Kurban Said's Ali and Nino

I finally finished reading Kurban Said's Ali and Nino: A Love Story, a gift from my Azeri host, Vali Huseynov.  The novel was published in 1937, and Kurban Said is likely a pseudonym.  The novel was most likely a collaboration between the Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels and Essad Bey, who was born Lev Nussimbaum in Baku, Azerbaijan, but took the name Essad Bey when he converted to Islam from Judaism as a child. 

Like most love stories, this one ends tragically; however,I enjoyed the book not for its love story but rather for its depicition of Ali and Nino's cultural conflict.  Nino is a Georgian Christian living in Baku; Ali is an Azeri Muslim.  Their love symbolizes the meeting of the West and the East. 

I once asked Vali if Azeris think of themselves as Europeans or as Asians.  He told me that this book actually begins with this very question.  Even in the conclusion, the author describes Baku as the place where East meets West, although this is more an expression of the war during which the Russians overtake the newly independent Republic of Azerbaijan (for +70 years until Azerbaijan gains its independence with the fall of the Soviet Union).

It is probably an unfair or absurd question to ask.  And yet, it is not without precedent in the USA.  When I was a little boy, it was not uncommon for us to identify ourselves to each other by way of our ethnically hyphenated ancestry.  I was, depending on the audience, Irish-American or German-American.  I think for my grandparents' generation possibly and my great-grandparents certainly, this split identity was something tangible, as tangible as the accented English on their tongues.  Today, my children don't think this way.  In fact, they are often perplexed by the question, "who are you?" as if the answer were obvious.

I would love to hear what my friends in Georgia and Azerbaijan they think about the novel (if they have read it) and the question posed by the Russian teacher in Ali's Baku school: 

It can therefore be said, my children, that is partly your responsibility as to whether our town should belong to progressive Europe or to reactionary Asia. (4)

Thomas Goltz's Chechnya Diary

I finished Thomas Goltz's Chechnya Diary over the weekend. I highly recommend this book (as well as Georgia Diary and Azerbaijan Diary) if people are interested in reading about these three remarkably interesting countries and regions.   However, I read the Goltz Caucasus trilogy out of order.  This posting briefly summarizes all three books and provides a short review of Chechnya Diary.

The first book in the trilogy that Goltz published was Azerbaijan Diary (M.E.Sharpe, 1999).  He does an admirable job of exploring the early Post-Soviet years in Azerbaijan, tracking the rise and fall of the popular political leader Elchibey, the rise and power of Heydar Aliyev, and the ethnic insanity of Nagorno (Mountainous) Karabagh, the still disputed portion of southwestern Azerbaijan that is currently occupied by Armenia.  It's 496 pages long, I finished it on my flight to Tblisi last month, and there was no way I was going to tote that tome back to Minneapolis: I left it in Vali Huseynov's capable hands and bright mind.

The final book in the trilogy is Georgian Diary (M.E. Sharpe, 2006).  The central story is the fall of Sukhumi and the secession of Abkhazia from Georgia in the tumultuous Post-Soviet years, a battle that left a profound mark on Goltz's worldview.  Goltz also writes about the political battles and includes the rise and fall of Gamsakhurdia and the eventual rise of former Central Communist Party bigwig-turn-champion of "democracy," Eduard Shevardnaze.  My recommendation: if you read only one of the trilogy, Georgia Diary is where you should begin.

"'The observer affects the observed.' --Essence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle."  This is how Goltz's Chechnya Diary (Thomas Dunne, 2003) begins.  The middle book is, in many ways from a literary perspective, the most intriguing.   The other two Caucacus books are bold and broad attempts at examining nascent independence in two complex societies/cultures/countries.  Both books are filled with photographs and multiple maps of the region, as well as detailed descriptions of events and critical analysis.  Chechnya Diary strikes me as the most difficult for Goltz to have written.  Instead of multiple maps and photographs, there is but one graph: a hand-drawn map of Samashki, a small Chechnyan village and the focus of Goltz's story.  Samashki is home to Hussein and his family.  It is also the site of a a bloody Russian double-cross, one where the Russians first assured the villagers that if they cooperated that they would be spared, but in the end, the Russians "clear cut" the village.  Hussein's story plays against a background of rebel leaders and Moscow chaos, but unlike the other two books, Goltz allows Hussein's story to represent the larger Chechnyan story.  It is a profile writ large.

