It can be difficult to picture the East Turkestani past. Even what lies closest to us, the photographs taken by some missionary in the 1930s or some rioter with a digital camera, are scenes, arrangements of views. The scrapyard that was the Urumchi bazaar in the time of Khoja Niyaz seems as empty as a movie set. It's hard to place Haydar Sayrani or Aitchen Wu in those ramshackle timbers, much less to ask ourselves how their wives and families, so absent from the historical and narrative records, went about their shopping.
Foreign researchers have little access to rural life in Xinjiang, unsurprisingly, and that usually gives them a pass on social history. Ildikó Bellér-Hann's work, both her historical anthropology volume and her other work on oral culture and the law, presents the best research and synthesis to date, I think, of what we do and can know. When I look at Community matters, a very popular volume in every library I've known, I have trouble, however, discerning the signs and mechanisms of change over time that intrigue me as a historian. How do we get from Community matters to Down a narrow road (another amazing book)? For, surely, there is something in between.
Native researchers, Uyghur or otherwise, though they may pose interesting questions about folkways and agriculture in the present day, seem hardly to have considered the consequences of living in a historical world lit only by fire of one sort or another. Partly, there's a been a terrible oversight by which none of the Jarring materials are available in Xinjiang. But it's also due, in part, to the ways that one party or another scrambles to promote a narrative of "development": Whether you're a Uyghur nationalist or a PRC apparatchik, sometimes you want to talk about Uyghurs being poor and backward, and sometimes you don't. On the one hand, the story goes, this place was poor and backward -- but now look what the Party (or Rebiye Kadeer) has done to promote business and growth since the 1980s! On the other hand, you can point to any number of little industrial projects from the 1890s onward and find "proof," after a fashion, that Transhistorical China (or Uyghur entrepreneurs) had the first leather factory, or whatever, in Central Asia. The presence of a factory with 200 employees can imply that Ghulja in 1907 was just like Shanghai in 1948; yet we are faced with the facts of agriculture in the 1930s, which seem not to have changed in hundreds of years.
Native researchers, Uyghur or otherwise, though they may pose interesting questions about folkways and agriculture in the present day, seem hardly to have considered the consequences of living in a historical world lit only by fire of one sort or another. Partly, there's a been a terrible oversight by which none of the Jarring materials are available in Xinjiang. But it's also due, in part, to the ways that one party or another scrambles to promote a narrative of "development": Whether you're a Uyghur nationalist or a PRC apparatchik, sometimes you want to talk about Uyghurs being poor and backward, and sometimes you don't. On the one hand, the story goes, this place was poor and backward -- but now look what the Party (or Rebiye Kadeer) has done to promote business and growth since the 1980s! On the other hand, you can point to any number of little industrial projects from the 1890s onward and find "proof," after a fashion, that Transhistorical China (or Uyghur entrepreneurs) had the first leather factory, or whatever, in Central Asia. The presence of a factory with 200 employees can imply that Ghulja in 1907 was just like Shanghai in 1948; yet we are faced with the facts of agriculture in the 1930s, which seem not to have changed in hundreds of years.
As things stand, then, it baffles the mind to ask what Baha'uddin Musabayev knew and Amanisa Khan ate. Do we know Tejelli indeed? And is he even worth mentioning, if every time that name arrives, it brings with it heavy inches of flimsy paper imprinted with awkward modern Uyghur?
My education began in earnest, and perhaps ended shortly thereafter, with "Caedmon's Hymn." In Anglo-Saxon, of course, because that's how it sends the best, and my English teacher's mighty leather-clad foot upon his particleboard throne.
Creator all-holy, He hung the bright heaven,
A roof high upreared, o'er the children of men. ... etc.
It became a sort of dhikr for me, as I think it was for him.
Still I feel myself closer to the medievalists, with their photocopies of cramped lines of Gothic script disgorged from the end of a cut feather. Working through manuscripts banishes, for a little while, the questions that preoccupy my time period, trite, nagging issues of modernization, of global movements, of everything contracting and mechanizing. (And, indeed, it can all start to seem very Steampunk, if you're not careful.) It gets me away from the preoccupations of the propagandists, from the two-faced narrative of progress.
Heaney talks about Caedmon.
And all that time he'd been poeting with the harp
His real gift was the big ignorant roar
He could still let out of him, just bogging in
As if the sacred subjects were a herd
That had broken out and needed rounding up.
I never saw him once with his hands joined
Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven
And the quick sniff and test of fingertips
After he'd passed them through a sick beast's water.
Do we know Tejelli indeed?
The man who copied the "Risāla of the camel-drivers," too, ran his fingers through a sick beast's water. I cannot help but wonder what he wanted from his days, if he lived to see his children have children of their own. Maybe his son took over his craft. But did he get to recite the formula that made his boy a master? There is a terrible emptiness here, a space that our eyes are trained to ignore. I wonder if it can be stared into?
The questions you raise about the yearning to learn about daily life in historical context remind me of why (auto)biography has become my favorite literary genre. I *like* reading about people, and their daily interactions, and how they then become incorporated (or not) into the historical narrative.
ReplyDeleteMuch as I admire the rigorously philological approach of many scholars in our field, most of the time, I want to ask, "yes yes yes, but what was this manuscript actually used for? what was its purpose? who made it? where did it come from?" etc etc. It's an object, with a history, and it was used by someone (or some persons), who attached to it some sort of relevance.
Part of the joy of reading Ali Shir's memoir of Jami is that I've been able to start creating a mental street map of Herat, with road-junctions and gardens afforded greater significance owing to their backdrop as scenery to encounters between Nava'i, Jami and the denizens of the city.