The Shrinking Aral (Poems)

THE SHRINKING ARAL [ A SEA EVAPORATING INTO A FOREST OF POSSIBILITIES ] Kristina Kim

Abstract​: In the last 70 years, the Aral Sea has been disappearing to the point of complete desertification, affecting the health, climate, economy, and vitality of the Central Asian people who depend on it. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, it was desiccated by the extensive irrigation practices of the USSR and subsequent leadership. What stands now is a far-stretching desert across the Karakalpakstan region of Uzbekistan, featuring ship graveyards, toxic dust storms, the displacement of families and communities— and yet, hope is still alive and thrashing. Through intergenerational storytelling, techno raves, and plans to grow a forest, a collective dream for a courageous existence is pursued. Capturing this perseverance (as well as the grief) through the combined perspectives of literature, journalism, photographs, and documentaries, my collection of poems and lyrical prose aims to re-imagine our current language surrounding topics of environmental devastation, disaster tourism, and hope, while practicing to re-render the past, present, and future existences of the Aral Sea alongside the cultural backdrop of the Central Asian steppe.

Fishing In An Invisible Sea - with snippets from a documentary of the same name

[ ​a boy ​- 10:08 ] My father and grandmother said that the sea was big.

It was full of fish that swam there.

They say there were lots of ships.

They swam and played with the foam of the waves.

Lying down by the sea.

Enjoying and watching ships coming and going.

I don’t believe them.

I haven’t seen this sea.

I cannot imagine it.

A mountain would laugh if you told it its body was once an endless pasture unable to gaze over the ends of its wispest grass? How do you tell a nine-year old a sea once billowed and danced on top of all this barrenness. A ballet of pike-perch and breams pirouetting from one end of the shore to the next? And at the end, post-encore, the ships would set off their horns in coordinated applause? The onlooking villagers never failing to witness the sea in its performance? How do you explain a world where the sun flirted with its reflection in the water’s glimmer. Or how the playful foam tickled any curious ankle leaving footprints on its shore. Is there a way to remember this version of the world without admitting it was lost. Is lost. A mouth is hot holding the words: ​sloshing / tides / ​and ​wet horizon​-- what grace is there in repeating the grief already dripping in your lap.

[ ​a man ​- ​31:03 ]​ You can only find meat in Kungrad, the closest big city But I don’t have money for the bus.

I will put all my effort into surviving here, I don’t want to move away Even if others move away, I will never leave this place.

I ate the bread of this land, lots of bread, How could I ever abandon this place?

a lepyoshka is a leavened Central Asian bread similar to naan : a disc-shaped beauty sprinkled with a rain of white sesame and black caraway : a fluffy blown up bagel with its middle still intact, but flattened to accentuate the raised ring of golden crust around it : M.F.K Fisher once called bread a ‘hypnotic business’ : she named it a type of ritual incomparable to an hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel : i wonder what god she visits : for the starving and impoverished, God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread : quote Gandhi : i wonder if it is the bread or the eating of it : the anticipation of its generous scent out the tandoor oven or the humble mouths chewing and chewing : when the healing begins at the tongue, around the gums, and down the throat, does it stay until the crumbs are also swallowed : when the hands that knead the dough are calloused, is there more flavour

[ an elder ​- 40:06 ​] The Aral Sea has dried up before.

It was not even called Aral at that time, it was called Six Wells.

Once, these six wells flooded and a sea appeared.

God knows what happens.

They say the earth changes every 50 years.

It is the wisdom of our ancestors.

Maybe the sea will come back in 50 years, I will not see it.

But maybe my grandsons will see it.

Before the Aral Sea dried up, it was not even called Aral; it was called a flooded God. Once, six seas appeared and well-- [ ] knows what happened. After the fifth one, I watched a child chug a thermos full of scorching jasmine, only to smile for holding a sea of her own. Even when it was boiling, she pretended the bottom of the ocean was calling her name. No one knows if she went. No one has stopped crying, dancing, singing. Every 50 years, our ancestors come back. Maybe their wisdom will change the earth. Maybe in 50 years, my grandsons will come and the sea will see them. I believe this.

[ ​again ​- 47:02 ] I often dream about the old times I dream that I was fishing in the boat But it’s useless now Everything is inside me, in my heart It comes back to me as a vision But all this is useless.

Anyways the only place I’ll sail now is to the grave.

I ​often ​dream ​about ​the old ​times I ​dream ​that ​I was fishing in ​the boat But ​it​ ’​s ​useless ​now Everything is ​inside me, ​in my heart It ​comes back to me as a vision But ​al​l this is useless.

Any​ways ​th ​ e only plac​e I’ll sail now is to the grave.

Where I Stand Before I Swim

As much as Central Asia is my birthplace, I never lived directly dependent on the Aral Sea. Not in the same way its shores have been home to entire villages. Any water that might’ve produced a shirt or meal I owned or ate, only means I’ve known the sea while either clothed or satiated.

