Renaissance of the real Kazakh woman: visual representation and role models

Paradox

We know in what circumstances the compliment "Nağyz Qazaq Qyzy" — the Real Kazakh Girl — is offered, but when a young woman fails to meet our personal idea of what a "real Kazakh girl" looks like, we reach for the Makarenko method: we subject her to public censure and justify it with the proverb "Qyzğa qyrıq üyden tyyu" — a girl is forbidden by forty households. And here lies the paradox: is this how a rising generation is raised? We are talking, after all, about the formation of a person.

One of the leading figures in social psychology, Penelope Lockwood, devoted her 1999 paper "Superstars and Me: The Role of Role Models in Girls' Development" to the problem of raising girls. In her view, "girls encounter both positive and negative role models every day: a hardworking, strong mother who stands against domestic violence, or a celebrity who leverages her sexual appeal to boost her popularity. All of these people influence how a girl perceives her own potential, and she uses them as guides for imitation." According to Lockwood, a chosen role model can inspire a child only when she finds the model "close" to herself, or when the model's success seems achievable; otherwise, the role model exerts a negative influence.

Do our girls have role models? Who do young Kazakh women look to? Three generations of Soviet women were fed a false ideal; we grew up imitating unreal models and continue to impose those ideals on the next generation. Is it not time for Kazakh society to revise them?

Remember the strange compliment paid to fair-skinned, wide-eyed Kazakh girls: "She's so beautiful — she doesn't even look Kazakh!" I remember it very well, because I am a narrow-eyed, dark-skinned Kazakh woman. It was understood that this type failed to meet not only the standards of beauty and elegance, but also the standards of "intelligentsia." In many people's minds, an "intelligent face" still means light skin and large eyes. Better still if those eyes are blue or green. Better still if she was born in a city and speaks flawless Russian. These were the requirements for a Kazakh woman's appearance twenty or thirty years ago. Being Kazakh was desperately unfashionable and unprestigious.

Pronounced Asian features and skin color are only half the problem. Within Kazakh culture, urban Kazakh women are contrasted with village women in terms of character: village women are considered "secretive" ("still waters run deep"), while "Russified" or city-bred Kazakh women are seen as "bold and direct." "Orys siyaqty, tura ayta salady" — she speaks her mind like a Russian woman — is how parents of urban Kazakh girls boast about their daughters.

Paradoxically, for traditional Kazakhs, coquetry and pretense are among the most negative qualities in a girl or young woman — and this is vividly reflected in the language. The verb "qylymsu," which dictionaries translate as "to flirt" or "to play coy," is far more commonly used in everyday speech to mean "to pretend." "Qylymsymashı!" or "Qaytedi ötirık qylmiyp!" — Kazakhs say this when a girl or young woman behaves unnaturally.

So both village and urban Kazakhs prefer their daughters to be "bold." Yet the "forty prohibitions" of the proverb "Qyzğa qyrıq üyden tyyu" conjure precisely the opposite image: a Kazakh woman as an ethereal creature without feelings or emotions, obliged to live like a ghost, yielding and pleasing everyone around her. Unfortunately, it is this proverb that legitimizes the practice of policing the young Kazakh woman's "moral image," controlling her behavior, appearance, and even her personal life — and that allows her to be subjected to verbal execution on social media and in the press. This interpretation has burrowed so deeply into our culture that it is especially difficult to contest. But I decided to try.

I believe that originally the "forty houses" referred only to close family relatives, and exclusively to the female half of the clan — since a patriarch is not meant to speak harshly to his daughter or daughter-in-law. I also believe that grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and zhenge only "chided" girls in the form of private conversation, behind closed doors — for the famous "uyat bolady" (it would be a shame) always concerned the ethics of behavior. As we know from world folklore, it is only a stepmother who publicly humiliates a girl — someone who has no concern for her emotional wellbeing or her future.

Each time I encountered everyday discrimination because of my appearance, or found myself the object of nationwide concern in the form of "a Kazakh girl shouldn't" or "it doesn't become a Kazakh girl," this paradox troubled me. It troubles me still, whenever a fresh scandal erupts on social media about a young Kazakh woman's behavior, or when respected writers permit themselves to be rude about young Kazakh women in the pages of newspapers and journals.

