Being here

Yurt galore! A picture of Kazanovka, a museum complex located in the Askizsky district.

Yes, a whole semester (three months) has passed since I started my English Teaching Assistantship and much mental energy has been expended solely on the process of figuring it out where I am. For those who don’t know, I am living in Abakan, the capital of the Republic of Khakassia and home to the Khakas ethnic group. Khakassia separated from Krasnoyarsk Krai when it was given full autonomy in 1991. Since the beginning approached Abakan as something I need to discover and research, not as a place where I could develop genuine friendships. Although I have begun making connection, natural, well-installed barrier of distrust is still acting up and keeping me from further developing relationships with people, which can only mean one thing: I still haven’t learned how to BE here.

So what have I been doing, aside from trying to figure out the aim of my existence here?

I’ve been teaching English at the Khakas State University,learning about my students, and trying to help them acquaint themselves with the sounds of an English native speaker’s speech. Lucky for them, they also got to experience the sounds of a Puerto Rican accent.

I arrived here with too many assumptions. I assumed that Khakassian culture was being actively marginalized by Russians, that Khakas people were resentful of Russian and USSR history. Instead, I found that Khakassian and Russian culture can coexist peacefully. However, I have heard Russian ( and some people of Khakas origin) say problematic things about Khakas culture. When I was volunteering as an English teacher at the National Gymnasium of Khakassia, one of the teacher who was assisting me was talking about how Katanov, a renown Khakassian ethnographer and folklorist, was not a typical Khakassian man.

“He was more European,”she said

From the way she was explaining this I could tell that she was relating the quality of being educated and scholarly with “European.”

Abakan is what scholar of Soviet history would call an “experiment city.” When the Bolsheviks arrived to Abakan in the early 1930’s, known back then as the village of Ust-Abakanskoe, the city was underdeveloped according to standards of Russia’s new communist world. The local Khakas people who had been living there for many years spoke more Khakas than Russian. The soviet decided that there was much to be done in order to to bring this “uncivilized” land up to par with its standards—to make it part of the grand socialist future. Around 1924 theKhakas language was adapted to the cyrillic alphabet. A. M. Topanov, the first Khakassian poet and playwright, founded the first Khakassian theater company.

Unfortunately, because Khakas language and culture were always subordinated to the USSR or Russia, ethnic Khakas people are now a minority in the region, comprising only 10% of the population. This may have to do with the fact that Khakas culture and language were supressed during the soviet era. Russian, being the official language of Khakassia, is spoken by everyone. Most Khakas people are bilingual in Khakas and Russian. In Abakan, not everyone of Khakassian origin speaks Khakas, let alone, practice shamanism. One of my students, Lena, is the only person I met whose native language is Khakas. She was raised in Askiz, a village located in a rural area of Khakassia, where ethnic Khakas people make up the largest share of the population Lena began speaking Khakas from birth and learned Russian only when she began school.

Because I am from Puerto Rico, I have always submerged in the issue of cultural identity and political sovereignty. The conversation of Puerto Rico’s political status and its cultural identity is inevitable and expected. Although I have grown somewhat accustomed to explaining Puerto Rico’s political clusterfuck,the topic still manages to hit a soft spot. Not many people know that political autonomy was, since the days of Spanish colonization, an unfinished project, a struggle led by many illustrious Puerto Rican men and woman. For this and many other reasons, I am drawn to the issue of cultural identity in Khakassia.

Here is a picture of the first Khakas textbook