3 summer 2011 - Prince Claus Fund

Prince Claus FundReader #3 summer 2011

Introductionby Siri DriessenOn the occasion of the publication of the first Prince Claus Fund Journal in 1997,the former director of the Prince Claus Fund, Els van der Plas, defined the mainobjectives of the Fund within the framework of international art. Internationalismand the Arts: Theory and Practice contains a critique of the then omnipresentwestern point of view that constituted the discourse about art. Consequently,the article comprises a proposal for a reorientation of the international artfield in which western and non-western (approaches towards) art are treated asequally valid. In addition, it emphasizes the importance of the exchange of informationbetween different cultures and stresses an open attitude towards others.In the concluding section of Internationalism and the Arts, van der Plas statesthat ‘being aware of and acknowledging one’s own values and qualities is essentialin order to understand and respect other forms of art from other cultures.’She argues for a self-reflective attitude when speaking, writing and thinkingabout the arts – a stance that, according to her, contributes to the valuingand framing of the arts from other cultures. This is a very compelling argumentwith a contemporary relevance; since it stresses the importance of introspectionbut at the same time only considers this introspection useful at themoment that it is used to improve the dialogue with different cultures. In otherwords, the argument places the very contemporary temptation to be selfreflectivein a framework of interaction and exchange, and in this way not onlyemphasizes the limitedness of a personal perspective but also underlines themalleability of these perspectives by means of being open to others.Seen from a broader point of view, Els van der Plas’s remarks lay bare a series ofproblems that are related to the processes of understanding and interpreting.First, they appoint the impossibility of ever objectively knowing the essentialidentity of other cultures, because there will always be the restriction of thelimited personal perspective. As said, this perspective can be adjusted as muchas possible by means of self-reflection and dialogue, but it will never completelygo away. Second, they indicate the possible manipulation of the processes ofunderstanding and interpretation. Consciously or unconsciously, external forcescan influence the way in which understanding and interpretation take place.The articles that are collected in this third edition of the Prince Claus FundReader all reflect these two arguments: they focus on existent prejudices,shifting meanings and empowering contexts. In doing this, they try to exposethe power that (manipulated) meaning can have on the way in which a personunder stands. The second article of the Reader does this very clearly. It isexcerpted from Mazaar/Bazaar, a book about graphic design and visual culture inPakistan, and co-published by the Prince Claus Fund Library. The featured articleby editor Saima Zaidi examines visual campaigns waged by different politicalparties during the country’s 2008 elections. Through repeated exposure,seemingly neutral and unremarkable symbols such as a fish, telephone, ladder andtumbler, among many others, became loaded with ideology once these symbolswere co-opted by political parties. As a result, Pakistani voters were forced tointerpret formerly neutral symbols in a context rich of politics and doctrines. Inthis way the unexceptional nature of these symbols were significantly changedand blurred.The third article of the reader is political in a different sense. It explores thepower of national anthems as exponents of nationalist fervor. According to theauthor, the Indian professor of linguistics Rukmini Bhaya Nair, national anthemsfunction as a substitute for old feelings of bondage and trust – sentimentsthat have gradually lost their political importance due to the emergence of safeand stable nation-states. Nevertheless, the urge for these ‘primitive feelings’,Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 4

as Nair calls them, did not disappear. Instead they were transformed into the wordsand melodies of national anthems and were attributed with a political context.Interestingly, Nair concludes that the political and nationalistic character ofthe anthems prevents them from being critiqued and satirized. According to her,a ‘magical immunity’ is attached to the national anthems that prevents them frombeing scrutinized and becoming modern and cosmopolitan. The political sometimesrestrains the possibility to debate. Meanwhile, the similarities in content betweennational anthems make them clear and understandable – the meaning of a nationalanthem is everywhere strikingly the same.The fourth article by the eminent Turkologist Talat Tekin presents a strictscientific approach to the politics of words and languages. It delves into thesimilarities between a broad range of Turkish dialects that are spoken in a vastgeographic area that stretches from the far east of Russia to the Baltic Seaand the Persian Gulf. This interesting article takes a very dissimilar group ofpeoples regarding their culture and geography as a whole, even though some ofthem can hardly understand each other. By doing this, it claims in an elaboratemanner that language has a comprehensive power – one that renders culture,race and geography irrelevant when analyzing Turkish culture.A related approach can be found in the fifth article of this reader, whichdiscusses the existence of Caribbean identity. Author Rex Nettleford searchesfor a way to comprehend a geographically, linguistic and culturally dispersed area,since he is convinced that Caribbean identity is specific and demonstrable. Dueto the lack of similarities in language, culture, and politics, Nettleford conceivesthe celebration of Carnival as one of the main expressions of a particularCaribbean identity. This renders the article very compelling, because it arguesfor a way of mutual understanding, or recognition, that is not based on languagebut on the body, in movement and gesture. Apparently, it is not only throughinteraction in language that understanding takes place.Yet, language still exercises enormous power. In the sixth article of this reader,the Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu argues for the emergence of an Africanphilosophy that comprises an essential African identity. Since many Africanphilosophers were educated in Europe or the United States, their work has beenhighly influenced by a western way of thinking, which makes it very hard to definetheir work as African. In order to avoid this overshadowing of African thought bywestern philosophy, he argues for a turn towards a philosophy that is identifiableas essentially African, as well as for the emergence of intercultural dialoguesthat enables understanding between different cultures. His argument is thustwofold: he sees a geographical identity as essential for the emergence of aschool of philosophy, while at the same time he emphasizes the necessity ofinter acting with other cultures. Yet also here it is ultimately the awareness ofbeing bound to a specific context that is stated to be the most valuable.The last article of the reader contains a very critical approach to cruelties ofthe twentieth century and the accompanying deterioration of humanism by theMexican author Carlos Fuentes. Under the guidance of the works of well-knownwriters like William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Henrik Ibsen, Ulises Hernán dela Cruz, Miguel de Cervantes, amongst others, Fuentes tries to find a redefinitionof humanism that is rooted in the recognition of others. ‘How does one livewith he or she who is not like you or me?’ Fuentes questions. His answer lies in therecognition of feelings of humanism in other cultures: one has to know thehumanism of others in order to be able to apply it to oneself.Fuentes’ argument recalls Els van der Plas’s request for interaction betweenself-reflection and being open to others. Yet, his starting point is different: hestates that self-knowledge is only possible after recognizing that what you wantto be in others. But, is this difference in starting point really urgent when consideringintercultural understanding, and does it lead into different results?5 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

Both authors argue for an exchange of perspectives that is said to be assistingin the emergence of mutual intelligibility. This exchange thus both encompassesthe identity of the exchanger as well as the one of the exchanged, leaving bothin an adjusted form after the moment the exchange took place.Returning to Internationalism and the Arts, it is easy in hindsight to discern inthe article the beliefs, motives and intentions that gave shape to the identityof the Fund at an early stage. Moreover, it is tempting to regard these beliefs,motives and intentions from a contemporary perspective, and try to determinewhether they have been successful, and if so, to what extent. In other words,it is possible to try to locate these motives in their mutated, adapted forms,indicate the results they have had, and connect them to articles that have beenwritten about the Fund in a later stage. However, such an approach has thedanger of rendering the article rather dated: it would judge the arguments thatare made upon their success-rate, and in that sense neglect their value asideas that can find a contemporary relevance. Of course, it is always importantto consider arguments in their historical framework. Nevertheless, by means ofcon centrating on the ambiguities that surround understanding and the productionof meaning, this reader hopes to argue for the creation of new personalperspectives, either within a historical or contemporary framework.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 6

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Internationalism and the Arts:Theory and Practiceby Els van der PlasPrince Claus Fund Journal #101Year published 1998Number of pages 72Number of articles by Van der Plas 4Number of contributors 8Number of articles 9Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 8

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ds, in wideruits, unprepost-anthroanconditionwaiting thetaneously onoutes: Historyhis article.ticle haveFrom 30 March to 2 April 1998 the Unescointergovernmental conference on the ‘Power ofCulture’ took place in Stockholm, Sweden.As an agora to this conference the seminar‘Vision of African Cultural Co-operation andDevelopment’ was organised, seeking to discusskey issues of African cultural development forthe 21st century.The event was also the occasionfor the international launch of Ubuntu 2000, apan-African initiative working in this field.At the invitation of the Bellagio PublishingNetwork, organiser of the conference, Els vander Plas, Director of the Prince Claus Fund,read the following paper.Internationalism and the Arts:Theory and PracticeThe world of the visual arts in the post-colonial,post Cold War and indeed even post-modernistera is characterised by certain specific features,which may serve as relevant starting-points fortoday’s discussion on internationalism and thearts, in theory and practice.Concepts and DefinitionsThe terms ‘art’ and ‘modernity’ – and thus also‘modern art’ – are of Western origin. In thisWestern perception, art is regarded as theultimate expression of the ultimate emotion. Inthis context the meaning of modernity is closelylinked with evolutionary ideas. The logicalconsequence of a belief in human progress is thatmodern artists create their ultimate expressionsof art in ivory towers and exhibit their works ofgenius in those Western ‘art temples’, themuseums of modern art. The almost religiousexperience of these objects comes close to thishigher ideal of ultimate emotional possibilities.This modernist concept is currently changing. Itis a change that started roughly ten to fifteen yearsago, especially through the influence of the artfrom non-Western countries and of art workscreated within multicultural societies in theDiaspora. Cultural relativism is making inroads inthe art world. In fact it is better to talk of‘contemporary art’ rather than ‘modern art’ whenreferring to contemporary developments in theinternational art world, given the Westernconnotations of the term ‘modern’.Els van der PlasThe visual arts take many forms. In addition tothe modern art I referred to above, there ispopular art, fashion, ceramics and religious andanimistic art from countries in Latin America,Africa and Asia. These forms of art are sometimesmore popular in their own country than modernart is in the West. At the same time this isprecisely the difference in comparison with themodernist definition of art given above. All ofwhich goes to strengthen the case for using theterm ‘contemporary art’ rather than ‘modern art’as a way of including various contemporarydevelopments in the art field around the world.Art HistoryIn the areas colonialised by the West, Westernersestablished academies of art. There a Europeansystem of academic art training was given (afterthe example of the 19th-century painter JoshuaReynolds) and modern art was taught from theImpressionists and the Cubists up to the time thecolonists withdrew again, the 1950s. As a resultartists in Latin America, Africa and Asia oftenknow a great deal about Western modern art,especially up to the 1950s. Western art historytherefore became a part of the history of thecolonial areas. In that sense ‘back to the roots’ isnot a contemporary idea, but rathera ‘neo-postcolonial’attitude.On the one hand, there is a lack of knowledge inEurope and America of the art history and currentdevelopments in the arts in the various countriesof Latin America, Africa and Asia. On the otherhand, in non-Western areas there is sometimes alack of up-to-date information on Westernmodern art. This makes the transfer of knowledgeessential. It is just as important for aMozambican artist to read ‘Art in America’ as it isfor the Museum of Modern Art in New Yorkto have ‘Revue Noire’ or the Zimbabweanmagazine ‘Gallery’ in its library. The mutual lackof expertise needs to be corrected on both sides.The gaps in knowledge and expertise I havereferred to, mean that art is not always assessedadequately and professionally or in its propercontext. As a result it is not always easy tocombine arts from various areas and bring themtogether in a balanced way, as can be done withother art forms. In literature, for example, this isstimulated by translating books and other works,Prince Claus Fund Journal #1 5511 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

in music by interpreting one another’s compositionsand by trying out one another’s sounds,rhythms and scales, and in dance by the directappeal of bodily expression. Visual art is often lessaccessible, particularly when we are seeking aninternational framework.An important intermediary for the visual arts iswriting about art (art history, art criticism,documentation). It is a way of giving meaning toart. Art history and art criticism are noteverywhere equally highly developed. In Africa,for example, the written word is by no means theessential force behind art production that it is inthe West. In Africa, as in Asia, the masterapprenticerelationship is an important mannerby which knowledge and meaning are transferred.In the West, on the other hand, art trainingis sometimes regarded as an inferior way ofbecoming an artist, because of the premium thatis placed on originality and individuality.Up to now the tradition of writing about art hasbeen an almost unilaterally Western affair. Thishas meant that opening our doors to art from thenon-West and criticising it has largely become amatter for the West, even in a global context. It isimportant to break this dominance. People likeJim Supangkat, Gerardo Mosquera, Ery Cámara,Salah Hassan, Okwui Enwezor and others arealready doing this, but it is no easy task. After all,writing about art sprang from the idea that art isan individual form of expression. Its origins arewith the Greeks and the Renaissance art historianVasari who has shown an interest in the artist’sindividuality, who described the man behind thepainting, the genius behind the Mona Lisa.If writing and publishing about visual art arealmost non-existent in a culture, it is important toensure the art itself is properly documented, bymeans of exhibitions and books, or slides,photographs and the like. This information iseasily distributed and may encourage morefrequent international exhibitions, both in theWest and in the non-West. The internationalnature of the Biennales in Venice and Kasselis still very much a one-way European andAmerican trip. The Biennales in Istanbul,Havana, and Johannesburg are conglomerates ofso-called Third World art which please the ‘OtherWorlds’. As a result there is too little follow-upand recognition for them, and this is also aShirin Neshat (1957, Iran):Grace under Duty, 1994black and white photography,ink130 x 106.6 cmcourtesy of the artistWomen of Allah, 1995black and white photography,ink144 x 101.5 cmcourtesy of the artispage 43Allegiance with Wakefulness,1994black and white photography,ink127 x 101.4 cmcourtesy of the artistquestion of power and respect. In the West, theinfluence and even presentation of non-Westernart is sometimes experienced as a threat; after all,it means less power to the few. Moreover, itconfronts curators with their lack of knowledge of,for example, Chinese contemporary art, and thisundermines the domination of Western knowledgeand expertise. Though it is not said in somany words that Western museums are full,implicitly this is the message that is conveyed. It isnot easy to put your finger on it, because thereasons for not displaying certain art are alwaysargued in terms of quality. And quality is a relativeconcept.Attempts at RedefinitionThe concept of ‘international art’ is capable ofincluding many different concepts of art, from artas the most personal expression of the mostpersonal emotion, art as a means of religiousexpression, to art as a social analyst and critic. Inconsequence distinctions between high art andlow art, or between applied art and fine art maydisappear. Of course there are differences in theway they are experienced and received, and it is agood thing that these are studied and given aname, but this discussion must be inclusive andconducted within the framework of art.While I am on the subject of art developments in aglobal context, I would prefer to talk of a ‘trueinternationalism’ in art rather than a ‘new internationalism’as described by the Institute for NewInternational Visual Arts in London. (After all,‘new’ is another product of the Western cultureof originality). This true internationalism isconcerned both with art in the multiculturalsociety and with presenting Western and non-Western contemporary art on an equal footing in avariety of publications, exhibitions and activities.Can we find a similar definition of art in thisinternational context? Let us try. An artistexpresses an idea or an emotion by means ofrepresentation. He or she may be expressing ameaning or a feeling and may be transmitting it toa local, national or international community. Anartist has the talent and skill to put this messageor emotion in a form that places it on a higherplane than the purely personal, so that it appealsto a wider audience.Not all kinds of art require an international56 Prince Claus Fund Journal # 1Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 12

West, then-Westernt; after all,oreover, itwledge of,t, and thisern knowsaidin sos are full,veyed. It isecause theare alwaysis a relativecapable ofrt, from artthe mostf religiousd critic. Inh art ande art mayces in theand it is ad given alusive andments in aof a ‘true‘new intertefor New(After all,rn culturenalism isulticulturaland nonootingin activities.art in thisAn artistmeans ofpressing aitting it tounity. Anis messagen a highert it appealsternational13 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

The Art of the Possible.The Visual Campaigns ofPolitical Parties in Pakistanfor Elections 2008Sustaining Life in a Geograof Adversityby Rema HammamiBy Prince Saima Claus Zaidi Fund Journal # 13From Mazaar/Bazaaredited and designed by Saima ZaidiPublished by Oxford University Pressand the Prince Claus Fund Library02Year published 2009Number of pages 347Number of pages by Saith 10Number of contributors 10Number of Articles 11Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 14

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the art of the possibleThe Visual Campaigns of Political Parties in Pakistanfor Elections 2008saima zaidiElection campaigns are a unique exercise in precipitatingand sustaining a concentrated interface betweentwo entities, the political party and its voters. Thechallenge in Pakistan, is to effectively communicatewith a plural, heterogeneous society constituting millionsof voters, i who not only speak different languagesand dialects but also have varying degrees of literacy,both in reading and decoding visual symbols.Political parties understand that their election campaignsmust act to rally the electorate and instilsolidarity. One way of achieving this is by ensuringthe consistent graphic application of the electionsymbol, party colours, iconography and slogans. Thisis an endeavour that requires substantial financialresources as a party’s street power is measured by itsability to swamp the public space with its presence.This essay depicts and discusses the visual electioncampaigns of several parties and the design of theposters and the ballot paper printed by the ElectionCommission of Pakistan ahead of the 2008 elections.It also concentrates on how this phenomenon playedout in the urban public space in Karachi, Lahore,Peshawar and the twin cities of Rawalpindi-Islamabad. iiThese elections and their campaigns were historicallysignificant because of at least three major developments.First, they were taking place after eight years ofmilitary rule. Second, two major political leaders, BenazirBhutto and Nawaz Sharif, had returned from longexiles to run their party campaigns, something theywere unable to do for the 2002 elections. Third, theassassination of Benazir Bhutto on 27 December 2007,a few days before the scheduled elections on 8 January2008 iii had an unprecedented effect on the electorate.i. Eighty million citizens were registered as voters in thecomputerized electoral rolls of 2006–2007.ii. The campaigns had to be swift and hard-hitting as theycan only start after the last date for the withdrawal ofnominations and have to end 48 hours before the midnightof the day of the election itself—16 February.iii. The elections were postponed to 18 February 2008 as aresult of the assassination.the art of the possible22717 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

stamping the symbolJust as a word can be assigned a variety of meanings, a symbol can havea multiplicity of meanings, leaving it up to the observer to award it aparticular or the most appropriate interpretation—depending on thecontext, as well as, his knowledge and experience. 1 This is demonstratedby signage for urban public spaces which conveys its message throughdesign elements that are condensed to basic forms. For example, thesilhouette of a woman wearing a dress, which is globally accepted as thesign for the ladies’ restroom, i is in itself ‘neither universal nor self-evident’but has managed to ‘transcend national boundaries and unify global life’, 2thus communicating across languages and cultures.As with any symbol, meanings may be attributed to a political symbolwhich can be learnt through repeated exposure. For example, the abstractsymbol of the swastika ii which has been referred to as ‘the most effectiveidentity system in history’ 3 and which Adolf Hitler claimed to havepersonally designed, was an ancient symbol of good fortune. It latercame to represent anti-Semitism and its display became prohibited byconstitutional law in Germany.The symbols associated with the politics and elections of Pakistanhave acquired meaning in much the same way. The Election Symbols2007–2008 poster printed by the Election Commission (EC) (Figure 3)shows symbols which appear to be an arbitrary assortment of inanimateand animate objects with no necessary or obvious political connection.A majority of them have been derived from a qaeda (a reader) that assignsan alphabet to an object from everyday life, such as fruit and animals,cleverly weaving pictures and words, the visual and the verbal (Figure 2).Employing these basic images as election symbols aid recognition andrecollection in a country where literacy levels are low. It is importantto note, however, that countries with higher literacy rates also utilizesymbols. In the United States for example, the elephant and the donkeyrepresent the Republican and the Democratic parties, respectively. iiiThe EC symbols are reduced to line drawings in a single colour to facilitatemass production. Of those available at the Election Commissioner’soffice, parties select symbols which best represent their ideology or aremost likely to appeal to their target electorate base (Figures 4–11). Certainsymbols are exploited because of different potential meanings for e.g. theMuttahida Majlis-e Amal (MMA), an alliance of six right-wing religiousPakistan is unique as it is a country thatwas voted into existence. In the electionsof 1945–6, the central issue of the All-India Muslim League’s campaign was thedemand for Pakistan. The party’s resoundingvictory among Muslim voters helpedto legitimize its claim to represent theMuslims of India, as well as its demandfor the establishment of Pakistan as aseparate nation.In the sixty-one years since Pakistangained independence in 1947, eight generalelections have taken place, and thecountry has experienced thirty-one yearsof military rule. It is important not toequate holding elections and the expansionof ‘representation’ with ‘democratization’.In 1970, after eleven months ofelection campaigning, 1570 candidatesfrom 25 parties canvassed across the widthand breadth of East and West Pakistan.Only ten of these parties ended up withseats in the National Assembly. 5 By the2008 elections, Pakistan had expandedto 342 constituencies in the NationalAssembly for which 2038 candidates contestedfrom 73 parties of which only 12parties ended up with seats.Figure 1 (Pages 226&227): Supporters cheeringand waving on their way to the polling stationon the day of elections, 18 February 2008.Figure 2 (Below). The end page of a reader ‘Funto learn series Urdu alphabet’. A series for earlylearning, ideal for toddlers & preschool children,Caravan Book House, Lahore (ages 2+).Figure 3. Election Symbols 2007–2008Poster printed by the Election Commission office.Prior to each election, political parties apply tothe EC for the allocation of symbols. Generallythe parties receive the symbols they request orhad received in the previous elections. If twoor more parties request the same symbol thenlots are drawn.2.saima zaidi228i. The man and woman symbols belong to an international hieroglyphics of publicinformation which have roots in a system called Isotype (International System ofTypographic Picture Education) devised by philosopher and social scientist OttoNeurath in the 1920s. The system encompasses people, places, objects and actions.ii. This graphic symbol is to be found in almost every ancient and primitive cultall over the world. It is the synthesis of two symbols of independent force: the(Greek) cross with arms of equal length and the cross with four arms appearingto rotate in the same direction and its implications are very wide, variouslyrepresenting the supreme deity, association with agriculture and with the pointsof the compass and as a specific sign, denoting rotation about an axis. Alsodepicted in the Indus Valley seals (see page 321). 4iii. Thomas Nast, a cartooning legend, popularized these symbols that originatedfrom a political cartoon in the 1870s.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 18

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parties, chose the symbol of a book (Figure 6) and promoted its perceptionas the Qur’an (known in Arabic as Al Kitab or The Book). These religiousovertones acquired additional relevance with the party’s unexpectedvictory in the 2002 elections, something that the analysts attributed to anexpression of the Muslim electorate’s disapproval of government supportfor the West concerning the Iraq war.4–6.Another oft-quoted example laden with religious sentiment is that ofthe sword (Figure 9), the symbol of the liberal Pakistan People’s Party(PPP) until the 1988 elections. Not only does it traditionally imply power,protection and courage but it semantically and historically refers to theword ‘Zulfiqar’ which is the name of the legendary sword of the fourthCaliph of Islam. When the EC decided ahead of the 1988 elections thatthe sword would no longer be a choice, the PPP selected the teer or arrow i(Figure 10) to replace it. Thappay pey thappa, teer pey thappa (Stamp afterstamp, stamp on the arrow) has since become a popular party slogan.saima zaidi230The selection of a symbol could be inextricably linked to its regional,agrarian, historical or religious connotations. An example of the regionalcontext were the Peshawari Chappals—a pair of leather sandals, namedafter the capital city of the North-West Frontier Province—selected bythe Pakhtoonkhwa Qaumi Party in elections 2002. Tools of the tradesuch as the spade, the karandi (trowel), and the tractor were chosen bythe Punjab National Party, Labour Party Pakistan ii and National People’sParty—parties representing the working class. In fact, the dual arrangementof the sickle and hammer iii and the charkha (wheel) iv recall earlierpotent political associations. The latter, reminiscent of the Independencemovement, forms a part of the Indian national standard, and inPakistan represents the Hindus and Scheduled Castes’ Party.Animals are an enduring visual phenomenon in the subcontinent, asaffirmed by the humped bull, the elephant and the unicorn of the IndusValley seals dating back to 4000 BCE. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz(PML-N) selected the sher (tiger or lion) as its election symbol and fullyexploited its well known characteristics of majesty, strength, justice andmight as the king of the jungle. One poster featured party chief NawazSharif and a lion alongside a famous Urdu quotation attributed to thelegendary fighter Tipu Sultan: ‘To live for one day as a lion is better thanliving for a hundred years as a jackal.’ 6 In the Punjab, the stronghold of thei. In Greek mythology it is the weapon of Apollo and Diana, signifying the lightof Supreme power. 7 According to PPP leader Syed Taj Haider, the arrow as asymbol was selected by party worker Akhtar Mirza at the request of the PPP’slate chairperson, Benazir Bhutto. ‘Mirza [randomly] opened Shah Jo Risalo a bookbased on the spiritual poetry of Hazrat Shah Abdul Lateef Bhittai (a Sufi saint ofSindh). The first thing he read was [the line] Sabr Jein Jo Seer…Teer Na Gussay Tin Jo.In a rough translation, this means ‘the one whose city is patience…the arrow shallnever hit (Narrated to Shah Jilani, reporter, The Daily Times).ii. In the general elections 2002.iii. Symbolic of Communism. The hammer in Pakistani politics is the symbol of theTameer-e Pakistan Party (tameer: construct).iv. The navy-blue wheel with 24 spokes, known as the Ashoka Chakra ‘the wheel ofRighteousness’, is used on the Indian flag and was taken from the Lion Capitalof Ashoka at Sarnath. Thus, the charkha (spinning wheel), a symbol of economicregeneration of India under Mahatma Gandhi, evolved into the chakra, the wheel.Figures 3–12. Wall chalkings of election symbolsSymbols are usually painted on walls in partycolours. Additionally, the name of the party inacronyms, the names of the party leaders, slogansas well as the party flag, are included.Figure 4 shows the symbol of a huqqa (waterpipe)next to which is written ‘Election symbolwaterpipe’. Figure 5 shows a rickshaw with thename Irfanullah Khan Marwat, a candidatefor a provincial assembly seat. In Figure 6 nextto the book (election symbol of the MMA)is written ‘Only stamp the book’ urging theviewer to ‘Make the book a success’. Figure 7depicts the fist accompanied by the slogan ‘Longlive Ghinwa Bhutto’. Figure 8 shows an ‘axe’within the red flag for Jeay Sindh, on the wayto Thatta, 2007. Figure 9 shows the flag of thePPP and its earlier symbol, the sword, paintedoutside the Bhutto mausoleum at Garhi KhudaBakhsh (2008), while in Figure 10 the arrowis painted in the PPP colours. Sponsored by theMalir District, it carries the name of the candidateSalman Abdullah Murad for the SindhAssembly seat. Figure 11 shows a stencil of thekite in party colours of the MQM from the 2002elections. In 2008, the party decided againstdefacing public property by not advertising onwall chalkings. Figure 12 displays the bright redlantern of the ANP along with its red flag.Figure 13. Activists of the PML-N flashing Vsigns gathered around a car with a stripedanimal-print skin stretched over its hood—avisual reference to their election symbol, thesher (lion or tiger).Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 20

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saima zaidi232PML-N, the lion is also a reference to the popular folklore of Jagga, a colonial-dayRobin Hood from Sialkot. Novelty was added to some of the PML-N’s campaign rallies by the presence of a live lion in a cage while othermore practical and animal-friendly versions were lion sculptures flankingthe podium, stuffed toy lions held aloft by party members or affixed to theroof of a car. One PML-N activist exhibited creative genius by stretching astriped animal-print skin over the hood of his car (Figure 13).The election symbols are thus open to interpretation by political parties,proving Gombrich’s notion of ‘the beholder’s share’. Meaning, thus,lies in the eyes of the beholder much like an ‘image in the clouds’ or theproverbial ink blot; you see what you want to see. For example, the kite(Figure 11) was the symbol of choice for the Muttahida Qaumi Movement(MQM), which started out as a party for Urdu-speaking Muslims (or Muhajirs)who migrated to Pakistan at Partition in 1947. The kite, generallyassociated with the attainment of height, could also refer to the notionof the kati patang or literally ‘the kite cut loose’ symbolising the ‘displacement’of the Muhajirs, as explained by a supporter. iNot all symbols, however, find resonance with political parties and voters;in fact, they may even have negative connotations. For example, the kursi(chair) implying a lust for power in popular Urdu idiom, was considered,by and large politically incorrect, while the lota, a vessel used for ablutionand disparagingly applied to political turncoats was soundly rejected inthe 2008 elections.Thus, the election symbol primarily serves as an identification device.Its relentless exposure ensures that it becomes ingrained in the voter’sconsciousness and is instantly recognised when it is time to stamp theballot paper.the prophets of politicsPolitics in Pakistan remains personality- (and not issue-) driven, theleader or the chairperson being the party’s most visible face. ‘The cult ofpersonality cannot be separated from the image or objectives of a party,’ 8and the visual campaigns for the elections 2008 were no different; smilingcandidates greeted the public from billboards, posters and banners(Figures 20–40). These faces carpeted the city and it is arguable that not asingle neighbourhood or major road was without them. What was conspicuouslyabsent from these graphic statements, however, was the image ofthe awam or masses, the people responsible for bringing them to power.Thus, the political poster for the 2008 elections aimed at doing littlemore than ‘stimulat[ing] (and simplify[ing]) moral sentiments’ as SusanSontag puts it, something that was ‘classically achieved through a visualmetaphor, usually a thing or an idea, being attached to the emblematicimage of a person’. This principle also plays out in commercial advertisingas exemplified by the pervasive use of the image of a pretty girl or asMarshall McLuhan puts it, the ‘mechanical bride’. ‘The equivalent ini. Revealed to Saquib Hanif (former editor of Herald magazine), by an MQM activist.Also to capitalize on their election symbol, a patang mela ‘kite-festival’ was heldat Nishtar Park as part of MQM’s pre-election campaign (recalling Basant, a kiteflyingfestival to welcome spring in the Punjab).Figures 14–19. Wall chalkings on Shahrah-e Faisalto welcome Benazir Bhutto’s arrival in Karachi,October 2007.Figures 14–17. This wall on the way to the airportreads ‘Challo challo’ (Let’s go, let’s go),a popular call to invite the public, especiallyto a political gathering. It continues, ‘Airportchallo, Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto ka tareekhiIstaqbal’ which means ‘Let’s go to the airportto give Benazir Bhutto a historic welcome’ on18 October 2007.Figure 18 declares ‘Benazir Ayegi, RozgarLayegi’ (Benazir will come, bringing gainfulemployment).Figure 19. ‘Fakhre Asia, Dukhtare Mashriq’(The Pride of Asia, Daughter of the East). Thepopularity of certain slogans can be gauged bytheir adoption by several parties for example,the poster for Zubeida Jalal, former EducationMinister celebrated her as ‘Daughter ofMakran, The Pride of Balochistan’ in Elections2002 in which she participated as an independentcandidate (not shown here).Figure 20. Thousands of photographs of thelate PPP chairperson have been used in everyconceivable graphics with her white dupattacovering her head. This poster shows Benazirprominently placed within a crescent with herface towards the Ka’aba and hands raised inprayer. This Reuters photograph showed herstopping while descending from the plane uponher arrival in Karachi on 18 October 2007after years of exile. She was captured frombelow as she lifted her hands in a prayer ofthanks for her return to Pakistan. This muchreproducedsemi-religious image came to carryintense meaning after her death.Figure 21. A banner of Benazir Bhutto beingunfurled for a gathering in Liaquat Bagh,Rawalpindi where she was assassinated. Itreads ‘Shaheed-i Jamhooriyat’ (Martyrfor Democracy) and ‘Ya Allah, Ya RasoolBenazir Beqasoor, Benazir Beqasoor, BenazirBeqasoor’ the slogan invoking God and theProphet (PBUH) and repeating the statement‘Benazir Innocent’.Figure 22. Poster by artist Khuda Bux Abro.As part of his political activism, Abro hasdesigned several posters which he uploads forviewing on the internet. This poster was inreaction to the 27 March 2008 meeting ofNational Assembly when slogans of ‘Zinda haiBhutto Zinda hai’ (Alive, Bhutto is Alive) wereraised defiantly in the oath-taking ceremony. Inthis poster the slogan is repeated several timesto visually capture the echoes.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 22

