling ourselves that this is a slight
blip on an otherwise admirable record of
tolerance.
As Europe anguishes over the
integration of its predominantly Muslim
minorities, it would do well to look back to
the Russia of not the past 10 years but rather
the past 300. Despite the barely audible
gasps, there’s a thing or two the enlightened
Scandinavians, Gauls, and Saxons could learn
from precedents in Tsarist and Soviet Russia.
As an official state religion,
Christianity arrived relatively late in
Russia, and given the country’s expansionist
tendencies, it just so happens that Muslims
were living on Russian territory far earlier
than Christians. In a seductive association
of majority/minority with who-came-first:
some Muslims refuse even to be called a
minority. Notwithstanding their expansionism
into Muslim lands, the Russian Tsars often
acknowledged the potential importance of
Islam as a unifying creed of Russian identity.
Catherine the Great even borrowed European
Enlightenment philosophy as inspiration
for a policy giving Islam a substantial if not
equal role to Orthodox Christianity in Tsarist
Russia. Below a telling example: a Mosque
within the Kremlin walls of Kazan, capital of
Tatarstan.
WHEN IN ROME, DO AS
THE ROMANIANS
XIV/32
In Slavs and Tatars land, children are not segregated from their
parents. The notion that a child needs to be somehow protected from
adult behavior or language only leaves the child less interesting,
if not less articulate. The young Slav, Caucasian, or Central Asian
strikes others as precocious, defying the oft mistaken assumption that
going fast means growing fast. We want our 5 year old to be brash,
resourceful, and prone to using the subjunctive or words du jour such as
sovereign democracy, subprime, or the prefix demi.
Our approach to education is a disarming one–bring children to
all events, where they walk at knee-height of adults equally drunk on
alcohol and ideology, not a “kid’s table” in sight.
Like Babak Ahmed Poor, who goes on an epic journey to return
a notebook to a friend, young Slavs and Tatars go to the great lengths
of their little fists, full of immanence and naïveté.
XV/32
1903-1904
Where is my friend’s house?
By Abbas Kiarostami
Dear Breather,
In times like these, we’ve always argued it’s better to be in the rearguard than the avant-garde. When leftist politics consist of antiwar marches featuring Samba bands and hemp clothing and such
micro issues as gay marriage or abortion, hiding in the right at least
allows for a sense of intellectual if not spiritual urgency. Our soft
spot for reactionaries extends to authors (from Céline to Nabokov),
aesthetics (totalitarianism), and media outlets (Le Figaro over
Libération, The Economist over The Nation A-N-Y-D-A-Y).
The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the
particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he
understands me.
My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is
wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for
the émigré who ‘hates the Reds’ because they ‘stole’ his money
and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing
all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not
sorrow for lost banknotes.
And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an
ecological niche:
…Beneath the sky
of my America to sigh
For one locality in Russia
The general reader may now resume.
(Vladimir Nabokov Speak Memory)
Another Russian–Vladimir
Vladimirovich Nabokov–on
the cover of Time Magazine
(May 23, 1969).
XVI/32
It’s time to retire the term, “The Young
Turks.” The problem is not that it has lost
all rapport with its original context—in fact,
its current divorce from history possibly acts
as its only viable lifeline. So complete is the
deracination that Rod Stewart could name his
love ballad “The Young Turks” and then never
so much as mention the phrase again, instead
keeping “Young Hearts” in the chorus:
“Young Hearts be Free Tonight.”
Originally, the Young Turks was a
name given to a group of young progressives,
squarely against the status quo—at the time,
the declining Ottoman Empire. Today,
however, the term is a victim of its own
success. Having precipitated the end of the
Ottoman Empire, and paved the way for
Ataturk, today the rank and file of Turkey’s
secular establishment too often stifles any
sense of evolution. So perhaps it is time
for Turkey to act its age again, and shed its
teenage obsession with the new.