What I appreciated about this book was Goltz's willingness to disclose his own ignorance of Chechnya, its complicated history, its difficult language.  More than once, Goltz wonders why he is in Chechnya, and more than once, he comes very close to dying while covering a war that very few people outside of Chechnya understood nor cared to know.  What does a journalist do when writing stories that no editor is interested in publishing?  Eventually, Goltz is able to get the "money shot" (essentially, five minutes of video framing dead bodies in Samashki), and he goes from jounralist pariah to a man in demand, including a nomination for the Rory Peck Award.  The attention and attendant prosperity is not without complications, since Goltz recognizes that his prestige comes at a steep human price.  The book ends with a desperate call from an exiled Hussein living somewhere in Kazakhstan, asking Goltz to speak with him, that Hussein can trust no one else, and Goltz admitting to the reader that he had yet to make the trek because he was finishing this book.

There are other books that present a more "objective" perspective about Chechnya, but if you are looking for a book that shows the limits of "objective" reporting, of how war effects those who report war, and how both the observed and the observer are shaped and altered by that relationship, Chechnya Diary is a perfect book.

You can read more about Thomas Goltz and his work at his web site.

You can see more photographs of the Azerbaijan and Republic of Georgia trip

at my new Shutterfly website.  Who knows?  You might be in one of those photographs!:)

As usual, I'd love to hear from people.  Please use the "comment" feature at the bottom of the postings to let me and the readers know what you think.

Georgia and Azerbaijan - Concluding Thoughts

Map Photo by lyndonK2's photostream
Flickr Creative Commons

It's Thursday, 8 April, and I spent part of this morning reading a New York Times article titled, "An Insurgency Evolves in the Caucasus Region as Wounds Fester," which describes the resurgence of violence in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia, all resistant Russian states just over the Caucasus mountains from Georgia and Azerbaijan.  While tracking down the link to that article, I found another NYTimes article about the unrest in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian country just across the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan.  Almost daily since I returned to the US a week ago, I have been reminded of how tenuous normalcy and daily routine can be for the people of the Caucasus region, and I think about the people that I met and the lives that they lead, and I hope nothing but the best for all of them.

This will be my last posting devoted primarily to Georgia and Azerbaijan.  I have written about Public Achievement and Theatre of the Oppressed.  I have written about my eye-opening trip to Ganja and Mingachevir, Azerbaijan, as well as Public Achievement site visits to Mtshketa, Gori, and Borjumi in Georgia.  I also wrote about passport and visa anxiety, as well as my jet-lagged staggers around Tblisi the first couple of days, entries that don't really warrant back-links:)

I want to devote today's posting to some of the incidental encounters that have stayed with me.

A day trip to Mingachevir from Ganja in fog so thick I could not see more than a 100 meters - the clouds lifting in Mingachevir - driving to the reservoir, the sun warming our backs, our faces - Lale and Gulshen running here and there with the wonder and enthusiasm of children - looking over the water to the mountains and thinking it looked not unlike water and mountains I'd seen elsewhere (the Ozarks, fall 2009; the Black Hills of South Dakota; mountain lakes in Colorado).

Visiting Vali Huseynov's classroom in Ganja - participating in an English conversation class with Azir, Rabim, Zaaur, and Aynur with a map of the Midwest spread on a table, me ranting about Lake Superior, the farm land where I was born, the Twin Cities and the Mississippi River - Vali's generosity, hospitality, and protective spirit, him asking if I wanted to see "both sides" of Ganja, and me eagerly acquiescing - discussing his Fulbright college plans for the US, knowing that Boston University was his first choice but selfishly hoping he'd select the University of Iowa:)

Look as Esmira's smile.  Look at Edgar's smile.

Me, a bit anxious about crossing the border from Azerbaijan into Georgia with the none-too-friendly Azeri border guards - a middle-aged woman with a nasty cough and a long pea green overcoat uses sign language to say, "Follow me.  I'll stay with you" - she waits with me while the border guards laugh at my passport photo, while an Azeri border guard in broken English tells me that he trained in Texas; she walks with me the one kilometer dirt-and-occasional pavement path to the Georgian checkpoints.  I smile and wish that I had taken the bloody time to learn how to say "Thank you - thank you so very much!" in Azeri.

