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Loving Like Aitmatov

By Lisa Walters, on 20 January 2025

Written by Ksenia Sizonova, PhD candidate, UCL SSEES

Aitmatov’s lines are music. They must be heard.
Their resonating waves carry the mystery of love and divine anxiety…’
M. Gapyrov [1]

Discourses about the Kyrgyz author Chyngyz Aitmatov’s legacy are often centered around his coining of the term ‘mankurt’ — an enslaved person deprived of their memory through torture. Originally described in the 1980 novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, the word ‘mankurt’ has acquired a life of its own, prominently featuring in national identity debates not only in Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian states but in many societies of the former Soviet Union [2].

I first heard this word from young Russophone Ingush women in Moscow who were accused by some Ingush men of having lost touch with their roots. Drawing on the Soviet understanding of a nation as defined by the national language, common history, and unique cultural identity, ‘mankurtization’ virtually came to mean ‘Russification’[3]. In Central Asia (most prominently in Qazaqstan and Kyrgyzstan), the erasure of a distinct national identity, primarily through the loss of titular language and cultural memory, is feared to erode independent statehood [4]. The term ‘mankurt’, therefore, emerged as a potent weapon of Othering as it creates and deepens the linguistic divide between Russian- and Kyrgyz-speaking Kyrgyz, which often overlaps with the socio-economic divide between urban and rural populations. Canonized by the state, the awe-inspiring figure of Aitmatov is in practice often perceived as a moralistic authority. As some of my Kyrgyz friends shared with me, school literature teachers idolized Aitmatov and used the curriculum to stigmatize Russophone Kyrgyz students, calling them ‘mankurts’. The mere existence of such interpretations is revealing, yet, I wish to argue here that the legend of mankurt is not about shame, but about love.

Chinghiz Aitmatov

Many great things were said by, about, and for Aitmatov, and I have none to add but my own token of appreciation. I insist that this text be read not as a literary or political analysis of any expertise but as a pure reflection of my at times too personal resonance with Aitmatov’s words. Reading Aitmatov, I came to believe that the legend of mankurt is (not only) about failing national belonging but about failing eternal love. In the legend, mankurt is described as a slave that does not remember their past, who they are, where they are from, what their name is, their childhood, and the names of their parents. They forget something important and lose the most crucial component that makes them human. Yet, the story of mankurt is not the only evocative legend in the novel, on which Aitmatov relies to create a magical realist dialogue between his main story and the eternal transgenerational folk knowledge. I believe that the legend of mankurt should be read alongside another story featured in the novel, The White Cloud of Genghis Khan. In this tale, a soldier and a banner seamstress employed in Genghis Khan’s march on the West secretly have a baby despite the Khan’s moratorium on childbearing during the conquest. Genghis Khan executes the parents and is punished by God-Tengri.

In The White Cloud of Genghis Khan, the lovers’ desire to immortalize their longing for each other in a child is smothered by the iron fist of the state, the political authority that dares to go against the most natural human intention. To me, this tale is not only a powerful decry of Soviet totalitarianism but also a rather anarchist renouncement of something that is inherent to all states — the subjection of nature, the subjection of God that is human. On one level, there is the biopolitical attempt to subject human bodies and their ability to reproduce to serve the needs of the state. On the other level, there is the modernist endeavor to mold the sacred and divine nature according to a simplistic and manageable design that is convenient for the state. And finally, there is the sacrilegious attempt to take away something that was given to humans (and animals [5]) by God.

‘Love is directedness toward immortality, and each is granted a walk on this path preordained by God’, writes Aitmatov in When the Mountains Fall. Immortality is achieved as an act of loving, the act that brings us closer to God. And love is immortalized in children that come of it. Two lovers live through their children as the child remembers where he came from, the names of his parents, and the stories of their lives. In The White Cloud of Genghis Khan, the new father tells his beloved as he holds their newborn for the first time:

‘I have always longed for you […] The most terrifying fear I have is not losing my head in battle, but losing my longing, being deprived of it. […] I kept thinking […] how to separate my longing from myself, so that it would not perish with me but remain with you. And I couldn’t think of anything, but I dreamed that my longing would turn either into a bird, or perhaps a beast — into something alive — so that I could place it in your hands and say: here, take it, this is my longing, let it always stay with you. Then I would not be afraid to die. And now I understand — my son was born of my longing for you. And now he will always be with you’.

