Mandaville, Alison

Naghiyeva, Shahla

ScholarWorks (California State University)

     The document to which this notice is attached is protected by copyright owned in whole or in principal part by the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents and the state of Oklahoma. You may download the document for reference and research purposes only. Subscriber ToolsRenewDonateESSAYSby Alison Mandaville and Shahla NaghiyevaIOne of several sculptures in Azerbaijan honoringnineteenth-century poet Khurshidbanu Natavan,Nizami Museum of Literature. Photo: Alison MandavilleHOME | MAGAZINE | MARCH 2016 | ESSAYSIntroduction: Five Younger WomenPoets from Azerbaijann the center of one square inthe capital of Baku,Azerbaijan, stands theobligatory Soviet statue of a womanfreeing herself from her veil. Thisimage paints a simplistic picture ofgender oppression under Islam–and its elimination under the greatmodernizing force of the Sovietstate. In another square, even morecentral to the city, stands a statue ofthe poet and civic leaderKhurshidbanu Natavan (1832–97),a woman celebrated both for herlyrical verses and her facilitation ofthe construction of a critical newmunicipal water system. Clearlywomen were busy working andwriting—and being appreciated fortheir work and writing—before theSoviet Union laid claim to theemancipation of Muslim women.In March 1991, exactly twenty-fiveyears ago, modern Azerbaijandeclared independence from thesoon-to-be-dissolved Soviet Union. Located in the south Caucasus, about the size ofPortugal or the state of Maine, with a population of 9.5 million, Azerbaijan is a placelong at the crossroads of the cultural influences of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.For centuries, Persia and Russia each sought control of the region, and in 1828 the areain which Azerbaijani Turkish was the dominant spoken language was split by treatybetween these two empires. Today ethnic Azerbaijanis are Iran’s largest minority;412 17BACK ISSUEMarch 2016World Literature Todaygoes graphic in March2016 with a specialsection on internationalcomics.Table of ContentsEditor’s NoteInternational ComicsINTRO: “Discovering International Comics,”by Bill KartalopoulosINTERVIEW: “Catalog of an ImpossibleLibrary”: A Conversation with David B., byBrian EvensonPREMIUM  COMICS: “Baby Boom (excerpts),”by Yūichi YokoyamaESSAY: “Casting Shadows: AnkeFeuchtenberger’s Comics and GraphicNarration,” by Elizabeth NijdamPREMIUM  ESSAY: “Frémok: Comics Out-of-Bounds,” by Erwin DejasseESSAY: “International Comics: FiveGroundbreaking Publishers,” by BillKartalopoulosREADING LIST: “Six Comic Books ForFurther Reading,” by Bill KartalopoulosESSAY: “Ilan Manouach: DefamiliarizingComics,” by Bill KartalopoulosFive Younger Women Poetsfrom AzerbaijanINTRO: “Introduction: Five Younger WomenPoets from Azerbaijan,” by Alison Mandavilleand Shahla NaghiyevaTwo Poems, by Rabiqe Nazim qiziTwo Poems, by Aysel (Nino) NovruzTwo Poems, by Jale IsmayilTwo Poems, by Elnaz EyvazDuring this period, women’s literary production blossomed,supported by educated patrons such as Natavan, who in thenineteenth century held literary salons for both women and menin her home.northern Iran is still referred to by Azerbaijanis as “Southern Azerbaijan.” Until a briefperiod of Ottoman influence in the region, when sixteenth-century poet Fizuli began towrite in a form of Azerbaijani (as well as in Persian and Arabic), the region’s literarylanguage was Persian. Embodying this intersection of cultures, today’s Azerbaijanilanguage contains many Persian, Arabic, and Russian loan words, and the influence ofPersian and Arabic forms can be seen in Azerbaijani poetry, especially in the oraltraditions of Ashiq (poet-bards) and Mugham (lyrical folk music).By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1905, the capital city of Baku was home to awide variety of peoples, languages, and religions. A nineteenth-century oil boom hadled to the rapid growth in wealth of a group of local families, many of whomparticipated in movements to reform local institutions of religion, education, andgovernment and to foster the arts. Indeed, by the time Azerbaijan became a Sovietmember state in 1920, the push for more education and a larger public role for womenwas already well established, at least in the bigger towns and cities. In this period,women leaders like Hamida Javanshir, who founded the first co-educational school inAzerbaijan, and the aforementioned Natavan, daughter of the last khan of theKarabagh region, promoted both the education of girls and the cultural and civicparticipation of women, ensuring that the seeds of gender equity had been sown.During this period, women’s literary production blossomed, supported by educatedpatrons such as Natavan, who in the nineteenth century held literary salons for bothwomen and men in her home. This early support for women’s participation in civic andcultural spheres was certainly reinforced by the Soviet philosophy—if not always thepractice—of gender equity. Azerbaijanis continue to speak of women as having played alengthy and central role in the region’s