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Slam in the Name of Country: Nationalism in Contemporary Azerbaijani Meykhana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2020

Aneta Strzemżalska
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Abstract

Meykhana is spoken word improvisation, verbal recitatives, and a kind of entertainment that in the last two decades has largely spread across Azerbaijan. Contemporary meykhana, although it retains its characteristic rhythm, increasingly resembles popular songs rather than classical Middle Eastern poetry, and is now often being sung, not read. Thus, in its form and function, it has become an element of mass popular culture. At the same time, meykhana is increasingly considered to be one of the national symbols on a par with other traditional musical genres such as mugham and ashig art. Meykhana's contemporary dual nature, which is understood differently by different constituencies within the Azerbaijani population, with their own politicized agenda, is inherently nationalist in nature. Using such aspects of nationalism as ethnicity, tradition, modernization, and folkloricization I analyze different levels of meykhana and the various actors involved in its implementation. This paper contributes a case study to the rich body of literature on nationalism in musical performances by analyzing the ways in which identities are constructed and mobilized.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 323 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1 The Absheron Peninsula (also called Absheron) is a peninsula in Azerbaijan. It is the location of Baku, the biggest and the most populous city of the country, and also the Baku metropolitan area, with its satellite cities Sumqayit and Khyrdalan. There are tens of villages located on the peninsula, known as Absheron or Bakuvian suburban villages; most of them have a rather long history, while others were formed from working-class settlements in the Soviet era.

2 Mejlis (Az.: məclis)—gatherings, in literal translation “a place of gathering.”

3 To read and to sing meykhana are denoted with the same word in Azerbaijani—“oxumaq.” Due to meykhana not being considered a music genre for many years, but rather a recitative, or poetry of sorts, the Azerbaijani say, “read meykhana” or “he said meykhana.” In this paper, I use the expression “to read meykhana,” however, it is also correct to say, “to sing meykhana,” especially if one has in mind the musical form of the genre.

4 Meykhana is most popular in such regions as the Absheron Peninsula and the Lankaran economic region (Astara, Jalilabad, Lerik, Lankaran, Masally and Yardymly), which is mostly inhabited by the Talysh people—an Iranian ethnic group. Nevertheless, meykhana is performed throughout Azerbaijan with the exception of the northern boundary, inhabited by Georgians, Avars, and Lezgic peoples, and even beyond the country, primarily in Russia and other post-Soviet republics.

5 In recent years, meykhana has been gaining more and more interest among scientists skilled in music, folklore, and literary science. The fundamental study of the phenomenon has been done by Aytac Rəhimova, Azərbaycan musiqisində meyxana janrı (Baku, 2002). In the book she explores the main structural features of the genre, the history of its development, and also analyzes the ways of translating meykhana into other artistic means of expression, such as opera, theater, cinema, or classical music. A valuable contribution into existing scholarship on meykhana, first of all, describing its composition and genre links with other literary forms, is Nizami Tağısoy and Zülaim Zakariyya, Meyxanənin poetikası (Baku, 2011).

6 Kend (Az.: kənd)—urban-type settlement with a population between that of a town and a village.

7 Chaykhana (çayxana; chay–“tea”) is a tea-house or a tearoom, an establishment popular in all Central Asian countries: Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, which primarily serves tea and other light refreshments, sometimes alcohol and food. A visit to the tea-house by a woman is considered improper.

8 Anasha—a colloquial name for marijuana, widespread throughout the post-Soviet area.

9 Azerbaijani researchers claim that a large part of meykhana is related to aruz (əruz)—a system of prosody based on the alteration of long and short syllables, which originated in Arabic poetry in the sixth-seventh centuries and then, with some modifications, was adapted by the Azerbaijani from Persian.

10 One should remember that in Azerbaijan exist more than the two musical genres that are considered national. Valuable insights pertaining to the topic of nationalism in Azerbaijani music and culture are presented in the following monographs: Inna Naroditskaya, Song from the Land of Fire: Continuity and Change in Azerbaijanian Mugham (New York, 2002); Oldfield, Anna, Azerbaijani Women Poet-minstrels: Women Ashiqs from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Lewiston, NY, 2008)Google Scholar; Huseynova, Aida, Music of Azerbaijan: From Mugham to Opera (Bloomington, Ind., 2016)Google Scholar.