Let me remind the reader: the publicly practiced condemnation of a young woman's behavior as 'immoral' is not a Kazakh tradition. It is the method of collective upbringing from Soviet pedagogy. There is little doubt that it was in this context that a perfectly sensible Kazakh proverb was converted into a weapon of false patriotism and hypocrisy. Let me also remind the reader that A.S. Makarenko's famous 'collective upbringing' was developed within a juvenile detention colony, and that his 'attempt to bring the school, and through it the country, closer to the order of the colony was not accepted by many' (Ivan Podlasov, Pedagogics).

The literal application of this proverb at a national level contradicts both the traditional and the contemporary worldview of Kazakhs themselves: in the traditional Kazakh family, a girl was accorded the place of a guest — and for a Kazakh, a guest is sacred. In the next section I will try to reconstruct the image of our great-grandmothers — erased from our collective memory — and their role in the nomadic world.

Women of the Steppe

Kazakh historian Radik Temirgaliev, in his essay "The World of the Steppe Woman" (2017), addresses the question: why do Kazakh women differ so profoundly from the stereotypical image of the Eastern woman? He cites numerous ancient sources confirming qualities of Turkic women well known to us all: willfulness, courage, decisiveness, and near-complete equality with their husbands in virtually every sphere of life. Among his examples is the twelfth-century Arab geographer al-Idrisi on Turkic women: "Their women are beautiful; they are hardier than men and more enterprising in obtaining necessities, owing to their energetic nature and proud character."

This assessment is confirmed by later sources as well. American historian Adrienne Mayor, in her well-known work "The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World" (2014), devoted an entire chapter to the epics of Central Asia. After analyzing the image of Saikal and other epic heroines, she concludes that the women of the Eurasian steppe were the inspiration for the mythological Amazons in Greek culture. The Amazons, she argues, were not mythical figures but nomadic women — equal partners to their husbands and brothers, representing a society in which gender equality was absolute.

In the famous article "How the Kazakhs Fled to Freedom," published in the November 1954 issue of National Geographic, American journalist Milton Clark describes the story of Kazakhs who fled a communist massacre in Xinjiang in 1953 and settled in Kashmir after covering three thousand miles in over two years. Clark recalls how Miliya, the younger wife of clan leader Kalibek, interrupted a conversation among the men and recounted how the communists had made a sudden raid on the aul. The women, having spotted the riders from afar, grabbed their children and mounted their horses. Miliya was already galloping toward the mountains when she saw a child crying beside a yurt. The soldiers were already in the aul. She turned her horse back, retrieved the child, and outran her pursuers. "Fortunately, the horse was fast," Miliya concludes — and Clark is struck by her composure and courage.

Every Kazakh family has its own memoirs. Our grandmother too often recalled the years of the Asharshylyk and the war. The Kazakh women in her stories correspond to the heroines of the epics and resemble Miliya. From her accounts I learned one truth: Kazakhs describe as "tekti" not those of noble lineage, but those who know how to withstand hardship and preserve dignity in any situation. Those unable to be masters of their own fate, Kazakhs call "yez" and hold in contempt. By all these accounts, nomadic Turks did not use women as objects of pleasure; the Eastern tradition of the "trophy wife" was alien to them — women were equal partners in everything. Adrienne Mayor explains this through the demands of nomadic life: harsh climates and conditions required solidarity at every level.

But why did this vibrant, resilient image of the Kazakh woman disappear in the twentieth century and get replaced by an artificial image of a physically fragile and submissive woman?

Temirgaliev holds that "a fundamental rupture in family relations came only in the nineteenth century. Of course, even in the early twentieth century there were still plenty of examples of powerful Kazakh women ruling families, clans, or entire tribes with an iron hand — but the general picture was already quite different. Having ceased to wage war, men turned their energy from the external world to the internal one. Now they held all the family's assets in their hands and made the final decisions on all important matters."

My own view is that this image was deliberately erased from Kazakh memory by Soviet power as part of the policy of denomadization. From Milton Clark's article we see that 'Amazons' were present among the Kazakhs of China and Mongolia well into the 1960s. And most Kazakhs continued to live in auls and raise livestock even under socialism. So I ask the logical question: how did the ideologues of the USSR manage to erase this image from Kazakh memory?

Whom Soviet Women Imitated

Let us turn first to the European context. The influence of Simone de Beauvoir on the generation of our mothers in continental Europe and America was phenomenal. The postwar generation of women devoured her book The Second Sex — bold as the defiance of Prometheus. Across 750 pages, the philosopher traces how for millennia woman was made into man's 'prey and property,' dissecting myths and stereotypes about women and exposing the manipulative nature of the ideology of 'secondariness' instilled in girls from birth. The book was so widely read that women of the baby boom generation, armed with de Beauvoir's theory, brought about a cultural revolution in the West, fundamentally changing the role of women in society and the principles of child-rearing. A full Russian translation appeared in 2017 — I recommend it to anyone interested in feminism.

