Renewing Self-Awareness

EDWARD A. ALLWORTH

The ill treatment endured by Crimean Tatars during the last half century has tested them severely. When other nationalities might have faltered, these Tatars have persevered. Immersed in a hostile cultural, economic, and social environment created by a Russian oligarchy, they found great strength to carry them through the man-made threats to the survival of their community. What sorts of resources and support have proved indispensable in sustaining the group to this extraordinary degree?

Two reflections of this strength, in particular, attract immediate attention: steadiness in the face of each new danger and a fearless determination to defend themselves, spiritually and culturally, against formidable opponents.

Expressions of Attitudes and Values

Those same traits reveal themselves person by person. The seemingly tenuous networks that tie individuals to a common cause may exist and reveal themselves most of all in the cultural values, moods, and attitudes expressed through words and other symbols. The literature, language, art, and related bearers and creators of signs serve more fundamentally than other factors to shape and support the outlook of Crimean Tatars in the postmodern season of the group's life. These mediums reach beyond bolstering courage and conviction. They convey a necessary appreciation of beauty, joy, and an affirmation of life that can give people the stimulus to act with imagination in hostile surroundings.

The way people express their feelings about their community and their place in this immediate post-Soviet period tells more about their group's viability under contemporary conditions than does news about their political life and institutions. A shattered community's many spokesmen and -women must participate in the process of reidentifying their group with its central nervous system, its significant core. Those talented enough to convey their feelings and ideas memorably in literature, music, and the arts probably exert the strongest influence in restoring and sustaining people's faith in the one community.

Crimean Tatars benefit in this respect from a small but active circle of writers, poets, composers, and other creative artists, men and women who have found that eloquence. Rather than conventionally idealize, they visualize their community and place in phrases and images that reaffirm them aesthetically in the minds and hearts of their audience. Where, under the circumstances, readers, listeners, and viewers might expect anger or hostility, more often than not the poets and artists speak softly, portray gently. A lyrical reengagement with suppressed feelings of longing seems all the more remarkable in view of the most recent history of the group. Decades of enduring an often harsh Central Asian exile have marked Crimean Tatars as surely as other previous, recent experiences. Nevertheless, the poetry and art publicly circulated usually accents a positive vision.

Although composing verse in Uzbekistan exile before the rise of glasnost as public policy in the Soviet Union after the mid-1980s, Eskender Fazi'l guardedly conveyed his thoughts in notably terse lines that skirted strong feelings. Under the heavy censorship then especially limiting the literary efforts of Crimean Tatars in Central Asia, the young writer's collections of poetry—The Violet (Melevshe) had appeared in 1970 and The Old Beechtree (Qart emen) in 1976—enjoyed the select company of only twelve companion titles by various authors created and issued in the Crimean Tatar language. But, because the Communist Party then continued to deny the crucial attributive Crimean to these Tatars, the colophon toGesture of Respect (Temenna, 1982) specifies only that this poetry appears in "the Tatar language." The experienced writer Cherkez Ali, one of whose verses this chapter cites, below, functioned as editor of the booklet, and Aidar Osmanov, once editor of the Crimean Tatar literary journal Yïldïz, wrote brief comments for Temenna, giving the younger poet strong backing in those difficult times.

Yet in that booklet's opening poem, ostensibly intended for young readers and devoted "To Mothers of the World" ("Dyun'ya analarïna"), poet and teacher Eskender Fazïl examines the human condition in the Soviet Union and beyond. In this eighty-six-page booklet circulated in only two thousand copies for the hundreds of thousands of potential readers, he searches for an understanding of the origins of the cruel as well as the merciful individuals in his society and others and, by implication, the institutions among which he and his people live:

White, (Beyaz,
Yellow, Sarï,
Black colored, Qara renkli,
Tenderhearted mothers— Merametli analar—
Tenderhearted, Merametli,
Just Adaletli
Bear children. Doghuralar balalar.
Or hard-hearted, Ya tash yurekli,
Black blooded Qara qanlï
Who bore the merciless one? Djellyatnï kim doghurghan?
The liar, Yalandjini
The troublemaker Fitnedjini
What sort of "mother" bore? Angi "ana" doghurghan?)

The tone and rhetoric of literature, such as this poetry composed in the period of exile under severe restrictions, naturally remained more guarded, more circumspect, than most writings toward the end of and following the breakup of the Soviet Union.

In a later, lyrical turn, one of the personal voices heard frequently toward the end of the 1980s and 1990s sounds in the poetry of Lilia Budzhurova. She revels in beautiful perceptions of Crimea, usually tinged with a nuance of sadness. Budzhurova's short verse (in Russian) "What Is the Homeland's Scent?" (1989) exemplifies this sensual evocation:

Of what does the homeland smell?
Of a dry blade of grass,
Caught in a child's hair,
Of a pine branch, of bitter wormwood,
Or, of...