4. Reviving Forgotten Epic Voice, with Dan Prior

Welcome to Chaï Latte & Salt, the first-ever Central Asian Culture Podcast

Find previous episodes here: www.janyljusupjan.com

Author: Janyl Jusupjan, an independent filmmaker and author from Kyrgyzstan.  

An amazing and unique Kyrgyz epic story recording – a phonogram on a wax cylinder - was lying around at a Russian archive for some 100 years, until historian Daniel Prior, did the work to decipher and publish it, with the help of a Kyrgyz assistant named Ishembai Obolbekov, giving it a new life.

 

Find my interview with Daniel Prior and Kenje Kara’s 117-year-old unique performance bellow.

 

First on my learning podcasting

In late March I registered Chaï Latte & Salt on Itunes with Apple, and in two days it was approved. I read that a real person sits there and listens to proposed podcasts and approves or disapproves of them. So it is on Itunes Podcast, which means that those who have an iPhone can just go to the Podcast App and subscribe to it. For me, this is a big event!

I also registered the podcast with Deezer, Spotify and a couple of other places.  Now you also can write a review on any of these platforms so that more people hear the exclusive content of Chaï Latte & Salt.

 

Central Asia is still considered a faraway place. Especially with the pandemic, our countries are becoming even less accessible to the world, for good or bad…

 

These days Kyrgyzstan is partially in lockdown and there is quite a bit of restriction in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Tajikistan and Turkmenistan seem to be completely sealed off and virus-free, at least this what the governments say to us!

 

Thanks to the volunteers and freelancers, the show notes of the podcasts are made available on my website www.janyljusupjan.com. The notes are quite extensive. So, if you are lazy or don’t want to disturb the person next to you, you can just read “the podcast”.

 

On my website, you can subscribe to my email updates. In March I sent an email to my subscribers with the picture of the jacket of my future “Breakfast Talks with Christian Lelong”, a book about the living life of a filmmaker and a producer! Soon I’ll email a fragment from the book, and the link to the long video for the 3rd episode, which is called “Treasures of Female Sufi Music” with Razia Sultanova, these all before they become publicly available. You can subscribe to my email updates on JanylJusupjan.com.

 

On work

During the quarantine, I find more time to do my work as a filmmaker and a writer. I finished writing for a new film project in Russia. If funding comes along, and the pandemic ends, the next step will be filming in Moscow. I love Moscow. I will be very happy to go back to Moscow.

 

The first time I visited Moscow when I was 13 years old. We went there to give a concert. I used to play komuz, a Kyrgyz national instrument, in a youth ensemble from the House of the Pioneers in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

 

(On a personal note,) at home, we decided to self-quarantine already at the end of February, because there is a member of the family who has a serious lung condition. We stopped meeting friends, even visits by family members are not possible. My dear friend Toro, who is the director of the Kazakh Department of Radio Free Europe in Prague, told me on the phone that today everybody is paranoid about having symptoms of Coronavirus. This happened to me recently. I was terrified. But it is so illogical because I had low energy, but also felt cold. With Coronaviurs one has a fever, right?

 

I also try to keep up with learning French. Watching films with French subtitles helps a lot. And these days we are watching tons of films, Curtiz, Casablanca, Duel, The Wages of Fear, Secrets and Lies, to name some! The oldish staff, but I have seen only a few of them!  It is nice to have time to educate myself.

 

I am also studying the textbook for traffic rules in French, to prepare for the truck-driving course in August and September. They accepted my application, despite my dismal French. On the other hand, learning a language for a purpose is more effective, so I am motivated! Why a truck driving license? Because my production company is proposing to rent a 4-wheel camper to use as a home during our filming trips in the deserts and highlands of Central Asia. All this sounds so impossible, with this Pandemic situation! But we need to keep our mind cool and plan for the near future, I think it is important.

 

What I miss these days, is meeting friends. One of them is Claudia Seymour. She is the author of The Myth of International Protection: War and Survival in Congo. The book is based on her 10 years of experience as a child protection adviser and human rights investigator for the United Nations. I saw her last time when she came home, with a bunch of different types of teas and a pot with Orchidee, which is growing well! From a Whatsapp group, I see that she is offering encouraging messages and yoga videos to her yoga groups. She has at least two of them, one for friends, the other for the refugees in the town. 

