Kazakhstan | Poetry | Russian
July, 2020Oral Arukenova is one of a dozen talented Kazakhstani writers whose work I’ve had the pleasure to get to know over the last few years. I became acquainted with Arukenova and her writing when a colleague included her work in our proposal for an anthology of contemporary Kazakhstani women’s prose, recently the fortunate winner of a RusTrans grant for Russian-language fiction in translation. It was surprisingly easy to find enough good short fiction to fill the anthology–and once we had enough, I kept discovering more, all of it wonderful and diverse. I knew Oral as a Kazakh-language fiction writer who crafts stories that take an ironic approach to Kazakh cultural traditions and mores. Thanks to these two poems, I now also know her as a Russian-language poet. Her quarantine poems struck me for their raw, honest examination of the emotional states stemming from the ongoing virus-related quarantine in Kazakhstan’s cities. There, police have zealously enforced restrictions governing who can leave their house, making every visit to the park or run on the riverbank a stealthy act of sometimes desperate self-expression. The first, shorter poem strikes a quiet tone, full of a simple longing for air, beauty, and room, where the narrator wishes to speak and breathe freely, на родном–a phrase I’ve translated for the rhythm as “in my way,” but which usually means “in my native language,” hinting at the tension of multilingualism. The second poem is more of a sweeping survey of emotional types in the city, where people jostle each other in line at the store, plug away at their remote work in isolation, and trade tips for how to navigate an online portal to get their 42,500-tenge government assistance deposit (about $100). Here, paranoia, financial desperation, and even the boredom of a lonely translator (!) can be hidden away in quarantine as easily as a bruise under a face mask, and a snappy refrain can almost help us hold it all together.
- Shelley Fairweather-Vega
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