Authors

Laura Berdikhojayeva¹;  ¹ Leiden University, Netherlands

Discussion

My paper explores the literary oeuvre of the Qazaq Soviet writer Sara Myńjasarova (1924-2002) widely known as the first woman novelist to emerge in Central Asia. Specifically, I present the analysis of her two novels Qyr qyzdary (Daughters of the steppe, 1971) and Tözim sheńberi (The circle of patience, 1988) from a postcolonial feminist perspective with an aim to understand and explain the manners and modes through which the author negotiated her identity as a Qazaq woman within the male-dominated Qazaq Soviet literary landscape. ‘Becoming a writer,’ as Myńjasarova states in one of her interviews, ‘was never a dream, but rather was an inevitable outcome of an immense anger she felt toward Qazaq male writers while reading their literary works.’ By using women’s sexuality as a rattle (shyldyrmaq) for their fiction, these writers objectified their female characters and assigned them secondary roles. In Myńjasarova’s understanding, such false portrayal of Qazaq women does not differ much from Soviet political discourse which often represented Qazaq women as ‘backward’ and docile ‘Eastern’ women. By denouncing and defying both literary and political representation, in her novels, Myńjasarova creates a variety of strong women characters who are capable of navigating themselves through various complexities of Soviet life. In this paper, I argue that Mynjasarova’s engagement with the form of the Socialist Realist novel undermines its inherently colonial structure which imposes a linear colonial narrative pattern. Taking this into account, I ask whether the form of Soviet Socialist Realist novel can be an effective medium for contesting the colonial and patriarchal power narratives.