[Slavica Publishers; 2024]
Tr. from the Russian/Tajik by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
I have become blissfully entangled in writing this review of Shahzoda Samarqandi’s beautiful Mothersland. The Uzbek novel was published in Tajik in 2013, translated into Russian by Yultan Sadykova in 2019, and from there into English by Shelley Fairweather-Vega. The novel’s semantic journey reveals the linguistic power imbalance between Central Asia, Russia, and the West, an imbalance echoed in the novel’s themes and plot. At its most simple, Mothersland is a love story, and an ode to the Uzbek land. At its most complex, the novel is a damning indictment of Soviet colonialism, wrapped up in an amnesiac’s search for herself.
Award-wining author Samarqandi, who writes under a pen name that echoes her birthplace in Uzbekistan, lives in exile in the Netherlands. The feminist and political themes she addresses in her work are challenging for the conservative Tajik community she belongs to, and have resulted in much criticism at home. Her 2007 novel Stockholm Syndrome, translated into English by Dayroush Poor, explores the choices a young Tajik woman has to make between work and motherhood, and questions women’s role in the home. Her more recent Back to Bukhara (2020), written in English, follows a Tajik woman on a trip to Uzbekistan from her adopted home of Holland. It confronts questions around Uzbekistan’s oppressive politics, both in the past and the present day. Samarqandi’s 2013 Mothersland combines these themes. Here again, women form the heart of the narrative, while the novel’s men appear to be mere sidenotes. Heroines Mahtab, and her mother Aftab exist, and grow, both without and despite them.
Mothersland centres around the shooting of a film called White Gold. During the social and political upheaval of the mid-1990s, a Russian director named Mikhail and his crew descend upon cotton fields in rural Uzbekistan. They wish to make a film about Aftab, the first woman in Uzbekistan to drive a tractor in a Soviet collective farm. Mikhail casts the woman’s daughter Mahtab to play her mother. Mahtab quickly falls in love with the enigmatic Russian man, and when she realizes that they cannot be together, suffers a breakdown that results in the loss of both her memory and her sense of identity.
Although triggered by her love for Mikhail, Mahtab’s loss of self is closely linked to her role in the film. Mahtab, who grew up reading her mother’s diaries, quickly loses a sense of where she ends and her mother begins. Mikhail encourages this. He asks her to “close your eyes and look through your mother’s eyes” to perform her scenes. Mahtab’s loss of her own identity is so complete that it is often difficult to know whether the scenes we read are Mahtab’s direct experience, scenes taken from her mother’s diary, or a description of Mahtab acting out her mother’s life for the film. Sometimes passages we imagine to be from Aftab’s diary are interrupted abruptly by Mikhail. A tumble of memories, like scenes from different movies, end with:
“Stop! Stop!” Clapping his hands, the director sends everyone’s concentration scattering like so many pigeons. “Listen! How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t maim your words! Let them speak freely! OK? All right, again, let’s go!”
The reader’s disorientation mirrors Mahtab’s. She does not know whether she is her mother or herself. Once the filming ends, she is taken to a psychiatric institution in distant Moscow to try and recover her memory and identity. Later, Mahtab recalls that a mysterious woman named Natasha came to her bedside every day and, once partially recovered, she becomes obsessed with finding out who Natasha really is. She watches recordings of herself taken by the institution during the first weeks of her illness. Even on the road to recovery, she does not recognize the girl she sees on the screen:
A thin girl with blue eyes, dressed in blue, gnawing on a black pen, frozen like a frightened fox in front of the camera’s lens. Everything in the picture is covered with writing: the walls, the girl’s skirt, the bed, her knees, her arms. Writing crowded in, no edge or end to it, like tattoos. There is so much of it that if you didn’t know that girl, you’d never know if all that writing had been done in real life, before the picture was taken, or after, on the photograph itself.
Mahtab is likewise unable to recognize herself when she finally watches White Gold. Even in the posters produced for the film, she can see only a representation of her mother:
. . . my mother’s old photograph: a big key in her hand, one foot on the step up to the tractor, her face tan and shining, in a pose that made her look something like a majestic horse, sheer magnificence and splendor. I don’t know if it was an old picture of Mama or a shot from the film set. That film had become reality for me.
The director’s eye is omnipresent in Mothersland, in the cinematic scenes described by Mahtab/Aftab, and also in Mahtab’s ability to see herself. It is no accident that she is only able to understand her illness by watching herself on screen. But her life is also relegated to the screen: Mikhail requests that the room where she tries to recover from her amnesia be preserved for shooting a future film.
