Qissa Reviews: A Collection of Female Writing from Kazakhstan

According to the introduction, the word ‘Amanat’ has many meanings. It could be ‘a promise entwined with hope for the future’, ‘a task that comes with a moral obligation’ or a ‘legacy [...] handed down for us to cherish and protect’. What a fitting name for this collection, which is very much something that should be cherished!

Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan covers women writers from over the past 30 years, and is the first of its kind to do so. There are twelve authors in total in the anthology; six writing in Russian and six in Kazakh. Before reading this, I had very little knowledge about Kazakhstan and its history, culture and literature. However, the foreword by Professor of Literature, Gabriel McGuire, provides a simple and illuminating context to the stories within. McGuire (and indeed the editors in their introduction) highlight the political and social circumstances in which these stories are set and help to tease out certain cultural references for the reader.

While the collection features many different stories and essays, there are some universal themes. The sense of nostalgia and longing for a previous way of life is prevalent in a number of pieces, particularly Zira Naurzbayeva’s essay, ‘The Beskempir’, which looks at how the older generation cope when moving to the city from the countryside. The differences between the generations and how fast the country has changed also features heavily in Amanat, as well as the more literal loss of losing a loved one. This is perhaps expected, given the amount of conflict and disruption that the country has seen in recent decades. Some of this is framed in a whimsical way, such as in Nadezhda Ohernova’s ‘Aslan’s Bride’; some works use dark comedy to showcase the horrors their families have witnessed, as in Lilya Kalaus’s ‘Operatic Drama’; whereas in other stories the grief and anger is much more at the forefront, such as in ‘An Awkward Conversation’ by Zhumagul Solty.

There is a pleasing continuity to this collection, made more potent through the editors decision to group certain writings by the same author together. This leads to occasions, such as in Oral Arukenova’s ‘Procedures Within’, where the narrator references a character from the previous story. The fact that so many of the works also focus heavily on family ties, whether that’s mothers and daughters in the exquisite closing piece, ‘My Eleusinian Mysteries’ or in distantly related relatives like the situation in the amusing ‘Propiska’, means that Amanat feels very much like a curated collection, rather than writing grouped together simply because it has been written by women from the region.

Other common themes include the tensions between the Russian and Kazakh languages (particularly interesting given the context of the collection they’re published in) and an exploration of different social classes and societal divides. I would recommend this collection to anyone looking to learn more about Kazakh culture specifically but, more importantly, I would recommend this to anyone looking for good writing about human emotion in general.

We were very pleased that one of the editors of the collection, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, could sit down with Qissa to answer a few key questions...