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political advertising is the heroic figure who may be a celebrated leader ofthe struggle, living or martyred, or an anonymous representative citizen,such as a soldier, a worker, a mother, a war victim.’ 9Heroic imagery is standard fare in propaganda worldwide. During thecultural revolution of China, an estimated 2.2 billion portraits of ChairmanMao were printed. They were found in every home where they wereconferred a highly revered status; ‘Nothing could be placed above it, andits frame could not have a single blemish.’ 10 Another revolutionary icon,Che Guevara, has morphed into a stylish global symbol of resistance,protest and desire for change. Albert Korda’s ‘most reproduced image inthe history of photography’ continues to surface all over the world—as isseen on walls in Palestine, the packaging of ‘Cherry Guevara’ ice cream inAustralia, 11 and placards in protest rallies in Pakistan (Figure 41).23.The notion of the martyr has been noticeably projected by the PPP whichfrequently features images of party founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hung in1979 by a military dictator. In a stunning historical twist, the PPP’s mostwell known face of Benazir Bhutto was transformed from a living icon to amartyred legend right in the middle of a campaign rally in December 2007.The heroic status of political leaders is consolidated in images thatcapture trademark body language. A popular hand gesture is the V-signdenoting victory i the clenched fist and other dramatic polemical devicesthat were used by the Left and were adapted later for Second WorldWar propaganda. 12 A crossroads in an MQM-dominated area in Karachiis popularly known as Mukka Chowk ii because of a large sculpture of aclenched fist, which was also the signature gesture of the first primeminister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan.Politicians in Pakistan also adopt attire which over time becomes theirtrademark. Headdress such as the turban, white veil, iii even a fez cap ivoften assumes significance by becoming a personalized ‘halo’.And then there are campaigns such as that of the MQM’s 2008 promotionalvideo Saathi (companion) in which party chief Altaf Hussain is depicted inan almost prophetic light but does not make an actual appearance. Duringthe six-minute clip, he is alluded to as a source of comfort in times oftrouble and grief by an approaching pair of feet in his signature shoes andhands with his well known rings. This technique was employed in motionpictures on the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) who, according to Islamictradition, can never be shown as a human image. Instead the camera itselfstood in as the persona, a method copied by the MQM in its video.Figure 23. A ribbon rosette with a photograph ofBenazir Bhutto pinned on a coat.Figure 24. A banner with a painting of BenazirBhutto in the foreground and that of her fatherZulfikar Ali Bhutto partially seen in the shadows(outside Bilawal House, Karachi 2008).Figure 25. On the eve of the elections, childreninstall a PML-N flag from the top of anabandoned tower in Rawalpindi. Featured areimages of Nawaz Sharif and the party symbol,the tiger.For the election campaigns, a persistent element present in most posters isthat of religious iconography. This was more of a preoccupation of secularsaima zaidi234i. In a radio broadcast during the Second World War, Belgian lawyer Victor DeLavelaye proposed using the V hand sign for ‘victory’ in a propaganda campaignagainst the Nazis. Winston Churchill adopted the idea and it became his personalemblem. The sign mutated into a symbol of peace, when it was used by thoseprotesting US military involvement during the Vietnam War. 13ii. Mukka: clenched fist, chowk: intersection.iii. Benazir Bhutto.iv. Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 24

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parties such as the MQM and PPP, which needed to woo the religiousvote bank than the actual religio-political parties that had already carvedout such an identity for themselves. A PPP poster (Figure 20) shows threecropped photographs of Benazir Bhutto; the most prominent is an imageof her head nestled within the crescent of a moon, facing the Ka’aba, herhands raised in prayer. Below, on the left, she is seen with a copy of theQur’an held over her head in a visual metaphor of protection, and on theright, she is waving one hand while the other holds a tasbeeh or rosary.26.These graphic demonstrations of piety i were a ‘bequeath’ of GeneralZiaul Haq’s Islamisation era. According to Iftikhar Dadi, ‘At this juncture,Pakistani leaders were negotiating with the legacy of fundamentalism,even as everyone understood that neither Benazir, nor Nawaz Sharif, norAltaf Hussain were “fundamentalists” or even personally pious.’ 14of the people27.saima zaidi236The production and dissemination of design can garner public opinionand facilitate the democratic process. An example is the trajectory takenby Solidarity, a pluralistic mass movement of radical democratic changein Poland from the 1980s. ‘Its activities, characterized by a commitmentto non-violence and subversive resistance to the harshly repressiveCommunist regime, eventually led in 1989 to the first democratic electionsin a Communist country since 1946.’ A popular poster referenced theAmerican film of 1952, High Noon, in which Gary Cooper is the cowboysheriff who stands ready to confront ‘the Communist outlaws’, armed notwith a gun but a ballot for Solidarity. 15 The same theme was evoked in apre-election poster-based campaign in 2002 in Zimbabwe; designer andsocial activist Chaz Maviyane Davies created the slogan ‘Take courage:Vote’, highlighting the need for freedom of expression and a violencefreesociety that would combat hunger and poverty by reviving democracy.A tagline on a poster declared ‘You don’t need a bullet, when you’ve gotthe ballot. Violence solves nothing. Use your vote’. 16In Pakistan, in the 1970s, a rallying cry of the PPP, Maang raha hai har Insaan:Roti, Kapra aur Makan (The clamour of every person: Bread, Clothing andShelter), echoed the basic needs of millions. In 2008, the manifestos oftwo major political parties centred on the 5 Es (Employment, Energy,Education, Environment and Equality) and the 5 Ds (Democracy, Development,Defence, Devolution and Diversity). The ruling party, the PML-Q, based much of its campaign on education, highlighting it in televisionadvertisements prior to the elections. Using the catchy slogan Parha likhaPunjab (A Literate Punjab) it featured students in rural classrooms alongwith images of party chairperson Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, also the PunjabChief Minister at that time.i. Also, it is important to note that parties such as the MMA and Jamaat-e Islami (whichboycotted the 2008 elections) etc. would not want to offend voter sentiment byusing photographs of leaders, which is perceived as forbidden in Islam. They insteadrely on architecture or objects such as Prophet Muhammad’s green-domed mosquein Madinah or the curved sword as it appears in the Saudi Arabian flag.Figures 26–32. Billboards of PML-N and PML-Q, Lahore.Large billboards cover the façades of buildings. The predominantcolour for both contesting parties is green andwhite while the distinguishing features are the electionsymbol and images of party leaders.Figure 26 shows two billboards placed over the façade ofa mosque, the one on the right features King Abdullah ofSaudi Arabia, with Nawaz Sharif on his right. This appearsto serve as a reminder of the close ties of the latter with theleader of the country which provided him political asylumin 1999.Figure 27 shows the exterior of the central office of the PML-N covered with billboards, wall chalkings and flags. On theleft is a photograph of the symbol of the PML-N tiger. Also, abillboard depicts the Sharif brothers and the candidates for theprovincial and National assemblies.Figure 29 displays a billboard of the PML-Q with a photographof Quaid-i-Azam at Chauburji, Lahore. The election symbol,the bicycle, is highlighted within a white circle. Figure30 shows the candidate Mian Muhammad Aslam Iqbal,with his arms raised in a glowing green silhouette in frontof a photograph showing supporters attending a politicalrally. Another photograph on the same billboard shows thecandidate addressing a gathering. Names and photographs ofthe sponsors are lined up at the bottom.Figure 31 shows candidate Moonis Elahi, waving frombanners stretched on a wall. Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi andChaudhry Shujaat Hussain focus on the bicycle with theslogan ‘The identity of the people is the cycle, the symbol ofvictory is the cycle’.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 26

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Even though they were included in the manifestoes, social issues were nottranslated into graphic statements. The design of promotional ephemeraubiquitously focused on photographs of politicians, cut and pasted ona flat, coloured background along with the party symbol and colours. Anotable departure from this were the visuals of the MQM, with its primaryconstituencies in Karachi and Hyderabad. Billboards with the symbols ofthe map of Pakistan, love, industry, peace, as well as their party symbolof the kite and a Warholesque silk-screened image of the party leadermushroomed across the landscape (Figures 35&36). The shift in stylesuggested an audience-oriented design strategy addressing the middleclass city-dwellers, bred on a daily diet of slick, international graphics.33.saima zaidi238Campaigns that fail to keep the target audience in mind can, however,misfire. In 2004, India Shining, a 100-million-dollar media campaigncreated by Grey’s Advertising emphasized the economic upswingbrought about by the then ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Designed toappeal to an urban, affluent audience, the campaign failed to charmthe underprivileged, rural electorate (forming the majority) which hadnot substantially benefited from the economic boom. Meanwhile, theCongress Party, for a paltry $6.5 million, assisted by a local subsidiaryof Leo Burnett, catapulted to victory by focusing on ‘What didn’t thecommon man get?’ 17 This is an echo of Saatchi and Saatchi’s successfulcampaign for Margaret Thatcher in 1976 ‘Labour Isn’t Working’, whichhad print ads of a long, winding line outside an unemployment office; 18this was the first time an advertising campaign was credited with affectingthe outcome of an election.conclusionElection symbols are customized to the cultural comfort zone of theelectorate. Mundane objects, such as the modes of transport, the bicycle,rickshaw, or helicopter, i become a vehicle for memory and a recognizablepolitical identity. The party symbols do not include anthropomorphicform and religious symbolism. These elements are incorporatedin posters, billboards and other graphic statements which venerate theleadership. An emphasis on religiosity as demonstrated in the visuals hasemerged in the last three decades and can be explained in terms of beingthe only binding force, or a common thread running through an otherwisediverse spectrum of ethnicities, sects, languages, in fact cultures.Subscribing to a repetitive visual agenda, the posters of different partiesplay musical chairs with three design elements—the symbol, party coloursand the leaders. And while this works, the potential for conceptualdesign as an instrument of political and social change remains essentiallyunexplored. This may in part also be indicative of the nascent andtruncated nature of democracy in the country. A focus on social issues andthe inclusion of the people may have considerable influence in increasingvoter participation, and building a vote bank. As stated by Susan Sontag,‘What determines whether good political posters are made in a country,more than the talent of the artists, and the health of the other visual arts,is the cultural policy of the government, or party or movement—whetherit recognizes quality, whether it encourages it, even demands it.’ 19i. Tehrik-e-Istaqlal (Rehmat Khan Wardag).Figure 33. Altaf Hussain posters pasted atMukka Chowk, Karachi show him wearingthe ‘ajrak’ and Sindhi cap over a white kurtapyjama and also in a western suit in an attemptto visually reconcile the provincial and theinternational.Figure 34. A large flag of the MQM hangingover a street.Figures 35–38. Billboards for the MQM withthe bands of red, green and white. The sloganin Figure 35 reads ‘Empowerment for all’,while in Figure 36 it states ‘We will givePakistan Peace, Progress and Happiness’.Figures 37&38 show typographic play with theletter Q being replaced by the election symbolof the kite and the universal symbol of peace.The website address is also stated.Figures 39&40. The red banners of the ANPin Peshawar. This figure shows the candidatesin the traditional Pathan ‘pakole’ cap and theparty’s trademark flat red cap.Figure 41. Placards of Che Guevara seen at arally on Zaibunnissa street, Karachi.34.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 28

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For the people, a party’s symbol and its political campaigns communicatea promise. Immediately after the elections, as a reminder of this responsibility,a local television channel ran a clip of black and white images ofthe winning candidates and their party workers with a popular old songplaying in the background: Jo wada kiya wo nibhana pare ga. The promisemade will need to be fulfilled.referencessaima zaidi1. gombrich, e.h. ‘Aims and Limits of Iconology’. In Symbolic Images: Studies in the Artof the Renaissance. Phaidon Press Limited, Oxford 1972 (p. 12).2. lupton, ellen and miller, abbott ‘Modern Hieroglyphs’. In Design WritingResearch Writing on Graphic Design. Kiosk, 1996. Phaidon Press Limited, London,1999 (p. 44).3. heller, steven ‘Hitler’s Children: Nazi Iconography in Contemporary GraphicDesign’. Looking Closer 2: Critical Writings on Graphic Design. Edited by Michael Beirut,William Drentel, Steven Heller and D. K. Holland. Allworth Press, New York. Copublishedwith the American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1997 (pp. 201–202).4. cirlot, j.e. A Dictionary of Symbols. Routledge and Keganpaul Limited, London,Second Edition 1971 (pp. 322–323).5. wilder, andrew The Pakistani Voter: Electoral Politics & Voting Behaviour in the Punjab.Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1999.6. dadi, iftikhar ‘Political Posters in Karachi, 1988–1999’. South Asian PopularCulture, 5:1 2008, (pp. 11–30).7. cirlot A Dictionary of Symbols, op. cit., (pp. 19–20).8. dadi ‘Political Posters in Karachi, 1988–1999’, op. cit., Ibid.9. sontag, susan ‘Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity’.Looking Closer 3: Classic Writings on Graphic Design. Edited by Michael Bierut, JessicaHelfland, Steven Heller and Rick Poynor (pp. 196–218).10. stefan r. ‘The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Propaganda Poster’. In ChinesePropaganda Posters. Taschen, 2003 (p. 16).11. charlton, hannah Introduction in Che Guevara The Revolutionary and Icon. Editedby Trisha Ziff. V&A Publications, London, 2006 (pp. 7–11).12. margolin, victor American Graphic Design for Social Change. CommunicatingDesign: Essays in Visual Communication (ed.) Teal Triggs. B.T. Batsford Limited,London, 1995 (p. 42).13. mangum, megan ‘Hands Talk’. In ‘Trace’ AIGA Journal of Design V1/N3 2001. Voice.Codrington, Andrea (ed.) New York, (p. 71).14. dadi ‘Political Posters in Karachi, 1988–1999’, op. cit.15. gromala, diane j. ‘Solidarity: Subversive Codes in the Production of PoliticalChange’. Communicating Design: Essays in Visual Communication (ed.) Teal Triggs. B.T.Batsford Limited, London, 1995 (pp. 46–54).16. www. http://www.maviyane.com/17. beirut, michael ‘India Switches Brands’. Design Observer. http://do3.rubystudio.com/archives/entry.html?id=152 (05.17.04).18. Ibid., comment posted by William Drenttel on 05.19.04.19. sontag ‘Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity’, op. cit.List of Political Parties and Symbols allocated to them in General Elections (2002,1997, 1993, 1990, 1988) http//www.ecp.gov.pk/content/PWS.htmhttp://www.ecp.gov.pk/content/Symbol-allotted.pdf\\The author acknowledges the help of Qamar-uz Zaman, Provincial Election Commissioner,(Karachi) and Saquib Hanif.Figures 42&43. Posters printed by the ElectionCommission of Pakistan outside a polling station.Figure 44. Poster listing the codes of conduct forthe voters. The headline reads ‘Making the electionsa success is a democratic responsibility’.Figure 46. Another poster depicting ‘The correctprocedure to stamp the ballot paper’.Figures 45&47. The ballot paper being issuedby a polling officer after confirmation of thevoter’s identity through the national identitycard and fingerprinting before the vote is cast.Figure 48. The translucent ballot box containingthe cast ballot papers. These boxes werecolour-coded, green covers for the Nationaland white for the Provincial assemblies.42.43.240Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 30

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The A-Z of Nationalismby Rukmini Bhaya NairPrince Claus Fund Journal #803Year published 2002Number of pages 59Number of pages by Bhaya Nair 4Number of contributors 19Number of articles 19Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 32

●●E S S A Y●●books she wrote, India Calling neatlyintertwines the story of her life withthat of her career, showcasing hercosmopolitan desires and her antinationalistpolitics better thananything else she committed to print.A Parsi “by nationality,” Sorabji wasborn into a Christian missionaryfamily in Bombay Presidency. Lokugérightly suggests in the Introduction tothe text that Cornelia was shaped bythree influences in her life—Parsi,Indian and British—but of coursethose cultural identities were crosshatchedby Hinduism, Christianityand Islam as well. The origins ofSorabji’s cosmopolitanism were, inother words, confessional andcommunal. They flung her into theworld of elite reform, which in turntook her to Oxford in pursuit of adegree in Law. One of the first Indianwomen to qualify for the Bar, by theturn of the century Sorabji was an all-India legal practitioner, sui generis.From the start she paid specialattention to the fate of purdahnashin(secluded women) on wealthy estates,the protection of whose legal andeconomic interests she made her life’swork, chiefly through the governmentposition she secured for herself asLady Commissioner for the Court ofWards. She travelled between India toEngland for over six decades, andconsidered herself lucky to havewarmed her hands at “two fires”. Butit was her relentless opposition toIndian nationalism in its Congress andGandhian varieties that earned her thescorn of many contemporaries and,until recently, the condescension ofhistory—nationalist and feministhistory equally.It is this condescension whichLokugé is determined to challenge byre-introducing Sorabji’s memoir to21st-century readers because, in herview, Sorabji was both “visionary andpragmatic”. Those intrigued by theenergetic, controversial and contradictoryfigure which emerges here shouldseek out Sorabji’s other writing andthe vast archive of her letters anddiaries available in the India OfficeLibrary, London—all of which shedonated (after destroying somematerials) in a highly self-consciousattempt to control how she would beviewed by history. Although she wasdetermined to be seen as exceptional,the difference between Sorabji’spolitical views and those of some ofher contemporaries—even reformmindedIndian women—is one ofdegree rather than kind, as MrinaliniSinha’s research on Indian feminismand ideologies of the modern Indianbourgeois has shown.(“Suffragism andInternationalism: The Enfranchisementof British and Indian WomenUnder an Imperial State,” in IndianEconomic and Social History Review36, October-December 1999; Reprintedin Women’s Suffrage in theBritish Empire: Citizenship, Race, andNation edited by Ian Fletcher, PhilippaLevine and Laura Mayhall, Routledge,2000).Lokugé is surely right in suggestingthat India Calling offers a “powerfullyanglophilic critique of Gandhianpolitics”. As significantly, it testifies tothe vexed structural locations in whicha would-be cosmopolitan woman likeSorabji found herself, even and perhapsespecially in the last, crisis-filleddecades of the Raj.■The A-Z of nationalismExamining the symbols of patriotism in the political unconscious of countriesRecent events seem as ifthey belong to a remotepast after September 11.Yet, not so long ago, weparticipated in quiteanother kind of grippingAmerican drama—thesoap opera of the 2001elections which, thanks to cabletelevision, reached distant corners ofthe globe with an alarming immediacy.At one of the many debates staged inthe CNN studios around that time, Irecall one particular moment vividly.It occurred when the commentatorStuart Rothenberg astonished everyoneby putting the endless rounds ofanalysis aside for a moment andsuggesting instead that it would be niceto have a “song or jingle” which toldthe story of ‘The Florida Recount’!Now, what prompted this need forsimple song in the middle of a fraught,21st century presidential campaign? Inthis essay, I will try to examine the rolethat a certain category of ‘songs of thenation’—namely, national anthems—play in the construction of the modernstate. What crises did they oncecommunicate, and do such expressionsof national pride remain relevant intoday’s ‘global’ culture or have theypretty much lost their shine?We must begin by noting that theseare no ordinary songs. Nationalanthems are psychological dynamos.They routinely succeed in gettingwhole countries to rise to their feet.Think about it—how on earth do therepetitive, often banal, compositionswe call ‘national anthems’ manage thisenormous physical arousal, thisconcerted magic? If one were scientificallyinclined, one could begin withRUKMINI BHAYA NAIR●a simple experiment to measure thegalvanic skin response (GSR) to theselyrics across social groups, and I feelsure that even the most sceptical wouldsoon be convinced that the potent mixof emotive themes and energetic musicin an anthem regularly contributes toa massive rush of adrenalin no matterhow phlegmatic or cynical its audience.For a true visceral reaction displayedin the public spaces ofmodernity, one can confidently assertthat, even now, national anthems offersoccer matches a run for their money.It is true that anecdotal evidence doesindicate that in the last 50 years or so,post-War, the importance of nationalanthems has waned world-wide. Theirsoul-stirring strains are no longerheard in cinema halls or quite so oftenover loudspeakers at political meetings.At the same time, however, over30 new nations have been added to theroster of the world’s countries and thissort of data promotes a contrary view.It implies that the national anthem stillmaintains a pervasive and ubiquitouspresence, turning up everywhere fromhumble school functions in remotevillages to presidential palaces amidstimpressive pomp and glitter.The anthem has also found smartnew cosmopolitan homes. Today, aprimary search-and-find tool isundoubtedly the Internet—and hereagain we are in for surprises. The websitesthat have sprung up overnight inthis new manifestation of the expandingarena of community reveal a strongundercurrent of interest in thediscourse of the national anthem. Onesuch exemplary site is David Kendall’s‘Anthem Reference Page’ whichprovides detailed and careful informationabout 98% of anthems currentlyin use! Articles such as this one mustbe read in conjunction with these otherefforts if we wish to understand thecontinuing role of the national anthemin a contemporary scenario where somuch is changing so fast that itbecomes urgent to ask: what remainsstable and unchanging? Exploring themeaning of the national anthem in thepresent ‘multicultural’ set-up may leadus to ask again those fundamentalquestions about who we are and aboutthe factors which confer on us our coresense of ‘belonging’From the standard definition below,for example, we learn that nationalismcounts as “the most powerful force inthe history of the modern world”.Despite the unsubtle nature of thisclaim, I shall take the risk of pursuingthis line of argument further bysuggesting that national anthems arepossibly the most potent emotionalexpression of the force in question. So,what’s nationalism?“Nationalism refers to the politicaland social attitudes of groups ofpeople who share a common culture,language and territory, as wellas common aims and purposes, andthus feel a deep-seated loyalty tothe group to which they belong, asopposed to other groups. Nationalismin the modern sense dates fromthe French Revolution but had itsroots in the rise of strong centralizedmonarchies, in the economicdoctrine of mercantilism and thegrowth of a substantial middle class.Nationalism today is also associatedwith any drive for national unificationor independence. It can alsorepresent a destructive force inPRASHANT PANJIAR / OUTLOOKB I B L I O S P E C I A L I S S U E 2 0 0 2●C O S M O P O L I T A N I S M A N D T H E N A T I O N - S T A T E55Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 34

multinational states.Exalts the nation state as the idealform of political organization withan over-riding claim on the loyaltyof its citizens...A moving force inthe rebellion of colonial people andthe resistance of nations andnational minorities threatened withsubjugation by more powerfulstates. Despite the rival claims ofclass-war on the one hand andinternationalism on the other,nationalism as a mass emotion hasbeen the most powerful force in thehistory of the modern world.”(The Fontana Dictionary of ModernThought).The history of nationalism, in short,has been synonymous with struggle.Those primitive loyalties that wenaively thought we had left behindwhen we entered ‘the modern age’ arereborn in the context of the nationstate.National anthems are thus newcodes for old feelings of bondage andtrust.Befitting their etymological roots inthe antiphonal chants of church music,contemporary national anthemscontain at their emotional coresentiments akin to religious faith.They are secular prayers. As theShorter Oxford tells us, an anthem maybe defined “loosely as poetry; a song,as of praise or gladness...which istechnically a hymn”. Both in theirorigin and in their essence, nationalanthems cannot help but display theircelebratory nature. Consider, forexample, the anthem of Afghanistan,heading the alphabetic chain ofanthems and that of Zimbabwe,closing the circle.AFGHANISTAN:“So long as there is the earth andthe heavens;So long as the world endures;So long as there is life in the world;So long as a single Afghan breathes;There will be this Afghanistan.Long live the Afghan nation.Long live the Republic.Forever there be our national unity;Forever there be the Afghan nationand the Republic.Forever the Afghan nation, theRepublic and National Unity.”ZIMBABWE:“O lift high the banner, the flag ofZimbabweThe symbol of freedom proclaimingvictory;We praise our heroes’ sacrifice,And vow to keep our land fromfoes;And may the Almighty protect andbless our land.O lovely Zimbabwe, so wondrouslyadornedWith mountains and riverscascading, flowing free;May rain abound, and fertile fields;May we be fed, our labour blessed;And may the Almighty protect andbless our land.O God, we beseech Thee to blessour native land;The land of our fathers bestowedupon us all;From Zambezi to LimpopoMay leaders be exemplary;And may the Almighty protect andbless our land.”Eternity on earth appears as autopian signifier within the Afghannational anthem. Faith in God istransposed to faith in an ideal communitythat exists in perfect unity —‘solong as a single Afghan lives’. Today,of course, these words cannot be moreladen with irony, when so manyAfghanis endure the unendurable evenas Afghanistan stands ‘liberated’ by acosmopolitan coalition of ‘civilisednations’ waging their just war againstterror. What is worthy of note here ishow the figurative language of thenational anthem and the forcefullanguage of international rhetoric heremerge to create a sacral and unitaryspace for the expression of‘righteousness’. In the Zimbabweananthem, images of paradise are likewisesummoned up by the vision of a‘wondrously adorned’ landscape andthe Almighty makes an explicitappearance as the final arbiter within apatriarchal hierarchy that includesnational ‘leaders’. These anthemsderive from widely divergent histories,locations and cultures, yet the similaritiesbetween them are striking—forinstance, it is implicitly understood inboth cases that the State is alwaysunder potential siege. Malevolentforces from outside, serpents, threatenthe Eden enclosure of the State at alltimes. Hence, the sacrifice of nationalheroes, a spill of blood and guts, is‘eternally’ needed to ‘protect’ it.A complete narrative of the nationas a ‘house of God’ is incorporatedwithin national anthems today, linkinga religious past with a secular future.Instances such as these demonstratethat the divine roots of the nationalanthem have hardly been eliminatedeven when the themes they touchupon are supposedly mundane.One of the lacunae in nationalistdiscourse that has always puzzled meis the fact that so few parodies ofnational anthems spring to mind. Asformal structures, simple and moralistic,national anthems simply cry outfor mimic versions. But where are theparodies? As I mentioned in myEditorial, an ability to laugh at one’scherished ideals may be one of thefeatures characterising the mind-set ofthe cosmopolitan sophisticate. Yet, inthe case of the national anthem, thedistance between the song and the‘jingle’ mentioned by Rothenberg inhis plea for a record of the ‘Gush andBore’ campaign, appears to constitutean almost unbridgeable abyss. Why isthis? My own hypothesis is that, justas there is a strong social taboo againstmocking sacred literature, there existsa parallel injunction against ‘desecrating’a national anthem—a psycho-logical restriction that can sometimeslead to situations of delicious irony.Consider, for instance, the case ofour own national anthem, rich inanecdotal evidence about the strangepredicament of Rabindranath Tagore,unarguably India’s most toweringliterary figure in the last century.Although in the forefront of India’sfreedom movement, Tagore thoughtof himself as a staunch ‘internationalist’,bitterly opposed to a narrownationalism, which he associated withfascism in Europe and religiousfundamentalism within India. Tagorewas certainly one of India’s originaland greatest cosmopolitans, and manywill be familiar with the seductive storythat has circulated for several decadesaround his composition of the Indiannational anthem. This version of thenarrative, dismissed by opponents ascanard, maintains that while Tagore’spaean to the nation is dedicated,predictably, to a supreme ‘deity’—Bharat bhagya vidhata—this superiorbeing happens to double up convenientlyas the Congress NationalCommittee as well as, perhaps, thePrince of Wales. Wales, veils, wails,wells, whales? If parody were indeedpermitted within the arena of anthems,the possibilities would be endless.Andrew Robinson and Krishna Duttawrite:“‘Jana Gana Mana’ is today India’snational anthem...Officially, it waswritten for the meeting of theIndian National Congress inDecember 1911, where it was sungfor the first time. Most probably itwas really composed for occasionof George V’s coronation at theDurbar held in Delhi in the samemonth—but not sung at the Durbarbecause in was insufficiently‘loyal’...The following year inLondon one of Tagore’s Bengalifriends explained how the songcame about to W. B. Yeats who toldEzra Pound, who then passed thestory on to his father in the USA,calling it a joke ‘worthy ofVoltaire’—‘The national committeecame to Mr. Tagore and askedhim to write them something [forthe Delhi Durbar]. And as youknow Mr. Tagore is very obliging.And all that afternoon he tried towrite them a poem, and he couldnot. And that evening the poet asusual retired to his meditation. Andin the morning he descended witha sheet of paper. He said ‘Here ispoem I’ve written. It is addressedto the deity. But you may give it tothe national committee. Perhaps itwill content them.’” (The MyriadMinded Man, 1995)A joke “worthy of Voltaire” comprisesthe complicated—and quitecosmopolitan—background to thisparticular national anthem. Yet Tagorehimself categorically denied, inkeeping with his own philosophy ofthe sublime, the origins of the alleged‘joke’, clarifying that the ‘greatcharioteer of man’s destiny’ in hispoem was not, and could never be,George V or any other trivial humanagency.Two warring perspectives—the onesceptic and cosmopolitan, the otherserious and cosmic—thus lieembedded and still unresolved withinthe history of our national anthem.But whatever the ‘truth’, its literaryand political antecedents seem to havedone nothing to prevent Tagore’sB I B L I O S P E C I A L I S S U E 2 0 0 2 ● C O S M O P O L I T A N I S M A N D T H E N A T I O N - S T A T E5635 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

