Read Around the World. Turkmenistan

“To have power you need guts, and that means you need to open your mouth eventually.” Ak Welsapar

The Tale of Aypi is the first book written by a Turkmen author to be translated into English. Even the backstory about the book is incredible. Turkmenistan was part of the Soviet Union until 1991, when it was taken over by an authoritarian dictatorship. The dictator, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, and more recently his son Serdar, fiercely crush any dissent. The only book taught in school is The Ruhnama written by his predecessor. One third of the population are unable to read or write. Welsapar was placed under house arrest for 18 months for speaking out against the Soviet Union’s horrific mortality and malnutrition rates and environmental disasters. He eventually had to flee the country to avoid persecution over his writings. His work is still banned in his own country and people found reading his books will be interrogated by police. Welsapar and his wife began a publishing house which prints banned books. Hundreds of his books have been smuggled into the country by people protesting the draconian censorship rules.

The Tale of Aypi is the story of a fishing village in Turkmenistan on the Caspian Sea border which the government has decided to relocate to make way for a health sanatorium. One brave villager, Araz Ateyev, bravely ignores the ban on fishing and continues to fight for his home. As he says:

“This is where my umbilical cord was cut; my true birthplace! … How could I let myself be forced out from here? My father, and my father’s father too, lie mixed with that sand, and his grandfather as well – all seven generations of my ancestors!”

The other story interlaced through the book is that of the ghost woman Aypi who comes back to inflict her revenge on men for their treatment of women.

This is a powerful story of bravery in the face of oppression and paints a picture of life in the coastal villages of Turkmenistan. This is an important book and a great addition to my read around the world journey.


Kush Depti dancing. ( )

Just a day or so when I wrote my review of Steven Lang’s Hinterland, I noted that his story of a battle over development in Queensland had universal themes because inappropriate development is an issue worldwide. The Tale of Aypi has a similar theme, but set this time in a coastal village in Turkmenistan during the Soviet regime. You won’t be surprised to hear that the Soviets have ways of making the villagers cooperate, or that the impending relocation fractures traditional ways of life that have been in place for centuries, or that the story features just one man standing up for what he believes in. What makes this story different is that it features a mythic creature called Aypi, a woman hurled to her death off a cliff centuries ago because she had the effrontery to accept some beads in exchange for sharing information about the village with some passing travellers.

The other point of difference is that despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the issues of freedom and individual agency are still current in Turkmenistan today, and that its author has been exiled from his homeland since 1993. You might have noticed that the book cover includes the logo of the PEN Writers Award. Although he won an award in a Turkmen national literary competition for his novel The Melon Head (1984) Welsapar’s novels are mostly banned in Turkmenistan, which, Wikipedia tells me, is one of the most repressive in the world. Turkmenistan naming him as a proscribed writer is a striking comparison to Russia where in 2012, The Union of Writers of Russia awarded him the Sergei Yesenin literary prize, and to Ukraine where in 2014 the Writers’ Union awarded him the Nikolai Gogol prize. Welsapar writes in Swedish, Russian and Turkmen, and but his articles are published internationally including in The Washington Post (presumably in translation).

The Tale of Aypi, however, was first published in 1988 before Welsapar attracted official attention. It begins in the home of Araz the fisherman and his wife Ay-Bebek, where their son Baljan is risking trouble by shouting out that they have sturgeon for sale. Fishing has been prohibited since the government has decided that their village is be turned into a health resort, but under cover of darkness Araz is still going out into the waters of the Caspian Sea, and his neighbours are still covertly buying sturgeon for their family celebrations.

There is dissension among the generations about the relocation. The young like the idea of living in the city with modern conveniences and a modern lifestyle. Their parents prefer traditional ways, but are resigned to the inevitable. Arguing with Soviet State decrees from faraway Moscow only causes trouble, as Azar finds when he is hauled in for interrogation and told to think of himself as a Soviet citizen not as a parochial local. (This passage put me in mind of the urban generation in Anatoli Rybakov’s The Children of the Arbat whose education and experiences in the capital meant that they did think of themselves as part of a great social improvement, but who found their theoretical understandings challenged when they were exiled to the countryside and had to confront the impact on individuals).

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/07/17/the-tale-of-aypi-by-ak-welsapar-translated-b... ( )