Here I warn the reader of my Western lens. Every “I” injected alongside imagery that is not mine is a conscious nod to their rightful owners, both dead and alive. Any pain I express empathy for is garnered solely by the archived echoes of others’ wounds. When I write about devastation, I am only scratching the surface of the lived and living. When I speak of hope, I speak it while living next to the vast Atlantic.

I admit that walking up to its crashing foam and looking to where the horizon becomes a kiss between two blues, I try to imagine a dust bowl in its place and cannot. There is never a choking storm or fatal wind. Every breeze of salt is only that, a breeze.

So I must be lucky to not get what I want. The ocean stays put, unwavering in my request to see it as a morbid figment, and I am left to splash / dive / float / dunk my head into its coolness when the sun gets too close.

Here, water slips between my fingers reminding me that even when I am in it, it isn’t mine to hold.

Perhaps I am saying all of this to splay my guilt out like dirty laundry. I must be naked and naive, airing it out on this page and giving myself permission to continue dreaming fully drenched.

Let me try again:

When I say I float, I am submerged in gratitude.

When I dive, I am searching for relics of a kinder future if only to prove that one exists.

When I splash, I hope I am making waves big enough to reach the middle of your desert.

If it was up to me, of course I would take it all back.

To Be Called

An endorheic lake outgrows the smallness of its title, and it is called a sea

A sea is pushed inside itself until its edges forget their size, and it is called a tragedy

A tragedy watches a seafloor surrender to salt and skeletons-- finally, a permission to weep

To weep is another way to call your mother river, dialing for an answer-- only to be left on hold for fifty years

For fifty years a man never goes ice fishing, no longer has to slip or squat by the frozen holes he drills with his hands

His hands no longer victims to frostbite or the sharp scales from skinning dinner instead they are twisted fists, mimicking the size of the stomachs six feet in the ground

The ground is all that’s left to carry the living. at night, the ghosts of drowners gurgle for this desert

This desert: a loud-mouthed hell for those still hopeful there is a day known as ‘tomorrow’ where each hold is softened, soaked, and speaking somewhere on the other side

Suffering of a Different Species

i have destroyed my house and you will pay to see the ruins years of our name in the headlines but never any help beyond a pity glance

what does it mean to display your own unmaking and bet on foreign fascination in order to feed a nation

we refuse to learn from history only take its atrocities and erect museums to house our hurt

we refuse to stop our own draining our economic backbone cracking, quivering unless we push our people toward the soft fields of white gold again and again

veins forget their own flow and we collapse once more

a call for help a plead, a please brings feet and photographs and roundtrip tours of voyeurs we watch them watch us welcome ghost towns as if those phantoms gave us any choice

how does it feel to see nothing and have your eyes split wide open to whisper ​how could they do this and walk through racks of cotton tees if only to feel grateful that desiccation exists elsewhere

the palm breathes heavy on a neck bending into rubber but isn’t it exciting? to touch something other and unlike your human skin?

New Colonial Wave For the American aerospace engineer advocating for a future on Mars

Dr. Robert Zubrin sings that Mars was once a warm n’ wet planet and Elon’s hands are electric with the thought of X AE A-Xii swimming in pools no man has ever swimmed before

what is Mars if not a mirror, a warning of a future we have built engines to speed toward to

what is the Aral Sea if not the first open wound, the origin of our unwinding even as we sit on bones of the extinct and shrinking

why we are more excited to find fossils of past life on another planet, when our own neighbors sleep soldered on the pavement down the street

tell me again about the forgotten living the ones who fished out of a disappearing ocean and are now swinging by the sharpness of their hooks

"One of the key ways to prevent the spreading of salt and chemicals that have accumulated from the Aral Sea is by tree planting and fixing the sand from the dried-up sea bed," he said. [ Vadim Sokolov, of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea] hopes to plant trees across a million hectares of the territory – one-third of the desert that was once a seabed. ” (​Watch: Students plant trees to save what's left of the Aral Sea; euronews)

I.

if a forest grows here, it will be because we asked it to

because the school children were told to plant each sapling as if

the feeble ghosts of fish and shriveled men can only be grounded by the roots

of cherry, apricot, and apple today we are planting them all

this martian soil sprouts and karakalpakstan swims

to a window of abundance it has long since forgotten

September 3rd, 2018

A man cycles up to meet the sound crew assembling what, in a few nights, is to be a stadium full of far flinging bodies, possessed by the mouth of techno, the tongue of EDM, and shufflers rubbing down the dusty bedrock that hasn’t known weight in half a century. All around them, a graveyard of ships are stranded alive.

The skeletons of a forgotten water, whose evaporated body could’ve swallowed Luxembourg 10 times and then some. Soon there is to be a stomping revival and no one in this area knows it yet-- especially not this panting elder on a worn out bike.

