Today we are featuring a personal essay by Dana Kanafina, a writer from Kazakhstan, currently living in Germany. Although I have never been to Kazakhstan, I have (an admittedly tenuous) connection with it: my grandmother and her family were evacuated to Alma-Ata (now Almaty) from Ukraine during WWII, which is how she and my great-grandmother survived. In a more recent and less life-and-death way, Almaty is where students from our department at UCLA have been going to study abroad, given that, even before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, they have been unable to study in Russia (I “entertained” the first cohort of such students by telling them that I was sure their experiences would be much better than my grandmother’s). We have previously highlighted contemporary Kazakhstani literature on Punctured Lines; the essay by Dana Kanafina focuses on Kazakhstan’s literary scene, both what it looks like today and what it might look like in the future.

Writing is the Closest We Will Ever Get to Time Travel by Dana Kanafina

In April of last year, my short story came out in Aina Journal, a Kazakhstani literary magazine for women. A week after that, I was at a meeting of a poetry club I was running at the time. This was on a weekday because on Saturdays I was busy with a writers’ group, a completely different set of people, and the two never wanted to interact with one another. The reasons were understandable. There was an age component that couldn’t be overlooked. Everyone in the writers’ group besides me was my parents’ age. The poetry club was “queer-friendly,” which, around here, of course, simply means “gay,” whereas people at the writers’ group didn’t understand labels of that sort. That I also understood: I suppose some self-exploration loses relevance by that point in life, or at least it does in Kazakhstan, where same-sex marriage is illegal and doesn’t look to become legal anytime soon.

It was a busy time for me, because I was also in the process of moving to Germany, an activity that, unbeknownst to me at the time, would occupy another year and a half of my life. In the middle of the poetry club meeting, we always had a smoking break. I smoke sporadically, which I’m not very proud of, so I was outside the cafe where we held the club, at the bottom of the stairs, one hand hovering over a trash can. There was another poet with me, a man, unlike me, but also Kazakh and also young. We weren’t really talking about anything. He didn’t speak Russian all that well and spoke no English, and I, in turn, don’t speak Kazakh all that well (another thing I’m not very proud of).

Language, or rather the gap I kept finding myself in between languages, had been a big topic for me for a few years by that point. It was the kind of thing I thought – and still think – about so much that when I had to face it externally, I almost had this urge to shoo it away, as if it were a fly hovering near my face. I always thought that being from Kazakhstan was a limitation; it set me up to write in languages that didn’t have as wide a reach as Western languages, making me simultaneously surrounded by people who didn’t consider the wider literary history, its significance, and profitability.

I often think about the time I went to a book signing by Alisher Rakhat, a contemporary Kazakhstani novelist. He was presenting his second novel, Parallel, which I thought was well-paced and well-told, especially for its relatively short size. I was there because I know Rakhat personally – he signed my copy “your friend, Alisher” – but the entire library room where the book signing was taking place was full. There must have been at least a hundred people. I was there with another friend who pointed this out while we waited for the presentation to begin.

“His publishing house should submit it for a literary prize,” I told her.

“Oh, Mecenat?” she asked me.

“No, not Mecenat,” I frowned; I felt silly for forgetting we have that. “I meant like, something prestigious, the International Booker maybe? Or for the Internationaler Literaturpreis. This one’s new, so maybe there’s a better chance.”

She thought about it for a moment.

“And would you translate it?” she asked me, “to help Alisher out?”

I laughed at that, quickly and involuntarily, which in retrospect might have come off as mean.

“I’m not a translator. And I don’t speak German well enough for that. Anyway, this is what the publishing house should worry about or his agent.”

“I don’t think anyone here has an agent.”

“Well, then,” I said simply. There wasn’t much else to say.

This was about two years before the interaction I am now describing. Not much has changed in the Kazakhstani literary community in terms of global representation. I, too, did mostly the same things as before, except, like I said, I ran a poetry club.

The guy I was talking to during the smoke break said that he’d read my story in Aina Journal, and I said, “Oh, yeah?” like it’s news to me, like I haven’t been a writer my whole life.

“Yeah,” he said, squinting slightly because it was a windy evening and cigarette smoke found its way towards his face.

“What did you think?”

