My Simferopol Home

Introducing virtual Maria Sonevytsky

2011-05-14T01:47:00.005+03:00

Hey internet, I've made a website called mariasonevytsky.com where I'll be logging all of my current and past projects. Please visit me there!

In other fabulous news, I am all set to distribute my dissertation this coming Monday. I cannot express how happy this makes me. I spent a few hours today culling through my photos and collected archival images from 2008-2009, feeling intensely nostalgic. I share with you a few at my random and impetuous choice.

Former PCV Scott Slankard and me on a midsummer hike in Mangup Kale, Crimea.

Me, Franz, and Mykhailo Tafiychuk on our first trip to the Tafiychuk homestead in May 2008. (Photo by Roman Pechizhak)

Milara and I relax on May Day.

Visiting Odosia Plytka-Sorokhan in Kryvorivnia (photo by Oksana Susyak)

An old Polish postcard advertising a kolyba in Hutsul'shchyna. Calisthenics!

An amazing archival image given to me by Rustem Eminov of the Khan's Palace in Bakhchisaray - of a student Crimean Tatar ensemble (that included his grandmother, Zeyneb Lumanova) in 1933 in Simferopol.

There are a billion more, but you'll have to read the diss to see those. Ha! I dare you.

Last (Field)notes

2009-06-20T13:01:00.003+03:00

This may be the last I write for some time, since I left Ukraine yesterday and hope to achieve some distance between the last frenzied months of fieldwork and the process of digesting and writing up all the data that will begin next semester back in New York, back at Columbia (and because our 2009 summer Debutante Tour commences tomorrow in the UK!). I’m typing these thoughts as the sun sets behind Wawel Castle in rainy Krakow, in the comfort of my distant cousin’s comfortable 5th floor flat. When I finally crossed the EU border yesterday, I will admit I experienced a rush of relief, and not only because the roads were suddenly free of the potholes that have nearly ruined the shocks on my weathered car. But it was a bittersweet crossing - I left fully aware that my life is moving forward and now away from the dear friends and adopted family that filled up my life over the last eighteen months.

In the last few days, both Ostap and Oksana, two of my closest friends and informants, independent of one another, confronted me about my role as an observer, just an observer. Just an ethnographer. Someone who stays for a while, ingratiates herself in communities of people, then leaves, writes a book in a faraway country in a foreign language to further her career. To what end? they both asked. Their words stung a little, and hit an old but still raw nerve for me, the place where my struggles about how to be a person of action, creating change, making things happen, should intersect with the academic work I do, which often feels too far away from everyday life, too serious or analytical to have an impact on the way the world works.

But I’m grateful that these two managed to strike that nerve again in my last days, because it reminded me of the responsibility that I have to the people whose courage, creativity, and perseverance inspired me over the course of my 18 months of fieldwork, people whose opportunities have been thwarted by the outrageously corrupt system that they live in, yet people who still manage to introduce beauty and art and justice into the world. And their confrontations reminded me of my belief in the power of stories, in the powerful act of creating an archive, a repertoire, a book. Personal, powerful stories can topple history and shape the future. Now it's my job to make them heard.

Lady Ethnographer, or, Why The Cossack Didn’t Punch Me

2009-06-18T08:00:00.000+03:00

I was sharing a late night tea recently in Rakhiv, a Carpathian town on the Romanian border, with a Peace Corps volunteer, a Fulbrighter based in L’viv, and Vasyl, a Rakhivite eager to try out his English language skills on us three native speakers. He had spent some studying English in America after he won the greencard lottery. We got onto the topic of differences between educational methodologies in Ukraine and the US, which segued onto the topic of patronymics, the formal way that teachers in Ukraine are addressed, i.e. “Hello, Maria Rostyslavivna! (“Maria, daughter of Rostyslav.”) The US contingent complained about the confusion that this breeds in schools where identical names are common, as in Rakhiv school no. 2, where three different Maria Ivanivna’s teach. In America, Vasyl told us, since this patronymic system wasn’t used, he preferred to address his teacher as “Lady Teacher.” To him a sign of respect, to us, somehow funny. “Hello, lady teacher.” He seemed confused at our laughter, so, as we dug deeper into an explanation, we came to the conclusion that it seemed misguidedly flirtatious to American ears. Redundant and idiomatically clumsy, “Lady Teacher” sounds like a vague come on, especially the way he was saying it. Vasyl blinked and smiled mischievously, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” Innocent enough.

I’ve been thinking a lot, in my waning fieldwork days, about the challenges and benefits of being an American “Lady Ethnographer” in Ukraine. My two field sites – Crimea and the Western Ukrainian Carpathians - presented their specific sets of different challenges. But more often than not, the mix of off-color wisecracks, blatant verging on aggressive passes, remarks about the un-lady-like nature of the work I do and the work I should be doing (seemingly alone in the world, 28 years old with no babies to show), the way I drive my beat up car (fast), and so on, made me feel uncomfortable at times, occasionally bemused, pissed off at others. It is too simple to say that I objected to being cast as the weaker sex, because women’s roles in these traditional societies are complex and too demanding to be weak – witness any wrinkled babushka hauling firewood like a lumberjack to understand. And it’s too easy to say that I simply resisted the popular belief that Americans are incompetent at basic life skills, because everything we own comes ready pre-packaged, everything we eat is microwavable, and everything that breaks is disposable and replaceable. But some combination of being cast as a delicate flower and as a helpless Americanka usually made me all the more determined to show that I was tough too, to push to the mountaintop faster, to get plenty of dirt under my fingernails, to cook dinner for the whole family. This led to a few absurdist spectacles - as when I spent three long early spring days doggedly tilling and planting a potato patch in Verkhovyna, pointedly alone, albeit publicly observed and teased by the neighbors and their friends (“Hey, look at the Amerikanka dig!”) - and a few frightening situations, as when I found myself mouthing off against men who held some bigoted or ignorant belief in harsh enough terms that, if I had been a man myself, the final punctuation on the hostile exchange would almost certainly have been my broken nose.

But I am a lady, after all, and you do not hit a lady. (At least, not in public – domestic violence is an entirely separate, ugly fact of gender relations in large segments of Ukrainian traditional societies.)

In the year and a half that I have spent in Ukraine, there have been numerous confrontations in which I have butted heads with worldviews predicated on hate, suspicion, or misinformation. Sometimes these confrontations are productive, carried through by both parties with diplomacy, to where I think I can feel the earth move slightly under my opponent’s feet. But sometimes they are not: they escalate to a fever pitch, to where the stakes seem high enough and the hurt runs deep enough that I can imagine how words might lead to physical violence. The two scariest episodes of such were both in Crimea, both surrounding my response to propaganda against the Crimean Tatars. In both cases, I was relieved to be a lady.

About a month ago, I got into it with a man in Cossack uniform. The setting for our verbal brawl was spectacular: at the foot of the Uspensky Monastery, which is carved into the gravity-defying cliffs above Bakhchisaray. A colleague from Turkey had come to Crimea to attend the World Congress of Crimean Tatars, and following the high-falutin’ “peace and harmony and a brighter future” rhetoric of the opening ceremony at the Khan’s Palace, we decided to blow off the banquet lunch and go, instead, on a hike up past the Russian Orthodox Monastery to the ancient cave city of Chufut-Kale. I stayed behind as he went up to the sanctuary in the caves because I was curious to speak to the “Cossacks” who I had noticed guarding the monastery in recent months. On that day, there were two men wearing military-style uniforms and berets, with badges and insignia linking them to the “KHY” – one of the xenophonic self-appointed “security forces” that are cropping up in various parts of Ukraine. I started up a conversation with the beefier, clearly more senior, of the two. Our exchange went something like this:

MS: [in Ukrainian] Hello, I’ve noticed you here the last few times I’ve visited, and I’m wondering who you are, who sent you…

Cossack: [in Russian] We were invited by the monks to defend their monastery.

MS: Did you invite yourselves or did they reach out to you?

C: We offered our services, and then they invited us.

MS: What is your purpose as an organization?

C: To defend our Motherland, Mother Rus,’ and our glorious religion.

MS: Your badge says you are Ukrainian Cossacks.

C: That’s right, we are. We defend the Ukrainian territory from foreigners, in the name of Mother Rus’.

MS: I’m confused. Do you speak Ukrainian?

C: [visibly annoyed, attempting to speak Ukrainian, but really speaking Russian with a Ukrainian accent.] Yes, but it’s not the language used here. You don’t understand anything, little girl.

MS: Who are you defending the monastery from?

C: [red-faced] You wouldn’t understand, little girl.

MS: I think I might understand, I know a little about this. Can you tell me from whom you’re defending the monastery?

C: [pause, sigh] From the Crimean Tatars. They want to steal it from us.

MS: Really? Who in particular wants to steal the monastery?

C: You don’t understand anything, little girl. You have to have lived here your whole life to understand. Many of their organizations are plotting…

MS: Can you name one such organization?

C: [long pause] The Meijlis.

MS: Ha! The Meijlis wants to steal the monastery! That’s simply not true, sir. You are misinformed.

C: [He is red-faced, a crowd of listeners has gathered around us.] Girlie, you don’t understand anything, They want to steal and take everything, those traitors, as they’ve done for centuries. They want to transform our Crimea into an extremist Islamic caliphate.

MS: [I lose it] Sir, you are operating under a set of xenophobic delusions. Your organization is breeding mistrust and hatred for no reason. This is Slavic supremacy. This is racism, plain and simple.

C: Devotchka! You don’t understand anything!
[He is steaming mad, looks like he wants to hit something, and storms away, starts telling sympathetic ears about the unjust abuse I have heaped upon him. They glare at me, the head-scarved Orthodox women selling honey and the Cossacks. My Turkish friend comes down the stair and I quickly steal him away from the scene, explain what happened down the road and fume for another twenty minutes.]

In retrospect, as in every situation where I’ve lost my cool and angrily confronted a scary (male) bigot, I regret it, because I know that my outburst led to nothing positive, just a rush of adrenaline and a pounding heart. But no change of heart in my opponent - probably just increased irrational hostility towards the perceived enemy and, for those that have known of my citizenship, toward the US, which is largely believed to be churning out its own anti-Russian, pro-NATO and pro-EU propaganda. (Which, to be fair, it was doing openly under the Bush administration. We’re still waiting to see what Obama’s strategy toward Ukraine is.)

Ukraine today is caught between two warring accounts of history, as it is caught between two different attitudes towards otherness, be it gendered, ethnic or raced otherness. In Russia today, Medvedev has taken some alarming steps to institutionalize the revisionism of Soviet history initiated by Putin. In the new revised version, Stalin is rehabilitated as a hero, Hitler’s attempt to take Gdansk is seen as “reasonable” and the fear and terror of the purge eras is underplayed. The flat-out refusal to acknowledge the genocidal Ukrainian Holodomor that took over ten million lives in 1932-33 goes along with the implicit denial of Ukraine as a viable nation. Russian blockbuster epic films like this year’s “Taras Bulba” simplify Gogol’s telling of history to preach a transparently throwback pan-Slavic message: there is no difference between Ukrainian Cossacks and Russian freedom-fighters, we are all Slavic brothers, fighting against the same (Polish/Muslim/NATO/US) enemy. The effect of seeing so many heroicized fallen warriors adhering to a Soviet ideal of masculinity, gurgling blood while they shout “Glory to Mother Rus’! Glory to Russian Orthodoxy!” seems to have had a mild brainwashing effect on many of the film critics whose reviews I read after seeing the bombastic film for myself, since they all seemed to repeat a variation on a theme: we are all Slavic brothers, Ukrainians should realize that. Commercials on Ukrainian television showed enthusiastic viewers proclaiming similar (19th century) visions of pan-Slavic unity after seeing the film.

Isn’t this as eerily transparent as it is familiar? Propaganda is an insidious but also necessarily blunt tool to serve its function of clubbing masses into alternate worldviews. But shouldn’t this also make it easier to dismantle, to deflate the delusion? How do you battle against blatant distortion of the historical record without risking violence, nevermind the obvious conflict of an outsider coming in preaching her own ideological worldview? When do we step back and throw up our hands and feel guilt at our privilege and the entitlements of our citizenship and our attempts to ideologically dominate in a foreign place, and when do we fight for the truth to come to light, for the historical fact to be, at the very least, acknowledged?

Deportation Day, 65 Years

2009-05-18T11:57:00.005+03:00

Over dinner in Simferopol with my adopted Crimean Tatar family last week, Ayder, a veteran of the Crimean Tatar human rights war against the USSR, used the term "genocide" to describe the present Ukrainian non-policy towards Crimean Tatars. He cited the attacks by militia groups on Crimean Tatar businesses and homes over the last twenty years, the inadequate implementation of protections for the indigenous people and the minority population, the alarmist attitude towards their Muslim minority group, framed without cause for extremism and denied land permits to build a new sobornaya mechet’, and so on. In my cautious academic way, I suggested that genocide was perhaps too strong a term: as careless and irresponsible as the Ukrainian government has been towards the Crimean Tatars, an indigenous people of Crimea, genocide implies a systematic, violent destruction of an entire ethnic group. It is more sinister than the bumbling indifference of the Ukrainian state. No, he asserted: "we are uncomprehending witnesses to a subtler form of genocide. The Crimean Tatars are being choked out of existence."

No one will dispute that Ukrainians, ethnic or not, face an Augean stable's worth of dirty and seemingly insurmountable problems in their country. Perhaps the struggle of the Crimean Tatars seems marginal. Emphasis goes to the geo-political rifts that have widened again between East and West, Russia and Europe: Westerners stereotyped as rabid Ukrainian nationalists are weary of Easterners depicted as Russian chauvinists. Crimean Tatars - remarkably loyal to the Ukrainian state since they were allowed to return to their ancestral homeland after 50 years in Central Asian exile – are nowhere in the debate. It would do Ukraine well to act in solidarity with the Crimean Tatars. To the essentialists, solidarity with others smells of capitulation, when it is actually a source of strength and communion.

Contrary to the simpleminded slogans of some factions of the Ukrainian right, Ukraine never had a simple purely Slavic story of ethnogenesis. Just like every other nation, it never had only one language, one religion, one monolithic culture. Ukraine is and has always been multi-ethnic. Retrograde policies of essentialist nationalism that exclude precisely the groups that are trying to contribute to and build the Ukrainian state are, sooner or later, going to embitter the excluded. A multi-ethnic Ukraine must exist, and its ideal should not be for stalemate, a platitudinous tolerance; Ukraine must seek a deep acceptance and respect for its diverse minority and indigenous groups. A propos to the Crimean Tatar situation, the Ukrainian government should finally approve a law to grant the indigenous people of the Crimean peninsula rights and protections as a threatened, indigenous people of their ancestral homeland: land rights, education in the native language, an end to religious discrimination, and ultimately, a right to self-determination within the territory of Ukraine.

We can learn from a Hutsul musician who I spoke to a few weeks ago, during the Easter holidays. We sat in his ancient Volga as he played me old cassette tapes and told me his deportation story. His family had been deported to Siberia during the war and not allowed to resettle in the Ivano-Frankivsk oblast until the 1970s. Reading about the Crimean Tatar non-violent resistance of the 20th century, their fierce support of the Orange revolution in 2004, and their annual celebration of Taras Shevchenko's birthday, he asked me for a recording of a Crimean Tatar violinist from whom he could learn some traditional melodies. I asked him why, and he said, "to show my respect, as they’ve been showing it to us." In place of fear, respect. In place of dim hostility, a desire to understand. In place of ignorance, education.

