Novels from Uzbekistan come to English but rarely, and if there’s one thing that may be helpful to know before you launch into Mothersland, it is the immense role that cotton production has played in the modern history of this country.
Grown for centuries in the Central Asian region connected to China and Persia via the Silk Road, cotton was a domestic plant. “My grandmother used to say that when she was young, every family used to plant as much cotton as they needed,” reports Aftab, the mother of the novel’s protagonist Mahtab. Things began to change in the industrial era, when the Russian Empire had conquered this area and started building railroads and expanding cotton production. After the revolution, the USSR’s increased pace of industrialization and a centrally planned economy led to extreme specialization between the regions. In the 1980s, 70% of Soviet cotton was grown in Uzbekistan, and nearly half of Uzbekistan’s arable land had been converted to cotton production.
This led to numerous systemic problems that only increased after the Soviet Union fell apart. Although Uzbekistan tried to diversify, its dependence on cotton persisted. The government coerced most of its citizens, including children, to work during harvest season. Here’s how Aftab puts it in Mothersland: “cotton, like a pet child, always demanded everyone’s attention. From cultural figures to doctors, from university students to schoolchildren, from the media to the arts, everyone and everything depended on flourishing, ever-increasing cotton yields. Cotton was society itself.”
Another outcome of the Communist Party’s central planning committee’s decision to grow cotton in Uzbekistan was the draining of the Aral Sea, once the third-largest lake in the world. The irrigation canals needed for growing cotton exhausted the water supply from the two major rivers feeding the lake, causing it to shrink to a quarter of its size and leaving a desert in its place — a desert where you can still see old fishing boats marking the landscape.
This staggering catastrophe is an important historical background to the novel. The very scale of the destruction and the horrifyingly picturesque images of the boats stuck in the sand attract the attention of the outsiders to the region, everyone from environmental activists to thrill seekers. One such outsider is a Russian film director, Mikhail Malnikov, who arrives in Uzbekistan from Moscow on a research trip for his next documentary. He has but a passing interest in the country as his own ambitions lie in Moscow. Consciously, Mikhail is interested in making a film about the history of Soviet cotton. But Shahzoda Samarqandi also skillfully shows us that her fictional but all too realistic character finds the Aral Sea tragedy and weirdly sensual: “He would scoop up a handful of earth, bring it to his mouth, and taste it. He would chew on the soil and mutter to himself. One time, he said, ‘The earth here smells like sea.’”
For his movie, Mikhail needs characters, and he finds his central character in Mahtab’s mother Aftab, “a woman who had spent her whole life courageously battling the land.” Aftab welcomes Mikhail to her house and lets him read her diary. Here, she has documented her entire life, from her birth at the edge of a cotton field circa 1950 to her career as a university student and the eventual return to the collective farm where she fulfilled her destiny in becoming a tractor driver and a hero of Socialist labor, an expert cotton grower.
Aftab’s diary provides Mikhail with the plot for his movie that eventually is titled “White Gold,” the local nickname for cotton. So far, so good, except that he selects Mahtab to be an actor in his movie, to play the part of her mother. Mahtab has no professional training; her and her mother’s lives are so far removed from the professional film business that they cannot anticipate what might go wrong with this scheme. Mahtab falls in love with Mikhail, and Mikhail initiates a sexual relationship with her.
Mikhail is married; he not only has a wife and two children, he also has a regular mistress, Natasha, involved in the movie project; yet he cannot keep his hands away from Mahtab. He seems to think that his sexuality is a gift to others, and neither Mahtab, nor her mother are able to resist him. “Mama had said that she had never been in love, and since I had experienced that feeling, I ought to go and find it,” Mahtab reports. Aftab seems to think that the experience of an affair with Mikhail might somehow benefit her daughter.
Mahtab’s emotion takes, however, an unexpectedly dramatic turn. Unable to say “No” to Mikhail as he compels her to act like her mother and then wants sex, Mahtab suffers a total mental breakdown. Her personality starts to disintegrate on the cotton field, now doubling as a movie set:
“My eyes flooding with tears, I ran from one furrow to the next, but all I could see was the white of the cotton. Suddenly, there was darkness: the tractor’s shadow. Without thinking, I jumped inside the machine and put my hands on the wheel. Its rattling voice rang out. I wanted that voice to be louder, I wanted it to explode. I wanted everyone to know he had betrayed me. Lied to me.”
