How accurate does geopolitical fiction need to be?

I recently watched The Diplomat (Netflix’s 8-episode show with Keri Russell cast as the lead, the new US Ambassador to the UK Kate Wyler, not the British TV show with the same name released 2 weeks prior) and the show was entertaining enough but I didn’t really feel any way about it until people kept sending me really angry reviews of it. The Discourse around The Diplomat is primarily driven by foreign policy nerds (a term of endearment from a fellow wonk) who primarily take issue with the liberties the show takes with the details of ambassadorial duties and international politics.

Kate’s CV is a major focus in reviews of The Diplomat. The Financial Times says that Kate has no ambassadorial experience whatsoever, making it totally absurd that she would be fit for the position of ambassador. A slew of American outlets wield the fact that Kate does have diplomatic experience as a gotcha. In an article brimming with “well actually” vibes, a Slate reporter says, “American ambassadors to St. James’ Court are never professional Foreign Service officers; the post, to a greater extent than all other postings, is reserved for prominent pols—campaign donors, party chairmen, ex-cabinet secretaries.” Twitter users say the show is unwatchable because Kate is plucked from an ambassadorship to Afghanistan to run the embassy in the UK without a Senate confirmation hearing. While there’s probably enough dramatic intrigue baked into these hearings to make a season of TV, and there’s certainly enough content for a Veep-style show about the absurdity of appointed ambassadors, that’s just…not what the show is about.

And maybe the detail of a Senate hearing can be forgiven, but for other reviewers, the show’s ignorance of geopolitical nuance cannot. These reviews take issue with the premise of the crisis driving the plot. (tl;dw[atch] – someone bombs a British aircraft carrier; everyone immediately thinks it’s Iran; Kate Wyler says, “Hmmm why would the Iranians do this?” and digs deeper; hypothesis 1 is that it’s the Russians; this is fine-tuned as hypothesis 1.1 that it’s a Wagner Group-esque group of Russian mercenaries.) Slate’s reporter doesn’t buy that Russia would frame Iran for anything (A+ for him, because characters have this same conversation on screen) and seems personally offended that showrunners didn’t take his suggestion that China makes way more sense as the baddie in this scenario. Vulture’s review contends that the geopolitical crisis makes sense, insofar as it’s predictably xenophobic toward Iran. “It’s drowning the canvas in decades of the same axis-of-evil talking points,” the author writes.

Certainly the entertainment industry’s role in the War on Terror is a disturbing history, and it is worth critical examination of tropes of The Other in popular TV and movies. But the angle of whether plots “make sense” given international actors’ prior behavior misses out on what can be gained from interpreting pop culture. “We might be tempted to analyse popular cultural representations primarily for their ‘truth value’ (historical accuracy) – i.e., what a film from a particular period can tell us about that era, or making judgements about whether individual films present a ‘balanced’ (‘true’) or ‘biased’ (‘propaganda’) view of the world,” Christina Rowley writes in Popular Culture and the Politics of the Visual. “However, representations should not be viewed as simple reflections of either ‘true’ or ‘distorted’ ‘reality’.”

Shows like Star Trek or Game of Thrones warp structural features of our world in ways that let us glean something about the nature of politics. Daniel Furman and Paul Musgrave make this point in their article “Synthetic Experiences: How Popular Culture Matters for Images of International Relations:” “Audiences watching Star Trek could discard the fictional chaff (starships, Klingons, and warp drive) from the relevant wheat (benevolent liberal hegemony leads to perpetual peace) and easily apply arguments encoded in the text to the real world (support liberal containment policy, not aggressive anti-Communist rollback).” International relations scholars who have published dozens of serious empirical and theoretical articles have also written about Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and depictions of zombie apocalypse. So why can’t The Diplomat, another work of fiction, get a similar read?

It’s admittedly harder to break out of this “real”/”fake” binary with a show like The Diplomat than shows that sit soundly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. The contours of the world where Kate Wyler is the US ambassador to the UK are too similar to our own to be able to suspend belief. After all, just like our world, there are NATO powers trying to figure out who’s responsible for an attack on a member country, there’s a Wagner-lookalike mercenary group, Iran is a rogue state. But… the diplomats are too hot to be real, Kate didn’t get a confirmation hearing, and her position in London isn’t for career diplomats anyway. With these gaffes, what could The Diplomat possibly tell us about politics? 

To answer that, we have to wade through domestic television that blurs the line between fiction and mirror of party politics. The Diplomat was created by Debora Cahn, who was a writer-producer on The West Wing, a show that is (in)famous for its rosy vision of high politics. A reviewer for Slate sneers that The Diplomat “indulges in the same liberal-intellectual fantasy” as Cahn’s previous work. “Wouldn’t it be great if a political leader got the job just because he (or better yet, she) was good at it?” With echoes of the 2016 election, we’re supposed to credit sexism as the reason we can’t have competent leaders. This is the tone of Rolling Stone’s review, which argues that “the show’s chief concern outside its plot is the uneven playing field between men and women who do the same job.” 

This is the wrong read of the show’s thesis, though. Kate has to navigate “wariness” and “skepticism” from her British counterpart and the deputy who’s been tasked with vetting her for VP. But her deputy doesn’t doubt her because she’s a woman (to the contrary, it’s made explicit that her gender is the main thing going for her potential pick as VP besides her commitment to public service over politics), he’s still reeling from Hillary’s loss in 2016 and doesn’t know if he has it in him to groom a candidate – especially one like Kate who doesn’t want the job. The British Foreign Minister isn’t guarded because she’s a woman (unless you count his withdrawal after making his crush on Kate clear), but because the U.S. has a history of giving a big middle finger to its enemies and closest allies alike.