11 The saz is a stringed musical instrument with a long neck, used in classical Ottoman, Turkish folk, Iranian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Armenian music, as well as in parts of Syria, Iraq, and the Balkan countries.

12 Dastans are an ornate form of oral history from Central Asia that are usually folk or literary interpretations of heroic myths, legends, and fairy tales.

13 It is worth remembering that the territorial division into the influences of ashig and mugham is to some extent arbitrary. Two phenomena derive from each other: in Azerbaijani mugham one finds elements of ashig art and vice versa. However, the division is necessary for further understanding of the paper due to its emic nature; it is important for my informants.

14 Martin Stokes, “Introduction,” in Martin Stokes, ed., Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Oxford, 1997), 1–27.

15 Micheal Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), 6. For more on this issue, see Tim H. Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Oxford, 2002); Tim H. Edensor, “Reconsidering National Temporalities: Institutional Times, Everyday Routines, Serial Spaces and Synchronicities,” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (November 2006): 525–45; Jon E. Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, “Everyday Nationhood,” Ethnicities 8, no. 4 (December 2008): 536–63; Robert J. Foster, Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea (Bloomington, 2002); EmiliaPawłusz and Oleksandra Seliverstova, “Everyday Nation-building in the Post-Soviet space: Methodological Reflections,” Studies of Transition States and Societies 8, no. 1 (2016): 69–86; Tanya Richardson, Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine (Toronto, 2008).

16 Billig, Banal Nationalism, 6.

17 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1972).

18 Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905–1920: The Shaping of a National Identity in a Muslim Community (Cambridge, Eng., 1985); Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition (New York, 1995); Audrey L. Altstadt, The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule (Stanford, 1992); Svante E. Cornell, Azerbaijan Since Independence (Armonk, 2011); Viktor Shnirel΄man, Voiny pamiati: Mify, identichnost΄ i politika v Zakavkaz΄e (Moscow, 2003); Aidyn Balaev, Azerbaidzhanskoe natsional΄noe dvizhenie v 1917–1918 godakh (Baku, 1998); Aidyn Balaev, Azerbaidzhanskaia natsiia: Osnovnye etapy stanovleniia na rubezhe XIX-XX vv. (Moscow, 2012).

19 Joshua Sanborn, “Family, Fraternity, and Nation-Building in Russia, 1905–1925,” in Terry Martin and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, 1917–1953 (Oxford, 2001), 93–110. For more information on the Soviet nation-making process, see Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, “The Dialectics of Nationalism in the USSR,” Problems of Communism 23, no. 3 (May-June 1974): 1–22; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993); Ronald Grigor Suny, “Rethinking Soviet Studies: Bringing the Non-Russians Back In,” in Daniel Orlovsky, ed., Beyond Soviet Studies (Washington, D.C., 1995): 105–34; Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–52; Philip Roeder, “Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (January 1991): 196–232; Francine Hirsch, “Toward an Empire of Nations: Border-Making and the Formation of Soviet National Identities,” Russian Review 59, no. 2 (April 2000): 201–26.

20 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1996).

21 Rogers Brubaker, “Nationalizing States in the Old ‘New Europe’—and the New,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 19, no. 2 (April 1996): 411–37.

22 Soviet politics on music have been studied in a number of scholarly contributions. See Theodore C. Levin, The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) (Bloomington, Ind., 1996); Alexander Djumaev, “Musical Heritage and National Identity in Uzbekistan,” Ethnomusicology Forum 14, no. 2, Special issue on Music and Identity in Central Asia (November 2005): 165–84; Tanya Merchant, “Popping Tradition: Performing Maqom and Uzbek ‘National’ Estrada in the 21st Century,” Popular Music and Society 32, no. 3 (July 2009): 371–86; Donna A. Buchanan, “Soccer, Popular Music, and National Consciousness in Post-State-Socialist Bulgaria, 1994–96,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11, no. 2 (2002): 1–27.