 

About Daniel Prior and his work with the Kyrgyz epic tape

 

Dr. Daniel Prior and his tedious work to decipher a now almost 120-year-old phonogram with less than a 20 minutes long fragment of an important epic story called Semetey, performed by Kenje Kara.

 

Ok, there are some names and words to clarify. Semetey is the son of glorious Manas, a Kyrgyz epic hero. With a half a million lines, Manas is the longest epic story in the world, as you may already know. It is 20 times longer than the Illiad and Odyssey, the ancient Greek poems, taken together, and 10 times longer than the celebrated Mahabharata. The Kyrgyz epic consists of at least three parts: named after Manas, his son Semetey and grandson Seytek.

 

For those of you who don’t know, the Manas epic poem is part of the oral poem tradition in Kyrgyzstan. Epic poems were recited and passed down over the centuries.  The poem could take days to fully recite and good performers became celebrities in their times. 

 

Several people made attempts to write down Manas and other epic stories since the 19th Century. However, Semetey as recorded by Russians in 1903, which we hear in this podcast episode, is the first-ever audio version of any Kyrgyz epic from time immemorial till recent times, as late as the 1960s. Daniel Prior took the task to decipher it and now it is available in bookstores.

 

Daniel Prior found out that Kenje Kara was a famous performer in his time. A sketched portrait of him reached us, where we see a person with a darker complexion, holding a bowed musical instrument called a kyl-kyjak.

 

Kyl-kyjak is a predecessor of a modern violin. My brother, Bakyt Chytyrbaev, plays this instrument and I produced an audio cassette in 2003, with a collection of the music of the kyl–kyjak family, the geography stretching from Siberia, Central Asia to Europe. In a cover of the cassette, I cite Theodor Levin that kyl-kyjak was a shamanic instrument.

 

This instrument was almost forgotten, and it remains in the margins of the musical culture in Kyrgyzstan today. Interestingly, we found out that my grand uncle played it. This we discovered only recently when a relative mentioned him in a book. He wrote that he saw my uncle often sitting in a dark room on a rag made of a bearskin while playing kyl-kyjak. Of course, it was a very long time ago and we never met our musician uncle.

 

What is very special about Kenje Kara's performance is that he sings the epic story, not recites, as traditional Kyrgyz epic tellers do. Also, he accompanies himself, from time to time, with a melody on the kyl-kyjak, which at least for me, was unheard of! That means we learn about something the Kyrgyz have lost.

 

The fragment of Semetey as recoded from Kenje Kara’s performance related to this episode of the epic. Aychurok, the child of a fairy and an adopted daughter of an Afghan king called Akun, becomes a swan and comes flying to a lake, where Semetey is reminded that she was promised to him at birth. I find it very poetic. Later, Semetey goes to meet her in Khorezm, where she used to live. Khorezm is a region now situated between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

 

Through Daniel Prior's research, we also find out that the Russians who recorded Kenje Kara, describe his way of performing as «wild» in a derogatory sense. I am not surprised, as we were told that Russians brought to us a civilization, just to find out that the Kyrgyz civilization existed long before the Russian one, which is very interesting.

 

Making long words shorter, as the Kyrgyz saying goes, here is the interview with Daniel Prior!

 

INTERVIEW

Q: Could you please tell us how you came to work on this record of Semetey epic by Kenje Kara?

 

A: I lived in Bishkek and traveled all over Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s and became fascinated with Kyrgyz epic poetry. I found out about the recording at that time and made some initial studies. At that time, I made a rather lengthy expedition on a horseback trip, retracing one of the routes from the century-old Kyrgyz epic poem Bokmurun, recorded by Wilhelm Radlov. As a result of publicizing the results of that expedition, I began the graduate study of Central Asia and Kyrgyz History and Culture at Indiana University. My master's thesis was on Kenje Kara, and I wrote my dissertation on the history of the Kirghiz epic tradition, a subject for which Kenje Kara’s material is vitally important. Now, 12 years after I first began work on the recording, the book is coming out. I have been teaching Central Asian history at Ohio State University for the past two years. At the moment I'm engaged in a year-long project on the Northern Kyrgyz chieftains, or manaps.

 

Q: What is special about the Semetey version by Kenje Kara? Who was Kenje Kara?