(NB: A rehabilitation of the word
Byzantine, however, is in due order. For
too long the positivist powers that be have
shunned any connotation of intricacy. Instead,
Byzantine should stand proud: against the
false promises of transparency that riddle
public discussions today, whether in business
or politics. As a reminder of the aesthetic
mash-up of Christianity and Islam, bring
Byzantine back into the fold.)
XVII/32
XVIII/32
If you were born before the Iran-Contra
Affair, there’s a good chance you’re too old
to belong to Khlebnikov’s famous state of
twenty-two year olds, “free from the stupidity
of their elders.”
War dispelled the ranks of Russian
futurism, who were all of draft age, and no
futurist poet was worse suited for army life
than the eccentric Germanophobe Velimir
Khlebnkiov, who was eventually drafted but
would have preferred pining from an armchair
or a library stack for the moment “Russian
steeds” would “trample Berlin”.
These twenty-two year olds might
draft policies that were not only out of the
box, but well in the realm of the impossible.
For example: push the draft age back such that
those who traditionally write the scripts of war
commit to doing the fighting (beginning at least
at, say, 38); wage a military campaign against
death; and redress the fact that young people
sent to war have become “cheaper than land.”
About a decade ago, though, there was
a very powerful, albeit burdened, twentytwo year old in the White House—Monica
Lewinsky—and it’s interesting to imagine
what things would be like if she had been
serving as president instead of the president.
While Lewinsky’s power was very real, it
was, alas, messy, sensationalistic and not so
far from the absurdism of the Futurists. For
all their promiscuity and naïveté, countless
twenty-two year olds would make halfway
descent leaders (cf. Day XV), certainly no
worse than what’s on offer today. They will
lead neither as monarchs nor autocrats,
neither as democrats nor dictators; instead,
as Khlebnikov would have it in War in a
Mousetrap, theirs would be a rule as forceful
as our dissatisfaction and imprecise as our
intentions: a smashocracy.
The return of the
Smashocracy
We often sit around dinner tables and argue over which nations we
like the best and which the least. The responses of dinner guests vary
widely but never fail to reveal a person’s politics and passions.
A recurring trope–what has Australia really contributed to the
world?–is often met by an equally clichéd turn to Anti-Americanism.
Regardless, we continue to excavate the intuitive, instinctive likes and
dislikes often found in children (but often smothered in adults), and
pummel them with the very adulterated world of politics and culture.
It is akin to putting Nature and Nurture in a blender and making a
smoothie called Know Thine Enemy, Really.
While we debate the relevance of one people over another, we
would do well to think of Lev Gumilev, whose theory of ethnogenesis
entailed a rather moving, poetic, if not very scientific, notion of
passionarity. According to Gumilev, passionarity or
represented each ethnicity’s power source or vital energy. This energy
would undergo an evolution through various stages: rise, development,
climax, inertia, convolution and memorial. Russia’s uniquely
European and Asian position, not to mention its tumultuous history,
was proof of its high passionarity.
For Gumilev, Europe is in a state of inertia, or introduction to
obscuration, and the Arab world is on the rise.
The Iranians would perhaps recognize this under another name
–
(literally translated as westoxication)–perhaps one of the
most important leitmotifs of the Iranian revolution and the creation
of a theocracy in its wake. Garbzadeghi literally means “struck by the
west”, and refers to what some believe is the corrosive effect Western
culture has on the foundations of Iranian and Muslim culture.
As with many thorny ideas, Gumilev’s Euasianism has been
hijacked: the Eurasia party today advances a worrisome breed of
Russian nationalism.
Today, we misquote Bono: “Charles Manson Alexander Dugin
stole this song from the Beatles Lev Gumilev, we’re stealing it back.”
“I am the last of the
eurasianists.” 1
–Lev Gumilev
XIX/32
1. Laruelle, Marlène
“Histoire d’une usurpation
intellectuelle: Gumilev,
‘le dernier des eurasistes’?
(analyse des oppositions
entre L.N. Gumilev et P.N.
