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| Jamila: Dedicated to the 60th Anniversary of the Author's Literary Legacy |
Jamila is not merely the tale of love between two people. It is a song in praise of the author’s homeland, a painting of Kyrgyzstan’s beautiful nature.
Love is an inner state, and describing this state is only possible for someone who has truly experienced it—especially when the love in question is forbidden. Perhaps this is why the author of Jamila tells the story through the voice of an external observer, someone outside the circle.
Aitmatov is essentially a painter of nature. He prefers to avoid a direct portrayal of the inner states of Jamila and Daniyar. Instead, he tells the story through the perspective of a painter who, at the time of the events, was a fifteen-year-old boy. The only keepsake he carries from those years is a painting of Jamila and Daniyar’s forced departure. The story both begins and ends with this painting. The narrative model of Jamila is the story’s clearest strength. It is as if the narrator—Jamila’s brother-in-law—is the same Aitmatov who, in the third year of the war, was the same age as the narrator. The narrator is a painter, and Aitmatov is an unmatched describer of the nature of the East. The book is essentially a tableau of Kyrgyzstan’s landscape, with the love of Jamila and Daniyar serving merely as a human seasoning to complete this canvas. To such an extent that one might say: if nature were removed from the story, Jamila and Daniyar’s love would not take place. It is as if such a bold, naked love could only occur within a rebellious, untamed nature. The story intertwines the two elements—love and nature.
Daniyar is a quiet and withdrawn young man who spent his childhood in exile, far from home. He carries the marks of war with him. The only clothing he owns—always washed and re-worn—is a relic of the war, and his limp is its inheritance too. He is mysterious and sorrowful. He spends hours enmeshed with the night, the river, and the landscape, as though listening to secret murmurs. He is, in a sense, a symbol of the devastation left in the wake of war; a symbol of exile and displacement. Perhaps he represents all the peoples of the Soviet Union who, in the Second World War, endured exile and forced migration—peoples who became isolated and silent. A symbol of the Circassians, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and others.
Daniyar is in love. He has always been in love. Daniyar’s songs are songs of the land, songs that draw nature into harmony with themselves. The steppe, in the darkness, awakens to his voice; the wheat stalks sway to the rhythm of his song. Jamila—the fearless, lively girl who once sang loudly and dashed through the village—falls silent and bashful before Daniyar’s singing.
Even the narrator is moved by Daniyar’s songs. With every melody, something within him catches fire. It is this feeling that drives him to take up his pen and depict the lovers’ devotion, and in doing so he feels joy and pride. The narrator has now become a painter, blending colors into words, painting a magical, astonishing autumn, and losing himself in the beauty of the land he has come to cherish. It is as though Daniyar’s songs awaken in him a love of homeland. Amid this awe and wonder—at the very moment when Jamila, hand in hand with Daniyar, is leaving the village—the narrator-painter realizes that Jamila was his first love.
Jamila too carries a share of the war’s burden. She sends the produce of her labor to the front. Her husband—Sadiq—has abandoned the home and gone to war. Both Jamila and Daniyar are products of war, and Aitmatov builds this forbidden love and new life atop its ruins. A war that gave birth to the devastation of the author’s homeland, and a love that opens its mouth through song, bursts out unrestrained, and yearns for life—a love whose ultimate fate remains uncertain, even for Aitmatov.
Jamila is not merely the tale of love between two people. It is a song in praise of the author’s homeland, a painting of Kyrgyzstan’s beautiful nature. Jamila becomes a pretext for breaking the taboos of society. The mother—the guardian of the village’s traditions and beliefs—loses her joy and strength with Jamila’s departure. She realizes that love has the power to shatter customs, rules, and conventions. Indeed, through the figure of a daring young woman, Aitmatov confronts a society in which preserving tradition is the highest value. This taboo-breaking, while a jolt to the mother, nevertheless seals Jamila and Daniyar’s fate: leaving the village is their inescapable destiny. A destiny that, even years later, compels the narrator-painter to keep the painting hidden. It is as if Aitmatov concedes defeat in this confrontation—a condition mirrored in the very moment of Jamila and Daniyar’s flight, when the narrator, even after confessing his love for Jamila, remains lying on the ground, making no attempt to rise.