PAKISTAN: Gulmit

The Karokaram Highway....the blinding white of snowy mountains rising steep all around. The road has literally been cut, blown and blasted through this tough rock. They say the mountains are still echoeing with the blows...they say for every 1.5km of the Highway, these imobile gods of stone claimed a life....and the road is long.

And so on a bus, through late October running, we bump and crash our way down the narrow path. At times the mountain edge opens to mock us-this little road of human acheivement is nothing in this world of white magnimanity. The mountains watch our slow descent. The mountains watch as we cling close round blind corners. The mountains watch....

Gulmit is the yellow of Autumnal orchards, lazy in the light breeze. Gulmit is the white of the watchful mountains, ringing close all around. Gulmit is the dust of narrow, windy paths climbing amidst the low stone houses.

Wedding Season has arrived in Pakistan, as food that takes almost four days to prepare lasts longer in the cooler weather. Drums pounding, horns blaring and wheeling through tuneless noise... here come the men to dance proud in the dust road. The flash of colour and the jingle of bangles...here come the women to sit and watch.

Elder men dance first and at the front of the line as a sign of respect, whilst young girls, still far from womanhood, run freely through the social boundaries. Their older siblings look on with longing at the lost freedom and eagerly await the all women celebrations where they will be able to dance.

But Ismaili Muslim communities are dramatically more liberal and open-women and men both pray together in the prayer hall. There is no call to prayer as it is believed it is up to the individual if they want to attend. Also, amidst the loosely worn head scarves, there are many women's development programes and employment centers.


Outside the house is a cobbled pile of stone, lying low amidst the apricot orchards and dusty courtyard. Inside, in a harry potter moment of unbelievable proportional inversion, the house opens to a spacious wooden center. Around the central hearth we gather for tea and chapati lessons- men on the right, women on the left. Intricate wood carvings amidst home woven bright woolen decorations. Despite the lack of windows, it doesn't feel claustrophobic. The feeling is one of being burrowed in the earth, the wood all around gives a sense of the earth being part of the home. The bodies of small children lie curled and hidden amidst piles of blankets in the corners. Different generations and multiple families all in the same space. Yet again, it is not a feeling of crowdedness so much as warmth, a feeling of connectedness and sharedness. It makes me wonder how much my private bedroom is really worth...and is it natural for humans to live in such isolation? Amongst earth's creation, what a freak of nature the moody teenage bedroom must seem!



Mr R. was born in 1934 in Gulmit but spent his early life touring across Pakistan with the Pakistani army. In his face I saw my own gentle grandfather the fisherman, smiling back at me again. I lost him before I had a chance to know him properly. It is only as I have grown more into me, I realise how much of him I would have loved to listen to. But sometimes we are given the chance to see lost faces in the living once more... a moment of illusion we cling to, catch and fold away, precious in our purse.

So at his feet, we listened to his life story as he sat grand, aged, exuding a calm and strength like the mountains he had grown up amidst.

He donned his white woollen cloak, embroided with pink and green flowers...his wedding dress from 1956. His wife had worn the traditional dress in red silk. They said their vows in the prayer hall...and the celebrations began. Four days of meat prepared by the men and bread and rice dishes prepared by the women.

Mr. R. always believed 'education was the key to peace' and he worked on committees and volunteer groups to bring the first school to Gulmit. He also believed that 'men and women were like two feet; without either, you fall' and was on the committee that brought the first women's college to Gulmit. And when given the chance to ask us about life in the UK, he was most keen to know if we really lived in separate families? The notion of the family is central to life in Pakistan and providing your identity. He could simply not conceive of elderly people living in homes alone...

The soft 1, 2..3, 4..4, 3...2, 1 of the traditional drum. The quavering, wavering, soft wail of songs of old. The strong, lumpy cheese of traditional wedding food. A night of culture, music, dance and stories.




Tales of love lost. Tales of friends gone. Tales of sadness with a rhythm that is still of joy. It is a music that is often about the harshness of life, but a music infused with a realists' optimism- the song will keep singing, the music will keep playing...life goes on and so we keep dancing.

Lucy Wrote:

love for Pakistan, for the mountains is up tight in my throat as I read this.

Xinjiang...are we still in China?

The state of Xinjiang is known as Xinjiang Autonomous Region and is made up of many different ethnic minorities, most of which are closer to to Tajikstan than China. After WW2 the region declared independence as the Republic of East Turkestan. But with the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 the new state collapsed when most of its political leaders died in a myserious plane crash on their way to talks with China's new government....