social and cultural spheres. From the same cityas the more well-known Nizami Ganjavi, a shadowy twelfth-century female poet calledMehseti Ganjavi, about whom there are few scholarly sources, nevertheless featuresprominently in Mirza Ibrahimov’s introduction to the first collection of Azerbaijanipoetry translated into English (Azerbaijanian Poetry, Moscow, 1969). He praises herand recounts stories (perhaps apocryphal, but no less culturally powerful) of herresistance to traditional limitations on women’s activities more than eight hundredyears ago.While Muslim women, like women worldwide of all backgrounds, may at timesstruggle for public equity, their lives are anything but homogeneous. The history anddaily lives of women from the region of Azerbaijan, mostly Muslim, are far morecomplex than common Western depictions of oppressed women in scarves suggest. Bytradition, women across the Caucasus and central Asia hold positions of significantpower in their families and local communities. Nearly half of the country’s wageearners are women; today more women in Azerbaijan graduate from universities thanmen. The five poets featured here are, indeed, divided on the question of whetherwomen writers face special challenges in Azerbaijan—a sign of increasing opportunitiesfor women.Two Poems, by Feyziyye AUDIO: “To a Phoenix”: A Poem fromAzerbaijan, by Rabiqe Nazim qiziESSAYSPUTERBAUGH ESSAY SERIES: “We WereBorn in the Houses of Storytellers,” byGhassan ZaqtanFICTION“Venom,” by Zsófia BánINTERVIEWS“From Catalan Poetry to Fortuny Gowns: AConversation with Pere Gimferrer,” by AdrianNathan WestIN EVERY ISSUECity Profile: “Melbourne, City of Literature,”by Jackie LamoureuxWhat to Read Now: “Three QuintessentialBooks to Add to Your ‘Russian Masters’List,” by Anastasia EdelTranslator’s Note: “Translating Manga,” byFrederik L. SchodtGlobal Frequency: “Proximate Pairings,” byRob VollmarEditor’s Pick: The Black Flower and OtherZapotec Poems by Natalia ToledoPREMIUM  International Crime & Mystery: “AGerman Triple Play: Sascha Arango, AnnaMaria Schenkel, and Nina George,” by J.Madison DavisOutpost: “Malvern Books: Reading Broadlyin Austin,” by Jen Rickard BlairBOOK REVIEWSView all reviews in this issueThis is not to say it is easy today for women in Azerbaijan–either in daily life or as apoet. Regardless of whether they hold jobs, women have primary, if not complete,responsibility for the “second shift”–household management, food preparation, andchild care. As all over the world, women work hard—at their jobs by day, at home bynight. While professional women in Azerbaijan today have more opportunities to meetoutside the home than working-class women, spending time in the company of menother than family members—even poets—is still discouraged. Men can comfortablymeet together at the many inexpensive neighborhood cafés, yet women are still largelylimited to public spaces such as parks or the far more expensive European-style cafésin the center of Baku, where a cup of coffee can equal a day’s salary for a teacher.Neither working-class nor most professional women have the resources to visit thesemore upscale cafés often. Between the demands of work, family, and finances, it isdifficult for women of all classes to find the time for creativity, much less opportunitiesto meet with other women and develop their own creative communities. When in 2010we held a two-week workshop for women writers in Baku, many had never laid eyes oneach other; one exclaimed during workshop introductions, “Ah! I’ve read your work,but I’ve never met you!”The prominent writer Afaq Masud, who made the transition as a successful authorfrom the Soviet to the contemporary period, said of women and writing today:A woman has a multifaceted life—at once a mother, a wife, a daughter, and an officeworker. There is a great distance between family life and the life of a writer. It’s likebeing in an airplane during turbulence—up and down, up and down—nauseating. Ihave lived my whole life like that—nauseous. Not everyone, especially women, has theability or occasion to live this way. . . . So, in fact, I don’t advise anybody (I mean girls)to be a writer. It is not a woman’s craft. I think that only the woman who just cannotlive without it should become a writer. If I hadn’t been a writer, I would have beendestroyed. (WLT, Sept. 2009, 17)And attitudes about gender are not the only barriers women writers in Azerbaijan facetoday. The chaos of the decade immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—with its corresponding collapse of the state-supported art and publishing apparatus,political turmoil, a war with neighboring Armenia, and the adoption of an entirely newalphabet—created a literary environment that was, as newspaper editor RaufTalishinsky has called it, in a coma. The frozen border conflict with Armenia and anatmosphere of fervid nationalism common to newly independent states, fostered by anauthoritarian government, continue to channel many public literary efforts towardthemes either entirely personal or explicitly patriotic.By 2007, when we started translating together, the country had