“Oh, so good,” he said flatly, but everyone in Kazakhstan always speaks this way. It’s something I am still not used to, even though I grew up here.

I nodded, or maybe even murmured a “Thanks,” and kept smoking. The sun was setting. It was the part of the year when days were getting long, but they never got long enough, and, at least in Almaty, everyone starts their day late anyway, so every event seems to last deep into the night.

“They have sex in there,” he said then, just as flatly as before, and I wasn’t sure what he meant. I turned my head and looked back, thinking maybe something scandalous was finally happening right in front of our eyes, this hunger-like feeling familiar to anyone who lives where nothing is ever going on. But the entrance to the cafe looked the same. There was a glass door and a potted plant with long leaves behind it, and then the hallway, which tilted to the right, making it look cave-like and endless.

I looked back at him and asked, rather stupidly, “Who?”

He took another drag of his cigarette and, copying him without thinking, so did I.

“I mean, in your story.”

“You mean the characters?”

 “Yes.”

He looked at me a bit more tentatively now, as if expecting me to say something only he would ever get to hear, but I didn’t have anything of this sort to say to him. I took another drag. The rim of my cigarette and even the tips of my index and middle fingers looked deep pink, smudged all over with my lipstick.

“Well, yes,” I said finally. “They do.”

He nodded without any expression, or maybe he had an expression I didn’t really register because he looked away or at his phone, and I went on staring at what was left of my cigarette. I was angry at how strangely direct this interaction was, as if he implied I was a nymphomaniac of some sort, even though the characters of my story were only described as having sex towards the very end and not graphically. As an adult, I always wrote fiction about struggling as part of a lower economic class in Kazakhstan and the desire to escape it; it struck me as weird that he interpreted sex to be at the forefront of my writing. But I didn’t have the words to say any of this, somehow. We went back inside and continued the meeting; we read poetry, eavesdropped on what the tables around us said, and listened to the music playing through the hoarsely sounding speakers.

I forgot about this interaction until almost a year later, when I was listening to an interview with Margaret Atwood on TVO Today Live. When asked about tribalism in modern society, Atwood recalled an anecdote about her grandmother. “Her next-door neighbor came – she is from rural Nova Scotia – her next-door neighbor came to bawl her out because her granddaughter,” here Atwood points at herself with an open hand, “had written a [debut] novel with sex in it.” There is laughter in the audience; Atwood continues: “I know all this because my aunt was behind the door, laughing her head off.”

I had to pause and stop what I was doing (a puzzle) to look up Atwood’s debut, The Edible Woman. It came out when Atwood was thirty years old. I am twenty-five, so she was a bit older than me, but not substantially so. I tried to imagine her in my shoes: outside of a cafe, smoking, being confronted the way I was, with the word “sex” heavy in the air, accusatory in its very nature. What would she say, or rather, what did she say to people? In my head, she is way cooler somehow; maybe she even laughs at all of this, tilting her head slightly, the way she always does in interviews.

This had a profound effect on me, and I thought about it for days. In fact, it bothered me so much that I re-listened to the interview and caught a new detail: it was her aunt who initially told Atwood this story. This implies the aunt was on Atwood’s side. There wasn’t a thick veil of shame as I initially assumed, even though this is a family member we are talking about. I live in Almaty, which is one of the biggest cities in the country and is commonly agreed to be the most progressive. And yet I can’t imagine telling this story to anyone in my family and them being on my side, even before the conversation ever steers towards sex. My mom gave up on my literary career when she found my notebook full of short stories in sixth grade. It was something that understandably never saw the light of day, but she was appalled by it.

“People in this part of the world go to jail forever for making up stories!” she told me. “Why do you do this? Is that what you think boys like?”

I was quite insulted by this. I was twelve; of course, I knew what boys liked (boobs and eyelashes), but what I did was intentionally different (literary fiction). My mom, of course, didn’t understand literature at all. I don’t remember now what it was exactly I wrote about at that age, but I doubt it was revolutionary anti-government essays. Yet, over the years I’ve met plenty of people like my mom (also older than her, as well as surprisingly young) – people who are afraid of the act of writing itself. In some circles in Kazakhstan, the very idea of expressing one’s thoughts in public seems dangerous and punishable. It is a kind of superstitious, unshakable belief. I could make an argument that this is almost genetic memory, tracing back to the destruction of the intelligentsia under Stalin in the 1930s, but regardless of whether it is or not, this sentiment definitely still overshadows contemporary writing life in Kazakhstan.