The last 20 years of television, during which we’ve moved away from The West Wing’s picture-perfect vision of liberal president Jed Bartlet and toward complex lead characters who we root for even though they are terrible people, guide us toward a different gender story. Per Vulture’s review, Kate’s greatest crime is being a girlboss. “She’s not a regular ambassador,” the review says, but “a cool, savvy political operator who really deserves the gig (because of a bunch of unexplained stuff she did in the Middle East).” But she’s not cool, not really, and I don’t think we’re supposed to actually like Kate Wyler. She is crass (hip, breaking gender stereotypes) and stinky (gross, breaking gender stereotypes), makes a fuss about having to wear dresses (girlboss feminist) but doesn’t know that Gloria Steinem is still alive (bad feminist). Some read into Kate’s boorishness as a quality we’re supposed to like, but on the whole, she’s not a super likable character – which is fine. She doesn’t need to be particularly likable for the show’s message to come through.

And that’s because Kate isn’t the mouthpiece for the show’s thesis. That job is for Hal, Kate’s charismatic diplomat husband, who the audience can tell is an asshole because he is a sexy smooth talker who steals the spotlight. Kate asks Hal to give a speech in her stead and does a classic feint, opening his speech on the theme “communication is key” by saying “Communication isn’t the key.” For Hal, “Diplomacy never works. Until it does.” To get there though, one needs to “talk to everyone. Talk to the dictator and the war criminal. Talk to the poor schmuck three levels down who’s so pissed he has to sit in the back of the second car, he may be ready to turn. Talk to terrorists. Talk to everyone.”

It’s a little obnoxious that the thesis is laid out so explicitly in a speech, though Cahn’s oeuvre has consistently resisted the adage “show don’t tell” with character’s conversations about the importance of democratic values. But Cahn doesn’t just tell through Hal, she also tries to show through Kate. 

The Diplomat shows that politicians of the Western world do all kinds of shady shit. They do this for instrumental reasons (to maintain geopolitical alliances, a theoretically justifiable cause that viewers are supposed to get the ick for; to preserve their hold on elected office, a deplorable cause that leaders from respectable allied countries aren’t supposed to do) and for spectacle (bomb Iran because we can).

And it’s Kate, a dogged public servant, who we see break procedural and diplomatic formalities to resist this. She works to speak to people who are morally reprehensible because they come from countries that have been deemed morally reprehensible. In doing so, she takes them seriously as political agents. In line with Hal’s speech, Kate challenges the truism of foreign policy that talking to an enemy legitimizes them. This notion stems from the bipolar world of US-Soviet conflict and matured during the era of American order. But this attitude isn’t fit for a multipolar world – which international relations theorists have deemed the most chaotic, the most ripe for violence.

If you want to be entertained by real geopolitical intrigue that showcases a strong, smart, capable female diplomat navigating an international crisis, make noise for a documentary on the new ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink. If you want insight on how average people make sense of geopolitics (the show’s first week got more than 55 million streaming hours, averaging out to about 6.9 million views per episode) with the added bonus of watching Keri Russell look smart in a pantsuit, take off your policy wonk hat and enjoy the show.

Long Time No Blog

I haven’t published anything here since December 2019 – a pivot point in my personal life and in the history of public health. COVID kept me stateside (and largely confined to my one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan), and what’s a travel blog without travel? But I have gotten out of the U.S. in the last three years, and have several things in my drafts with pictures and stories and musings and links to things I read to make sense of these places. For whatever reason, I got stuck at the point of pressing “post.”

Prekrasno was such a trusty friend during Peace Corps – it was a way to communicate with people at home, but the work of weaving my day-to-day experiences with historical-political-social context helped me make sense of the world. Even after I stopped posting, those skills came in handy as I wrote a 200-page manuscript on social media and activism in Kazakhstan for my PhD and carved space as an expert on Central Asian politics. I learned to pitch editors, frame my analysis in the tone and scope of a number of digital outlets and magazines. I plan to keep doing that! But, I’ve noticed that when ideas bubble up – musings that weave TV shows and current events and art exhibits and podcasts – that I don’t pursue it if I can’t churn it out with the goal of making money. This impulse to sell my words has made sense since finishing the PhD (when I lost my health insurance and transitioned to adjuncting/freelancing to pay rent and buy groceries), but the calculus has shifted as I prepare to re-enter the world of salaried employment with benefits.

So, expect intermittent photo essays on travels of the last year, how academics take themselves too seriously, television about foreign policy, and the game theory of reality dating shows. Perhaps some link round-ups too (such as this piece on how Italy’s food-driven global brand is a recent construct, or this personal essay about the consequences of loading a dive bar’s juke box with the same song for hours). Who knows, we’ll see, but it’s prekrasno – lovely, delightful, wonderful – to be back.

A photo from a dreamy late afternoon on Metro North last month. I had biked forty miles north from my apartment, sweating in unseasonal 80 degree heat and straining up and down the hills of the Hudson Valley.

With My Brilliant Friend in (Meers/Frei)burg

Despite having traveled quite a bit since my last post (a return to Kyrgyzstan in spring, a week in Moscow, a train journey from Tbilisi to Baku, more trains across Kazakhstan, a sleepless four days in Berlin, yet another train far north of Moscow to the Republic of Karelia), Prekrasno has laid dormant. Compared with academic deadlines (conferences! final papers!) and recurring submissions to The Diplomat, it feels frivolous to sit down and recount travel stories.

