anthro in Azeri

Cherries in Əhmədabad, Objectivity in Tbilisi

Over the past two weeks I’ve had to say goodbye to Əhmədabad and Tbilisi.  Not goodbye forever, I hope, but goodbye nevertheless.  In Əhmədabad, I went to a wedding which ended in a medical emergency when the mother of the bride suddenly collapsed, was told that my Azeri had gotten worse, and was made to sign sashes and judge a cake contest at a graduation party.  My best moments were hanging out with my little friend Gülcan and eating cherries from the trees in her uncle’s orchard with Fəridə.  Everyone in Əhmədabad seems to be waiting for something.  Some wait for their first child, others wait for their hair to grow back so they can wear the clips that were a present from an American guest, and still others wait for a reconciliation between a daughter and the father she defied.  And many are waiting to return.  They worry about who will buy this land and they dream of the house they will build on their land, their real land, and how different it will be from this ramshackle, 19th century mess.  It will have an enclosed garden with birds and speakers tucked away in the corners so that one can sit with guests and enjoy all the beauty of life.  I wonder if their time will ever come.

My own time comes very quickly.  In the morning I am on marshrutka speeding away from Əhmədabad, and by 10 pm that same day I am on train inching towards Tbilisi.  This time, my trip is all business.  I conduct 12 interviews with people from the community, NGOs, and international organizations.  Over the weekend, I finally visit Samskheti-Javakheti.  I’ve been hearing about this place, the vətən, the “rodina,” the historic homeland, ever since 2005 when the first refugees from Krasnodar Krai began arriving in St. Louis.  Most of those who had described it to me had never actually set eyes on it, but all spoke with almost religious fervor of its beauty and perfection.  I thought they might have set the bar a bit too high, but I was wrong.  It was more beautiful than I expected.  A million different shades of green, purple wildflowers punctuated by bright red poppies, and a background of mountains and clear blue sky.

Of course this is not the whole story.  I visited a few houses and the living conditions weren’t any better than in Azerbaijan and possibly worse.  And everything in Georgia was very, very complicated.  People I spoke with expressed a strong disdain, even loathing, for other people I’d met with.  A graduate student currently writing his dissertation on Meskhetians (he wouldn’t call them Turks) told me that I had to be objective and that only then would I come around to see things his way.  Which is an interesting take on objectivity.  And then I was saying goodbye to Tbilisi, a city I’ve really come to love.  It feels so fragile and not just because of the protestors camped outside of parliament or the cookie-cutter houses of the IDPS along the road to Gori or even the powerful and power-hungry neighbor to the north.  There’s just something romantic and ill-fated about the whole county.

There is a proverb about Georgia that I’ve heard several times: God was distributing territory to all the peoples of the world, but the Georgians didn’t turn up.  After he’d given everything away, the Georgians turned up drunk and out of breath from running.  “It’s too late, ” said God, “There’s nothing left.”  “But God!” exclaimed the Georgians, “We were feasting and toasting in your honor!  Oh you should have been there, it was a wonderful feast!”  “Well,” considered God, “I do like a bit of feasting and toasting.  You know, I saved the best little bit of land for myself, but you’re my kind of people so, I tell you what, you can have it!”