The mourners of Bayal depicts a society where poverty and frugality, superstition and compromise, alienation and estrangement bring it ever closer to collapse and decay. Sa’edi portrays the society of his time through the lens of a village whose roofless houses are shorter than the stature of its dwarf-like inhabitants. A village that is the very ground of death—a living cemetery where every corner holds a tragedy. Its people—whose faces the narrator avoids describing—are all faceless. A face is a mark of individuality, and in Bayal, individuality is an unforgivable sin. Loneliness is the unwritten law of the story, and anyone who strays from this isolation is expelled from the narrative. A boy dependent on his mother, a young man who befriends a dog from a neighboring village, a girl whose love drips like a festering wound from her knees, a couple whose love leads to an untimely departure from the village, and a man who is in love with his cow—all are doomed to perish.
The world of the story is one of revenge, and Sa’edi mercilessly exacts a symbolic revenge on the characters of Bayal. He shuts every window of hope, blocks every path to liberation, and tightens the narrative space to the point that with each line, the reader is made to feel more isolated and defeated. He even erases “Moosorkheh,” the beloved character of the story—the one faint sign of deliverance and otherness.
Amid all this stands Mash Hassan of Bayal village, a man in love with his cow who, after its death, comes to identify himself in the form of the animal. He embodies all of Sa’edi’s concerns—one end of which is tied to his daily labor, the other to his muteness following the cow’s death. This muteness becomes a sign of alienation—a wound that echoes throughout Sa’edi’s work, particularly in his “mute plays” (lâl-bâzi), which without doubt served as a refuge from the torment of speechlessness. For him, the mother tongue was only a fleeting window toward liberation; one year living under the rule of the Azerbaijani Democrats—a period he described as the most beautiful year of his life—attests to the fact that Sa’edi’s anguish over voicelessness was a fundamental one.
It’s a strange tale—almost as if it is our destiny that our writers must voice their pain of voicelessness in a language other than their mother tongue. A destiny that encircles a geography as vast as Turan. A bitter fate stretching from Azerbaijan to Kyrgyzstan; from Sa’edi of Azerbaijan to Aitmatov of Kyrgyzstan.
Aitmatov, that unparalleled chronicler of the Central Asian steppes, that lover of the Eastern natural world, invokes the legend of the mankurt in The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years to expose the phenomenon of alienation within a mythical framework. The legend, in symbolic terms, portrays the loss of self in the body of one who has been stripped of historical memory—who has forgotten their roots and ancestry. Aitmatov’s mankurt is the same as Sa’edi’s Mash Hassan—only more ruthless, and perhaps more universal.
According to the legend, mankurts were warriors who, after being captured, had their heads shaved clean and the raw hide of a camel’s neck stretched over their scalps. As the hair grew inward, it destroyed their memory and thoughts, turning them into mindless slaves who remembered nothing of their past—not even their mothers, whom they would kill without hesitation. Aitmatov speaks of no spell or sorcery in this transformation. Rather, it is a historical-psychological process tied to the human mind, one that erases memory and turns a person into a rootless slave. The legend is a direct and symbolic reference to the imposition of alienation through the erasure of historical memory—a sorrowful oblivion that turns man into his own enemy.
The story of Sa’edi and Aitmatov is the story of our present day—we are the forgotten of a geography where, every day, a fresh camel hide is pulled tight over our heads. Each day, the inward-growing hair further disrupts our collective memory, and with every passing moment, we become more severed from our roots. We are the condemned voiceless ones—condemned to forgetfulness and oblivion.