Savickij” in Sergei Panarin
(ed.) Eurasia: People &
Myths, Moscow, Natalis
Press, 1993 (Russian lang.)
XX/32
Those
Who Disagree
The Mir with the
Thorn in his Side.
Statue of Lion, Oshnavie,
Iran
XXI/32
During the brief reign of the Mahabadi
Republic (cf . Day X), an old folk custom
bringing elements of social charity, public
theater, and disproportionate violence
enjoyed an equally brief revival. An
individual with exceptional self-control
would be appointed Mir and asked to walk
around villages asking for alms for the poor.
The villagers were then given a task: to make
the Mir laugh. If the Mir maintained his selfcontrol, the bystander would be obliged to
make an offering. However, if the Mir were
to laugh, he would be beaten to death.
In retrospect, at least, the custom
foreshadows the imminent downfall of the
Republic: such a consummate, horrific event
is a sign of peoples clearly living for today,
not tomorrow.
Rarely have we come across such an orgiastic
example of the carnavalesque in the 20th
century. Bakhtin once quoted Herzen’s
famous line: “It would be extremely
interesting to write the history of laughter”.
If he had lived to do so, the Mahabadi custom
would surely deserve a chapter of its own.1
1. Perhaps he did, and like his study of the bildungsroman
simply used the pages of his only remaining manuscript to roll
cigarettes.
As foreigners living in foreign lands, we are often asked to choose
between identities, despite the terminology itself being skewed
if not altogether faulty. On one end, the very contemporary term
‘immigrant’: implying, almost defacto, a desire for integration,
as a key factor for success in the host country. On the other, the
romanticized if passé term ‘émigré’: an evocation of whitened
knuckles, gripping an increasingly fossilized sense of ‘home’.
Either way, we lose.
Instead, we look to precedents. Some people have to blur, even
betray, one identity to fight for another. In music, this person would
perhaps be Bob Dylan or David Bowie. In Central Asia and the Middle
East, it would be Jamal al-din Al-Afghani.
Born a Persian in 1838, Jamaluddin Asadabadi became Jamal
Al-Din Al-Aghani (i.e. from Afghanistan) to mask his Shi’ite and
Persian roots and gain the confidence of Sunni leaders when on the run
from Iran. When in Afghanistan, he came to call himself Istanbuli
(i.e. from Istanbul), to further cover his tracks.
Only multiple identities allow for multiple careers, or
ideological thresholds. Al-Afghani is credited with no less than the
following: the founder of Islamic modernism, a fierce polemicist
against (especially British) Imperialism in the region, an influential
emigrant publisher, a counselor to the King of Afghanistan and
Ottoman Sultans, and an on-again-off-again adviser and fierce critic of
Persia’s Nasser Al-Din Shah. Al-Afghani was the best kind of adviser,
one who never relents, who never fears speaking truth to power. Who
never worries about job security even if this means risking a somewhat
harsher punishment than losing one’s retirement benefits or company
car—say, for example, imprisonment and deportation, naked, strapped
to the back of a mule. Some claim him to be the founder of what later
became the Muslim Brotherhood and yet there is increasing evidence
that Al-Afghani was a skeptic, if not an atheist. If false, it shows the
dizzying, seductive complexity Al-Afghani embodied. If true, it proves
he used religion in the same way he used ethnicity and identity: as tools
of expediency. Either way we salute him, for either way, he won.
Jamaluddin Asadabadi
Jama Al-Din Al-Afghani
Jamal Al-Din AL-Istanbuli
XXII/32
At home, we are no less displaced than abroad. We are not
nomads. Instead, we are rooted
to one too many places. What’s
more: the places in our heads
and hearts sometimes fail to
recognize the ones on the maps
and vice versa. You and I are
the hair on a mother’s head,
pulled in different directions by
her numerous children. It hurts
but, as John Cougar once sang,
it hurts so good. The country we
call home, the country we used
to call home and the country we
dream to call home are all very
distinct and disparate places.