Mahtab’s extreme suffering underpins the very fragmentary structure of this novel. She forgets where her own story ends and her mother’s begins. She also loses some of her own memories. The events of the novel are somewhat challenging to reconstruct as the narration shifts from Mahtab’s own story to her retellings of her mother’s story, to the scenes from the movie where Mahtab reenacts Aftab’s life. It also shifts quickly between different time periods in Mahtab’s own life. After her breakdown, Mahtab is taken to recover at a psychiatric facility in Moscow, and later on, having made significant enough progress to return home, she travels back to Moscow, trying to reassemble her writings and memories made during the convalescence. The memories from these two trips add to the narrative complexity of the novel.
Although the transitions between Mahtab’s own story and her mother’s diary are intentionally blurred, I should note that the English translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega makes them as easy and clear for us as possible by expertly switching rhythms and linguistic registers. In translated sections presumably written by Aftab, Fairweather-Vega’s language is more old-fashioned and poetic, infused with vocabulary like “bosom,” “embrace,” and “indisposition.” Mahtab’s own sentences are choppier and use more contemporary style, words like “breasts,” “hug,” “like” and “didn’t like.” Bringing us this novel from its original Persian via the Russian translation by Yultan Sadykova, Fairweather-Vega avoids literal translation of words that can seem old-fashioned in Sadykova’s Russian, choosing, for example, to say “tea cup” in English instead of “piyala,” yet she cleverly keeps Russian term for collective farm, “kolkhoz,” highlighting the ghostly presence of the Soviet Union in the landscape of this novel.
Reading Mothersland entails unpacking its levels of narration, uncoupling Mahtab’s story from Aftab’s, and reconstructing the order of events as they took place, while at the same time reflecting on the work’s deeper meaning, starting from the violence that a man from Moscow does to a young woman from Uzbekistan.
“When I start looking for someone to blame, I always remember the director,” Mahtab declares at the beginning of the novel. But knowing who the guilty party is cannot make her whole again, and there are no legal or social instruments for Mahtab to exact as much as an apology from Mikhail. No, she has to find a way to heal that is independent of Mikhail, that starts with an understanding and acceptance of her own vulnerability to him. In this her mother cannot help her; in the affair with the overreaching Russian, Aftab herself is a part of the problem.
The need for women to achieve autonomy has been a recurrent preoccupation in the work of Samarqandi (a pen-name that calls back to her home city of Samarqand). Coming from the Tajik community of Uzbekistan and currently living in the Netherlands, Samarqandi has been advocating for the rights of women both in her writing and in her public appearances. In an interview with Radio Ozodi, a Tajik service of Radio Free Liberty, Samarqandi has asserted that “Tajik women need to learn to express their opinion freely, to be able to say what they like and what they don’t like, starting from a very young age. They need to know their rights, that they are free to choose who to be friends with, who to start a family with.”
In this, Mahtab is an exemplary character: she’s doing the work of reassembling her memory, separating herself from her mother’s Soviet past wholly subsumed by cotton, and finding her way toward psychic and bodily autonomy. Although inexperience makes her vulnerable, she’s a strong woman making her own decisions about her future. Her narration is tender, full of youthful desires and yearning for connection, and firmly established in the fast-paced, globalized present. As she travels from Uzbekistan to Moscow and even to Poland to find the people who can help her rebuild her memory, she is a passionate, if at the same time naïve and overly generous, observer of the people and customs. Here’s, for instance, how she reflects on the people she’d met in the Moscow clinic:
“Since my recovery, I’ve been better able to tell things apart. I can see better that Russian kindness has a different color, smell, and taste. This kindness goes beyond simple customs and community understandings, and it envelops you immediately.”
Piecing together Mahtab’s story allows us to better understand the destructive legacy of the USSR in Central Asia, and the toxic romance that Russia continues to offer to the people of Uzbekistan. (Since 2022, there has been reporting that Uzbekistan increased its cotton exports to Russia to supply gun powder plants for Russia’s war with Ukraine.) I interpret the title of Mothersland as a somewhat aspirational search for a new beginning on a land wiped clean of cultural memory by cotton overproduction, and of separating Mahtab’s future from her mother’s Soviet past. She has so much work to do in picking up all the threads of her history and weaving them into her own, unique story.
[Published by Slavica Publishers on August 15, 2024, 71 pages, $19.95 hardcover]