Three winning tales of exile featuring a wandering philosopher, a penniless writer and a bee forced from its hive
Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the newly independent nation of Uzbekistan has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most repressive countries. The government has a nasty habit of imprisoning its opponents and forcing the population into the fields to harvest cotton. Its political process is tinged with sinister black comedy: when I interviewed a former presidential candidate in 2001, he was at great pains to make clear that he had cast his own vote for the incumbent president. “If it had come down to one vote, I couldn’t have lived with myself if he had lost,” he said. He needn’t have worried: the president “won” more than 95% of the vote.
But beyond the sham democracy, human rights violations and authoritarianism of present day Uzbekistan lies a rich cultural tradition that fuses Persian and Turkic influences and has built the ancient cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. Uzbekistan also claims as a native son possibly the greatest Islamic philosopher who ever lived: the polymath Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, known to the west as Avicenna.
Modern era
History records that Avicenna was born near Bukhara in the 10th century AD, spent his itinerant life writing treatises on philosophy and medicine, and died in exile in Persia, aged about 55. But did he? Hamid Ismailov’s new novel, Of Strangers and Bees, explores the possibility that somehow the great philosopher physician has survived into the modern era. The question of who he now is, how he made it to the present day, and his relationship to a bee called Sina is at the heart of this funny, fantastical and hard-to-classify book.
Avicenna appears in the novel as the Stranger, a wandering mage who shows up in medieval Baghdad, Florence and Istanbul, at moments when religion and politics fuse to create an atmosphere of paranoia and intolerance. But these episodes, with their Rushdie-infused magic realist flavour, may in fact be the literary fantasies of Sheikhov, an expatriate Uzbek writer whose life makes up the central strand of the book.
This, the most naturalistic section of the novel, painfully evokes the farce and humiliation of being an impoverished writer in exile. Sheikhov tells us of his travels in the years before and after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Perpetually broke, he bumbles his way through France, Germany, Britain, the US and Italy trying to scrape together a living. He gets gigs as a freelance translator, works as a painter and decorator, and at one point helps a French director make a documentary about the real-life Uzbek cyclist Djamolidine Abdoujaparov – the so-called Tashkent Terror. There’s something utterly winning about the penniless Sheikhov, who maintains his dignity in spite of constant setbacks and so strongly feels his duty to represent Uzbek culture to an indifferent world.
Philosophical bent
A third strand of the novel comprises scenes from the life of Sina, a honeybee of a philosophical bent who’s been forced out of his hive and laments his changed circumstances: “Life in exile! May it be cursed. Once you have become a stranger, a stranger you shall remain; you may endeavour to make friends, but the task is a difficult one, full end to end with uncertainty.”
It’s this preoccupation with the agony of exile that links the different strands and gives this triply picaresque book its unity. Ismailov himself has had to live outside Uzbekistan since 1992, thanks to what the Uzbek government called “unacceptable democratic tendencies”.
In an occult way, the book suggests, each of the three characters are incarnations of Avicenna himself, the wandering philosopher. Sheikhov’s name recalls one of Avicenna’s titles: Sheikh-ar-Rais – the Supreme Teacher.
Ismailov’s translator, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, has done a nice job rendering the switches in register between the various threads of the tale. One of the great achievements of the book is to upend western readers’ assumptions.
Dates are given according to the Islamic calendar and Sheikhov’s natural frames of reference are all Uzbek ones. This unfamiliar normal, centred on Islamic civilisation and the literature of Central Asia, exoticises the west in ways that are both telling and funny.
For Sheikhov, the mean streets of a provincial town in Brandenburg feel as threatening and strange as the Cairo bazaar does for Indiana Jones. Similarly, when he meets Abdujapparov, he gropes for an appropriate metaphor to convey to the reader a sense of what it means to be a gifted sprint cyclist. “I would compare him with a rider in a traditional Central Asian buzkashi match - the game some people call goat polo - who would steal the goat carcass away from his opponent at the last second, and burst free of the crowd of other riders to victory.”
Christian and Islamic themes
Learned, strange and charming, Of Strangers and Bees enriched my understanding of history. It’s also gently ecumenical, fusing Christian and Islamic themes, and reminding the reader of the mythic tradition of bees - from a Breton legend about their origin in the tears of Christ, to the Islamic verse which Ismailov quotes approvingly: “There emerges from their bellies a drink, varying in colours, in which there is healing for people. Indeed in that is a sign for people who give thought.”
One quibble is that the magic realist sections, which veer occasionally into bombast, lack the emotional punch of Sheikhov’s episodes. The Stranger is an immortal with no human ties, whereas Sheikhov is vulnerable, impoverished and separated from his young daughter. It’s the pathos and comedy of Sheikhov’s misadventures that give the book its power. Meanwhile, the strangely poignant little bee Sina is there to remind us that there are forms of ceaseless wandering that can be enriching and productive. This book is the proof of that: the polyfloral outcome of Ismailov’s years of exile. - The Guardian
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