Literature award – The Alma Review

Sharkhan Kazygul: “Through National Identity You Can Conquer the Respect of Other Nations” – Part 2

Read Part I of this intervew here.

– How autobiographical is your novel?

– The main character and I only have the same place of birth. Of course, I associate myself with him. His childhood and student years are my childhood and my student years. Certainly, his inner world is my inner world, how else could it be? It would be hard for me to write about someone else’s, but I’ve already figured mine out pretty well.

– At the end of the novel, the main character returns to his homeland. How important is the motif of returning to one’s roots, to one’s identity?

– When Abu arrivesin his homeland, when he sets foot in his city, his anguish disappears. Before that, he felt like he had betrayed his homeland but when he comes back to Aralsk, he feels purified, freed of all his sins. He experiences a catharsis. The human body is made of material that is destructible, but the soul is made of eternal material, and Abu was afraid that in the next life his soul would suffer again.

Only by not losing one’s roots can one reach the heights of civilization.

I wanted to show the love for the motherland through the anguish the main character experiences, the gravitational forces that had not given him peace for nearly forty years. Usually, patriotism is just a word, and it seems to me that no one has ever talked about the gravitational force of one’s native land before. Without this power, one cannot love one’s homeland, and it must be in one’s brain, in one’s mind. My main character had everything in the States: recognition, money, a family, a child. But he did not have a homeland, the place where he had been born.

Why am I talking about this? Only by not losing one’s roots can one reach the heights of civilization. So it is important to remember that through national identity you can conquer the respect of other nations. In our stores we can see Coca-Cola. As soon as this soda entered our market, we became part of globalization. There is no longer any place to hide from it. But we don’t have to be consumed by it. How do we do that? We can counterbalance the massive pressure of globalization with our own national values and characteristics. Only then, in this diverse world, will we retain our unique, intrinsic qualities and stand out from the polyphony. After all, sameness, living according to the same laws and traditions, one language for everybody make life boring. People once wanted to invent Esperanto, one language for all people. We all know how it turned out: Esperanto disappeared from our lives! To show interest, to remember and to understand who you are–that is what I wanted to show in the novel.

Muse, Mentors, and Favorite Authors

– Do you have a someone close to you to whom you immediately show what you have written?

– Throughout the novel, I had a muse with me. She is always near. It is my wife Nabat, who is also my first reader. She is a journalist by training. She is very critical about everything, even about me. It helps me a lot.

– Who was your mentor? Where did you learn to write?

– I did an interview once; it was called ‘I’m an uneducated journalist’. I didn’t have a teacher; I’ve always been on my own. Other journalists can talk about their mentors but after graduating from the Faculty of Journalism at Kazakh State University, I was always on my own: working as a translator at a district newspaper, translating from Russian into Kazakh. Then I became an executive secretary and the editor of the regional newspaper. I had no time to learn from anyone. I always worked on my own and did not want to lose my independence. I liked being the chief editor, so the final decision was up to me. In general, I am a lone wolf.

– What authors have influenced your works?

– I learned a lot from Chingiz Aitmatov and Nodar Dumbadze’s philosophical attitude to life. There were also Tolen Abdikov, Abdijamil Nurpeisov. Nodar Dumbadze called for uniting all people on Earth to help each other. And this philosophy is very close to me.

– What audiences might be interested in your novel?

– My reader is an ordinary person, thinking, having values, and ready to reflect.

Only a writer who appeals to the principles of honor can move society toward progress

About the Mecenat.kz Value and What It Is Like to Be a Winner

– In your opinion, what is the significance of the Mecenat.kz award?

– The main objective of the Mecenat.kz literary award is not to identify the winner but to develop the genre of the novel in Kazakhstan. The award aspires to raise the level of literary excellence, to give writers from Kazakhstan international visibility, and to discover new names. This year the contest has achieved its goal. Just compare: In the thirty years of independence, abotu a hundred novels have been published in Kazakhstan. When the call for submissions opened, the award collected nearly seventy new works within six months. This is a record figure. I have no doubt that this large-scale project will go from quantity to quality in the coming years. If there is a tradition to hold this contest every year, local writers will receive invaluable support. That is the main value of the Mecenat.kz Award. That is why I am sure that the status of the contest will only grow.

– How do you feel about being a winner?

– I feel like I used to. I don’t feel any special joy. On the contrary, I upset a lot of people by winning. I always wanted to stay somewhere in the middle. But there was the vote…

My father always told me, ‘Son, don’t ever outrun anyone, but don’t lag behind anyone! That’s one of the life’s important principles. When one end of a peg is hammered with an axe and the other is buried in the ground, only the middle remains unharmed’. Golden words! They reveal the truth.