But right now, under this sun, it is too early for dancing and too late for swimming. At this moment, the sky is hot and glorious, and all the sweaty backs sporting the words ‘STAFF’ appear like mini angels in this heat. From them come yearnful prayers that the incoming equipment hasn’t been hijacked by the Taliban in the South. The man learns to pray with them and the DJs smirk, knowing he is oblivious of the electric dawn that awaits him.

During soundcheck, Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” rolls across the dunes and Otabek Suleimanov, the mastermind behind this Coachella/Burning Man-inspired venture, catches the onlooking man grow perfectly still and unblinking. The 13-minute song infiltrates his entire being. As the surround-sound speakers further amplify the saxophone notes and yearning vocals, the ears and heart forget the distance between them. After the music fades, the man approaches Suleimanov and asks him to play the song again. For another 13 minutes, the man is once again raptured, moved in every way possible, while appearing frozen only in the physical sense.

Remember when you were young You shone like the sun

“I’ve never heard anything like this in my life,” he admits in his native language.

“This is the music of the gods.”

Come on, you raver, you seer of visions Come on, you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine

He doesn’t remember the last time this vast stretch of rock felt full. But in his fleeting state of exaltation, the familiar scrubland is lifted into a paradise once again, even the arid breeze feels less abrasive.

Wet Dreams

In the evening, we drop the formal titles Turn Zubrin to unnecessary syllables Turn Robert back to Bobby and no longer let Dr. be a personality trait

When you strip a man of power, he finally feels the softness of his skin

When I say even sleep is violence I mean no one is safe from the imagination of those who wake up praising the future while forgetting the soon-to-be-dead

Like animals, we only think of one thing in the nighttime

Take Bobby in the bed of Gaia, shaking in his drool and plans to terraform the fuck out of Mars

while Earth lies cold wanting but a corner of the blanket that Bobby hordes and clings to like there isn’t plenty to go around

for once, Earth wants to be the small spoon, whispers: is that so much to ask for

when you curve yourself around ungrateful lovers, the body turns both crescent and crumble

how do i explain it is a wild dream to want to be safely held by those who take and take and take and then don’t hesitate to move on

Cotton-Mouth

Two and a half scores ago, the people held onto a different vocabulary.

dengiz orol aral ten’izi baliq baliq polnyy zheludok baliq

40,000 hands used to trade the smell of pungent brine as they pulled in Danube bleaks and sabrefish.

When the rivers stopped flowing, there was nothing they could do but witness the shores retreat with shallow breaths. If someone wanted to yell, nothing would come out. Even a shaking throat couldn’t escape the invading desert. sahro cho’l sahro

When it hits, grief touches the body the same way in every language. All over.

The former fishing boats-- those which were not already sold off for scrap metal-- were left to be swallowed by eager eyes. Their purpose forever reduced to panoramic shots and camera clicks. But in truth, I cannot blame the foreigners who indulge in climbing carcasses. I am one of them-- zolted and unnerved by the exhausted tilt of these hulks. Through photographs, I understand the curiosity around these markers of past plentitude. Once: they levitated in a lush turquoise liquid. Once: they were the location keepers of Amu and Syr’s recurring rendezvous. Once: they accidentally dropped a boy into the icy bottom, paralyzing half his face while he undrowned himself, and 50 years later, the boy still continues to write ballads for their waters.

Once: they were the beasts who steered Lenin’s famine in the Volga away from cannibalism. But once the global market turned its head toward cotton, the satiated ones grew a fervent hunger for white gold instead.

Gratitude only goes so far. When the gracious learn of a new thing worth chasing, even the loyal are betrayed.

These days I wonder how long an open-casket funeral can last. Cutting through the perfect flatness of Karakalpakstan, it must be the mourners who asked these rusty tombstones to bleed a new color into the dust.

Afterall, what good is it to leave a rotting body with the living lest it add a pinch of burnt sienna to the otherwise hard blue sky and beiged-out floors?

“Not one tree, not two, not a dozen, but the thousands he had planted in seed and sprout.

And not little trees, no, not saplings, not little tender shoots, but great trees, huge trees… nourished by alien and magical soil and, even as he watched, throwing out new branches, popping open new buds…

[He] took one long deep drink of green water air and fainted.”

-

Ray Bradbury’s “The Green Morning”

II.

if a forest grows here, it will return our darling water in a new body

a wave of dense green, rippling in the wind, its lurky depths

explored by eyes and hands that mean no harm;

forget the days of taking— no what i mean to say is: remember

those who did not live to witness this reincarnation, but whose descendants

might breathe with full lungs and clean bellies, full bellies

and clean lungs will sing against a symphony of dombras

newly carved from apricot or mulberry wood, and we will know

what was meant to be, became.

GRAFFITI IN FRENCH & RUSSIAN “ARAL SEA – WATER NEVER FORGETS WHERE IT’S BEEN” PHOTO: ALMAS KOLDASSOV