I want to dust off the old travel blog both to record a visit to southern Germany, but also to pay homage to Rebecca, a dear friend who hosted me (and responded with “YES AND” to a joke about roadtripping to Liechtenstein, a doubly-landlocked microstate nudged between Switzerland and Austria just south of Lake Constance). I can’t quite process that I met Rebecca in 2010; as of tomorrow, a ten-year period (!!). She has featured in many of the adventures I recorded here on Prekrasno — a roadtrip through the American South after we graduated from college, reading fortunes in coffee grounds, walking past a UN-sanctioned buffer zone to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a bizarre ferry ride to get out of Northern Cyprus, swimming in a pool at the top of a 30-story building in Kuala Lumpur — (and doubtlessly has been front in center in many stories that were not shared here).

What a treat it was to spend two weeks in Germany, most of it spent laughing/making weird faces/eating cheese or chocolate or nutty bread next to such a good and wise and funny person. The weather was not on our side, but we still managed to visit Freiburg’s outdoor markets, climb to the top of its cathedral (home to a gargoyle that sticks its butt out rather than grimaces to scare passerby/release water from the roof), cram a few hours of work in the massive library, and glimpse a meteor from a balcony. I left Rebecca for a few days to visit Berlin, but when I got back we packed up for a 48-road trip to Liechtenstein and Lake Constance.

All the travel blogs I looked at for tips on how to visit Liechtenstein recommended taking the train from Zurich; renting a car and driving from Freiburg turned out to cost something similar. As a car-averse person, I’m proud to say I drove us on non-toll backroads through Germany, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein (Rebecca’s constant assurances that I was doing so well made me question whether indeed I was doing well, but, we got from A to B with no scratches or fines). In Vaduz, we paid 3 Swiss Francs to get our passports stamped and paid nothing to climb a small mountain to see Vaduz Castle, where Liechtenstein’s princely family lives. For some strange reason they wouldn’t let us inside for tea with the family, but the weather did finally cooperate and clouds blew away to reveal just how high the Alps reach. We visited Liechtenstein on winter solstice, and with such little daylight we didn’t visit any of the museums in Vaduz’s center, instead driving on to Balzers to check out a cathedral and castle. From there, we passed through Austria and entered back into Germany to a cottage near Meersburg.

It’s almost upsetting how cute Meersburg was — vineyards on the coast of Lake Constance, pastel buildings, tiny doors, a man dressed in medieval-looking clothing guarding the entrance to the old castle (the Meersburg castle is the oldest continuously inhabited castle in Germany; though I think this is a questionable superlative because a new castle was built for people to move into. But! I digress), and a giftshop with the most wackily arranged mannequins I’ve ever seen. The sun peeked out for an hour as we walked around Old Town; after popping in to the Wine Museum, though, it started drizzling again — our cue to head out. 

From there we drove to the Ravennaschlucht Christmas market — a collection of wooden stalls selling raclette-covered potatoes, flammkuchen (a pizza-like flatbread from the area along the southwestern French-German border), hot chocolate, and tiny bottles of local gin. The weather was not exactly on our side, but we managed to take a walk in the forest, admire cuckoo clocks, and eat the tastiest pulled pork sandwich (topped with sauerkraut) I’ve had in years. We rolled back in to Freiburg late at night, parked the rental car in its platz, and walked back to Rebecca’s apartment.

This is a terrible travelogue in the sense of lacking any restaurant recommendations (we didn’t go out to eat in Liechtenstein because of the cost + the daylight limitations; even in Freiburg we didn’t eat out much and opted instead to cook at home or eat snacks from the Christmas market) or unique Christmas market goodies other than rosé gluhwein.

 

Last month, I finally got around to watching the HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, a story of two remarkable girls who grow up near Naples. This paragraph from a review in the New Yorker struck me:

 

Why have a playdate when you could have a sleepover? Why have a sleepover that lasts one night when you could have a sleepover that lasts three, or a week? That might sound obsessive, or borderline erotic, and it is: childhood friendships of the kind I’m describing are like the primordial soup of human relationships, messy and unformed but with the raw parts to make anything that might come after. Such friends are like family (you need, or hate, or cannot forsake them) and a beloved (you are so jealous, so sensitive to their slights!) and an alternative (better?) self, squashed into one.

 

This trip felt like an indulgence in the impulse to keep going that the author expresses here — two weeks of sipping on primordial friendship soup that’s been simmering on the stove for a decade. I went into 2019 with my friend, and what a treat to say goodbye to 2019 with her as well. This year we saw each other in New York, Baku, Rhode Island, and Germany — who knows where I’ll see her in 2020?

Driving the Pamirs

I was sitting in a taxi rolling back into Osh after a two week trip to Tajikistan when I got a text from my grandma – “Update time,” she wrote. And so, an update!

After spending a week tourist-ing around Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, I set out on a 6-day tour of the Pamir mountains. I was joined by another PhD student who studies Central Asia and a mutual friend who works in Bishkek; the three of us are all easygoing, and plans for the trip came together about a week before we made it to the Pamirs.

