Tadshikische Teestube

[imomus]

Berlin's Tajikistan Teahouse overlooks I.M. Pei's German Historical Museum, but this orientalist interior has been in Mitte (hidden in the Palais am Festungsgraben, next door to the Gorki Theatre) much longer; the Soviet Union gifted the tearoom to socialist East Germany.



Amongst the Tadjik murals you'll find a cultural map of how the USSR looked at the time; the Stans are the exotic sector of the empire, southern satellites buffering Mother Russia from Iran, India and China. Culturally, though, the borderline is very porous: Tadjik lamps look Chinese, their customs overlap with the Afghans', their population is closely related to the Iranians. Since 1990 Tajikistan, riven by civil war, has become the poorest of the Stans. The removal of the Soviet administration left a power vacuum, with ethnic and tribal conflict destroying much of the mountainous country's infrastructure. The return of religions repressed under communism didn't help, either.



The Soviet era was actually good for the cultural identity of the Stans -- a BBC Nomad report describes how the Russians built culture houses in the form of "wooden fairy tale castles" in amongst the brutalist concrete administrative buildings of their Central Asian regions, places like the Museum of Kazak Musical Instruments. The interplay of Stan and Soviet was mutually-enhancing, a forerunner of globalization's local-global identity dialectic -- a theme we play the subsidized harp about quite a bit here at Click Opera.

I was introduced to the Tadjik teahouse last weekend by journalist David Robert Smith. After removing my shoes and ordering a pot of "Margret Autumnal Daarjeeling", I got chatting to the man next to me, a friend of David's. He told me he was a musicologist specializing in decadence and neurosis and their reflection in 19th century classical music. "A musicologist, not an ethnomusicologist?" I asked, trying not to sound too disappointed. (I suppose you drop the "ethno" prefix when you're discussing the white ethnicity.) We got talking about Freud's patients in Vienna, and how the neuroses they suffered (hysterically frozen arms and the like) have all more or less disappeared from the world, only to be replaced by new ones like anorexia and bulimia. Afterwards we crossed the road and saw quite possibly the most boring opera ever made, the Faust story drowned in a sub-Schoenbergian soup.

I felt more at home in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic recreated in the Tadshikische Teestube than sitting through the stiff, bombastic European culture in the opera house across the road. I guess white European high culture brings out the ethnomusicologist in me.

Comments

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Which opera was it?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Pascal Dusapin's Fausus, the Last Night (http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2006/01/pascal-dusapins-new-faust.html). Horrible music, horrible set (a huge tilted rotating clock), horrible acting, just skull-crushing boredom for the longest 90 minutes of my life. And indeed the musicologist's life, too. We were six people, and we all hated it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Faustus, the Last Night, that should read.

[(Anonymous)]

Yawn.

Doesn't matter what the subject matter is, you can always trust old Momus to drag out exactly the same dialectic, over and over again.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It is a new opera?? I had no idea people were still making operas. Except rock operas or some such thing.

Re: hysterics; I had a friend in primary school who made herself psychosomatically lame because her parents would never allow her to outdo her brothers at anything. I daresay it still happens quite a lot among the very religious, where demands on women are different.

[idealforcolors.livejournal.com]

The Soviet era was good for the cultural identity of the 'stans if you consider Soviet ideology forced into place, combined with national culture shaped and handed down from above in an attempt to differentiate the USSR from Western colonial oppressors and form a social consciousness through national identity in places considered too undeveloped to have a proletarian identity, to be good for the cultural identity of the 'stans. The fact that legal privileges were established for the titular ethnic group regardless of other ethnic groups residing in each country (keep in mind, boundaries were not clear in the area before the USSR), or that the USSR did its best to erase forms of local religious tradition it considered barbaric (but perhaps you agree, those aren't safe parts of culture worth keeping?) while preserving safer artifacts of cultural history like traditional musical instruments, ought to count for something too. I would say mutually-enhancing global-local dialectic was at least equally mixed with central planning of identity from a colonial power that really didn't want to call itself that. I'm not saying there were no helpful aspects of the USSR, or that it was all oppression and no mutual development, and I'm sorry to be the soviet history buff jumping down your throat - I'm just saying it's a little more complex than your explanation.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

a) Engage with it, then. Pull it in the direction you personally think is more interesting, fruitful, amusing.

b) Go to one of the internet's other pages.

c) Sit here and yawn uselessly. Or start your own blog (http://imomus.livejournal.com)! You can yawn in technicolor! You can have a personality (ie repeatedly come back to themes that fascinate you)! It's free! It's great!

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, serious question: Why do you blog, and why do you blog quite so intensely? I mean, just about every day for the past two or three years, that's an inordinate amount of time devoted to it, surely far more than you devote to your artistic enterprises. I don't know many people who consider themselves artists who blog, and I don't know any who do it as intensely as you do. If you first and foremost consider yourself an artist (and perhaps you don't, I don't know), spending so much time blogging seems strange to me. Blogs aren't art, no one's going to remember a blog entry five days after they read it, let alone five years. Are you really content to be primarily known as a blogger rather than an artist? Are you really happy to spend more time on your blog than on your music? Or are you kind of hooked on the immediate response you get from a blog?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's vastly more complex, of course. But I think the subsequent history of Tajikistan does show that small differences can be the most murderous. It's the same thing that happened in Iraq: remove a central tyranny, see a bloodbath, suddenly see the good side of the central tyranny when you understand the forces it was suppressing (and yes, fervent religious devotion is one of those forces in both Iraq and Tajikistan).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Why are people so meta this week?

Short answer: always kept diaries. Love the idea of a virtual seminar (next best thing to running your own art school or university). Have bad memory, want to remember what I did. Like researching things -- learned about Tajikistan writing this entry.