 

A: Very little is known about Kenje Kara. He was a middle-aged man in about 1903-04 when he was contacted by a group of Russian travelers, amateur explorers, who happened to be in Pishpek, collecting all manner of ethnographic and scientific information. Kenje Kara performed a short music program for these Russian travelers. And it happened that someone recorded his performance on a phonograph machine, and so by fate, we have a 17.5-minute long recording of a short excerpt of Semetey sung by Kenje Kara, which is over 100 years old. He is one of the few Kyrgyz epic bards who also played a musical instrument while he performed. There are little snatches of playing on the kyl-kyak as he sings.

 

Q: Do you mean that the epic is told to the accompaniment of kyl-kyak, or the instrument is played during the pauses?

 

A: The music is in-between. You get a few snatches of the kyl-kyak (music). It is played as reinforcement, rather than an accompaniment. We know from the description of the performance, which was later published by one of these Russians, that the kyl-kyak was played more than we have it on the recording.

 

Q: Kenje Kara was a well-known epic teller?

 

A: It is known that he was famous. He was called "a famous singer " by the person who wrote down the description of his performance. He was observed performing at the memorial feast of the Sarbagysh chieftain named Shabdan. There is a photograph published of Kenje Kara and his kyl-kyak performing at this memorial feast. So, he had some fame and he had quite a high profile among the chieftains in Chuy valley around Bishkek. He was a member of the Solto tribe. He was born somewhere near Kant (a town some 30 km east of Bishkek). He moved in his adulthood to Besh-Küngöy which is in Alamedin district south of Bishkek.

 

Q: There was some audio recordings made in the 1930s and later by Soviet researchers (here I made mistake, in fact, those recordings were in 1960s). There were famous epic tellers like Sagymbay and Sayakbay. Do Kenje Kara and his epic telling in the accompaniment with kyl-kyak stand out in any sense?

 

A: It does stand out. Kenje Kara was, as far as the sound document can tell us, quite a distinctive and unique performer. His performance is quite good, though quite different from the theatrics of Sayakbay. (Of course, we don't have recordings of Sagymbay). Kenje Kara was a song-like, musical performer. The music of his performance reminds me more of another earlier bard, Moldobasan Musulmankulov, who was more measured and song-like in his performance. As far as the plot, or the structure of the poem that Kenje Kara produced, is concerned, it was quite good despite the adverse circumstances of the performance. He was performing for a group of Russians, who, as far as we can tell, knew little or no Kyrgyz (language). They openly displayed their unfamiliarity with the musical conventions of Kyrgyz epic singing and perhaps a slightly negative esthetic attitude towards the sounds, and this, of course, affects an oral performer very much - if his audience is not in sync with him. But never the less, Kenje Kara was able to stitch together a very evocative and wide-ranging summary or even distillation of the main thrust of the Semetey epic throughout a very, very short time. He did it by constructing an arrangement of high scenes, important moments in the bride-wooing journey where Semetey is on his way to get his wife Aychürök with the help of Kül Choro. Kenje Kara was able to construct it in an illustrative little mini-epic with great skill. I call it a work of a good bard on a bad day.

 

Q: What do you mean by "negative esthetic attitude" of his Russian listeners?

 

A: There’s a quotation by one of these Russian observers. "It was not sounds of a voice in a sense we normally understand. They were a kind of wild moaning and howling. There was something in them akin to the bellow of a camel, the neighing of a horse, the bleating of a sheep, and all this to the accompaniment of a steppe wind, now gentle, like the silky rustling of feather-grass, now wild and rough... Even the very form of the guttural, sputtering vocal sounds could not have matched the music more. The singer is only good on the steppe, in the room his singing seemed wild and strange." Cultured, educated Russians at that time viewed music as something very refined by Western standards, and of course, the folk music of Kyrgyzstan did not give them many familiar reference points.

 

Q: Where have you found Kenje Kara's recording?

 

A: I first found a copy of the phonogram on magnetic tape in the Phonographic and Cinematic department of the Central State Archive in Bishkek. The quality of the audiotape was not good. So, I traveled to St. Petersburg, to the Institute of Russian Literature, Pushkinski Dom, and made a direct recording off the wax cylinders. It is held there, in the archives.