23 For more detailed information on the Azerbaijani “national idea,” see a chapter “Azerbaidzhanskaia ‘natsional΄naia ideia’ v kontekste obnovleniia mezhnatsional΄nykh otnoshenii” in Ramiz Mekhtiev, Mezhnatsional΄nye otnosheniia na iskhode XX stoletiia: Problemy teorii i politki (Baku, 1995), 73–82.

24 Federico Spinetti, “Open Borders. Tradition and Tajik Popular Music: Questions of Aesthetics, Identity and Political Economy,” Ethnomusicology Forum 14, no. 2, Special issue on Music and Identity in Central Asia (November 2005): 185–211. For in-depth discussion of the concept of folklorization, see Rebecca S. Miller, Carriacou String Band Serenade: Performing Identity in the Eastern Caribbean (Middletown, 2007), 216.

25 Spinetti, “Open Borders.”

26 Theodore C. Levin, “Music in Modern Uzbekistan: The Convergence of Marxist Aesthetics and Central Asian Tradition,” Asian Music 12, no. 1, Symposium on Art Musics in Muslim Nations (1980): 151.

27 Ibid., 149–58.

28 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 1–14;

29 Spinetti, “Open Borders”; Merchant, “Popping Tradition.”

30 Christopher A. Waterman, “‘Our Tradition Is a Very Modern Tradition:’ Popular Music and the Construction of Pan-Yoruba Identity,” Ethnomusicology 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 367–79.

31 Mahallah (məhəllə)—is a country subdivision or neighborhood in the Caucasus and many Middle Eastern countries.

32 Toponym “Zavokzalni” is also commonly used by meykhana lovers in broken Russian. The correct name of the mahallah is Zavokzalnaia.

33 Stereotypes of Bakili and the capital can also be explained in terms of power relations and intersectionality, where masculinity/sexuality/social class/ethnicity are intertwining in the perception of different groups. For more detailed information about the concept, see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990); Sherry B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (January 1995): 173–93.

34 Censuses of Republic of Azerbaijan 2009, at http://www.geohive.com/cntry/azerbaijan.aspx (accessed October 17, 2019, no longer available).

35 Vəli Həbiboğlu, Maştağa (Baku, 2003).

36 For more information about the origin of the Massagets, see, for example, Ilya Gershevitch, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 2, the Median and Achaemenian Periods (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), at https://pl.scribd.com/document/319090974/The-Cambridge-History-of-Iran-Vol-2 (accessed April 9, 2020); Peter Wilcox, Men at Arms, vol. 3, Rome’s Enemies: Parthians and Sassanid Persians (Oxford, 1986); René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: History of Central Asia, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, 1989); Shnirel΄man, Voiny pamiati, 147–82.

37 Georgii Tumanov, Baku i ego okrestnosti (Tiflis, 1891): 64. It is worth noting the fact that in the Soviet and Azerbaijani historiography there is a tendency to call Tats (regardless of language) a settled, agricultural, and urban population in opposition to the nomadic Turks. See Boris Miller, Taty, ikh rasselenie i govory (Baku, 1929) at http://www.miacum.ru/docs/taty/index.html (accessed April 9, 2020); Aidyn Balaev, Etnoiazykovye protsessy v Azerbaidzhane v XIX-XX vv (Baku 2005). Therefore, for their lifestyle Tats are sometimes equated with Sarts. For more information see Sergei Abashin, “Problema sartrov v russkoi istoriografii v XIX—pervoi chetverti XX v.,” in Natsionalizmy v Srednei Azii: v poiskakh identichnosti (St. Petersburg, 2007), 95–176.

38 Tumanov, Baku i ego okrestnosti, 64.

39 Gilles Authier “New Strategies for Relative Clauses in Azeri an Apsheron Tat,” In Volker Gast and Holger Diessel, eds., Clause Linkage in Cross-Linguistic Perspective: Data-Drive Approaches to Cross-Clausal Syntax (Berlin, 2012), 225–52; Aleksandr Griunberg, Iazyk severoazerbaidzhanskikh tatov (Leningrad, 1963).