I express my gratitude to all the writers who took part in this contest. I want to point out such a factor as luck. I wish that each of them will always have good luck!

About a Contemporary Writer

– How do you see the contemporary Kazakhstani writer?

– I believe that a Kazakhstani writer needs to get out of his orbit and seek answers to the eternal philosophical questions facing all mankind.

Writers of the older generation noted, ‘Literature is a matter of honor‘. Only a writer who appeals to the principles of honor can move society toward progress. Only a writer who fights for justice can represent the country with dignity. I, like other writers, would like our country to prosper and be worthily represented on the international stage. I want our state to be advanced and developed. Yes, we are a nation suffering from injustice. You could say that this phenomenon has reached its apogee in our society. How does it manifest itself? Often we see injustice even in righteous deeds and quite just decisions. That is a dangerous signal.

Again, referring to my father’s words, I want to express my fears: if we are hammered with an axe, the other end might sink into the ground and disappear altogether. Injustice is not fought this way. We can only make progress when we begin to respect the opinions of others. We must fight injustice with compassion and humanity. I wish everyone could understand and accept that this is the thought behind the fight against injustice. Only then can we see the results of our labor!

Interviewer Yuliya Gubanova

Sharkhan Kazygul was born in 1956 in Aralsk. He graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of the Kazakh State University named after S. M. Kirov. He is the author of nine publicistic books. He is an academician of the International Informatization Academy and also the winner of the Mecenat.kz Literary Award.

Yuliya Gubanova was born in Moscow in 1977. Translator, writer, traveler (40+ countries, 150+ cities). A graduate of the Open Literature School of Almaty. Author of a collection of short stories “The Way Home”. Author of the course “Tell a Story in Your Travel-blog”.

Sharkhan Kazygul: “Through National Identity You Can Conquer the Respect of Other Nations” – Part 1

Interview by Yulia Gubanova

Sharkhan Kazygul, the first winner of Kazakhstan’s Mecenat.kz Award, was one hundred percent confident about his novel The Kulpet. Yuliya Gubanova spoke with the writer at the request of Alma Review and found out what this confidence was based on, how the novel was written, and how Sharkhan Kazygul sees the modern Kazakhstani writer.

“I’m a Real Text Twister, or After 60 You Have to Create“

– Sharkhan, tell us, how did you write the novel?

– During the pandemic, I had nothing to do as I am retire. I usually ghost-write memoirs, but at that time there was not even that kind of work. And I can’t judy twiddle my thumbs. After sixty years of working in both hemispheres, it is so important to me at my age to be engaged in creativity, mental work. One shouldn’t interrupt this! Otherwise it can lead to the breakdown of neural connections, and a person quickly grows old and dies. That’s how I began to write my novel. I can say I had spent the previous forty years thinking about it. I was a strong reporter and didn’t want to be a bad writer, so I didn’t take up fiction. But literary steam has to be let off. I also know that I’m going to die one day. So as long as I was alive and strong, I decided to write at least one novel.

I wrote Kulpet in four months, and spent six months polishing it. Editing is an important part of my journalistic work, so it took me a long time to finish the novel. You see, I’m a real text twister!

While I was writing, I didn’t have a strict schedule: I would wake up and have tea (one mug of tea, then one cigarette for a total of three mugs of tea and three cigarettes in half an hour). I would get focused and get my thoughts together and sit down to writte. For me was very important not to be disturbed by anyone. When my thoughts were consistent, I did not stop writing. I paused when I hesitated and went for a walk. While walking I would often have the idea of how to proceed and then I would keep writing. My only principle was not to write when I had no ideas.

There were days when I did not write at all, and sometimes I managed to write five pages a day. There were also days with thoughts but without writing. I wrote them down on paper, but then I would walk around and think, “How is it better to write from a literary point of view and as understandable as possible?” In other words, I mulled over on this or that plot turn or scene until it was perfectly formulated.

I have been collecting material for the last thirty years. I had a spontaneous card-file. I was slowly writing down different details, thoughts. There was no scientific approach to it. But these notes helped me preserve the temporal vocabulary, so that I could convey the atmosphere of the novel’s events and accurately render the dialogue.

I chose the settings that would allow me to write about large-scale things. If a person travels, he thinks globally, but if he lives in an aul, a village, he thinks in proportion to the place where he lives.

I have never been to Afghanistan or the United States, but I read a lot about these countries, studied materials about the Afghan war. I have a friend who lives in the United States, we studied together in the university. I asked her a lot of questions about adapting, how to learn English to the level needed to live in America, how to get a job, and many other things.

– When you applied for the contest, you were 100% sure of the novel. What gave you this confidence?

