Language and Power

An author is invited to a reading in a small provincial town and is given a friendly welcome there by the local notables. When it comes time for the event, however, he finds himself in an almost empty meeting hall. No one, not even the host, is interested in his writing. This theme in Hermann Hesse’s story “An Evening with the Author” (1914), which is based on an actual event, serves Kazakh director Darezhan Omirbaev as the literary reference for his most recent film AKYN (Poet). The renowned Kazakh auteur, whose films have been shown in Cannes, Venice, and Locarno, relocates Hesse’s story to present-day Kazakhstan. In the film, the fortunes of a contemporary Kazakh poet raise questions relevant to people in a lot of countries: the future of poetry and poets, of language, and ultimately of culture at large.

Didar, the hero of the film, is a poet by calling and a journalist at a small newspaper out of financial necessity. He bemoans the increasing commercialisation of society, in which poets are no longer heard, while pop stars are celebrated by the masses. (It is not without a certain irony here that Omirbaev cast, of all people, Erdos Kanaev, the singer of the popular Kazakh boy band Zhigitter, in the role of the suffering poet.)

The suffering of the poets

One of the first scenes of the film tracks an intellectual conversation, studded with literary references, among Didar’s colleagues at the newspaper on the future of the Kazakh language. Despite massive efforts to promote it, their fear that Kazakh will be crowded out by other languages and could eventually disappear is still pervasive in the multiethnic state of Kazakhstan. This is a place where, after the country gained independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, not even all ethnic Kazakhs had a command of their mother tongue but instead communicated primarily in Russian, the lingua franca of the USSR. For the journalists, the fate of their language is closely connected with the fate of the poets. They don’t see them as a having a place in contemporary society, although it also becomes clear that even in the past it often wasn’t until after death that they received recognition. Didar silently follows the conversation, which is conducted in Kazakh, until it is finally interrupted by a secretary who addresses—in Russian—the person dominating the conversation (incidentally played by Omirbaev himself). These shifts between languages, which are not indicated in the subtitles, are always significant in the film, which largely plays out in Kazakh. They indicate an imbalance in power between the speakers, with Russian the language of power and money.

In present-day Kazakhstan writers can hardly live from their craft due to meagre public interest, a lack of public funding for literature and the absence of a functioning publishing scene.

These power structures expressed in language are slowly changing, thirty years after the breakup of the Soviet Union. A command of Kazakh is now a prerequisite for a successful career in government and administration. At the same time, more people in Kazakhstan today speak Russian than Kazakh and—unlike in most of the other successor republics of the Soviet Union—the former has a special status as the language of “interethnic communication” in Kazakhstan’s constitution.

Once this conversation between colleagues has sketched out the film’s subject matter, it is illustrated with the example of the poet Didar: we see his comparatively humble home in the modern environment of Almaty, capital of Kazakhstan until 1997 and still the cultural centre of the country, as well as his less-than-successful reading in a provincial town, mentioned above. In this dismal situation, the unexpected proposal of a wealthy businessman for Didar to compose a poem about the heroic deeds of his ancestors appears as a lucrative temptation. Family history still plays an important role for Kazakhs: it is a given that everyone can trace their ancestry back seven generations and knows what tribe and which of the three traditional hordes their family belongs to.

But even if it is common in modern Kazakhstan for business people to act as patrons of the arts and, for instance, to financially support traditional folk singers, Didar feels humiliated by the suggestion that he compose a glorifying commissioned work. At the same time, he recognizes that he can only live comfortably from literature in its commercial form. In the film this kind of literature finds expression, for instance, in a literary café where guests eat their meals under portraits of famous Kazakh, Russian and international poets. The café is run by an acquaintance of Didar’s, who was once also a hopeful literature student. It is in fact the case in present-day Kazakhstan that writers can hardly live from their craft due to meagre public interest, a lack of public funding for literature and the absence of a functioning publishing scene.

Historical parallels …

Didar’s inner struggle is dramatically underlined in the film by way of a parallel storyline about the fate of the well-known Kazakh akyn (a kind of critical bard) and resistance fighter Makhambet Otemisuly (1803–1846). Along with Isatay Taimanuly, Otemisuly led an uprising of Kazakhs, at the time a nomadic people who, in 1837, revolted against their ruler (khan in Kazakh) in protest against high levies and a shortage of land. The uprising was quelled, Taimanuly was killed, and Makhambet hid from prosecution in the steppe for almost ten years. The film’s storyline begins in 1846, at the moment when Otemisuly is tracked down by the khan’s henchmen. Diverging somewhat from the historical record, in the film the khan’s men convey his offer to Otemisuly: if he praises the ruler in his future works, he will ensure that his story will be published. Otemisuly refuses to sell himself to the ruler and pays with his life.

Didar too ends up rejecting the offer made by the embodiment of power in our times. The interweaving of the fortunes of the historical figure Akyn Otemisuly with those of the contemporary poet Didar is underscored by the same actors playing key figures in the two narrative strands: thus Kanaev not only plays Didar, but also Otemisuly, just as Otemisuly's murderer is played by the same actor portraying the businessman who makes Didar the dubious offer.

… and contemporary instrumentalisation

In the course of the film, several flashbacks provide more information about what happened to Otemisuly's remains, shedding light on the way in which he is viewed in Kazakh cultural memory has changed, as well as on how society treats poets. For over a century, his grave in the steppe was marked by nothing other than a small sarcophagus and was known only to insiders. It was not until 1995, four years after Kazakhstan achieved independence, that a mausoleum of white marble was built there, with militant lines from his poems engraved in the walls. These verses, which are shown in the film in slow tracking shots, inviting viewers to read along, do not, however, reflect the range of content of Otemisuly's work. The roughly one hundred preserved poems, which were not put into writing until after his death, cover a broad thematic spectrum, extending from elegies to the explicit criticism of existing power structures. The selection of the militant verses for the monument, as well as the construction of the mausoleum as a whole, can be interpreted as an expression of the Kazakh people’s search for their own past, one which reflects—just as in many other post-Soviet states—a growing nationalism.

Modern poets who criticize this nationalism have a hard time in Kazakhstan, not only because of the lack of opportunities for publication and meagre public interest, but also because of the political conditions in the country. Thus the poet Didar does not express any criticism of existing conditions in the film. At the same time, he preserves his dignity by rejecting the offer that would have corrupted his honour as a poet.

Nina Frieß is a Slavist and a research associate at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) Berlin.

Beate Eschment is a Central Asia specialist and a research associate at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) Berlin.

Translation: Millay Hyatt