Charles Merrill, the son of the man who created Merrill-Lynch, good and dear friend to Julie Boudreaux of MTO (the group that sponsored my trip), sitting on a wall in Borjumi with Kurban Said's Ali and Nino in his hand - Charles, who started progressive schools in Boston and St. Louis, author of numerous books, now an abstract watercolorist (there's a framed painting that survived the checked baggage flights home that's waiting to be hung somewhere in my living room) - Charles, who at 89 years of age is still fascinated by the world around him, and me hoping I can be that curious and open when I am his age, inshallah; Charles, whose self-deprecating sense of humor can light up a room.  Charles and Julie walking arm-in-arm in Gori, all of us a bit thunderstruck by the hometown monuments to the Man of Steel, Josef Stalin.

Rodami Tsomaia, translator of the mono-language trainer, me.  She, fluent in Georgian, Russian, English, and who knows what else.  Me, smiling the first time she completes a thought of mine without me saying anything.  Me, speaking with someone after a workshop session and waiting for Rodami to translate, even though she was nowhere to be seen and I was speaking to a fellow English speaker.  Wondering if she would like to study in the USA, knowing that she could,  and the responsibility that comes with that.

Salty soup broth (just the way I like it), meat filled dumplings, garlic oil, and chives.  Large steamed noodle dumplings filled with salty broth (just the way I like it) and ground meat, eaten best with a loud slurping noise.  Khatchapuri (cheese pie) and kata (flat bread stuffed with spinach), sour yoghurt drink to wash it down.  Eating while walking the Tblisi streets.  Raw bacon served at breakfast, and Ala telling me that "you don't know what's good!"  Bread baked in outdoor, round, concrete ovens, eaten hot and fresh, like school children on an outing.

Sitting on Main Street in Ganja, and feeling two strong feelings: one that I stand out like a tree in the prairie, that it couldn't be much more obvious if I were wearing the redwhiteblue USA flag around my shoulders AND two that the small town streets looked like the small town streets back home: could be Alexandria, or Sauk Centre, or Mora, or Duluth, or just about anywhere.

Sitting in an airport and wondering how the Twins finished the spring exhibition baseball season and thumbing my wallet schedule.
.
Looking at photographs of my family when I felt just a little bit alone.

Wondering when I can return.

Using Theatre of the Oppressed as a Public Achievement Learning Tool

I became familiar with Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) approximately the same time that I became familiar with Public Achievement (1998 - 2000), so in my mind, these two pedagogies (and I call them that because for me they have always been about different ways of teaching and learning) frequently compliment one another.  Along with a number of colleagues from the Courageous Conversations Theatre of the Oppressed group at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, we began analyzing how we could use TO to enrich and deepen the work of Public Achievement (PA).

The training in Georgia was the first time where I could build TO into PA training over a period of time longer than a quick one-hour workshop.  Over the course of three days, the participants enjoyed a series of TO games and exercises (those interested in a great introduction to TO games and exercises should read Augusto Boal's Games for Actors and Non-Actors; those interested in the theoretical underpinnings of TO should read Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed).  These included the circle and the plus-sign, the three greetings, the basic image, Colombian Hypnosis (multiple variations), push-and-pull, stop-walk, Image Theatre, the images-in-transition, and a truncated version of the Rainbow of Desire.  For the sake of this posting, however, I will limit my discussion to just a few of these games and exercises.

Colombian Hypnosis and Push-and-Pull   Colombian Hypnosis and its variant push-and-pull have always been two of my favorite games.  Colombian Hypnosis asks one person to be the hypnotist by placing her hand six inches from the face of the person being hyponized.  The hypnotist then moves her hand and the hypnotized must follow, keeping his face six inches from the hypnotist's hand.  The two never touch (although you'll notice that Shahnaz to the left "cheated" just slightly:)).  Variations add additional people to the activity, increase the distance between the hypnotist and hypnotized, or play with different postures.   These first two photographs show a chain of people involved

in Colombian Hypnosis.  We used Colombian Hypnosis as an introduction to the Public Achievement roles of mentoring and mentor coordinating.  I wanted them to see how they used their bodies to analyze what it means to "mentor" or "lead" or "facilitate," what it means to "be in control" or "to follow."  In the discussion that followed the activity, participants spoke of forms of resistance to roles, of how working together made the activity "more beautiful," of how hard it was to both follow and lead at the same time.