The combination of Uyghur, Krygyz, Tajik cultures are evident in the many mosques, night markets with different foods, clothes, languages and faces and creates a sense of having already left China.



(local tea ingredients" dried snake, lizard, mushrooms and all manner of interesting animals



Most people we spoke to resented the Chinese Government's suppression of their culture and history and there seemed to be a historical void in people's memories. Either they were too afraid to talk about the history of their land, or they had never been allowed to learn it. There is a book, detailing the history and culture of the different ethnicities of Xinjiang but it is illegal under Chinese law, you can be sent to prison for just owning a copy.

And so we walked, talked and observed different ways without knowing why or how it came to be like this. There is an empty hole filled only with fear and anger. How long can people live without their history?

By the clear blue of Karakul Lake we stayed the night in a Kyrgyz yurt. White, cold stone amidst warm brown eyes. Biting winds tempered by soft voices. Empty vastness but crowded yurt.
Deep amidst the dust storms, lies the village. The red Chinese flag flies high over the faces of a different people. A reminder that big brother is always watching. We asked for stories, they knew none. We asked for songs, they sang one. We asked for history, they were silent.

Amy wrote: so sad to read about the way a regime can steal a people's history.

BEIJING...

A Phoenix carved into a stone in the 'Forbidden City', which is a fascinating complex of passage ways, offices and residences built in the early fifteenth century. Protected by three walls it was created during the rule of the 'Ming' dynasty to house the Emperor, his wife, concubines and entourage. The central area consists of a series of enormous open squares, overlooked by the Emperors office and military buildings. Around the edges are a maze of passageways in which people lived and worked (we got lost exploring just a small section). It was conquered by the 'Qing' Emperor in 1644. In a state of near bankrupcy the Ming family were unable to resist the Qing army. As the armies approached, the last Ming Emperor murderred both his wife and Son and hung himself on the hill that overlooks the forbidden city...

The Phoenix symbolised the Empress, while images of Dragons symbolised the Emperors Power. These creatures can be seen all over the architecture, particularly on the roofs. The number of animals (from 3-11) perched on the roof of a building indicated its importance.

Pushing, shoving, shouting, whistling, megaphones declare 'one minute here, take your photos and come back'...the sounds of Chinese tourist groups.

The marriage bed in the 'Palace of Earthly Tranquility'. Tourists cannot enter any of the buildings and you find yourself continually peeping into rooms containing ornate and tantalising scenes, at once aware of your own image being reflected back at you.

I liked the names of the buildings; the wedding room in the forbidden city was called 'The Hall of Earthly Tranquility', which was next to the 'Palace of Peace and Tranquility', where the Emperor and Empress would spend three days after their marriage. In reality these palaces may have been far from tranquil; the marriages were arranged and our guide told us that one of the Empresses hung herself in this complex. After his marriage, the Emperor would later have taken concubines, who lived competing for his attention in a section of the city. The life of a concubine who had fallen out of favour would have been bleak- they were fed just enough to survive and had no proffession or purpose other than to please the Emperor.

Words, sounds, movements that are not based on realism. Monkey gods talk, dance and wreak havoc across the Heavens. Men dress as women and slide their vocals across painful heights. In the Chinese Revolution, the opera was banned. For Revolutions are times of certainty, there is no more room for shadows and dreams. "Orwell perceived clearly that in a totalitarian state dreaming is a crime. Instead of dreams, realism. Total visibility. The contours must be clearly drawn lest one be seduced to allow heretical thoughts to come in. ...Because dreams are testimonies that the soul has not become an encaged bird" (Rubem Alves, The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet; 31).
The opera lives on, but the land of mist, shadows and dreams, the land of equisite culture that once was China, is yet to return.




" Many soldiers refer to the wearing of uniforms on the first day of reserve duty as the donning of disguises, as the bearing of masks" (Ben Ari, Israeli Anthropologist)

The mask, painting the face, the costume, creates a space where you are no longer yourself. Social norms and rules of behaviour can be broken..The family man becomes the soldier in the simple act of donning a uniform. The actor paints his face and is transformed into a fantasy being. Theatre is the powerful space of politics where fantasy and dreams can change reality.

Amy wrote:

I've been thinking about dreaming being a crime and a lifeline... Azar Nafisi captures this in her book, Reading Lolita in Tehran. She evokes the haze that people are left with when imagination is criminalised. She quotes... someone (I can't remember and don't have my copy of the book to hand to check sorry!) who talks about 'the land of the imagination', and it being a place where people can choose to reside, as a form of protest against a totalitarian regime.