It is the result of a productive
schizophrenia: we are in all of
them at once, a ravishing sensation but one tempered by the
slow, sobering devastation of
never being in any one entirely.
This copy of Conan the
Barbarian #29 from 1973 sold
for US $0.76 on ebay on Dec.
24, 2007.
XXIII/32
Though she never enjoyed the daytime technicolour fame of Conan the Barbarian, it is safe
to bet that Turan will be remembered longer,
whether or not legions of dorks get behind her.
Some names inhabit more planes of
existence than others. Turandokht is a Persian
word meaning the “daughter of Turan”.
Turan, the land of Tur, an ancient term for
Central Asia; dokht a contraction of dokhtar,
or daughter. AndTurandokht is a daughter
who has been semantically reincarnated over
and over since her birth, in the womb of the
Persian Empire, in the form of the fairy tale–
from A Thousand and One Days–that bears
her name.
But the meat on Turan’s linguistic
bones is enough to nourish many narratives:
consider that to Zoroaster, Turya was not so
much a linguistic or ethnic designation as
a title given to the nomadic infidels resistant
to Zoroastrian preaching. Or that Turanian
was adopted, during the declining days of
the Ottoman Empire, by nationalists seeking
a pan-Turkic identity, and more recently, by
others seeking a pan-Altaic one, including
the not only the unity of all Turkic peoples
(cf. Day XI) but also that of Mongols,
Koreans, Japanese, Finns, Estonians, and
Hungarians.
So it is fitting that Conan and Turandokht
are two reactionary, anti-heroic mash-ups of
history and fiction: Conan wanders Barbarianlike through the fictional “Hyborian Age”
as a mercenary and a pirate, his heroic actions
a factor of happenstance; the Europeanized
Turandot—a Chinese princess who captures
the heart of the Prince of Tartary at the
hands of Bertold Brecht in Turandokht, Or
the Whitewasher’s Congress, in the 1960s, and
of a dying Puccini in the 1920s. For him,
Turandokht was a “Principessa di morte”—
icy and stubborn, finding love only despite
herself against an ambiguously pan-Oriental
backdrop of Tatars and Pekinois.
But unlike Conan we are not two against
Turan; instead in leagues we impatiently
campaign for our cold, semantic daughters of
the various Easts.
Two Against
Turandokhtar
XXIV/32
“The world, the so-called world, knows
everything about Yugoslavia, Serbia. The
world, the so-called world, knows everything
about Slobodan Milosovic. The so-called
world knows the truth. Thus, the so-called
world is absent here today, but not just today,
and not just here. I know that I don’t know.
I don’t know the truth. But I look. I listen.
I feel. I remember. Thus I am present here
today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia,
close to Slobodan Milosovic.” close to
Slovenia, close to Croatia, close to BozniaHerzogovina, close to Kosovo, and close to
Montenegro.”
—Peter Handke
Istranka, the boat belonging
to Marshall Tito
Euramerica
XXV/32
Somewhere between 145 and 65 million years
ago, the land underneath the present day Baltic
republics–Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania–left
a minor supercontinent née Euramerica and
joined the Eurasian supercontinent.
On January 24th, 2008, we propose
giving it back.
For years, as if by mere proximity, goods
unheard of and only dreamed about in the rest
of the Soviet Union were readily available in
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, a phenomenon
that earned the region a nickname that was
coveted by all: “the West”.
How times have changed. Whether Obama
happens or not, we can already smell the odor
of future recriminations between member
states–“Euramerica! No, you are!”
The Baltic countries are, strangely,
closer to the other side of the Atlantic than
their neighbors–both former Satellite and
former Soviet–flanking them. Where else
this side of the Volga does one encounter such
preposterously positivist ideas such as a flat
tax, high-tech, and hard work?
Bush and the Baltic trio.
In the Dictionary of Forced Synonyms,
a red flag highlights the conniving enmity
and maps a football pitch of distance between
“intelligent” and “knowledgeable” on one
side and “smart” on the other.