The policies of the Soviet Union brutally uprooted and ended countless human lives across the map of the former USSR. To his credit, Yushchenko has worked to promote awareness of the Holodomor against the grain of Soviet (and some post-Soviet) accounts of Stalinist history. But, in the 20th century, there were other genocides on the territory of contemporary Ukraine. Today, let us not be witnesses to other, albeit more casual, acts of destruction.

Today, May 18th, Crimean Tatars from all over the world will gather in Lenin Square in Simferopol on the 65th anniversary of their day of their deportation. They will mark their darkest day with somber music and a call for no more genocide. Tomorrow, they will commence the first World Congress of Crimean Tatars - the first meeting in history to bring the massive and diverse Crimean Tatar diasporas and the Crimean population together – at the Khan’s Palace in Bakhchisaray. They will make a renewed commitment to persevere, and a call - to the Ukrainian government, the UN, the Council of Europe, and the international human rights community - for support and assistance as they struggle to build back their community in Crimea.

Last night, the candelight vigil organized by the Crimean Tatar Youth Center spelled out the words: No Genocide - in lights. I think we can all easily agree on this slogan, but we must also sharpen our awareness to other more insidious forms that annihilation can manifest in, and battle and battle against it.

Love Song

2009-03-18T15:09:00.001+02:00

I wrote a little song, here's the demo. Debutantes are going to do it up.

Pressje!

2009-02-10T20:39:00.004+02:00

Hot off the Pressje! The latest edition of the Krakow-based magazine has published a gorgeous full-color spread of the No Other Home photographs and article. Behold:

A hearty thanks to my extremely brilliant, extremely distant but kindred spirit kind of cousin, Marta Soniewicka, who approached us with the idea of publishing it, translated the text into Polish, and even hand-delivered four copies to me on Friday.

It’s true: on Friday, Marta crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border on foot and boldly ventured east of the EU. I met her on the other side, where I spent a couple hours hanging out in my car, avoiding the smugglers and border drunks. We hightailed it back to L’viv for a photography exhibit opening and a decadent Georgian meal.

On my 28th birthday, Marta and I pilgrimaged to the village and town of Upper and Lower “Syn'ovydne” (Synewidzko/Synewodzko in Polish) in the foothills of the Carpathians - from where we may or may not take our common last name. Marta, whose interest in genealogy and thoroughness as a researcher reunited our disparate family branches in the 1990s, tells that Synevydne was founded in the 12th century (the oldest tombstones we found were from the mid-19th), translates as “blue water” in proto-Ruthenian (the waters of the Striy and Opir rivers really were blue on Saturday), and that our distant ancestors were large landholders - and since large landholders often took the names of the places where they lived as surnames, this gave a shade of credence to the otherwise lark-like expedition on which we embarked. It was fun, anyway.

We spent the night in the nearby idyllic Carpathian town of Slavsk, hiked to the top of a mountain, dined on marinated vegetables, banosh, and a little horilka, and then steamed in the private banya of the Boyko home in which we stayed the night. I was in bed, sleeping on a post-birthday, post-banya, post-feast cloud, by 10:30 PM. No complaints.

Penguins and Hutsuls

2009-01-16T09:46:00.004+02:00

At the anti-kryzova knaypa (anti-crisis club) in L’viv, there’s a sign on the wall that reads “Crises are not Frightening to Penguins and Hutsuls.”

They have a point. Every time I've shared this phrase in Verkhovyna, people nod their heads in agreement.

Since most every local heats the home with firewood and survives the winter on stores of corn meal, summer’s pickled vegetables, milk and cheese from the family cow or goat, the energy crisis seems distant. If it gets really cold, there are local banyas or homebrewed fire water usually within reach.

The gas crisis doesn’t pose the same threat here that it does to the cities, and people take pride in that, but the opportunity to make cracks about the crisis is not wasted. SMS New Year “vinchuvannia” that reference the gas crisis have opened a whole new frontier of Ukrainian text message poetry.

The Old New Year

2009-01-14T09:01:00.002+02:00

Happy Old New Year! We traveled to the villages of Kosmach and Sheshory to take part in the Old Calendar (Julian) New Year celebrations on January 13th. Malanka!

Bands of masqueraders and musicians stopped our two-car caravan every few feet to sing us carols and extort small sums of money. More than once, we were guided out of the cars and pulled along by a gang to a nearby village house for more dancing, eating, and drinking.

There were the usual un-PC malanka characters and ethnic caricatures - Devils, Gypsies, Dead Brides, Jews, Old Men, Baba Yagas, Bears, Nazis, Brezhnev....

Putin made more than one appearance this year. Yulia, to my surprise, not one.

Photos by Oksana Susyak, here with gorilla bride and Brezhnev.

Malanka, Part 2

2009-01-14T08:30:00.001+02:00

Some more Malanka images from Kosmach and Sheshory. Photos by Oksana Susyak.

Everybody Thinks I'm a Spy

2008-12-26T11:13:00.005+02:00

I wrote a song yesterday. The title speaks for itself, but let me add two comments: It all started during my first weekend back in Crimea in September, when an elder in the Crimean Tatar community looked me straight in the eyes and said, "I know you're a spy. But it's ok, you don't have to admit it." I was too flustered to say anything in my defense, which probably led her to believe that I was, indeed, a spy. Just our little secret.

Accusations of such shady dealings have come up since, and not just at me. In November, I helped Joshua Kucera, a journalist reporting in Crimea to make some introductions. Afterwards, many of those to whom he was introduced asked me if he was a spy. No, no, no, I said, he's writing some articles for Slate (but it's true that he was once offered a gig by a Russian spook.)

Today's New York Times reports on a Russian spy case in Estonia which, frankly, would make me a little paranoid, too.

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Also, still a few days left to catch some very rare music in New York City, straight from Hutsulschynna from where I'm writing this. Here's another plug for the Yara Arts Group Carpathian Mountain Winter Ritual Performance, which has been recommended by the Village Voice, New York Press, and Villager as the event to see this weekend.

Koliada

2008-12-24T13:51:00.004+02:00

One things leads to another, and then you find yourself overdubbing sopilka tracks in a sublet room in the Carpathian Mountains.

Yes, I've recorded a Ukrainian Christmas carol (koliada) just in time for what they call "Polish Christmas" (which nobody really celebrates) here in Kosiv. It's a tune I've always liked, called "Nebo i Zemlia" ("Heaven and Earth"). My rendition features a banjo, a sopilka, and my congested-sounding voice. It was inspired largely by what I had on hand (call it necessity, call it realism), a little by nostalgia, a little by Hutsul music, and a little by the opening of a Grandaddy song that I really like. If you'd like to hear it, you can go to my long-neglected page at www.myspace.com/tsarinamaria.

Point of Clarification, or, What My Dissertation Might Be About

2008-12-23T15:07:00.003+02:00

Nose deep in the L’viv Archives last week, I came across a 6-page essay written at the turn of the century by a L’vivan ethnographer, speculating on the commonalities between Hutsul-Carpathian and Caucasian cultures – both the high mountain dwelling wild people of their respective regions, known for their independent spirit, animist and superstitious beliefs. (This morning I was told to whisper the secret of my previous night’s bad dream out of my open window so it would float away and unburden me. I obeyed, but am not sure yet if it worked.)

The article is titled “The Carpathians and the Caucasus: Some Hypotheses About Ethnological Parallels.” The author’s cautious advancing of his hypotheses impressed me, given the frequently imperious tone of early anthropology. Gingerly, he suggests that future study of high mountains dwellers in numerous regions – including Taurida, future Crimea – might prove fruitful for ethnographers interested in the “halbwild” peoples of the various “civilized” empires.

Two days ago, my first day back in the Carpathians, my friend Marta from L’viv and I visited our sick-bed-bound friend Oksana (Hutsulka Ksenija) and her mother in their Hutsul home in Verkhovyna (where the girls are pretty as geese, as the song goes. Oksana, to be fair, is rather stunning.) After an evening of gossip and mulled wine, we awoke lazily to a Sunday breakfast of fresh cheese, sour cream and poppy seed rolls in the coziest wood-heated bedroom imaginable.

Afterwards, Marta and I left to wander in the mountains, which had been dusted with snow overnight. Behold:

We got quiet on the mountaintop, and I got to thinking (about my dissertation, of all things). Last week, I took pride in finally being able to articulate, in Ukrainian, to an ethnomusicology colleague from the Ivan Franko University, what I’m actually doing here, without having her blink and nod at me as if I was more than a little deranged. I’ve found myself delivering half-hearted explanations right and left lately, to people as dear as my kid brother (who, it was revealed in a phone conversation yesterday, had absolutely no clue why I’m here) and as distant and administrative as the IRB board (don’t ask). So I’m going to attempt to start up this blog again with a clarification, a small explanation of my project (and with hopefully less jargon than my dissertation proposal required).

Unlike the comparative project of the early 20th century armchair ethnographer, my project does not attempt to pin down similarities between the cultural traits of the Crimean Tatars and the Hutsuls (though I will admit that finding an article like that in a musty archive is totally thrilling, in the nerdiest possible sense). My project is to compare histories of exoticism, specifically how both groups have been the traditional wild people to some other, more powerful or more insecure (depending on how you look at it) group. Comparing the histories of exoticism between the Hutsuls and the Crimean Tatars is, admittedly, not the most obvious choice. Both groups are de facto “Ukrainian” (in the sense of citizenship) – at least this is what their post-Soviet passports say. But until the euphoria (and subsequent disenchantment) of the Orange Revolution effectively bonded these two groups in their political orientations, the Crimean Tatars and the Hutsuls had been the subjects of different histories in different empires, sometimes fighting against the same enemies, but often pitted against each other.

So, why these two groups? While distinct in ethnogensis, history and territory, Hutsuls, the superstitious, hard-drinking subsistence farmers to Poland and Austro-Hungary’s urban intellectuals, and Crimean Tatars, the perceived inheritors of Genghis Khan’s barbarism to the Russian Imperial gaze, are the two ethnic groups on the territory of contemporary Ukraine that are the most laden with stereotypes of “otherness” or, specifically, “wildness.” The interesting twist, in both cases, is that being exotic, or colorful, or unique, or wild, is an effective way to stimulate cultural revival vis-a-vis tourism and the heritage industry.

Yesterday, the curator at the Kosiv Hutsul Museum told me that she herself “didn’t realize how special her culture was” until she saw it on display at a festival in Warsaw, which convinced her that a top priority of the Hutsuls should be “to show their culture to the world.” Of course, once you leave the enclave, the world begins to meddle, and then debates about authenticity and representation begin.

Music, this thing that not only reflects but also creates culture, is my way into this whole project. Often, the debates that rage in traditional communities about how musical culture should be used - preserved or updated, institutionalized or hybridized - bear striking analogies to bigger questions about how minority and indigenous groups should be bracing against homogenization/assimilation while being realistic (and savvy) about living in the globalized 21st century. Which is why it is not wholly surprising that the rather famous Tafiychuk family of Hutsul musicians are caroling in New York City right now (and not, as I had hoped, in the Karpaty). So if you’re around in the city, you might want to check out the events that the Yara Arts Group is putting on this week at La MaMa (and tell me how it is):

Still the River Flows
Dec 26-28 – Fri- Sun
a new theatre piece by Yara Arts Group
featuring Koliadnyky of Kryvorivnia, Tafiychuk family,
Svitayana, Julian Kytasty, Yara artists and Lilia Pavlovsky and family
La MaMa Experimental Theatre, $25 children $10
74 East 4th St (between 2nd & 3rd Ave) New York (212) 475-7710

Hey, that’s a small start, I think!

It’s snowing outside. I’m going to bundle up and head into Kosiv proper to buy a tiny Christmas tree.
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From the sweaty internet cafe: Here's another photo from the top of the very chic ski resort Bukovel, where we happened upon this Hutsul ensemble caroling for some German television special. This is the only ski resort I've ever been to where men with trembitas (alpine horns) wander around drinking hot beer at the bottom of the slopes.

Romania: Party at the Palace

2008-12-08T16:22:00.006+02:00

Greetings from Bucharest, Romania, where I am sitting opposite from Alison, who managed to find me off the train this afternoon and steered zombie-like me through the gray Bucharest streets into a nice Italian cafe with free WiFi. Phil Collins is playing on the loudspeakers, and I just drank a mint latte.

We're here to open the "No Other Home" exhibit of photographs at the spectacular Cotroceni Palace as part of a European Council meeting that will be taking place next weekend.

Tonight, we're catching a train to Costanza on the Black Sea coast, the home to the biggest population of Crimean Tatars in Romania, where we'll try to do some more interviews and take some more photographs of the community there.

"No Other Home" on Triple Canopy!

2008-11-23T11:49:00.005+02:00

The online magazine Triple Canopy has just published us! Read, look and listen here: www.canopycanopycanopy.com/4/no_other_home.

I'm also thrilled to write that we'll be presenting yet another version of the project in exhibition form in Bucharest, Romania in mid-December. Special thanks to Serdal Uteu for inviting us and coordinating the exhibition. If you happen to be in Bucharest, please come by!

Opens on December 12th, 2008
9 PM
Cotroceni Presidency Palace/ Palatul Cotroceni/Muzeul Cotroceni
Presidency Hall Room

We're also in the early stages of developing our own website, which will include more stories, more photos, and more music. So stay tuned.

Hard to believe, but I'm leaving my Simferopol home on Tuesday and soon venturing into Western Ukraine to spend the caroling season with the Hutsuls. Bracing for a Carpathian mountain winter...

Here's a neat map I was given recently. It contains a lot of the pre-deportation Tatar names of places (published in Istanbul in 1968). The color scheme, I think, may have been a coincidence.

Khayrli Presidentlerden olsun! Хаырлы Пресидентлерден олсун!

2008-11-05T15:17:00.004+02:00

Early this morning, I came downstairs bursting with news about the presidential elections, so Shevqiye decided to make her famous apple pie to celebrate. The sun came out in Backhchisaray, and we clinked our black tea glasses for the new U.S. president. I learned to say "May the President be successful" in Tatar. I would have been dancing in the streets outside the White House, but this was a pretty good way to celebrate too.

post-Turkey, pre-Bakhchisaray

2008-11-02T13:17:00.006+02:00

Since we last checked in, I have been to Turkey. The country was rife with busts of Atatürk on the 85th anniversary of modern Turkish statehood.

I also ran a 15 km race (part of the Istanbul Eurasia marathon, which boasts the distinction of being the only marathon to cover both Asia and Europe) in chilly torrential rain. It was an absurd experience, but being sopping wet and imagining the hot shower to come probably made me run faster than usual. I made reasonably good time and was done by 10 AM.
I visited Aya Sofia and the Sultanahmet (Blue) Mosque.
I met the Crimean Tatar diaspora in Istanbul and in Eskishehir, where the director rounded up a crowd for an evening of socializing, music and dance. I passed around photographs from Crimea, where most of these people have never been.
They sang Ey Guzel Kirim, a deportation era anthem, as their first song.
We took photographs and I was gifted plaques.

We visited Crimean Tatar villages near Eskishehir, where people invited us into their homes,
and told their stories of immigration to Turkey, usually shortly after the Crimean War in the mid-19th century.
It was difficult for me to tell apart Crimean Tatar and Turkish, but people say that Crimean Tatar is very well preserved in these villages.
These guys were out for a stroll.

These women wanted us to have coffee, but we were on our way back to town.

We visited an instrument maker in Eskishehir, where a PhD candidate in musicology sang gorgeous songs from the Ottoman Empire, accompanying himself on the oud, and a young instrument maker described the process of making the perfect instrument:

It was an incredible trip with a lot of information collected and many strong impressions formed in just a week. Next... the Romanian Crimean Tatar diaspora? Alison and I have been invited to come and present in mid-December on Crimean Tatar day in Romania. I hope it happens.

(So....I know, I know; it's been a long time since you last heard from me. Thank you to those of you who write to remind me to post. Believe me, it's been on my mind. But so many things have been happening - a visit from my uncle, interviews, a visit from my boyfriend, interviews, an attempt to follow American politics and Ukrainian politics, a visit to Lviv, interviews, a visit to Turkey, interviews - and no internet at home. Right now, I'm planted in the corner of a hip cafe on fashionable Pushkina vul. quickly uploading some photos in feverish time to the ambient eurotechno favored by this cafe to assuage my pangs of conscience over not being a more proactive blogger. A warning that things might get worse before they get better: I'm leaving my Simferopol home today for Bakhchisaray, which may make my internet accessibility even more limited, but maybe I'll get there and discover a signal. Ada Helbig was recently telling me about opening up her laptop in a Roma village near Uzhgorod and discovering that the village had provided free WiFi for anyone with a computer in the area.... Anyway, blog or not, one day, there will be a fat book.)

The Tragedy on the Arabatska Strilka

2008-09-29T15:45:00.007+03:00

Yesterday, the Crimean Tatar community commemorated the mass drowning of all of the Crimean Tatars who were not deported on May 18, 1944.

The reason these Crimean Tatars were overlooked? They lived on the narrow spit of land known as the "Arabatska Strilka" ("strilka" = arrow) that stretches over 110 km from the Kherson oblast' in Ukraine down to the Azov coast in Eastern Crimea. The best image yielded from my very quick google search is above (we salute you, Wikipedia!) -- it's that little skinny dark blue part that looks like a Photoshop free-draw.

The somber day began with a prayer at the mosque in Generalskoye,

and then a caravan to the beach, where we assembled on a sand bar.

The local imam led a prayer,

and a local Ukrainian Orthodox priest lead a short panakhyda (death mass) in honor of the Slavs who were drowned for witnessing the crime.

Carnations and beans were tossed into the Azov Sea. It was a somber affair.

But day trip from Simferopol ended warmly, with an invitation for dinner (and to break the Ramadan fast for those who had not eaten all day) at a home in Dzhankoy. We watched wedding videos and I got leads on some musicians who I am told need to be recorded. On the drive home, I got to ride shotgun, and had a debate about religion and politics with the driver, a local community leader. It was an inconclusive but exciting debate, and it felt good to achieve a level of exchange almost untroubled by the fact that he spoke Russian and Tatar and I spoke fake Russian and Ukrainian.

Tonight, in honor of the last day of Ramadan, fried food is on the menu. In fact, I have less than hour to report to Milara's kitchen for cheburek duty, and I still need to mail things from the central post office, so this is me bracing for that and signing off.

Crimean Tatar cookbooks for sale!

2008-09-23T16:18:00.004+03:00

Hot off the Bakhchisaray presses, straight from Shevqiye Seytmemetov's family kitchen! Learn to make all your 26 favorite Crimean Tatar dishes, including Qashiq Ash, Chebureky, Sarma, Manty and Qurabiye!

If you'd like to purchase a copy (in Russian or in English) feel free to e-mail me your address and I'll arrange for it. The cost, including mailing from Ukraine, should be approximately $9.

This is the kind of dinner party you can have, just imagine it:

And here are two photos from the Koktebel jazz fest which took place the past weekend, where we camped with all the Ukrainian hippies and their djembes...

and got to see a late-night fire-dancer even though we weren't VIPs.

Some roads lead to Simferopol

2008-09-19T12:52:00.004+03:00

Yesterday afternoon, my first full day back in Simferopol, I sat down for a rest and a snack on a concrete slab on the side of Sevastopolskaya vulitsa and watched the traffic-clogged street move in fits and starts. I'd stopped into a magazin, where the lady in charge regarded me with what appeared to be scorn, and refused to reach for the plain packet of "Cossack's Fun" peanuts, instead offering me chicken or bacon flavored peanuts. I gave up trying for plain and took the chicken.

Oh, Simferopol. I'm easing in, taking my time, since that's the way in these parts. It's been lousy and raining outside, which resulted in a cancellation of my plans for today's meeting in Bakhchisaray. But happily, an invitation to a birthday party came in, and I've convinced a friend to roadtrip tomorrow to Koktebel' to check out the famous jazz festival going on this weekend. I'll miss Richard Galliano tonight, but catch Archie Schepp on Sunday.

And so next week the interviewing begins. I hope to start learning some more songs, take a few lessons in vocal style and maybe accordion if I can find a teacher willing to deal with an accordion-less student.

It's been fascinating to talk to folks here about the South Ossetian conflict, as you might imagine. I had a sense of how different the American and Russian media were spinning the conflict while in the states, but on the ground, the difference is really palpable. Western analyses of the tensions in Crimea about to bubble over seemed alarmist to me while in the US, and compared to how people here have been talking about it to me that feeling seems justified: the consensus from those I've spoken to seems to be that Crimeans aren't looking for war, but they think Russia did right in protecting its citizens in Tskhinvali. For those that opposed the Orange Revolution, Saakashvili's misstep (or response to Russian threats) and the recent (albeit familiar) political turmoil in Ukraine has only hardened convictions about Yushchenko as American puppet, in the same league of incompetence as the Georgian leader. But then, I haven't spoken to politicians here, and some Tatars I've talked to certainly regard Russia's recent meddling with more cynicism than others. Here's some of the latest in the Western press -- more, it appears, of Russia as provocateur. (I keep wondering why there hasn't been more press about the glaring example of Chechnya.)

Let's shift to a bit of good news: the online journal Triple Canopy is going to publish a version of our No Other Home project! So we're working on getting that together for next month's issue.

No Other Home: The Crimean Tatars, a preview

2008-09-07T21:37:00.003+03:00

A long hiatus from the blog, but online today to make sure you know about the preview of the presentation that Alison Cartwright and I are developing.

If you're in New York, please come to the Harriman Institute on Tuesday evening to see a first draft of the presentation:

And if you're in Washington DC, please consider joining us on Friday evening.

My six weeks in the states flew and I'm preparing for my return to Crimea next weekend. Once back in Simferopol, I expect this blog to start up again, so stay tuned.

To Sheshory, but not in Sheshory

2008-07-11T19:08:00.002+03:00

In L'viv today and had a most wonderful and remarkably affordable flight on WizzAir, which launched its Ukraine service today (linking Kyiv, Odesa, Simferopol, and Lviv - I am going to be their biggest cheerleader). Since it was the kickoff morning, our obviously self-conscious flight attendants gave us complimentary beverages and snacks and we appaluded when we touched down in L'viv. What a nice experience for $10.

Tonight, off to the Sheshory "music and landart festival" which no longer takes place in Sheshory ( a small Carpathian village) but rather in Podillia. I'm taking a train to Vinnytsia with my friends from the Les Kurbas Theater and Hutsuls who will be performing. I have a toothbrush, a blanket, a change of clothes, and a sopilka in my bag. I expect there will be stories to tell.

A Surprise Appearance

2008-07-07T21:00:00.002+03:00

The news from QHA today reports on a gathering that occurred yesterday in Ay Serez (now known as Mizhdurechia):

Вчера, 06 июля, в старинном крымскотатарском селе Ай-Cерез (Междуречье), что неподалеку от Судака, состоялась «Койдешлер корюшюв» (встреча односельчан). Затерянное в горах село примечательно тем, что является малой родиной двух лидеров крымскотатарского народа – Мустафы Джемилева и Рефата Чубарова.
С самого утра в село, к зданию старой мечети начали съезжаться уроженцы Ай-Cереза и их потомки. В общей сложности на встречу односельчан собралось около 500 человек. Мероприятие было организовано сельским междлисом (председатель Аблямит Ибраим) при поддержке предпринимателей-айсерезцев. Активное участие в организации встречи принял и первый заместитель председателя Меджлиса крымскотатарского народа Рефат Чубаров.
Перед односельчанами выступили их земляки – Председатель Меджлиса крымскотатарского народа Мустафа Джемилев и его заместитель Рефат Чубаров. В своих выступлениях они призвали айсерезцев заботиться о единстве крымскотатарского народа, чтить его культуру, язык, веру. Р. Чубаров, также, подчеркнул, что только сами айсерезцы могут возродить свое родное село, для чего необходимо возвращаться в Ай-Серез, строить дома, растить здесь детей. Как известно, сам Рефат Чубаров, вместе с братом Эльведдином, в прошлом году сумели купить старый дом в родном селе и сейчас обустраивают его.
Хорошей новостью для айсерезцев стало сообщение о том, что получены решения о возврате здания мечети мусульманам села, и вскоре начнется работа по ее восстановлению.
Для айсерезцев, собравшихся в этот праздничный день выступил ансамбль «Макъам» под руководством Джемиля Карикова, пели народные любимцы Рустем Мемет и Афизе Караса. Приятной неожиданностью стало выступление гостьи из США Марии Соневицки, докторанта Колумбийского университета, приехавшей изучать крымскотатарскую музыку. К радости айсерезцев и гостей праздника Мария исполнила крымскотатарскую народную песню, чем вызвала бурю аплодисментов в свою честь.
Даже хлынувший ливень не испортил праздник собравшимся односельчанам.
Также, с днем села айсерезцев приветствовали ветеран крымскотатарского национального движения Зампира Асан и председатель Сакского регионального меджлиса Зевджет Къуртумер, принявшие самое деятельное участие в проведении встречи.
Встреча закончилась обещаниями обязательно встретиться в Ай-Серезе в следующем году.

Here is my surprise appearance. A surprise to me, for sure. I was backed by a terrific band - Makam - though, which was also a pleasant surprise. Strangely, this is the second time in two weeks that I have found myself with microphone in hand in front of a band and a crowd of many Crimean Tatars. Last week, there was a similar moment at a wedding. I guess this is some variation on the participant observer paradigm: performer/observer?

www.alisoncartwright.com

2008-07-02T15:53:00.003+03:00

Oh! And please check out Alison Cartwright's website to see some of the photos from our expeditions in May! (A sincere thanks to the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council for providing funding for that round of shooting and travelling.) Text, audio, and exhibitions are all in the works...

Kurortniy Reyon

2008-07-02T15:31:00.002+03:00

Back to Crimea and so are the tourists. The Kyiv Post reports that "while high cost, poor service and unsanitary conditions are turning some summer vacationers away from Crimea in favor of such destinations as Egypt and Turkey, the fact remains that 6 million people are expected to visit the still-beautiful peninsula this year." Still beautiful, but a little trashed. Sounds great, huh?

(My mother visited me here last week and was positively outraged at the amount of trash just lying around. She immediately stopped a lady selling newspapers on the beach to find out which newspaper is most widely read in Sevastopol and plans to write a letter castigating the citizenry. And you wonder where I get my energy from...)

In less than 48 hours back in Simferopol, I managed to get pulled back in to the Tatar community as if I had never left. Attended a wedding near Bakhchisaray, marked the 30th Anniversary of Musa Mamut's self-immolation at his burial site near Simferopol, chatted with Ukrainian nationalists, and have a whole new roster of musicians to interview.

Also, while at Kraina Mriy in Kyiv, I met the inspiring organizers of a summer camp called the "Chemistry of Tolerance," taking place in Bakhchisaray from July 11-21. A friend told me on the phone earlier today about how she and a group of Ukrainian-speaking students got kicked out of an internet cafe in Sevastopol recently for... speaking Ukrainian. (Luckily, the teenagers at the village internet shack from which I am currently writing seem to find my Ukrainian to be funny and harmless.) Point being, tolerance is a wise thing to spread around in these parts, so please check them out: www.chemistryoftolerance.org.

A Nod to Wordsworth

2008-05-28T14:57:00.005+03:00

I am restoring my powers in Krakow.

For almost 48 glorious hours I have read, walked, visited with my wonderful extended extended cousin, and attempted to reflect tranquilly on the last month of unstoppable, intense work. There's a lot more tranquility to be recollected before the project gets edited and written, but I am, at this point, at least able to remember half of what Alison and I did in our weeks of work.

Alison flew out of Kyiv a few days ago with something like more than 10,000 images stored on various external hard drives. I have something like 40 hours of recorded interviews and songs and a notebook full of notes. We plan to cyber-manage all that information in the coming weeks, and I hope to update this blog occasionally with more images from our weeks of interviewing and travelling in Crimea in May. Our final day of documentation, on the Day of Deportation (May 18th) in Simferopol, felt like a very peculiar episode of "This Is Your Life." As Alison and I forged through the crowds in search of the ever-elusive Milara-odzha, we ran across countless people whom we had interviewed and photographed in the previous weeks all over Crimea.

Tonight, I will travel to Berlin where Susan and I will kick off our slapdash Debutante Hour European tour, and then meander our way down to Italy, across to Poland, and then back to Ukraine, where we will finish out with a performance at the Les Kurbas Theater in L'viv. Then, I will go back to Crimea, where I will begin another 6 weeks of research generously supported by an SSRC pre-dissertation fellowship.

More to come...

Crimea Looks Good

2008-05-08T20:46:00.012+03:00

Alison has been shooting lots of photos. And I have been taking interviews. We have been drinking coffee. Four or five times a day.

We have also been attending Khydyrlez celebrations, the annual Crimean Tatar May celebration of strength and vitality on the occasion of two prophets meeting. Alison manages to get photos of everything while I stand around and shmooze.

At Khydyrlez celebrations, there is music and dance.

There are tests of strength.

There is a lot of hanging out with old friends:

Sometimes, when Khydyrlez takes place on a holy site, there are wishing trees.

There is always plov.

We have also started making the rounds to a variety of Crimean Tatar homes, including "vremianky" (from the Russian время meaning time, indicating that these homes are temporary or, in many cases, just markers to land claims waiting to be legalized). Today we photographed a family in Доброе, outside of Simferopol, who have been living in their vremianka since December. Theirs are the only kids on the block so far.

We have travelled to pre-deportation homes, such as this young aspiring politician in front of his grandfather's house (now occupied by a Slavic family).

We have been fortunate to visit the most prominent Tatar politician, Mustafa Dzhemilev, in his home.

We have photographed families that are still building, families done building, and families about to start building. We have recorded stories of deportation and repatriation and some beautiful songs.

And I have gotten a little time to soak up some sunlight and pose.

More to come.

Indigenous People

2008-04-30T09:01:00.004+03:00

The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, an advisory body to ECOSOC, is in the closing days of its seventh session in New York City. Crimean Tatars are acknowledged as an indigenous people in Ukraine by the international community and have sent representatives. But Ukraine has dragged its feet for almost 18 years on passing a law designating the Crimean Tatars as an indigenous people of Ukraine and awarding them the rights that come with that designation according to international guidelines.

There are a lot of ways to speculate about why this law has failed to be passed in Ukraine and in Crimea. If you read the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, you might get some ideas. (Land reparations is a big one.) Also, Natalya Belitser has written some excellent articles that summarize the "history of the political debate" over Crimean Tatar indigenous status. As of a few weeks ago, there were rumors that the law was going to be coming up in the Verkhovna Rada again soon, though I have also heard criticisms about the various ways in which the law has been defanged and made empty through the drawn out parliamentary process.

Nadir Bekir, the head of an organization called the Foundation for the Research and Support of the Indigenous People of Crimea (which includes Crimean Tatars, Karaimy, and Krymchaky), shared the following appeal from a member of his organization. I don't think it expresses the voice of all Crimean Tatars, but it's one loud voice among many. What follows is Mr. Muybeyyin Batu Altan's presentation to the UNPFII in New York, which ends with the plea to "Don't let Crimea become Ukraine's Tibet!" Strong words.

THE CRIMEAN TATARS’ STATEMENT

Madam chairperson, esteemed delegates and observers!

I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues for giving our organization this opportunity to report on the ongoing human rights violations perpetrated against the Crimean Tatars, one of the indigenous peoples of Crimea.

It was our sincere hope that we would report some positive developments on the status of Crimean Tatars’ human rights issues in Crimea. We are saddened to report, madam chairperson, that the human rights violations against the indigenous people of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars has significantly increased. Since our last report to this honorable forum, not only our people were attacked and beaten, but our cemeteries were also vandalized and desecrated.

On November 1, 2007, a large group of Russian paramilitary group called “Sevastopol Cossacks” armed with clubs and other weapons, attacked Crimean Tatars on Balaklava Street in Simferopol, Crimea. There were 200 “Berkut” special forces present, but no arrest was made during or after the attack.

On November 6, 2007, a 600 strong “Berkut” special militia forces attacked and destroyed small Crimean Tatar business establishments in Ai-Petri, Yalta. Crimean Tatar businessmen and their supporters were severely beaten by “Berkut” forces, four of them needed hospitalization.

Madam chairperson, barely three months had elapsed since the “Berkut”, the special Ukrainian militia forces attacked and brutally beat Crimean Tatars in November of 2007 Ai-Petri, near Yalta, and destroyed their small business establishments. The same militia forces were on site during the Balaklava Street attack on Crimean Tatars by the Sevastopol Cossacks on November 1, 2007.

While Crimean Tatars were yet to recover from the shock of the aforementioned attacks, in early hours on February 10, 2008 in town of Seitler (Nzynyohirsky) in Crimea, a group of vandals broke into the Crimean Tatar Muslim cemetery, killed the watchdog and then ransacked and desecrated 270 Crimean Tatar headstones.

The ink on our last “Appeal to World Public” and to Ukrainian government in particular, to stop the violent attacks on Crimean Tatars and their sacred places had not dried yet when we received reports and photographs of yet another vicious attack on Crimean Tatar Muslim cemetery in Chistenkoe, near Simferopol on April 11, 2008. This news came just a day after 1000 Ukrainian “Berkut “ special militia forces forcibly evicted 16 Crimean Tatar families who after almost ten years of waiting had no other choice but occupy the building and lived in that unfinished building on Yubileynaya Street in Alushta.

One photograph of the Chistenkoe attack, among several sent to us instantaneously by Nadir Bekir, president of Foundation of Research and Support of Indigenous Peoples of Crimea stands out as it conveys the dangerous and critical ethnic situation in Crimea. Right behind the vandalized and destroyed Muslim headstones, on the wall one sees a graffiti written in red ink that reads as follows:

“TATARI VON IS KRIMA!- TATARS GET OUT OF CRIMEA!”. Next to this ultimatum a hanging noose and next to it the Crimean Tatar national symbol “Tarak Tamga” is crossed off. As we stated in our previous appeal to world public, this vicious attack is just a continuation of series of well planned attacks on the indigenous people of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars, by the chauvinist forces who are determined to destabilize the peaceful Crimean peninsula. As always, the authorities expressed their sadness and act as if they are shocked by these barbaric

desecrations of Crimean Tatar cemeteries, yet so far the perpetrators are not arrested and have not brought to justice. We are puzzled to see thousands of “Berkut” special militia forces marching in to evict 16 innocent Crimean Tatar families, but our cemeteries after numerous attacks still remain unprotected. What are the authorities waiting for? Are they waiting for these hoodlums to attack the Crimean Tatar homes?

These vicious attacks are just continuation of series of attacks on the indigenous people of Crimea, Crimean Tatars, by the chauvinist forces who are determined to destabilize the peaceful Crimean peninsula.

We are afraid that Crimean Tatars’ patient is running thin, and after this latest attack on their cemetery they began to ask their leaders about taking the safety and protection of their families and properties into their own hands. Once again the Crimean Tatar leaders advised against it and asked Crimean Tatars to remain calm and patient. The Crimean Tatar leaders again asked their people to “turn the other cheek” to avoid bloodshed. But how long can they keep “turning the other cheek?” Crimean Tatars’ patience is running out. The peaceful cry of the Crimean Tatars always has been “We have no other homeland, but Crimea” They have no other place to go, they are in their ancestral homeland to stay, and their goal is to coexist there peacefully with all other nationalities as a people and a nation.

Madam chairperson, we apologize if these are repetitious, we have no choice but repeat our demand year after year as the human rights conditions have not changed significantly in the past sixteen years. We, therefore, once again appeal to the United Nations Organization and world public for support of the Crimean Tatars’ always peaceful national struggle for their human and national rights. We also ask the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to join us in our appeal to the Ukrainian National government for an immediate:

Restoration of the human and national rights of the Crimean Tatar people!
Recognition of the Crimean Tatars as indigenous people of the Crimea!
Recognition of the Crimean Tatar National Mejlis as the de Jure representative of the Crimean Tatar people!
Recognition of the Crimean Tatar language as one of the official languages of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea!
Redress all the Crimean Tatar losses including land, homes and other properties!
Return of all Crimean Tatars [living in exile] to their ancestral homeland under government sponsorship, and help them resettle in Crimea, their ancestral homeland!
Protection and Safety of our sacred places, our cemeteries so our deceased may rest in peace!

CRIMEAN TATARS HAVE NO OTHER HOMELAND, BUT CRIMEA! DON’T LET CRIMEA BECOME UKRAINE’S TIBET! HELP US MAKE CRIMEA OUR PEACEFUL HOMELAND AGAIN!

Thank you, madam chairperson!

Mubeyyin Batu Altan

Research and Support of Indigenous Peoples of Crimea Foundation

batu@prodigy.net

April 21, 2008

Field Report

2008-04-29T20:03:00.009+03:00

Well, I have solidified my relationship with the fruit-stand-lady. The fruit-stand-lady-by-the-Salgir-river has decided to trust the foreigner-running-in-a-bright-red-Canadian-hoodie. My casual waves upon arriving and leaving the Salgir river have led up to this responsibility: I am entrusted to guard the fruit stand while the lady makes a dash for the loo. My reward upon her return? A banana.

One could not ask for a more mutually agreeable relationship. I get potassium. She gets some relief.

More importantly, I can say that the last week has been positively fruitful (sorry) from the standpoint of fieldwork. I have met some fascinating people, heard many incredible stories, and recorded some beautiful music.

Last week, I interviewed DJ Bebek, a prominent Crimean Tatar electronic musician whose debut album Deportacia piqued my interest in my first weeks in Simferopol. I also interviewed Enver Seit-Abdulov, an accomplished Crimean Tatar classical bayan player who comes from a line of Tatar musicians. His mother was recorded on this LP, a compilation of Crimean Tatar music recorded in Uzbekistan after Khrushchev's secret apologies for Stalin loosened things up a little bit.

I sat in with the Crimean Tatar student orchestra at KIPU, which is just getting off the ground.

Yesterday was big: I interviewed Fevzi Aliev at his home in Kamianka, one of the first Tatar settlements outside of Simferopol.

He is a towering figure in Crimean Tatar folk and popular music, a composer and performer, and the author of an impressive Anthology of Crimean Tatar Folk Music. He is also incredibly lively and funny, and even played a Ukrainian song that he wrote last year for me at his piano. Here he is demonstrating how it was back in the day when you appeared on Soviet television. (No dancing around like the kids today do.)

Then, I met up with Milara-odzha and we traveled to the Tatar settlement in Maryna outside of Simferopol. Here's a photo of the corner store and the mosque being built.

We went to Maryna to record the story of Nariman Umerov, an octogenarian whose life of hardships is impossible to comprehend when face to face with his humor and charm. (Milara-odzha wanted to write his story up for an upcoming issue of the Avdet newspaper, since the Day of Deportation is coming up on May 18th. It was only after an hour of listening that we learned he was an accordion player. That's his photo at the top.)

Conscripted as a Nazi Ostarbeiter at the age of 14, escaped from the camp outside of Berlin in 1944, subsequently and suddenly handed a gun and integrated into the Red Army (where he eventually became a decorated hero), then exiled to Uzbekistan in the 1950s, reunited with his sisters (who survived the deportation). He told us of how he made his living as a musician (an accordion accompanist in schools and orphanages in Uzbekistan) through complete luck. We heard all the way up to the house that he, his wife and their sons built with their own hands in Maryna in the 1990s. Here are some of his awards and medals.

Today, I had the great honor to meet Mustafa Dzhemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatar political movement, a Soviet Gulag survivor, and an eminent advocate for human and indigenous rights. One of the most surprising things to come of our meeting was his offer to make me a CD of Crimean Tatar music. I am supposed to pick it up tomorrow.

I continue to be astounded by the generosity and hospitality of people at every turn.

There are pages just screaming to be written about each name I've just dropped, but it is too late in the day and there are too many field notes that need to get jotted down before they fly out of my head to do that just yet. Oh, but one day...

Your Worldview Gets Me Down

2008-04-26T14:31:00.003+03:00

I wrote a new song and finally found the time and will to record it today with Milara-odzha's younger brother's old Soviet accordion.

It's part ode to Stringbean (whose signature line: "Lord, I feel so unnecessary" was inspiration), part ode to optimism, and also a passive comment on all of the disagreements I have with people's worldviews in general. The hero who enters at the end actually exists in real life, which is something to be optimistic about.

You can listen to it here.

Ukraine is Not Dead Yet

2008-04-26T01:18:00.003+03:00

Ladies and Gentleman, Verka Serduchka.

I've got to give Verka, Ukraine's beloved cross-

dressing pop star, credit for the winning song of the night, a clever play on the strangely uninspiring sentiment that is the title and refrain of the Ukrainian national anthem: "Ukraine is not dead yet." Doesn't that just make you want to get up and fight?

Not dead yet, everyone!

False alarm.

So Verka adds, "Ukraine is Not Dead Yet if we can DANCE like this." Um tzah um tzah um tzah tzah. Young and old - at the birthday party that I just got home from - everyone could agree to get up and shake it to that.

All this talk about Verka just makes me excited for Eurovision. It's coming up so soon!

Ok, one more. Here Verka accuses you of getting "drunk as a pig."

Ladies and gentlemen, it seems Ukraine's not quite dead yet.

Dialogue of Cultures

2008-04-23T20:52:00.004+03:00

Last week, a conference titled "Dialogue of Cultures" took place at KIPU, my host institution.

I was informed about the conference the day before it started and then eagerly included in the proceedings. It was all very sudden.

Maya, a young teacher in the English department, offered to translate my talk (which I literally threw together in one hour) into Russian and read it for me on the panel. Good practice, she said. I tried to weed out jargon, but she still had a tough job. There's no easy way around post-colonial language.

The episode was chaotic from frenzied start to finish: on the morning of the conference, I was shuffled between three lunches, encouraged to drink wine copiously, photographed, and then hastily introduced as a last minute addition to a (mostly Russian) literature panel, of all things.

My talk - which was basically my dissertation prospectus distilled - was not received very well. If I had to judge solely by the two women sitting in the front row who kept smacking their foreheads and sneering, I would say that it was received very poorly, in fact. Unfortunately everyone blamed this on Maya's translation (which was actually pretty close) and exempted the author, the Amerikanka, from any culpability, even though I interrupted whenever the translation seemed imprecise, encouraged questions (I was denied), and mentioned to anyone who would listen that it was not the (Crimean Tatar) translator's conspiracy to make me seem critical of Soviet, Russian, or other dominant group's nationalist agendas. I am critical.

I felt stupid for not thinking better about who my audience was going to be - and more awful that Maya unfairly bore the brunt of their attacks. In the end, I thanked my victimized translator for her work and apologized for the misunderstanding. Then I listened to my No. 1 heckler give a paper on the mystery of acronyms borrowed from English and adopted into Russian ("we say SMS - but what does it mean? ATM - does anybody know?"), and then I vowed to be more vapid next time. Or learn post-colonial theory in Russian so I can say it all myself.

Dialogue of Cultures.

If you're looking for a strange way to spend 16 or 17 minutes, my friend Max Fass recently posted video footage from a 2005 trip that we took to Космач in the Carpathians, in which we literally collided with a Hutsul wedding party (first scene) and then spent the next day following around the musicians, crashing the wedding. This coming weekend, Kosmach - a village that was at the end of a long squiggly line on my roadmap of Ukraine in 2005 - is hosting its second annual international music festival. For the times, they are a-changin'.

Albeit in fits and starts.

A Story about Music and Deportation

2008-04-20T09:35:00.003+03:00

Late last Saturday night in a garden in Bakhchisaray, after we'd finished the shashlik, spicy carrots, garden tomatoes, pickled cabbage; after an impromptu drum circle began and ended; after we wished Anna well after her 2 years of Peace Corps service; after I played my Crimean Tatar repertoire through on a borrowed accordion and realized that the only "American" songs I actually know the words and chords to are obscure country tunes (which stifled the sing-along with other English-speakers & Peace Corp volunteers); after a taciturn man who used to practice the accordion for 3 or 4 hours a day in Uzbekistan but hadn't touched it in years finally picked it back up and we sang what we could; after we had cleared the tables and started goodbyeing, this same man told me a story about music and deportation:

When the night of the deportation came, a group of musicians from one particular neighborhood in Bakhchisaray were herded onto the same cattle car and transported to Uzbekistan. They all survived the journey, and their instruments survived too. Miracle. When they arrived in Uzbekistan, fatigued, starving, shaking, the local people - who had been led to believe by Soviet propaganda that the Tatars had horns and were cannibals! - were understandably weary of the "special resettlers." But, despite their fatigue and their hunger, the musicians rallied and began to play a къайтарма, a typical Crimean Tatar dance. And, in the storyteller's words, "the people immediately understood what kind of people these were and greeted them with bread and water."

In the years that followed, he said, "music became a way to keep our culture alive."

There is so much more to say about this. Crimean Tatars, having been erased as a nationality, wiped clean of the history books, faced with restricted mobility until Khrushchev's de-Stalinization period, used music as a mnemonic for more than lyrics, melodies, modes; music became a mnemonic for home.

There is so much more to say about this and about everything, really. I have lapsed in my blogging. And while I want to apologize for this, in truth it's mostly a positive development, because I have been busy learning and talking and meeting people, so much so that by the time I get home I am often too exhausted to update the blog. But one day, it will all get written up in the dissertation, Inshallah.

Some highlights of late - including that wonderful farewell party in Bakhchisaray, which was more romantic than my description allowed (imagine stars and firelight and that early spring air) - include my first Crimean Tatar wedding and a visit to a small village to see a small Crimean Tatar children's ensemble. The latest setback - my computer erased its memory mysteriously two days ago, so I've been trying to inventory and mourn the damage.

But hey, this is exciting! Alison Cartwright, my old old friend and a great photographer, is coming out to Simferopol on May 2nd and we will commence our 3-week photo documentation and ethnography project on Crimean Tatar concepts of "home" 20 years after the right of return - and culminating on the Day of Deportation, May 18th. I imagine we will be busy, but there will also be a lot to report....

I can't live in that place

2008-04-11T23:58:00.006+03:00

Another Crimean Tatar cemetery was desecrated yesterday outside of Simferopol. The International Herald Tribune has a little article about it, but it was at the heart of very big discussions on the ground today.

The mood this evening was a little heavy in Milara-odzha's home - lots of visitors - but we took breaks from talking politics to sing.

I thought it might be fun for you to listen to me trying to learn this song, which is called "Эй, Гузель Къырым" or "Oh, My Beautiful Crimea," so I posted this sketchy "field" recording - complete with meandering piano solos! - here.

The last time we left the table for the piano, after dinner and tea and talk and more tea, my teacher, who told me earlier in the day that her heart was heavy from the news, said that while singing hadn't changed anything, it had made her heart a little bit lighter.

This song was written after the deportation, and was popular among Crimean Tatars living in Uzbekistan. My loose (functional, but not poetic) translation of the chorus is:

I can't live in that place

I can't see those places

I miss my homeland

Oh, my beautiful Crimea

I hope it's not too stark to pose this against the glaring instruction by vandals today for Tatars to Get Out of Crimea.

Oh, Simferopol

2008-04-10T19:39:00.003+03:00

I can't help but feel hopeful.

This was the line I came up with on my first jet-lagged afternoon in late January when I sat down to plink out my low-fi ode to heimweh and to celebrate my new temporary home. With almost two weeks of travel behind me, I've returned to Simferopol with fresh eyes and more patience than I had when the draggy end of winter seemed to put everyone - even strangers on the marshrutka - into combat mode. Now that the willows by the river have bloomed and the sun doesn't set til 7, things seem a little friendlier.

This afternoon, I finally had the chance to meet with an exceptional young Crimean Tatar woman, a student at the University, and the secretary of Bizim Qirim, an international youth organization oriented towards supporting the Crimean Tatar political cause. I'm eager to find out more about their work, but it's inspiring - makes me feel hopeful, even - to see savvy energetic people reaching out and making things move a little.

In case you were wondering, my paper at BASEES went off just fine for the tiny audience that attended our panel despite its enticing title. ("Music, Memory, and Politics in an Age of Revolution" - irresistible, no?) I talked about Ruslana's entanglements with various social and political causes on the eve of her Amazonka CD release in Ukraine, which I snapped up in Kyiv on Monday. I'm beginning to see a dissertation chapter or more in this, which is also hopeful.

Academe

2008-03-27T08:53:00.002+02:00

One of the perks of this lifestyle if that sometimes you get to travel to conferences.

Today I set out for the UK to participate in a Slavic and Eastern European Studies conference in Cambridge, where I'll be presenting a paper titled "On Wildness and Civilization: Ruslana's Wild Dances and the Pursuit of Ukrainianness." (Or at least that's the title I settled on this morning, but still subject to change.)

This is part of the reason why you haven't been hearing too much from me this week and probably won't for the next week or so. But once I'm back in Simferopol, armed with my new digital recorder and a variety of curries, I plan to start interviewing Tatar musicians in earnest. So stay tuned.

Black Ears, White Ass

2008-03-24T18:48:00.004+02:00

I am posting this on Monday because I haven't had internet access for the last few days, but the bulk of this entry is from Saturday. I made a quick and dirty recording of the first Crimean Tatar song that I learned on Saturday as well. If you like, you can listen to it here.

Today, Monday, overly generous people at the University praised me to high heaven for my performance of this and one other song last Wednesday for Navrez (which was also, apparently, shown on the Tatar television hour - and they're including it in tomorrow's newspaper! And, I've been invited to sing again tomorrow between acts of the "Miss Beautiful Tatar" contest at the University.)

People especially liked to flatter my accent-less delivery of Tatar, but truthfully, I say the vowels kind of funny. And I can't get the "k'h" sounds to be quite severe-but-still-somehow-delicate enough. And maybe I can't just take a compliment either. Anyway, you get the idea of how a beautiful Crimean Tatar song sounds when accompanied by a mediocre banjo player.

---

Saturday, March 22

Misunderstandings abound. In less than eight hours spent in the coastal resort town of Yevpatoria today, I managed to get into more than a day’s share of misunderstandings, stuttered questions, clumsy exchanges, and even outright spats.

I even lost my temper today! It happened in the car that drove me from Simferopol to Yevpatoria. I had allowed the cab driver to believe that I was a student from Western Ukraine - which he had assumed when he quoted me the very fair price, less than a mashrutka, because he was eager to go and had already lined up three other passengers that he was overcharging. And then, in keeping up the charade that I was from L'viv, I smiled when they asked me if I was «orange». The car full of strangers seemed to scowl in unison. (I swear.) Then followed a 35 minute sermon from the man in the backseat about the stupidity and incompetence of the Yushchenko administration, and anyway, all hail Russia, aren't they smart for figuring out how to keep Putin in charge, and did you know that in Russia everyone has a microwave and Russians this and Russians that and now the world will fear Russia again and soon they will all have Land Rovers and I bit my tongue and bit my tongue and then I bit my tongue and then the I saw red and I YELLED AT HIM VERY LOUDLY. ABOUT CORRUPTION. AND SOULLESS OIL CORPORATIONS. AND KGB AGENTS REVAMPED AS PRESIDENTS AND THEN PRIME MINISTERS. And about how I am a reasonable person who thinks that a brighter future rests on having a representative democracy in Ukraine because that seems to be the best option we've got and really, I just hope that soon we'll have a democracy that represents me too (in the USA, cough cough tee hee). And though I agree that the law that mandates that all movies be subtitled or dubbed in Ukrainian is not good for Russian speakers (and yes, I know you're the majority in Crimea) and agree that it might just polarize Eastern/Western Russian/Ukrainian factions more, I don't think it proves that Ukraine is a bust and we should all salute the Russian flag just yet. And yes, I think those t-shirts at the L'viv bazaars that say «kiss me, I'm not Russian» are not helping anyone. But neither are all the folks in Crimea who spit on the floor and sneer or laugh when they hear Ukrainian. I looked intently out the window at the sea.

And then I asked him to change the subject. The cab driver and the backseat man's waifish lady-friend asked me neutral questions about my imaginary life in L'viv. When I hopped out of the cab later, the man in the backseat reassured me that it would all be ok and that he's sorry if his words seemed harsh. I said goodbye in Russian.

They had dropped me of at the Dzuma Khan Dzami mosque in Yevpatoria, where I was fortunate to be able to tag along on a free tour that had just started. I was pleasantly surprised to follow my tour guide Refat’s compassionate logic as he explained about the misunderstandings of the term “jihad”, the historical reasoning behind Muslim sanctioned polygamy, and how wisdom lies in being able to enter every human interaction mindfully, to ask every question respectfully.

When the tour ended, I stuck around to ask him some questions. We were interrupted by an elderly pale-skinned man – an ethnic Ukrainian, it turned out – who wanted to know what time the tours were going to be give on Sunday. He explained his interest in Crimean Tatar history and in trying to untangle Soviet and contemporary propaganda from objective truth. Refat engaged him in what he called his “subjective truth.” And then ensued one of the most informative dialogues on which I have ever had the privilege to eavesdrop. They covered the Golden Horde, the Tatar Khanate, the Crimean War, the Romanovs, Catherine II, World War II, the deportation, the Black Sea Fleet, and the Russian Empire's historical obsession with strategic ports. The gentleman would thank Refat for his stimulating and well-balanced opinions and then apologize to me for the interruption, but then he would ask another question and the dialogue would start up again. You wish these two men could debate in a public forum - on Ukrainian television, let them debate in Russian, hell! – as they were both so knowledgeable about historical facts and discrepancies and finely tuned to the many reasons why Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, etc are historically positioned to be suspicious or hateful of one another. They talked for almost an hour, looking to me every few minutes to see if I seemed to mind that my conversation in broken Russian had been co-opted, and I assured them that this was much more interesting. (It made me realize that my Russian comprehension is quite good at this point, but my self-conscious spoken impression of Russian is a struggle.) They talked about the damage and utility of generalizations about physical anthropology/physiognomy and accompanying cultural behavioral stereotypes, why and how to protect difference without allowing it to breed misunderstanding.

(And, this was not nearly the most profound point made, but I found it particularly interesting, somehow: the Turkic-language term “white ears” – used mostly for Slavs, but also Europeans – is an inversion of the Slavic pejorative for the indistinguishable huddle of those Caucasian and Central Asian and Tatar “black asses.” Did you know that?)

After the impromptu meeting of minds outside of the mosque, I followed the recommendations of Refat and Milara-odzha and visited three other sites in Yevpatoria.

The first, the old gate to the stariy gorod, where a museum of Tatar culture and a highly recommended kofeyina is housed, was closed for renovations.

The second was the site of my most frustrating misunderstanding of the day: the Tekye Dervish Museum, where a very elderly Tatar woman banished me from the premises of the ethnographic museum. Even now, in tranquil recollection, I am not sure what I did that was so criminally wrong to provoke the blind rage that it apparently did in this woman. My crime: I didn’t ring the bell as the tiny little sign outside the big (and open) wooden doors instructed visitors to do. I didn’t see the sign. And, since the museum doors were open, I entered. The woman was gardening on the other side of the yard so I smilingly said, «Селям Алейкум!» and waved and then, all of a sudden, she was threatening to sic the guard dog on me. She approached me hollering, yelling at me to get back on the street, and literally pushing me out the doors. The large tour group of schoolchildren assembling outside the museum doors found this amusing, and their teacher tried to mediate between me and the old lady. The old lady told her I had been climbing up and down the floors of the museum, poking around disrespectfully. («Not true.») As the teacher told her pre-teens smoking outside the doors to the museum that they «were not normal» and to come inside, she shrugged her shoulders at me. There's too much respect for elders – even ones apparently teetering on the brink of sanity – to challenge their authority in the Tatar community, so I watched the door close and decided not to push it. I'll go back some other day and make sure to ring the bell. Two sites down, one to go.

My final stop included the clumsiest and most random interaction of the day. I visited the beautifully restored site of the 15th century Karaite Kenasa, where the man at the door assumed I was Polish and began telling me facts about our Polish poet-hero Mickiewizc before I even recall opening my mouth.

After strolling the grounds, I decided to have my late lunch at the Cafe Karaman before catching the elektrichka back to Simferopol. All the tables at the small café were occupied, so I asked a rather sophisticated middle-aged woman sitting alone if I could join her. She kindly said «yes, of course» then asked where I was from. She spoke half a sentence in English, and then switched into very fast Moskovskiy Russian. She told me her story. Ira is a retired Russian journalist who is one of the «refugees» - as she put it – from Putin's Russia. She didn't vote in the recent Russian election. She supports Kasparov's «Other Russia» which was, as you may know, blocked from participating. Her growing disgust at witnessing Putin's «authoriarian hold» on «a country of information-starved people» and the «xenophobic attitudes that she witnessed daily on the streets of Moscow», led her to decide to sell her apartment and move to Yevpatoria. She had moved two weeks ago. She ended up walking me to the train station, talking almost the entire way in her smoky rapid-fire Russian. I concentrated hard on listening.

So though I did not get to see two of the main four sites of Tatar and indigenous Crimean culture that I had come to see, I sure did get some information - many stories from an array of strangers. On the elektrichka back to the strange little city where I find myself now, I thought about how those people in that much smaller town will probably never get to talk, to hear each other's stories. But what if the man who believes that life is so much better in Russia could hear Ira's story. (Would he believe it?) What if the cab driver, who nonchalantly dismissed the Tatar squatter's plots as mafia corruption, could hear Refat's subjective truth. What if that old woman had just let me speak. What if all those superior little ears of ours just opened up for a while to listen.

Oy, I'm getting sentimental.

Наврез Байрамынъыз Мубарек Олсун! Or, Happy Vernal Equinox!

2008-03-20T20:15:00.011+02:00

Or most literally, Happy New Day!

I'm all set up in my new solo digs in Simferopol. Now that I'm a 20-minute-or-less walk to every place I need to go, I get phone calls advising me to be somewhere in 20 minutes or less. For example, yesterday morning, I got a phone call about a protest that was quickly picking up steam. I jogged over with my camera and witnessed a sight which was eery and disorienting, all the more so once the sun-shiny early morning calm suddenly switched into an eery windstorm.

Aydir called to say that a protest was going on at the Crimean Autonomous Republic Verkhovna Rada, where Crimean Tatars set up tents a few weeks ago to protest the government's stalling in legally registering land claims made years ago.

I arrived to witness two simultaneously occurring protests: the first protest was the "Russian nationalist bloc" protesting the February law that mandated that all movies shown in Ukraine were now to be either dubbed or subtitled in Ukrainian (and not Russian). Many Russian-speakers - the majority in Crimea - are strongly opposed to this law.

But their protest was impeded by the clang of trash cans being beaten. The Crimean Tatar protest, much bigger than the Russian-bloc, was making quite a bit of noise to call attention to their cause. They were tired of being ignored, one participant told me.

I didn't stick around to see the Crimean Tatar protest tents get taken down later in the day by militsia with riot gear, but the word was that it wasn't pretty.

Later yesterday evening, when I was briskly assisting Milara-odzha in the making of late dinner chebureky, she would periodically dart out of the kitchen - despite not having eaten all day - to shake her rolling pin at the television screen for providing "disinformatsia" on the nature of the Tatar protest.

The reason we were feverishly making fried-dough-and-meat dumplings late at night was because the Navrez performance at the University ran for three hours. Navrez is not a religious holiday, but it's celebrated by many Muslims on the vernal equinox as the New Year. Yesterday, the Azerbaijani diaspora in Crimea hosted a Navrez performance at the University, and I was invited to sing two Crimean Tatars songs with my banjo "as a gift" (to whom?) from the Tatar Literature Department.

It was hard to compete with the other many booty-shaking acts, but the auditorium's worth of students was attentive enough and the two American friends I planted hooted for me at the end of my all-Crimean-Tatar performance. I delivered a short introductory word in Crimean Tatar that was more nerve-wracking than any performance I can recall since I was a teenager playing stormy Teutonic sonatas in competitive situations. Next time I might just lipsynch and strut around the stage instead, I think.

Yesterday was a great example of the kinds of days I have been experiencing more and more in Simferopol - jammed full with conflict and confusion and sadness but also a heavy dose of absurdity and humor. Amidst yesterday's kitchen discussion of exactly what motivates the kind of "disinformatsia" that Milara-odzha objected to on the television, her older daughter observed that I had managed to coat my nose in flour. I told her this was all the rage on the streets of New York, so she smeared her nose with flour too.

Well, the phone just rang, but I don't have to be anywhere until the morning.

With a Little Help from the Friends of My Friends

2008-03-15T17:29:00.004+02:00

I am moving into a cozy - every real estate's favorite euphemism - but centrally-located apartment in Simferopol tomorrow afternoon. Feeling daunted by the Russian-language newspapers advertising apartment rentals, the few phone calls I attempted solo that ended with an abrupt and jarring dial tone after I tried to explain why an unmarried 27-year-old woman needs her own place ("I don't plan on inviting in people off the street, no, not the types that will steal your forks, I promise"), and a frustrating story of an apartment found-and-lost from a friend Peace Corp Volunteer, I activated the chain of friends of friends and - voila! Nabbed the first apartment I saw. It makes up in location and amenities for its size, and it's the right price for the grant money I'm surviving on. Thank god for the friends of your friends' friends.

In other big news, I have been awarded an IREX-IARO to pursue my dissertation research further, so it's looking like I will return to the States for the month of August and then return to Ukraine until - eep - May 2009.

The internet has been down at home which makes this blog unmaintainable. More once I'm relocated and settled in my new pad.

A Week of International Women's Day

2008-03-07T20:24:00.006+02:00

International Women's Day hasn't technically commenced (but it will very soon, on March 8th), yet I've been celebrating it nearly since the moment I touched Simferopol soil yesterday morning after my whirlwind but wonderful jaunt to L'viv and Kyiv. The festivities, by all accounts, had begun in my absence, and I'm booked through Monday.

(Let me just say that I would write a sonnet for L'viv if only iambic pentameter felt less contrived, and Kyiv is all the better when you have an old friend with a cozy apartment to visit. Returning to Crimea emphasized how diverse this country is - I felt more as though I had arrived in another country entirely - especially once the questions about whether I'm Polish began to arise every five minutes again. In L'viv, people usually assume I'm German or Canadian.)

On to International Women's Day. My presence with banjo was requested at the Turkic Lang & Lit celebration at the University yesterday afternoon, so I hopped on the marshrutka and arrived in time for about 5 toasts before I gave my (first) one. Milara-odzha wrote out what I should say in Crimean Tatar and I botched it, but then I think I redeemed myself by playing "Ay yaruk' gedzhesinde" and "Angel Band" accompanying myself on the banjo. "Mashallah" was used generously. I felt glad about that.

Then the dancing began. I couldn't help but imagine what it would be like if 1) Columbia Music Department parties featured professors dancing and 2) if Columbia Music Department parties were called to celebrate the beauty, mystery, and (ahem) biological utility of the females in our department - in addition to their brains.

International Women's Day, much like the Soviet tradition of awarding females who bear 10+ children with "Mother Hero" medals - was a revolutionary gesture in nature, meant to extoll and encourage the achievements of females who, especially at the time, were seen as second-class citizens. The principle of awarding a medal to women who bore so many children was rooted in the premise that socialism needed more workers, especially after a decade of Stalinist exterminations and the massive losses of the Red Army in World War II. Big families were encouraged, mothers who could produce them were advancing the socialist cause, and were therefore heroes. "Hero"is a word traditionally saturated with masculine virtue, so this was, undeniably, a revolutionary move. (Veniamin Makarov was the only male - out of 430,000 Soviet awardees - to get the prize. He adopted 12 boys. Thanks, Wikipedia!) Yet the obvious irony is that a woman raising ten or more children is not going to get very far from the kitchen, as the rhetoric goes. She is probably not going to finish that dissertation. Or even start it, more importantly. So while it's called "heroism" to mother an enormous family, the mother's ability to be emancipated from the shackles of the homestead is destroyed.

International Women's Day contains some of these same ironies. While the gesture is certainly benign - I can't complain about being gifted chocolates and jewelry boxes for being female - its manifestation gets more complicated (especially if you like to overthink things and risk sucking all the joy out of them, teehee). Here in Crimea, the holiday seems in many ways to double as a second Valentine's Day. Instead of emphasizing the achievements or advancement of women in male-dominated or traditional spheres, such as politics, business, and speech-giving, feminine beauty gets privileged. Many women are serious about looking their best for International Women's Day. (You could argue that this is for their own self-esteem, but I think it also has something to do with appealing to the other sex.) My host mother, who runs a small salon, just told me that the two weeks leading up to March 8th are two of the worst weeks of the year for her, with 13-hour days booked months in advance in which she provides manicures and depilatsiya in preparation for the holiday. The only other time it gets this bad, she said, is leading up to the New Year.

Today, I attended the International Women's Day tribute concert at the Crimean Tatar theater in Simferopol, which featured many, many acts and speeches. Some of the acts were terrific, some were confusing to both my eyes and ears. Nine female violinists in what appeared to be wedding dresses played twice, both times accompanied by a synth-y backing track. Pop divas gave dramatic (lipsynched) interpretations of love songs. Many dance troupes featuring children of all ages offered a variety of traditional dances to music ranging from scratchy folk music recordings to Crimean Tatar hip-hop. (My favorite dance was Tum-tum, which is connected to a legend about the Khan's daughter that I plan to get the details on soon. The music, also, was incredible.) The display of feminine beauty was indeed staggering. And beautiful. On the flip side, women who have done good deeds or productive work in the community were also honored on the stage. Most of what was said about them went over my head, though the woman sitting next to me was kind enough to translate when I asked, so I got the gist.

After three hours of variety show with Milara-odzha's younger daughter on my lap and snapping photos with my digital camera, I joined a group of women going out for coffee. The night before, I had attended a dinner with eight women from the lit department. Tonight as yesterday, I noted that I was in a group of women who had left their men at home, treating themselves to a night out. Going out with girlfriends and paying for myself is such a normal part of my life in the States that I would never stop to think about it, but for women with husbands and children in a more traditional society, I began to understand how such acts carry the fragrant whiff of revolution.

In conclusion, I'd like to defer to the philosopher who met me at the door when I got home tonight. I think it helps us understand how confusing everything is:

"The beer is the beer.

The people is the beer.

The world says the trees." (Thanks, Pasha!)

Happy International Women's Day!

How Emira Became Ema

2008-02-29T11:10:00.003+02:00

Since my potato, bread, and cookie intake has shot through the roof in the last month, I decided to join the power gym to which my host brother belongs. So, for the fifth time in two weeks -and much to the alarm of the trainer who presides over the single stuffy room that is the "training hall"and doesn't seem to like to see women exert themselves too much - I have run my 5k and then proceeded to stretch and (feebly) lift weights.

The demographic among women who attend the power gym seems break down into two pretty stark categories: the bodybuilder types who are intimidating to behold and seriously jacked, and the rail thin pretty girls who seem to have come straight from the salon to their workout. These women look terrific, their hair is styled, their little outfits are cute, they like to get attention from males who are working out, and they seem to never break a sweat.

Following my run and stretch this morning, a young women in the locker room told me that I was "умна" (clever?) for being able to run so long and so fast. We chatted for while, she introduced herself as "Ema." I finally confessed that I was foreign, and told her as best I could why I am in Simferopol. She then confessed that she is Tatar and her real name is "Emira." But, she explained, people here have a hard time with that name.

I didn't press it any more, but you begin to wonder how many things besides pronunciation "hard time" encompasses. This is the second time in two days that a young woman has divulged her Tatar heritage in my presence by admitting that her modified or adopted name is an attempt to blend in.

Yesterday, Milara-odzha teasingly called out the young woman who came to read her electric meter. Looking at her squarely, she said, your name is really "Карина"? - I could swear you look like a Tatar. The girl admitted that her given name is actually "Elvira," but it's easier to get around with the other name. She read the meter, and then joined us for coffee and cookies.

---

I am boiling eggs and packing my bags for the 25-hour train ride to L'viv during which I plan to hone my basic knitting skills, practice Tatar silently, and finish the Norman Rush novel that I am engrossed in. Return journey will be through Kyiv with a stopover for a couple days, too. Very much looking forward to seeing long unseen friends and family in both places. Crossing my fingers that I don't have to share my train compartment with any thugs.

Coffee in Bakhchisaray, with Blow Torch

2008-02-27T20:36:00.021+02:00

I have lucked into the excellent company and expertise of two stunning and inspiring Peace Corp volunteers in the last week. Yesterday, my new Simferopol based friend Scott took me to meet Anna in Bakhchisaray, a magical townlet about an hour from Simferopol. Both Anna and Scott have been working with the Crimean Tatar community here for the last 2 years, so both have really interesting perspectives (and sometimes even answers, lo!) on the mysteries and questions that have been pestering me all around. Both have also been so generous about sharing their network of contacts with me, which almost makes it feel like I'm cheating somehow. (But really, I'm just a lucky ethnographer.)

The gentleman making coffee above is Ayder Asanov. He and his daughter

Elmira are master artists who create gorgeous jewelry for sale at the Usta Handicraft Shop which Anna has set up during her tenure in Bakhchisaray. The Asanovs are a talented bunch -

Elmira's brother is also a well-known Crimean Tatar musician who worked on the Crimean Tatar karaoke DVD that I finally got to see today.

Two days before, I visited the Ablaevs, another family of jewelery makers (to whom this necklace can be attributed). They live in Maryna, a rayon of Simferopol in which some of the mustard-yellow squatter's claims have been slowly built up into livable houses. The photo below shows the scene across the street from the Ablaevs. More on this soon.

This weekend, I scored an old Russian accordion

from Milara-odzha's brother (it's on loan, really)

and just now figured out that I can accompany myself on banjo to a Tatar song

that I've learned to sing (John Comfort Fillmore, anyone?). Discoveries abound.

Unbecoming, or, Just Words

2008-02-21T21:18:00.004+02:00

There are some words I don’t use, and it’s not because I’m humorless. Some words make me uncomfortable. This has been a recurring intellectual problem for me, and I’ve had to confront it here in Ukraine since I arrived.

The other morning, I was chatting in English with a Russian-speaking college student who speaks broken English rapidly and wanted to practice. Let’s call him Sasha. I told him that I had awoken that morning from a dream in which I was one of Barack Obama’s grade school confidantes, and that I had been walking the halls of the White House engaged in who-likes-who level discourse. (I guess all the CNN talk about Obamamania – is that the coinage? – has seeped through to the point that my subconscious thinks it is best girlfriends with this admittedly likeable politician. Anyway.)

Sasha said that he had heard on the news that Obama won’t stand a chance in the general election because Americans “will not vote for a nigger.” (It frightens me even to write it, even if it’s in quotes.) I told Sasha that I heard a different statistic and then I told him not to use that word.

The clip that CNN World Edition has been replaying over the last two days features Hillary pushing her “talking not doing” critique of Obama, and Obama responding with part of that speech that he borrowed in which the formula is:

1. Insert famous line (We hold these truths to be self-evident/I have a dream/Ich bin ein Berliner/life, liberty, property/fear itself/etc …
2. Crowd erupts in applause
3. Speaker, derisively: “Just words?”
4. Crowd continues to erupt.

It’s a good and obvious rhetorical tactic (Thanks, Cicero!). The great irony, of course, is that taking any of those famous utterances out of their context only works because of the famous actions they accompanied. FDR or MLK or JFK were people facing real situations when they said those words. But then so is Obama - so good for him for using other people’s words to remind us that all of this is just overheated pre-real-situation talk.

Just words? The man’s got a point. Words may be arbitrary signs and all that, but they’re also dense catalogs of meaning. Words are some of the most public and the most personal items we possess. The meaning of a word is layered with the history of that word’s currency in our own lives as much as its wrapped up in its social history: of literature, speech, or a genre like hip-hop. Every time I try out a new word I’m as conscious of it as if it’s a new wig I’ve just put on. (How does it look?) Every time I dredge up a ten-dollar word I’m sensitive to it. (Am I pretentious now?) Every time I hear Bush's mid-sentence hem-and-haw, hear the wheels in his brain turn, I think about the word that's gone missing. I’m aware of how other people use words, especially at weird times: a flashy word in a kindergarten class, academic jargon while ice-skating, an archaic term in a pop song, or a mundane word lodged in a sophisticated critique. (A professor who always referred to good writing as “nice” comes to mind.) I’m sensitive to words in context most of the time. I imagine it’s the same way for most of us who care about words and know how powerful they can be.

So, back to my problem: I got flustered. Sasha blew my defensiveness off as an absurd PC-ism, an American tic. He said, “How come if they can say it to each other all the time I can’t use it. Jay-Z, Nelly, 50 Cent, Kholi-vud - they all use it.” I pointed out that it’s a specific context, that Obama would never refer to himself using the term, just as Hillary would never designate herself a “ho.” Eep. I pointed out that this has been a contentious issue even within the hip-hop world, if you remember that ban proposed by Russell Simmons a few years ago and the T-shirt debacle from last week. (CNN, my only friend…). Sasha didn’t care. I warned him against ever using the term because people will misunderstand him. He shrugged. This went on for a while. I resorted to berating him (not a debate tactic endorsed by Cicero, I think). My behavior grew to be не красиво, as people here like to say, which my instinct translates as “unbecoming,” but is probably literally closer to “not beautiful” (it’s tricky to find the exact right words). I felt blindly righteous on this point. And then, later in the day, I got to thinking about Ching Chong Song.

Ching Chong Song is a band that I got hooked on a few months ago. (Susan’s playing with them now, which makes it even better.) They are surprising performers, authors of really interesting strange music, and nice people to boot. They are not Chinese. (Would it be different if they were?) Their songs have nothing to do with Asia. They are not people who hate other people. But they are passionate. They are not naïve. They did not set out to provoke anybody, I think, but they did. Their band name has been in the center of a controversy: they’ve been protested at Bryn Mawr College and at NYU and just this past weekend, had a gig cancelled because a half-Asian bandmember of another band on the bill felt uncomfortable. Susan told me that she wrote a letter to the guy in the other band to explain why she doesn’t have a problem playing with Ching Chong Song. I asked to see it, then I asked her if I could post part of it on my blog. She said yes:

“The way I see it, yes, "Ching Chong" is a racial slur. It was created out of ignorance. It's a dumb term created and used by people who let their stupidity and fear have the better of them. That's how we originally experienced these words. But Ching Chong Song is not a racist band. They're simply not. I think the juxtaposition of the band name with the kind of band that Ching Chong Song is points out the silliness of the term and could even have an inoculating kind of effect on it. To me, this is empowering if anything. We can't erase the term "ching chong" from the American vocabulary. It's like trying to erase knowledge of unpleasant things like how to make weapons or historical events where people were mistreated. I, as an Asian American, don't see the need to obliterate any words at all, but perhaps change how we relate to them and hopefully change how we relate to each other. And (as cheesy as this sounds) I think one of the ways to change how we relate to each other as human beings is by creating rich and true music. And Ching Chong Song creates some of the most inventive and beautiful music I've heard.”

Later, in a letter to me, Susan wrote, “What do we do with these words that were used to hurt people? Or that represent ignorant, hurtful thought? I think it's a sensitive case-by-case kind of thing. I don't think there's a fast rule to anything. But that's why I say, in the case of Ching Chong Song, it makes the ridiculousness of the words stand out because of the kind of band they are and the kind of music they make. If they were a KKK country band or a gangster rap group with an Asian fetish, would I feel different? I don't know... maybe. It would depend on the hairstyles. Ha.” And still later, “I've been thinking ever more about what if those words were used in other contexts, and the conclusion I came to was that when it comes to words, I don't care that much. I'm not so much offended by words as I am by actual racists. In the example of bands I used, I thought it wouldn't be offensive that a KKK country band was using the words Ching Chong, it would be offensive that a KKK country band was racist. Do you get what I mean? Words are just words, but what's offensive are racists - people who actually believe another race of people are lower than them.”

What is our responsibility when it comes to words? Should we police others, or only when their words are motivated out of hatred or ignorance? Where’s the line between using words and believing in all the meaning that they can encompass? Am I a hypocrite for getting so upset over Sasha’s word preference while listening to music made by this band?

A friend told me, when I asked her about Ching Chong Song, that white people never ever under any circumstances get to use any ethnic slurs. They just don’t, because they’re white, and that means power and privilege and all the accompanying accoutrements. Whiteness is hegemonic, there’s no way around that. Ching Chong Song knew the slur they were invoking, they knew that paper/rock/scissors is a game played in Germany with the same name, and they knew that they liked the way the name sounded. Is it defensible? I don't know. Listen to their music.

I’ve been conducting a poll here in Simferopol. I ask everyone I can about the little mustard-yellow squatter’s houses that are strewn across the landscape outside of Simferopol, outside of Bakhchyserai, and other Crimean towns to see how they explain them. (The little houses represent plots that Tatars have claimed – and now other groups have glommed on to the plan – in an attempt to get adequate land on which to build houses in the future.) About three or four responses have referred to the property as being seized by “Tatar mafia,” and, in one case, “Ukrainian-Tatar mafia.” These never come as explanations from Tatars. I mentioned this yesterday at lunch with 4 women from the Crimean Tatar Literature department at the University. One of them said, “Yes, I’m the mafia. I staked a claim.” She didn’t laugh. I said, “But doesn’t mafia imply power and violence?” She said, “It depends on your perspective.” Everyone at the table seemed to smile knowingly. I probably looked confused, because explanations followed: the Tatars are a minority group whose position is widely misunderstood by a majority people who have no real reason to try and empathize. In the sense that they’ve tried to organize and have been willing to take some risks (albeit non-violent ones) in asserting themselves as repatriates, sure, they’re a mafia.

Nobody got too touchy about the word itself, the label of “mafia.” The term, with it’s не красиви connotations, became a stand-in for Crimean Tatar solidarity at the lunch table. The word itself unbecame the word as it's defined in the dictionary. It unbecame itself in our conversation, as we tried to understand the perspective of other people's (inappropriate) use of the term. Maybe there's something to that: unbecoming.

I present you with the tip of the iceberg.

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There seem to be lots of fireworks going on outside in my neighborhood right now. I wonder if it’s because the sun finally came out of hiding today.

Vacationland, why hast thou forsaken me?

2008-02-19T19:46:00.004+02:00

It snowed a lot more today. Those of you who thought I was clever for choosing Crimea for its beaches now know how far into the future I can see. I can't remember the last time it was this cold in New York.

The trudge home over the train tracks from the overcrowded marshrutka almost made it worth it, though. Made me feel like I was in a Tolstoy novel, somehow. A marginal character, perhaps.

Observation of the day: children don't make snowmen here, they make very large snowballs.

I decline, you decline, he/she/it declines

2008-02-18T18:10:00.011+02:00

I had a semi-mortifying experience today when I attended Milara-odzha's class for 1st years in the Crimean Tatar and Turkish Language and Literature department. Lots of Tatar flew over my head - these are what we would call "heritage" speakers at Columbia - and then before I knew it, I was standing in front of the class, chalk in hand, asked to decline the noun "rale" (рале) which means "desk." There's that "Knowledge is Power" Norman Rockwell painting that comes to mind. Except maybe with knobbier knees in my case. And the chalkboard was bright blue. Anyway, declining nouns is not my forté. Nor is conjugating verbs, turns out.

Well, monkey has a new trick. Milara-odzha and I have begun to advertise my ability to sing a traditional Crimean Tatar song whenever my inability to speak Tatar inhibits the possibility of a good and easy time for all. The advertisement inevitably invites a request to hear the song, and then, after 30 seconds of song, everyone says "Mashallah!"

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to be included on my new friend Natasha's family excursion to the chic new ice rink in Sevastopol. Afterwards, we went bowling, in the gorgeous bowling alley in the same mall where ice skating is located. Maybe you know that I love bowling. Well, it was really fun, though I didn't play very well.

There's been a lot of little doses of snow over the last week. Pipes are bursting, and the train tracks that I cross are looking more picturesque than usual.

Another development: the Baby Pool CD is now available on CD Baby!

How to Make Plov

2008-02-16T21:56:00.017+02:00

I arrived to Milara-odzha's house this morning and she was making plov. And so began our first cooking lesson in Russian and Tatar. Here's what you need to make what she calls "real Uzbek plov" - in which proportions are roughly 1 kg - 1 kg of most ingredients. Easy peasy.

250-300 grams sunflower or olive oil

1 kg meat of any kind

1 kg carrots

1/2-1 kg onions

(250 grams of peas, optional)

1 kg white rice

boiling and cold water, which you'll eyeball on a few occasions

"plov spices" - with barbaris (barberry), cumin, coriander, and peppercorns

salt to taste

(I did ask whether it was possible to make vegetarian plov. Her first response was "If there's no meat in it it's not plov." Then, she seemed to reconsider, and added that her husband has made varieties with apples or peppers or pretty much anything when there's no meat around, which get pretty close to plov.)

1. So, in a pot like the one pictured below, fry the onions and the meat in oil until brown. Then add carrots, and if you have them, peas. Stir it up.
2. Once it's all good and brown, add boiling water to cover the mixture. Add plov spices and salt by instinct. While you let that boil for a minute, give your rice a good washing in cold water to prevent it from getting soggy later on. Put the rice in a bowl, and pour boiling water to cover it. Let it sit like that for a few minutes.
3. Then, add the rice to plov mixture.
4. Throw in 1-2 heads worth of whole garlic cloves. (Also, you can throw in an entire garlic head at this stage and use it later as a garnish. Just cut the tough part off the bottom.) Cover the rice and plov mixture with "two fingers worth" of water.
5. Stir it well, and then cover it. Let it cook on high while you have coffee.

6. Enjoy your coffee.

7. Uncover the plov and check it out. The rice should be mostly cooked but not completely done. Pile it up "like a mountain" and then give it some air to breathe, as pictured below. Set the heat on low. Cover it again.

8. Get your pickled vegetables ready.

9. Uncover the mixture, fish out the meat and make sure it is cut into small enough bits.

10. There you go, now you have plov. Unlike borscht, which is always better on the second day, plov is best enjoyed fresh, so eat up. No, really, have some. Oh, you like it? Have some more. And some more after that.

Ой Боже!

2008-02-14T21:09:00.015+02:00

You might know how the old song goes:

Oy Bozhe, what a beautiful world

How hard it is to leave it behind

They make vodka there, they make wine,

and then they offer you beer as a chaser.

In my case, it was vodka-cognac-beer-cognac-vodka. A palindrome of alcoholic beverages.

And this started before noon.

(Although, contrary to the stereotype I'm invoking, the truth is that there's been little imbibing in Simferopol. My host family aren't really drinkers - this was an exception - and no one else seems to be either.)

Today was my host mother/sister's mother's (my host grandmother's?) birthday, and I was invited to join in the celebration when I first arrived almost 2 week

s ago. So, we travelled by glamorous elektrichka to Джанкой (Dzhankoy) a town on the northern end of Crimea, to visit baba's house.

The day was great fun, though I took a serious nap following our meal. Baba presented me with a Tajik caftan. The caftan had originally been given to her by her Tatar friend and neighbor Ana, who was kind enough to show us the footage from her niece's wedding last summer - this was part of the reason I was encouraged to come. (Ana also prepared some very delicious plov, and now I'm charged with preparing it according to her recipe for International Women's Day when Baba comes to visit Simferopol.) Baba wanted to demonstrate how the caftan looked before presenting it, which is part of what is happening in the photo below. What was also happening was that Baba was dancing to the music emanating from Russian MTV or whatever Boris was watching in the other room.

And, to satisfy those of you who have been asking, here's a photo of me with my younger host brother Pasha. (That's still what I look like, thanks for reading my blog.) Pasha and I have the most amazing avant-garde conversations in English. Here's a loose transcript of the conversation we had right before this photo was taken:

Pasha: "Don't." (time elapses, he's looking at me expectantly)

Maria: "You?...What?"

P: "eh, hotel"

M: "wait -- "

P: (interrupting, very quickly) "- it was say present gift. Say, saying"

M: "what was?"

P: "yesterday... eh... tomorrow."

M: "hotel?"

and so on....

He's going to be fluent by the time I leave.

Happy Day of Lovers, as they say here. I wrote a love song for a bureaucrat to celebrate.

And I'll leave you with that, my second self-promotional stunt in this entry.

a cathedral-like mosque

2008-02-12T23:05:00.001+02:00

I've heard it said now by 3 or 4 different people that the battle for the "cathedral-like mosque" (sobornoya mechet') in Simferopol is going to make news.

Yesterday, I went with three faculty members of the University to deliver money that had been collected to support the men who are taking shifts to keep the protest going around the clock. The conflict, from what I understand, centers on the lethargic pace at which the paperwork to secure the land for the mosque is being processed, and also on the site, which is on the outskirts of the city (the original spot, closer to the center of town, was rejected). The frustration of the community is easiest to understand when you witness how many churches seem to be springing up in every neighborhood in Simferopol, including the center. Right now, there's one official mosque in town. (Though there may be others; this has been contested by some people I've talked to.)

We arrived at lunchtime. The man approaching with the box came to offer my cohort and me each a pyrizhok. We were invited to come inside, and I was greeted warmly - (and publicly, with a word about how my parents instilled in me their Ukrainian culture and language, and they should take this example!) - by the gentleman I met on my first day at the University.

The flags flying outside the tents are the Crimean Tatar flag (with the tarak symbol) and the Ukrainian national flag.

We're at -13 degrees Fahrenheit in Simferopol.

American klutz

2008-02-12T20:01:00.000+02:00

I had one of those days when it felt like, just to walk down the street and appear normal, you need to have internalized a cultural knowledge that only those who were born in this part of the world can possess. Amidst the towering waifish rhinestone-and-fur adorned women, I felt conspicuous and awkward in my sensible wool coat, flat-heeled boots, and outfit featuring every layer I own, which I trotted out to battle the bone-searing cold. A klutzy American roly-poly.

It appears that when the temperature dips below zero I lose a significant amount of brain function. Conjugating verbs today: impossible. Purchasing dental floss: not easy. Eating dinner: untidy. Opening marshrutka doors: multiple attempts. While recording banjo for this new love song for a bureaucrat I got tangled up in the three cables I have in the most surprising, spectacular way. You should have seen it.

This Love Song is for all you lonely hearts who have been victims of a bureaucracy. It's also for those of us who know the power of being a lowly bureaucrat, and taking that power out on someone from outside the system: blame it on the rules. I've been on both sides, I admit, though I will be enjoying Crimean bureaucracy some more for the coming months. Bring it on.

(I'll probably stop making this disclaimer once I stop trying to get my MOTU to work and get comfortable with my one-internal-mic aesthetic, but the recording situation here in my room is poor poor poor. And the barking dogs give no respect.)

Internet's been down the last few days, but Susan and I are still going to try and get a Debutante Hour podcast out for everyone's favorite holiday, when we honor the most mercurial of the cherubs with our recollections of first kisses and greatest embarrassments and so on.

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On a more serious note, I have had a fascinating few days learning about the Crimean Tatar situation and am going to write more about it possibly even tonight if the internet holds. This morning, the Turkic and Tatar languages department office was abuzz with the story of the desecration of a Tatar cemetery in a Crimean village. Really sad. Here's the Kyiv Post article. If you read Russian, there's a ton more. Milara-odzha (who is a real firecracker, incidentally) pointed out that someone's trying to provoke the Tatars into retaliation but their religion (Islam) doesn't allow for a violent response. I thought that was such a refreshing perspective, given how often Islam seems to get confused with extremism these days.

place is a palimpsest

2008-02-09T23:09:00.000+02:00

If places are made of layers – dust, mud, brick, legend, name, text – what happens when one layer gets removed? A genocidal campaign on text, on history, architecture, an attempt to erase a place and to forget its former inhabitants, what Rory Finnin (2007) calls “discursive cleansing.” There is power in naming and there is power in making. Can remembering be as powerful? How do we learn “home”?

The situation of the Crimean Tatars can be summarized as: a struggle to remember, and a willfulness to persevere. An attempt to excavate a history that was brutally excoriated, a campaign to restore a lost layer, the vestiges of eras, onto a place that has continued to evolve, be written and re-written, over decades. And the denial by many that this layer, the memory of an older place, deserves to be restored.

Histories written in different alphabets are different histories. Yesterday, Milara-odzha told me that Simferopol was named Kermençik until the 13th century, Aqmescit (or Aq Mechet, “white mosque”) until 1784, when it was conquered under Catherine the Great and renamed Simferopol (from the Greek, “city of utility”). In Crimean Tatar, it would have been written this way, in Latin script, between 1928 and 1939. In 1939, the alphabet changed again along with the occupying Soviet power. Modifications were made to preserve sounds that had already been carried across different alphabetic conceptualizations of sound. In the end, two vowels didn’t make it into the Cyrillic version of Crimean Tatar, and conventions of pronunciation changed as a result. The sound of our language changed, she said.

One of the attempts by the Soviet regime to depict the deportation of the Crimean Tatars as a humanitarian relocation was to claim that Tatars would feel more at home in Central Asia, where they were linguistically and ethnically closer to the native population. Part of this is true: Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz speak Turkic-Altaic language. They had a religion, Islam, in common. Crimean Tatars tend to have features similar to many Central Asian ethnic groups.

Yet despite their peaceful ability to make lives, pursue higher education, have families and community in Central Asia, most Crimean Tatars chose to return to Crimea when the path for return finally opened. These were the children, and in many cases, the grandchildren or great-grandchildren, of those deported. Yesterday, I asked a musicologist professor where life was better. His answer seemed more scientific than sentimental: “Materially, life was better in Uzbekistan. In Crimea, life is better for the soul.” His family sold their Tashkent apartment for nothing, came to Simferopol and began to build a house from scratch on the outskirts of the city. They have heat, electricity, and water now, but their house is still not finished. It was a powerful idea that made them persevere.

One of my answers to “Why Crimean Tatars? It’s so specific” is because the example of the deportation and return of the Crimean Tatars is an extraordinary example of what home means and how powerful memory can be. We theorize deterritorialization, we hear about globalization daily, I feel it most palpably now as I sit in my room in Simferopol and write something to post on the internet. Individuals break with home and feel happier that way, some create multiple homes or believe that human relationships are home. But when a collective home is rooted in place and the site becomes contested, conflicts flare up on every scale: epic disputes (Israel-Palestine), neighborhoods campaigns (Atlantic Yards), and contemporary genocides (Darfur), with which we’re all familiar.

It’s trite, maybe, but Dorothy may have awoken to a startling truism. Home is potent. There’s no place like it. And while home may be unique to each individual, the case of the Crimean Tatars shows that a collective memory of home can mobilize a quarter of a million people to move thousands of miles to a place they had never actually been, but still called home.

How does a collective memory of home get transmitted? One way is through songs. Yesterday, singing about the Black Sea coast and the romance of the Crimean moon in Tatar with two little girls and their proud Tatar mother (in landlocked Simferopol), I remembered how one learns such things.

