Kazakhstani literature – Punctured Lines

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.

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Shelley Fairweather-Vega on Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan

The idea to translate and publish a collection of recent women’s writing from Kazakhstan grew out of my collaboration with Zaure Batayeva, a Kazakh writer and translator living in Belgium. Zaure contacted me in October 2016 when she wanted to hire someone to edit her English translation of a novella by Aigul Kemelbayeva. We eventually submitted the final version to Words Without Borders, whose editor, Susan Harris, was looking for “post-Soviet” literature from different places. Excerpts from the Kemelbayeva novella and two other pieces appeared in a WWB feature in January 2018. By that time, Zaure and I were thinking seriously about collecting writing by more authors and publishing an anthology. Ever since, she and I have been trading stories, checking each other’s translations (she translated the Kazakh-language stories, and I translated the Russian-language pieces), and querying publishers. We won some much-needed funding and publicity from the generous RusTrans program, and our collection is now nearly complete.

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