That famous crash, immortalised in countless YouTube clips, cemented Abdoujaparov’s legend as one of cycling’s great mavericks. It should be little surprise, then, to encounter this already larger-than-life character swerving his way into fiction. In Of Strangers and Bees, the latest novel from Hamid Ismailov to be translated into English, one of the novel’s protagonists goes to meet Abdoujaparov at his home on the shores of Italy’s Lake Garda. Sheikhov, an exiled Uzbek writer living in Paris, receives a phone call from a man called “Thierry Somebody,” who is making a documentary about the Tour de France. Thierry asks him if he will act as interpreter for Abdoujaparov, and Sheikhov readily accepts, excited both to have a proper job for once and at the chance to interview a sporting celebrity. As Thierry educates him about Abdoujaparov’s ferocious cycling style, Sheikhov sees in it the ways of a wily player in a game of buzkashi, Central Asia’s goat-carcass-chasing answer to polo. As an exile, Sheikhov’s homeland is never far from his mind.
As I read this passage about Abdoujaparov, my mind began to wander back to my own first encounter with those five syllables. Like Sheikhov, I too was embarking on a new work venture, although in my case it did not take me to the shores of Lake Garda but across the river Clyde to Glasgow’s south side. I was preparing to carry out a traffic survey in Pollok Country Park, which is home to the Burrell Collection, donated to the city in 1944 by Sir William Burrell. Among its treasures are a number of stunning suzani textiles from Bukhara in Uzbekistan. Perhaps this was on my mind when, as my erstwhile colleague and I cycled between the park’s countless entrances, the subject of that Central Asian country arose. “Whenever someone mentions Uzbekistan,” he said, “I always think of Abdoujaparov.” I stared back blankly, insomuch as you can stare blankly whilst riding a bicycle. “The Tashkent Terror?” he tried again. Still nothing. But by the time we reached the end of our circumnavigation, I, much like Sheikhov, had received a thorough education.
I remember feeling a sense of the surreal as we chatted in Pollok Park about the Tashkent Terror while nearby people were gazing in awe at Bukharan textiles. How had these disparate elements, these quiet emissaries from two of Uzbekistan’s great cities, come together that day in Glasgow? Looking back on that day through the prism of Ismailov’s writing, however, their coalescence seems far less strange. Reading his work can make the world feel very small. Small, and endlessly intersecting, like the spokes on a bicycle. This quality may well be familiar to readers of works like The Devils’ Dance and Gaia, Queen of Ants, but never is it more in evidence than in Of Strangers and Bees. Here Ismailov’s characters cross borders, take flight, and incant their way across continents, shrinking the whole of civilisation into the novel’s pages.
Sheikhov is forced to leave Uzbekistan by the new, or not so new, powers amassing in the country as it sets out on its post-Soviet path. He travels through Germany, France, America, and beyond, but as the episode with Abdoujaparov shows, his exile is always punctuated with the familiar. Whether he’s chatting in Tajik with a pair of New York taxi drivers (“those immigrants from Holy Bukhara couldn’t get enough of me”) or reading the works of Uzbek poet Navoi to the French literati, Sheikhov always manages to find sustenance in his native soil and the culture that took root there. “I have been trying to describe life in foreign lands,” he reflects, “but in the end, just the same, I return home.”
Sheikhov’s wanderings, though, are not just a tearing away from his home, but also a drawing towards something altogether more mysterious. A dream has left him convinced that Ibn Sina—or Avicenna, the philosopher perhaps best known in the West as the father of modern medicine—did not die in the eleventh century but in fact survives to this day. The search for traces of the thousand-year-old philosopher becomes the driving force in Sheikhov’s nomadic existence. Cultural and linguistic identities in Central Asia have always been manifold, fluid, and in recent times, hotly contested. Thus, the question of who, if anyone, can lay claim to the legacy of Ibn Sina, born near Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan, but then formed part of the Samanid Empire, is far from simple. Persian, Islamic, Central Asian, Uzbek—whichever epithet we choose for Ibn Sina, Sheikhov clearly feels a kinship with the wandering scholar. His ostensibly farfetched quest provides a connection to a land now off limits to him, and a past that transcends the country’s troubled present. As he puts it, “I sink into the vortex of meaningless events, and I try, always, to find some meaning in them.”
Sheikhov’s journey is just one of the novel’s three narrative strands, and despite the spectral presence of the immortal Ibn Sina it is easily the most conventional. The structure of the book has been called labyrinthine, but I prefer the term used by translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega in her introduction: multilayered. This term better evokes the interpretative hierarchy of the novel’s three distinct strands, each of which requires a different kind of reading. Jumping from strand to strand, rather layer to layer, the orthodox melts into the magical, which in turn melts into the allegorical, making reading Of Strangers and Bees a sometimes dizzying, dervish-like experience.
The protagonist of the novel’s second layer has an identity as solid as the shifting desert sands he crosses in the course of the novel. We encounter him, now Ibn Sina, now simply the Stranger, as he, like Sheikhov, wanders the Earth. In his adventures he crosses paths with artists and poets, and runs rings round sheiks, pashas, sultans, and grand viziers. These adventures are told in episodic form, leading Fairweather-Vega to compare them to a new collection of Arabian Nights. At times, his story coincides with what we know of the real Ibn Sina. Refusing to travel to the great city of Balkh at the behest of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, he instead makes his way across the burning desert to Gorgan and then to Rey, a journey that occurred about a thousand years before Ismailov incorporated it into his novel. It’s somewhat more doubtful, however, that the real Ibn Sina made it quite as far as Tokyo and Florence, as the Stranger does. Nor, we might imagine, did he actually transport an Alexandrian beekeeper to Baghdad in a single night, strong though his mental powers undoubtedly were.