The influence of fictional characters is equally worth noting. Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet was a proto-feminist in literature and became a model for millions of readers in the twentieth century. What most inspired them was Elizabeth's insistence on the right to choose her own fate: 'I am resolved to act in that manner which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me…' It is no wonder that this image returned in the reincarnation of Bridget Jones in the twenty-first century and proved phenomenally popular: Bridget, who demands to be loved exactly as she is, instantly became a role model for women over thirty, worn out by the stereotypes society imposes on them.

Soviet schooling chose the image of Natasha Rostova as its role model. Her first ball, her décolletage, and her ultimate domestic happiness became the 'template' for many women in the USSR. It is little wonder that women of at least two generations still live under the illusion of 'making it to the ball' and 'finding a rich husband.' (Feminists have long criticized Tolstoy for choosing to turn the intelligent, vivid Natasha into a tedious housewife.)

The powerful image of Vassa Zheleznova, businesswoman and independent woman, was interpreted as 'bourgeois,' and her family troubles as 'the collapse of her class.' Before Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980), the image of the independent woman was simply not cultivated in the Soviet Union — but whether the successful Katerina Tikhomirova in that film is a genuine role model is also unclear, since her image implies that a woman's success threatens a man's dignity in the family, and that 'female happiness' matters more than career.

Chingiz Aitmatov's headstrong Jamila (1958), who followed the call of her heart against the traditions of Kyrgyz society, played a special role for Kyrgyz women. The attempt to present her as a frivolous woman who betrayed a Soviet soldier only produced the opposite effect: Jamila became a symbol of freedom, and for sixty years four generations of Kyrgyz women have admired her strength of character. This is confirmed by French director Aminatou Echar's documentary Jamila (2018), in which Kyrgyz women of all ages — from teenagers to the elderly — share how Jamila has inspired them not only in matters of the heart but in their professional lives: she encourages them to be happy.

I attended a Kazakh-language school, and though the epic heroines — Gülbarshyn, Qurtqa, Qarlygash — were presented as ideal wives and sisters, with their subordination to the batyr heroes heavily emphasized, we could read for ourselves that these were warrior women. Qyz Jibek is not only the central heroine of her epic — she participates in the political life of her clan and chooses her own fate. In one of the sixteen versions of the epic, when her beloved is killed, she chooses death over submission. The visual representation of such heroines in Soviet Kazakh textbooks and popular culture is so wildly at odds with their textual portraits that the subject could support an entire dissertation.

Visual Representation of the Steppe Woman

Nikolai Khludov arrived in Verniy in 1877 as a topographer and traveled extensively across the country. His paintings are more than the observations of an attentive artist — he documented rare episodes from the lives of the nomads that have since become invaluable historical and ethnographic material. Interestingly, many scenes in Khludov's paintings are deeply puzzling to twenty-first-century Kazakhs. For example, his painting Zhülde üshin bäseke depicts half-naked women taking part in a competition. Cultural scholar Zira Naurzbaeva offered several explanations for this unusual contest, but many Kazakhs categorically deny that such games ever existed.

Whether or not this painting is realistic, one thing is clear: Khludov saw the Kazakh women of his time as independent, dynamic, and active participants in social life. Yet his work found no reflection in the visual culture of the Kazakh SSR — it was kept in museum storerooms. As Yury Dombrovsky wrote in his novel: 'What kind of artist is this? — said the art critics. No style, no color, no mood. He just wandered about the steppe and sketched whatever he came across.'

This verdict speaks for itself: it confirms just how essential the policy of denomadization was to the Communist Party.

The first Kazakh painter, Abilkhan Kasteev — a student of Khludov — continued this theme, depicting the life of Kazakhs from the inside. In his painting Qyzdy eriksiz äketu (1934), we see not only the fate but also the character of the heroines of early twentieth-century Kazakh fiction: Aqbilek, Qamar sulu, Shuga.

The image of the Amazon also appeared in the cinema of the era: Balym in Amangeldy (played by Shara Zhienkulova) and Galiya Yerdenova in The Girl-Jigit (played by Lidia Ashrapova) both represent the steppe woman we recognize. In the early 1960s, this image disappeared from visual art entirely.