40 The Baku district covered the Absheron Peninsula, as well as other Azerbaijani territories along the Caspian Sea, which are adjacent to it. The division into groups was made based on the native language. In addition to the Tats, Azerbaijanis also lived in the Baku district (34.7% in the census are indicated as “Tatars”), as well as Russians 24.0%, Armenians 12.3%, Persians 2.6%, Germans 1.8%, and Jews 1.1%. See Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis΄ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1987 goda. 61. Bakinskaia guberniia, Nikolai Troinitskii, ed. (Sankt-Peterburg, 1897–1905, at https://www.prlib.ru/item/436609 (accessed April 13, 2020).

41 The map is compiled on the basis of Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis΄ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1897 goda, at http://ikalto.com/librarium/map-etno-baku.jpg (accessed April 13, 2020).

42 Griunberg, Iazyk severoazerbaidzhanskikh, 6.

43 Ibid., 6.

44 Miller, Taty, ikh rasselenie.

45 H. M., 26-year-old civil servant, interview, Baku, 2015; S. W., 32-year-old interpreter, interview, Baku, 2016; H. W., 35-year-old, journalist, interview, Baku, 2016.

46 A bastion of devout Shia Muslims neighbors with Mashtaga kend Nardaran. Nardaran is home to a madrasa as well as the Rahima Khanim Mosque, a large Shia mosque built in the late 1990s over the tomb of Rahima Khanim, the sister of Imam Reza, which is the spiritual center of the Azerbaijani people.

47 V. M., 41-year-old film studio director, interview, Baku, 2013.

48 Deborah Wong, Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Performance (Chicago, 2001), 249.

49 Ibid.

50 Dastgah (dəstgah)—is a collection of all the sections traditionally included in this mugham; melodic materials based on several related mugham frets that unfold sequentially and form a certain system.

51 Ghazal (qəzəl)—a genre and form of poetry, popular in the Middle Eastern region, including in Azerbaijan. It is composed in different meters of aruz. Usually consisting of 5–12 couplets (bayts). Two lines of the first bayt rhyme; in the subsequent bayts, each second line rhymes with the first and the second lines of the first bayt according to the sequence: aa ba ca da.

52 Deyishme in other Turkic languages is often called aytysh, aytys, or atyshma.

53 Abbasqulu Nəcәfzade, Nizami Rəmzi, Mahnılar və qəzəllər (Baku, 2002); Trans. Zulaim Zakariyya, Meykhana: The Poetics of Time and Space (Masters thesis, University of Oslo, 2012), 43, at https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/34226 (accessed October 17, 2019).My lovely love, beauty in loveThe extract of my love, beauty in jewelsYour absence made my heart huntYou are the most beautiful deer of the mountains.

54 F. M., 39-year-old musician, interview, Baku, 2014.

55 Madrasa (Az.: mədrəsə)—educational institution, performing the function of a secondary school, whose graduates had the right to enter the university. Madrasas, since elementary schools—mektebs (Az. məktəb), historically existed at mosques. In these institutions, classical literature, natural and exact subjects were taught, most often in Persian, less often in Turkic (Azerbaijani). At the turn of the XIX and XX centuries, the majority of Muslim schools in the territory of Azerbaijan were closed by the Russian authorities, which led to the fact that in 1917 the literate population of Azerbaijan was 6 percent of men and 0.1 percent of women, see Mieczysław Lepecki, Sowiecki Kaukaz. Podróż do Gruzji, Armenii i Azerbejdżanu (Warsaw, 1935), 134. The secular education system, in turn, was formed only during the Soviet Union.

56 Nizami Ganjavi (Nizami Gəncəvi) and Khagani (Xaqani Şirvani) were twelfth-century Middle Eastern poets; Fuzuli (Məhəmməd Füzuli) was a sixteenth-century Middle Eastern poet and philosopher. All three are considered among the most important national poets and moral authorities in Azerbaijani.

