Book: The Railway (Железная дорога)/The Underground (Мбобо)/ The Dead Lake (Вундеркинд Ержан)
Author: Hamid Ismailov
Publication Year: 2006 (1997)/2015(2009)/2014(2011)
Genre: Fiction/Historical fiction
Uzbekistan is somewhat of a curiosity. It is one of only two double landlocked countries in the world (i.e. you have to travel through two other countries to reach a body of water that opens out into one of the world’s oceans). However, the other country with this dubious distinction is Liechtenstein (see: Liechtenstein), which is a tiny country in the Alps. It’s like comparing Kansas City with Colorado.
If the wider world has heard of anywhere in Uzbekistan then it will undoubtedly be Samarkand. Samarkand was an important settlement along the Silk Road that connected Europe to China. It has been a centre of Islamic scholarship for centuries. As we noted when we looked at Turkey (see: Turkey), the Persian poet, Rumi, moved to Samarkand with his family when he was about 5.
Samarkand, along with much of modern day Uzbekistan, was once part of the Persian Empire and part of Iran until Russia expanded its borders into Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The city and country at large remained a part of Russia right through the Soviet era. The three books we will consider in this piece all take place (for the most part) during that era.
Hamid Ismailov was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1954, but moved to Uzbekistan as a young man. He lived there throughout the Soviet regime, but was forced into exile in 1992 following the election of Islam Karimov as the first President of the newly independent country.
Karimov remained President for 25 years until his death in 2016. His reign was marked by corruption, censorship and torture and extrajudicial killing. Election results regularly exceeded 90% in Karimov’s favour. In 2002, his security forces were said to have executed two prisoners by boiling them alive. Despite this, the US occupied an air force base in the country for four years from 2001-2005 during their operations in Afghanistan.
Hamid Ismailov left Uzbekistan after he was accused of seeking to overthrow the government (“Unacceptable democratic tendencies” was the phrase they used). He settled in the UK, where he worked for the BBC World Service, becoming a Writer in Residence in 2010. He speaks and has written in numerous languages, including Uzbek, Russian, Turkish, French and German. For the most part his books are written in Uzbek and Russian and have been translated into English by other writers.
All of three books under consideration here have elements in common with one another. The central character in each is a child. All of them feature railways of one kind or another. However, each is set in a different country of the USSR. The Underground takes place exclusively in Moscow. The Dead Lake is principally set in Kazakhstan. Only The Railway features Uzbekistan, mostly the fictitious Silk Road town of Gilas. However, even here the book crosses oceans as part of its sprawling narrative.
Ismailov wrote The Railway when he still lived in Uzbekistan. It was published in Russian in 1997 with the English translation coming out in 2006. Despite having written an Uzbek version, Ismailov’s novel, like all of his novels, remains banned in Uzbekistan. He often publishes his books via Facebook in order that Uzbek readers have access to them.
The Railway is one of those novels, like A Grain of Wheat (see: Kenya) or The Forty Rules of Love (see: Turkey), that uses multiple narrators and Point of View characters to create a composite picture of the people and community featured. Central to the story is the unnamed boy, whose italicised narrative runs through the book between its tragicomic set pieces.
The literal railway is also central to the novel as the first line connecting Central Asia to Russia is being constructed. It pulls like a magnet with many of the stories culminating and concluding in the vicinity of the iron tracks.
Gilas is a multicultural town of Uzbeks, Russians, Tartars, Armenians, Chechens, Persians, Germans and Ukrainians. There is a large Jewish population. Also a sizable Korean community, due to the very real fact that when thousands of Koreans fled to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula during World War Two to escape the Japanese, Stalin had them sent to Uzbekistan because he was as paranoid of them as he was of everyone else.
As translator, Robert Chandler, says in his Preface to the novel, “Gilas is a Noah’s Ark of humanity – and a microcosm of the Soviet Union.” Like a Soviet Leviathan or Moby Dick. Or, an overlong Bob Dylan song with a cavalcade of characters, the roll call of whose names goes on for pages before the book even begins.
