What is your opinion on a man who, without mercy, whips two women and a boy? One woman is his wife, a mother of his children, and the second is rumoured as his mistress. A boy is his son. In real life, there are no words but expletives there. In fiction, the man is a villain who gets a fair punishment at the end of the story to underline that the penalty for misdeeds is unavoidable. One of the distinctive principles of socialist realism literature is didacticism. Based on that principle, Kyrgyz Soviet writers portray family violence as antagonists who take responsibility for their actions. However, things are not the same in the book of Kazat Akmatov.
The book is the short novel "Munabya." The paradoxes of that masterpiece could make an endless list, and what happens in that scene is one of them. A narrator - an adult son of a protagonist, memorizes the event from the distant past:" I saw Mama with her strong hands full of Munabya's hair trying to drag the woman by the head. Mama's face burned with fury, as if she was avenging herself on a murderer. Munabiya was younger than Mama and very strong, but she did not fight back. Instead, she tried only to free herself from Mama's grasp." Then he recalls how he joins the fight attacking defenceless Mynabiya, and the outrageous brawl raises to epic proportions. The furious mother uses her hands, feet trying to wreck the rival. The sharing mother's rage child struggles with all of his might to beat the woman avoiding harming him.
The onlookers truly enjoy entertainment, cheering, laughing, and whistling. Most of them are drunk. The show abruptly ends up when another show participant enters. " On the height of victorious revenge," the boy feels excruciating pain after braided whip snaps across his back. He turns and sees his father - Quiet Januzak is chasing and mercilessly whipping Mama and Munabiya.
This scandalously shameful scene is the first episode where the jeweller Januzak, the novel's hero, confronts the people of the ail. At once, the crowd, mostly women, are shocked to see the pale, contorted with rage face of the thin bony man and fall silent. When Mama runs and hides behind women's backs, Januzak realizes that further actions could provoke the not less shameful continuation of the previous fighting; he leaves the room grinding teeth. The women triumphantly laugh in solidarity with Mama and scoff at Januzak again: "That timid loner's got one hell of temper!"
The boy rases away from the festive crowd enjoying his father's defeat. The father is looking for someone to release his fury. On his way home, the boy attacks Munabiya one more time: "Emboldened by the realization that she could not hear me because I was barefoot, I run up behind her and pul her skirt as hard as I could. Then I turned to look at her, as I have done something particularly worthy. Munabiya had just been publicly whipped by my father, and now she was being burned alive by the shame of it." Then the boy witnesses a father's meet with the humiliated and ashamed woman.
The narrator tells about the events of his childhood from the point of view of a mature adult. He left the countryside for the city many years ago. As a city dweller, he finds out the actions and words of his village mates, parents, and relatives are weird and pretty hard to understand. Moreover, after many years of reflection, he has realized that the father whipped three of them to abrupt the awful and embarrassing scandal. Furthermore, he is now confident that the father has not had another option to save his honour.
Kazat Akmatov's use of violent scenes has thematic and symbolic meanings. The deterioration of the ethic and moral values in Soviet times is one of the most concerning issues for the writer. In that scenes of cruel abuse, he shows that the violence of men, women, children is common for anyone in the village. The mother, who is supposed to be calm, respectful, and wise, fight no shame and mercy with another woman in public. Instead of stopping the child from joining to fight, the crowd cheerfully laugh, shout, and indulge in entertainment. The father ferociously whips three of them, and nobody bothers to intervene.
Akmatov masterfully develops the novel's characters by writing about the tremendous amount of cruelty they are committing toward each other. The narrator characterizes the mother as a pillar of their household - hardworking, tirelessly mending family, house, livestock woman. Meanwhile, she physically punishes children for small and big wrongdoings without hesitation, but they do not mind. There is a true mother-children bond between them. Portraying the mother's abusive behaviour as typical, the author asserts that violence is a part of everyday life in Kyrgyz ail.
Two personages differ from the ail population on that matter. They are Munabiya and the father - Quite Januzak. Munabiya is a beautiful young woman living alone on the same street as the Januzak's family, appearing only in two episodes: in the scandalous fight and culmination episode of the novel's central personage's funeral. The writer underlines that when the mother and boy viciously attack her, she does not retaliate: " Munabiya was younger than Mama and very strong, but she did not fight back. Instead, she tried only to free herself from Mama's grip." In an attempt to stop the boy from attacking, she is careful not to harm him.
Both women behave differently after the brawl: Mama hides behind the villagers' backs, openly enjoying the show and humiliation of her husband, sad, ashamed Munabiya immediately leaves the event in tears.
The father seemingly is different from the people around him. Januzak was a jeweller well-known for his high-quality artistic works. He spent days without talking to anyone. The narrator vividly recalls the non-stop tapping of a small hammer sounding from his workshop and his father's attitude while working. As an adult, he assumes that the father put in jewellery created himself, his dreams, joyful moments, and reflections on this reality. Akmatov portrays Januzak as a beautiful human in tragic conflict with his surroundings.
His wife and the ail peoples think of Janizak as a weak, timid loner. The son knew that father " was nothing of that sort. When he was angry nothing could stop him, not fear of his own death, and certainly not someone's else's. But to be fair, it was rare for him to get this angry." What does angry Quiet Januzak? The answer is simple: when human dignity is humiliated. In analyzed above episodes, Januzak rages over the antihuman nature of the fight, which is not compatible with his understandings of dignified women behaviour. He whips his wife because he knows that the woman on the high point of wild rage would not listen and, probably, turns on her husband. Januzak does not want to
entertain the gleeful crowd further. The author put the novel's hero in a tragic situation. The tragedy is an absence of choice for Januzak. He has to use violence to stop his wife's abusive behaviour; to save his honour, he has to whip the son and the woman he loves ruthlessly.
What happens after the scandal has a significant meaning to Akmatov's ideas, and he changes a point of view in that episode. Here, the narrator is whipped by his father defeated boy running from the battlefield. When he sees that the father catches up with Munabiya, the boy wishes he hit the woman again, and what he sees is that the father bows his head and says some words. Due to the importance of the scene, we give it as the author has described: "Perhaps he was criticizing her, or asking for forgiveness. I did not understand what was happening. Munabiya looked at him sadly; her eyes wide and filled with tears. Then she turned sharply and walked away from him along a narrow path that cut through a field of clover. Father made a strange motion as if he wanted to go after her, but then he stopped, glanced with annoyance at the people who were staring at him from a distance, and made straight for me with a threatening look on his face." That scene has a deep symbolic meaning, and the symbolism and his role in the novel are topics for the next post.