GAIA, QUEEN OF ANTS is a rollicking good, weird, uncomfortable time

GAIA, QUEEN OF ANTS
HAMID ISMAILOV (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega)
Syracuse University Press
$19.95 trade paper, available 13 December 2019

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Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov comes a dark new parable of power, corruption, fraud, and deception. Ismailov narrates an intimate clash of civilizations as he follows the lives of three expatriates living in England. Domrul is a young Turk with vague and painful memories of ethnic strife in the Uzbekistan of his childhood. His Irish girlfriend Emer struggles with her own adolescent trauma from growing up in war-torn Bosnia. Domrul is the caretaker for Gaia, the eighty-year-old, powerful wife of a Soviet party boss with a mysterious past.

One of Ismailov’s few novels written in Uzbek, Gaia, Queen of Ants offers a rare portrait of a complex and little-known part of the world. A plot centered on political corruption and ethnic conflict is punctuated with Sufi philosophy and religious gullibility. As Ismailov’s characters grapple with questions of faith, power, sex, and family, Gaia, Queen of Ants presents a moving tale of universal themes set against a Central Asian backdrop in the twenty-first century.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED A DRC FOR REVIEW VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Corruption is universal, I suppose we can now agree. Politics and power corrupt innocents and attract the corrupt. Purity fetishists would do well to contemplate what their insistence on viewing all signs of corruption in a person wielding or seeking power costs, as well as being utterly unhelpful, bordering on destructive, in seeking a government. Then there is Gaia Mangitkhanova, the central powerful figure of the novel; she is Kali, the destroyer-to-create-again goddess of Hindu myth; she is also Gaia, Greek goddess of Creation, who parted Chaos to summon all order and logic into being. These divinities use their femaleness, their existence as sexual as opposed to unsexed divinities, to create and to destroy entire races; Gaia (or Goia, as we also learn to think of her) is very explicitly made in their mold.

We meet her in the lift of her geriatric-care home in Eastbourne, a new-by-English-standards resort town on the Sussex coast that's near Brighton. Like many seaside towns, Eastbourne houses a lot of the elderly who are waiting for God to notice them again...to die, that is...and among them was Friedrich Engels. You know, the codifier of Communism, together with that other German fellow...what was his name...well, anyway, here's Gaia:

Bringing with it the smell of mouse, the lift came for her, moving as ponderously as the old folk it carried. Old Lady Gaia pressed the G button and peered into the mirror. Her hair stuck out in clumps, and her eyelids were swollen. But what really broke her heart was that her mustache had thickened.

Her carer, here in the England of today, is Domrul. He is an Uzbeki refugee, whose childhood there was blighted by inexplicable (to him) agonies of threat and loss. His aunt carried him to the safety of England with a few stops in between, Istanbul and Cyprus among them. England accepted the family, and Domrul is now a thirtyish British citizen. Let's meet him:

He knew he was a very patient and tolerant person, but still, as he descended in that malodorous lift ride from the heavens to the earth, from the distant tongue of his childhood a curse came to him. F... yes fuck her, even if she is a begum!
Angels bless both good words and bad, as they say, and this absolute shame indeed came to pass in their second meeting.

Author Ismailov, Uzbeki political refugee and banned writer, is a deeply cruel person. Domrul's young life is about to go totally out of control again, and just when his prospects were looking up. He's floated through life meeting amazing people, about whom he feels as Forrest Gump is presented as feeling: "Oh, there you are, hi and welcome." He has had menial jobs, as an immigrant to England will have had, as well as been the darling of some powerful older peoples' lives. His bosses and his gurus have led him on a meandering path that culminates at the door of Gaia Mangitkhanova. It is here that this Turkic Uzbeki exile to the rainy cold of England will gain the energy to rocket home to Uzbekistan, to find the woman he thinks he loves, Emer the evangelical, and rescue her from imprisonment in the underworld of...

But you know...the story is best left for you to experience, its digressive and discursive style is less suited to a recapitulation or a review than it is to experiencing it directly, engaging with its storytelling and its layered meanings left to you to pick apart. The novel's charm, and it is plentifully endowed with charm, is in its voices. The storyteller, the novel itself, has a voice that breaks the fourth wall to address the reader in a conspiratorial first-person plural "we." I very often inveigh against that usage; here it felt appropriate, almost inevitable. Myths aren't best told at a narratorial remove. They're shared experiences of power and its victims, they're cries of outrage and triumph and unbearable, peak feelings. Domrul's young, virile body servicing Gaia's cronehood in body and in soul is a cruel and horrible perversion of lust's purpose: Connection to the Other is not easily attained but the shortest route is through the sexual acts—and what connection worth the name can be made between spent ending and burgeoning middle?

It will disturb some readers to know that Gaia exerts power over Domrul, her literal servant, in sexual terms. But think of the myths, the root stories of all cultures. Think of the Mother Goddesses who create all things and then, somehow, have husbands...modern squeamishness elides the glaringly obvious fact: Mother beds son. Goddess enfolds creation in her sacred body. Gaia fucks Domrul, and in the process, sets her life into a crystalline clarity of pattern. Remember, when you're reading these squirmy uncomfortable scenes, to contextualize the actions Gaia and Domrul take in mythic not quotidian terms. Goia Mangitkhanova is Gaia Calligeneia, the Maker of Good, the Good Mother of All. In the generative process, she creates Domrul to destroy him. In the process of creation, she carries the meaning of the novel in her vagina: Creation and destruction, joy and shame, sex and birthing, are sides of a coin that we all must use to pay the ferryman at the end.

This is very much a novel about endings, about the end of life, about how to end the agony that is emptiness. I disliked the character Emer most strongly. She is an evangelical christian and she is an utter void of a being. Her trajectory is tragic, but to me it felt more satisfying than pathetic, evoking pathos that is. Her last act in the book isn't credible, at least not to me; Domrul is the focus of it, and that takes away the power of her presence as the young Gaia-Creatrix. It is a sour note from a sour person, and I was expecting better of her story. But that was the last of my woes while reading. (There are far too many w-bombs dropped in this book, as seems to be a developing norm in litrachure. This cartoonish means of expressing...what? what is expressed in a wink that can't and shouldn't be expressed in another way?...must die in fire.) The other stories, of Gaia and Domrul, end in ways much less simple. They feel, therefore, more satisfying, more the thing the reader earned by confronting the uncomfortable use of sex as metaphor for destruction. This is where the story was meant to go. That it reaches the harbor, not a safe one, of the divine destruction wreaked on Gaia and Domrul together, is a satisfying payoff to a complex and unsettling journey.

Translator Fairweather-Vega is to be praised for her fidelity to the structure of a myth. She didn't impose a spurious order on her words, she clearly felt the power of this story and went to the full extent of her powers to render its soul in English prose. She had, I must surmise, more trouble with the baxshis' poetry-cum-songs (a baxshi is more or less a bard, the book tells us), as the inevitable complexity of expressing in poetry what prose is purported to be unable to carry weighs her efforts down:

A drunken nightingale took this road,
a land of flowers it found,
On it went with a flower,
goblets and good cheer did abound.

Finally it spoke the truth; in my ear I heard the sound,
Saying the sorrow was gone now,
but still no peace could be found.

Okay. Well. That's just perfectly corking, isn't it. It's not *bad* per se, but it's not something I'd seek a lot more of. That cavil aside, I encourage y'all to seek out the novel and to explore the end, the ending, and the process of ending a pattern.