In the days leading up to the trip, I relied on a handful of travel blogs for ideas about which places to visit/what to see and found this day-by-day itinerary format helpful. In hopes of helping someone else who wants to organize a similar trip — and directing business to Жоомарт/Jomart, aka the best and most charming driver in the biz (you can get in touch with him on WhatsApp at +996 558 977 552) — here’s a broad sketch of the trip:

Dushanbe -> Khorog -> Langar -> Murghab -> Karakul -> Tulpar-Kol -> Osh

Day 0: Dushanbe

I had the luxury of enjoying Dushanbe for a week before setting off to the Pamirs, but one of my travel mates flew in from Bishkek the morning before and had a crash-tour of the city. We both applied for e-visas ($70, including the $20 permit for visiting eastern Tajikistan) a few days before our respective flights. After stocking up on snacks for the road (the good kind of instant coffee, crackers, spreadable cheese, cherries, cherry tomatoes, nuts, dried fruit), we made a quick walking tour of the city at dusk before heading to bed early.

Day 1: Dushanbe to Khorog

We woke up at 5:30 to take a taxi to the bus depot in central Dushanbe in order to catch a shared Jeep to Khorog, the capital of Gorno-Badakhshan region in eastern Tajikistan. It didn’t take long to find a driver (Gulom was the first person to call out “Taksi”), but it did take a while for the car to fill up and to pack the top of the jeep with everyone’s bags. After checking that the price was fair (350 Tajik somoni is about $40, which seemed high compared to the price of a ride of similar distance in Kyrgyzstan), drinking some tea, and stocking up on water and candy, we hit the road at 7:30 in the morning.

Not long after getting out of the city stopped to buy some watermelon and talk to police officers who flagged the car down. A few of the blogs I read mentioned never having the visa/GBAO permit checked, but this was not our experience at all — on the trip from Dushanbe to Khorog alone, we had to show our passport three times.

This was a long, long ride. We stopped to take pictures of the Nurek Reservoir about an hour outside Dushanbe, stopped again in Kulob for lunch, stopped once more in Kulai-Kum to stretch our legs and buy more snacks, and stopped for the last time at some roadside cafe (I think around Rushan?) for salad and some tea. Finally (FINALLY) around 9:30pm we rolled in to Khorog, where the highway linking Dushanbe and the Pamirs is also the town’s main street. The women at Sheron Homestay were really helpful in navigating Gulom to the gate, and the accommodations were so comfortable after 14 hours on the road.

Day 2: Khorog to Langar

Our driver Jomart met us at Sheron Homestay in the morning, and we stocked up 5-liter containers of water at the bazaar and pulled out money from Orion Bank. (There’s nowhere else to pull out or exchange money until well after you cross into Kyrgyzstan, so calculate what you need beforehand.)

After lunch in Ishkoshim, we made a pitstop at the Bibi Fatima hotsprings (10 somoni fee to go in, worth every diram and then some). While digging through the trunk to pull out swimsuits, Jomart told us we wouldn’t need those, and in fact, we could be fined if we wore anything at all in the water. This was the only full body water experience of the trip, so even without soap, it was incredibly refreshing. If you go, be sure to ask before you head down to the springs which door is for men/women — they switch the two frequently, apparently, and my travel mates accidentally walked in on a guy toweling off from his dip in the water.

After the hot springs, we drove another hour and a half to Langar. Jomart organized our homestay for us, calling around to the several guest houses in every village to see which had space open. The place where we stayed in Langar (I think it’s here) was a full house, but very comfortable — they had an indoor toilet and a nice shower, and dinner was tasty.

Day 3: Langar to Murghab

One of my travel mates was really sick in the morning, with what we thought was food poisoning, but seemed to be altitude sickness (the symptoms can be similar). We had to keep going, and it took another 5 or so hours to get to Murghab. Once in Murghab, we found a really nice pharmacy near the hospital at the far end of the bazaar, which was well-stocked by the Aga Khan Foundation.

We stayed at Fariyma Homestay, which was also packed — a tour group of 15 Russians took up half the house, and another group of North Americans bumped us from the first room where we had set up. Fortunately, the room where we ended up sleeping was the warmest of all. Fariyma was very accommodating of my friend’s stomach situation, the food was tasty, and no one minded that we hung out around the homestay until mid-day before leaving.

Day 4: Murghab to Karakul

This was the shortest travel day, by far. We left Murghab after lunch in the bazaar and made it to Karakul by mid-afternoon. We stayed at Elrik Homestay, where we slept in the most comfortable beds of the trip and borrowed a deck of cards from some Tajik men who were also renting a room. Electricity at the house was powered by a generator, which they only ran at night.

There is very little to do in Karakul, other than walk to the lake – we went three times in the one day we spent there. A group more ambitious and suffering less from altitude sickness than ours could have walked further around the lake and potentially toward the hills, though Karakul sits close to the Tajikistan-China border fence, so ask around before heading off in any one direction.

Day 5: Karakul to Tulpar-Kol

The Tajik-Kyrgyz border is not far from Karakul, though it takes a while to get to because of the several mountain passes on the way. This was one of the days I was most grateful to be traveling by car, as the bikers struggling through the 4200 meter pass in between the border posts looked really worn out.

We passed through four checkpoints on the Tajik side (passport check, customs, narcotics, final passport stamp + visa collection) and then drove 13 kilometers to the Kyrgyz post, where we were greeted by an English-speaking border guard. It was another thirty minutes in the car to Sary-Tash, where we ate lunch and bought some refreshments (watermelon, a 2-liter bottle of kymys, and a 1-liter bottle of good ol’ Kyrgyz beer). Driving to Tulpar-Kol was in the opposite direction of Osh and took about an hour, but boy were the views worth it. The lake is near the base camp for Peak Lenin, and there are two yurt camps situated on either side of a hill. We picked a yurt at Peak Lenin Yurt Camp and spent the afternoon wandering the hills, drinking kymys with Jomart, and reading.