Visual Representation of the New Kazakh Woman

The totalitarian system understood the effect of visual art on mass consciousness and used it to great effect in sculpting the image of 'the new person.' Lenin's famous remark about cinema says it all. And so when we speak of our Soviet past, we must call into question almost everything we inherited from it.

After the collapse of the USSR, many scholars turned to the question of the visual representation of the Soviet woman. Zhanar Zharmukhammbetova, in her 2007 article 'Ideology in Images: The Visual Representation of Women in Soviet Women's Magazines of the 1950s and 60s,' identifies two dominant images: the worker and the mother. 'These were generalized images, stripped of personal qualities,' she notes. Russian sociologist N. Zakharova writes: 'These ideologically constructed female images were capable of affecting the deepest levels of public consciousness, constructing a required mode of thinking, feeling, and corresponding model of behavior; and it was they that constituted the ideological foundation of the myth of the emancipation of the Soviet woman. Yet the gender construct that formed during the Soviet period continues to exert a powerful influence on women's identities in the post-Soviet space.'

Gulfairuz Ismailova's first paintings appeared in the 1950s. From the outset of her career she worked as a set designer at the opera and ballet theater, and the influence of graceful nymphs is evident in her female figures. Later she created similar images for productions of Yer Tarğyn and Qamar sulu. In them we see for the first time in Kazakh painting a stylized image of the fragile, timid, and modest Kazakh woman — head bowed.

This was the image that began to circulate through Kazakh culture: in illustrations for epics and in literature textbooks. In the work of Kazakhstani artists of the 1970s and 80s, a template is visible: when a Kazakh woman appeared outside the factory or collective farm, she was shown in national dress, beside a yurt, at a cradle — and invariably with her head bowed. By the 1970s this image had also penetrated cinema.

The heroine played by Zhanna Kuanysheva in the film Gaukhartas (1975) was an attempt to visually legitimize this new image of the Kazakh woman — but the image is so idealized, so unreal and unrecognizable, that it remained opaque even to critics. Romil Sobolev, reviewing the film in the journal Sputnik kinozritelya (1977), asked the perfectly reasonable question: 'Why does this modern girl so readily submit to the outdated laws of a patriarchal family?' The answer is simple: the image bore no relation to reality and offered no one to identify with.

The images of Kazakh women in films of the 1980s lost face and character entirely. Several factors contributed: weak casting, the Soviet culture of securing roles through personal connections, the absence of strong female figures in the literature. But the chief cause remained the gender politics of the USSR: Gabit Musrepov's novel Ulpan, translated into Russian and popular among Kazakhs, was never adapted for the screen.

In the experimental films of the Kazakh New Wave of the late 1980s and early 1990s, women appeared rarely, only in minor roles. A new generation of directors in the 2000s, inspired by the international success of the Dardenne brothers' social cinema, placed women at the center — but their characters came from society's most vulnerable margins.

The heroine of Satybaldi Narymbetov's Prayer of Leyla (2002) is a defenseless orphan, a victim of the nuclear test site, easy prey for a rapist. The heroines of Zhanna Isabayeva are women at rock bottom, with no hope for the future. In Nagima (2013), the protagonist, in complete despair, takes the life of her friend's newborn child.

The artists named here do everything they can to draw public attention to the condition of the vulnerable. But the real characters — those who might inspire young women, those with whose success and example someone might want to identify — have never appeared in our films.

By the early 1990s, the image of the steppe woman had been erased from our memory, while the artificial image created by the regime had never taken hold. The image of the strong mother, the independent intellectual, the successful professional, is absent from Kazakhstan's visual media: from films, television programs, painting — not to mention advertising.

In the 2000s, with the rise of social media and new media formats, the negative role models of half-naked superstars and Instagram celebrities filled this vacuum. As a result, positive role models — strong and independent individuals — are not equally accessible, while we continue, out of habit, to impose on young women the image of the timid, fragile, and submissive Kazakh girl.

Renaissance

The formula of British political theorist Benedict Anderson's 'imagined community' (1983) comes to mind: 'A community falls into amnesia until someone retrieves folk memory as needed.'

In the 1990s, Kazakh literature went through a pause — necessary for the formation of something new. In the early 2000s, an entire cohort of poets and writers emerged, saturated with the material of the turbulent nineties. Most of them were women. Struck by how much the unappealing nineties had positively shaped the work of a whole generation of artists, I also cannot stop marveling at the novelty of the female images in this new literature. It was while reading it that something became clear to me: we had always been fed a false ideal; we had always had unreal models.

