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Feathered Remnants
- Oregon State University Press
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146 Feathered Remnants The first bird I saw upon awakening in Central Asia was a common myna. Perched on a high wall, it contributed its brown, white, and olive to the roses’ coral and the blushing orange of persimmons in the courtyard of the Atlas Guesthouse. Several more of the yellow-billed, yellow-legged mynas, like robust thrushes with cowlicks, joined the first. Over the next several days, I seldom climbed up or down the wrought-iron spiral staircase to my room without one or more mynas hanging about, or slicing open the Asian air. Like black kites over the Ganges, egrets on the industrial fill of San Francisco Bay,or kestrels haunting the verges of interstates,motorways, and autobahns,these mynas bespoke a long indwelling with people in their millions,turning the dense human overlay to their advantage.They became a signature of the handsome, post-Soviet city of Dushanbe. One of the measures by which I’ve always parsed the days and places of life has been the birds that have accompanied me, not just as ticks on a life list, but as companions in the business of being somewhere--in this case, Tajikistan. I’d come here with Laurie Lane-Zucker, director of the Triad Institute, to teach a ten-day seminar on place-based writing for the Aga Khan Humanities Project.My writers were twenty-one university students and professors from cities in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.“Stan” means “land” in all these Turkic languages, and we had come together to discuss the land itself, our place and lifeways upon it, and how writing can help conserve it in the twilight of traditional farming and in the glare of fierce global change. We worked in both English and Russian, and sometimes Tajik, Kyrgyz, and Kazakh, employing gifted and hard-working translators. Communication was painstaking,deliberate,and exciting.An exercise could take all afternoon.When we attempted transliteration of the last paragraphs of Lolita,these writers made a literary,moral,and esthetic leap entirely new in their experience.And when I played Nabokov’s poem “The Swift” for them in the author’s own voice, in both Russian and English, they were 147 Feathered Remnants beside themselves with delight. Following his example, I asked my writers to attend to the birds, because the ways they adapt to the land can signify much about our own potential for adaptation, because of their inherent beauty and interest, and because the colorful mynas were all around us, everywhere we looked. Returning to the guesthouse after my first day in Dushanbe,I found the evening sky full of crows. Carrion crows, crossing the sky back and forth to who knows where, enlivened the smoky dusk with their dark shimmer and coarse exhortations. Among the “caws,” I heard another corvid song that I well remembered from my years in England:the falsetto,two-part call and response of the onomatopoeically named jackdaw.“Jack!” one would call,and“Daw”answered another.Scores of these compact black birds with their dapper,dove-gray heads spun among the clouds of crows.Venus hung above the treetops, blazing as I’d never seen her before, with a star just above. Suddenly, as I was glassing the planet and her companion, one of the jackdaws cut right betweenVenus and the star: a gift from the sky such as you’ll never see unless you watch birds.You’d miss it too if you fell for the common trap of despising crows for their racket, ubiquity, and cheek. Their success is worth attending to: there is a reason they say that England will last as long as there are ravens at the Tower. Corvids persist in spite of all we dish out. For organisms lacking the ecological chutzpah of crows and mynas, survival is dodgy on the tattered margins of heavy human occupation. On my only previous visit to Central Asia, to Turkmenistan (then the Turkmenian S.S.R.) in 1978, I took a boat trip on the Kara Kum Canal. Curtains of reeds blocked the view of the endless desert beyond. Even where camels trampled the banks to drink at the murky water it was hard to see beyond the mountains of cotton stacked for transport, sometimes a hundred feet high.Yet there were also chartreuse-and-blue bee-eaters cruising back and forth across the bow, a brilliant and endlessly engaging procession from reed to reed. It was good to know that the bee-eaters had...