From October to December 2019 I stayed in Dushanbe/Tajikistan, supported by the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa). I stuck to my writing practice there and did extensive research.
The texts are written from a personal perspective, not with a journalistic approach. The selection was edited in August 2020.
Cultural memory in Tajikistan is in a very vulnerable state. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independence in 1992 and the end of the civil war in 1997, there is something like a state doctrine to consolidate a “national identity”. But what exactly this identity should contain, what historical backgrounds and traditions it can refer to, and how it should be carried to the outside world, seems to be completely up in the air and dependent on arbitrary decisions of the respective rulers. What should the many young people who were born in the 1990s onwards learn about their country?
Continue reading “Observations on Tajikistan. Culture”