evocative words, set to music byPandit Ravi Shankar, from being sungwith gusto at every possible forum.From which evidence it might beconcluded that a national anthem,once established, seems to enjoy a sortof magical immunity. It ensconcesitself as an indelible part of the culturalrepertoire—resistant to mockery, toerasure and to contradictory impulses.Perhaps for this reason, few, to myknowledge, had publicly crossed thelakshman rekha that protects ‘Jana,Gana, Mana’ from its mimic,potentially hydra-headed, rakshashacounterparts—until recently, that is,when the winds of cosmopolitanismwhistle through the world. In theseludic times, it turns out that a “legaland political controversy”—notwithout its potential for parody—haserupted of a sudden around both ournational anthem and our flag. Accordingto the Attorney General of India,Soli Sorabjee:“Our Supreme Court in the case ofBijoe Emmanuel (who refused tosing the national anthem) emphasizedthe importance oftolerance in the ringing words ofJustice Chinnappa Reddy: “Ourtradition teaches tolerance; ourphilosophy preaches tolerance; ourconstitution practices tolerance; letus not dilute it.” This judgement issought to be reviewed on theground that under Article 51A oneof the fundamental duties of acitizen is to sing the nationalanthem and refusal to sing it impliesdisrespect... Another controversyhas recently erupted because RabriDevi and Lalloo Prasad (the ChiefMinister of Bihar and her far betterknown politician consort) remainedseated when the national anthemwas played on Republic Day 2002.The incident raises interestingconstitutional issues. Is it a breachof fundamental duty if one does notstand when the national anthem isplayed? Are fundamental dutiesenforceable? Even if they are not,can political leaders breach themwith impunity? The irrepressibleLalloo Prasad may yet make anothercontribution to our constitutionaljurisprudence. Political life in Indiais never dull...” (The Times of India,3 Feb 2001).In January 2002, the Union Cabinetdecided further that all citizens, andnot just representatives of thegovernment, could hoist the Indiantricolour throughout the year, “subjectto certain restrictions”. But unawareof these strictures, a youthful and byno means unpatriotic friend sent methe following email on Republic Day,January 26:“And a very merry republic day toyou too. Vive la republique! Eversince the rules regarding flagdisplayhave been lifted, my fertilemind has been thinking of new andinnovative ways to show myIndianness and love of themotherland. Tricolour boxer-shortsperhaps—with the ashoka chakraplaced at strategic positions.Nowadays I even find myselfreading the papers. Mostly to findout if we are at war yet.”My point in quoting this fragmentof private conversation is to show that,today, our automated responses to any‘disrespect’ shown towards the objectssanctified by the nation-state can beas fierce, if not more so, as in Tagore’sday. Even to think in derisory termsabout a fetishized national objectseems to be unutterably offensive andshocking. For, how can laughter everbe permitted around a symbolrepresenting the country our soldierssacrifice their lives to defend? Toexercise one’s ‘fertile mind’ is simplyforbidden in a context where ‘finalvocabularies’ prevail and the limits ofa ‘ringing’ call to tolerance are quicklyreached in such cases. Yet, difficult asthey are to resolve, no truly civilsociety can afford to dismiss them, forthey are the very ones that may helpus focus most clearly on the harshestareas of conflict between the individualityof cosmopolitanism and theimperatives of nationalism.The paradoxes contained within theengagingly plain format of the nationalanthem are in fact incredibly complex.Sometimes a country turns out to havemore than one national anthem—Denmark or Fiji, for instance. Thesedifferent anthems often mark phasesof a country’s history. One of Fiji’santhems clearly dates back to the timewhen it was a colony; the other is postcolonial,nationalist. Denmark’ssecond anthem harks back to alegendary past while the first belongsto contemporary times. At othertimes, the cultural diversity that amodern state entertains is reflected inthe fact that a single country may haveup to three or four versions of ananthem in its different languages:Zimbabwe’s anthem is sung in Shona,Ndebele and English! Confusingly,states or groups not officiallyrecognised by the United Nations mayhave national anthems. Former‘colonies’ still loosely affiliated to a‘mother country’ sometimes possessthis characteristic. Aruba, Bermuda,the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Manand Scotland—all have ‘national’anthems but are not listed as ‘nations’!Then there are ‘unofficial’ nationalanthems that can rival an officialanthem in popularity. The first essayby K. Anthony Appiah in this issue ofBiblio serendipitously mentions justsuch an instance, so it is satisfying toreturn to the theme in this last article.On our own subcontinent, bothIndians and Pakistanis owe allegianceto Mohammad Iqbal’s exquisite ‘SareJahan Se Achcha’. In India, crucial Stateoccasions such as the Republic andIndependence Day celebrations aregraced by this ‘alternative’ anthemwhich seems to work like balm, a salveto remembered pain. Under tryingcircumstances where our countries arelocked in dispute, a common heritageof memories and aspirations issummoned up by Iqbal’s words.Kashmir momentarily becomes notthe current battleground where Kargil,Chitthisinghpura and a host of othersearing images jostle for space; and thewounds of Partition are forgottenawhile as Iqbal merges visions of afaraway past and an ideal present. HisHindustan is an enchanted garden thatits people inhabit as amicably asbulbuls or songster birds. Who couldfail to fall in love with this fairytaleaccount? Indeed, many believe that ifordinary Pakistanis and Indians wereto meet at the Wagah border armedwith nothing more threatening thanIqbal’s poem they would just fall intoeach other’s enchanted embrace!On the contrary, if we compare thewords of Pakistan’s official nationalanthem with our own, we find thatboth emphasise a down-to-earthterritoriality. Tagore, of course,chooses the enumerative path idiosyncraticallylisting ‘Punjab, Sind, Gujrat,Maratha, Dravid, Utkal, Banga’ butnot, alas, some other constituenciesthat are just as crucial today. At a timewhen the three new states ofUttaranchal, Jharkhand and Chattisgarhare coming into a troubledexistence in this country, whilePakistan faces insurrection in Sind, itis worth looking again at the strategiesof ‘unification’ that our nationalPRADEEP MANDHANIanthems adopted. Unlike Iqbal’salternative anthem, there is lessnostalgia here, less dreamy ambiguityand much more assertiveness. ThePakistani anthem is not as specific asthe Indian, but it seems equallycommitted to territorial sanctity in itsreferences to a sacred ‘qaum, mulk,sultanat’:“Pak sarzamin shad badKishware haseen shad badTu-nishan-e azm-e-alishan arzeMarkaz-e yaqin shadbad.Pak sarzamin ka nizamQuwat-e akhuwati awamQaum, mulk, sultanatPainda- ta-zinda bad shad.bad manzele muradParcham-e sitara-o hilalRahbare tarraqi-o kamalTarjumane mazi shanehal jane istaqbalSayyai, khudae zul jalal.”“Blessed be the sacred land,Happy be the bounteous realm,Symbol of high resolve, Land ofPakistan.Blessed be thou citadel of faith.The Order of this Sacred LandIs the might of the brotherhood ofthe peopleMay the nation, the country, andthe stateShine in glory everlasting.Blessed be the goal of our ambition.This flag of the Crescent and theStarLeads the way to progress andperfection,Interpreter of our past, glory of ourpresentInspiration of our future.Symbol of Almighty’s protection.”A particularly interesting feature ofthe Pakistani anthem is its sophisticatedfocus on the national flag as a‘symbol’ of the nation—“interpreterof our past, glory of our present,inspiration of our future”. Here, onemight also invoke another sort ofevidence provided by recent cinematicventures such as Dil Se or 1942—ALove Story in which the tiranga jhandafigures prominently. These ‘frames’demonstrate how evocative the graphicimage of a flag can be in furthering notjust a film’s narrative but its ‘interpretation’of history.My thesis is that the auditorypassion ignited by a national anthemis akin to the visual arousal signalledby a national flag. When the twoPRADEEP MANDHANIB I B L I O S P E C I A L I S S U E 2 0 0 2 ● C O S M O P O L I T A N I S M A N D T H E N A T I O N - S T A T E57Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 36

Ceremony of the guards at Wagah, the Indo-Pakistan bordercombine, as in the case ofthe frenetic genius A.R.Rahman belting out thealternative ‘anthem’ VandeMataram, the people atlarge are also moved tonear frenzy.At our border withPakistan at Wagah inAmritsar, one witnessesyet another conjunction ofthese potent symbols—flag and anthem. Ofcourse, that daily ritual inwhich our two nationsmatch each others’bravado in equal measurehas often been described,but just one furtherrehearsal of the ‘story ofnation’ repeated withquotidian enthusiasm andenjoyed by a capacitycrowd, especially on thepopulated Indian sidewhich has kindly built forus an amphitheatre-likestructure to facilitate theshow, is never entirely out of order.Wagah is authentic Toba Tek Singhcountry, involving the same madmimicry brilliantly captured in Sa’adatHasan Manto’s classic story ofPartition. Identical strips of no-man’sland on both sides; double jeep tracks;sad, divided fields of wheat; and acurious populace eyeing each otheracross tall, spiked gates painted withour respective ‘national colours’encapsulate the ambience of Wagah.As Gore-Bush brigade, so savvy aboutthe superficiality of sign systems,would no doubt comment in their upfrontAmerican democratese—samedifference.Most of all at Wagah, we observethe strapping soldiers ‘on display’plumaged to the hilt and stamping upand down in a border-dance that is atonce touching and terrifying. But justas my trammelled academic mind isbeginning to ask its customary questionsabout the semiotic significanceof these tribal dances, the final buglesblow and the flags are lowered. HarbirSingh, from the Guru Nanak DevUniversity, who has accompanied me,points out that there is a split secondat the end when the Indian andPakistani flags seem to meet as theycome down, although they are severalfeet apart in reality! It is this synchronisedmoment that the cognoscentiwait for—when music and flags cometogether in a fantasy of eternaltogetherness and separation.But, says Harbir, if you look up atthe cloudless skies above Wagah at thatexact time, you are bound to perceiveanother phenomenon which usuallygoes unnoticed. It is a flock of birdscrossing the border—without fuss,without passports, without nationalanthems to sing them into existence!And far, far below these freedomflights, a clutch of families from thefar corners of the peninsula—Kerala,Bihar, Maharashtra—now stragglebrightly dressed out of the Wagahcamp. There is a visible stimulation, anelectric current running through thecrowd at the end of the performance—anda sense of catharsis...It strikes me that we have justwitnessed our essential humanness, inall its vulnerability—its need forsymbolic unity, however questionable.And so, I’d want to contend that itslogical position as a ‘binding’ centrifugaldiscourse within the whirlingvortex of modernity confers on thenational anthem an undeniableauthority. The diverse nation as onefamily is a comforting metaphor thatwe know well. To extend this comparisonto the national anthem would beto assert that it functions as a kind ofmaternal lullaby—but with a dualpurpose. It both soothes the nation,singing it into a moral calm reminiscentof a dream-state; simultaneously,it arouses sentiments that are selfprotectiveand defensive. This psychologicalconflict between peaceful andaggressive instincts lies at the heart ofthe national anthem.Pacifists may find the violenceinternalised in national anthems hardto take but righteous self-assertionseems to go with the terrain here. Anational anthem abounds in cues about‘membership’ because it works on aprinciple of exclusion. Some belong byvirtue of birth, others don’t. Onerecalls at this point the Latin root‘nasci-’ (to be born) of the word‘nation’. The nation is, as it were, thescene or setting of a rebirth—anindividual’s second birth as a citizen.Specific references to a ‘womb’environment of familiar rivers,mountains, landmarks and symbolsthus inevitably shore up and redeemthe otherwise bland reassurances ofsolidarity on offer in an anthem.Reactions to the sound of an anthemare as spontaneous as they would beto maternal speech. They compel usto listen—and to love—withoutquestion and without irony.Consistent with my thesis thatnational anthems are Freudian lullabiesfor populations that can be as large asa billion, music seems an essentialelement of the structure of the nationalanthem. There can be anthems withoutwords—such as those of Spain andYugoslavia, for instance—but nonewithout pulsating musical rhythms.Most national anthems are made to bemarched to and danced to; theyabound in choruses and repetitiveelements that render them memorableand are consequently the one form ofinstitutionalized poetry that even themost prosaic of a country’s citizens areunable to escape! Anthems, it seems,cannot by their very nature, beanathema.That the national anthem is such aPRASHANT PANJIAR / OUTLOOKtouchstone of certainties contrastsintriguingly with its capacity toinstigate uncomfortable queries. Willthe nation state—without which the‘national’ anthem would seem ananomaly—retain its centrality acentury or two from now? Who willbe responsible for the problems of anoverpopulated, aging, environmentallypolluted world—self-contained countriesor a global community? Howmuch will cultures and even humannature alter in response to therevolutionary, and unpredictable,technologies we have invented? Andwill a cosmopolitan anthem alwaysremain a contradiction in terms?Despite its naivete, the nationalanthem functions as a natural vehiclefor the expression of such deepquandaries about once and futureidentity. They serve to replay theAyodhyas of the mind.Conventionally, we know that thebeginning of a millennium marksintellectual disquiet. One useful routetowards imaging this subliminalanxiety is to imagine yet unborn subversionsand supra-versions of ourpresent day anthems. We could beginwith the notion of a ‘world anthem’for instance, in which all the nationsof the world want to raise their voices.Chances are, as I’ve already said, thatsuch a venture might turn out tocontain a logical difficulty becausenational anthems rely on exclusivity.If every one of the world’s six billionhumans is included, who would be leftout except denizens of outer space,animals or plants? I think we can safelyconclude that some alien nation—say,of the Martian variety—will turn outto be a probable motif in anydeterminedly ‘cosmopolitan’ anthemwhich seeks to unite the earth’steeming peoples! And it may be worthnoting at this point that ‘untie’constitutes a neat anagram of ‘unite’.Plurality, after all, is the obverse ofthat pugnacious call to unity socharacteristic of the national anthem.An anthem is predicated on difference,on strands of consciousness tiedtogether that could also comedangerously untied. The strenuousavowal of togetherness in an anthemis not accidental, it verbalises thefundamental unease that cultures havealways felt when faced with radicaldifference. These apprehensions arenot necessarily put to rest in aninformation-rich but empathypoorworld where we have tocome to terms every day withso many unique ‘types’, suchan assortment of individualhuman beings. Now, more thanever, we need to confront thoseancient demons of interculturalconflict. And it is herethat the national anthem mayprove useful as a means ofunderstanding ourselves—creatures who are designed bybiology to thirst for union butwho thrive on difference.Karl Marx’s call to theworkers of the world to unitefor they had nothing to lose buttheir chains resonates in thiscontext. While playing thegame of fantasising about thenational anthems of the future,one might take a leaf out ofMarx’s great failed book here.Intellectual capital—words,books, ideas—versus politicalcapitals—Washington, Beijing,Pretoria. The national anthem drawsproudly on both sources of history.Read via the lenses of a doctrine ofliberation, an anthem is not just aboutunity. It is about unity as a form ofemancipation, of freedom—recallingvia its very existence memories ofsocial fights against oppression and thecultural losses imposed by colonialregimes.Is it possible, then, that the anthemsof the future might become de-linkedfrom the political confines ofnationality? Are national anthems onlya step towards other yet unnamedanthems, such as anthems of gender,of race and of other major coalitionsthat also speak the language ofresistance? Or is this a retrograde idea,throwing us back to a divisive past? Ibelieve the answers to these urgentquestions can be sought in the firstinstance at the dynamic but ambiguousintersection of cultures that nationalanthems so alluringly offer.Finally, I wonder about a whole newconstituency. How would the childrenof this nascent century write or rewritean anthem? For, until they areschooled into learning the story oftheir nation-states, children have otherilluminating narratives—possiblyuniversal in their particularity—abouthow they came into being. I argued alittle earlier that in its unselfconsciousnarcissism, the national anthem isrelated to the timeless universe ofchildhood. It is essentially a nurseryrhyme for adults disseminated acrossan entire population, but in the end Iwant to add that there might well be adisarming wisdom to this process. Ananthem, like a child’s tale, energizes acollective psyche by invokingfoundational myths about selfcreation;in this respect, it offers us avaluable tool for looking back inwonder while at the same time lookinginto our imperilled future with hope.For William Wordsworth, writing afterthe French Revolution (“bliss it wasin that dawn to be alive and to beyoung was very heaven”), we recallthat the child was the father of theman. Perhaps in this new millennium,too, our children offer us our best betsfor an interpretation of cosmopolitanismthat retains the magical spirit ofthe national anthem but goes farbeyond it in imaginative scope.■B I B L I O S P E C I A L I S S U E 2 0 0 2 ● C O S M O P O L I T A N I S M A N D T H E N A T I O N - S T A T E5837 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

Present Day Turkic Peoplesand Their LanguagesSaving What We Can of theThe Bam Photographic Rescby Talat TekinFrom by Parisa The Turkic Damandan Speaking Peoples,edited Prins Claus by Ergun Fund Cagatay Journal and # 14Dogan Kuban04Year published 2006Number of pages 496Number of pages by Tekin 24Number of contributors 36Number of articles 34Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 38

Past:ue Project39 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

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30–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 31LANGUAGE AND IDENTITYPresent-Day Turkic Peoples andTheir LanguagesTALAT TEK‹NA young Mongolianhorseman stands beside thepillar containing theeighth-century TonyukukInscriptions, chiseled withinvaluable observationsabout the lives and battlesof Turkic-speaking peoplesduring that era.Before embarking upon the main topic, I would like topoint out that there are several Turkic languages—in fact, oneshould speak of a “family” of Turkic languages. For a long time,these languages, all descended from an Ur-language in thedistant past, have been referred to in English as “Turkic” languages.The term Turkish, which has long existed in English, isnow used to refer only to the Turkish language employed incontemporary Turkey.At the present time, Turkic languages are spoken over avery wide area stretching from the Pacific Ocean and the Seaof Okhotsk in the east to the Baltic Sea on the west, and fromthe shores of the Arctic Ocean in the north to Basra and theshores of the Persian Gulf in the south. These Turkic languages,which are located quite closely together in Central Asia, arevery widely separated in other areas. Speakers of Turkic andrelated languages number some 135 to 140 million.Until quite recently, Turkic languages were classified insix broad categories: (1) The South-West or Oghuz group, (2)the North-West or Kipchak group, (3) the South-East orChaghatay group, (4) the North-East or Altai Tuva-Abakangroup, (5) Yakut, and (6) Chuvash. The German TurcologistGerhard Doerfer, who discovered a Khaladj language spokenin central Iran displaying certain archaic characteristics, addedthis language as a seventh group.In our opinion, the application of phonetic principles inthe classification of these Turkic languages will lead to the creationof twelve separate groups: (1) Chuvash (r- and il-di: tıhhır“nine,” hil “winter”), (2) hadak group (Khaladj), (3) atax group(Yakut and the Dolgan dialect), (4) adak group (Tuva and Tofadialect), (5) azak group (Khakas; Middle Chul›m, Mrass, andUpper Tom dialects), (6) ayak/tağliğ group (Northern Altaidialects: Lower Chulym, Kondom, and Lower Tom dialects;Yellow Uighur, Fu-yü Kirghiz), (7) ayak- and tu:lu (written Altaidialect), (8) ayak and to’lu group (Kirghiz), (9) ayak and tağlik(Chaghatay) group (Uzbek, New Uighur), (10) ayak and tawli(Kipchak) group (Tatar, Bashkir, Kazakh, Karakalpak, Nogay,Kumuk, Karachay-Balkar, Karay or Karaim, Crimean Tatar,Baraba Tatar, the Khwarezm-Kipchak dialects of Uzbek), (11)ayak and tağlı group (Salar dialect or Salar language), (12) ayakand dağlı (Oghuz) group (Turkmen, Trukhmen dialect; Khorasandialect; the Khwarezm-Kipchak dialects of Uzbek; Azeri orAzerbaijani Turkish; Kashkay, Eynallu, Kirkuk, and Erbil dialects;Gagauz Turkish).Of the twenty-four Turkic languages and dialects, twentyare written languages. From near to far, these are: Turkish,Azeri or Azeri Turkish, Turkmen, Kumuk, Karachay-Balkar,Nogay, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Kirghiz,Kazakh, Karakalpak, Uzbek, Uighur, Altai, Khakas, Tuva, andYakut. The following are Turkic languages and dialects withouta written component: the Yellow Uighur spoken in China’sKansu Province; the Salar spoken in the Xunhua SalarAutonomous County of China’s Qinghai Province; the Chul›mTatar spoken in western Siberia; and Khaladj, the archaic Turkiclanguage recently discovered in central Iran. To these dialectsmay be added Shor and Baraba Tatar— both of which lack awritten component—spoken in Siberia. It would, however, bemore reasonable to accept Shor as a dialect of written Khakasand Baraba Tatar as a written dialect of Tatar. As for ChulymTatar, there are two dialects of this language: (1) Middle Chul›m,(2) Lower Chulym. As a /z/ dialect (azak “foot”), Middle Chul›mis close to Khakas and may be regarded as a dialect; as a /y/dialect (ayak), Lower Chulym combines with the Northern Altaidialects (Kondom and Lower Tom) to form the tağlığ group ofTurkic dialects.In the various Turkic languages and dialects spokennowadays, mutual intelligibility ranges from zero to 75 or 80percent. For example, Chuvash has a mutual intelligibility ratioof zero with all the other Turkic languages, and the same canbe said of Yakut, Tuva, and Khakas; between Turkish and Azeriand Gagauz Turkish, there is a fairly high mutual intelligibility3141 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 32ratio of 75 to 80 percent. The mutual intelligibility ratio betweenTatar and Bashkir, Kumuk and Karachay-Balkar, and Kazakhand Karakalpak is also quite high. Indeed, since the Soviet revolution,written Karakalpak is accepted by almost allTurcologists as a dialect of Kazakh rather than as an independentlanguage.It seems logical to start the detailed discussion of Turkiclanguages with the Oghuz or South-West group, to which ourTurkish language belongs. The Oghuz group is composed of thefollowing four written languages: Turkish (the Turkish ofTurkey), Azeri or Azeri Turkish, Gagauz or Gagauz Turkish, andTurkmen.I. OGHUZ GROUPA. The Turks and Their LanguageOf the various Turkic languages, Turkish is the languagewith the greatest number of speakers. The Turkish Republic hasas many as 50 to 55 million citizens with Turkish as their mothertongue. When those outside Turkey are added, this raises thenumber of Turkish speakers to at least 60 million.Turkish is the language of the Oghuz Turks, who, afterconquering Anatolia toward the end of the eleventh century,founded the Seljuk state (eleventh to fourteenth centuries) andlater established the Ottoman Empire (1299-1920), straddlingthree continents. The Turks, particularly during the Ottoman era,combined with different ethnic groups in Anatolia and Rumelia(Thrace and parts of the Balkans), such as Greeks, Armenians,Kurds, Arabs, Persians, Laz, Circassians, Georgians, Albanians,and Bosnians. The great majority of the Turks are SunniMuslims, although there is a fairly large number of members ofthe Alevi sect. Turkish is now spoken mainly in the TurkishRepublic, of which it is the official language, but Turkish speakerslive in many other parts of the world: Northern Cyprus, theBalkans (Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, etc.), the RussianFederation, Arab countries (Syria, Iraq, etc.), European countries(Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, etc.), the United States,Australia, and so on. Anatolian Turkish—which was widely spokenin its pure form in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—was corrupted during the Ottoman era with a large number ofArabic and Persian words and grammatical forms and transformedinto an official literary language that completely lost itsnational identity. This trend was obstructed by the growth ofjournalism in the country from the mid-nineteenth centuryonward. This, coupled with an increase in literacy, led—particularlyduring the era of the Second Constitution—to a simplificationof the written language, which had come to be knownas Osmanlıca.Thanks to efforts undertaken in private as well as officialspheres during the Republican period, Turkish was largelyrestored to its original national identity by the elimination of foreignvocabulary (particularly Arabic and Persian) and the creationof new words based on Turkish roots.The dialects of the written Turkish employed in Anatoliain the Seljuk era at the end of the thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies can be divided into: (1) Anatolian dialects, and (2)Rumelian dialects. The Anatolian dialects can be divided intothree subgroups: (1) Black Sea dialects, (2) Eastern Anatoliandialects, and (3) Central and Western Anatolian dialects.32LANGUAGE AND IDENTITYThe most typical characteristics of the Turkish belonging to theOghuz group are the following:1. The shortening of the long vowels in Turkic, and thechange of the consonants /p, t, ç, k/ between two vowels followingthese to /b, d, c, €/, respectively: dip, dib-i; kap, kab-ı;git-, gid-er; yu:rt, yurd-u; öç, öc-ü; yok, yoğ-a; gök, göğ-e, etc.2. The loss of /€, g/ at the end of polysyllabic words:sa:rığ > sarı, ti:rig > diri, qu:ruğ > kuru, ölüg < ölü, etc.3. The addition of ben and biz pronouns as copulas inthe form of -ım/-im/-um/-üm and -ız/-iz/-uz/-üz; alır ben > alırım,bilir ben > bilir-im, turur ben > durur-um, körür ben > görürümvb.; alır biz > alır-ız, bilir biz > bilir-iz, turur biz > durur-uz,körür biz > görür-üz, etc.4. The change of the initial voiceless /t/ and palatal /k/to /d/ and /g/; taş > dış, tel- > del-, tıl < dil, ti:ş > diş; kel- >Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 42

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 33Yenisei inscriptions, sixthcentury AD. MinusinskMuseum, Minusinsk,Russia (cf. p. 30).gel-, ke:t- > git-, kör- > gör-, kü:z > güz, etc.5. The change of the nasal /ng/, an individual phonemein Old Turkic, into the normal consonant /n/; tang > tan, tengiz> deniz, bıng > bin, singek > sinek, etc.6. The change of the phoneme /b/ at the beginning ofthe following three words into /v/ is a distinguishing feature ofTurkish: ba:r > var, bar- > var-, be:r- > ver-.7. The disappearance of the phoneme /b/ at the beginningof the following word is a feature distinguishing Turkishand Azeri from other Turkish languages: AT bo:l- “to be” > Trk.,Az. ol-.There are also certain morphological features peculiar toTurkish. One of the most important of these is the formation ofthe future tense by the addition of /acak/ or /ecek/; al-acak,ver-ecek. A second important morphological feature of Turkishis the persistence of the Old Turkic -matin/-metin in the form ofthe verbal suffix -madan/-meden; olur-matın > olturmadın >otur-madın > otur-madan, udı-matın > uyu-madın > uyu-madan,kelmetin > gel-medin > gel-meden, kör-metin > gör-medin >gör-meden, etc.B. The Azeris and Their LanguageThe Azeri Turks, who are in very close geographical andlinguistic proximity to the Turks and take their name from theland they inhabit, are descendants of the Oghuz Turks whoconquered Iran, Iranian Azerbaijan, Eastern Anatolia, andnorthern Iraq in the tenth and eleventh centuries. At the beginningof the Seljuk era (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), theirancestors combined primarily with the Iranians to produce adialect differing very markedly from the old Anatolian Turkish.Most Azeris live in the Republic of Azerbaijan (whosecapital is Baku) and Azerbaijan Province (whose capital isTabriz) in northwestern Iran. Apart from these two Azerbaijanprovinces, there are also Azeri communities in the Republics ofGeorgia and Armenia. The number of Azeris living in the formerSoviet Union in 1989 amounted to 6,791,106. Although thenumber of Iranian Azeris is usually given as approximately6,646,000, the actual number is reckoned to be much higher. Itis uncertain whether the Kashkays and Eynallus—who still continuetheir nomadic existence—are included in this number. Thenumber of Azeris living in Kirkuk and Erbil in northern Iraqtotals around 200,000. There is also a smaller Azeri communityconsisting of around 45,000 Afshars living in Afghanistan,mainly in and around Kabul. There are fairly large Azeri communitiesin Eastern Anatolia, particularly in the Kars andArdahan districts. Thus, the total number of Turkish-speakingAzeri Turks probably amounts to at least 15 to 20 million. Mostof the Azeris are Shiite, with a sizable Sunni minority.The Book of Dede Korkut is the first anonymous work offolk literature in the Azeri dialect, while the first literary workswritten in the Azeri dialect are poems written by a man namedNesim (1369-1404), the Sivas judge Kad› Burhaneddin (1345-1524), and Fuzuli of Iraq (1498-1556). Although the first literaryproductions in Azeri Turkish date as far back as the thirteenthcentury, the foundations of modern written Azeri may be said tohave been laid in the mid-nineteenth century in the comedies ofMirza Fethali Ahundov (generally regarded as the Azeri Molière)and the Ekinci newspaper, which began publication in 1875.Until 1927, Azeri Turkish was written in Arabic script, butthis was replaced by the Latin alphabet from 1927 to 1939.Beginning in May 1939, Azeri Turkish was written in the Cyrillicscript, but after the disintegration of the USSR and the declarationof Azerbaijan’s independence in 1991, the Latin scriptwas restored. There are four main groups of Azeri Turkishdialects in Azerbaijan: (1) Eastern group (Kuba, Baku, Shamah›,Mughan, and Lenkoran), (2) Western group (Kazakh, Gence,and Karaba€ dialects and Ayrum subdialect), (3) Northerngroup (Nuha), (4) Southern group (Nahchivan, Ordubad, andTabriz dialects and Yerevan subdialect). The Azeri dialects outsideAzerbaijan include the Kirkuk and Erbil dialects spoken innorthern Iraq; the Kashkay and Eynallu dialects spoken in Iran’sShiraz Province; the Afshar dialect spoken in and around thecity of Kabul in Afghanistan; and the Azeri dialects spoken inEastern Anatolia, principally in the Kars region.The characteristicfeatures of Azeri Turkish may be listed as follows:1. The shortening of long vowels and the conversion ofthe /p, t, ç, q, k/ consonants following these into /b, d, c, €, y/:ka:p > gab “course,” o:t > od “fire,” a:ç > ac “hungry,” a:k > ağ“white,” kö:k > göy “sky, blue,” etc.2. The conversion of the voiceless consonant /t/ at thebeginning of a word into the consonant /d/, of postvelar /q/ intoguttural /g/, and of palatal /k/ into frontal /g/: ta:ş > daş“stone,” tırngaq > dırnag, tu:z > duz, qal- > gal-, qız > gız , qonşı> gonşu , käl- > gäl-, ke:t- > get-, etc.3. The conversion of the back consonant /q/ after shortvowels into medial and final position into fricative /x/: aq- > ax-, çıq- > çıx-, qorq- > gorx-, qırq > gırx, yoqaru > yuxarı, uxarı,etc.4. A frequent occurrence of metathesis: körpü “bridge,”torpag “soil,” yarpag “leaf,” arvat “woman, wife,” etc.5. The preservation of the closed vowel /e/ in CommonTurkic as a phoneme quite distinct from the open /ä/: er “early”(but är “husband”), el “folk” (but äl “hand”), en “width, breadth”(but än “width”), et- “to do, to make” (but ät “meat”), etc.6. The disappearance of the /y/ consonant at the beginningof a word. This usually takes place in front of /›, i/ and,infrequently, in front of /u, ü/: yıp > ip, yigit > igid “young,” yılan> ilan “snake,” yultuz > ulduz “star,” yu:t- > ud- “to swallow,”yüräk > üräk “heart,” yü:z > üz “face,” etc.7. The palatal consonant /g/ in Old Turkic is alwaysreplaced by /y/: tägirmi > däyirmi “round, circular,” yigirmi > iyirmi,yignä > iynä “needle,” äg- > äy- “to bend,” täg- > däy- “totouch,” etc.As is evident from some of the above examples, the /›/vowel never occurs at the beginning of a word in Azeri Turkish,because, as a result of the disappearance of the /›/ vowel or/y/, the /›/ vowel at the beginning of a word is replaced in thislanguage by /i/: ıraq > irag “far,” ıslaq > islag “wet,” yıl > il “year,”yılıq > ilıg “warm,” yışıq > işıg “light,” etc.8. The conversion of the postvelar /q/ consonant at theend of multisyllabic words into /g/: ba:lıq > balıg “fish,” barmaq> barmag “finger,” qonaq > gonag “guest,” qu:çaq > gucag“embrace,” etc.9. The nasal /ng/ in Old Turkic is replaced by the normal/n/: tang > dan “dawn,” song > son, tonguz > donuz “pig,”etc.PRESENT-DAY TURKIC PEOPLES AND THEIR LANGUAGES3343 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

