TURKMENISTAN ~ Learning to Weave (Feb 27 2011)

First trips outside Ashgabat. Soviet nostalgia. Turkmen-dili.

Madeline at National Carpet Museum, Ashgabat

Been here 2 months.  The recurring metaphor is carpet weaving.  I’m at the stage now where no one would buy the thing:  just a mass of warp and a pattern barely emerging.

I’m in the land whose most famous product, not counting natural gas, oil reserves, cotton and wheat exports, is carpets.  I’ve moved from a country that had Basotho hats on its flag (symbolizing mountains) to one with carpet patterns on its flag

(symbolizing the five regions, once tribal fiefdoms), patterns dating back to the 12^th century.  I put $100 down on my first carpet, told the Afghan man, host father of one of our Volunteers, that I’d pay the $300 balance “soon,” then realized after I’d left the shop that $400 had merely been his opening price.  Maybe by the time I return I’ll have my bargaining skills better honed.

The romance of Turkmenistan is its Silk Road heritage.  I imagine camel caravans winding their way across the Karakum desert[1] just on the edge of Ashgabat, up into the Koppet Dag Mountains, where the country of Iran begins, inaccessible to me.  Yurts and pots would be wrapped in the carpets, perhaps even a bride astride one camel, bound for her husband’s family, a traditional bride carpet covering her head.  But this was a century ago.  I hear there are still yurts in use, though I’ve only glimpsed one in a back yard.

Camels cross the highways, herders usually trailing after.

Bread lady in open market

The other Turkmenistan:  I’ve “escaped” my desk and the overly elaborate city of Ashgabat twice now, traveling with my colleague Rahman on visits to see our Peace Corps Volunteers in the two regions of Mary (near Ashgabat) and Lebap (a stone’s throw from Uzbekistan and Afghanistan).  The distances are long, the road terrible (as in Lesotho, there’s a single major road that traverses the country), and flights cheap, so sometimes we fly.  The Peace Corps driver slogs it alone, meets us at the airport, and transports us from site to site, drops us off at the airport again after a couple days, then spends an entire day driving home.

Renowned Tolkuchka Bazaar closed just months after I arrived

Cotton pickers near Mary

In these times I glimpse the “other” Turkmenistan.  My time here will give me an insight to Soviet days of not so long ago.  Even though Turkmenistan has been independent since 1991, and even though these years have been characterized by a return and celebration of everything Turkmen (reinstituting the language in schools, encouraging women to wear their native dress, extolling its poets and scholars, repopulating the calendar with its national holidays), still, seven decades of Soviet life lies heavily atop all.  First is the architecture, linear, spaced with military precision, ugly.  Second is the approach to industrialization and agriculture – haphazard telephone and power lines, canals pierced through the countryside, gray factories, dust blowing everywhere, though ruddy-faced peasant women in rose-colored scarves still sell fresh vegetables, pickles and freshly slaughtered chickens in open markets.   And third is the political heritage: KGB-style local police stationed in front of every government building, the need to report one’s movements, to register when moving to a new city, and even, in Peace Corps’ case, to ask permission (just denied yesterday) to host teacher training workshops.  The word “association,” spoken even in English, can get one into trouble.  And as one watches anti-government demonstrations sweep Egypt, Tunisia, Yeman, Iran, Bahrain, Libiya, (even Wisconsin), one can perhaps understand a government’s healthy fear of its own people.  

Rahman buys cigarettes in a small dukan or mini-market

Soviet nostalgia:  Yet in Turkmenistan there is not only a genuine appreciation for what people gained during the Soviet era, but (as I often heard in rural China) a nostalgia for the social security that used to warmly envelope each person, for instance, farmers were paid regardless of the unpredictability of the harvest.  As my colleague Zohre puts it,

Zohre

“Yes, for 70 years everything was under the control of Moscow, but everything should be under somebody’s control – in a country, in a family, in any organization.  Also, if we had not been with Russians, we would be a very poor society.  They educated us and made us intelligent and free of Islam.  There was a bad side, too, of course.  Turkmen people were not to be trusted as leaders.  But now that Turkmenistan is independent, we find out that Turkmen people are not so stupid, that they are able to be leaders.  Yes, Russians took our cotton and oil, but in exchange they gave us some good things.  Personally, I am glad that we were part of the Soviet Union.”