Although it’s the peak of summer, it was quite cold at night. Even with a small stove, we were still chilly. Fortunately, we had bought some wool Pamiri socks in Murghab and there were plenty of heavy blankets piled in the corner of the yurt.

Day 6: Tulpar-Kol to Osh

After breakfast and coffee, we packed up and said goodbye to the yurt camp around 9:30. It was about a five-hour drive to Osh — we traded slow, bumpy roads for fast, zippy turns, which resulted in a bit of motion sickness BUT it was magical to feel the difference in the air as we descended from Tulpar-Kol’s 3500 meters to Osh’s 800 meters of altitude. On the way, we passed some familiar views and then – suddenly – beautiful Suleyman Too appeared on the horizon.

Did I mention that Jomart is the best driver?

Jomart dropped us off directly at Konok Hostel, which I will forever and always preach as the best hostel in the city. Meergul, the owner, is an absolute queen – she is incredibly well connected, can tell you everything you need to know about Osh (and southern Kyrgyzstan more broadly), and runs a lovely hostel with a range of options (dorms, private rooms, and two apartments. You can find Konok Hostel on any major booking website, but you can also reach out to Meergul (who speaks English well) directly on WhatsApp at +996 558 382 777.

I would definitely recommend staying a few days in Osh! This is hands down my favorite place to spend time in in Kyrgyzstan, it’s really magical. Consider taking a tour of the city with my friend Atabek (here’s his website). Be warned, this won’t be an average “walk around and see the sites” tour, but will be hands on and knee-deep in local culture. I’d recommend the sunset tour of Suleyman Too or the food tour (SAVE ROOM FOR MANTY) or the plov cooking tour or…really, any of them.

How much did everything cost?

• Flight, Bishkek –> Dushanbe = $100
• Visa, including GBAO permit = $70
• Shared taxi from Dushanbe to Khorog = 350 somoni ($38)
• My share of our brilliant driver Jomart’s services (remember, message him on WhatsApp at +996 558 977 552) = $200
• One night at a homestay in Khorog + four nights of homestays in the Pamirs, including breakfast and dinner = $68
• Bibi Fatima hotsprings = 10 somoni ($1.11)
• Snacks = 80 somoni ($8.89)
• Water = 50 somoni ($5.55)
• Beer = 36 somoni ($4)
• A pair of Pamiri wool socks = 70 somoni ($7.80)
• Total: $503

If I were to do it again, I’d…

A lot of the travel blogs I read included some beautiful photos and laid out their itineraries really well, but none described what they would have done differently. I absolutely loved our tour and am really happy with how everything turned out, but now that I’m on the other side of it, I think I might have done a few things differently:

• get picked up straight from Dushanbe instead of Khorog, and then spend a night in Kulai-Kum to split up the drive
• bring more medicine along, including Oral Rehydration Salts + ibuprofen + Нош-бпа (Russian version that works like Pepto Bismol)
• take an extra day or two to explore Khorog (and get a chance to eat at KFC – Khorog Fried Chicken)
• pack a deck of cards and Bananagrams for passing the time
• split up the drive between Khorog and Langar, taking a day to stay in Ishkashim and check out the bazaar
• stay another day in Murghab (partially to get used to the altitude, partially to talk to more people and seek out the museum that’s supposed to be somewhere around town)
• learn a few Pamiri words (Shugni and Wakhi are the main languages of the Pamirs; many Pamiris speak Russian better than they do Tajik)

Overall, it was an amazing trip and an incredible opportunity to see a corner of the world that few people manage to visit. I’m still trying to stretch out my legs and back after so many hours crossing bumpy roads in a jeep, but I’ll try to get out some posts with more details about who I met and what I saw along the way.

Small Scenes of Central Asia: May 2018

“Kettik, let’s go,” the sweetest word you can hear after an hour sitting in a minivan waiting for passengers to come in from the village. I’m not sure whether it’s more satisfying when a driver announces a departure immediately after climbing in to the backseat of a packed Stepwagon, or after having waited in a stuffy marshrutka for seventy minutes on a slow day; I think it’s probably a u-shaped relationship.

Guljamal is the only person in her family who’s fasting for Ramadan (her mother is too, though when I’m visiting, she’s taking a few days off for her time of the month). She’s young, only in fifth grade, and she slips up when I bring out candy from the US. Immediately after popping a Reese’s peanut butter cup into her mouth, she clasps her face – which I read as a sign that she’s allergic, and start to panic. “No, no, Orozo!” she says in English. I put a finger to my lips and tell her I’ll keep it a secret. Later, when Guljamal runs inside at 8:30 to prepare for ooz achuu (Kyrgyz for mouth opening, or breaking fast) with a xeroxed copy of iftar prayers, she tells her mom anyway about the candy incident.

While staying in Togolok Moldo village, I took a day to visit the county capital, Baetovo. After my morning meetings at the school board office, I panicked about finding my taxi back to the village. Baetovo is pretty small, only about 10,000 people, but it’s big enough to take up more than just the one main road – the taxi could be anywhere. I stop in to a bodega and ask the woman behind the counter if she can call the driver and then point me in the right direction. She’s surprised that I made the request in Kyrgyz, which necessitates the full “who are you” conversation, complete with the “And you’re sure you don’t want to marry a Kyrgyz boy from our village?” line of questioning. I buy some juice from her on the way out, because I’m thirsty and she was helpful, and it only takes a minute to find my taxi. We wait in front of the bazaar (on a Wednesday afternoon, only 3 ladies selling vegetables under tents) for another three hours until the car fills up with the same people who came out from Togolok Moldo that morning.