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030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 35Yenisei inscriptions, sixthcentury. MinusinskMuseum, Minusinsk,Russia (cf. pp. 30, 32).10. The formation of the aorist (indefinite) by the additionof -(a)r/-(ä)r, and of the present tense by the addition of -ır/-ir, -ur/-ür: çıx-ar “(he) goes out,” çıx-ır “(he is) going out,”ged-är “(he) goes,” ged-ir “(he is) going out,” oxu-r “(he) reads,”oxu-yur “(he is) reading”: çıx-ar “go out,” çıx-ır “going out,” gedär“go,” ged-ir “going,” oxu-r “read,” oxu-yur “reading.”Azeri Turkish is very similar to Turkish, but the presenceof one or more words of unknown meaning can impede comprehensionof a sentence. The following are examples of sentencesof this type in Azeri Turkish: Avtobusa gabagdan bin, daldandüş “Enter the bus from the front, leave from the rear”;Köçädä maşın fit çaldı “The car sounded its horn in the street”;Yay gälmämiş havalar istiläşir “Although summer has not yetarrived, it is getting warmer”; Şamı eşikdä yiyäcäyik “We’ll go outfor our evening meal”; Gonaglardan biri kinoya zäng elädi “Oneof the guests phoned the cinema”; Atam paltarını çiyninä alıbbayıra çıxdı “My father threw his jacket over his shoulders andwent out.”The influence of Persian syntax can be observed in AzeriTurkish. For example, the Azeri Turkish beş il bundan gabag,meaning “five years ago,” is in the nature of Persian pänc sa:lpi:ş äz i:n.C. The Turkmen and Their LanguageThe term Turkmen (or Turcoman) first appears in theMahmut Kashgarl› dictionary, which has the name Turkmen assynonymous with the ethnic term Oghuz. The Turkmen aredescendants of the Oghuz Turks, who remained in their owncountry rather than migrating to the West. The Turkmen languageis thus the sole representative of the Eastern branch ofthe Oghuz group of Turkic languages. (The Western branch ofthe Oghuz group consists, as we have seen, of Azeri Turkish,Turkish, and Gagauz Turkish.)The “Turkmene” (Oghuza) words are first encountered inthe dictionary produced by Mahmut Kashgarl› and in the dictionariescompiled by fourteenth-century Arab linguists; thefirst literary texts were produced in the seventeenth, eighteenth,and nineteenth centuries by Turkmen poets, such as Andelib,Mahdumkul› (Turkmen Magt›mgul›), and Mollanepes. Turkmenonly became an official written language after the Soviet revolution.Until 1928, it was written in the Arabic script; from 1929to 1939, it was in the Latin alphabet. Since 1939, it has beenwritten in Cyrillic script.Nowadays, Turkmen is spoken mainly in the Republic ofTurkmenistan, but there are also Turkmen-speaking communitiesin Uzbekistan, the Karakalpak Autonomous Province, theRepublics of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, and the Stavropolregion of the Russian Federation. According to the 1989 census,the number of Turkmens in the former Soviet Union was2,718,297. Adding the Turkmens living in Iran (590,000),Afghanistan (330,000), Iraq and Syria (5,243,000), and Turkey(92,000) produces a Turkmen-speaking community of approximately4 million. The Turkmens are Sunni Muslims.There are several dialects of Turkmen, which can be collectedin two large groups: (1) Teke, Yellow, Sal›r, Gökleng,Yomud, Ersar›, etc., (2) Nohur, Anav, Eski, Suhr›, Arabaj›, K›rach,Chand›r, Mukr›, Hatap, Bayat, and Cheges. To these should beadded the Trukhmen (= Turkmen) dialect spoken in theNorthern Caucasus and the Stavropol region, the KhorasanTurkmen spoken in Iran, and the Khwarezm Oghuz dialectsspoken in the Khwarezm region of Uzbekistan. In its display ofcertain features of Common Turkic, Turkmen occupies animportant place both in the Oghuz group and in Turkic languagesas a whole. In other words, Turkmen is in the nature ofa “key language.” The distinguishing features of Turkmen are asfollows:1. The most important feature of Turkmen is the systematicpreservation of the primary long vowels in CommonTurkic. The long /a:, ä:, ›:, i:, o:, ö:, u:/ vowels in Common Turkicare preserved intact in Turkmen, while the long /ü:/ is convertedto /üy/: a:t “name,” ä:r “man, husband,” *kı:z > gı:z “girl,” i:ş“work,” o:t “fire,” *tö:rt > dö:rt “four,” bu:z “ice”; but *kü:ç >*güyç “power, strength,” *kü:z > güyz “autumn,” süyt < *sü:t“milk,” etc.2. The long closed /e:/ in Proto-Turkic normally takesthe form of long /i/ in Turkmen: *be:l > bi:l “back,” *e:r > i:r“early,” *e:şik > i:şik “door,” *ke:ç > gi:ç “late,” *ye:t- > i:t- “tolead,” etc.3. In the two following words, the long closed /e:/ inProto-Turkic takes the form /iy/ in Turkmen: *te:- > diy- “to say,”*ye:- > iy- ?to eat.” The postvelar /q/ at the beginning of a wordis replaced by the /k/, and front /k/ sounds are replaced byback and front /g/ sounds. In this respect, Turkmen displays aproximity to Azeri: ga:l- “to stay” = Az. gal-, gatı “hard, solid” =Az. gatı, gı:z “girl” = Az. gız, gıssan- “to envy” = Az. gısgan-,gork- “to be afraid” = Az. gorh-, gu:rı “dry” = Az. guru, etc.4. The /t/ sound at the beginning of a word changes to/d/, as in Turkish and Azeri. In this, Turkmen is more advancedthan Turkish: da:ban “floor,” da:ş “stone,” dak- “to put on,” darak“comb,” dep- “to kick,” dık- “to cram (into),” du:z “salt,” etc.5. An important feature concerning vowels in Turkmenis the labial attraction also found in Kirghiz. This consists of therounding of flat vowels in following syllables under the influenceof rounded vowels in the first syllable (this rounding is notreflected in the written language): oğlak (oğlok), oğlan (oğlon),oğlanlar (oğlonlor), buzav (buzov) “calf,” çörek (çörök), kömelek(kömölök) “mushroom,” dümev (dümöv) “flu,” etc.6. Another feature of Turkmen is the conversion of /s/and /z/ sounds into interdental /s/ and interdental /z/: sa:z, söz,sız- “to ooze,” süz-, suv “water,” dessa:n “epic,” ussa:t “master,”gızzırma “malaria,” etc.7. Yet another characteristic feature of Turkmen is theconversion of the /a/ or /i, ü/ vowels at the end of a verb into/e/: okı- > oka- “to read,” *ba:yu- > ba:ya- “to be rich,” sämri-> semre- “to grow fat,” törü- > döre- “to happen,” etc.8. Another feature common to both Turkmen and AzeriTurkish is the conversion of the /k/ consonant into /g/: AT *ka:l-> ga:l-, AT *kı:z > gı:z, etc.9. The present-tense suffix from -a yorur in O€uz, > -ıyor/-iyor < in Turkish, and -ır/-ir in Azeri takes the form -ya:r/-yä:r in Turkmen: bar-ya:r “(he is) going,” gel-yä:r “(he is) coming,”oka-ya:r “(he is) reading.” Even though Turkmen is theclosest Turkish language to Turkish after Azeri, the mutual intelligibilityratio between Turkish and Turkmen is fairly low.A few sentences in Turkmen: Parahot tolkunları bövsüpbarya:r “The ship sails on through the waves”; Ca:yıng bina:sıPRESENT-DAY TURKIC PEOPLES AND THEIR LANGUAGES3545 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 36berk uruldı “The foundations of the building were securely laid”;Zala münge golay a:dam sığya:r “The salon can accommodateup to a thousand”; Acala pul tölä:p gutulıp bilmez “No one canescape death by paying money”; U:kısızlık zera:rlı kellä:mağralıpdır “My head is heavy through lack of sleep.”D. The Gagauz and Their LanguageThe Orthodox Christian Gagauz probably derived theirname from Seljuk Sultan Keykavus II, who is said to have sentseveral thousand men to the Balkans in the mid-thirteenth centuryat the request of the Byzantine Emperor Mihail Paleologosto prevent the Slav raids on the Byzantine Empire. These Seljuktroops adopted Christianity under the influence of the Slav people.In the course of time, the Gagauz—who had adoptedChristianity in this Slav environment—mingled with theBulgarians, Romanians, and other ethnic groups in the region.Today, the Gagauz form a Christian community inhabitingthe southern section of the Republic of Moldova andOdessa Province in Ukraine. The Gagauz emigrated from northeasternBulgaria to this area—formerly known as Bessarabia—at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of thenineteenth. The 1989 census gives the number of Gagauz livingin the former Soviet Union as 197,164. Apart from the populationin Moldova, there are 5,000 Gagauz in Bulgaria. InUkraine and Kazakhstan and other parts of Central Asia, thereare small Gagauz communities that migrated there between1908 and 1914. The total number of Gagauz thus amounts tomore than 200,000. The Gagauz had no official script until 1957,when the High Council of the Moldavian SSR drew up a newalphabet of Gagauz Turkish. It was based mainly on Cyrillic, withthe letters /ö, ü, ä/ from the Latin (German) alphabet.Nowadays, there are two dialects of Gagauz Turkish spoken inMoldova and Ukraine: (1) The Central (or Chad›rlung-Komrat)dialect, (2) the South (or Vulkaneflt) dialect. The written languageis based on the Central dialect. Soviet Turcologists suchas N. A. Baskakov and L. A. Pokrovskaya regard Gagauz Turkishas a separate language, but, according to the distinguishedGerman Turcologist Gerhard Doerfer, Gagauz is very close toTurkish. We share this view and classify Gagauz Turkish as oneof the Rumelian Turkish dialects. The characteristic features ofGagauz Turkish may be listed as follows:1. The narrowing of initial /o/ and /ö/ to /u/ and /ü/:boğaz > buaz, doğ- > du:-, soğan > suan, yoğurt > yu:rt, böğrek> bü:rek “kidney,” göğüs > gü:s, öğren- > ü:ren-, ögsüz > ü:süz“orphan,” söğüt > sü:t, söyün- > sü:n- “to be extinguished,”öğey > üvä “step,” etc.2. The y- prothesis of a /y/ sound in front of wordsbeginning with /e/: ek- > yek- “bread,” el > yel “foreigner,” eri-> yeri- “to melt,” ertesi > yertesi, eski > yeski, esir > yesir, ev >yev, etc. This prothesis of /y/ can also be seen in words beginningwith /i, ›/: iftira > yıftıra, insan > yınsan, ısla- > yısla-, ısın-> yısın-, etc. There are also cases of the disappearance of the/h/ consonant at the beginning of a word: > yesap, hepisi >yepisi “all,” etc.3. The loss of /h/ at the beginning of a word: hafta >afta, hakikat > akikat, hani > ani, haçan > açan “when,” hangı >angı “which,” hava > ava, etc.4. The disappearance of /y/ at the beginning of a word.36LANGUAGE AND IDENTITYThis usually occurs in front of /ü/: yügsek > ü:sek “high,” yügsük> ü:sük “thimble,” yük > ük, yürek > ürek, yüz > üz “face,” yüz> üz “one hundred,” yüz- > üz-, yüzük > üzük, etc.One of the most important features of Gagauz Turkish isfound in the syntax. As a result of the several centuries of coexistenceof the Gagauz and the Slavs (Bulgarians), Gagauz brokeaway from Turkish syntax and became wholly Slavic. The followingare a few examples: pa:sı bu fistanın “the price of thisdress,” yaprakları kiyadın “pages of the book,” Di:l lä:zım “It isn’tnecessary,” Lä:zım lafedeyim “I have to talk,” Annader cenk için“He is talking about the war,” Uşak çek etti a:lama “The childbegan to cry,” Laflanmışlar gitmä “They agreed to go.”Compound sentences formed by relative pronouns such asnicä “how,” ani “where,” neçinki “because,” etc., have a convertedsyntax: Yoktu nicä gitsinnär “They couldn’t go”; Bizgördük, ani yavaş işlemektän var nicä ge:ri kalalım “We saw thatby working slowly we would fall behind”; Tutunduk yeniycä işä,neçinki yeskiycesinä bü:n yok nasıl yaşama “As we realized thatwe couldn’t go on as before, we set to work again.”II. KIPCHAK GROUPThe Kipchak group, as we have seen, comprises severallanguages and dialects. These can be classified in accordancewith the position of the/o/ vowel and initial /s/ sound. Takingthe verb koş- “run, add” as an example of a verb containingboth sounds, we may classify these subgroups as follows: (1)kuş- subgroup (Tatar, Bashkir), (2) kos- subgroup (Kazakh,Nogay, Karakalpak), (3) koş- subgroup (Kumuk, Karachay-Balkar, Crimean Tatar, Karay or Karayim).The Kipchak group of Turkic languages comprises thefollowing languages and dialects: Tatar, Baflkurt; Kazakh,Karakalpak, Nogay; Kumuk, Karachay-Balkar, Crimean Tatarca,Karay or Karayim. A general characteristic feature of this groupis the conversion of the /d/ sound in Old Turkic (as in the Oghuzgroup) into /y/, initial /a€/ group into /aw/, and the disappearance(again as in the Oghuz group) of the /g/ sound at the endof polysyllabic words: adak > ayak, tod- > toy- “to become satiated,”tağ > taw “mountain,” tağlığ > tawlı “mountaineer,” sa:rığ> sarı, ti:rig > tiri “alive,” etc.A. The Tatars and Their LanguageThe word Tatar as an ethnic term is first encountered inthe Orkhon inscriptions in the forms Tatar and Tokuz Tatar, butthe names in these inscriptions are very probably the names ofMongolian-speaking tribes, not Turkic-speaking ones.The name Tatar is found in the famous dictionary of MahmutKashgarl›. In the map of the Turkic peoples in the Kashgarl›work, the Tatars, together with the Bashkirs, are shown asoccupying a region north of the Caspian Sea, northeast of theBulgarian Turks, in the Idil-Ural region inhabited by the Tatarstoday. The emergence of the Turkic-speaking Tatars under theirown name coincides with the era of the Golden Horde. Finally,in the Codex Cumanicus, the language of the Kipchak Turkictexts is named Tatarja or Tatar til. In the Golden Horde state, theMongols were in the minority; the majority consisted of KipchakTurks. The region also contained an urban population ofBulgarian Turks. The present-day Tatars are probably descendantsof a mixture of the Kipchak and Mongol tribes in theYenisei inscriptions,sixth century, MinusinskMuseum, Minusinsk,Russia (cf. pp. 30, 32, 34).Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 46

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 37Mongol armies with Muslim Volga Bulgarians who hadchanged their language.The great majority of Tatar speakers live in the TatarstanRepublic, although there are also fairly large Tatar communitiesin various regions outside Tatarstan, such as the AutonomousRepublics of Bashkir, Chuvash, and Mordov, as well as in theoblasts of Gorkiy, Tambov, Penze, Ryazan, Ulyanov, Kuyb›shev,Orenburg, Volgograd, Saratov, Astrakhan, Chelyabin,Novosibirsk, Om and Tom, Tümen, Perm, and Kirov. Accordingto the 1989 census, there were 6,645,588 Tatar speakers in theformer Soviet Union. At the present time, apart from theRussian Federation, there are small Tatar communities in variousother countries: Romania (24,000), Bulgaria (11,000),Turkey (10,000), Finland, and the United States.The Tatars are Sunni Muslims, but some of the Tatarcommunities adopted Christianity in the period under the tsars.These are known as Kreshen or Kreshen Turks.At the end of the nineteenth century, Tatars who hadused Chaghatay as their written language until the middle ofthe previous century abandoned Chaghatay as their writtenlanguage and, under the leadership of intellectuals such asKayyum Nasiri, began to write in their own dialect—i.e., KazanTatar. The famous poet Abdullah Tukay, who was born beforethe Soviet era and died at an early age, wrote his poems inKazan Tatar.Until 1927, Tatar was written in the Arabic alphabet; from1927 to 1939, it was written in the Latin alphabet, which wasreplaced by a new alphabet based on Cyrillic in 1939. Thereare several dialects of Cyrillic, which can be classified into threegroups: (1) The Western dialects (Mi_er, etc.), (2) the Centraldialect (Kazan Tatar, etc.), (3) the Eastern dialects (WesternSiberian dialects: Tobol, Tevriz, Baraba, Kazanl›k, Tümen, Tara,Tom, and Buharl›k). The Tatar written language was based onthe Central dialect, Kazan Tatar.The most important features of Tatar consist of vowelchanges. These changes can be grouped into four categories:1. The broad /o, ö/ vowels are narrowed to /u, ü/: bol-> bul- “to become,” okı- > ukı- “to read,” tok > tuk “satiated,”kör- > kür- “to see,” köz > küz “eye,” söz > süz “word,” etc.2. As opposed to this, the initial narrow, rounded /u,ü/vowels are converted into the broad but weak vowels /o, ö/:kuş > koş “bird,” tur- > tor- “to stop,” yut- > yot- “to swallow,”kün > kön “day,” küz > köz “autumn,” süz- > söz- “to filter,” etc.3. The conversion of initial open /ä/ and closed /e/ to/i/: män > min “I,” sän > sin “you,” be:r- > bir- “to give,” käl- >kil- “to come,” ke:t- > kit- “to go,” käräk > kiräk “necessary,” etc.4. On the other hand, the long and short /i/ vowel ischanged to a short, weak /i/. (In writing, this is represented bythe letter /e/.): bi:r > bir “one,” biz > biz, ilk > ilik “first,” isig >issi “hot,” kiçig > kiçi “small,” sämiz > simiz “fat,” etc.5. One of the most important features of Tatar is theconversion of the initial /og, u€, ov, uy/ groups to /u/: boğ- >bu-, soğıq > suık “cold,” tuğ- > tu- “to be born,” qov- > ku-, suv> su, uv- > u- “to rub,” etc.6. The initial /i€/ group in Tatar is modified to /iy/ or /›/:sığır > sıyır “cow,” yığ- < cıy-, yığla- > yıla- “to cry,” etc.7. The initial /y/ in Tatar, more frequently before /›, i/and less frequently before /e/, /a/, and /ä/, is modified to /c/:yılığ > cılı “warm, hot,” yığ- > cıy-, yır > cır “song,” yel > cil“wind,” ye:ti > cide “seven,” yer > cir, ya:y > cäy “summer,” yay-> cäy-, yadağ > yayağ > cäyäw “pedestrian,” etc.A few sentences in Tatarca: Bezneng uram zur uram “Ourstreet is a large street”; Ana şatlığınnan cılap cibärde “The motherwept for joy”; Atlıyk dustlar alga taban! “Let’s go, friends.Forward!” Anıng maturlığı mine tangga kaldırdı “Her beautyamazed me”; Bay bay öçen tırışa, yarlı yarlığa bulışa “The wealthywork for the wealthy, the poor help the poor”; Cılı söyäk sındırmıy,suık cannı tındırmıy “Heat breaks no bones, cold cannotgive comfort.”B. The Bashkirs and Their LanguageBashkir, as an ethnic term, is first encountered in theMahmut Kashgarl› dictionary in the forms Başgırt and Başkırt.The map of the Kashgarl› Turk peoples shows the Bashkirsoccupying a territory more or less identical with the one theyPRESENT-DAY TURKIC PEOPLES AND THEIR LANGUAGES3747 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 38occupy today to the north of the Caspian Sea—but northwest,not east, of the Tatars. Although it is uncertain from whichtribes or peoples the Bashkirs took their ethnic origin, it wouldappear that, as in the case of the Tatars, they consisted of aTurcophone people of mixed Kipchak-Mongol-Bulgarian composition.Moreover, the ancestors of the Bashkirs may, in thebeginning, have mingled with some Finnish-Ugor tribes inhabitingthe area. The Bashkirs are Sunni Muslims.Bashkir is a Kipchak dialect that achieved a written formonly after the Soviet revolution. It was written in Arabic scriptuntil 1929, when a script based on the Latin alphabet wasadopted. This was used until 1939, when it was replaced by thepresent-day alphabet based on Cyrillic. Nowadays, Bashkir isspoken mainly in the Bashkurdistan Republic in the southernUral Mountains. According to the 1989 census, the number ofBashkir speakers amounted to 1,449,462.There are two main dialects of written Bashkir: (1) TheEastern or Kuvakan dialects, (2) the Southern or Yurmatdialects. There are five Eastern dialects: Ay, Argayash, Salyut,Miyas, and K›z›l. The Southern dialects are found in the following:‹k-Sakmar, Orta Agh›z, Kara-‹dil, Dem, and South-West.There are important differences between the Eastern andSouthern dialects of Bashkir. The South-West dialect has longbeen influenced by Tatar. The Baflkurt written language isbased not on this dialect but rather on the Eastern (Kuvakan)dialect. Although Bashkir is close to Tatar in vowel changes andmodifications, it is radically distinguished from Tatar by certainimportant phonetic features.1. Of these differences, the most important is thechange in Bashkir of /s/ to /h/: Tatar sarı = Bashkir harı “yellow,”Tat. sin = Bshk. hin “you,” Tat. song = Bshk. hung “last,”Tat. bul-sa = Bshk. bul-ha “to become,” Tat. ata-sı = Bshk. atahı“his/her father,” etc.2. In Bashkir, as in Tatar, there is no change of /y/ > /c/,but there is the opposite change of c > y. The initial /c/ in wordsborrowed from Arabic and Persian regularly changes to /y/: Tat.cawap = Bshk. yawap “answer,” Tat. comğa = Bshk. yoma“Friday,” Tat. cämäğat = Bshk. yämäğat “society,” Tat. can =Bshk. yän “heart,” etc.3. Another distinguishing feature of Bashkir is the regularreplacement of /c/ by /s/: Tat. çap- = Bshk. sap- “to run,”Tat. çık- = Bshk. sık- “to go out,” Tat. öçen = Bshk. ösön “for,”Tat. öç = Bshk. ös “three,” Tat. kiç = Bshk. kis “evening,” Tat. çäç= Bshk. säs “hair,” etc.4. In Bashkir, the /d/ in the –da/-de and –den endingsat the beginning of the past-tense suffixes in words ending invowels changes to /n/: Tat. kala-da = Bshk. kala-na “in the city,”Tat. bala-dan = Bshk. bala-nan “from the child,” Tat. ukı-dı =Bshk. ukı-nı “(he) read,” etc.5. Another important feature of Bashkir is the labialattraction also found in Turkmen and Kirghiz—i.e., the roundingof flat vowels following rounded vowels: Tat. bolıt = Bshk. bolot“cloud,” Tat. yokısız = Bshk. yokohoz “sleepless,” Tat. yoldız =Bshk. yondoz “star,” Tat. öçen = Bshk. ösön “for,” Tat. kölemserä-= Bshk. kölömhörä- “to smile,” Tat. yöriy = Bshk. yöröy “(he is)walking,” etc.6. Another feature distinguishing Bashkir from Tatar isthe interdentalization, as in Turkmen, of Turkish fricative /s/ and/z/ consonants: Tat. asra- = Bshk. asıra- “to protect,” Tat. bas-= Bshk. bas-, Tat. kis- = Bshk. kis- “to cut,” Tat. azık = Bshk. azık,Tat. ozak = Bshk. ozak “long,” Tat. büz = Bshk. buz “gray,” Tat.süz = Bshk. hüz “word,” etc.7. Still another feature distinguishing Bashkir from Tataris the change of y > c, particularly at the beginning of a word:Tat. cide = Bshk. yete “seven,” Tat. cibär- = Bshk. yebär- “tosend,” Tat. cäy = Bshk. yäy “summer,” Tat. cılı = Bshk. yılı “hot,”etc.A few sentences in Bashkir: Häzer ük kuzgalayık, yukhahunglarbız “Let’s get going or we’ll be late”; Yulğa irtänge halkındasığırbız “I’ll set out in the cool of the morning”; Kistären minöyzä bulam “I’m at home in the evenings”; Uynap höylähäng dauylap höylä “If you make a joke, think before you speak.”C. The Kazakhs and Their LanguageKazakh as an ethnic term is never encountered in OldTurkic. The Kazakhs are mixed Turkish-Mongol people formedon the Asian steppes after the Mongol invasion. The greatmajority of Kazakhs live in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Thereare also Kazakh communities in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,Kirghizstan, and Tajikistan, as well as in the Russian Federation.According to the 1989 census, there were 8,137,867 Kazakhsliving in the former Soviet Union. If one takes into considerationthe Kazakhs inhabiting Mongolia, Afghanistan, China, andTurkey, the number of Kazakh speakers amounts to nearly 10million. The Kazakhs are Sunni Muslims.Kazakh became a written language under the tsars at theend of the nineteenth century. Until 1929, Kazakh was writtenwith the Arabic alphabet. Between 1929 and 1940, it was writtenin a Latin alphabet, but in 1940 this was replaced by aKazakh alphabet based on Cyrillic.Characteristic features of Kazakh:1. The initial /y/ sound changes to /j/: yaz- > jaz-, yet-> jet-, yıl > jıl, yigit > jigit “young,” yok > jok, yuğur- > juwır- “toknead,” yüz > jüz, etc.2. The Common Turkic /fl/ sound always changes to /s/:baş > bas, beş > bes, kuş > kus, kış > kıs, kişi > kisi, yaş > jas“young,” yaşıl > jasıl “green,” etc.3. The Common Turkic /ç/ sound always changes to /fl/:kaç > kaş, iç > iş, üç > üş, üçün > üşin “for,” saç (> çaç) > şaş“hair,” etc.4. In Kazakh, /€/ and /g/ sounds at the end of multi-syllablenouns disappear, as in the Oghuz group languages, whilein infinitives they change to /w/: qatığ > kattı, sarığ > sarı, ölüg> öli “dead,” tirig > tiri “alive”; but barığ > baruw “to go, going,”kelig > kelüw “to come, coming,” ölüg > ölüw “to die, dying,”etc.5. The /›€/ group in the initial syllable changes to /›y/,while the groups /eg/ and /ig/ change to /iy/: sığ- > sıy-, sığır> sıyır “cow,” yığın > jıyın, beg > biy “sir,” eg- > iy- “to bend,”teg- > tiy- “to touch,” yigne > iyne “needle,” etc.A few sentences in Kazakh: Siz Kazakşa söylese alasızba? “Can you speak Kazakh?” Sizdi tüski aska şakıramın “I’minviting you to lunch”; Mağan konak üyge baratın joldıkörsetingizşi “Could you please show me the way to the hotel?”The earliest known recordsof Old Turkic proper areeighth-century stoneinscriptions found in theOrkhon River Valley(Mongolia). They arededicated to Bilge Kaganand his brother Kültegin ofthe Göktürk Empire. TheGöktürk language is alsorepresented in somewhatlater inscriptions andmanuscripts. This photoshows the weather-beatenGöktürk side of the stone.38LANGUAGE AND IDENTITYPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 48

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0–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 41Chinese characters appearon one side of the BilgeKagan stone, from theOrkhon River Valley,Mongolia.Men sizben koştaskalı keldim “I’ve come to say good-bye”; Olawruw; sondıktan jumıs istemeydi “He’s ill; that’s why he isn’tworking.”D. The Karakalpaks and Their LanguageMost of the Turkic people of Kipchak origin known as theKarakalpaks today live in the Karakalpak Autonomous Republicwithin Uzbekistan, while smaller Karakalpak communities livein Khwarezm and Fergana Provinces in Uzbekistan, TashavuzProvince in Turkmenistan, various parts of Kazakhstan, andAstrakhan Province in the Russian Federation. According to the1989 census, the number of Karakalpaks in the former SovietUnion amounted to 423,436. To this should be added the smallKarakalpak community in Afghanistan.The Karakalpaks are Sunni Muslims. Karakalpak is oneof the written languages that emerged following the Soviet revolution.Until 1924, Karakalpak was written with the Arabicalphabet. Between 1928 and 1940, it used a Latin alphabet;since 1940, it has used an alphabet based on Cyrillic.Karakalpak is so close to Kazakh as to be considered a dialectof the latter. The main distinguishing features are the following:1. While in Kazakh the initial /y/ changes to /j/, in theKarakalpak dialect it changes to /c/: Kazakh jas = Karakalpakcas “young,” Kzk. jıl = Kklp. cıl “year,” Kzk. jol = Kklp. col “road,”Kzk. jigit = Kklp. cigit “young,” etc.2. While in Kazakh the initial /l/ after certain soundschanges to /t/ and /d/, it is preserved in the Karakalpak dialect:Kzk. atta- = Kklp. atla- “to step,” Kzk. attı = Kklp. atlı, Kzk. kızdar= Kklp. kızlar, Kzk. tister = Kklp. tisler “teeth,” etc.3. While in Kazakh the initial /t/ is preserved, inKarakalpak it changes, in certain words, to /d/: Kzk. tiz- = Kklp.diz- “to arrange,” Kzk. tize = Kklp. dize “knee,” Kzk. tuman =Kklp. duman, Kzk. tuz = Kklp. duz “salt,” Kzk. tüz- = Kklp. düz-“to organize,” etc.4. While in Kazakh the palatal /k/ at the beginning of aword is preserved, in the Karakalpak dialect it changes to /g/in certain words: Kzk. kez- = Kklp. gez-, Kzk. küzet- = Kklp.güzet- “to protect,” Kzk. kümis = Kklp. gümis “silver,” Kzk. küz= Kklp. güz, Kzk. küres = Kklp. güres “war,” etc.These and other differences are merely differences indialect rather than language. This can be easily understood inthe light of a few sentences with their Kazakh equivalents: Kklp.Ağaynim, men bunı tüsinbeymin = Kzk. Ağaynım, men munı tüsinbeymin“My friend, I don’t understand that”; Kklp. Bunı islepülgere almaspanba dep korkaman = Kzk. Munı istep ülgerealbaspınba dep korkamın “I’m afraid I may work and not succeed”;Kklp. Ol nawkas; sondıktan da islemeydi = Kzk. Ol, awruw;sondıktan da istemeydi “He’s ill; that’s why he isn’t working”;Kklp. Onı heş närse kızıktırmaydı = Kzk. Onı eş zat kızıktırbaydı“Nothing interests him”; Kklp. Sen bul tuwralı esitpeding be? =Kzk. Sen bul tuwralı estimep pe eding? “Haven’t you heard anythingabout it?”E. The Nogays and Their LanguageLike the Kazakhs, the Nogays are a people of mixedTurkic and Mongol extraction formed within the community ofthe Golden Horde. At the present time, the great majority of theNogays live in the Stavropol province of North Caucasia andthe autonomous region of Karachay-Circassia. There are alsosmall Nogay communities in Astrakhan and the AutonomousProvince of Daghestan. According to the 1989 census, therewere 75,564 Nogays living in the former Soviet Union. TheNogays are Sunni Muslims. The written form of Nogay thatemerged after the Soviet revolution was very similar to Kazakh,and the two languages possess a number of common features.For example, the changes of ş > s and ç > s in Kazakh can alsobe found in Nogay: bas “head,” kıs “winter,” kisi “person,” şıgar-“to extract, to take out,” keş “evening,” etc. Nevertheless, in certainfeatures, Nogay differs from Kazakh:1. The most important feature distinguishing Nogayfrom Kazakh is the preservation of the initial /y/: Nogay yas“young” (Kazakh jas), Nog. yasıl “green” (Kzk. jasıl), Nog. yasır-“to hide” (Kzk. jasır-), Nog. yawlık “handkerchief” (Kzk. jawlık),Nog. yemis “fruit” (Kzk. jemis), etc.2. Another characteristic feature of Nogay is thechange, as in Bashkir, of the initial /c/ in Arabic-Farsi borrowingsinto /y/: Arabic cawa:b > Nogay yawap “answer,” Farsi ca:n> Nogay yan “heart,” Arabic cennet > Nogay yennet, Arabiccum’a > yuma, Farsi cawa:nmard > *co:mart > yumart “generous,”etc.3. Another feature distinguishing Nogay from Kazakh isthe formation of the future tense in Nogay by means of the suffixes-ayak/-eyek: barayakpan “I will go,” bereyeksing “you willgive,” şabayak “he/she will run,” etc.A few sentences in Nogay: Men tangla bararman “I’mgoing to go tomorrow”; Taw tawga yolıkpas, ädem ädemge yolıgar“Mountains don’t meet; men do”; Erten barayakpan em yıyıneteyekpen “I will leave early, and have a meeting”; Men barayakekenmen, mutıp kaldım “I would go, but I forgot”; şaşuwdı songgakaldıruwşı bir kolhoz da bolmawga kerek “No kolkhoz [collectivefarm] should postpone the harvest till later.”F. The Kumuks and Their LanguageKumuk, which belongs to the koş- subgroup of theKipchak group of Turkic languages, is spoken mainly in theAutonomous Daghestan Republic attached to the RussianFederation, with its capital at Mahachkala. According to the1989 census, the number of Kumuk speakers was 282,178.The Kumuks are Sunni Muslims. Kumuk emerged as awritten language after the Soviet revolution. Kumuk was writtenin an Arabic alphabet from 1921 to 1928 and in a Latinalphabet from 1928 to 1938. Since 1938, it has been written ina Cyrillic alphabet. There are three dialects of Kumuk: (1) TheNorthern (Hasav-yurt) dialect, (2) the Central (Buynak) dialect,(3) the Southern (Haydak) dialect. The written language isbased on the Buynak dialect.The most important of the features of Kumuk commonto the Kipchak group of Turkic dialects is the change of /€/ and/g/ sounds in the middle and ends of words into /w/: ağır >awur, ağrığ > awruw “pain,” arığ > aruw “clean,” tağ > taw, ketig> ketüw “going,” säbig > süyüw “love,” etc.The change of g to y in the middle or at the end of a wordis one of the features common to the Kipchak group of Turkiclanguages: bäg > biy “Sir, Mr.,” äg- > iy- “to bend,” ägir- > iyir-“to spin,” kigür- > kiyir- “to insert,” täg- > tiy- “to touch,” tüg-> tüy- “to knot,” etc. Following are features peculiar to Kumuk:PRESENT-DAY TURKIC PEOPLES AND THEIR LANGUAGES4151 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 421. In Kumuk, the initial palatal /k/ changes to /g/: käç-> geç-, ke:çä > geçe “evening,” käl- > gel-, kertü > gerti “true,right,” ke:t- > get- “to go,” ke:tär- > geter- “to remove,” kötür-> götür- “to lift,” kişi > gişi, etc.2. In Kumuk, vowel rounding takes place in severalwords as a result of following labial consonants: ağzımız >awzubuz, awçı > awçu “hunter,” bağımız > bawubuz, kamış >kamuş, birlän > bulan “with,” yapış- > yabuş-, etc.3. The initial postvelar /q/ changes to guttural fricative/x/: qonşı > xonşu “neighbor,” kum > xum “sand,” qu:rt > xurt“wolf,” etc.4. The initial /ä/ is narrowed to /i/: ädär- > iyer- “to follow,”äg- > iy-, “to bend,” ädlä- > iyle- “to wet,” ärü- > iri- “tomelt,” etc.5. The /r/ sound at the end of the plural suffix disappearsbefore the genetive-accusative suffix -nı/-ni and thedative suffix -ga/-ge: giççiler “little ones,” but giççile-ni “littleones’,” ullular “adults,” but ullula-nı “adults’,” balalar “children,”but balala-ğa “to the children,” üyler “houses,” but üyle-ge “tothe houses,” etc.6. A vowel is created at the end of words of Arabic originthat end in a pair of consonants alien to the Turkic language:Arabic asl > aslu “basic, main,” Ar. fikr > fikru “idea,” Ar.ilm > ilmu “science,” Ar. waqt > wakti “time”; but Ar. sabr >sabur “patience,” etc.A few sentences in Kumuk: Awrumaygan başnı yawlıkbulan baylamas “They do not treat anyone who isn’t ill”; İssiliğolay güçlü çü, hatta adam suwdan çıkmağa süymey “It is so hotthat nobody wants to come out of the water”; Yer Günnüaylanasından aylana “The earth goes around the sun”; Onuki tüzbolmak neden görüne dağı? “How is it obvious that he is right?”Cıyın tünegün boldu “The meeting was held yesterday”; Sütteawzu bişgen suwuk suwnu üfürüp içer “He who scalds his mouthwith hot milk will blow on cold water before drinking.”G. The Karachay-Balkars and Their LanguageThe Karachays and Balkars (or Malkars) are two Turkishpeoples with very similar dialects. The Karachays live mainly inthe Autonomous Karachay-Circassian province linked to theRussian Federation, while the Balkars (or Malkars) live in theAutonomous Kabardin-Balkar Republic. There are also smallKarachay and Balkar communities in Kirghizstan, Kazakhstan,and Uzbekistan. According to the 1989 census, the total numberof Karachays and Balkars in the former Soviet Unionamounted to 156,140 and 88,771, respectively. There are alsosmall Karachay communities in Turkey.Written forms of Karachay and Balkar emerged followingthe Soviet revolution. From 1920 to 1924, the Karachays andBalkars employed an Arabic alphabet, and from 1924 to 1936they used a Latin alphabet. Since 1936, they have employed aCyrillic alphabet.The Karachay-Balkar dialects can be divided into threegroups: (1) The Karachay-Baksan-Chegem dialect, (2) theMalkar (Balkar) dialect, (3) the Holaml›-B›z›ng›l› dialect.The Karachay written language is based on theKarachay-Baksan-Chegem dialect. The characteristic featuresof the Karachay-Balkar written language are common to theKipchak group of languages: the change of the initial /a€/ into42LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY/aw/ (bağ > baw “vineyard,” tağ > taw “mountain,” etc.); thechange of the final /a€u/ into /ow/ (buzağu > buzow “calf,”kırağu > kırow “frost,” etc.); the change of the final /ägü/ into/ew/ (bilägü > bilew “grindstone,” küdägü > küyew “groom,”etc.); and the change of /o€, u€, ow/ into /uw/ (boğ- > buw-,tuğ- > tuw- “to be born,” kow- > kuw- “to repel,” soğık > suwuk“cold,” etc.).1. As for the distinguishing features of Karachay-Balkar,the most important is the disappearance of the /r/ at the endof the plural suffix: tağlar > tawla “mountains,” yigitler > cigitle“youths.” The final /r/ at the end of the copula -dır/-dir disappears:aman “bad,” aman-dı “(it is) bad,” aşxı “good,” aşxı-dı “(itis) good,” etc.2. Another feature of Karachay-Balkar is the use of thesuffix -lık/-lik, -rık/-rik in forming the future tense: bar-lık-ma “Iwill go,” min-nik-me “I will ride,” aşa-rık-sa “You will eat,” etc.3. One of the most important features of Karachay-Balkar is the change of /aw, awu/ to /uw/ or /uwu/: aw > uw“hunt,” awçı > uwçu “hunter,” awuç > uwuç “palm,” etc.Similarly, /ög, üg/ change to /üy/ or /ü/: ögrän- > üren-, ögrät-> üret-, ügür > üyür “family,” tügüm > tüyüm “knot,” etc.A few sentences in Karachay-Balkar: Ahmat elge deribardı “Ahmet went to the village”; Sabiyle tamadalarını aytxanlarınatınggılay edile “The children listened to what their elderswere telling them”; Ol kanatlını uçup barganlay atadı “He hits thebird in flight”; Men kesimi cangılganımı angılayma “I realize Imade a mistake”; Anı caşawu alkın allındadı “He has his wholelife in front of him.”H. The Karaim and Their LanguageThe Karays, or Karaim (Karaim is the plural of the Hebrewword Karay, employed in the Torah to refer to “a reader of theHoly Book”), are members of an Old Turkic community whowere converted to Judaism during the Khazar period.Until quite recently, the Karaim lived as small communitiesin Lithuania in the cities of Trakai (Troki) and Panevé_ys,and in Ukraine in the cities of Lutsk and Halicz (Halich). In formertimes, there were also Karaim communities near the cityof Evpatoria on the Crimean Peninsula. According to the 1959census, the total number of Karaim living in the former SovietUnion was 5,900; by the time of the 1989 census, the numberhad fallen to 2,803. Before 1930, the Karaim employed theHebrew, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets in writing their language,but most of the old manuscripts of religious texts (translations)are, naturally, in the Hebrew script.Karay, which is now a dead language, had three dialects:(1) Troki (Trakai), (2) Halich-Lutsk, and (3) Crimean. TheCrimean dialect of Karay was once assimilated by CrimeanTatar. The Troki and Halich-Lutsk dialects are now totally assimilatedby the Slav languages. There are several important differencesbetween the Troki and Halich dialects of Karay:1. Although in the Halich dialect the back explosive /k/is generally preserved, in the Troki dialect it changes to fricative/x/: Halich arık = Troki arıx “tired,” H aksak = T axsax, Hkasık = T kaşux “spoon,” H yabuk = T yabux “closed,” H yırak =T yırax “far,” etc.2. Similarly, although /c/ is preserved in the Trokidialect, in the Halich dialect it changes to affricate /dz/: T canYenisei inscriptions,sixth century. MinusinskMuseum, Minusinsk,Russia.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 52