 

Q: Are there many other things stored there?

 

A: This sample is the only Kyrgyz sample there that’s anywhere near a hundred years old. The folklorists, the collectors at the Russian Institute of Literature, made expeditions to Central Asia in the later decades, in the 1960-80s, and recorded Kyrgyz epics at that time, but nothing is approaching this age from Kyrgyzstan. At the same time, I think there might be very interesting materials there. They have a lot.

 

Q: You may know that in Kyrgyzstan the sound archives are in a dismal state. How could you estimate the loss for Kyrgyz music culture due to the loss of audio tapes?

 

A: Conditions can be very hard in intellectual institutions in Kyrgyzstan because there is very little funding for them. It can be very hard not only to do research but also to take care of collections stored there. Kyrgyz institutions need to make contacts with UNESCO, and perhaps the Agha Khan Foundation, who can help them. It is a problem of the world's cultural heritage. It is not a problem just for the Kyrgyz.

 

END OF THE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

 

Daniel Prior’ book The Semetey of Kenje Kara: A Kirghiz Epic Performance on Phonograph you can find here: https://books.google.fr/books?id=zjUg5HDJN-oC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:3447051388&hl=en&sa=X#v=onepage&q&f=false. Information about Daniel: https://miamioh.edu/cas/academics/departments/history/about/faculty/prior/index.html

 

After all, with Daniel, we ended up talking not only about the transcription of the photogram of Kenje Kara.

 

We also discussed Shabdan baatyr, that very Manap. The related work by Dan Prior is called: The Šabdan Baatır Codex.

 

You can listen to Kenje Kara’s performance in full on a youtube video put together by Ereli Bitikchi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB-GOfVN9hA). Bitikchi is a Kyrgyz historian, and his video has the subtitles of the fragment of the epic as transcribed by Daniel Prior. Good work, Eleri!

 

Daniel’s other project relating to the Kyrgyz oral tradition is an English translation of Kökötöydün ashy (The Mwmorial Feast for Kökötöy), which is the first chapter of the Manas Epic. He is also working with a Kyrgyz archivist to seek funding for a project to put Arabic-script Kyrgyz manuscripts online. That means, if it works out, it will be possible to use research tools for studying these manuscripts. For example, I don’t know the Arabic alphabet, so I will be happy to be able to read those early 20th-century Kyrgyz texts.

 

If you want to contact Daniel Prior, write to him at priordg@miamioh.edu.

 

My interest in our culture brings me lots of inspiration. For example, some years ago, I found out that there was a female epic teller among the Kyrgyz! In the mid-1990s, I was at the celebration of the 1000 years of the Manas epic at his birthplace Talas in West Kyrgyzstan. There, at the mausoleum of Manas, I came across an exhibition devoted to a woman epic teller named Seydene.

 

According to what I found out, Seydene had a dream, in her dream Manas himself, later his son Semetey came and asked her to tell their stories, but she refused. Her father-in-law was also against her telling the Manas epic. You know, people say, “this is not for women”, “this is only for men” kind of things?!

 

But her first child died and she decided that it was a punishment for not telling the great deads of the epic heroes. As she did not dare recount the story of Manas, that is why she chose to tell the story of his son Semetey. That is how she became known as Semeteychi Seydene, or Seydene who tells the story of Semetey. She had another 5 kids and lived a long life.

 

If you like this show, please share it with ONE friend who might be interested. If you like Chaï Latte & Salt, become my Patron at Patreon.com/janyljusupjan. The small amount as a cup of coffee in a day will help me and my small team of freelances to make this podcast.

 

The artwork for the Chaï Latte & Salt Podcast is by Karla Avsenik, who lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I found it on the site called Unsplash.com, you can use the photographs on Unsplash for free (I’m not promoting the site, just telling what might be interesting for you). Thank you, Hvala Vam, Karla!

 

The next, 5th show of Chaï Latte & Salt Podcast will be with Filip Noubel, the editor of the Global Voices and the promoter of the Central Asian fine literature. He lives between France and Taiwan and runs cafes in Prague and Beijing. Filip grew up in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and speaks some 10 languages.

 

If you want to drop me a message, find me everywhere on social networks as Janyl Jusupjan, or drop an email at janyl_j@hotmail.com.

 

Have a wonderful rest of the day!