Uzbekistan

When I was young I had a crush on one of my oldest brother’s friends—a lovely guy who unaccountably became… well… an accountant. Not long after starting his working life he got an offer to work in one of the overseas offices for the company employing him. The next thing I knew he had moved to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. So now that I’m thinking about the 1 September celebration of Uzbeki independence, celebrating the 1991 declaration of independence from the then-USSR, I can’t help but think of my brother’s friend too. Oh, and because I like those odd facts, and I don’t see any pirates in the history (not surprisingly, since its one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world) I thought you might like to know that Uzbekistan is the world’s second largest exporter of cotton. It’s also the only Central Asian country to border all the other Central Asian countries.

I expect you know that Alexander the Great conquered the area. What you may not know is that he married Roxana, daughter of a Bactrian chieftain—and Bactria is a region of greater Iran that covers some Uzbeki territory too. And Tamerlane—the man who overpowered the Mongols—was from the region. Not surprisingly he’s an Uzbeki national hero.

These days there are some concerns over human rights—and by some concern, I mean that human rights groups report widespread violation of human rights.

Another red flag is the environment—the Aral Sea, for instance, which is adjacent to Uzbekistan. While it was once the fourth largest inland sea, the resource has been misused for decades, and is now a fraction of what it once way—and there’s high salinity too. Where does your cotton come from?

While you’re thinking about that question, here’s a poem for you. “The Corpse of a Sufi” is by Eshqabil Shukur. Thanks, as so often, to New European Poets.


The Corpse of a Sufi

In a dark cave lives a snake,
A black wind nestles there,
The corpse of a Sufi lies flaming,
It has been thus for five hundred years.

The corpse of the Sufi each day
Speaks one piece of wisdom… the snake writes it
down in a book.
The truth lies five hundred years beyond.
Five hundred years hence tarries a lie.

Every day on the ceiling of the cave a spider
Easily weaves a shroud for the corpse.
The snake lies protecting the treasure,
Every day the wind tears up the shroud.

—Eshqabil Shukur
translated from Uzbek by William M. Dirks
from Language for a New Century