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:21 Uhr Seite 43= H kek “blue,” T k’orklu = H kerkli “beautiful,” T k’oz = H kez“eye,” T öpk’a = H epke “lung,” T öz = H ez “himself,” T t’ugal= H tigel “complete, finished,” T t’uv’ul = H tivil, kivil “not,” Tyur’ak, yür’ak = H yirek “heart,” T yuz = H iz “face,” etc.7. Although the Common Turkic /fl/ is preserved in theTroki dialect, in the Halich dialect it changes to /s/, as in Kazakhand Nogay: T taş = H tas, T kişi = H kisi, T yaşırın = H yasırın“secretly,” T ülüş = H ilis “share, portion,” etc. As for the thirddialect, this displays a certain confusion in the use of thesesounds r: çaç //tsats, zer //cer //yer, köçüb // köçüf, etc.One of the most important features of Karay is the totalcorruption of Turkic syntax under the influence of writtenHebrew syntax: Halich bitigi karandasnın “the brother’s letter”;Troki uturu tängriga “against God”; Troki Yaptılar tereceni artxarı“They closed the window again”; Kaytmamen artkarı sezimden“I never go back on my word”; Da algışladı allarnı tangrı “And theLord blessed him”; Ullu edi kerki bu yarık ketsenin “The beautyof this night was great”; Sendir otnu suvba, yamanlıknı dostlukba“Fire is extinguished with water, enmity with friendship.”= H dzan “heart, soul,” T cıns = H dzıns “type, sort,” T terece =H teredze “window,” etc.3. Although the Common Turkic /ç/ is preserved in theTroki dialect, in the Halich dialect it becomes affricate /ts/: T üç= H its “three,” T çaç = H tsats “hair,” T küç = H kits “power,” Töç = H ets “revenge,” etc.4. The Common Turkic /ng/ becomes /n/ in the Halichdialect and /y/ in the Troki dialect: H atan = T atey “your father,”H barınız = T barıyız “you go, please,” H mana = T maya “to me,”H sana = T saya “to you,” etc.5. Although the initial /ti/ is preserved in the Trokidialect, in the Halich dialect it frequently changes to /ki/: T til= H kil “tongue,” T tiş = H kis “tooth,” T tiz = H kiz “knee,” etc.6. Although the Common Turkic vowels /ö/ and /ü/ arepreserved in the Troki dialect as /ö, o/ and /ü, u/, in the Halichdialect these vowels change into the vowels /e/ and /i /: T k’okI. The Crimean Tatars and Their LanguageThe Crimean Tatars are the descendants of the people ofthe old Crimean Khanate. Until the end of World War II, therewere as many as 200,000 Tatars living in the Crimea. After thewar, the Crimean Tatars were banished to Uzbekistan, wherethey lived for many years. In recent decades, they have finallybegun returning to their ancestral homes in the Crimea.Crimean Tatar is the general name applied to the languageused by the Turks of Kipchak extraction (Tatar andNogay), who have inhabited the Crimea since the fifteenth centuryor earlier. It is also the language employed by the CrimeanJews known as K›r›mchak, who also inhabited the Crimea in thepast. The Dobruja Nogay spoken in Romania north of Costanzaand the Dobruja Tatar spoken to the south of the city may beregarded as dialects of Crimean Tatar. Crimean Tatar is a Turkicwritten language consisting of a mixture of Tatar and Oghuz,with three distinct dialects: (1) The Northern dialect (Nogay),(2) the Central dialect (Tatar), (3) the Southern dialect. TheSouthern dialect is not Tatar but Turkish—the Turkish as spokenin Turkey. For that reason, it has been given the name CrimeanOsmanish in Turcology literature. Until 1928, Crimean Tatar waswritten in Arabic script, but from 1928 to 1938, this wasreplaced by a Latin alphabet. Since 1938, the language hasbeen written in a Cyrillic alphabet.1. Crimean Tatar is a complex written language withhighly complex features. For example, although in certain wordsthe initial /y/ is preserved, in others it changes to /c/: yangı“new,” yardım, yıl, yer, yok; but caş “young,” cay “bow,” curt“motherland,” ciber- “to send,” etc.2. The change of the final /i€, ig/ to /uw, üw/ is one ofthe distinguishing characteristics of Crimean Tatar: aluw “take,”baruw “arrival,” berüw “giving,” etüw “doing,” kelüw “coming,”bitirüw “completing, finishing,” etc.3. One of the general characteristics of Crimean Tataris the disappearance of the initial and medial /h/: ayat “life,”araret “heat,” areket “movement,” al “condition,” angi “which,”azır “ready,” er “every, each,” ikaye “story,” oca “teacher,” episi“all,” muim “important,” etc.PRESENT-DAY TURKIC PEOPLES AND THEIR LANGUAGES4353 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:22 Uhr Seite 444. Another feature of Crimean Turkish is the preservationof a narrow vowel in a middle syllable: yalıngız “alone,”akılında “in his mind,” çevirilip “turned,” etc.5. Another of the characteristic features of CrimeanTurkic is, as pointed out above, the lack or restriction of labialharmony: kurıp “established” bulunıp, coştırıcı, dortunci “fourth,”kulunçli “ridiculous,” içün, niçün, oldıgı “as it is,” onıng “his/her,”yolımıznı “our way,” etc.6. The partial velarization of the vowels /ö/ and /ü/, andtheir approximation to /o/ and /u/, is also a feature peculiar toCrimean Turkic: boyle “like this,” koz “eye,” buyuk “big,” butun“all,” koster- “to show,” etc.7. Although labial harmony is preserved fully in theSouthern dialect and as far as the second syllable in the Centraldialect, it has completely disappeared in the Northern dialect:Southern tuzluh = Central tuzluk = Northern tuzlık, S çürüklük= C çürüklik = N çüriklik, S xuruluş = C kurulış = N kurılış, Skoylü = C koylü = N koyli “villager,” etc.8. Although the initial /t/ is preserved in the Northerndialect, it changes to /d/ in the Southern dialect: Northern taw= Southern dağ, N tat = S dat “taste,” N tur- = S dur-, N tiş =S diş, N tüş- = S düş-, etc.9. Although the initial /y/ is preserved in the Southerndialect, it changes to /c/ in the Northern: Southern yol =Northern col, S yel = N cel, S yayaw = N cayaw “pedestrian,” Syığ- = N cıy-, S yok = N cok “absent,” etc.10. The written language of Crimean Tatar contains anumber of Oghuz (Turkish) words borrowed from the Southerndialect: adım, dağ, değil, gece, kadın, ocak, oda, ol- , etc.A few sentences in Crimean Tatar: Tang ağarıp yata“Dawn is breaking”’ Saba salkını tenimi çımırdata “The morningwind makes my skin shiver”; Kay etecegimizi bilmeymiz “Wedon’t know what we shall do”; Biz saçuwga azırmız diyler “Theysay they are ready for the harvest”; Oyle tartkan, cardan suvgatüşken “He hit him so hard he fell into the water”; Zalde yengilkulkü koptı “There was some laughter in the salon”; Yüzümsarargan sayın işta:sı da: ziya:de arta eken “As the grapes turnedyellow, his appetite increased.”III. CHAGHATAY GROUPA. The Uzbeks and Their LanguageThe Uzbeks are a Turkic people of mixed Turkic,Mongolian, and Iranian extraction who take their name fromEmir Özbek, one of the emirs of the Golden Horde.The great majority of the Uzbeks live in the Republic ofUzbekistan, whose capital is Tashkent. There are also fairlylarge Uzbek communities in Tajikistan (450,000), Kirghizstan(220,000), Kazakhstan (140,000), and Turkmenistan (125,000).According to the 1989 census, the total number of Uzbeks inthe former Soviet Union amounted to 16,686,244. Adding thenumber of Uzbeks living in Afghanistan (1,390,000), theRepublic of China (15,000), and Turkey brings the number ofUzbek speakers to 19 or 20 million. Modern Uzbek is a continuationof the old Chaghatay written language. Thus, theChaghatay written language may be regarded as “Old Uzbek.”Chaghatay emerged as a classical written language in the eighteenthcentury, with many features borrowed from the Uzbekspoken language. There are several dialects of Uzbek that can44LANGUAGE AND IDENTITYbe classified in four groups: (1) The Khwarezm Kipchakdialects, (2) the Northern Uzbek dialects, (3) the SouthernUzbek dialects, (4) the Khwarezm Oghuz dialects (‹kan-Karabulak, Hive). The Khwarezm-Kipchak dialects of Uzbekbelong to the Kipchak group of Turkic languages, while theKhwarezm-Oghuz dialects belong to Turkmen. According tothis, the true Uzbek dialects are the Northern and Southerndialects in groups 2 and 3. The Southern Uzbek dialects can besubdivided into the following groups: (1) Iranianized dialects:Samarkand, Karshi, Katta-Kurgan, Bukhara, etc.; Tashkent, Ura-Tübe, Cizzah, Leninabad, etc., (2) semi-Iranianized dialects:local dialects; Fergana Uzbek (Fergana, Andican, Kokand,Namangan, etc.). From 1929/30 to 1937, the Uzbek written languagewas based on the Northern Uzbek dialects, which preservedboth phonetic and oral vowel harmony. The Uzbek writtenlanguage underwent radical changes in 1937, when it wasbased (from the point of view of grammar and vocabulary) onthe dialects of the Fergana Valley; in both phonetics and writing,the vowels /›, ö, ü/ disappeared and /a/ was usually labializationin accord with Iranianized Tashkent speech. Until 1930,Uzbek was written using an Arabic alphabet; from 1930 to 1940,it used a Latin alphabet. Since 1940, Uzbek has been written ina Cyrillic-based alphabet.1. One of the main features of the Uzbek written languageis the labialization of the initial /a/: altı > ålti “six,” a:la >ålä “spotted,” a:ra > årä “distance,” ata > åtä “father,” ta:ğ > tåğ“mountain,” yağ- > yåğ-, etc.2. Another characteristic feature of Uzbek is the changeof /›/ to /i/ when unassociated with /q/ and /€/: altı > ålti “six,”altın > åldin, yakşı > yaxşi “well,” yıl > yil “year,” yılan > yilan, etc.3. In Uzbek, the closed /e/ is found only in the initial syllable;in other words, the initial closed /e/ is preserved, but theopen /ä/ is changed to closed /e/: el “folk,” elt- “to send,” ertä“early,” keçä “evening,” är > er “man, husband,” äski > eski, ät> et, ätäk > etäk, käräk > keräk “necessary,” sämri- > semir- “togrow fat,” täri > teri “leather,” etc.4. One of the most important features of Uzbek is thedisappearance of the pronominal /n/ following the third personalsuffix: uy-i-gä “to his house,” årä-si-dän “in between,” åtäsi-gä“to his father,” toğri-si-dä “about,” etc.5. One of the most important features of the Uzbekwritten language is the extensive impairment of vowel harmonyas a result of the disappearance of the vowels /›, ö, ü/: båğli“bound,” toğri “correct, right,” toğrisidä “about,” åräsidä “inbetween,” boldir- “to make happen,” bolim “part,” buzil- “tobecome spoiled,” unli “vowel,” suwsiz “thirsty,” etc.6. Another very important feature of Uzbek is thechange of /€/ and /g/ to /q/ and /k/ at the end of multisyllabicwords: a:çığ > aççiq “bitter,” adığ > ayiq “bear,” sa:rığ > sariq“yellow,” ta:ğlığ > tåğliq “mountaineer,” bilig > bilik “knowledge,”ölüg > olik “dead,” tirig > tirik “alive,” etc.7. The /ö, ü/ sounds in Common Turkic are velarizedwhen unassociated with /k/ and /g/—that is, they are pronouncedas /o, u/: ölüg > olik “dead,” ölüm > olim, tü:n > tun“evening,” tü:ş > tuş “dream,” tüşün- > tuşun- “to understand,”etc.A few sentences in Uzbek: Sizdi korgänimdän xursändmän“I was pleased to see you”; Gäpimgä tuşinäyapsizmi? “DoTonyukuk, who died in 724AD, was the grand vizierand commander-in-chieffor four Gökturk leaders,the best known of whomwas Bilge Khan. His brieflife history, achievements,and regulations for hisadministration were carvedin the TonyukukInscription, found aboutthirty miles outside of UlanBator, Mongolia.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 54

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030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:22 Uhr Seite 46you understand what I’m saying?” Tuşunämän, ämmå cävåbqaytärä ålmäymän “I understand but I can’t answer”; Ulär birbiribilän gäpirişmäydi “They don’t talk to each other”; Åldinåvqatlängänlär stoldän turişä yåtibdi “They were leaving the tablebefore eating”; Yer quyåş ätråfidä äylänädi “The earth revolvesaround the sun”; U kelgändä edi kinogä bårär edik “If he hadcome, we would have gone to the cinema.”B. The Uighurs and the New Uighur LanguageThe Uighurs are descendants of an Old Turkic peoplewho founded two states—one in Mongolia in the middle of theeighth century (744-840) and the other in their present homelandin the middle of the ninth century (approximately 850 to1250). The great majority of the Uighurs now inhabit theXinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republicof China. Some 6 million Uighurs live in China. Outside China,there are Uighur communities in Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan,Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. According to the 1989 census,the total number of Uighurs living in the former Soviet Unionamounted to 262,199.New Uighur is a continuation of the Old Uighur writtenlanguage and the old Chaghatay written language, which isitself regarded as its continuation. New Uighur, known inTurcology as “Do€u Türkçesi” (Eastern Turkic) has a number ofdialects. These can be divided into two groups: (1) TheSouthern dialects, (2) the Northern dialects. The Southerngroup contains the following dialects: (1) Kashgar-Yarkent, (2)Hotan-Keriya, (3) Aksu-Karashar.The Northern dialects are spoken in the northeasternand eastern regions of Eastern Turkestan and in WesternTurkestan. These dialects are: (4) Kucha-Turfan-Hami (China),(5) Taranchi (Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Uzbekistan, andTurkmenistan).Apart from these, the following dialects can be foundoutside the Uighur area: (6) Lobnor (Lobnor, Charhal›k, andMiran), (7) Hoton (Busurman “Müslüman”) (in westernMongolia and the area between two lakes—the Ubsu-nur andthe Khirgis-Nur).The New Uighur written language is based on theSouthern dialects. In China, until 1960, Uighur was written inthe Arabic alphabet; from then until 1970, throughout the periodof the Cultural Revolution, it was written in a Latin alphabet.After the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Uighur languagewas once more written in the Arabic alphabet.In the former Soviet Union, Uighur was written in theArabic alphabet until 1930; from 1930 to 1947, it was written inthe Latin alphabet. Since 1947, it has been written in the Cyrillicalphabet. The main features of New Uighur are the following:1. In New Uighur, as in Uzbek, /›/ changes to /i/, beingpreserved only in association with /q/ and /€/: yıl > jil “year,”yılan > jilan, yıraq > jiraq “far,” çiq- [çıq] “to go out,” qiz [qız]“girl,” qizil [qızil], ağır > eğir [eğır], dialect > eğiz [eğız], etc.2. Another characteristic feature of New Uighur is theweakening and narrowing of low vowels in the central syllable:ana “mother,” anisi “his mother”; bala “child,” balisi “his child,”balilar “children”; parça “piece,” parçila- “to break into pieces”;qollan- “to use,” qolliniş “use”; jüräk “heart,” jürügüm “my heart”;sözlä- “to speak, to talk,” Sözlügün “Talk!” etc.46LANGUAGE AND IDENTITYPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 56

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:22 Uhr Seite 47Yenisei inscriptions,sixth century, MinusinskMuseum, Minusinsk,Russia.3. Another of the main features of New Uighur is thepreservation of the initial /a€/: ağri- “to ache,” bağ, tağ, yağ-,etc.4. The closed /e/ is preserved in an open first syllable:e:di > egä “owner,” ke:çä > keçä “evening, night,” ke:din > keyin“then, later,” etc.5. On the other hand, the closed /e/ in a first syllableclosed by a consonant changes to open /e/: be:r- > bär- “togive,” be:ş > bäş “five,” e:rtä > ärtä “early,” ke:t- > kät- “to go,”ye:ti > yättä “seven,” etc.6. Very important features of New Uighur are theregressive vowel assimilations. These assimilations are of twotypes:(a) The initial /a/and /ä/ in an open first syllable changeto closed /e/ under the influence of an /i/ in the second syllable:arığ > eriq “clean,” ba:lıq > beliq “fish,” sa:rığ > seriq “yellow,”at+i > eti “his horse,” baş+i > beşi “his head,” qaş+i > qeşi“in front of him,” är+i > eri “her husband,” ät+i > eti “his meat,”etc.(b) The initial /a/ and /ä/ are rounded to /o/ and /ö/under the influence of the rounded /u/ and /ü/ in the secondsyllable: açuq > oçuq “open,” a:ruq > oruq “tired,” yaruq > yoruq“light,” ä:tük > ötük “boots,” tämür > tömür “iron,” täşük > töşük“hole,” etc.7. One of the most important features of New Uighur isthe change of /€/ and /g/ at the end of multisyllabic words, asin Uzbek, to /q/ and /k/: ta:ğlığ > tağliq “mountaineer,” atlığ >atliq “cavalryman,” a:tlığ > atliq “famous,” bilig > bilik “knowledge,”ölüg < ölük “dead,” ti:rig > tirik “alive,” etc.8. A principal feature of New Uighur is the disappearance,as in Uzbek, of the pronominal /n/: orun “place,” orn-i-ga“instead of,” öy-i-gä “to his house,” otturu-si-da “in the middle,”üst-i-din “over,” etc.9. The change of the initial /y/ sound to /j/ before thevowels /i, u, ü/ is one of the most characteristic features of NewUighur: yığla- > jiğla- “to cry,” yıl > jil “year,” yılan > jilan “snake,”yipäk > jipäk “silk,” yu:- > juy- “to wash,” yurt > jurt, yügür- >jügür- “to run,” yüräk > jüräk, yüt- > jüt- “to disappear,” etc.A few sentences in New Uighur: Adättikigä qarigandabügün köpräk işliduq “Today we worked harder than ever”; Pulnipoçta arqiliq äwättim “I sent the money by mail”; Uningga qarigandabu ärzänraq ämäs mu? “Looking at it, isn’t it cheaper?”Bizning tehi ügünüşimiz keräk “There is more we have to learn”;Siz bilän hoşlaşqini käldim “I have come to say good-bye”; Mänhär yäkşänbä küni teatrga baridiganmän “I go to the theatreevery Sunday.”IV. to:lu: GROUPThe Kirghiz and Their LanguageThe Kirghiz are a Turkic people whose name frequentlyappears on the Orkhon inscriptions. In 840, the Kirghiz—whobefore the eighth century had been in frequent warfare with theTurks and later with the Uighurs—put an end to Uighur hegemonyin Mongolia and established their own hegemony overthe Mongolia steppes (840-924). After this relatively short periodof independence, they and other “forest peoples” cameunder Mongol rule in 1207. As a result of the great rebellionsbetween 1254 and 1270, some of the Kirghiz were forced tomigrate to Manchuria (1293). When the Russians arrived in theYenisei,-Abakan region at the beginning of the seventeenthcentury, they found four Kirghiz principalities. In the second halfof the seventeenth century, the Yenisei, Kirghiz were obliged toaccept Kalmuk rule. At the beginning of the eighteenth century,the great majority of the Kirghiz migrated to their presentdayhomeland in the Tian Shan region.According to the inscriptions, at the beginning of theeighth century the first Kirghiz homeland was located to thenorth of the Kögmen (Sayan) Mountains. The runic Yenisei,inscriptions found along the upper basin of the Yenisei, Riverare thought to belong to leaders of the Kirghiz tribe. The greatmajority of the Kirghiz now live in the Republic of Kirghizstan.There are also Kirghiz communities in Uzbekistan andTajikistan, northern Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in the XinjiangUighur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China.According to the 1989 census results, there were 2,530,998Kirghiz in the former Soviet Union. The number of Kirghiz andKirghiz speakers in other countries amounts to 3 to 3.5 million.The Kirghiz are Sunni Muslims. Kirghiz emerged as a writtenlanguage following the Soviet revolution. From 1924 to 1926, itwas written in the Arabic alphabet and from 1928 to 1940 in aLatin alphabet. Since 1940, it has been written in a Cyrillicalphabet. The characteristic features of Kirghiz are as follows:1. One of the principal features of Kirghiz is the creationof very long vowels as a result of the contraction of soundgroups such as ağ, aw, ağı, ağu, oğ, oğu, uğ: tağ > to: “mountain,”tağlığ > to:lu: “mountaineer,” bağ > bo:, bağır > bo:r“liver,” ağır < o:r, dialect > o:z, yağı > co: “enemy,” buzağu kıro: “rime,” birägü > birö: “anybody,”küdägü > küyö: “groom,” etc.2. Apart from these secondary long vowels in Kirghiz,there are also a number of primary long vowels in certainwords: a:rı “bee,” ba:rı “all,” ya: > ca: “arrow,” yu:- > cu:- “towash,” etc.3. In Kirghiz, the initial /y/ changes to /c/: yaş > caş“young,” yığ- > cıy-, yıl > cıl, yel > cel, yol > col, yigit > cigit“young,” yigirmä > cıyırma “twenty,” etc.4. One of the most important features of Kirghiz is theoccurrence of labial attraction in this language. This results inthe rounding of /a/ and /ä/ following /o, ö, and ü/: yol-lar >coldor, yol-lar-da > coldordo, köl-lär > köldör, köl-lär-dän >köldördön, korkak > korkok, yüräk > cürök, yüräk-lär > cüröktör,yüräk-lär-dä > cüröktördö, etc. There is, however, no roundingin the initial /u/, as in kuçak “embrace,” kulak, etc.5. The labial attraction in Kirghiz is also encountered inAltai, as in: koçkar > koçkor “ram,” köllär > köldör “lakes,” bolgan> bolgon “became,” bolmağan > bolboğon “didn’t become,”körgänlär > körgöndör “ones who saw,” etc.6. The initial long /›/ is diphthongized to /iy/ in certainwords in Kirghiz: kı:kır- > kıykır- “to call,” kı:mıl > kıymıl “movement,”etc.7. Similarly, in Kirghiz, the sound clusters /eg/ and /ig/regularly change to /iy/: beg > biy “Sir, Mr.,” eg- < iy- “to bend,”teg- > tiy- “to touch,” yigrän- > ciyrän- “to be disgusted,” etc.Some sentences in Kirghiz: Men kün sayın erte turamın “Iget up early every day”; Krovatımdı cıynaymın cu:namın “I makemy bed and wash”; Siler caşsıngar, ösösüngör, keleçektin e:siPRESENT-DAY TURKIC PEOPLES AND THEIR LANGUAGES4757 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:22 Uhr Seite 48bolosungar “You are young, but you will grow up and be themasters of the future”; Al o:ru, mına oşonduktan iştebeyt “He’sill; that’s why he isn’t working”; Aba ırayı özgördü “The weatherhas changed”; Ukpayt dep uşak aytpa, bilbeyt dep u:ru kılba“Don’t gossip, thinking they won’t hear; don‘t steal, thinkingthey won’t know.”V. tu:lu GROUPThe Altai Kiji and Their LanguageAltai is the language spoken by the Oyrot (Altai), Telengit,and Teleüt peoples inhabiting the autonomous region of Da€l›kAltai and the Tuba, Kumand›, and Chalkandu peoples speakingNorthern Altai dialects. According to the 1989 census, therewere 70,777 Altai speakers. This figure includes the NorthernAltai speakers to whom we shall be referring below.The Telengit mainly inhabit the basins of the Chulismanand Bashkauz Rivers. They are shamanist, Orthodox Christian,and Lamaist. The Teleüt are closely related to the Telengit. Thegreat majority of the Teleüt live in Kuznetsk, while others live inthe Altai Autonomous Region. The Oyrot refer to themselves as“Altai kiji [Altai],” but their neighbors refer to them as“Mountain Kalmuks” or “Ak Kalmuks.” The Oyrot live in the valleyof the Katun River and in the upper reaches of the Charish(old Yaris), Anuy, Peschenaya, and Urusul Rivers. They areshamanists. Altai emerged as a written language in 1922, followingthe Soviet revolution. Until 1928, it was written using amissionary alphabet, but between 1928 and 1938 this wasreplaced by a Latin alphabet. Since 1938, Altai has been writtenusing a Cyrillic alphabet. Until 1948, the Altai language wasknown as Oyrot. The Oyrot or Altai written language was basedon the Southern dialects (Oyrot or Altai, Telengit, Teleüt).However, the Northern dialects of Altai (Tuba, Kumand›,Chalkandu) are somewhat different from the Altai written language.For example, while words such as tağ and bağ appearas tu: and bu in the Southern Altai dialects and in the writtenlanguage, these are preserved as tu: and bu in the NorthernAltai dialects. The rounding characteristic of the Altai writtenlanguage is not encountered in these dialects, as, for example,in: bolgan > polgan (Altai bolgon), körgen (Altai körgön), etc.The principal characteristics of Altai:1. One of the most important features of Altai is thechange of the initial /a€/ to a long or short /u/: tağ > tu: “mountain,”bağ > bu: “vineyard,” sağ > su “healthy,” yağ > d’u, etc.2. Another characteristic feature of Altai is the changeof the final /›€/ and /ig/into a short /u/ and /ü/, respectively:tağlığ > tu:lu “mountaineer,” arığ > aru “clean,” qatığ > katu“hard, solid,” tirig > tirü “alive” (Altai, Telengit tirü:), isig > üzü“hot” (Alt., Tel. üzü:), etc.3. The change of the final /y/ into a front palatal closeto /c/ is a feature peculiar to Altai, but this is not reflected inthe written language: yaş [d’aş] “young,” yıl [d’ıl] “year,” yılan[d’ılan], yılığ [d’ılu] “warm,” etc.4. In Altai, the /a€u/ sound group in Old Turkic ischanged to short /u/ while /ägü/ is changed to long /ü/: buzağu> bozu “calf,” kırağu > kuru “frost,” bilägü > bilü “grindstone,”küdägü > küyü “groom,” etc.A few sentences in Altai: Angdap kuştap barar bolzoğor,men kojo bararım “If you are going hunting, I’ll come with you”;48LANGUAGE AND IDENTITYBaldar oynop d’at “The children are playing”; Turanıng tıştındad’a:ş d’a:p d’at “It’s raining outside”; Men slerding ıra:k d’adıpd’adım “I live a long way from you”; Slerge kerektü biçik üstünded’adırı “The books you need are up there”; Ot birde öçö beret,birde küye beret “The fire burns intermittently.”VI. ayak/ta¤l›¤ GROUPNorthern Altai DialectsAs noted above, the Northern Altai dialects are markedlydifferent from the Altai written language based on theNorthern dialects: Tuba, Kumand›, Chalkandu. The change of/a€/ > /u:/, /›€/ > /u/, and /ig/ > /ü/—typical of Altai—have notoccurred in these dialects. The same situation can be observedin the Shor, Kondom and Lower Tom dialects and the LowerÇul›m dialect of Chulym Turkic. Thus, all the dialects we havelisted form a separate, ayak/tağlığ group.The principal features of these dialects are the following:1. In these dialects, the initial /ä/ and /e/ generallychange to /i/: bärk > pik “healthy” (Altai bek), sämiz > sibis “fat”(Alt. semis), bel > pil “waist” (Alt. bel), etc.2. In these dialects, the initial /a€/ is preserved: tağ“mountain” (Altai tu:), bağ (Alt. bu:), sağ (Alt. su), etc.3. Although the initial /ç/ is preserved in the written language,in these dialects it changes to /fl/: çerig “war” > şerig(Altai çerü), çık- > şık- (Alt. çık-), etc.4. In the Kumand› and Chalkandu dialects, the initial /y/changes to /ç/: Turkic yakşı “good, well” = Kumand›/Chalkanduçakşı (Altai d’akşı), Tu. yıl = Kum./Chal. çıl (Alt. d’ıl), etc.5. The Old Turkic /a€/ and /›€, ig/ are preserved, as inKhakas: tağlığ “mountaineer,” qatığ “solid,” sarığ “yellow,” ölüg> ölig “dead,” tirig “alive,” etc.6. In these dialects, /›€/ and /ig/ are preserved at theend of polysyllabic words: koyuğ > koyuğ “dark” (Altai koyu),tirig > tirig “alive” (Alt. tirü), etc.7. In these dialects, changes of the initial /b/ > /m/ andthe medial /m/ < /b/ can be observed: böri > mörü “wolf” (Altaibörü), borsuk > mursak (Alt. borsok); but tämir > tebir “iron”(Alt. temir), sämiz > sibis “fat” (Alt. semis), etc.8. The first of these dialects is a ç-dialect, because ofthe preservation of the Common Turkic /ç/ and the /c/ developedfrom /y/: çaç “hair,” köçüb “moved,” cer “place,” etc.VII. azax/azak GROUPA. The Yenisei-Abakan Tatars and KhakasThe Khakas-speaking peoples are composed mainly ofthe Sagay-Beltir, Kacha-Koybal-Kyzyl, and Shor groups.According to the 1989 census, the total number of Khakasspeakers amounted to 81,428.Khakas is spoken by peoples inhabiting the middlereaches of the Yenisei, Abakan, and Chulym Rivers in theKhakas autonomous province of the Russian Federation. In olddocuments, these peoples were referred to as “Abakan Tatars”or “Yenisei, Turks.” Khakas was a name borrowed from oldChinese sources as the label for this whole group of peoplesfollowing the Soviet revolution, but the people referred to ashsia-chia-szu (according to the old Chinese pronunciation gatkat-sie)were most probably Yenisei, Kirghiz. Khakas emergedas a written language after the Soviet revolution. The firstPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 58