Spending the weekend in Internatsional’ without internet was a breath of fresh air; I ate so much village bread, took a trip out to saray (“the animal shed,” aka the field where the family’s cows and sheep are taken to graze) to bring food to Urmat’s dad, and watched kids play in puddles. My host family has grown since I saw them last; baby Jansuu was born in January, right after New Year’s. I don’t know why people laugh when I say Jansuu is a copy of her dad, because it’s true – look at them.

It was easier, but also more expensive, than expected to get a taxis from Naryn to Kazarman to Jalalabad. I booked a seat on a Bishkek-Kazarman taxi, and even though I was only in the car for the last 4 hours of the 10-hour journey, I paid full fare. The driver was chatty; even when I put my headphones in and pretended to sleep, he just called out my name louder to ask whether I’d tried this Kyrgyz food or liked that Kyrgyz song. The Kazarman-Jalalabad trip was easier to arrange, but was logistically more challenging: the 3 men in the backseat, visiting from Andijan, Uzbekistan, delayed departure by 4 hours by calling every 15 minutes to say they’d be right there; a snow storm blocked the road at the top of the pass, leaving us stranded until a van of young men with shovels could arrive to dig out a path; normal stuff.

J-1 Visas (…And Grassroots Public Diplomacy) At Risk

In April, Trump signed “Buy American Hire American,” an executive order that targeted the H-1B visa because it supposedly screwed over American workers by driving down wages. Think what you will about the H-1B, which brings foreign workers in specialty occupations (especially tech) to work at US companies by a lottery system.

But now, the White House is reportedly looking to cut J-1 visas, which allow 300,000 foreign visitors to see the U.S., experience our culture, and bring what they’ve seen and learned back to their home country. These are visas given to research scholars and students (like my brilliant friend Asel, who’s getting a Master’s at Columbia through the Fulbright program in order to go back and rock the world of education policy in Kyrgyzstan), au pairs, Work and Travel visitors (like many of my students in Kyrgyzstan, and those featured in this This American Life episode, who come to the US for a summer just to see it), kids on academic exchange programs, trainees participating in structured professional development programs, and — closest to my heart — camp counselors.

If you know me at all, I’m a summer camp person. I’ve spent the majority of my summers since high school at the Concordia Language Villages in northern Minnesota — these camps provide an immersion experience for learning 15 world languages, but they also foster a sense of curiosity about other cultures and responsibility as global citizens. These camps are a magical place, and the diversity of staff who work at the Concordia Language Villages is a huge part of that magic. Each year, around 200 people travel from around the world to Bemidji, Minnesota to offer language and cultural skills and develop genuine international friendships.

I would not be the person I am today without those connections — I think about Valya, who has been working at the Villages for 9 years, who is the best babushka a summer camp could ask for and who has hosted me in her cozy St. Petersburg apartment multiple times; I think about Rahat, who showed me my first glimpse of Kyrgyz culture; I think of Vadim, a literature teacher from a small town in Siberia who is a brilliant thinker and who taught me a foundation of Russian that helped me skip several semesters of coursework; I think of Lida, Yulia, Olga, Anton, Cholponai, Sasha, so many people who have spent their summers teaching kids traditional crafts, music, dance, and language from their home countries.

Losing this visa means losing these people, and these connections. This visa is so important to public diplomacy at the grassroots level, and taking away this arm of intercultural exchange also blocks a path to a more peaceful, understanding world.

So please take a minute to contact the higher powers that be and ask to protect the J-1 visa. You can send a written message to your representatives via Alliance for International Exchange; if you’re more the phone call type, you can reach the White House Comment Line at (202) 456-1111 or the State Department Operations Center: (202) 647-1512.

Small Scenes of Summer

In the last three months, I’ve: finished up 2 years of Peace Corps service; moved into a new apartment in New York City; wandered through 12 airports on layovers, customs checks, and diverted flights; journeyed by bus, plane, train, car, and even boat to visit old friends and new cities across Russia and New England; settled down long enough to sift through several hundred pictures of these adventures. And it’s not even August yet.

As I make the transition from Peace Corps volunteer 3rd Goal proponent extraordinaire to full-time graduate student, I’m trying to be intentional about how this space will change. In the meantime, I’ve been inspired by the #VantagePoint project (an initiative from the folks at Light.Co who are developing new camera technology) to get back into sharing snaps from my travels.

From the Kazan River to Casco Bay, my travels this summer have afforded some beautiful sunset views — being so far north, sunset has ranged from 10pm to 1am, giving me plenty of daylight to explore these cities and enjoy the outdoors.

Gorgeous sunsets in popular tourist spots have meant vying for the prime #VantageSpot with tons of other people — learning to take a step back or swap out of selfie mode on my camera have made for some nice shots (my favorite being the anachronistic French general handling a smart phone, taken in the Alexandrovskyy Garden before a reenactment of a battle from the Napoleonic Wars). Stay tuned for stories from Russia and the end of my time in Kyrgyzstan!

Kyrgyzstani Classics: The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years

Did you get a chance to read Mark’s guest post about Chyngyz Aitmatov’s novella Jamilia? If not, check it out, and while you’re on his site, check out a few other gems of his — in addition to knowing all about Central Asian pop stars, he’s better than me at blogging about the nuts and bolts of Peace Corps service here.