[(Anonymous)]

researching things = looking it up on wikipedia?

[(Anonymous)]

As marvellous as your previous post was, I was surprised to see a self-professed grammarian spell Millennium wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

To be honest, I'd much rather read your 1980 diaries. If I wanted to know about Tajikistan, why would I come to you?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This is an entry about a Tadzik teahouse in Berlin. It seems to be the most voluminous entry about said teahouse on the internet. Anyone coming to Berlin might well like to know about this place. People who read Click Opera come to Berlin, and ask me regularly what I recommend.

The entry also chipped out two ideas I found interesting: that the Stans' relationship to the Soviet Union has a lot in common with the current globalization in terms of national identity. And that the distinction between musicology and ethnomusicology depends on an understanding that white Europeans are blind to the fact that they, too, have an ethnicity.

I actually started blogging my 1980 diaries elsewhere on the net and stopped because they were way too pompous and oedipal.

[(Anonymous)]

I actually started blogging my 1980 diaries elsewhere on the net

What's the URL?

Pompous and oedipal are par for the course for a 19 year old, as I'm sure potential readers would understand. Alternatively you could edit out the most embarrassing bits...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's new. The author came and took a bow at the end.

[(Anonymous)]

Anyone coming to Berlin might well like to know about this place. People who read Click Opera come to Berlin, and ask me regularly what I recommend.

Maybe you could set up a profitable sideline as a tourist guide, Momus!

[idealforcolors.livejournal.com]

The Soviet Union did have a very strong stabilizing effect on the area, and its collapse is definitely a huge factor in the growth of Islamic insurgence in Central Asia. But stability has its price (e.g. suppression of political and religious dissidents - and in Central Asia early on, those weren't separate categories), and it was far from democratic in its support of traditional cultures, giving money and support specifically to areas it approved and attacking those it didn't with propaganda and reforms. A lot of the attitude of of nineteenth and early twentieth century Western anthropology guided policy, rather than contribution and dialogue from the people (even though the central planners were really very well-meaning). I see the contemporary local-global identity dialectic as much more of a dialectic to which the local contributes than the very centrally planned Soviet policy.

There are a couple neat things I've read about Soviet nationality policy that reminded me of your note about ethnomusicology vs. musicology - specifically, how most of the republics were considered representatives of traditional cultures that could only come into communism after their own cultures were recognized apart from imperialism, but the Russian republic was basically considered without a culture once you took out the capitalist elements, so Russians were to become the proletariat immediately. An article you might like is called "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, Or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," by Yuri Slezkine.

And I would like to visit that teahouse!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I had no idea people were still making operas.

They do--but instead of new operas, mostly what gets made now is "Regietheater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regietheater)", that is to say, remaking old operas in a way that reflects the director's hackneyed political "critique" (as if anyone should give a damn). It's "radical" and "cutting edge", which is to say these directors all "transgress" in exactly the same way--sheep who fancy themselves wolves. It's insensitive, lazy, and predictably dispiriting.

One will often see poised, frothy, lighthearted fare like Mozart turned into hateful, bombastic pastiche: prostitute’s nipples sliced off, masturbation, urination as foreplay, forced oral sex, Quentin Tarantino–esque bloodbaths...as if that was actually an artistic risk in our current culture. Yawn.

I want to see an opera director make an opera so sunny, humane, gentle, plaintive and sweet that the cynical critics universally pan it. Imagine their sneers when confronted with the joy of unabashed artifice and glamor! An opera inspired by Erasmus Darwin's "Loves of the Plants", perhaps.

[onigaishimas.livejournal.com]

Are there any Tajiks working in Berlin these days? Over 1/5 of the population works abroad, most of them in Russia, but some do make it to Europe. It would be interesting to know whether the recent transplants view the tea house as a Soviet ethno theme park or something, for lack of better word, relatable.

[rodebrecht.livejournal.com]

Unreliable tourist guide!

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

I heard that the soviet union was good for Tyva (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyva) too. Back then everyone had a job but now the region seems to be a bit overlooked.

It is quite interesting that Putin ventured to Tyva (http://en.tuvaonline.ru/2007/08/16/1946_putin-in-tuva.html) earlier in august!

Oh, and why doesn't we westerners get to know about their forest fires (http://en.tuvaonline.ru/2007/09/04/5801_fires.html)?

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I know that. Holland is (sadly) the absolutele epicentre of that. They make everything shoutey and harsh.

It´s a shame you can´t speak Dutch, there was a hilarious sketch by some comedians in the 90s about that.

Your analysis of it is very good, though, I agree wholeheartedly.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

interjection: yo i like this new click opera icon!

[hulegu.livejournal.com]

I was on the verge of posting my own thoughts on Momus's post but you got there first! great comments, btw. Amongst other things, the Tajiks were considered, objectively and subjectively, the most literate and culturally-advanced of the various Soviet peoples. After all, Rumi (claimed as national poet of Iran and Turkey, inter alia) was born on the territory of modern-day Tajikistan, and the great cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, which were contentiously awarded to the Uzbek SSR (and therefore are now in modern-day Uzbekistan), were traditionally centres of Persian culture. Indeed, Central Asia is a wonderful case study of how European concepts of nationalism (what was it Stalin defined a nation as - a historically contiguous community based on cultural, economic and linguistic lines, or somesuch, I can't remember the precise words) were imposed on an area without recognised borders or national identities.

[directbetween.livejournal.com]

We have a similar Tajik teahouse from in Boulder, Colorado. Could it be that teahouses are Tajikistan's primary cultural export?

http://www.boulderteahouse.com/

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It could well be!