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:22 Uhr Seite 49The weather-beatenGöktürk inscription,Orkhon River Valley,Mongolia.Khakas alphabet was drawn up in 1926 on the basis of a Cyrillicalphabet, but in 1929 it was replaced by a Latin alphabet. Since1939, Khakas has been written using a Cyrillic alphabet. TheKhakas written language is based on the Sagay-Beltirdialects.Characteristic features of Khakas are as follows:1. The most important feature of Khakas is the changeof the Old Turkic /d/ to /z/: adaq > azax “foot,” adır- > azır- “toseparate,” bädük “big” > pözik “high,” qudruq > xuzurux “tail,” etc.2. One of the most important features of Khakas is thechange of Old Turkic /fl/ to /s/ in an initial and final position andto /z/between two vowels: baş > pas, beş > pis “five,” quş > xus,yakşı > çaxsı “good,” aşuru > azıra “excessive,” kişi > kizi, beşik> pizik, etc.3. Another feature of Khakas is the change of /ç/ to /s/:çaq- > sax-, çık- > sıx-, çıqar- > sıxar-, aç- > as-, etc.4. The change of the initial /b/ to /p/ is another impor-49PRESENT-DAY TURKIC PEOPLES AND THEIR LANGUAGES59 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:22 Uhr Seite 50tant feature of Khakas: bar > par “present,” basa > paza “anew,”beş > pis “five,” ber- > pir- “to give,” bol- > pol- “to become,”etc.5. Another important feature of Khakas is the regularchange of the postvelar /q/ to the fricative /x/: adaq > azax“foot,” qadıng > xazıng “beech tree,” çıq- > sıx-, qız > xıs “girl,”qol > xol “hand,” yaqşı > çaxsı “good,” etc.6. In Khakas, the initial /ä, e/ changes to /i/, as in Tatarand Bashkir: käl- > kil- “to come,” käs- > kis- “to cut,” beş >pis “five,” ber- > pir- “to give,” etc.7. On the other hand, a long or short primary /i/ isshortened, again as in Tatar and Bashkir: bir > pir “one,” biz >pis, tiş > tis “tooth,” iç- > is- “to drink,” isig > izig “hot,” kişi >kizi, etc.8. The change of the initial /y/ to /ç/, as in Tuva, is oneof the most important features of Khakas: yaqşı > çaxsı “good,”yadağ > çazağ “pedestrian,” yıl > çıl, yügür- > çügür- “to run,”etc.9. The Old Turkic /a€/ and /›€, ig/ are preserved inKhakas, as in Tuva: tağ > dağ, bağ > bağ “strap, belt,” qıdığ >kıdığ “coast,” bilig > bilig “science,” tirig > tirig “alive,” etc.A few sentences in Khakas: Çılığ kün polar tip pis niyiktonanıp algabıs “We wore light clothes because the weather iswarm”; Kün sıxxannang per, pis kilometr irt pargabıs “We’ve coveredfive kilometres since sunrise”; Xacan toğıstı tossar, pis sınıxtırgakilerbis “When we’ve finished work, we’ll come to cleanup”; Sirerge par kilerge mining mam çoğıl “I haven’t time tocome to you”; Min sirerzer tangda kilerbin, neke “Perhaps I’llcome to you tomorrow.”B. The Yellow Uighurs and Their LanguageThe Yellow Uighurs are a Turkic people inhabitingChina’s Kansu Province. According to the 1990 census, theirtotal number amounts to 12,297. The Yellow Uighurs are partiallyMongolianized and speak Mongolian, referring to themselvesin Mongolian as Shira Yugur (“Yellow Uighurs”). TheTurkic-speaking Yellow Uighurs refer to themselves as XaraUighurs (“Black Uighurs”). The Yellow Uighurs are Buddhists.Yellow Uighur, which belongs to the same languagegroup (azak group) as Khakas, has no written form. The mainfeatures of Yellow Uighur are the following:1. In Yellow Uighur, as in Khakas, Old Turkic, /d/changes to /z/: adaq > azak “foot” (Khakas azax), adır- > azır-“to separate,” ädär > ezer “saddle,” bädük > pezik “high,” u:dı-> uzu- “to sleep,” etc.2. In Yellow Uighur, as in Khakas, Old Turkic, the initial/b/ changes to /p/: Old Turkic bar- > par- “to arrive,” OT baş >pas, OT ber- > per- (Khakas pir-), etc.3. In Yellow Uighur, as in Khakas, Old Turkic, /fl/changes to /s/: Old Turkic baş > pas (Khakas pas), OT be:ş >pes “five” (Khak. pis), OT ta:ş > tas “stone” (Khak. tas), etc.4. Unlike Khakas, the initial consonant /y/ is preserved:ya:şıl > yasıl “green” (Khakas çazıl), yer > yer (Khak. çir), yığla-> yiğla- “to cry” (Khak. ılga-), yultuz > yıltus “star” (Khak. çıltıs),yüz > yüs “one hundred” (Khak. çüs), etc.5. Unlike Khakas, Old Turkic /fl/ between vowels is preserved:Old Turkic aşuru > asıru “excessive” (Khakas azıra), OTkişi > kise (Khak. kizi), OT yaşıl > yasıl “green” (Khak. çazıl), etc.50LANGUAGE AND IDENTITYVIII. adak GROUPThe Tuvas and Their LanguageThe term Tuva is derived from the tribal name T’o-pa,which is found in old Chinese sources. The T’o-pas belongedto the Eastern Hun Confederation that founded the T’o-pa Weistate, which endured for two hundred years (fourth to sixthcenturies) in northern China.Today, Tuva is spoken primarily in the Tuva AutonomousRepublic (capital: Kyzyl), part of the Russian Federation.According to the 1989 census, the total number of Tuva speakersin the former Soviet Union amounted to 206,924. There arealso small Tuva communities in northern Mongolia, the BuryatAutonomous Republic of the Russian Federation, and theXinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China. The religion ofthe Tuvas is a combination of Tibetan Buddhism (Lamaism) andshamanism. Tuva, together with the closely related Tofa(Karagas) dialect, forms a separate branch of the Turkic languages.The Tuvas refer to themselves as Tıva kiji or Tıva. In scientificliterature, this people is typically referred to as Uryanghay,Soyon, or Soyot. Tuva is a Turkic language that emerged as awritten language after the Soviet revolution. On June 28, 1930,the Latin alphabet was adopted by the government of the TuvaPeople’s Republic. This alphabet continued to be employed until1943. Since then, Tuva has been written in a Cyrillic alphabet.The principal features of Tuva are the following:1. The Old Turkic consonant /d/ is preserved in Tuva:Old Turkic adak “foot”= Tuva adak, OT adığ “bear” = Tuv. adığ,OT udı- “to sleep” = Tuv. udu-, OT bädük “big” = Tuv. bedik“high,” etc.2. Long vowels are shortened, short vowels are gutturalized:a:t “name” > at, but at “horse” > a’t; tü:ş “dream,” buttüş- “to descend” > dü’ş-; kı:z “girl” > kıs, but kıs- > kı’s-, etc.3. The final /z/ changes to /s/: az > as, kız > kıs, biz >pis, tuz > tus, küz > küs “autumn,” etc.4. The /fl/ between two vowels changes to /j/: eşik > ejik“door,” kişi > kiji, beş on > bejen “fifty,” bışur- > bıjır- “to cook,”etc.5. The Old Turkic /i/ is generally preserved in Tuva: tıl >dıl “tongue,” ıt > ıt “dog,” bıt > bıt “flea,” bıç- > bış- “to cut,” etc.Tuva possesses four dialects in addition to Karagas:Central, Western, North-Western, and South-Western. The writtenlanguage is based on the Central dialect. There are nowsome 500 or 600 speakers of the language referred to by SovietTurcologists as Tofalarskiy yazık, an oral Tofa language that maybe regarded as a dialect of Tuva. The Tofas live on the northernslopes of the Sayan Mountains and the upper reaches of theUda and Biryusa Rivers. The Tofas are thought to be TurkicizedSamoyeds. In Tuva, as in Khakas, the initial /y/ changes to /ç/:yaş > çaş “young,” yer > çer, yıl > çıl, yol > çol, etc. A few sentencesin Tuva: Kandığ amıradıp çor siler? “How are you?” Kaşharlığ siler? “How old are you?” Bejen harlığ men “I’m fifty”;Kırgan dep sanatınar eves siler “You aren’t really old”; Çaşkınhungdan kudupkan ışkaş cap tur “It’s raining cats and dogs”;Uluğ hünde çılığ bolur bolza hemele:r bis “If it’s hot on Sunday,we’ll go for a row.” After the Soviet revolution, the Tuvas hadtheir own independent republic named Tannu-Tuva. On October13, 1944, for political reasons unknown to the West, this republicjoined the USSR as the Tuva Autonomous Republic.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 60

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:22 Uhr Seite 51IX. ta¤l› GROUPSalars and Their LanguageThe Salars are a Turkic people inhabiting the XunhuaSalar Autonomous County in China’s Qinghai Province.According to the 1958 census, there were only 30,000 Salarspeakers. It is now thought that there are more than 40,000.The Salars are thought to have migrated at the end of thefourteenth century from Samarkand and the neighboringregion to the banks of the Huang He River, where they livedside by side with Chinese and Tibetans. As a result, their languageand their Muslim culture had strong Chinese andTibetan influences. The Salars are taught in Chinese schoolsand use Chinese as their official language. This has led to theborrowing of a large number of Chinese and Tibetan words. A.Samoylovich included Salar in the Kipchak-Turkmen group ofTurkic languages, while Turcologists such as Poppe, Menges,Pritsak, K. Thomsen, and Baskakov regard Salar as a dialect ofNew Uighur. According to E. R. Tenishev, Salar belongs to theOghuz group of Turkic languages, but with the admixture ofcertain Kipchak elements. These views are very rightly criticizedby V. Drimba, who regards Salar as an independent dialect orlanguage. In our opinion, Salar forms an independent group ofTurkic languages classified according to tağlığ as a criterion.The word tağlığ appears as tağlı in this language as a result ofthe disappearance of the final /€/. The same word appears astağlıq in New Uighur, tawlı in the Kipchak group, and dağlı inthe Oghuz group. Salar, which has no written form, has twomain dialects: (1) The Gey-tszı dialect (together with theChinshu dialect), (2) the dialect of the Da€l›k Minta region. Theformer is spoken in Xunhua Province and the latter in the East.Most Salars use the Gey-tszı dialect. Both dialects contain featurespeculiar to the Oghuz-Kipchak groups. This is perfectlynatural, as in Kashgarl›, the ethnic term for Salar, is one and thesame as Salgur (Turkmen Salır or Salar), which is recognized asone of the twenty-two Oghuz tribes.Some of the characteristicsof Salar are:1. As noted above, the most important feature of Salaris the disappearance of /€/ and /g/ at the end of multisyllabicwords: Old Turkic a:çığ > a:ci “pain,” OT sa:rığ > sa:rı, sa:ri, sa:re“yellow,” OT uluğ > ullı, ulli, uli “great,” kü:çlüğ > küşli “strong,”OT kiçig > kiçi “small,” etc.2. In Salar, a /d/ in front of /i/ generally changes to /c/:yedi > yici “seven,” aldı > alci, almadı > almaci, ala almadı > alalmaci“couldn’t get,” etc.3. In Salar, one finds that /ç/ becomes /fl/ in severalwords: ağaç > ağaş, üç > uş “three,” kü:çlüg > küşli, kuşli“strong,” etc. This sound change occurs in several Turkic languagesof the Kipchak group.4. Another characteristic feature of Salar is the preservationof the initial /t/, as opposed to normal practice in theOghuz group of Turkic languages: tağ “mountain,” tokos “nine,”temur “iron,” totax “lip,” teşüx, teşux “hole,” töve “camel,” etc.5. Yet another characteristic feature of Salar is thepreservation, as can be seen in the examples given above, of theprimary long vowels in Old Turkic: a:çığ > a:ci “pain,” sa:rığ >sa:rı, sa:ri, o:tun > o:tın “firewood,” bu:tak > pu:tax “branch,” etc.6. The preservation of the pronominal /n/ in Salarshows the absence of any close relationship between Yellowand New Uighur (and Uzbek): taşinda “except,” işinda “in,”ya:nina “near,” ilinda “in front of,” susınten “from its water,” etc.A few sentences in Salar: Anigi apasi takka yirtux vurmavamiş “His father went shooting”; Pu a’tcux yaxşi a’ttır “This is agood horse”; Pu oy minigidur “This house is mine”; Pu zanzusinigi ider-o? “Is this cup yours?” Men sinigi kuyung iter “I amyour husband”; Vular va’por “They are going”; Seler varoxtır “Youaren’t going”; Piser varaloxtır “We can’t go.”X. hadak GROUPThe Khaladj and Their LanguageThe Khaladj are a Turkic people inhabiting a region incentral Iran between the cities of Hamadan and Qom, beginningabout 75 miles southwest of the capital, Tehran. The numberof Khaladj speakers is around 18,000.Until relatively recently, Khaladj was regarded as a dialectof Azeri Turkish. As a result of research and investigations inIran in 1968, however, the German Turcologist Gerhard Doerferproved that Khaladj was a Turkic language preserving a numberof archaic features.1. One of the most important of these archaic featuresin Khaladj, which would appear to be a continuation of the oldArgu dialect, is the systematic preservation of the initial /h-/: ATha:r-, ha:rı- “to be tired” > Khaladj harkan “tired” (MK a:r- “tobe tired,” Uzbek hår-, håri- “to be tired,” New Uighur har-,Uighur, har-, Karakalpak hari-, Turkish argın “tired”), AT hark“dung” > Khal. hark (MK ark), AT hürk- “to be frightened” >Khal. hirk- (AT hürk-, Trk. ürk-), etc.2. The preservation of the /-guluk/-gülük/ suffix in OldTurkic, signifying obligation, is one of the most important archaicfeatures in Khaladj: män käl-gülük’äm “I must come,” Bona:ma yaz-guluk’ar “I must be written a letter,” var-guluk’ar “hemust come,” etc.3. The formation of the locative by the /-ça/-çä/ suffixrather than /-da/-dä/ is one of the most important features ofKhaladj: ho här-çä “that man has,” sanduk-ça “in the chest,”şa:m isti-çä “in the evening,” şa:h İsma:il zama:ni-çä “in thetimes of Shah Ismail,” etc.4. There are also a number of archaic formal featuresin Khaladj. One of these is the dative case in Old Turkic, withthe suffix /-ka/-kä/: ta:k-ka “to the mountain,” bu:zäk-kä “calf,”meydan-ka “to the square,” şa:m-ka “in the evening,” häv-kä “tohome,” etc.5. Another archaic feature in Khaladj is the retention ofthe participle suffix /-gli/-gli/ in Old Turkic in the form /-gıli/-gili:/: sat-gıli “salesman,” sävmä-gili “one who doesn’t love,” viergili“one who gives,” etc.6. Another formal feature of Khaladj is the use, as inOrkhon Turkic, of the suffix /-dan/-dän/ alongside the formationof the ablative, of the / -da/-dä/suffix: älisin-dä “from hishand,” oğli kötin-dä “after his son,” ollar-da bädtär “worse thanthem,” etc.7. Another phonetic characteristic of Khaladj is thechange of /ñ/ to /n/: Azeri Turkish ka:ñak “cream” > Khaladjka:nak, AT koñ “sheep” > Khal. kon, ko:n, AT kö:ñ- “to burn” >Khal. kien-, etc.8. One of the most important features is the systematicpreservation or gemination, as in Turkmen and Yakut, of pri-PRESENT-DAY TURKIC PEOPLES AND THEIR LANGUAGES5161 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

030–053talattekin_alt:turklergaram 29.11.2007 9:22 Uhr Seite 52mary long vowels in standard Turkish: Azeri Turkish a:ç “hungry”> Khaladj a:ç, AT a:t “name” > Khal. a:t, AT a:ş- “to exceed”> Khal. a:ş-, AT kı:z “girl” > Khal. qi:z, AT i:ş “work” > Khal. i:ş,AT ho:t “fire” > Khal. hu:ot, AT be:ş “five” > Khal. bi:eş, AT e:şik“door” > Khal. i:eşük, AT kö:ñ- “to burn” > Khal. kien-, etc.9. The second most important feature of Khaladj is thepreservation, as in Tuva, of the /d/ sound in Proto-Turkic: AzeriTurkish hadak “foot” > Khaladj hadak (Tuva adak, Yakut atax,Khakas azax, Turkish ayak), AT e:di “owner” > Khal. eydi(Orkhon idi, Uighur iyä, Turkmen eye, Azeri Turkish yiyä, YellowUighur eydi), AT kuduruk > Khal. kudruk (Old Turkic kuduruk,kudruk, MK kudruk, Tuva kuduruk, Khak. xuzurux, Yak. kuturuk,Trk. kuyruk), etc.10. Finally, Khaladj syntax reveals Persian influence,more particularly in sentences combined with /ki/.A few sentences in Khaladj: Bu här häyli karrımış, bi:hadakı o dunyaçar “This man is quite old; he has one foot in thenext world”; Hadakuy iö:z gälimi gadar uza:tı “Stretch your legaccording to your kilim!” Män şä:rkä kälän dağam “I haven’tcome to the city”; Yol havul dağ ärti “Yol iyi de€il idi”; Här näviergülükär kälitür vierür “He will bring and give whatever is necessary”;Här nä şäygäy säyä vierüm “I’ll give you whatever youwant”; Män taqi bi: zo:di: ha:yguluk dağam “I have nothing elseto say”; Häri: va:rarti ki a:ti Ha:tumarti “There was a man calledAd› Hatum”; Män särguzäştim bi: towrar ki haymaguluk dağ “Myadventure is of a kind that cannot be described.”XI. atax GROUPA. The Yakuts and Their LanguageThe Yakuts are a Turkic people inhabiting the YakutAutonomous Republic of the Russian Federation in the extremenortheast corner of the Turkic world. Small Yakut communitiescan also be found in Magadan (eastern Russia) and onSakhalin Island. According to the 1989 census, there were382,225 Yakut speakers in the former Soviet Union. This maywell have risen to 400,000 at the present day.The Yakuts refer to themselves as Saxa. This term, likethe word Yakut itself, derives from the Turkic word yaka. TheYakuts may be the descendants of the Y›r Bay›rku, whose nameappears in the Orkhon inscriptions. The Yakuts are thought tohave migrated to their present-day homeland during theMongol period. Although the Yakuts are officially Christian, theyhave not entirely forgotten their ancient shamanism. Yakut,which emerged as a written language after the Soviet revolution,has a number of dialects, which can be divided into threegroups: (1) Nam-Aldan (xatın “woman,” seri:n “cool”), (2)Kangal-Vilyuy (xotun “woman,” sörü:n “cool, coolness”), (3)Dolgan (katun “woman,” serü:n “cool, coolness”). In the nineteenthcentury, Yakut was written using a Cyrillic alphabet preparedby Russian missionaries and linguists such as Otto vonBöhtlingk and E. K. Pekarsky. In 1917, the Yakut educator andlinguist S. A. Novgorodov developed an alphabet based on theLatin alphabet; with a few modifications, this was used until1938. In 1939, it was replaced by a Cyrillic alphabet, which isstill in use. Yakut displays a number of archaic features. It formsa very important branch of the family of Turkic languages. Ofall the Turkic languages, it is the closest to Tuva, although themutual intelligibility ratio between Yakut and Tuva is zero.52LANGUAGE AND IDENTITYAround 50 percent of the Yakut vocabulary consists of Mongolborrowings. The principal characteristics of Yakut are the following:1. The primary long vowels in Common Turkic are regularlypreserved or geminated: Common Turkic a:t > a:t “name,”CT be:ş > bies “five,” CT qı:z > kı:s “girl,” CT bi:r > bi:r “one,” CTho:t > uot “fire,” CT bu:z > mu:s “ice,” CT kö: l > küöl “lake,” CTkü:ç > kü:s “strong,” etc.2. The development of the Old Turkic /a€/ group into/›a/: Old Turkic tağ “mountain” > tıa “forest,” OT bağ > bıa “vineyard,”OT sağ- > ıa- “to milk,” etc.3. The change of the Old Turkic medial or final /d/ to /t/:Old Turkic adaq “foot” > atax, OT adgır “stallion” > atı:r, OT ädgü“good” > ütüö, OT tod- “to be satiated” > tot-, etc.4. The disappearance of the initial /s/: sağ- > ıa- “tomilk,” sän > en “you,” sämiz > emis, söz > ös, säkiz > ağıs“eight,” etc.5. The change of the initial consonant /y/ to /s/: AT ya:z“spring” > sa:s, AT yo:l > suol “road,” yat- > sıt- “to go to bed,”yıl > sıl, yer > sir “place,” etc.6. The change of the initial and final /s/ to /t/: Old Turkicisin- “to grow warm” > itin-, OT isit- “to warm” > itit-, OT yastuk“pillow” > sıttık, OT ini-si “his brother” > ini-te, etc.7. The change of Old Turkic /ç/, /fl/, and /z/ at the endof a word or next to consonant to /s/: Old Turkic çäriğ “army” >seri: “war, army,” OT saç > sas, OT be:ş “five” > bies, OT qı:z“girl” > kı:s, OT yü:z “one hundred” > sü:s, etc.8. The change of the secondary /s/ consonant derivedfrom Old Turkic /ç/, /fl/, and /z/ between vowels to /h/: OldTurkic üçün > ihin “for,” OT yaşıl “green” > sahıl “fox,” OT uzun> uhun, OT üçünç > ühüs “third,” OT beşinç > behis “fifth,” Yakutkı:s “girl,” kı:ha “his daughter,” etc.9. An important morphological feature of Yakut is theabsence of the -sız/-siz suffix, as seen in the use of the wordsuox to signify absence: tıl-a suox “dumb” (i.e., “a person whois not smart”), u:-ta suox sir “waterless, dry” (i.e., “a place wherethere is no water”), etc.10. The lack of a genitive suffix is one of the most importantfeatures of Yakut: saxa tıl-a “Yakut language,” saxa tıl-ıngrammatika-ta “the grammar of the Yakut language: (the -ın inthe word tılın is the original form of the third person possessivesuffix).A few sentences in Yakut: Xaydax oloroğut? “How areyou?” Min saxalı: kıratık öydü:bün “I understand a little Yakut”;En olus türgennik sangarağın “You speak very quickly”; Bihigisarsıarda erde turabıt “We get up early in the morning”; İti oğotü:nneri ıtı:r “That child cries at night”; Olorbutta:ğar ülele:bitorduk, “Work is better than just sitting.”B. The Dolgans and the Dolgan DialectThe Dolgan dialect of Yakut is spoken by some 10,000people in the Taymur Peninsula, a long way from Yakutistan.The Dolgans are a Yakuticized Tungus tribe.The Dolgan dialect differs from Yakut in several features:1. The systematic retention of the Old Turkic initialpostvelar /q/ sound: katun “woman” = Yakut xotun, katıng“beech tree” = Yakut hatıng, kol “shoulder” = Yakut xol, kon- =Yakut xon-, etc.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 62

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Texture and Diversity:the Cultural Life of the Caribbeanby Rex Nettleford2001 Prince Claus Awards05Year published 2001Number of pages 96Number of pages by Nettleford 14Number of contributors 18Number of articles 12Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 64

65 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

Texture and Diversity:the Cultural Life of the Caribbeanby Rex NettlefordThe textured diversity of Caribbean cultural life is arguably the most significantclue to an understanding and grasp of the dynamism and energy thatcharacterises life in a region that stretches geographically from the Bahamasacross the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Haiti/Santo Domingo, Jamaica and Puerto Rico)proceeding for over a thousand miles southward along an archipelago comprisingthe Leewards and Windward Islands with Barbados a little out of line to the East,then curling round from Trinidad and Tobago to the Netherlands Antilles lyingnorth-west of Venezuela which, like Colombia, insists that it too has a Caribbeancoast. The Guyanas on the South American mainland regard themselves as‘Caribbean’ as would much of Northeast Brazil for definitively cultural reasons.For as I have said elsewhere, the Caribbean shares in the great drama of theAmericas whereby new societies are shaped, new and delicately tuned sensibilitiesare honed, and appropriate designs for social living are crafted through thecross-fertilisation of disparate elements. The process has resulted in adistinguishable and distinctive entity called ‘Caribbean’ and the process isintensely cultural. The encounter of Africa and Europe on foreign soil and they inturn with the indigenous Native Americans on their long-tenanted real estates,and then all in turn with later arrivants from Asia (India and China) and still laterfrom the Middle East (Lebanon), has resulted in a culture of texture anddiversity held together by a dynamic creativity severally described as creativechaos, stable disequilibrium or cultural pluralism. An apt description of thetypical Caribbean person, then, is that he/she is part-African, part-European,part-Asian, part-Native-American but totally Caribbean. To perceive this is tounderstand the creative diversity which is at once cause and occasion, resultand defining point of Caribbean cultural life.This is arguably what makes the Francophone Caribbean, the Ibero- (Spanishspeaking) Caribbean, the Dutch-speaking Caribbean, the British OverseasCaribbean Territories, the US Caribbean (including the Commonwealth of PuertoRico), true kindred spirits despite the differences in linguae francae andpolitical systems. For they all perceive themselves to have in common a full graspof the power of cultural action affording to their inhabitants a sense of placeand purpose. Small wonder that Martinique and Guadeloupe, Curaçao and St.Maarten, Cuba and Santo Domingo along with Haiti, Puerto Rico and the US VirginIslands, as well as the British colonies of the Cayman Islands, the British VirginIslands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands identify culturally with thenewly Independent nations – from Belize to Trinidad and Tobago. If theycelebrate their cultural affinities with the wider Caribbean they are no lessaware of the challenges posed by the complexity of the process of managingdiversity. For this demands of all who tenant the Caribbean region the capacityto build bridges not only between classes and races of people within countriesof the region, but also between the continents of the world, themselves allrepresented in the Caribbean through centuries of migration (voluntary andinvoluntary), continuing interaction via tourism, commercial transactions andprofessional contacts.The Caribbean, itself the expression of such diversity and of its survival andbeyond, has struggled for all of five centuries with mastering the management ofthe complexity of such diversity. Such have been the challenges that today it ispossible to say with a fair degree of certainty that the people of the Caribbeanhave learnt to live together rather than simply side by side. In any case thecommunications technology revolution and the tremendous improvement in travelfacilities have dictated the urgent need for people of the 21 st century to learnPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 66

to live together, to deal with the dilemma of difference in ways that will servethe enhancement of the quality of life for human beings and to ensure positivehuman development well into the third millennium.The diversity, then, is certainly a defining point of contemporary Caribbeancultural life. The cross-fertilisation of the colliding cultures in what has come tobe called by scholars the ‘creolisation process’ is marked by the integration ofdisparate elements which these cultures signify; and the process depends on thedynamics of contradictions and multivariate connections now coalescing, nowrejecting, now integrating, now separating in a continuous act (enchainment) ofchange, movement and kaleidoscopic re-contouring. Yet all of this retains aninner logic and consistency preserved in shared experience repeated over timeand in the telescope of a common vision of reality even with theacknowledgement of a shattered existence and chaotic creativity – in short,much that signifies the essence of an intertextual multi-culturalism.Many believe that all this is evident in Carnival, pre-Lenten in origin and arguablythe most definitive of festival arts nurtured throughout Plantation America –from Havana and Port-au-Prince through Port of Spain to Rio de Janeiro withBahia, all of the Eastern Caribbean and New Orleans thrown in between. It is seenby the Cuban scholar Antonio Benitez-Rojo as the prime socio-cultural practicethat ‘best expresses the strategies that the people of the Caribbean have forspeaking at once of themselves and their relation with the world, with history,with tradition, with nature, with God’. Here, then, is the basis for an appropriatesense of the Caribbean ‘self’, an appropriate sense of a wider world to whichthat Caribbean persona (individually and collectively) must relate and, byextension, an appropriate sense of ‘knowing’.It is the mind, which is here at work. By its very nature, the mind cultivates thespace(s) that remain inviolate – beyond the reach of oppression and oppressorwhether he be slave master, colonial crown official or native successor rulerturned-tin-czar.That very mind also constructs from the intellect and theimagination bastions of discrete identity(ies) as well as quarries of invaluable rawmaterial that can be used to build the bridges across cultural boundaries asthey can, in moments of irrational self-assertion, close out something called ‘theOther’ and implodes into the sort of racism, and racial discrimination, xenophobiaand myriad related obscenities which caused the United Nations to mount a worldconference (albeit controversial as it turned out) on the topic in September2001 in Durban, South Africa.Benitez-Rojo puts the case graphically: ‘I start from the belief that‘Caribbeaness’ is a system full of noise and opacity, a non-linear system, anunpredictable system – in short a chaotic system beyond the total reach of anyspecific kind of knowledge or interpretation of the world’. He here joins myselfand others in the fiercely held view that perspectives of human thought dividedinto pre-modern, modern and post-modern are meaningless in coming to termswith Caribbean cultural life since all three ordered states of existence co-existin dynamic interplay in the definition of Caribbean self and society. The productsof the creative imagination, from language and religion to the artisticmanifestations in the performing and visual arts, all betray the awesomecomplexity of Caribbean life and cultural being.That complexity is more than what the binary syndrome of Europe suggests. Inthe Caribbean ‘great tradition’ (so-called) stands side by side and interacts with‘little tradition’. A folksong, a contemporary reggae tune or calypso can be‘classical’, ‘contemporary/modern’ and ‘ethnic’ all at the same time. Bob Marley’s‘Redemption Songs’, Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, Peter Tosh’s ‘Jah Is MyKeeper’, the Mighty Sparrow’s ‘Jean and Dinah’ or ‘Congo Man’, Lord Kitchener’s‘Sugar Boom Boom’, Black Stalin’s ‘Caribbean Unity’ and David Rudder’s ‘High Mass’are classics in their genres.67 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