Ulugh Bek is celebrated as one of
Uzbekistan’s foremost cultural heroes;
he excelled in the sciences but as a sultan
lacked the skills of simple administration.
The legacy of Ulugh Bek—who, as an
astronomer and mathematician, might have
been theoretically concerned with order, with
rigor—is fittingly as riddled with foibles and
idiosyncrasies as it is with accomplishments.
There are anecdotal mishaps and oddities,
such as the extra 58 seconds in Ulugh Beg’s
sidereal year calculations, the fact that a
certain Mirzo Ulugbek is most famously
monumentalized in Riga, Latvia, not
Uzbekistan, the crater on the moon named
after him (an honor he shares with the likes
of Baudelaire and Thomas Mann); there is
the fact that the underground chambers of
Ulugh Bek’s observatory in Samarkand were
excavated a hundred years ago by a primary
school teacher, an archaeology hobbyist,
not an archaeologist. And then there are his
political messes, crystallized in his tragic
demise: the sultan’s administrative skills
failing to live up to his scientific dexterity,
he was martyrized on the way to Mecca,
when a group of revolutionaries led by his
oldest son beheaded him.
And so we look back on the naivety
of the clearly enlightened and curious
Ulugh Bek, who died at the hands of an
acute inability to grab the reigns of his own
turbulent time. Pop-cultural heroes in recent
times have been able to transition seamlessly
into rulers (read: Schwarzenegger); purecultural ones, perhaps, are sucked into an
ether of fate fit for an Oedipus—or, more
fittingly, a Kronos—brilliant enough to map
the stars yet lacking an iron fist with which to
scrape their trench in history.
Monument to Ulug Bek
in Riga.
XXVI/32
XXVII/32
Mountaineers leave the aul,
by Pyotr Gruzinsky.
XXVIII/32
Caucasians for
I prefer Veal.
Before Ahmadinejad (cf. Day XII), another
figure inspired a similar sense of PanCaucasianism, one that had nothing to do
with early 21st century Anti-Americanism
but rather a 19th century tide of anti-Russian
sentiment. Imam Shamil led various
campaigns of guerilla warfare against the
Russians during the Caucasian War and was
known for being able to unite the famously
warring tribes of the region.
Marx called him “a desperate
democrat” but there was clearly more than
just politics to his life. After 20 years of
guerilla resistance and improbable escapes,
Shamil suddenly surrendered. After a brief
stint in a prison outside Moscow, where he
complained of the cold temperatures, he
took up residence in a posh villa in Kiev in
what was then very much part of the Russian
empire. Tsar Alexander III foot the bill and
Shamil wrote, incredibly, that he was quite
grateful (to Allah, of course, not Alexander)
for his current situation: the climate was
pleasant and the surrounding mountains
reminded him of his home.
The mountain people, as they are often
referred to in the region, are a tough people.
But cultural convenience has us forget that
toughness begets an acute appreciation for
luxury: Caucasians are also an eminently
epicurean lot. Clearly, Shamil was no
exception, with a sartorial taste for outfits
he wore on walks in the Tsar’s garden.
Dressed in bear fur, yellow Moroccan boots,
and a white turban (the latter with special
permission from the Tsar), the Lion of
Dagestan cut a striking silhouette.
IF HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE
VICTORS, WILL THE FUTURE BE
WRITTEN BY THE DEFEATED?
President Jimmy Carter being
fed to the sharks during the
Iran Hostage Crisis.
XXIX/32
Our dreams of a common heritage come
closest to becoming reality, and shedding
the siege mentality, on and around March
21st. Every year, around this date, peoples
in countries that had once been part of or
influenced by the Persian Empire–from parts
of the Middle East like Iraq to former Soviet
states such as Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Azerbaijan, Kazakstan and Kirgizstan–
celebrate Nowruz, the beginning of the new
year.