While a beekeeper plays an important part in the story of the Stranger, the novel’s third and most surreal layer has at its heart an actual bee, whose name is Sina (not to be confused with his namesake, Ibn Sina). In these sections of the book, Ismailov’s descriptive skill, and that of his translator Fairweather-Vega, comes into its own, as the narrator brings Sina’s minute world into vivid focus. The hubbub of the hive resembles the “mosques in Kum,” spiders appear “as if they were simply reflected off the surface of a samovar,” and another bee behaves like “the idle master of ceremonies at a typical Uzbek wedding.” Of course, as his name might suggest, Sina is no ordinary bee. “Memory is consciousness infused with honey,” writes Ismailov. We might speculate that in Sina’s case, consciousness has been infused with something yet more potent, perhaps the hallucinatory “mad honey” made by the beekeepers of Turkey’s Kaçkar Mountains, or even the soul of a wandering Stranger. Whatever his particular infusion, his mind is populated by visions that extend far beyond the walls of the “dark, close, secluded hive” of his birth.
“Thank God those humans did not understand the language of bees,” says the narrator of Sina’s tale. No surprise, then, that it is in these passages that readers must work their hardest to grapple with the novel’s meaning. Fortunately, humans have always found bees a rich source not just of honey but of metaphor as well. They appear in the Qur’an, and were written about by ancients from Aesop to Aristotle, not to mention Ibn Sina himself. Later, the worker bee would prove an all-but-irresistible image for writers from Marx to Kollontai, making its own mark on the Soviet state. Now, however, the imminent risk of their extinction means that the bee most often stands metonymically for our impending ecological collapse. No matter what, the bee is a palimpsest, overlaid with meaning. Could Sina’s tale reference the plight of the individual in the workers’ state for which its hive was once a model? Does Sina represent the sublimation of the ego, the Sufi ideal, distilled into its purest form? Or is Sina just a little bee with big ideas?
Behind these more probing philosophical questions lies a funny novel. Ismailov has a strong sense of the absurd that he employs to great effect when playing with the relationship between the Uzbek language and that of its more hegemonic neighbour, Russia. At one point, Sheikhov is travelling, or staggering, from Tashkent to London, via Moscow, loaded with sixty kilos (or twenty-five volumes) of Pushkin that his publisher has asked him to bring. The episode is pure slapstick, and it would be hard to imagine a better metaphor for the weight of Russian on the peripheral Soviet writer. Elsewhere, though, Sheikhov beautifully subverts this dynamic. When asked by his friend Boris to give a lecture on Russian literature at a school in Laon, near Reims in France, he begins: “Please allow me on behalf of my teachers Ivan Bunin and Anna Akhmatova . . . to thank you from the bottom of my heart.” However, he then continues, “Russian literature is a vast ocean, but I will begin on the far shore, with Uzbek literature.” Suffice to say, his feet remain very dry: the lecture is spent extolling the virtues of Uzbek, rather than Russian, literature, with neither Bunin nor Akhmatova getting a further mention. And Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Sheikhov asserts, were merely repeating what the Uzbek writer Navoiy had done long before.
Ismailov, of course, is as well versed as anyone in Russian literature, and writes in both Russian and Uzbek. His novels, though, quietly seek to grant Uzbek literature its place alongside that of its better-known neighbours. Indeed, Ismailov’s vibrant and cosmopolitan framing of his native culture stands in sharp contrast to the often clumsy and monochromatic version advocated by the powers that be in the country itself over the last twenty years. They have shown little desire to celebrate, or indeed tolerate, Uzbekistan’s cultural and linguistic diversity as embodied, for example, by its large Tajik minority (though there are some signs this is beginning to change). Ismailov’s books, meanwhile, are a compendium of Central Asian culture, and reading him can leave you with an overwhelming sense of all the names you wish you recognised. In Of Strangers and Bees, we encounter Navoiy, Jami, Mashrab, Rabguzi, Tagay Murad, and Muhammad Salih, to name just a few, alongside Choʻlpon and Abdulla Qodiriy (who will be familiar to readers of his previous work The Devils’ Dance), both of whom appeared in English for the first time in 2019. One has to be careful, of course, because Ismailov loves a literary game, and he also appears in the novel alongside at least one of his manifold literary pseudonyms. If you’re tempted to look up the history of one Sokrat Sharkiev, for example, you may be disappointed.
When Ismailov is first mentioned in Of Strangers and Bees, Sheikhov describes him as “writer, poet and translator.” Elsewhere, Sheikhov describes the branches of an olive tree as “something I had only ever encountered in García Lorca’s verses, as translated by Shavkat Rakhman.” It is significant that Ismailov, who is indeed also a translator, chooses to foreground translation in this way, and he is fortunate to have found someone as dedicated as Shelley Fairweather-Vega to bring Sheikhov’s wry humour and the general bewilderment of Sina the bee into English. She offers bold word choices, as when the Stranger enters a mysterious room where he feels the presence of shadow-like souls that, in Fairweather-Vega’s rendering, “began to keen.” With its Gaelic roots, “keen” is so much more evocative than the alternatives (lament? mourn? wail?) and highlights how Fairweather-Vega has unearthed the full riches of the English language in her translation.
In the introduction to Of Strangers and Bees, Fairweather-Vega describes her translation as “arguably at least as Uzbek as Avicenna,” juxtaposing the Uzbek novel, now in English, and the Latinate name of the Uzbek (or should that be Persian, Central Asian, Bukharan?) scholar. The ambiguity, humour, and self-deprecation in that one short statement, not to mention what it says about translation itself, a process easily as hard to pin down as any ancient philosopher, encapsulate so much of what is great about Of Strangers and Bees. I dare say Ibn Sina couldn’t have put it better himself.