The Edible Woman came out in 1969, over half a century ago. I can’t really imagine the way life was back then, and yet the implication is that Canada was already socially ahead of where Kazakhstan is now. In the context of kleptocracy and colonization, it is, of course, an unfair comparison to make: contrasted with the West, Kazakhstan is a poor country with an outdated educational system. This isn’t something we can easily change. Even in that same poetry club that I am describing, someone once stated that all worthy poets grew up poor, it comes with the territory, to which I said, “No, they don’t. Wasn’t Anne Sexton, for example, a daughter of a socialite?” There was a pause, my peers looked at one another and then back at me: “Who is Anne Sexton?”

Recently, Almaty-based writer Meruert Alonso got in trouble over public prudery. She alleged that certain chapters of her novel Forbidden Forms of Love have been banned from publication specifically for sexually explicit content. It is my understanding that, despite its name, the book features heterosexual storylines (admittedly, I haven’t read the book, though I tried twice – once when I loitered at a bookstore on the weekend and another time when a friend lent me her copy, which I kept by my bed alongside my other current reads and couldn’t look at without feeling vaguely guilty, but the prose style just isn’t for me).

In interviews elsewhere, Atwood alludes to the fact that she moved to the United States because the publishing industry was stronger there. She wouldn’t be the first writer in history to physically move to a different geographic location to find oneself “in the future” of the literary world. T. S. Eliot followed a similar trajectory during his time (though it was from the US to the UK; he would later claim that his poetry would have been quite different if he were born in England). This was Nabokov, too (Russia to Germany to France to the US; in his case, prosecution was responsible). I am moving both to find a better life and to build a career – I’m finishing this essay on the last Friday of August, and my flight to Germany is at three in the morning the next day. Between writing this, working, and packing today, I ran to the store to pick up something, and an older woman tried cutting ahead of me in line; when I didn’t let her, she called me a whore. This is what I write about: the way poverty, hopelessness, and unspoken and unprocessed violence corrode a person, and I can’t write about it as it is actively happening to me. This isn’t an untreated, progressing illness; this is my home. 

In another interview, when Atwood is asked whether she ever daydreamed about the “incredible success of productivity” that eventually did happen to her, she firmly says no. “[T]his was Canada,” she says. “And it was Canada in the early sixties. And nobody had in Canada, at that time […] that kind of international success. Canada was the boonies, even for Canadians.” She goes on to say that she was the first Canadian writer to make it in places like Sweden or Finland, and people asked her “where this Canada is” and if there were any other writers besides her. This isn’t all that different from what happens to authors from Kazakhstan (though the situation here is a bit more complex because of the added racial component – for example, out of the five Kazakhstani residents of the International Writing Program in Iowa over the years, three are white, despite white people representing under 30% of Kazakhstan’s population, according to most sources; but this is a topic for another time). Similar interactions have even happened to me whenever I was in writing circles in the US and in the Czech Republic, which always baffled me – I don’t even have a novel out right now, so why am I expected to be the spokesperson for almost twenty million people?

So does all this suggest that sixty years from now, Kazakhstan will be as central to world literature as Canada is today? I don’t want to be grim, so I say, “I don’t know.” I would love to imagine Kazakhstan entirely different by the time I am in my eighties (Atwood’s age). I can also see myself on my third or fourth marriage, and Kazakhstan, though by then it will be a distant memory for me, as promising and comforting as a familiar room after waking up from a nightmare.

Dana Kanafina is an author from Petropavl, Kazakhstan. She is an alumna of Between the Lines of the International Writing Program (2019). She was an ambassador for the Almaty Writing Residency (2021) and a judge for the women-only literary journal Aina Journal (3rd issue, 2024). She co-ran Kazakhstan’s first queer poetry collective, Jalanash Poezia (and curated its zine in 2024), and Writers Rule! Club (2023 – 2025). She now lives in Konstanz, Germany.