The ‘creole languages’ of the Caribbean are considered languages in their ownright. This goes for Jamaican Talk which boasts a dictionary published byCambridge University Press, as well as for Papiamento, which is strong enough tobe used for instruction in schools in Curaçao, Kweyol, which is the language usedfor news broadcasts in territories where the French once settled and still havecultural influence and which has brought rhythmic substance to much of thepoetry of St. Lucian Derek Walcott and Martinican Aime Cesaire, and Sranan Tonga,which might well have given kinetic power to the stanzas of Suriname’s MartinDobru. Nicolas Guillen’s poetry sings with the voice of Cuban Spanish, notCastilian. And the Antillean lilt of mountainous isles washed by the ebb and flow ofCaribbean sea-water, now asleep with calm, now aloud in stormy turbulence,comes through in the lyrics of the calypsonian, the rhyming quattrians offolklorist and poet Louise Bennett or in the story-telling humour of a PaulKeens-Douglas. These languages, described as the vehicles of resistance, ritual,oral history and humour, hold their own on perfectly sound linguistic grounds,orthographical difficulties not-withstanding. And they serve their myriadpurposes alongside Standard English, Académie Française French, metropolitanSpanish, and Standard Dutch, the imperial and still considered ‘legitimate’ meansof formal/civilised communication in a Caribbean which is arguably the longestcolonised region on Planet Earth, that is, ever since Cristobal Colon discoveredthat he was discovered by Native Americans of the Caribbean in 1492.As with language, so with religion. Caribbean cultural life is an expression of thebiblical reminder that in God’s House there are many mansions. It is possible fora Caribbean citizen to be baptised a Roman Catholic, an Anglican, a Methodist ora Presbyterian and still find grace and comfort in santeria, vodun, pocomania/zionrevivalism, kumina, shango, or any other Caribbean native-born and native-bredreligious expression in ways the ‘alien creeds’ cannot quite muster. Hinduism,Islam, Orisha worship and New Age spiritualism are all legitimate religions today inwhat was once an outpost of Christendom. And it is possible for an [East] Indianwith indentured labour antecedents to be born into a Hindu family, educatedin a Christian (Presbyterian or Roman Catholic) school and later get married toa Muslim. Such cultural ‘confusion’ does not necessarily result in schizophrenia.Frequently it serves as a source for creative living. Herein lies much of thematter of Caribbean cultural life – the ‘noise and opacity’, the ‘unpredictable…chaotic system’ of Benitez-Rojo’s carnival.Such dialectical reality is within the reach of most ordinary beings in the regionand accounts for the Caribbean’s textured diversity. So the left-centre-rightcontinuum of Western political perception is likely to be too linear for theCaribbean person’s dynamic multi-layered existence. It is possible for him/herto be conservative on one set of issues, radical and leftist on another andirritatingly centrist on yet another, causing problems for many a ‘solution’ andsometimes delaying action in the name of caution, if not recklessness. Thephenomenon may well be deeply culturally determined by the historical andexistential experience of a life of contradictions, paradoxes and dialecticalrelationships and one lived for centuries by formal rules of engagement not ofone’s making. The magical also co-exists with the scientific. Small wonder that tomany Caribbean people ‘science’ means ‘higher science’ rooted in the notion ofthe supernatural as much as in empirical experience in the practice of traditionalmedicine based on the dialogue with Nature’s plants, Nature’s springs and thefertile soil. The metaphysical stands tall with the epistemological indeed, and mythsto live by battle with factual history to eke out of lived reality meaning and thevalidity of existence. Such, indeed, is the texture of Caribbean cultural life.The chaos does not mean chronic disorder though cynics will be quick to find in itreason for displays of political mismanagement, evidence of licence and lawlessnessunder the guise of freedom and human rights and the incidence of coups(military and ‘democratic’ electoral) in Independence. Rather, there are regulativeprinciples which underlie all this turbulence and fragile stability. They, happily,Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 68

give cause for repetition and ‘ritual’ evident in Caribbean arts and other culturalexpressions. These in turn give to the peoples of the region a sense of placeeven while they operate on the margin and find cause to question the principles.It is such paradox that gets encapsulated in the festival arts of the Caribbeanof which the pre-Lenten carnival is only one – albeit an iconic and dominant onein contemporary Caribbean life. It is used for conventional means of release,recreation and celebration alongside the attraction for tourists whose dollar(or euro) is vital to Caribbean economic survival in these globalised times. TheCaribbean Diaspora is itself a preserver of the phenomenon and so Brooklyn (NewYork), Boston and Miami, Toronto, (Canada) and Notting Hill (London) have becomecentres of the Caribbean Carnival in the diasporic West Indian battle for spaceand the preservation of identity among migrants residing in hostile host communitieswhich are struggling to save themselves from ‘contaminants’ deemed alien totheir hallowed homogenous selves.Back in the Caribbean other festival arts exist as part of that same process ofself-discovery and the creation of a unifying space that bridges the gaps withina society produced by centuries of differentiation based on place of origin,race, skin colour, class, gender and the more modern differentials of politicalaffiliation and sexual orientation. So there is the more recent Crop Over festivalart drawing on the historical experience of sugar-cane slavery in Barbados whichhas revived and developed a time-worn celebration into a major contemporarycalendar event of national observance. Hosay serves to bring into the loop ofCaribbean cultural life the [East] Indians who entered Caribbean society afterthe abolition of slavery as indentured labourers but fully equipped with acultural memory of Islam and Hinduism. The cross-fertilisation process naturallycontinued and the paradoxes of new encounters increased the heightening anddeepening of the enriched mixture, even while tension plagued social and politicalrelations. Hosay is one result of such contradictory omens threateninglydisintegrative but hopefully integrative. So the Afro-West Indians often do thedrumming, while the [East] Indians do the dancing in this festival art. And the[East] Indian ‘spirit’ in Jamaican pocomania speaks to the early integration ofAsian indentured labour into ex-slave syncretised religious rituals, themselvesproducts of cross-fertilisation.There are, of course, other festival arts equivalent to the pre-Lenten carnivaland which have ancestral pedigree rooted in the clash/encounter of Europe andAfrica on foreign soil in the Americas. It is called Masquerade in the LeewardIslands. It has long existed in Jamaica, Belize and the Bahamas under the name ofJonkonnu and in Bermuda as Gombay. The Dia de Reyes of Cuba which has been thetarget of anthropological study by Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, the Rara of Haiti andother minor complexes of collective cultural assertion bear testimony to thesuccess and tenacity of the process and the products.They all represent the essence of Caribbean cultural life since they are, asRoberto Gonzalez-Echevarria has said of Cuban artistic manifestations: ‘Theindiscriminate fusion of European, American classical and popular elements, as wellas of instruments of the most varied origins…produce a new music, a newconglomerate in which there need be no synthesis. The heterogeneous…is also anabandonment of the notions of origins, to which none of the sundry elementsneed remain faithful, instead it is in itself an origin, a new beginning – it isalready the future contained in the beginning’.So, according to Edouard Glissant, the Martinican writer, the Caribbean has nomyth of origin, only a myth of relations – relations of this, that and the otherand all in one grand pepper pot, transforming the Caribbean cultural persona intothe part-African, part-European, part-Asian, part-Native American, but totallyCaribbean phenomenon already cited. The Native American component remainsdespite a history of ethnocide affecting Caribs and Tainos. The fact of cultural69 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

survival among these indigenous Caribbean people give cause for annualcelebration of a Carib Week in Dominica or in the tenacious hold to the name‘Indios’ by inhabitants of the Dominican Republic with drips of non-Caucasianblood in their veins. But the Afro-Carib population of Belize hold on to theirculturally miscegenated ‘being’ in the Garifuna festivals and consciouslypreserved retentions which have gained enormous currency since the 1960’s inthat Caribbean mainland country.To civilisations or cultural aggregations wedded to the notion of homogeneity asthe organising principle of society and the determinant of sense and sensibility,such a multifaceted, multi-layered, pluralistic profile of consciousness andreality is bound to appear complicated rather than merely complex, threatening‘mongrelisation’ of the thoroughbred as an Anglo-Saxon member of Parliamentrecently feared Britain would suffer with the continuing immigration of hordes ofPakistanis, Indians, Africans and West Indians into the United Kingdom.All of Europe seemingly fears this threat with overt or covert anxiety. Pakistanisin northernmost fjords of Norway, Turks in the urban settings of Denmark andSweden or in the factories of Germany and Arabs and West Africans in Paris are allgiving a new ethnographic profile to Western European countries which are becoming‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘multicultural’ and challenging individual countries to a reevaluationof values and ideas of the true basis of power (political and economic)and the structure of governance and the nature of civil society within theirborders. The borderlessness of latter-day globalisation at once seems amenablemore to computerised fiscal transactions and less to organic human mixing. Theold globalisation (under colonialism) at least maintained the class and ethnicdifferences between Caucasian/Christian overlordship and subjugated Negroid/heathen and Asian/Hindu and Muslim labour. Things now seem different, admittedly,in the face of widespread biological miscegenation and the onset of widespreadreligious ecumenism added to which is the universal appeal for a new ‘spirituality’.In the Caribbean such ‘new-found’ problems of Western Europe are age-oldfeatures of the region’s history and development. And the resolution of theinherent conflict continues to be realised through the shaping of cultural lifewith ‘culture’ loosely defined as the expressions that come from the vigorousmix of diverse elements and manifested through language, religion, kinshippatterns, artistic manifestation and collective maxims of prudence serving asphilosophy underpinning politics and economic life.Again, as I have said elsewhere, the entire world is gone ‘creole’, in the Caribbeansense of forging from disparate elements of a ‘village-world’ new expressionschallenging all to a new cosmology. The truth is, the futures of generations ofpeople in the Caribbean were always shaped by the interdependence of thosewho found themselves in encounters of differing kinds. The slave master was highlydependent on the slave and vice versa. In fact the emancipation of the slaveswas the liberation of both masters and slaves since to quote myself, ‘the jailersand the jailed are after all both in jail’. Such is the paradox that has sustainedCaribbean cultural life which continues to manifest contradictory relationships,producing agony but also new life.West Indian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott has grasped the true nature of thephenomenon in his essay ‘The Muse of History’ as follows: ‘The tribe in bondagelearned to fortify itself by the cunning assimilation of the religion of the OldWorld. What seemed to be surrender was redemption. What seemed the loss oftradition was its renewal. What seemed the death of faith was its rebirth.’To achieve this, Caribbean society has long retreated to unassailable areas ofspecificity with rich results in religious expressions and the creative arts (visualand performing) as well as in home-spun philosophy to be found in the region’soral literature (proverbs, storytelling or the ‘contes’ tradition) which housesPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 70

the collective wisdom of the ordinary people. It is as though the mass of thepopulation in the Caribbean possesses an intuitive grasp of the fundamentaltruth that a world which ignores the fact of plurality, of texture in the humanmakeup, of the multi-faceted nature of all living beings and the systems andstructures they create for their survival, is not a world fit for human habitation.What, then, is the lesson to be learnt from Caribbean cultural life with itsparadoxes, problem conditions and possibilities? It certainly shows that theshifting paradigms, determining the new international order under globalization,the textured sense and sensibility of third millennium youth bombarded withmyriad images of self and society via the media or through personal contact withpersons of different backgrounds, races and cultural origins, are all challengesto humankind’s creative diversity which must be managed with sensitivity anddaring. For the underlying regulative principles that make all of humanity themembers of one human family, despite the diversity, must also be acknowledgedand recognised. The Caribbean remains a good enough example of such acknowledgementand recognition of the ‘e-pluribus-unum’ concept in the shaping ofcivil society – the basis of 21 st century democratic governance.Such are the contradictions in the architectural designs and construction workthat attend both the building of bridges across continents in the interest ofhuman development, and the imperative of creative management of the complexitiesresulting. The investment in the human resource which is here implied demandsno less of the products of the exercise of the collective creative imagination.Carnival, inter alia, as an iconic element in Caribbean cultural life is naturally partof the journey ahead, rather than the minstrel-like self indulgence that too manyare likely to mistake it to be.For it is among these would-be ‘minstrels’ – the ordinary people from below –that is to be found the crucible in which Caribbean cultural life is forged. Andthis is known to all true Caribbean artists – popular performing, literate literary,and visual arts exponents (whether intuitive or academy-trained). From Sparrow,Black Stalin and Kitchener through Bob Marley and Peter Tosh to George Lamming,Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott the word is long out that the extraordinarinessof Caribbean cultural life is the result of the ordinary lives lived by the massof the Caribbean people who may have been severed from ancestral hearths andsuffered the indignity of denigration and dehumanisation but have managed tosurvive and journey beyond survival to a rich, textured, diverse germ of a civilisationthat can be justifiably labelled ‘Caribbean’.71 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

1. Brathwaite, Kamau: Contradictory Omens: CulturalDiversity and Integration in the Caribbean, Savacou,Mona, Kingston, 19852. Benitez-Rojo, Antonio: ‘The Polyrhythmic Paradigm: TheCaribbean and the Post-Modern Era’, in: LawrenceHyatt, Vera and Rex Nettleford (eds.): Race, Discourseand the Origin of the Americas – A New World View,Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1995,chapter 123. Glissant, Edouard: ‘Creolization in the Making of theAmericas’ in: op. cit., chapter 134. Gonzales-Echevarria, Roberto: Alejio Carpentier: ThePilgrim at Home, Cornell University Press, New York, 19775. Hill, Errol: The Trinidad Carnival – Mandate for a NationalTheatre, University of Texas Press, 19726. Lamming, George: Coming Coming Home: ConversationsII, House of Nehesi Publishers, St. Maarten, 19957. Liverpool, Hollis: Rituals of Power and Rebellion: TheCarnival Tradition in Trinidad and Tobago 1763-1962,Hollis Liverpool (Research Associates School TimesPublications), 20018. Nettleford, Rex: ‘Caribbean Creative Diversity – theDefining Point of the Region’s History’, lecturedelivered to Caribbean Diaspora Conference, Universityof South Bank, London, August 31, 20019. Nunley, John W & Judith Bettelheim: Caribbean FestivalArts: Each and Every Bit of Difference, University ofWashington Press, 198810. Ortiz, Fernando: La Antigua fiesta afrocubana del diade Reyes, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Havana,196011. Walcott, Derek: ‘The Muse of History – An Essay’, in:Coombs, Orde (ed.): Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods inthe Caribbean, Doubleday Anchor, New York, 1974Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 72

73 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

African Culture andInter-Cultural DialogueInstituto de Historiade Nicaragua y CentroamérA Miracle to be RemembereSpeech by Kwasi WireduOn the occasion of the 1997 Prince Claus AwardsBy Sergio RamirezPrince Claus Awards Book 200906Number of pages 96Number of pages by Wiredu 11Number of contributors 16Number of articles 14Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 74

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African Culture andInter-Cultural Dialogueby Kwasi WireduLet me begin with a statement of gratitude. I regard the invitation to me togive this talk as in itself a major demonstration of faith in intercultural discourse.The honour I have in making this presentation is an honour that belongs also toAfrican philosophy and to Africa at large. I wish therefore to express my thanksto the Prince Claus Fund on behalf of myself and also of Africa.Philosophers are apt to try, at the start of a discussion, to explain what it isthat they are talking about. I cannot resist this occupational propensity. I amto talk about African philosophy and intercultural dialogue. Neither term is, inspite of appearances, easy to define. As a matter of fact, the question ‘What isAfrican philosophy?’ is one that has absorbed a great part -- too great a part,according to some outsiders as well even as some insiders -- of the energies ofcontemporary African philosophers. I am all the more motivated to address thisquestion as its importance in contemporary African philosophy is connected withhistorical circumstances of an intercultural character. The present condition ofAfrica is due in many respects to the historical adversity of colonialism. Afterindependence there was a movement for self-rediscovery that, starting in WestAfrica in the sixties, had swept through the sub-Saharan regions of thecontinent (except, of course South Africa) by the seventies. This movementmanifested itself in various spheres of African life, cultural, political andliterary. In philosophy it took the form of a quest for self-definition.This quest was also a creative quest, for it was essentially an effort to initiatethe modern discipline of African philosophy, as far as sub-Saharan is concerned.The need for this creativity was due to the fact that during the colonial period,African philosophy, as an academic discipline practised preponderantly byAfricans, was nonexistent. There were, indeed, earlier in this century some worksof philosophy notably J. B. Danquah’s ‘Akan Doctrine of God’ 1 and Father Tempel’s‘Bantu Philosophy’, 1969 (1959), first published as ‘La Philosophie Bantoue’ inElizabethville, Belgian Congo, in 1945. In the previous century, there had alsobeen works by people like Edward Blyden, Africanus Horton and Casely Hayfordwhich, though political and cultural in intent, had considerable philosophicaldimensions. But these, obviously, did not occur in or define the framework of anacademic discipline. It has thus been only since independence that a large groupof Africans who are professional philosophers in various parts of Africa and theworld have begun to profess a subject known as African philosophy in academia.It quickly began to strike many Africans that to be an African and a philosopherdid not necessarily guarantee that your philosophical productions, if any, wouldconstitute an African philosophy.But why not? The reason seemed simple enough, but actually shrouded an ambiguity.For some participants in the discussion the reason was that the philosophy ofa people must have its basis in their own culture. In the way of an illustration ofthis standpoint, consider an African who, having studied in Europe or the US, hasbecome a specialist in phenomenology or, say, analytic philosophy. Suppose hewrites a brilliant treatise on phenomenology or analytic philosophy with absolutelynothing to distinguish it from the work of a European phenom enologist exceptperhaps an African-sounding name on the title page. What rational warrant wouldthere be to call such a work a contribution to African philosophy? The answerwas: ‘None!’ Plausible as it sounds, further thought may easily suggest a contraryhypothesis. Imagine, for example, that, for some reason having no connectionwith African culture, the overwhelming majority of Africans who are philosophersin Africa and abroad think and write exactly in the same phenomenological mannerand, furthermore, that this habit is sustained over many generations. Then, mostPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 76

certainly, that body of writing, that tradition of thought, would be just whatmodern African philosophy is. In the face of this thought it must become clearthat the reason why our original African phenomenologist could not rationally beconsidered a contributor to African philosophy is because he was too lonely. Itis for the same reason that one swallow does not make a summer, but multitudesof them in appropriate formations do. However, unlike swallows, the activities ofhuman beings and the intellectual seasons they foreshadow or precipitate aresusceptible of normative evaluations. And if we ask whether it would be toAfrica’s intellectual good health, at this historical juncture, to be overtaken inthis way by European phenomenology or Anglo-American analytic philosophy, theanswer must be ‘no’ for the following reason. Because the philosophicalpossessions and potentials of African cultures received little attention incolonial times, it is reasonable to suspect that philosophies that have emergedin the context of the concerns and perhaps conceits of other cultures may beoblivious to some vital imperatives of life in Africa or some philosophicalpromptings of her cultures.It must still be granted, in the abstract, that even after scrutiny through thelenses of an African culture, phenomenology or analytic philosophy may still takea total hold of the African mind. But in that case the phenomenon will haveoccurred because of rational reflection cognisant of Africa rather than previouscolonisation. It just may be that phenomenology is universally the right mode ofphilosophical thinking and that anyone who considers it rationally must come tothat conclusion. In concrete reality, however, such an outcome is unlikely.Philosophy, as it now exists in various continents, cultures and countries, isdemonstrably tied in some respects to the particularities of their languages andsocial formations. It stands to reason, therefore, to expect that if Africanstake adequate cognisance of their own languages and cultures in theirphilosophical meditations, they might come up with philosophical options that arein some respects different from those, for example, of the Western cultureswithin which ways of philosophical thought such as phenomenology and analyticphilosophy have their home. Such options, as I will suggest, do in fact exist.The taking account of one’s cultural self to which reference has been made issomething that contemporary African philosophers may find that they need tomake a conscious effort to do because if you receive your philosophical trainingexclusively in a foreign language, as has been the case with all of them (i.e. us),it tends to become your most natural language for philosophical reflection. Itseems fair to say that any African unwilling to do such self-reference, or incapableor unappreciative of it, betrays what might be called a colonial mentality. Asshould be apparent, this process of conceptual self-examination is not one thatmust necessarily lead to the rejection of ideas coming from former colonisers.It just ensures that our philosophical persuasions are not simply owing to acolonial or neo-colonial circumstance. This thought process may be calledintellectual or, more specifically, conceptual decolonisation. It follows that ifAfricans were to betake themselves to, say, the phenomenological way ofphilosophising without a moment’s thought about how that may square up withthe conceptual framework embedded in their own languages and cultures, theywould not be doing African philosophy in the right way. Or to put it more positively,the thought is that good African philosophy must have a basis in African culture.And this is true not only for African culture, but, mutatis mutandis, for anyculture whatever.Note, however, that the notion of having a basis in a culture is a minimal conceptwhich can only mean something like ‘having been viewed or reviewed in the lightof the conceptual framework discernible in the language and usages of a givenculture.’ Since both the truth and falsity of a given proposition might be compatiblewith this test, it is clear that the proposed condition does not determinethe truth or falsity of a philosophical thesis. In fact the viewing or reviewingin question may actually lead to the reformation of the conceptual framework77 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

of a sound tradition of contemporary African philosophy. This, I repeat, is only anecessary condition for a sound African philosophy. No one, unfortunately, cangive the sufficient conditions of good philosophising in the African or any othertradition.But the fact, noted already, that intellectual decolonisation does notnecessarily mean the rejection of Western conceptions suggests that a soundAfrican philosophy can expect to avail itself of possible insights from theWestern philosophical tradition, leading to a synthesis with insights fromindigenous sources. I mention the Western tradition since the present reflectioninvolves decolonisation. But, ideally, such a programme of synthesis must, inprinciple, be based on an attitude of respectful curiosity about all culturaltraditions. The idea of such a synthesis already presupposes not only thepossibility but also the desirability of intercultural discourse. Which brings us tothe meaning of intercultural dialogue. The intercultural part presents nodifficulty. It just means that, in the literal sense, one is envisaging a kind ofdiscourse involving at least two different cultures. But subtle problems arisewith respect to the concept of dialogue. We start with the fact that not everydiscourse between two parties constitutes a dialogue in any but the most trivialsense. Not only can real dialogue elude discussants who talk at cross purposes,but it can also be out of reach to parties who both argue to the point but canforesee no possibility of a change of position as a result of the exchange. Muchpolitical and religious and, perhaps, some philosophical exchanges are of this kind.The participants regard themselves as infallible in all but explicit declaration.Sometimes the illusion of infallibility is operative at only one end of the debate.But that is enough to effectively frustrate dialogue.It is necessary to be clear about the moral, or more strictly, immoralimplications of such an approach to inter-person or inter-group discussion. Onewho enters a debate or discussion ipso facto demonstrates a desire topersuade the other party. Not to acknowledge the possibility that one mightoneself become the persuaded is to display in one’s conduct a highlyobjectionable asymmetry. It is an unethical asymmetry in that it obviously floutsthe categorical imperative. No respect, or an insufficient degree of it, isaccorded the other as a person, as a possible source of rational persuasion. Itmakes no difference whether the discussion is about a policy of action or a pointof theory or whether it is interpersonal or intercultural; this point holds,regardless, and implies that genuine dialogue entails the recognition of a certainmoral equality of all concerned. In this sense dialogue presupposes respect for‘the other’. It is this respect that some disputants lack either in their heads orin their hearts.Interestingly, the problem in African philosophy regarding ‘dialogue’ with theintellectual legacy of colonialism has often been that there is too much ratherthan too little respect for ‘the other’. And this is what was meant, in moralterms, by our earlier allusion to the excessive malleability of the colonised mind.If the popular adage that too much of everything is bad is true or even probable,then that alone supports a program of intellectual decolonisation. This is not anationalistic enterprise, for a nationalistic reaction is apt to swing to the otherextreme, draining the mind of the respect necessary for dialogue. In Africanphilosophy one level of thought is a sort of intercultural dialogue that goes onbetween two different cultural sectors of the African consciousness. Colonialeducation and Christian evangelisation -- substitute ‘Islamisation’ for ‘Christianevangelisation’ in the appropriate regions of Africa -- have ensured that thereis a substantial involuntary component in African culture. As yet this componentcoexists with the indigenous one in a confused amalgam crying for rationalisation.I have studied some aspects of this situation as regards ethical theory andpractice in ‘Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective’ 3 and in‘Morality and Religion in Akan Thought’ in ‘African American Humanism: AnAnthology’ 4 .79 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

Philosophy at least must try to introduce some coherence into this admixture ofcultural elements at the theoretical level through a critique in the spirit of theprogramme of synthesis. African philosophy has, in any case, to be comparative,because in colonial times much of the vaguely philosophical body of literaturerelating to Africa was written not by philosophers but rather by anthropologistsand religionists who formulated their accounts of African thought in terms ofthe intellectual categories of their own culture without a prior investigation oftheir conceptual appropriateness. No opprobrium is intended. Conceptualspeculation was neither their motivation nor occupation. Nor was intellectualdialogue among their priorities. Even in those rare cases when somebody likeFather Tempels undertook a serious exposition of an African system ofphilosophical thought, the motive was quite patronising. Tempels had committedwhat in his own circles was the revolutionary heresy of supposing in print that anAfrican people, the Bantu, in their traditional condition had a coherentphilosophy (though a false one, since it was pagan). 5 But his reason forrecommending a careful study of that philosophy was so that ‘these primitives’might the more easily be civilised, i.e., Christianised. Farthest from his mind wasanything like dialogue as a process of discourse in which there was any possibilityof his being proved wrong.African philosophy in our time, however, in seeking to evaluate those earlieraccounts of African thought, has to proceed in the spirit of dialogue, not onlybecause that is the morally right way to interact with others intellectually, butalso because the discourse is, at least in part, self-reflexive in the manneralready explained. That evaluation has to be with respect not only to thepropositional import of the accounts in question but also to the conceptualframework within which they were formulated. For illustrative purposes itsuffices to take but a few instances: Africans are held to entertain a world viewin which spirits and spiritual forces play a very prominent role and in which thereligious outlook predominates. The religion involved revolves round theancestors, whose commandments constitute the basis of African morality, and agreat host of minor gods and other spiritual beings, whose activities impingeupon the projects and daily life of mortals inspiring worship but also frequentlyfear and trembling. Mortals themselves are supposed to be conceived ascombinations of a material body and multiple souls, the latter ensuring for all animmortal afterlife in a supernatural world of the dead. According to this type ofaccount, this world of ours is understood by Africans to have been created outof nothing by an almighty God but the objects of their religious devotion are theancestors and the assortment of spirits whose interventions in daily life arepalpable and constant.Categories are highly fundamental concepts in terms of which wide ranges ofitems of thought and experience are conceptualised. What is called a conceptualframework is an interconnection of such concepts. Discernible in the genericaccount summarized in the last paragraph is a conceptual framework featuringcategories familiar in many Western systems of thought. We find the notions ofthe material, the spiritual, the supernatural and the religious prominentlydeployed. These are wide-ranging enough to be called categories. Less widerangingbut no less important, particularly in the context of the propositionalmessage, are the concepts of God, gods, creation, spirits, souls, ancestors,morality and immortality. It may surprise a Western observer to be told that (inmy opinion, at any rate) hardly any of the categories (i.e., the first group ofconcepts) assembled here fits unproblematically any African thought items knownto me. Let me explain, before going on, that because the conceptual claims tobe made in what follows require a level of linguistic understanding to which Icannot pretend in regard to any African language than my own, which is Akan, thelanguage of the Akans of Ghana, I will base my considerations on that specificlanguage. On the basis of available information, it seems to me probable that theconsiderations are valid for a great number of African peoples, but I see noPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 80

need to generalise beyond the bounds of personal confidence.What, then, are the reasons for the inapplicability of those categories? Take,first, the category of the spiritual. Informative definitions of this notion aredifficult to come by in Western philosophy. The spiritual seems to be simply thatwhich is non-extended. Not to protest so negative a definition too much, wesimply observe that in the Akan language the concept of existence is locative,and because of this, no such category of existents as that of the unextendedis admissible. Unless the notion of the material is defined otherwise than innecessary contrast with the spiritual, that too will have to go. Consider, next,the concept of the supernatural. If the spiritual has no leg to stand on, thesupernatural can hardly stand either. The Akan ontology, if you view it from insidethe Akan language, seems to dispense with sharp dualisms. Whatever existsbelongs to one framework of existence starting from the top with the supremebeing, the architect of the world order, down to the most modest item in thefurniture of the universe. Everything happens according to law, but some laws ofthe cosmic order are more familiar in ordinary life than others, so that thenotion of a miracle as that which contravenes any such law is unintelligible.The ancestors, on this showing, cannot be said to live in a supernatural world,nor can they, or, for that matter, the class of beings often called lesser gods,be described as spiritual. The ancestors, who, in fact, are supposed to liverather close to the living and are held to be in constant touch with them, arevenerated, but simply in the sense of being accorded a higher degree of therespect that is considered to be due to elders. If worship means more, theconcept is inapplicable to the attitude of Akan mortals to their ancestors.Indeed, as Abraham observes in his ‘The Mind of Africa’ 6 , ‘worship is a conceptthat had no place in Akan thought’. Nor, therefore, is the notion of worship anymore appropriate in relation to the ‘spirits’ or ‘lesser gods’. These are beingsthat are supposed to be capable of helping people in various ways but to whomhomage is paid strictly in proportion to their perceived efficiency in deliveringbenefits. Consistent failure attracts to them nothing but contempt, culminatingin the withdrawal of attention, a state of affairs which is known to be capable ofleading to the demise of such ‘spirits’; from which it can be inferred that these“spirits” are not all that spiritual or godly. Moreover, such utilitarian attitudehardly invites a religious description. Actually, the plural word ‘spirits’, even inthe English language, refers to quasi-material entities, by which I mean entitiesthat are material in imagery but less restrictively governed by the ordinary lawsof motion than bodies such as our own. The remarkable difference here betweenEnglish and Akan is that in the former it seems intelligible, at least in a preliminaryway, to talk of material, quasi-material and immaterial (spiritual) entities,whereas in Akan only the first two can be spoken of with any show of sense.In what sense, then, does the concept of religion apply to any aspect of Akanlife and thought? It does so only in the rather minimal sense that the Akans havean unconditional reverence for the supreme being and a sense of total trust inand dependence upon him. No ideas of worship, and, consequently, no religiousinstitutions are associated with this attitude to the supreme being, who, by theway, is conceived of as a divine architect rather than a creator ex nihilo.Obviously, the Akans did not think that there was any rationale for the worshipof a being supposed to be perfect. Given all this, it should come as no surprisethat neither the commandments of God nor of any spirit were considered thebasis of morality in Akan thought. That God does not like evil is one of thecommonest sayings in Akan life. But the Akans considered evil to be evil becauseit was thought to disrupt and injure the harmonious pursuit of human interests insociety; which is why God was believed to dislike it in the first place. To defineevil or its opposite in terms of the commands of God or any being, for thatmatter, would mean putting the cart before the horse, as Plato’s Socratespointed out long ago in another tradition. As for the ancestors, whatever partthey are supposed to have in the enforcement of morals is simply a contribution81 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

to the promotion of good conduct defined on pre-mortem criteria.These last four paragraphs merely delineate some conceptual options; they donot demonstrate them. They constitute only a brief summary of the critique ofthe sort of colonial and colonial-inspired accounts of African thoughtsummarised even more briefly above. In neither case is anything like completenessapproached. 7 Despite this brevity, there is enough here to support twoobservations. First, counterposing my account to the other is already an act ofintercultural dialogue, though it is an intercultural dialogue in one head.Secondly, in so far as the account calls attention to a number of categorial anddoctrinal options alternative to the ones frequently met with in Westernthought, it is an invitation to dialogue to all Western observers given toabstract reflection on such issues. Exposure to alternative categories ofthought always has mind-broadening possibilities. Even if the experience shouldlead, in the final analysis, to the reaffirmation of one’s old conceptualframework, one cannot then be accused of living the unexamined life.Intercultural dialogue can be initiated in all manner of ways. But contemporaryAfrican philosophy, by virtue of its historical circumstances, seems to inviteintercultural dialogue with the Western world by much of its intrinsic concerns inour time. There is today evidence of a growing interest in African philosophy inthe Western world. But it is not always clear whether this interest goes beyondmere exotic curiosity. The gesture of the Prince Claus Fund responsible for mypresence here certainly suggests that it does, at least here. I would like toconclude with some remarks on the larger implications of intercultural dialogue inphilosophy. As I have argued, any dialogue implies the recognition, on all hands,that the truth may turn out to lie on any one side rather than the other. In theintercultural context this means that discussants acknowledge the possibility ofcommon canons of philosophical evaluation. They cannot therefore be relativists.But, beyond this last consideration, it follows that the parties to the dialoguemust foresee the possibility of the eventual evening out of the differencesbetween the philosophies that are, as of now, resident in the different culturesof the world. It is for this reason that I subjoined a temporal qualification tothe requirement that a sound African philosophy must have a basis in Africanculture. Obviously, the possibility we have lately been considering implies thatthe time might come when the cultural origins of philosophers will not evenloosely determine the character and content of their views. Such a prospectmust be very far indeed into the future. But philosophers are people who arenot afraid to look that far into the future. In any case, we can reflect that ifand when that happens, it will facilitate understanding among all the members ofour species. Furthermore, any small gains in that direction are gains in interhumanunderstanding. They would be gains in which the Prince Claus Fund can claimsome part.Thank you.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 82