As the warrior and the seamstress hold the child of their love, they are standing face to face with immortality, hoping to keep each other alive in their descendants’ memories. A sacrilege is the breaking of the natural cycle of love by preventing parenthood, by tearing children off their parents, by erasing children’s memories of the generations before them. This crime was committed by Genghis Khan, by those who turned a captive into a mankurt, and by the Soviet state. In the main story of The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, Abutalip is prosecuted for producing an ‘anti-Soviet enemy ideology’ and ‘hostile

memories’ (враждебные воспоминания). In reality, Abutalip was writing down his own life story (including his time as a prisoner of war in the Second World War Europe) and the stories of the place he and his family lived, the vast and harsh Sary-Ozek steppes. Abutalip sought to pass down to his children what he had time to learn about the world. Yet, in an act of state violence against what is preordained by God, Abutalip’s writings never reached them, lost as a file of an ‘enemy of the people’ on dusty desks. The crime committed by the Soviet state, and by Genghis Khan, was separating the parents from their children, not letting the parents pass down their stories, and forcing them to remain nameless in eternity.

The value of one’s memory, and very importantly, one’s experience of love is not only in bringing oneself closer to God and reaching immortality. The sentimental human experiences are what make us recognize each other’s souls. The stock of shared memories, the heritage of love left behind, binds together a community. As Abutalip says about the Sary-Ozek old songs, ‘And you can just see those people clearly. And you want to be with them soul to soul (душа в душу). And to suffer and to love, just like they did. That is the kind of memory they left behind’. Suffering and loving, and leaving behind these memories is not only what eternalizes one within their family lineage, but what makes us experience community. By documenting the tales of the Sary-Ozek steppes, Abutalip was creating a sense of enrootedness for his children: ‘Let them not think they lived in an empty place’. That is, the land matters because it is overgrown with lush stories related to it. The land is where our ancestors experienced love, and where they lay. Ana-Beit, the ancient cemetery described in the legend of mankurt, is one such place in Aitmatov’s world.

Understanding the mystery of love, and sharing respect for one’s past and memory, is a humanistic value that creates solidarity that is not bound by a nation or language. Aitmatov shows it as the main character, Yedigei, seeks to bury Kazangap, one of the village’s elders, at the Ana-Beit cemetery. They found the cemetery turned into a high-security object, gated and guarded by a soldier. Yedigei attempted to relate to the soldier by proclaiming himself and his companions ‘not strangers (посторонние)’ and asking where the young man was from. As the soldier turned out to be from Vologda, Yedigei fatherly asked if such were the burial customs of his homeland. The soldier immediately expressed solidarity because these were not the traditions of Vologda either. It did not matter that the soldier was not Qazaq – as a Russian, he still could share with Yedigei the respect for the past, a humanistic value. On the other hand, the soldier’s superior, a Qazaq, spoke fluent Soviet bureaucratese and labeled Yedigei ‘comrade stranger’ (товарищ посторонний). This Qazaq official and Kazangap’s son Sabitzhan are named mankurts precisely because they fail to respect their own and communal memory. Raised away from his parents in a Soviet boarding school (интернат), Sabitzhan does not care about honoring his father with a proper burial. Calling Sabitzhan mankurt, Yedigei pities him as the young man fails to see that he is not ‘alone in the world’. Torn off the love of their parents, having lost their memories and legacies of the generations before, mankurts see only strangers around them because they cannot experience solidarity ‘soul to soul’, recognise love in each other. Not able to remember, mankurts are those who are not capable of loving others.

This love knows no national boundaries. Describing mankurt, Aitmatov does not necessarily seek to construct the national but instead builds a different kind of solidarity. Aitmatov’s writing is sometimes described as decolonial because it defies the Soviet state and calls for remembering one’s past. I would describe Aitmatov’s writing as decolonial because it creates the kind of solidarity that transcends the national and builds on love. This immortal love is the antidote to Othering.

Ksenia Sizonova is a current PhD student at SSEES. Her working thesis is titled  ‘Discrimination and resistance – how do Kyrgyz migrant women reflect on their everyday experiences in Russia?’ She is supervised by Dr Agnieszka Kubal and Dr Victoria Redclift.

[1] All translations are my own. Retrieved from: https://rus.azattyk.org/amp/29562849.html
[2] Diana Kudaibergen, “Mankurts, Kazakh “Russians,” and “Shala” Kazakhs: Language, national identity, and ethnicity revisited”. In The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan, ed. Marlène Laruelle (Lexington Books, 2019), 89-112.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5]  It would be a mistake to assume that Aitmatov celebrates humans as uniquely capable of loving and therefore uniquely close to God. In When the Mountains Fall, the main character’s story is intertwined with that of a snow leopard, who is driven by the same desire to love and leave offspring, reaching immortality. In Aitmatov’s complex ecologies, we are all one.

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