Tekinshi or seamstresses in a Turkmen style sweat shop

Turkmen koynek (dresses) feature hand embroidery

Starting my Turkmen wardrobe:  I now own three Turkmen dresses, called kὅynek, which I wear to the office about once a week, complete with head scarf, ŷalyk.  Scarf-tying has many steps, including putting extra scarves under the main scarf to bulk it up, so I come scarf-less to work, and beg my female colleagues to tie me in.  The dresses are full length and comfortable stretch-velvet, with elaborate hand- or machine-embroidered bodices, and I have good, though mono-syllabic relations with my dressmakers (see photo).  Ethnic Turkmen women wear kὅynek, while the ethnic Russian women go about town in contemporary fashions, heads bare, with a penchant for knee-high boots and big leather purses.  All students , kindergarten to university, wear school uniforms, the young women long, lovely kὅynek, and boys formal suits, while the city men dress much like men everywhere, though there’s an abundance of furry Soviet hats and jaunty wool caps, and an occasional Muslim mullah with flowing beard, huge hat, and robes.

Turkmen dili:  As for the Turkmen language (called Türkmen-dili; it’s a dilly!), there are many y’s and z’s and it belongs to the Turkic family, so Turkmen and Turks can understand one another somewhat.  My heart’s not yet in studying.  I worked so hard, so recently, on Sesotho, the language of Lesotho in southern Africa.  I've underestimated the tremendous energy it takes to learn a new language, understand a new culture, and create yet another social life, complete with dear friends and lovely parties and casual laughter, three times in five years – Lesotho, Washington DC, and now Turkmenistan.  I’m a woman of great energies, but I’m faltering these days, despairing at a page of verbs that refuse to gel inside my brain, or staring out my high rise windows at falling snow on a lonely Saturday night.  As in Japan, as in Lesotho, and now in Turkmenistan, I create confusion and comedy as I ask for a cabbage at the market (while pointing to carrots), tell the driver in a gypsy cab to turn right (meaning left) or insist on change in 20 manat pieces - dollars, (meaning 20 tenge - pennies).

Everyone is amused, except me, unable to get what’s so funny, like this exchange, which happened entirely in Turkmen,

Soltan, my Turkmen language tutor

Soltan:  Next lesson, Magdalena, we’ll learn about TIME.

Madeline:  It is now 7:00.

Soltan (smiling):  No, I mean, next lesson is about TIME.

Madeline (confused):  Next lesson? It’s Wednesday.

Soltan (laughing):  No, I mean the topic will be TIME.

Madeline (completely baffled, continuing to hear only the word TIME):  Today, it is January 31.

Soltan (laughing hysterically, departing):  Good-bye, Magdalena.

Or the apartment manager who banged on my door early on Flag Day, yelling excitedly, “Yash mashine!  Yash mashine!”  I beckoned her in and showed her my washing machine, wanting her to see that my applicance was no cause for panic.  But “yash mashine” meant “your car” (in Russian, not Turkmen), and she thought that a car with blue diplomatic plates, parked in the apartment lot, the only one that hadn’t yet been moved, belonged to me.  The President of Turkmenistan was going to be driving down our avenue on his way to a flag ceremony in a couple hours, and our street needed to be “in order.”  This takes a only paragraph to relate, but it took a good 30 minutes  with several people involved as translators, to unravel. Washing machines were not involved, but police escorts, limousines, street closures, street sweeping, building decorating, curtain closing, and car re-parking were. “Do not look out your windows!” my landlady admonished.

So, the carpet weaving has begun – that unwieldy, unattractive stage, when one thinks it will never, ever be complete, and is discouraged just looking ahead, much less out the windows.

Turkmen family on a traditional swing

Here’s hoping your washing machine is in order, your utterances fluent, and your daily culture so obvious it bears no mention.

P.S.  As an antidote to whining, I’m reading INDEPENDENT PEOPLE (1946), by Iceland’s great writer Halldór Laxness, thought by some to be the best book ever written, wherein characters eat one meal a day, go in rags through the winter, ride a reindeer across a frozen river then stagger for two days though a blizzard.  Fabulous book. 

Magdalena

globalmaddy@gmail.com

Posted on Feb 2011 as Public Letter 2 to family & friends

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[1] The desert dusts blown on a powerful east-west airstream carry pesticide residues that have been found in the blood of penguins in Antarctica (Wikipedia).   Rainfall averages once a decade.