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Kyrgyz people are often confused when I can’t list off the national clothes, national drink, or national food of the United States (though, to be honest, I just always say that hot dish is our national meal). The idea of a national “everything” is very important here, and these symbols of Kyrgyz(stani) culture are fairly fixed: kymyz is the national beverage, kara jorgo the national dance, and besh barmak the national food (though, as a resident of southern Kyrgyzstan, I’d make a case for ash).

When it comes to Kyrgyzstan’s “national writer,” arguments could be made for various poets and authors, but it would be pretty hard to beat Chyngyz Aitmatov. His short stories and novellas have been a joy to read, but nothing so far compares to his 1980 novel The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years.

The book takes place in the course of a single day: villagers of the Boranly-Burannyi rail station learn of the passing of a respected elder, Kazangap, and go on a journey to bury him. The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years gets its name from the weaving together of several stories: some intense magical realism involving a pair of Soviet and American astronauts who make contact with an alien planet, the fallout of Stalin-era purges on a man and his family, the main character’s relationship with his feisty Bactrian camel, and two Kazakh folk tales (3, if you’re reading the original Russian).

The fate of Central Asian traditions and identity is a focal point of the novel, highlighted by the efforts of Yedigei, an old man who made his home at the rail station, to bury his beloved friend and fellow railworker Kazangap. Yedigei is determined to bury Kazangap in the Ana-Beiit cemetery, but is frustrated with the perceived lack of dedication and care on the part of the other, younger men in the burial party:

“Looking at his young companions on the tractor, Burannyi Yedigei was genuinely distressed and sorry to think that none of them knew a single prayer. How then could they bury one another? With what words, covering the beginning and end of a life, would they sum up the departure of a man into the unknown, into non-existence? ‘Farewell, comrade, we will remember you.’ Or with some other sort of nonsense?” (97)

The Ana-Beiit cemetery is off limits to the villagers, who decide to bury Kazangap in a random patch of the steppe instead. Ana-Beiit, which means “mother’s grave” in Kazakh, appears in the landscape of another fairytale told throughout the novel, that of the “mankurt.” According to Central Asian legend, mankurts were prisoners of war, tortured by roaming Chinese tribes, and turned into zombie slaves with no memory of their former village, family, or identity.

The movie adaptation of The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years focuses solely on this sub-plot, entirely ignoring the more magical threads of the novel’s narrative structure. Shot in 1990 in Turkmenistan, the movie (aptly called Mankurt) follows the fate of a young soldier, Yolaman. Yolaman is captured by Chinese bandits and is tortured with a piece of camel flesh tied around his head; as other captives die of starvation and dehydration, Yolaman slowly loses his mind and all his memories.

Yolaman, still taken from the 1990 film Mankurt

Yolaman’s mother, Naiman, is waiting impatiently with in the canyons; on a hunch, she decides to head out to the steppe to fine her son and bring him home. Naiman is devastated that her son can’t remember who he is; as she shouts “Dorunbai! Dorunbai!”, the name of Yolaman’s father, a bird picks up the call and repeats the name over and over as the encounter turns tragic.

This same bird circles overhead as Yedigei tries to gain entry to Ana-Beiit, the final resting place of Naiman herself, calling out Dorunbaiiii, dorunbaiiii. Here, the bird doesn’t speak to recall a forgotten father, but instead forgotten traditions. Aitmatov uses the novel to make a statement about this generation of people, fully transformed Homo sovieticus, who are disconnected from the language and cultural staples of their ancestors.

In a eulogy for Aitmatov published in Harper’s, Scott Horton writes, “One of the great charms of Aitmatov’s life was that he charted first the decline of the Central Asian life and identity, and then participated in its resurrection as the Soviet Union collapsed and as the Central Asian states regained, quite unexpectedly, their autonomy and footing on the world stage.”

It’s fitting, then, that Aitmatov, a Kyrgyz man, wrote this book that takes place on the Kazakh steppe, and a team of Turkmen filmmakers picked up the mankurt tale. The struggle to protect and pass on traditional ways of life persisted in many areas of the Soviet Union, and Chyngyz Aitmatov was able to give voice to the way that played out not only in Kyrgyzstan, but all across Soviet Central Asia.

Reading this book, I couldn’t help but wonder at how these works – The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years and Mankurt – were produced and distributed before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film portrays the danger of losing grasp on traditional mores, and the book advocates individualism, wariness of state authority, and Islamic rites. Somehow by the grace of glasnost, it made it through, and thank goodness for that.

Kyrgyzstani Classics: Jamilia

Fellow PCV and Central Asian culture enthusiast Mark, who blogs at Monday Bazaar, agreed to do an exchange of posts on the work of Kyrgyzstan’s most famous author, Chyngyz Aitmatov. His post about the classic novella Jamilia and the fantastic film adaptation is up first. Check out his blog on Facebook and follow on Instagram for more from Mark!

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Louis Aragon called it “the most beautiful love story in the world.” He wasn’t talking about Romeo and Juliet; he’s talking about Jamila (also spelled Jamilia in some translations), the first significant work of Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov first published in 1958.

A postage stamp from 2009 featuring Jamila, Daniyar, and the cart they take to the station each day.

Jamila might best be described as a novelette, since the edition I have is less than 100 pages. But, it’s one of the most beloved pieces of literature in the entire Soviet Union. First published in Russian in 1958, this was the book that put Aitmatov on the map and led to him becoming the most beloved author in Kyrgyzstan and one of the most revered across the USSR.