The name Zhumagul Solty is unknown to many — her work has not been translated into Russian. Her story 'An Awkward Conversation' (1991) touches on one of the most important women's issues in our society: marital infidelity and the institution of toqaldyq. The narrator, who considered herself close to her parents as the eldest child, suddenly discovers her shameful indifference to the suffering of a mother who endured her husband's betrayal for the sake of family and children. The mother's humiliating situation was accepted by everyone as natural — until the narrator learns from strangers that the husband betrayed his wife even in death. This remarkably beautiful story highlights the inner elegance of a simple village Kazakh woman, mother and wife — her delicacy in the face of a husband and a two-faced society that shows not the slightest delicacy toward her, and censures not the traitor-husband but her.

Aigul Kemelbayeva's novel Munara appeared in 2003. Aizhan, a fourth-year student at a literary institute, finds herself in a Kafkaesque situation in the former capital and is forced to take work as a housekeeper in a nouveau riche family. In her 'kitchen slavery,' ambitious Aizhan undergoes a spiritual catharsis: her free spirit resists more powerfully than her wounded pride. The novel did not receive the critical attention it deserved in its time, yet the image of the young intellectual appeared in Kazakh literature at exactly the right moment, inspiring a number of writers of the new generation to try their hand at the craft.

The image of Azhar in Umit Tazhekenova's novel The Axis of Being (2009) is a tribute to our mothers, who endured the infernal difficulties of the nineties. When our fathers were knocked flat by shock therapy, these women took on the role of family breadwinner — quietly attributing the credit to husbands and sons, delicately protecting their honor and dignity. Azhar tried never to ingratiate herself with anyone. She recalled a line: like in the zone — do not trust, do not fear, do not beg. Azhar, who had stood up to the racketeers of the 1990s, loses the ability to continue her business when patronage of small enterprise passes into the hands of local authorities. At the moment of crisis, her existential dilemma resolves itself: you are a writer, after all.

Zira Naurzbaeva does not consider herself a prose writer, but in her documentary work Beskempir (2010) she created a unique portrait gallery of our grandmothers. Among the steppe women who found themselves in the city against their will were the ALZhIR prisoners — wives of the repressed intelligentsia. These women are the true heroes of their time, who lived in the shadow of the false heroes of socialist labor and the Great Patriotic War, in the shadow of socialist realism's fabricated figures; to us they were nothing more than 'apashkas' with funny accents. Yet these women survived the Asharshylyk, the camps, the war, the loss of their closest people, involuntary migration, and the unexpected estrangement of their own children.

The lyrical heroines of Rena Zhumanova and Aigerim Tazhi are the voice of twenty-first-century Kazakh women. Their poetry is not about a forsaken woman's longing for a man — it meditates on existence in the context of global upheaval. A Kazakh woman speaking her love across the centuries to Shoqan Uälikhanov resembles brave Tomyris far more than timid Tatyana Larina:

I put the yoke on myself, enamored of a mystery —

Ablai's descendant. We were tête-à-tête.

But only here, on this private field,

He is my knight, I am his lady in the tower.

The crown of our merged thoughts: a sonnet.

The images of three generations of Kazakh women in the new literature are a kind of renaissance of the Nağyz Qazaq Qyzy — the Real Kazakh Girl, whose character was erased from our memory even while her living models, our grandmothers and mothers, were still among us, and replaced by an artificial image of faceless, characterless dolls. If these images find visual form in our films, painting, and advertising, perhaps positive models will become more visible, and young women will think twice before choosing to identify with half-naked stars rather than with those who have achieved something through intelligence and talent. Perhaps then society will also think twice before calling openly indecent behavior an act of courage.

Ansa Mustafa, for example, is the first Kazakhstani artist to depict contemporary Kazakh women as they actually are: thin, full-figured, lost, anxious, searching, kind, and difficult. Ansa's figures accept themselves as they are and want the people around them to see a Person first — not a defenseless Kazakh Mouchette. Her painting Mamam meni öltiretin shyğar is a brilliant articulation of this cultural dissonance, of false ethnocentrism and the rejection of the personal.

Unfortunately, the artist's dialogue with her contemporaries has been dismissed by some colleagues as 'amateurism' — yet it is precisely the dialogue we are unable to conduct with young Kazakh women, or with young people growing up in a cynical society where everything spiritual is deliberately packaged as weakness and failure. This is why visual art, in any form, must first of all be truthful — which means personal. We must rid ourselves of the representation of nonexistent ideals.