stabilized politically, ifnot as democratically as the West had hoped, and younger writers, whose entire adultlife had been lived in a post–Soviet space, began to emerge. Initially, opportunities forpublishing, other than paying for the printing of a book oneself, were rare. Quite a fewprint literary journals have come and gone since 1991—few have staying power, largelybecause of the time and money required to sustain them. A reading public coping witha mandated nationwide change in alphabet (Cyrillic to Latin) together with theeconomic stresses of moving from a subsidized to a developing capitalist economy hasnot helped the already-challenging publishing situation.The rapid adoption of the Internet in Azerbaijan in the late 2000s, albeit withincreasing government regulation, has started to offer more opportunities forThese are not poems that sidestep hard or controversial issues,even as they deal with these issues at times in highly figurativeways: a broken cup, sparrows overcoming a great snowman, onered scarf bringing leaders to their knees.publication. That there are still relatively few active creative writers has also madepublication in the venues that come and go somewhat “easy,” according to poet RabiqeNazim qizi. All the poets featured here have published their poems; several havepublished more than one book of poetry. Yet despite the increased opportunities forpublication in the past decade, many writers in Azerbaijan lament that literature, whilea beloved part of their national identity, is no longer taken seriously—even less so,Rabiqe admits, when it is by a woman.But being taken less seriously has its advantages in politically constricting culturalspaces. You can fly a little under the radar. While some of these women’s poemsexplore common and broadly palatable themes of national pride, they also write ofdomestic violence, rape, divorce, adultery, war, gender inequity, and the strength offemale relationships in their lives. These are not poems that sidestep hard orcontroversial issues, even as they deal with these issues at times in highly figurativeways: a broken cup, sparrows overcoming a great snowman, one red scarf bringingleaders to their knees. Though specific political critique of the government rarelyenters these women’s poems, they write in a long tradition of classical and then Soviet-era poetry through which leaders were often critiqued figuratively and obliquely, orthrough satire. Indeed the concrete nakedness of some of the younger writers’ worksdoes not always sit well with those writers who came of age and achieved literarystature during the Soviet period. Some older writers, such as Masud, argue that thenext generation of writers often just writes for shock value and attention (such as thereis for a writer). And Rabiqe reports that her parents, who admire traditional formalverse, have a hard time understanding her success with more experimental, free-verseforms. But this conversation itself is a sign of a dynamic literary environment.The five poets featured here were all born after 1975, and so have lived their entireadult lives since the end of the Soviet Union. They all work at waged jobs, some havechildren, some are divorced. They are members of, or peripherally connected to, whatremains of the official state Writers’ Union, though that body is still largely dominatedby men. Some included here have been nominated for or won national literary awards.For the last decade, most have been connected to the larger world on the Internet.Even more importantly, all of these women are now connected through social media,especially Facebook, where they post and comment on each other’s poems. This fast-moving, somewhat ephemeral interface operates, in fact, as a kind of virtual mejlis, orsalon, not unlike those that the philanthropist and poet Natavan made possible morethan a century earlier. The significance of these women’s relationships with oneanother in support of their creative work cannot be underestimated in this culture thatis still highly homosocial. One poem here by Jale Ismayil, “We Shall Manage,”illustrates the closeness of this group of writers; like many of their other pieces, thisone set in conversation with another of the group: Rabiqe.This small sample of poems was chosen from those offered by the poets specifically forthis piece, a kind of post-Soviet self-portrait representing a wide range of subjectmatters and styles. The selections reflect the diverse ways in which this group ofyounger women poets has forged, from what was a near coma, an increasingly vibrant,often virtual, literary space for new poetry by women in Azerbaijan today.Alison Mandaville is a poet and assistant professor of literature andEnglish education at California State University. Shahla Naghiyeva is a professor of literature and translation studies atthe Azerbaijan University of Languages. 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Five younger women poets from Azerbaijan

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Five younger women poets from Azerbaijan

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