57 Can be translated as “a ghazal master.”

58 The fact that the ghazals of Aliagha Vahid were equal to Fuzuli himself is also written in almost all the articles published on Azerbaijani portals. For comparison, here are just a few titles: “Vakhid—Poet, Gazel΄khan,” Nash Baku, February 22, 2018, at https://tinyurl.com/ujmoxkb (accessed April 13, 2020); Vugar Imanov, “Velikii gazel΄khan Aliaga Vakhid—vecher filosofii, muzyki i poezii,” Trend.az, February 19, 2016, at https://www.trend.az/life/culture/2496528.html (accessed April 13, 2020); “Statue of Aliaga Vahid,” Baku Travel Guide April 20, 2018, at https://bakutravelguide.com/statue-of-aliaga-vahid/ (accessed April 13, 2020).

59 Oksana Bulanova, “Aliaga Vakhid—velikii Gazel΄khan,” Ekho—obshchestvenno-politicheskoe obozrenie Azerbaidzhana, February 18, 2017, at http://ru.echo.az/?p=56784 (accessed April 13, 2020).

60 For more detailed information, see Zakariyya, Meykhana: The Poetics, 54–61.

61 A. M., 45-year-old representative of the scientific establishment, interview, Baku, 2013.

62 A. M., 58-year-old research staff member, interview, Baku, 2014.

63 Martin Stokes, “Music, Fate and State: Turkey’s Arabesk Debate,” Middle East Report, no. 160, Special issue on Turkey in the Age of Glasnost (September–October 1989): 27–30; John M. O’Connell, “A Resounding Issue: Greek Recordings of Turkish Music, 1923–1938,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 37, no. 2 (December 2003): 200–16.

64 Raphaela Lewis, Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey (New York, 1988). Nancy Micklewright, ‘“Musicians and Dancing Girls:’ Images of Women in Ottoman Miniature Painting,” in Madeline C. Zilfi, ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden, 1997), 153–168.

65 Abdurrakhman Dzhami, “Gazeli,” in Iosif Braginskii, ed., Irano-tadzhikskaia poeziia. Seriia pervaia, (Moscow: 1974), 21, at http://www.wysotsky.com/0009/109.htm#123 (accessed April 13, 2020). Original: “Mne chuzhdoi stala medrese, i khanaka mne ne nuzhna: Obitel΄yu molitv moikh otnyne stala meykhana.”

66 I use the word “party” to describe an informal group of people (musicians, publicists, academics, journalists, etc.) who are involved in an activity together; in this case, they strive to make meykhana known as meykhana, or bedie.

67 T. M., 69-year-old writer, interview, Baku, 2013.

68 Meaning the following publications: Süleyman Səfәrov, Satiragit Tjatrosunda deyilmiş Vahidin Meyxən әl әri (Baku, 1925); Əhməd Anatollu, Qupletl әr, Bütün dünya işçiləri birləşin! (Baku, 1925); Əhmәd Anadollu, Qupletl әr “Şapalaq,” 3-ncü hissə (Baku, 1927); Bağır Cabarzadә, Qupletl әr (Baku, 1927); Əhmәd Anadollu, Kupletl әr, Çuvalduz, II tәbi, (Baku, 1930).

69 The Bakuvian weddings, also called traditional Azerbaijani weddings, in contrast to the modern, urban weddings are organized only in rural areas. Depending on the geographical location, it may have different characteristics. At Absheron, traditional weddings are usually held in large tents, men are separate from women and children. Meykhana is read in the men’s tent.

70 N. M., 42-year-old, bedie representative, Baku, 2014. Similar information can be found in an article of the Azerbaijani writer and employee of Baku State University, Aziza Djafarzade (Əzizə Cəfərzadə). In the publication titled “What does the word bədahətən mean?,” the professor interprets the term bedie: “Bedie” (bədihə) means a beautiful word, told impromptu, without preparation; a witty poem told impromptu, Əzizə Cəfərzadə, “Bədahətən nə Deməkdir?,”Mədəniyyət (2002): 5–18.

71 J. M., 45-year-old meykhana representative, interview, Baku, 2013.

72 A. M., 58-year-old research staff member, interview, Baku, 2014.

73 Sumgait is located 30km North of Baku, with a population of 284,600.

74 V. M., 51-year-old actor and academic teacher, interview, Baku, 2012.