The Railway can also be seen, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (see: Dominican Republic) as a history of Uzbekistan and Russia during the first half of the 20th century as told through it characters. Like Diaz’s book, the novel revolves and recirculates through time, picking up threads as it goes. Like The Great Reclamation (see: Singapore), there is a point in the past beyond which it will not go. For Heng’s novel, that is 1965. For Ismailov it is the end of the Stalinist era and, presumably,. the birth of Ismailov himself (Ismailov was born the year after Stalin died).
Chandler notes in his Preface that the Uzbek capital of Tashkent was regarded as a cosmopolitan city in the years immediately following the Second World War. Gilas is said to be located not far from the capital. Characters in the novel travel to the UK and the USA and make the Hajj to Mecca. For all that we think of the Soviet Union as inward facing and inaccessible, life at the margins of the regime are portrayed as broadly tolerable.
Communism is a constant presence of course, but the communists are lampooned like everyone else. As Jean-Jacque Rousseau understood, the larger an empire grows, the harder it is to control and disseminate the message of any central authority. Technology makes this easier to achieve, as we see with China’s mass surveillance systems, but in the Uzbekistan of the first half of the 20th century, communism had to compete with Islam, Christianity, Judaism and centuries of Central Asian tradition and folklore. It’s strict enforcement was then somewhat diluted.
The Underground is a different beast entirely; set as it is in Moscow, the belly of the Russian bear. The novel is told in the first person by Kirill, or Mbobo, the son of Siberian mother and an African father, who was conceived during the 1980 Moscow Olympics. As we learn in the opening passages, Kirill’s mother died when he was 8 and he died 4 years later. His ghost or soul tells his story more than a decade after his death.
As a child of an African father, Kirill’s dark skin marks him out in the capital of Russia. He is subjected to frequent racist abuse and even uses racist terminology to refer to himself. As his mother is Siberian in origin, he is doubly prejudiced against. His mother drinks and flits between two different lovers.
The tragedy of Kirill is despite the disadvantages and prejudices he faces, he is academically gifted and reads books far beyond his years. One of his ‘uncles’ calls him Pushkin. in reference to the Russian novelist, Alexander Pushkin. Like the unnamed mother and daughter of Soviet Milk (see: Latvia), the collapse of the Soviet regime comes too late to offer salvation. If salvation was ever even possible in the heart of Russia. Unlike Latvia and other countries that gained their independence, the bulk of the former Communist republic lurched from the collapse of the Soviet regime, to economic collapse and financial looting by its oligarchs to the coming of Putin and the return of political oppression.
In The Dead Lake, we travel to Kazakhstan and the shadow of the Russian nuclear weapons programme. The narrator meets a young violin player while travelling through the country by train. Although he appears to be a child, he is in fact 27. As they travel on though the country, Yerzhan tells his story.
As the atomic tests produced great pools of contaminated water, the locals were forbidden from approaching them. One night Yerzhan dives into one to impress the girl next door with whom he is in love. His curse in to never age, even as she grows into a woman and drifts from his grasp. The narrator doubts the veracity of the boy’s tale, but when he meets two relatives at the end of the line, neither of whom he has seen in many years, the story seems to be verified.
Indeed, all of the Ismailov’s books feature folk and fairy tales told to children. The Dead Lake becomes the snake eating its own tail as the story of Yerzhan takes the form of a story told to Yerzhan. But then Ismailov’s books often seem like stories told to his own young self. Yerzhan, Kirill and the unnamed boy of The Railway feel like facets of the author himself.
Hamid Ismailov’s own story is one we have encountered too many times on this journey so far. The writer forced into exile by invasion, civil war or the sheer paranoia of the ruling autocracy. Unlike the rest, Ismailov has been unable to return to Uzbekistan since he left more than 30 years ago. Even the writers we encountered in Afghanistan (see: Afghanistan), have been able to return to their homeland at various stages. Though that now seems impossible for the foreseeable future. The freedom to create and express oneself remains a distant dream for many in the world. Which makes voices like Ismailov’s all the more important.
Uzbekistan seems a curiosity, but it’s repressive government is sadly more the rule than the exception. It might be one of only two double landlocked countries in the world, but there are many more doubly landlocked from truth and freedom of expression. If this project has any one aim, it is to shine a torch on the dark, oppressive corners of our world. Hamid Ismailov and his contemporaries are the motes of light without which thiat task would be impossible.
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| Hamid Ismailov |
