Tradition and modernity are locked in a miserable marriage in Baqytgul Sarmekova’s short story collection To Hell with Poets. The children of this union spend their lives in Kazakhstan’s auls bursting with gossip, lonely apartments in the sprawling capital of Astana, and at busy markets. Sarmekova’s characters attempt to broker a peace with their circumstances but often meet tragic consequences. Occasionally, and perhaps by no act of their own, they encounter brief glimmers of a conceivable future.
Grotesque and witty, To Hell with Poets deals with the heavy pressure of a patriarchal system mingling with a now reified commodity culture since Kazakhstan’s independence from Soviet control in 1991. These stories take place in an environment reconfigured by time, technology, and desire. Sarmekova casts the former Soviet Union’s power over the region as a peripheral shadow; one character marvels that the wood for his house traveled “a-a-a-all the way from Russia.” But it would be misguided to approach this collection as a unified treatise on Central Asia in the post-Soviet world. While some authors from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, namely Chingiz Aitmatov and Hamid Ismailov, have become better known in the West since the 1990s, many anglophone readers may still struggle to name a Kazakh writer, let alone a woman author from the region. To Hell with Poets provides both an introduction to the region’s cultural output and a skillful, independent work of literary fiction.
The abrupt endings of these concise stories cut deep wounds. “Dognity” inhabits the perspective of the abandoned dog Aqtös. Just like the imperfect humans around him, he tries to express all of his complicated emotions through the constraints of the communicative tools available to him, often resorting to a variant of this formulation: “Humans are lucky. They can smile and laugh if they want . . . ” In “The Night the Rose Wept,” a young writer feels the painful ephemerality of time when she takes revenge on another woman’s misogynistic jabs by seducing her husband. “Lying becomes natural when you have no choice,” says a writer in “The Taming of Aqtory,” in which she is ostracized for rejecting the advances of a powerful older man, and then makes the awful trade of her sense of dignity for rent money. For these characters, memory is a malleable thing; some even conveniently choose to forget the less fortunate people that they bullied out of a sense of shared history.
At first, Sarmekova seems to offer images of horses and birds as feminine creatures, beautiful and frail or yoked to traditional marriage ceremonies. But then traces of the most brutal and animalistic tendencies of human behavior emerge: sexuality intertwined with the carnal threads of power and fear. Many women in these stories find themselves disappointed by the unfulfilled promise of exceeding their humble origins. In stories like “To Hell with Singers” and “Boarbai,” tentative contemplation risks turning women into targets for predators. As the stories unfurl, it is less clear whether the women themselves figure as a kind of prey to masculine predation. In rare moments, the roles flicker in reverse and something shifts—men become delicate things, collateral of the traditions that organize their lives.
Baqytgul Sarmekova grew up in Kazakhstan by the Caspian Sea, and she has published two other short story collections, Күн батқан кездегі оқиға (An incident in the twilight) in 2019 and Кейіпкер (In search of a character) in 2020. To Hell with Poets is the first of these collections translated into English. Her stories present a welcome alternative to the current atmosphere of anglophone realist fiction. While dark and often sickening, Sarmekova’s prose is also contemplative and wrinkled with a sense of affirmative longing.
Mirgul Kali’s translation, meanwhile, is poised and restrained, allowing the moments of dialogue and extended internal rumination to come through clearly in the narrative. Besides the clarity of the characters’ voices, the translation allows the occasional narrator’s words to remain enigmatic and powerful. Kali’s rendition of Sarmekova’s language invites readers into the polyphonic stories and the contemporary Kazakh environment that they depict.
The collection arrives at a time when our bodily needs and functions (or malfunctions) have exceptionally occupied the literary world. Alongside Jenny Hval’s sensitive mingling of human and plant life in Paradise Rot or the violently kneaded feminine bodies of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels, Sarmekova’s short stories offer their own horrific, corporeal descriptions with a sneer. Here, bodily trauma acts as a kind of currency that—usually—women can exchange for partially realized, partially chewed-up dreams. This mushy flesh does not stop at revulsion: it satirizes the weak boundaries between the internal and external, between an encroaching commodification of one’s physical self and the mental bonds to city and small-town life, social expectations, and a developing sense of shared Kazakh culture.
That’s not to say that every story bodes a grim ending for its protagonists. In “The Cobbler,” a shoemaker quietly admires the neighboring samsa seller at the market. Although he never finds the right moment to speak to her or any of the other people on the daily bus route that he finds so interesting, his desire to share in their community shines through. Never admonishing of other characters’ complaints and chatter, but not fully resolved in the cobbler joining them, the story persistently stays open to the possibility of change. In “The Warmth,” a grandmother softly reads aloud a book of Kazakh history to her granddaughter near the comfort of a masonry stove. Eventually, modern gas lines uproot the home’s foundation, and the girl wistfully remembers her childhood home. Melancholic in its remembrance of a simpler past, the story also provides a literary document of personal memory. Here, in place of a physical hearth, memory acts as a grounding force, and reading as an anchor: “I didn’t know if she grieved for the characters in the book or her own generation, nearly wiped out by the great famine of the thirties that she’d sometimes tell me about,” the narrator says. In these atmospheric vignettes, a lack of resolution offers freedom from the myriad constraints already imposed on individuals.
“My novel’s characters have been too stubborn; they refuse to speak the words I put in their mouths. I’m tired of trying to make something decent out of them,” says a writer in the last episode of Sarmekova’s collection. It’s easy to read these words as a flippant, self-reflexive gesture toward the rest of the stories. After all, in this collection it is the poets who turn out to be frauds and the singers who croon of true love and passion but know nothing of it themselves. Rather than a kind of facetious remark for the reader who labors through her narratives, the quotation above can be viewed as a reflection of Sarmekova’s own mix of pleasure and disgust, providing her greater purchase on her own creations. To Hell with Poets leaves the queasy but candid impression that language is just as tricky to navigate as everyday life.
© 2024 by Lora Maslenitsyna. All rights reserved.