A variation of Colombian Hypnosis is push-and-pull.  To the right, you see Maia doing this exercise with Badri (or at least Badri's hands and forearms:)).  I was struck by how assertive, even aggressive, some of the participants were.  When demonstrating with Shahnaz, she almost pushed me to the ground before grabbing my wrists and pulling me up!  I had done this game maybe 50 times before this, and that had never happened (even when I played with Nickia Jensen, who is someone to be reckoned with:)).  During the discussion, the participants talked about the ambiguous roles prompted by the game (who is following? leading? who has the power?  what does it mean to exercise power?).  It was good stuff.

The Images-in-Transition
Another exercise that we used was the Images-in-Transition to introduce a discussion of the Public Achievement core concept of power.  Briefly, people form small groups and create two body sculpture/images: one depicting powerlessness and another depicting powerfulness.  I will let you determine which is which in these photographs:)  The groups then form their "powerlessness" image and, over the course of thirty seconds, morph the image into the same "powerfulness" image.  We had to do this exercise twice to get it right.  The first time, all four groups were done after five seconds.  I tried explaining the reasoning behind
moving slowly: that change normally takes time, that I am asking them to self-consciously and critically feel the change, that - frankly - it is more fun to do this exercise slowly (an entire book could be written on the subversive nature of fun - actually, it probably already has been).  When we did it again, the images were very powerful indeed.  I saw the look of surprise and awe on a number of the participants' faces.  I was so moved that I had to work hard to keep from tearing up (yeah, I'm a softy - so kill me).  The discussion about the exercise was rich, and this led seamlessly into the core concept discussion of power.

Rainbow of Desire  The participants over the three days were so willing to engage in TO exercises that they inspired me to lead an exercise I had never done before; in fact, I had only learned of the exercise Rainbow of Desire  from Nickia Jensen the week before I left.  In short, one person volunteers to describe briefly a long-term problem that they would like to overcome.  That person recognizes the need to overcome the problem, has perhaps even tried to solve the problem, but has been unsuccessful in doing so.  The person on the far right is the volunteer Jeyhun, whose problem is that he Facebooks five hours per day.Jeyhun then describes what he desires when he is on Facebook: for him, it was both recognition and praise.  Two more volunteers came to the front and strike poses.  Above right, Vali (far left) is Praise, and Elvin is Recognition.

Then, Jeyhun describes what fears keep him from solving the problem: he says that it is Indifference of others to him (portrayed by Salome, photo left, middle character) and Rejection (portrayed by Asia, far right).

Next, Jeyhun has discussions with his Fears and his Desires.  At one point, Recognition has a discussion with Rejection (an editorial aside: Asia was absolutely fabulous and indomitable as Rejection!).  In many ways, this exercise was the most fascinating one for the participants, but it was also my least successful facilitation.  I was trying to use the exercise to introduce the Public Achievement core concepts, how the core concepts are merely abstractions until we give them meaning.  Only because the participants were so engaged and analytical (not because of any adept facilitation on my part) did this exercise work well.  I am glad that I did this, however, because it taught me much about the potential for this exercise.  I thank Asia, Salome, Jeyhun, Elvin, Vali, and the participants for being my teachers.

I don't mean to argue that Theatre of the Oppressed is some magical tool to help train Public Achievement concepts.  Instead, this training has reawakened in me a line of thought that connects creativity with democracy.  For the emerging democracies of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Georgia, after 80 years of rule by the Soviet Union, I argue that building a democracy is ultimately a creative act, one that asks citizens to think and behave differently.  For the still-young democracy of the United States, I argue that keeping democracy vibrant requires powerful acts of creativity to contest media-packaged and consumerist-driven models of democracy.  If democracy is going to survive and thrive, it requires the citizen's creativity.  For me, then, Theatre of the Oppressed is a useful tool in this effort.  What might it be for others?  Music and song?  Drawing, painting?  Architecure?  Landscaping, gardening?  Sculpture?  Dance?  Think about it.  I know that I am.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Ben Fink and Nickia Jensen for their bright minds and insightful analysis regarding the use of TO within PA, and I also must recognize Chaka Mkali and Dennis Hopkins (D-hop), Minneapolis community organizers at Hope Community, for helping me think about TO within the larger community organizing world.  Finally, Sonja Kuftinec at the University of Minnesota has been a wonderful teacher - her criticism and analysis has helped to make the Courageous Conversations work better.

