“To Hell with Poets” by Baqytgul Sarmekova

Baqytgul Sarmekova

How is a reviewer, faced with (yet another) excellent short-story collection, supposed to convey to readers a convincing rationale for “why this one?” To note that this author is Kazakh is necessary but insufficient; if diversity alone were the criterion, one would need an entire year to cycle through books from every country, territory and language in the world. To Hell with Poets is good not just in the context of Kazakh or even Central Asian writing available in English, but good, period.

So, why? Baqytgul Sarmekova is indeed Kazakh and the stories are set in Kazakhstan. The reader will be introduced to auls and tois, respectively villages and parties, particularly weddings.

 

Soon, the yellowish, moss-grown roofs tucked between drab-colored hills overgrown with squat tamarisk bushes came into view. The squalid aul looked like a sloppy woman’s kitchen.

 

She includes towns such as Astana and even Atyrau (on the Caspian) which the reader has probably never visited (although I, entirely coincidentally, have visited Atyrau, several times). There are stories about a rural way of life that hardly exists anymore in the developed anglophone world (and is probably on its way out in Kazakhstan as well). And yet, there are parts of the USA or Hong Kong that seem more exotic: Sarmekova’s stories and characters are so rooted in common humanity and daily life that little seems unfamiliar. A young woman leaves her village for Astana to find a job and possibly a husband; she waits in “a long, seemingly endless line” at the unemployment registration office,

 

Armangul was tired of waiting. Even waiting for cows to come home for their evening milking was bliss compared to this. It took her all day to reach the door of the first room, but she came out with her hopes shattered. She imagined her hope as a young woman with a long braid, and this braid had just been chopped off. Lady Hope flipped the stump of her braid back over her shoulder, shot a glance at her, and took off.

 

There are stories that feature a bridal scam, that special connection between rural people and their animals, an erstwhile pet’s desire for human companionship, a shepherdess, post-Soviet cars, the “Great Retreat of Kazakhs from the Jungar Invasion” (or at least a book about it), a cobbler. There are stories about women alone in the city, children’s love for grandparents, children yearning for ice cream, sacrifices women make for men, art and life in general. Sarmekova’s stories are familiar songs with different harmonies.

 

To Hell With Poets, Baqytgul Sarmekova, Mirgul Kali (trans) (Tilted Axis, March 2024)
To Hell With Poets, Baqytgul Sarmekova, Mirgul Kali (trans) (Tilted Axis, March 2024)

Familiar, too, in tone and approach: there is—in the stories’ general sensitivity to the vicissitudes of life, a focus on human foibles and the oblique and slightly satirical look at society’s failings—something of a feel of European or even, dare one say, Russian literature, at least that in English translation. Since she writes in Kazakh not (as some Kazakh authors do) in Russian, one supposes that this is in the original rather than being a mere artifact of translation. Sarmekova’s translator Mirgul Kali, it must be said, has done the author a great service by rendering the stories in language that seems as natural as the original must be.

 

Rough cast with mud and straw, the brown adobe house never failed to attract swallows. They must have found the house, with its beefy posts, bolt-upright walls, and proud demeanor, tall enough to build their nests on: every spring, they lined the edge of the roof, their fuzzy red-orange necks shimmering in the sunlight.

 

Sarmekova’s Kazakhstan is one of villages, steppe and city; her characters range from villagers, farmers and shepherds in the countryside to poets in the city. The title story, which is actually two linked stories, tells of a male poet and sometime taxi driver who takes advantage of a young protege, a story that could take place (and probably has) in Paris or a US college campus as easily as in Kazakhstan.

The stories are, for the most part, short. There are twenty packed into just 100 pages. Some are very short indeed, a few hundred words. This is in itself neither good nor bad; what matters is Sarmekova is evidently a master of the (very) short form. While some stories are fully plotted, sometimes a plot is merely hinted at in a vignette. Some are rounded off with a denouement; others are, like life, left ambiguous. Yet despite her mastery of description, ambience and situation, the stories for the most part focus on the people, all fully actualized, even when one clocks in at only a page and a half.

Maybe that’s “why this one”: in Sarmekova’s stories, we can see our own world reflected back at us through a mirror whose distortions somehow make it all the more familiar. It’s a short book; it won’t take long to read. Do.


Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.