Book: The Blue Sky (Der blaue Himmel)/The Grey Earth (Die graue Erde)
Author: Galsan Tschinag
Publication Years: 1994/1999 (English language versions 2006/2010)
Genre: Fiction
Next on this journey
through the countries of the world and their writers, we find ourselves well and truly off of
the beaten track. To Western Mongolia and the steppe region that sweeps for
5,000 miles from the mouth of the Danube to Manchuria in China.
The Egypt and Cairo of Nawal El Saadawi (see: Egypt) are easily reached, even if tourists come largely to visit the pyramids. Paasilinna’s Finland (see: Finland) is a plane flight and train journey away; though his native Lapland is a little harder to reach.
The setting for The Blue Sky trilogy, on the other hand, is 2,000 miles from even the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. In opening Galsan Tschinag’s books, we are stepping into the wilderness and stepping back in time.
The central character of Dshurukawaa is a
thinly veiled avatar for Galsan Tschinag himself. Both the writer and his young
protagonist are Tuvan, a Turkic people indigenous to Mongolia, China and
Russia. Most westerners probably know them through the practice of Tuvan Throat
Singing.
Dshurukawaa’s parents are nomadic goat and sheep farmers who live in a yurt, that most evocative of Mongolian dwellings (though the word yurt is Russian and is slowly being replaced with the Mongolian equivalent, ger). They roam the steppe with their herd, close to the border with Kazakhstan, staving off wolves, Kazak horsemen and Dshurukawaa’s older siblings trying to take him off to school.
The Blue Sky trilogy is set during the 1950s. The eponymous first book takes place during Dshurukawaa’s young life up to the age of 7. The Grey Mountain follows him as he is finally enrolled in school and brought face to face with the Marxist indoctrination of Communist Mongolia. The final part of the trilogy, The White Mountain, has yet to be translated into English, although there does seem to be an English translation due for release in 2027.
Of the two books available in English, the second installment is the more interesting. The events of The Blue Sky could take place in the 1650s for all the difference it would make. You get the sense that the lives of Tuvan nomadic farmers have changed very little in centuries.
The first book is an interesting window on to this world and the mysticism and shamanistic beliefs of Dshurukawaa and his family. Yet with a cast of characters all but limited to his mother, father, grandmother and Dshurukawaa’s dog, Arsylang, the action is limited.
It is when we reach school that the narrative
becomes more dynamic, if Dickensian in tone. Dshurukawaa wishes to become a
shaman (something Tschinag achieved in real life, whatever you think about
that), which is heretical in a hardline Communist country in the final years of
Stalinism.
I guess many of us on this side of the former Iron Curtain don’t think about Mongolia as a Communist country. Yet despite retaining relative independence from Russia to the north and China to the south, Mongolia had its own Communist revolution in the 1920s and remained a Communist country until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Into this political
torrent, Dshurukawaa is thrown
and left to sink or swim. Navigating the waters is made all the more
treacherous by the fact that the Principal or Head Master of the school is his
older brother. He is threatened with prison 2,000 miles away in Ulaanbaatar
if he does not renounce his shamanistic ambitions and become a good Communist,
with all of the doublethink that involves. Yet his inchoate shamanism becomes
essential at various points in his first year at school, until tragedy strikes
when he is still only 9 years old.
The Grey Earth in
particular is as relevant as anything Dickens wrote. Dshurukawaa’s experiences are as universal as
those of Oliver Twist (although Dickens’s great flaw was that he could
seemingly only feel empathy for boys like himself who had suffered the same
indignities he experienced). Dshurukawaa’s fate is ultimately less bleak than Oliver Twist. He at least has two living parents to whom to return.
Mongolia is another of those places that exist in the periphery of the western imagination. Genghis Khan and his Mogul hordes; vile, ablest language given to us by eugenicists, as well as other fallacies of white supremacism that depressingly still inform much of western thought and policy making. So we turn to writers like Galsan Tschinag to bring these places into sharp focus.
Tschinag’s life continued to be buffeted by the
forces of Communism. He studied German at Leipzig University in the 1960s (then
called Karl Marx University), before becoming an university German
teacher in Mongolia. In 1976, his teaching licence was revoked for "political
untrustworthiness".
Approaching his 80th year, Tschinag still lives in Mongolia and continues to write, mostly in German. The Blue Sky books were all originally written and published in the German language, with English translations of the first two books not being released until a decade or more after their original publication.
Der weiße Berg (The White Mountain) was released in German in 2000. The English
translation is slated for release in 2027. However, as the date given is New Year’s
Eve 2027, I am not holding my breath tht this will actually happen. If I want to finish the trilogy before that
date, I might have to learn German. It’s not impossible, but seems unlikely.
The question is, will I finish this project before The White Mountain is
finally released in English? Watch this space to find out.
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| Galsan Tschinag |
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