Jamila tells the story of a family on a collective farm in northern Kyrgyzstan during the Great Patriotic War (for more info, check out my post about Victory Day in the former USSR). The story is that of Jamila, a young woman whose husband is at war, and Daniyar, a young soldier who has returned to the village from the front due to injury. Narrated by Jamila’s younger brother-in-law, Seit, the three of them together each day take loads of flour and grain down to the main town and its railway station to dispatch the food to the soldiers at the front in Europe.

Spending so much time together combined with the spirited nature of the characters drives the plot in a direction that is both expected and unheard-of for the time in which it was written. I won’t say any more for fear of spoiling it, but I highly recommend you take time to read the book and watch the movie. It provides such a nuanced look into the family relations and life in a small village during the era immediately after collectivization and forced settlement of the Kyrgyz nomads, exploring themes of family, devotion, true love, and the question of what is true happiness.

Once you’ve finished reading and watching, there’s a fantastic literary analysis of the book and its historical context here that I recommend you check out.

How to read and watch Jamila:

The book (which you MUST read!) is available at Amazon and other bookstores, and is also well worth the read. It’s on my list of my 10 favorite Central Asia books.

You can watch the video dubbed in English or with English subtitles over at Soviet Movies Online, a great website which hosts hundreds of important films from the Soviet era. Since they pay for hosting costs out of their own pockets, I’m not going to embed the movie here, but I hope you all get a chance to take a look at the film. There is also a 1994 version made in Germany, but that version has the character of Daniyar played by a blonde white guy (in the book, the character is clearly said to be Kyrgyz), and I’m not really a supporter of whitewashing in cinema.

For When Internet Jok 9

Although I’m often amazed at how great telecommunications work in this country, there are still stretches of time when internet jok — there’s no internet. In anticipation of those long hours, days, weekends, I like to load up on reading material while at work or cafes. Here’s a compilation of some of the things that made me look twice and think a while, mostly about Kyrgyzstan, international development, foreign policy, feminism, and language. Enjoy.

The Falling of the Lenins: The podcast 99% Invisible recently did an episode about the visuals of de-communization, with a focus on Ukraine, which at one point was the Soviet republic most densely decorated with statues of Lenin. So how does that factor now, 25 years after declaring independence, and while a war over Ukraine’s identity and relationship with Russia rages in the eastern part of the country? “According to the Institute of National Remembrance, the process of decommunization isn’t just about removal — it’s also meant to help Ukrainians learn their own history. Which is why, in many cases, they have suggested that towns revert to the names they had before the Soviets changed them. But whether they choose to revert to old names or pick new ones, Ukrainians do not have the option of keeping the Soviet names.”

Photos of Women Villagers Who Run the Show in Rural Russia: ““[A] village woman is strong. She can do almost everything by herself, she doesn’t really need a man for house work or raising children,” says Ivanova. “She does all the supposedly men’s work: mow, carry heavy logs, chop wood.”

A drinker’s guide to Islam: “To add to the bizarreness of the situation, this Oktoberfest, the seventh of its kind, took place not in hip Ramallah but in the remote village of Taybeh, perched picturesquely at 850m above sea level and with a population of just 1,500. Moreover, readers in western countries may wonder why thousands upon thousands of revellers had trekked all that way to attend a beer festival with only one beer on tap.”

Post-Yugoslav ‘Common Language’ Declaration Challenges Nationalism: There’s a lot of…overlap, to put it mildly, between Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin languages. In regions of these former Yugoslavian countries where the local ethnicity does not match the titular nationality, public signs or cigarette boxes comically display their message in multiple languages — but the message is letter for letter, word for word the same (except for Serbian, which is written in Cyrillic). A recent Declaration on the Common Language has caused a stir in the Balkans. ““I don’t believe this is a linguistics issue, but a political one,” she added.” 

In Tblisi: An excerpt from “Trip to Tbilisi” by Victoria Lomasko, a Russian journalist based in Moscow. Lomasko documents her conversations with Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, and Russians she meets in Georgia’s capital, and accompanies their words with lovely portraits. “In Tbilisi, I heard repeatedly from Armenian friends that despite the ongoing conflict between their countries, Armenians and Azerbaijanis understand each other better than they do Georgians. There were no people closer to them, the Azerbaijanis told me, than the Armenians.”

These Passionate Latvian Linguists Refuse to Lose Their Language: Livonian, a Finno-Ugric language (think Finnish, Hungarian) native to the Latvian coast, no longer has any living native speakers — a small group of enthusiasts and academics, about 30 in total, have taken up the responsibility of keeping this language alive. “But Ernštreits is just one of a handful of speakers, and one of only 250 people who identify themselves as Livonian in government surveys. He can write poetry in it, but he can’t buy a loaf of bread.”

A Glimpse Into Moscow’s Little Kyrgyzstan: “Every year, tens of thousands leave the republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — the poorest countries in Central Asia — to find seasonal employment in Russia’s main cities. Many stay for years; others never return home, but their remittances form an important share of their country’s economy. The World Bank estimates that, in 2014, money sent back home by migrants was comparable to 36.6 percent of Tajikistan’s GDP, and 30 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s.”  Moscow’s Little Kyrgyzstan, a 25-minute documentary, explores the dynamics of migrant labor in Russia — many of which mirror those of migration patterns in the United States.

Watch the documentary here: