How Emira Became Ema

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

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

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 n****.” (It frightens me even to write that much, 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. --- 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?

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

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

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!

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

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

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. 

---

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

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.

---

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

and I am testing my new blog