– I can tell you for sure: it was not self-confidence. I put my whole soul into this novel: into the composition, the characters, the language and the style. It was important for me to polish everything. I’m not saying I wrote it at the level of the greatest writers. But I did what I wanted to do as well as possible.

Since I have been doing journalism all my life, I know very well when I have done a good job and when I haven’t. For example, I am writing an essay. If it doesn’t come out well, it is obvious, and I’ll tear it up and write it again. When it comes out well, it is also clear. So with the novel, I’m not bragging–I knew I had written it wal. I wouldn’t have entered the contest if I had any doubts about it. In fact, this is the first contest in my life. Before, I did not want to participate in journalistic contests. But this was a happy accident: I had written the novel, and then heard of a new contest–Mecenat.kz.

Kulpet is Anguish

– Since the novel is in Kazakh and has not yet been translated into Russian, can you tell us what it is about?

– In short, my novel is about anguish, the suffering of the soul, the love for the homeland, and the search for self-identity. My main character, Abuzhan Raiysov, returns to Kazakhstan, his homeland. On the plane he starts remembering the past, thinking about life and death, about conscience, the final judgement and redemption.

His parents died when he was a university student. His father’s enemies took revenge on Abuzhan by sending him to serve in Afghanistan in 1985. By that time, he had already graduated from the Aktobe Medical Institute and worked as a surgeon in a regional hospital.

Before deploying, Abuzhan comes home to say goodbye to his homeland. On the train he meets a girl, Assel, leaves her his house, and departs to serve without saying anything. While he working in a hospital in Kabul, a nurse, Irina, persuades him to escape: together they make their way to Pakistan, and from there they fly to the USA.

In the USA, he continues to work as a surgeon, and he is doing well: he is in demand and quite well off. He marries a girl from the Kazakh diaspora, and they have a son. But Abuzhan constantly feels that he is losing his identity, his roots. His wife tragically dies, and Abuzhan raises his son by himself.

The son graduates as an astrophysicist, works for the IAEA, and considers himself an American. Abuzhan decides to return to Kazakhstan. What will his return to his homeland be like? Will he find what he was looking for so long? Readers will find out about this when they finish the novel.

– How did the title of the novel come about?

– I work a lot with the fifteen-volume explanatory dictionary of the Kazakh language. In my spare time I study Kazakh words from there – 5-6 words a day. Even though I know Kazakh perfectly well, I still find something forgotten or out of use. Many of these words have very interesting meanings. When I was writing a novel, I didn’t immediately think of a title, but somewhere in the middle of the work, I opened one of the volumes of the dictionary, and found the word “Kulpet“. It is an archaism which means suffering of the soul – a perfect title for my work because I am a human soul investigator.

– How did you come up with names for the main characters?

– The names of my characters are charactonyms. The main character’s name is Abuzhan Raisov, his name consists of two parts: Abu means a person capable of dealing with issues in the emotional and spiritual spheres, and Zhan means soul. Besides, I knew that in the USA he would have to adjust his name to local standards: there he became Abu Rais. His father’s name was Erden, because he was a brave and principled man /the direct translation from Kazakh is “a powerful warrior”, from Mongolian “erdene”–a jewel (interviewer’s note)/. The main character’s mother’s name was Rakhia, a Muslim name, and she believed in God. The Nurse Irina Nemolyaeva was just a woman without spirituality, she did not believe in God and the final judgement /the surname presumably comes from the nickname Nemolyai, Nemolyaka which literally means “one who does not pray, goes to work or to the table without prayer”(interviewer’s note)/.

– How did you find the idea of the novel?

– I have always been involved in philosophy, antropology, and the study of the Universe. I constantly recorded my reflections in social networks. I have published nine non-fiction books including a two-volume collection of reflections Online Thoughts On My Ownsome. For example: ‘When a woman and a man get married, they say, ‘It happened by the will of God!’ And when they get divorced, they start blaming each other, ‘It’s been your fault!’, ‘No, it’s been your fault!’ A kind of paradox… There is a rumor, Allah once said, ‘I do everything, and people blame each other.’

I wanted to interpret these reflections through images and scenes. I came up with a story, a plot, using an idea from the early 1980s. However, I put it aside for a long time, as I didn’t think I had enough writing talent. Then, two years ago there was that very moment to realize the idea.

The story in the novel is fictional but based on real events. It was very important for me to convey the inner feelings of the characters, to delicately show the culture of intimate relationships about which our today’s youth knows almost nothing – this part took me the most time: I spent three months working on just three pages. For us, Kazakhs, this is a very closed topic, and this is why I wished to make it as interesting and beautiful as possible.