The calendar date unearths a starkly
different sense of cultural geneology,
geopolitics, and religion. There is Iran’s
problematic definition as a Middle Eastern
country: Nowruz clearly positions the country
closer to the Caucases and Central Asia.
It points to a resilience of national sentiment:
Nowruz is a pre-Islamic festivity and its
extensive geography coincides with what
was the Persian Empire’s first major religion,
Zoroastrianism.
Nowruz
Nowruz celebrations in
Tajikistan.
XXX/32
Sergei Paradjanov’s 1968 cult
classic Sayat Nova ( Color of
Pomegranates)
XXXI/32
The Fruit of Fundamentalism
Of late the pomegranate runs a similar risk
to the foreigner who ‘passes’ as a local:
integration often means emasculation.
Originally from the Caucases, the
pomegranate has been embraced by hordes
of the health-conscious in the extreme
West (California) for its particularly high
concentration of antioxidants. We accuse the
contraction: the pomegranate has become the
pom or, thanks to a particularly exploitative
trademark, Pom. Regrettably, this is a tried
and true tradition amongst immigrants: Pavel
becomes Paul, Hossein becomes Henry, but
we would petition to leave the Pomegranate
alone.
Via a turn of linguistic fortune, we can
redeem the aesthetic and atavistic violence
of the pomegranate. In French, the word for
pomegranate and grenade are one and the
same. If we look to its explosive nature–surely
the only fruit to require a change of attire for
fear of its irreparable stains–it is for another
health benefit: namely, its anti-Occident
character.
Amend Your Calendars.
But never make amends.
We do not spend time. In our Dictionary
of Forced Synonyms, under duration there
is no dollar sign, only duresse. Time is not
money because there always was plenty of the
former but never much of the latter. For half
a century, the two did not even occupy the
same latitude. Now, money is so bountiful
for some that entire longitudes talk of trading
places, while for others time resists late
capitalism’s hat-trick of progress. We do
not measure time with colleagues, friends or
family in barter-like terms of dinner, a coffee,
or a drink. We might stop by your home not
for half an hour but for half a month, not
leave the house, not do much of significance,
in the sense of being productive, but simply be
present and pass the time with you.
To amend a calendar is a positivist
putsch against our otherwise Central Asian
prose of defeatism. If time is by its nature
imperfect, then perhaps embracing the
flaws of the most accurate calendar in use
today–the Iranian calendar–makes it that
much easier to swallow. In use in Iran and
Afghanistan only, the Iranian calendar is
considered more accurate than the Gregorian
calendar used predominantly around the
world because it does not need leap years1.
By beginning each year on the vernal equinox
as exactly determined by astronomical
observation from Tehran and Kabul, the
calendar accurately defines the length of the
year but is refreshingly less prescriptive in the
definition of a particular day. If calendars are
the Achilles heel of perfectionists–as in what
brings them down, what devastates them–let
us risk playing the idiot, that is history,
to science.
One has to go back, incredibly more
than 1000 years in the region, to find a time
when revisions were needed to accommodate
seasonal drift. Before the present Iranian
calendar and before its predecessor–the
Jalali Calendar, drafted in part by Omar
Khayyam in 1079–a Thirteenth Month was
seen as one solution2. We have resurrected the
extra month of 32 days not to accommodate
seasonal drift but rather to revise a certain
lexical drift, back from the reductive fists of
professionalism where it implies a financial
bonus at the end of the year and towards a
celebration of the complexity inherent in any
attempt to spend time
XXXII/32
1. Leap year
There was a time when women were only permitted to
make marriage proposals in
leap years; fines were levied
if the gentleman refused, to
soften the blow. Fortunately
for the romantic, 2008 is just
such a year.
2. Robert Graves, in his introduction to Greek Myths, cites
a ballad exclaimed by Robin
Hood at the time of Edward
II, the thirteen-month lunar
year having survived among
peasants for over a millennium after the adoption of
the Julian calendar:
“How many merry months
be in the year? There are
thirteen, I say …”