What cures Mahtab in the end is her return to her homeland, the land of her mothers. Although Uzbekistan has changed much since the collapse of Communism, and the country’s declaration of independence, the land itself remains the same. The entire novel is shot through with the elemental imagery of earth, sun, water, and cotton that are rooted in Mahtab’s concept of home. The image of the sun, which represents both home, and her mother, is perhaps the strongest. Mothersland’s opening scene depicts Aftab’s birth almost from the earth itself. Aftab, we learn, is named after the sun because she was born under the sky: She watched her first sunset “from between her mother’s legs.” Much later, in the Moscow institution, Mahtab covers the padded walls of her room (filled with cotton from the Central Asian steppe) with drawings of the sun, emblems of the love and support she receives from Natasha when she is unwell. When Mahtab sees Mikhail after she recovers, she notices the “light-blue sun of his hands.” This elemental imagery extends as far as the mythic Soviet tractor that Aftab tames in the cotton fields. When Soviet power dissipates, and the work in the cotton fields slows down, Aftab describes the tractor being reclaimed by the Uzbek land:
When it broke down for good, and its body tumbled to pieces, it dedicated itself to the earth’s embrace and nestled down inside it. The last time I drove out to visit the kolkhoz lands, which no longer belonged to the kolkhoz, I saw that the only part of the tractor remaining was its big rake, fallen somewhere at the edge of the steppe, just like a dinosaur skeleton. The local kids were playing on it, jumping off and crawling between its steel ribs.
We slowly learn why Mothersland is concerned with this push and pull between water and land, and the ever-present sun: the ecological disaster in the Aral Sea. Throughout the 1960s, the Soviet government diverted the rivers that fed the Aral to water cotton fields throughout Central Asia, causing an ecological disaster with repercussions that continue today. A direct line is drawn by “the young poet,” an encounter Aftab/Mahtab describes from the muddle of the past;
He walked over to me as I sat by the fire and took the first seat available. A few photographs had caught his attention. I was curious about them, too. The pictures showed a newborn lamb with two heads, barely standing up. In Qaraqalpaqstan, on the banks of the Aral Sea, there were a lot of babies and lambs being born with two heads or six legs. That was the first time I ever heard about the Aral Sea.
The horror of this passage, and its significance, is almost muted. Aftab/Mahtab only now discovers that the water taken from the Aral to feed the cotton fields is the cause of this disaster. Reading the passage, we suddenly question the narrative we thought White Gold was celebrating. Aftab’s supposed heroism in the cotton fields is misplaced. She (alongside many others, we imagine) has been betrayed by the Soviet government.
Towards the end of the novel, Mahtab describes watching White Gold. We learn that the film begins with her mother (or Mahtab?) laying the medals she received for her work in the cotton fields at the base of ships stranded in the now dry Aral Sea. In this brief scene, we learn that the cotton farming we thought was being celebrated by White Gold is linked to an ecological disaster that symbolizes not only the failure of Soviet policies, but also Russia’s abandonment of Central Asia since the 1990s. Everything that Aftab worked for seems as though it was based on a lie. Mikhail, we suspect, always intended to make his movie about this. While filming in the cotton fields, he mentions that “the earth here smells like the sea,” and we later hear obliquely that censors have cut parts of the film. But, as with the rest of the narrative, it is never entirely clear what order things have happened in, who knew what and when, or where the truth lies.
I spoke to Shelley Fairweather-Vega about her translation of Mothersland in an interview for Asymptote. She was very careful to make sure that Yultan Sadykova’s excellent Russian text did not overly influence her own translation, and liaised with Samarqandi to make sure that she could represent the Tajik text as accurately as possible. Shelley’s translation preserves the cinematic quality of Samarqandi’s novel with some stunning evocative passages, which appear to pass through the director Mikhail’s gaze. For example, the lush description of the cotton fields during a storm: “The rain smacked the cotton in the face, and the sunset tossed a velvet shawl over the shoulders of the steppe.” Or set up and ready for filming, “Railroad tracks divided the wide field in half. The blossoming cotton covered the earth like snow.” The English is clear and direct, and rarely inflected with either the Tajik or Russian words. There is only one instance that I could find—the use of the term “hanum,” which Mahtab uses to refer respectfully to Nina, who took care of her in the institution when she was unwell. The use of “Nina-hanum” feels marked because Mahtab uses it when she is in the distant city of Moscow, dislocated from Uzbekistan. The rest of the novel’s language feels neutral and fresh, a necessary decision in part because Mahtab herself is already translated numerous times. Mahtab speaks Tajik, lives in Uzbekistan, and recuperates in Moscow. She translates her mother’s diary into Russian for Mikhail without even being asked. We imagine White Gold was also shot in Russian—the Soviet past translated to the post-Soviet present, the Tajik language over-ridden. Mahtab has translated herself into her mother, and she has translated the past to make it her own. This final translation into English, then, is a triumph for the author and translators, and a joy to become entangled in as a reader.
Sarah Gear holds a PhD based on research into the influence of political bias on the translation of contemporary Russian fiction into English. She works as an assistant interview editor at Asymptote, and her reviews and interviews have appeared in Asymptote, the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Language Review, Full Stop, the Glasgow Review of Books and Rights in Russia. She is based in Scotland.
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