I welcome all comments, but I am especially interested in the TO communities' response to this work.  What do you think?

Tomorrow, Thursday, 8 April, I will write my final posting about the work in Azerbaijan and Georgia.  It will be mostly a traveler's/tourist's impressionistic rendering of what I enjoyed.  Then, folks, I really need to "return" to the work here, not least being filing my taxes, which are due 15 April!  

Comparing and Contrasting Public Achievement USA and Caucacus Versions

On April 2, Nickia Jensen, a great PA team member and PA coach in her own right, commented on this blog, asking, "I am wondering how you see/think of the connections between the PA you see there and the PA you see in the US. Are they the same structure? What can we learn from the way that PA is done in other countries that we can apply to PA in the US?  These are great questions.  After all, the primary reason for the trip was to train Public Achievement mentors/coaches.  (I include a brief description of the Public Achievement photographs at the bottom of this posting.)

Briefly for the non-PA crowd, Public Achievement is a democracy movement intended to teach people the skills (public work, acting from a position of self-interest, working from positions of relational power)) and attitudes (freedom, free spaces, diversity of ideas)  necessary to be active citizens.  PA incorporates the best of community organizing principles (relational power, understanding public v. private, working in the spaces between the World As It Is and the World As It Should Be).  Those interested can read more at the Public Achievement web site.  Those interested about community organizing can read more at the Gamaliel Foundation or the Industrial Areas Foundation web sites, the two community organizations that I know best.  (Don't let the anti-community organizing rhetoric that Sarah Palin and the Fox News crowd likes to exercise fool you: good community organizing has been and continues to transform people's lives in constructive ways that make a democracy deeper and richer.)

Description  Public Achievement in Georgia takes place primarily in Internally Displaced People's (IDP) settlements.  These are people displaced by the Russian encroachments in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  Many of us remember the brief and devastating battle between Russian and Georgian troops in 2008, but there is a longer history; many of the IDP settlements we visited had people who had lived as IDPs since the chaotic early days of independence from the Soviet Union (1991-1993).  Many of the Public Achievement teams in Georgia tend to be young and middle-aged adults, and the mentors, too, tend to be young or middle-aged adults.  In Azerbaijan, much of the Public Achievement work takes place in education settings.  Most of the mentors/coaches are teachers or recent college graduates.  (I encourage more knowledgeable readers to add corrective information in the comment section.)  Follow these links to learn a bit more about the Georgian and Azerbaijan PA teams.

Similarities  The similarities are many.  The Public Achievement process (Issue-Problem-Project/Action) is the same as the USA model.  The basic requirements for any Public Achievement project/action are the same: it must be legal, non-violent, and contribute to the common wealth or public good.  PA teams are formed the same way around the individual team members' interests.  I noted similar learning outcomes between PA USA and PA Caucacus: the team members spoke of the "honor" that they felt when they did their public work, as well as the power that they experienced; the mentor/coaches spoke of a new-found respect for the team members as individuals, how it positively morphed the relationships they had with team members, and how it made their career lives richer and deeper.

 Differences  1) The difference that I most immediately noticed involves subtle semantic variations.  In the Caucacus, a PA coach is a PA mentor because coach doesn't have the same connotations, while mentoring captures best the type of relationship the Caucacus want to encourage.  Instead of Issue - Problem - Project the Caucacus use Issue - Problem - Action, and while I never asked anyone directly about the difference, my sense is that project is more static while action is more dynamic.  The biggest difference, however, is how people understand leading, leader, and leadership.  I won't repeat myself here: you can read about the hornet's nest I batted around in the 28 March posting titled "The Workshop is Finished."