When my little brother and I were wee Ukrainian-American tots, we were taught a song that, loosely paraphrased, goes “When we grow up big and strong, brave warriors, we’ll restore our native Ukraine to its rightful hands.” (These were still Cold War years, remember.) We learned a lot of other songs, too, about Halya, Ivanko, the idyllic Carpathian mountains, and how delicious varenyky with cheese are to eat.

My family came to Ukraine for the first time, as it happened, on the day that Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The trip was emotional, but I was too young to really understand why. I didn’t feel like I was home (in fact everything seemed very drab and grey and alien) but I sobbed when we left. I used to cry every time I left Ukraine for years after. Though I never felt at home here, and arrivals were often jarring, it always felt like a wrenching away when I left. It felt elemental, historical, a wrenching away from a deep connection to place - possibly, a symptom of the inheritance of home.

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On a totally unrelated and much lighter subject: The Debutante Hour EP is now available for purchase online, Weeee! It’s economical and special. You can buy your very own copy here.

I spent the entire day pretty much hanging out at Milara-odzha’s house with her daughters, a visiting artist, and her husband. It was really fun and I learned a lot. Heart and Soul is going to be a big hit when the girl’s perform it on International Women’s Day (March 8th).

Pace yourself

2008-02-07T21:31:00.000+02:00

If ever you should find yourself on your birthday in Simferopol, and have the good fortune to be invited to someone’s home for lunch and someone else’s for dinner, you should, first, count yourself lucky. Second, pace yourself. Third, pace yourself. Because there’s always more to come. The instant a plate appears empty there will be more salat oliviér to fill it up, or more chebureshki, or more manta, or cake, or homemade wine, or more of whatever the table is laden heavy with... Oh, we do know these things, but we forget.

It was a good day. I woke up to some lovely things from friends far away, spent the morning interviewing a Crimean Tatar musicologist, made contact with accordion, bayan, folk ensemble, and other faculty members at the University (who I’m looking forward to working with over the coming months), and then had my Tatar lesson in Milara-odzha’s home. I got to hang out with her two adorable little girls (ages 8 and 11), who presented me with happy birthday watercolors of Minnie Mouse and Baba Yaga. We quizzed each other on proper nouns - they had the right answers in Tatar and I knew the English, at least. We played and sang Tatar songs at the keyboard and I taught them “Heart & Soul” for four hands. It still needs some work.

People who I have known for exactly a week were so kind as to gift me many books, a mug (it says "Мариа" - I'm holding it in the too-dark photo that I attempted to salvage at the top of this page), enormous boxes of chocolates, a loofah, and even a statue of a mouse standing on a glittering pile of money. (How did they know?)

Tomorrow, I'm going to write a less diary-like entry. On the idea of "home."

Спокойной ночи!

Машалла! Or, Mashallah!

2008-02-06T21:12:00.001+02:00

Селям алейкум!

I walked through the Park Gagarina to the University this morning. It took almost an hour, but the day anticipated spring and it's more fun to practice Tatar while you're strolling. Can't wait til the willows along the river bloom.

The walk was in some ways a tour of the extremes of Simferopol, and maybe Ukraine - crumbling old churches, expansive mansions, stray dogs in piles of garbage, gargantuan satellite dishes, awkward English expletives etched in graffiti - all come up along the river in the park. And then a jaunt through the mostly

posh center of town, where my heart bleeds for the elderly baba beggars, the nouveau riche parade by in metal stilettos and ostentatious furs, and the street music seems always to include some kind of accordion.

The afternoon was spent with Milara-odzha declining nouns and trying to figure out that guttural "k" and "h" that I can't seem to reproduce. She likes to take me around the department, introduce me in lightning-speed Tatar to whoever as the New Yorker who came to learn Tatar, and then put me on the spot. Right now I am able to muster about 5 complete sentences when called to do so, to which everyone generously responds Машалла! ("mashallah") which is like "molodyets" which is a word of congratulations in Russian/Ukrainian that is difficult to define exactly. At the end of our lesson, we sang a beautiful love song, talked about love, and she listened to the recording of herself singing and explaining the same song at our lesson the previous day. It felt like a real deep ethno moment. We're going to get it properly recorded soon.

Hashed over the primaries, drank an unsatisfying beer, and watched a strange game of pool unfold this evening when my host brother/bodyguard accompanied me to meet a Peace Corps volunteer who I found serendipitously on the all-knowing interweb. The pool game, which had elements of calvin-ball, was the first very surreal experience of that nature that I've had here on this trip. The dream ended when the last marshrutka left (close to 9 pm) and I finally relented and admitted that I was Polish to an inebriated guy who had been trying to get me to admit it for quite some time. Yes, ok, I'm Polish! See ya!

Акъшам шерифинъиз хайырлы олсун! Which is the long way to say "Good night"!

On Crimean Tatars, Or, Meet My Didactic Side

2008-02-04T22:06:00.000+02:00

Today, I had a mani/pedi. My host mother, Ira (she's really like my host big sister) pictured below, runs a small subterranean salon where she also offers makeup tattoos and "depilatsiya" with sugar (a process shrouded in mystery, even after much questioning). But this was really only the very first thing that happened today.

Ira offered me a mani/pedi practically upon my arrival last week, partly because I'm a guest in her home, but also because a co-worker of hers is a Tatar woman. So Gulnara, a pretty dyed-blond Tatar woman, told me an incredible story about her family's deportation from and return, half a century later, to Crimea - while I had my nails painted in an ornate poppy flower design. She delivered her story in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable: We lost $15,000 when we left Uzbekistan, sold our house there for nothing. We came here and were homeless. My father couldn't get a job. He still can't. We decided to come spontaneously, and it's been hard, but life is hard. Etc.

A quick review: On May 18, 1944, the entire population of Crimean Tatars - some 200,000 - were loaded onto cattle cars by order of Stalin, who believed that they were conspiring against the Soviet regime, and deported en masse to Central Asia. Many Tatar men were serving on the front, so the majority of those deported were women, children, and the elderly. It is estimated that 1/2 to 2/3s of the total population of Tatars died on the trains before they reached Central Asia. Shortly after, the Soviet regime pushed a propaganda campaign to encourage ethnic Russians and Eastern Ukrainians to move to Crimea. Land of Sun and Sea! Boundless opportunity awaits! Land land land! Many Turkic place names were changed to Russian names, mosques destroyed, houses resettled, books burned. In 1954, Khrushchev gifted Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR as a token of 300 years of friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian people.

In 1991, Crimea became independent along with Ukraine, and after an extremely volatile decade - with threat of secession from multiple sides and huge fights over the Black Sea fleet - the Crimean autonomous republic of Ukraine seems to have settled into an unsteady compromise, somewhere between complacency and tolerance, for its present political affiliations.

Crimean Tatars weren't given the right of return to the Crimean peninsula until 1988. Even then, they weren't provided any guarantees about access to land, jobs, education, or, really, anything. In 1991, the Crimean Tatars formed an independent governing body, the Mejlis, to advocate for their rights. By the end of the 1990s, about 250,000 Crimean Tatars had returned to Crimea. Many squatted in vacant homes and lots. Some, when forced by authorities to surrender land, threatened self-immolation and in some cases, made good on the threat. The international human rights community became involved. NGOs proliferated, the Crimean Tatars were considered for special status as a Ukrainian "indigenous" group. Things were looking better. The international human rights community slowly left. Many NGOs began to disintegrate.

Today, Crimean Tatar is being offered in some secondary schools and universities, such as the Crimean Engineering and Pedagogical University, pictured below. (I'm studying here.)

Many Tatars have found jobs and homes, but many haven't. On the way out of Simferopol, I observed vast open fields that are cluttered with tiny mustard-yellow brick houses, many of which look like the ruins of shacks that never got built. These houses represent the claims of Tatar families seeking to gain legal rights to build on the land (though I was told today that other ethnic groups have caught on to that plan).

Feelings of animosity towards the Tatars are surprisingly quick to rise to the surface. I visited two English language classes today where I explained that I came here to study Crimean Tatar culture and music. Afterwards, the teacher told me that, when I say such things, it is really shocking to her students, because no one wants to study Tatar culture here. Tatars, she explained, are largely despised by Russians and Ukrainians. They are not all bad, she said, but they feel entitled to something that is no longer theirs.

This certainly is not the opinion of everyone I've spoken to. But the "shock" over my decision to come and study this culture is evidence of something, and has been observable since I first opened my yap about this whole project.

I met a lot of Tatars today. On my walk to university, I grabbed a quick lunch and met Rushen, who operates a small shawarma/cheburek stand in the central bazaar. We chatted as he prepared my food - his Ukrainian was really good - and shared his family's story of deportation and return. Incredible how consistent his telling was with Gulnara's a few hours earlier.

I also met the gentleman pictured below at the University. Refat is a WWII war veteran and autodidact philologist/ethnographer who is working on publishing his 5th volume of oral history of the Crimean Tatar deportees. He was overwhelmed by the fact that a Ukrainian-American New Yorker was interested in his culture.

I have to confess, though, that my first lesson in Crimean Tatar didn't go so well. Switching from Russian through Ukrainian to English to Crimean Tatar is quite taxing on the brain. It's difficult for me to pronounce. And I'm still jet-lagged. And Milara-odzha, my teacher, threw a lot at me. Including 37 letters of the alphabet, 4 of which don't exist in either Ukrainian or Russian. It's been hard, but life is hard. And this is probably not an example of that.

So, I convinced Milara that we should go for a walk. That was fun. Women in this part of the world tend to take other women under the arm, and I quite like walking around like that. We promenaded by a statue and she told me the legend of Арзы Кьыз, pictured below. And then we walked to the Gasprinsky library, from which we could hear the evening call to prayer.

We sat in the security man's little shack outside the library with first two, then three, then four, impassioned Tatar men. They talked about how the Krym-Tatar community's aspiration to build a "cathedral-like mosque" in the center of Simferopol has been repeatedly thwarted by the city administration. But they plan to keep trying.

Thanks if you actually read all this. These'll be shorter from now, I think.

Rocket Street

2008-02-03T17:47:00.001+02:00

Racketnaya vulitsia intersects Melytopols'ka right where marshrutka 59 stops to go to the center of town. Conveniently, it also goes right by the

University where I begin Crimean Tatar language tomorrow.

This is the house where I am living......

Picturesque, right? That veranda on the second floor connects to my room. I imagine practicing the banjo on it when it gets warmer.

The neighbors are building something next door, but no one seems to know what it is.

Behold:

It's been stalled at this stage for months, apparently. Ran out of money, they speculate.

I went running this morning, and many people on the street commented on this fact to me: You are running! Why, devotchka? What's the hurry? etc.

Was it my Canadian hoodie?No, I think it's that there's no culture of jogging, or really recreational exercise here, unless you're an Olympic athlete or a school-age child. This is what my host brother believes. He says that most Ukrainians and Russians just want to drink and to smoke and be lazy. He goes to the "power gym" though, so he's an exception. My host brother also believes that arugula is expensive grass, so take his opinions with some salt. mmmmm, arugula and salt.

As I started my run, it was like knocking over a string of dominoes, except instead of dominoes, it was howling dogs. One by one, down the block.

There are many howling dogs around and also many cats. The dogs belong to families, many of the outside cats seem to be communal. This cat seemed especially suspicious of me:

Below is the family dog, Rolf. Those tires are in the concrete front yard, I'm not sure why.

(There's another dog, but he is small and yappy and presently undeserving of a photograph for his bad behavior. Hear that, Mot'?)

This afternoon I was invited to attend an English club meeting for 13 and 14 year old Ukrainian girls. They seemed more interested in the older teenaged boys (my host brother and his pal) who accompanied me to the club than in the visiting Amerikanochka, but it was fun anyway. We watched "Just Like Heaven" I think it's called, with Reese Witherspoon and some guy. It was all about the kiss of life. Or maybe it was about the kiss of true love, which is basically like mouth-to-mouth. But everyone was pretty grossed out by that scene when it came around, so we didn't really discuss it.

Here is the soup I will probably eat for dinner:

Hi, Mamo! Tomorrow, I write about Crimean Tatars!

Joy-giver

2008-02-02T21:12:00.000+02:00

was one of the names listed by the authors of the liner notes for "Planet Squeezebox"as a colloquial term for "accordion." I think Samim would agree. You should watch this, it came on Ukrainian MTV just recently and, indeed, filled me with joy.

Today, I ventured to Yalta, a quick 2 hour marshrutka ride from Simferopol. I forgot my camera. But, I did get to hear three street musicians, all accordionists (!), two on bayan, one on piano accordion. All wearing fingerless gloves. One had a pretty sweet cover of Stevie Wonder's "She's so Lovely."

I went to Yalta mostly to find out what the University offers as far as Crimean-Tatar language instruction goes (nothing, it turns out, so no more scheming to get to the coast for me) and to visit the Museum of Lesia Ukrayinka in Yalta. I arrived at the museum in time to interrupt a "tekhnichna pererva" which was not actually a technical break at all, though technically, I suppose, it was someone's birthday, so they took a break. Everyone there spoke Ukrainian, which was relaxing for my brain. Also, no one there was especially rude to me, which was a nice break for me. I think they may have been toasting just as I walked in.

I don't know if it's more jarring after traveling last in Asia, but I'm beginning to see "rudeness to strangers" as a real future obstacle for Ukrainian tourism. Rudeness in the home is quite uncommon, on the contrary, in the home Ukrainians, Crimeans, Russians, all seem to be overly hospitable and generous and kind. But you ask someone where the marshrutka stop is and they sneer and spit on the sidewalk. Compare this to when Susan and Tom and I merely paused to look at a map in the middle of downtown Tokyo and strangers would come up to us to ask if we were lost. And then guide us to where we needed to go. Walk us there, even. They would walk us past the rockabilly boys and the Lolita goths, even if it was out of the way. Seriously, this happened.

Today, the best conversation I had started off the worst. I walked into the University in Yalta and the gatekeeper woman - she controls all the keys - glared at me. I asked her if I could see the bandura exhibit and she said no. I asked her if there was anyone from the music department I could talk to and she said, flatly, nyet. I asked her a few more questions to monosyllabic answers. Nyet nyet nyet. Then I stood for a minute, smiled sweetly, and said, slowly, "When do you think I might possibly see the bandura exhibit? I travelled very far to see the bandura exhibit." I continued to smile and stand there, brimming with respect for her gatekeeping ways. She melted a little, I could see it. And then suddenly, she was asking me questions, talking about Tatars, speaking at a Russian clip I couldn't quite keep up with. In the end, she showed me everything, gave me the phone numbers of many people I wanted to talk to, even took me next door to the post office to find out what code I needed to dial these people's homes with my Kyivan cell phone. And wished me well, told me to do good, to come back and visit anytime. That was unexpected.

Oh blog, thank you for allowing me to rant.

And thanks to all those of you who weighed in with your opinion on my new song. Ryan thinks it sounds more Vashti Bunyanesque than the other one, which is a nice thing to say. No perfect rhymes in there, huh? You try "Simferopol."

Since I don't know how to post audio here

2008-02-01T20:05:00.000+02:00

I am creating this myspace page for my new poorly recorded song, "Oh, Simferopol!" This features my semi-improvised lyrics, pretty much everything I know on banjo, and my voice overdubbed many times. I guess Tsarina Maria is my debutante alias while in Ukraine, how does that sound?

You can find "Oh, Simferopol!" here.

It is cold in my simferopol home

2008-02-01T20:02:00.000+02:00

and I am testing my new blog