1 London: Frank Cass & Co., 1968 (1944)2 Regarding the Ethiopian case Prof. Sumner of theUniversity of Addis Ababa has published a multi-volumework on this tradition. More recently he has publisheda book on ‘Classical Ethiopian Philosophy’, Los Angeles:Adey Pub. Co., 1994, which is convenient and easilyaccessible3 Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, chap. 6:‘Custom and Morality: A Comparative Analysis of SomeAfrican and Western Conceptions of Morals’4 Edited by Norm Allen Jr., New York: Prometheus Books,19915 Tempels, ‘Bantu Philosophy’, Paris: Presence Africain,1959, chap. 16 Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 527 For more detail, though still not completeness, seeKwasi Wiredu, ‘Cultural Universals and Particulars: AnAfrican Perspective’, chaps. 5-983 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

Critical Humanismin a Multicultural WorldSpeech by Carlos FuentesOn the occasion of the 1998 Prince Claus Awards07Number of pages 112Number of pages by Fuentes 9Number of contributors 16Number of articles 17Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 84

85 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

Critical Humanismin a Multicultural Worldby Carlos FuentesYour Majesty,Your Royal Highness,Your Excellencies,Ladies and Gentlemen,It is a very high honour indeed for me to address you today, as the keynotespeaker at this ceremony marking the announcement of the 1998 Prince ClausAwards. I come to you as a citizen of Mexico, a Latin American and a writer in theSpanish language. The greatest Spanish author, Miguel de Cervantes, is also thegreatest literary descendant of the Dutch thinker who shaped, throughCervantes, the literature that we write in Latin America today: Erasmus ofRotterdam, with his “Praise of Folly” and his conviction that, in a humanisticuniverse, neither reason nor faith can be absolutes, since both are - and shouldbe - the object of critical and ironical imagination.Personally, I am not a stranger to this wonderful nation, the Netherlands, sincemy parents were the Mexican Ambassadors to The Hague in the 1960s, andmaintained the highest regard and fondest memories, Your Majesty, of yourparents Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard.Furthermore, as a lawyer I am steeped in the works of the great founder ofinternational law, Hugo Grotius, and, as a cultural citizen, in those of yourmagnificent painters, from Rembrandt and Vermeer to an artist extremely closeto my own literature, Hyeronimus Bosch; while, on my first visit to this beautifulcountry after the bleak years of the Second World War, I soon discovered akinship with the imagination of your great post-war novelist, Willem FredrikHermans, an admiration which I have maintained and renewed to this day in thesplendid novels of my most admired contemporary Cees Noteboom. Thank you,then, for receiving me back in a country for which I have such great affection.We meet at the doors of a new century and a new millennium and, as never beforein the 20th Century, we have the strong sensation that something is ending andsomething is beginning.This has been, in the words of the British historian Eric Hobsbaum, ‘the shortestcentury’ - a century of barely eighty years, beginning in Sarajevo in 1914 onlyto end, again in Sarajevo, in 1994.Compare it with the latitude of the 19th Century, which began, according totaste, with the American Revolution of 1776 or with the French Revolution ofl789, only to end, with the Guns of August, in 1914: a century of as much as 138and at least 125 years. Ours has been a short century and a cruel century.The unlimited faith in progress and human happiness announced by theEnlightenment of the 18th Century and sustained by the optimism of the l9thCentury, did not prepare us for the horrors of the 20th Century. 9 Million dead inthe trenches of World War I. 3 Million Jews murdered in the Nazi holocaust.Countless millions sacrificed in the purges and the Gulag of Sta1inist Russia. Andnumberless, as well, the victims, tortured, murdered, disappeared, of the LatinAmerican dictatorships.A short century, a cruel century, and a paradoxical century: Never hastechnological and scientific advancement been greater, never has moral andpolitical regression been more damaging, never has the chasm between them beenPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 86

deeper. A short century, a cruel century and perhaps even a wasted century.Twelve of the eighty years of our century were lost in bloody world wars andanother forty-five in a cold war that placed us all on the threshold of nucleardisaster and which, in the name of competing ideologies, postponed urgent social,economic and cultural problems.Now that the Cold War is over, these problems have reappeared with a vengeance,demanding the attention that, to our peril, we denied them for so long. Theseare concrete problems having to do with the ecology, the population explosion,the rights of women, the increasing divide between the developed and developingworlds and, within each of them, a third world within the First world and a firstworld within the Third world, amounting to a generalized crisis of urbancivilization, embracing the plight of the homeless, and the aged, crime andviolence, declining standards of education, decaying infrastructures, unyieldingpandemics and the uncontrollable drug trade.This is the new reality of the world. It lacks a new legality. Nation, state, internationallaw, public sector, private sector, civil society: all of these traditionaljurisdictions of socioeconomic problems are questioned, in crisis, and calling outfor a new legality in a new reality. We are groping for answers. We are, as theFrench poet Alfred de Musset said, in the transition from the Napoleonic Warsto the bourgeois, industrialized and nationalistic societies that followed therevolutionary period, we are unsure if our feet touch a furrow or a ruin.The question I am proposing today requires this critical background and incitesa historica1 answer. The land on which the French poet set foot is ours, always ours:it is the territory between past and future, or rather, it is the present whichcan not be understood without the memory of the past or the hope of the future.We are in the world. In it, we are free because we can act. But in it, we are notfree because we must die. Civilizations live or perish because of their capacityof failure to overcome the certainty of death with the continuity of life, handeddown from generation to generation and from people to people, through theprocess we call ‘culture’ and through humanism and creativity as the names wegive to the concrete action of continuing life beyond death and of living, inthe present, both the past we recall and the future we desire.As we rush, blindly at times, into a new century and a new millennium, let us recallthat the future has a past - that we can not have a living future with a deadpast - and that the past, especially in moments of high exuberance, holds manylessons teaching us to temper our confidence and take heed of the tragicdimension of mankind and its history. That is why I wish to centre my words hereon the twin concepts of humanism and creativity - the right and the left handsof culture - as the basis for transcending differences and crafting a globaltapestry.Creativity and humanism can be defined as widely as the Oxford Dictionary does.Humanism is ‘a devotion to the studies which promote human culture’. This cansound awfully abstract, though until you give the word a historical context. Weall know that ‘humanism’ is a concept historically defined by the EuropeanRenaissance, and perhaps the single most striking declaration of humanist independencefrom the fetters of medieval scholasticism can be found in MarsilioFicino the Florentine writer of the 15th century: ‘All is possible’, Ficino loudlyproclaimed so that his age and all the ages, could hear him. ‘All is possible. Nothingshould be disdained. Nothing is incredible. Nothing is impossible. The possibilitiesthat we deny are but the possibilities that we ignore.’ He could be voicing theoptimism of today’s global universe of communication.Yet Ficino, after praising the possibilities of humanism, opens the gates ofadversity. Things can go terribly wrong, even with the best humanist intentions87 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

in the world. The nature of humanity, he writes, ‘contains each and all the levelsof being, from the horrendous forms of the powers of hell, to the hierarchies ofdivine intelligence’.If everything is possible, the humanist seems to be saying, then the worst canhappen along with the best; the possibilities of good along with the possibilitiesof evil. He was right, for the brilliant humanist horizons of the Renaissance weresoon clouded over by everything that denied then: protracted religious conflict,bloody wars between dynasties, commercial rivalries, a world of greed and strife,disclaiming the possibilities of the human spirit. In the same way that today’sshining world of high technology coexists with 900 million illiterate adults worldwideand, also globally, with 130 million school-less children, while a combat planefor a Latin American air force costs as much as eighty million textbooks. TheAmericas, our land, Terra Nostra. Renaissance Europe, feeling it had lost its ownhumanist Utopia in the Old World, sought it in the New world. The Americas were theinvention of a European humanism desperately in need of a new space for Utopia.The discovery of America became the invention of America and the invention ofAmerica became synonymous with a new chance for humanism. We were saddledfrom the very start with the obligation to be happy. What a heavy burden! Andwhat a temptation to delude ourselves into believing that, in the Americas,history would necessarily have a happy ending! Yet what an opportunity also toclearly see the pitfalls of illusion and develop a critical view of ourselves and ofthe world! This courage, this clear-sightenedness, is part of the humanistdemand in the Western Hemisphere - where, only in Latin America, according tothe Latin American Commission to the Conference on World Poverty held inCopenhagen in 1994, out of 400 million Latin Americans, 196 million survive on lessthan sixty dollars a month.But as Utopia also failed in the New World, betrayed by the harsh realities ofcolonial exploitation, slavery, the destruction of ancient Indian cultures and thecontinuing rivalries between imperial powers, humanism once more had to call onits hand-maiden, creativity, to transcend the contradictions between the humanand in-human, both in the Old and in the New Worlds -- which means, if we look atthe cultural history of the Americas, that the defeats of history had to becompensated by the triumphs of art, and this has been true from the 17thCentury poet and nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in Colonial Mexico to the contemporaryColombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and from yet another great17th Century female poet of Colonial America, Anne Bradsstreet, to the greatestUS novelist of our century, William Faulkner.The compensation of the defeats of history by the triumphs of the creativespirit. This is both the burden and the glory of humanist culture, its right, itsobligation, certainly in the Americas, as, from Canada and the United States toMexico, Brazil and Argentina, we demand so much because so much has been promisedin our name. We are spurred by the need to give ourselves and the world whatwe have promised ourselves and the world in the name of the Americas.So, what is creativity? Surely, then, not only a compensation, but something- much - more. Again, the Oxford Dictionary comes to the rescue. Its broad,stimulating definition of the creative is: ‘The calling into existence of the world’.Not the New, not the Old, but the World itself, the vast inheritance and thevast possibility of humankind embracing it all, heaven and earth, life and death,peace and strife, labour, love, memory, imagination, and time; past and futuretime held in the cusp of time present.Time for the imagination. Time to live our deaths. Time to die our lives. This iswhat is proper to the creative spirit of humankind: to call a world into existence,along with the tradition of that world, its living past, and also, its yearning forthe future. But above all, the realization that everything is present: the past isPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 88

our memory, the future is our desire, and both happen today. Technologicalinnovation, locally or as a global information network is not – cannot - be exemptedfrom this consciousness, from this demand, for it occurs in the measure of ourlives that we call time.After all, as William Blake wrote, eternity is in love with the works of time, andtime was beautifully defined by Plato as the movement of the eternal. Wheneternity moves, we call it time. In this way, the repeated defeats of the humanistideal by the incessant claims of power are constantly checked and, with luck,transcended by the force of the creative spirit. Yet, in the modern world, wehave been reluctant, at times even blind, to accept that failure - tragic failure- is in no way alien to the humanist ideal.In other words, there is no immediate cause and effect relationship betweenhumanism and creativity, because there is none between history and happiness.At times, creativity does not flow directly from a joyful humanist spirit, but mustmake a tragic detour to overcome adversity. The possibility of failure in all humanenterprises was clearly seen by the Ancient Mediterranean world and given theform of a tragic warning. Consider the myth of Prometheus so strikingly visualizedby the great Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco in his frescoes at PomonaCollege in California. Prometheus steals the fire of the gods so as to bring freedomto men and women. He is punished by the gods, chained to a mountain, his liverpecked away by an eagle, for all eternity. The tragic question is: Prometheus looseshis freedom because he uses it. Would he have been freer if he had not lost itbecause he had not used it?The tragic question posed by the Greeks echoes throughout the corridors oftime. Let me evoke the greatest: writer of the English language and, as a Mexican,the greatest writer of the Spanish language. I love Shakespeare, who is thetragedian of the great hopes of the Renaissance, as he brings them down to thewarning that reason and folly are perilously close to each other, that the arrogantuses of unbridled human power can lead to bloodshed and ruin, and that Renaissanceman, who had thought himself the master of the universe, is a sorry thing indeedwhen pitted against the unleashed forces of the cosmos; humanity struts but anhour upon the stage of the world, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...’Cervantes, on the other hand, is the comedian of the Renaissance: Don Quixoteis a fool who believes all that he has read and rides out on a broken-down nag toredeem the dreams of medieval chivalry in a brave new world of thieves, cowards,rogues and cruel aristocrats. ‘Don Quixote’ was written in the world of the SpanishCounter-Reformation, the Inquisition and the defeat of Spain’s multicultural- Christian, Jewish and Arab - civilization. What Cervantes’ creativity did was toput all the dogmas of the repressive age in doubt, by asserting the uncertaintyof place, names, authorship, and therefore authority, in favour of the certaintyof the human imagination.In the transitional world which was that of Cervantes and his paper hero, DonQuixote, many things were dying but many deserved to survive. Their dilemma isours today: we are witnessing the breakdown of a world based on its own systemsof analogy and recognition, and suddenly caught in a storm of differences inwhich we no longer recognize ourselves. It is curious that Shakespeare andCervantes died on the same date: 22 April 1616.And it is curious that ‘Don Quixote’, ‘King Lear’ and ‘Macbeth’ were all published inthe same year: 1605. Two old madmen and a young assassin rush in to fill the voidsof humanism and warn us that we need time, against the crimes of impatience,indifference towards others and lack of human reflection. We need time: a healingpause, time to transform information into knowledge, time to repair the damagethat ambition, disdain, the uses of power and sheer mindlessness, have inflictedupon our lives.89 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

The lessons of creativity and humanism handed down by the Greek tragedians, byShakespeare and Cervantes, were not heeded by the optimism of the Enlightenmentand the modern world. Since the 18th Century, we have been assured that progressis inevitable and happiness our destiny. Our blindness to the possibilities offailure made sure that if happiness and progress failed, we would not have theintellectual and emotional safeguards with which to renew ourselves, our lives,our politics. We would be caught unawares. But the Devil, wrote André Gide,adores those who do not believe in him; he is just waiting to pounce on people’sunawareness of evil.The 20th century - the short 20th century - was born in a blaze of optimism anddied in a long night of pessimism. Unawareness of the demonic forces of humanityled to Auschwitz and the Gulag, the holocaust and the concentration camp, thediabolical figures of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Again: Never before has thegap between extraordinary scientific and technological development and moraland political lag, been greater.Certainly, creative humanism has borne witness and offered imagination to theplight of the 20th century. Not in vain the indispensable 20th century writer,Franz Kafka, derided by political commissars of Left and Right as an irresponsiblefantasist, is the only realist writer, in a profound sense, of the nightmare ofpersonal violence, loss of identity and inevitable pain that has forever tarnishedour century and our lives.The first hero of the modern novel, Don Quixote, thinks he is a gallant knight ofchivalry. The last hero, Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in ‘The Metamorphosis’, wakes upone morning and discovers that he has become a bug. In that misty awakening inPrague, Kafka restores tragedy and offers us the most terrible promise ofhappiness: ‘there shall be much hope, but not for us’. Indeed, the supposedlysurreal, fantastical Kafka turned out to be the most realistic, almost clinicalwriter of our time. His despair leads directly to Samuel Beckett’s shivering graveof humanism: ‘I do not exist. The fact is self evident’, writes the author of‘Waiting for Godot’. The creative imagination thus announces that in our time,the bearer of humanism, the human being, is also dead.Should we surrender to this despair? Should we give in to this nihilism? The lasthero has no face or, at the most, he has the head of an insect. Should we cut offhis horrible head? Or should we rather seek out our - his-her - new human features?Should we surrender to the delightful tickles of a world of technology as pureentertainment - or as pure, manipulative speculation? Has not the end of theCold War given a face to the multiple cultures of humankind, long hidden byideological masks?Another great writer, William Faulkner, gives us a clue in this direction. Faulknerwrites within the most optimistic and future-oriented of all societies, that ofthe United States of America, a culture where nothing succeeds like success.This makes the US an eccentric country, since most nations have a direct andoverwhelming experience of failure. Faulkner dissented from the foundingoptimism of the American Dream and said: We, too, can fail. We, too, can bear thecross of tragedy. It: is called racism. The North did not defeat the South. TheSouth had already defeated itself by enslaving, humiliating, persecuting otherhuman beings because they were different. Yet the pain of tragedy can redeemus, if within it we can recognise the humanity that we share with others. Faulkneroffers the clearest guide to a new humanism defined as the recognition of theother, the capacity to live with he or she who are not like you or me; totranscend differences and weave a common tapestry.Today, now that the Cold War is over, the discarding of the shirt that we worefor fifty years tears away, like the garment of the mythological Nessus, our veryskin. This means that our skin must change, so that it can touch, come intoPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 90

contact with the vast agenda of the post-Cold-War world, an agenda hidden byfour decades of Manichean simplifications and strategic myths that clouded theconcrete reality of the bearers of any possible creativity: the six billion menand woman who live on this planet, demanding our embrace because they aredifferent and because we are different.The end of the Cold War has permitted many cultures to rise from the basementand become the protagonists of a history that is far from over. We have entereda dangerous world of conflicting jurisdictions: the transnational, theinternational, the regional, the national, the local, even the tribal. All of themdispute our allegiances and fight for supremacy.They are conforming two distinct villages, the Global Village of instantcommunications, world-wide economic integration and accelerated technologicaladvances, and the Local Village of faith in traditional values, self-government,the hearth and the memory of a culture - the Global Village of Bill Gates and theLocal Village of Emiliano Zapata. Both villages present great opportunities, butalso great dangers, to creativity and the new humanism.The Local Village, all too often, spills over into religious fundamentalism, ethniccleansing, hatred of the other, xenophobia, and racism.The Global Village, all too often, wears a cold, uncaring technocratic mask, asthough macroeconomic wisdom did not affect people, only numbers: it generalises,conforms, and even amuses people to death, robbing them of their personality.We are caught, in a sense, between the Cheerful Robot who lives in the GlobalVillage and the Idols of the Tribe who inhabit the Local Village. How to bridgethese extremes? Through our attention, I think, to real people, to the urgentagenda of the 21st century: the saving of the environment, the populationexplosion, the bodily and mental freedom of women, the increasing disparity allover the world between haves and have-nots, inside each society but especiallyin the North-South divide; and the grim crisis of our urban civilizations, Northand South: crime, drugs, violence, the homeless, the elderly, crumbling infrastructures,plunging standards of education and brutal pandemics that do notdistinguish between First, Second, Third or Fourth worlds.The Evil Empire is no longer. It has shifted to the Evil Slum.And from these slums, both internal and external (since the First World has itsown Third World; since there are beggars and homeless people in Boston, Birminghamand Bogota; since children are murdered in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, theghettos of New York City and the suburbs of Liverpool), from all of theses placesand many more, come the new nomads of the local village moving towards theGlobal Village: the immigrant, coming in waves from South to North and from Eastto West, challenging us to meet the other, the men and women of differentcultures, transforming but enriching our own; or exterminating the other, denyingthe humanity of those who are different and degrading our own humanity, oncemore, in repeated holocausts.The 3,000-mile border between Mexico and the US is the most striking exampleof this challenge to meet and understand two different cultures. How to livewith those who are not like you or me? How to expect that in the age of globaleconomic integration, and instant communications, the other would not instantlyarrive in our midst? Did not, after all, during five hundred years of ceaselessexpansion, the West, take over the land, modify the culture, colonize, exploitand arrogantly rule over those who are now heading West to give the West ataste of its own challenges? Here they are, coming back, defying our humanity,our sense of justice and, finally, even our creativity.For the centres of humanist creativity, once limited to the nations of the West91 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

- Europe and North America - have shifted, for powerful economic and politicalreasons, to include through the sheer excellence of their creativity and humanism,regions long considered as eccentric or dispensable. As a Latin American, I belongto a mixed culture of Indian, Black, and European descent; and through Spain,I am also a multicultural Mediterranean: Greek, Roman, Arab and Jewish.Many cultures, not only one, tell us the immensely gifted and varied writers fromLatin America, Japan and China, the French Caribbean and formerly French NorthAfrica; an immense variety of human minds and voices, tell us the writers in Englishfrom the former British colonies of Black Africa, South Africa, the Caribbean,Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan and India: the Empire Writes Back. Andmany histories, not only one, tell us the Black American writers - Tony Morrison -,the Mexican American writers - Sandra Cisneros -, the Cuban American writers -Cristina Garcia -, the Sino-American writers - Amy Tan -, the Puerto RicanAmerican writers - Rosario Ferré-, and the Indian-American writers: LouiseErdrich. All women, all modern Sheherezades who by telling a tale assure us of onemore day of life: the mothers of the new American Awakening.This is the message of creative humanism today: Cultures perish in isolation.Cultures only flourish in contact with other cultures. There are no pure culturesin this earth. And who is the bearer of the worlds culture’s at their most basiclevel? A child. Always a child at the very root of life. The child, the father of theman, in Wordsworth’s magnificent line. For whatever our ideas about development,politics and society, we must realize that we are being watched, as we enter thecoming century, by the true protagonists of the next hundred years: children,their questioning eyes, twinkling at times, at others saddened, eyes filled withhope sometimes, and other times despairing, sometimes blank and other timesluminous eyes, waiting to learn, waiting to know, do and be, waiting for the veryfirst social impulses towards work, the experience of work, the pride of work.This shall be perhaps the greatest challenge of the 21st Century as we try totranscend our differences and craft a global tapestry: not to waste a singlechild’s talent.Memory, imagination, reasoning, physical ability, the awakening to art, the artof communicating with others: we must give the children of the 21st centurya powerful sense of their personal dignity, of the capacities they must develop,of their strengths to survive, of their intelligence to make their own decisions,of their will to go on learning.What a terrible loss when children are wantonly isolated from their culture, fromart and the humanities, on the perverted notion that culture is only for theprivileged, a minority issue, and a dangerous one at that! This is shocking to me,this wilfull insistence on the expendable nature of art, these short-sightedpolicies that perpetuate the gap between the majority of the people in any onenation and the culture that, after all, the people themselves created - and,again, between the culture of one national community and the tapestry ofinternational historical cultures we are invoking here today. Artists, writers,educators, are men and women of the people, bearers and translators of multipletraditions created and nourished by multiple peoples.Furthermore, ‘Every new work of art’ - Henrik Ibsen said as he faced thestalwart Pharisees of his own time, ‘Every new work of art serves a process ofspiritual emancipation and purification.’Culture, humanism and creativity - the themes I have invoked here today - are atthe very root of that fragile and powerful creation which is a human personality.They are also at the summit of any given nation’s capacity for actingconstructively on the world scene. Within a person’s soul, culture bothintegrates and differentiates. So it does within any national community. But moreand more, to integrate without loosing our differentiations, is becoming a biggerPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 92

and bigger demand in the world I have been describing, defined, at the level ofthe Global Village, by economic interdependence and technological advances and,at the local level, by an anguished need to rediscover the shelters of family,tradition, religion, identity. How to integrate these two worlds, the global andthe local? How to avoid the sickness that both the Global and the Local Villageare menaced by: a soulless, mechanical, money-grubbing, racist and xenophobicworld up in the penthouse; a deprived, mendicant, fundamentalist, even tribalworld, in the gutter?The growing social and economic gaps between different societies, developedand developing, and within each society, developed or not, will not be breachedonly by culture and the arts. But take these away and the chasm dramaticallywidens. Our sense of belonging to the same human species is going to be severelychallenged in the years to come by the faceless movement of speculative capitalsmanipulated by invisible forces; by the insults we are accumulating on the roofof our common house, the biosphere; by the dangers of nuclear accident; by theprofound crisis of urban civilization shared by the First, Second and Third Worlds;and by the untouchable powers of a megacorruption beyond the scope ofnational or international jurisdictions.Can our answer to these challenges be indifference, frivolity, or the mentalityof ‘after me the deluge’? Can it be a complacent hedonism fostered by the fastbuckentertainment industry? Will we all become cheerful robots, amusingourselves to death? Even the availability of instant information might not saveus: are we perhaps witnessing, on a planetary scale, an explosion of informationalong with an implosion of meaning? Are we sure that we are better informedsimply because so much information is obtainable - even if it is meaninglessinformation?The responses to these dangers are both cultural and political. We have torestore this essential value, the reminder that the real purpose of economicactivity is the well-being of concrete human beings end their families. This willnot happen without an approach to education that stresses the variety, theuniversality but also the necessity of exposure to the greatest values createdby any given community, our own and those of other nations: the arts, theletters, the visual and verbal treasures created by humankind.The creative spirit becomes a force for understanding today, when it realizesthat we can only recognize our own humanity if first we recognize it in others.Humanism today means a recognition of the humanity of others, of the culturesthey bear.And creativity means calling into existence new worlds, often forgotten, oftenshunned, but which are, and will have to become, a part of our emotions, of ourlove, and of the value we give to the continuity of life on this earth.Your Majesty,Your Royal Highness,Your Excellencies,Ladies and Gentlemen,As we approach the new millennium end the coming century, I am convinced thatthe Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development is called upon to play amediating role between cultures, defying prejudice, extending the idea we haveof our own limits and possibilities, increasing our capacities to give and receive,our intelligence for understanding what is foreign to us and living up to thedemands of cultural universalism, without which technological globalism canbecome an empty shell.93 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

Let us embrace the cultures of others so that others can embrace our ownculture.History is not over. We are living an unfinished history because we are unfinishedmen and women. The lesson of our unfinished humanity is that when we exclude weare poor, and when we include, we are rich. We have yet to discover, touch, reachout, name, embrace the number of our brothers and sisters our arms are capableof holding.And none of us will recognize our humanity if we do not, first, recognize it in others.Thank you.Amsterdam, 9 December , 1998Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 94

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BiographiesRukmini Bhaya Nairis Professor of Linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology, NewDelhi and an award-winning poet. Her last book of poems was The Ayodhya Cantos(Viking Penguin India, 1999) and her latest book on theory is Narrative Gravity:Conversation, Cognition, Culture (Oxford University Press, 2002).Carlos FuentesIs a writer. His oeuvre ranges from novels to essays on cultural, literary andpolitical themes; he has also written plays, film scripts and journalistic articles.Many of his novels have appeared in translations all over the world. In 1987 hereceived the Cervantes prize, the most distinguished literary award in theSpanish-speaking world.Rex Nettlefordwas a social and cultural historian, a political analyst and the Vice Chancellor ofthe University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (appointed in 1998). He is also adancer and choreographer and founder of the National Dance Theatre of Jamaica.His numerous books include: ‘Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica’;‘Caribbean Cultural Identity: the Case of Jamaice’, and ‘Dance Jamaica: SelfDefinition and Artistic Discovery’.Els van der Plaswas Director of the Prince Claus Fund from 1997-2010 before she became Directorof the Dutch Premsela Platform for Design and Fashion in 2011. She is an arthistorian, curator and art critic. She studied Art History and Musical Theory atthe University of Utrecht (1980-1986) and Esthetics at the University ofAmsterdam (1985-1986). She founded the Gate Foundation in Amsterdam (1987), anorganization which stimulates the intercultural exchange of contemporary art.She was Director of this Foundation for ten years. She published in differentinternational magazines, and organized various conferences and exhibitions allover the world.Talat Tekinis a Professor in Linguistics. He taught at different universities, including UCBerkeley, UCLA, the Haceteppe University in Ankara, the Bilkent University inAnkara, and the Yediteppe University of Istanbul. In 1997 he became Chairman ofthe Department of Turkish Language and Literature at this university. Hepublished in a broad range of journals and publications.Kwasi Wireduis Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, U.S.A., since 1987.He studied philosophy at the University of Ghana (1952 - 1958) and at OxfordUniversity, U.K., where he wrote a thesis on ‘Knowledge, Truth and Reason’. Hestarted teaching philosophy at the University of North Staffordshire, U.K., (1960- 1961) but returned to the University of Ghana the following year where hetaught philosophy from 1961 to 1983 and served as Professor and Head of theDepartment for several years. He has published on African philosophy, thephilosophy of logic and general philosophy in Africa, Europe and the U.S.A. Hisbooks include ‘Philosophy and an African Culture’ (1981) and ‘Cultural Universalsand Particulars: An African Perspective’ (1996).Saima Zaiditeaches history of design and typography at the Department of Visual Studies,University of Karachi and the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture,Karachi. She graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore and has an MScin communication design from the Pratt Institute, New York.Prince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 96

ColophonEditor Siri DriessenConsulting Editor Malu HalasaProject Supervisor Keefe CordeiroDesign Irma Boom Office© Prince Claus Forum 2011Prince Claus FundHerengracht 6031017 CE AmsterdamThe Netherlandswww.princeclausfund.orgSpecial thanks toAll contributors, Ergun Çagatay, Elmer Driessen97 · Prince Claus Fund Reader #3 · Summer 2011

Herengracht 6031017 CE Amsterdamt +31 20 344.91.60f +31 20 344.91.66info@princeclausfund.nlwww.princeclausfund.orgPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 98