2) On the one hand, the Georgia PA actions/projects are much larger in scope and scale and reflect the urgency of the teams involved: running water, playgrounds, employment, building safety.  The school-based projects, on the other hand, look very much like the PA actions/projects that I see in the USA: classroom-focused or school-building focused (with notable exceptions in Mingachevir, where PA teams conducted ethnographic-style studies to learn more about the history of their city or worked with local health officials to rid a school of mice and the accompanying threat of dysentery).  Seeing this reminded me of how frustrating I often am with the PA issue conventions in the USA.  Too often, especially with the college-based or school-based issues, teams are selecting unnecessarily parochial issues that are tame and too frequently not central to the hearts and minds of the teams' individual members.  Is it the foucaldian discipline of school settings that often drain the teams of more inspired selections?  What role does the instructor/coach coordinator/coach play in this (and I am thinking in particular about how I want to change the way that I address issue development in my own PA environments)?  Is it fear of failure or fear of success?  I don't know.  I do know, however, that this trip has jolted me awake when it comes to issue development.

3)  There seems to be more willingness to collaborate and share the learning in the Caucasus.  This inference is probably colored by my experience with really talented mentors, but I have worked with talented coaches in the USA and Northern Ireland, and I didn't get this sense of wanting to learn from each other.  This might be a by-product of US rugged individualism and Soviet-style inspired cooperation, but I think it is more complex than that.  I know that as a PA coach and coach coordinator, I want to structure learning environments where team members and coaches can genuinely and authentically learn from one another.  (I'll try to remember to write about this sometime in the fall when I'll have my first chance to act on this analysis.)

What can USA PA learn?  I was humbled by the seriousness of the work in Georgia and Azerbaijan.  Nobody is "playing at democracy."  Because both countries are nascent democracies, this group of citizens is establishing a baseline for what it means to be a citizen in a new democracy.  Older citizens are learning from younger citizens, and the young are learning from the more seasoned (this, from a guy who's 51 years old:)).  I am wondering how I can co-create environments wherein this can of seriousness can rise to the surface.  If I don't, then my concern is that I will only contribute to the growing cynicism that many people experience.  I have to keep asking myself how to make the work more real. 

I am writing an evaluative report for Julie and Ala at the Educational Society for Malopolska (MTO) and the folks at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship.  I'll share a link in a future blog posting for those who are interested in a more formal and thorough evaluation.

First two photographs:  Ganja PS 39 classrooms.
Third photograph: Aufto's kitchen in Borjumi (after he worked with others to remodel over 20 kitchens in the Borjumi IDP sanatorium, he worked with others to remodel his own)
Fourth and fifth photographs: Khaka's PA team member Dadto and the field that the team will turn into a soccer field and playground for the IDP settlement between Mshkteka and Gori.
Fifth photograph:  Gori IDP settlement, and the PA staircase.

To Georgia and Azerbaijan

I leave for Tblisi, Georgia, and Ganja, Azerbaijan, on Monday, March 22.  I am going on behalf of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship to train Public Achievement coaches in those two cities.  I am very excited about the trip (and not a little anxious - while the Embassy of Azerbaijan has assured me that my visa and passport are in the mail, until I have them in my hands, I will not be able to relax:)).

My trip is sponsored by PAUnite out of Poland, and the organizers, Julie and Ala, have been incredibly helpful preparing me for this work.  I strongly encourage people to view the PAUnite web site.  Of special interest to the Public Achievement community will be the descriptions of the Public Achievement team projects: they are doing some amazing work, and I've been inspired by the writings.

My primary task is to help the mentors (what Public Achievement coaches are called in both Georgia and Azerbaijan) to understand more clearly the dynamic role of coaching, as well as other Public Achievement roles such as mentor coordinator and site coordinator, so that the groups can work more collaboratively, both within their local sites and between the countries.  To that end, I have worked with Julie and Ala, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, and colleagues within the Twin Cities Theatre of the Oppressed community to create a plan for the four-day gathering.  (I'll post the plan in a later blog.)

My plan is to blog almost-daily while I am in the Caucasus, and I hope that you'll enjoy the postings.  I encourage you to comment, too.  Depending on my technical abilities (and that is asking quite a bit), I'll be adding photographs and possibly short film and audio to the blog postings as well.

Let me know what you think.