A Critical Theorist visits Azerbaijan

As often happens with those who read too much, they start to read the world as the text of the book that they are currently reading. It might have happened to you too. Remind yourself of the day when you were sitting in a café, reading Sartre or some other author, near the big glass window from which you can see outside on the street. People were passing by, rushing through for their next stop, calculating in their minds the cost of the next buy and cars driving past with their drivers deep in pensive thought about what to do next. You were reading, looking outside intermittently and were struck by the commonality between the thought that just ran through your mind while reading and the scene that just passed before your eyes outside the window. Well, that happens with the reader of a novel. 

What about the reader of non-fiction? Especially non-fiction that allows you to see through the illusory screen of everyday life and lets you envision the motivations, the vices, the virtues, the real reality of the mundane everyday actions of people. My friend, who had recently finished writing an essay on the Frankfurt School critique of European politics, happened to visit Baku a week ago. She came back and told me about her trip to Azerbaijan. Her fresh memories of Baku and its outskirts were as unusual as is her perspective of the world, conjoined with her recent endeavors into the critical analysis of Adorno and company, her narrative of her journey to Azerbaijan was too interesting to not be recorded.

Language:

Right when she landed at Heydar Aliyev Airport, she was struck by its barrenness and emptiness. Neither too many airplanes landing, nor too many passengers, nor too many conveyor belts at the airport, to top it all off, the exit was as far from the immigration as is the distance between the taxi drop off and entrance at Dubai airport! Not to get too far ahead. She observed some obvious things at the immigration counter that depicted the influence of the Soviet era, in fact what she precisely said was: “It is wrong to consider Azerbaijan a post-Soviet state, it is still a Soviet state.” To provide evidence for this claim, she pointed to the many “excavation terminals” she could see from the airplane window in the Caspian sea, and later on wherever she went around Baku, she saw more gas and oil pipelines running along the road and in the field than all the humans and animals combined. Hopefully, that is an exaggeration. But her point was simple, Russia, or Putin to be exact, still seems to have a lot of say in this Eastern European bloc, precisely because of the huge reservoir of oil and gas still present there.

She went to the immigration counter and there stood men, wearing the traditional ushanka hats, and women, and men too, looked like they were sculpted out of Soviet metal. She is a Shi’ite herself. She told me that she was very enthusiastic that she would be visiting a Muslim Shi’ite majority country (Don’t know from where she had heard that) but that image shattered as soon as she stood at the immigration counter. Whatever Islam they follow in Azerbaijan, according to her, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Shi’ism as she knows it. Another cultural shock followed with the accent of Azeri language, again too much of the Russian dialect put her off, and on top of that hardly anyone understood any English except for the pragmatic, parsimonious language that should be employed to just get done with a task and move on with life. By that time, she had not worn her glasses polished with critical theory, to put it differently she had not yet known the real reason why most of Azerbaijani people are deliberately kept away from English.

Because she arrived earlier than usual at the conveyor belt where she would receive her baggage, and since there were only twenty-five passengers on the flight, she knew that her baggage would not be lost. To kill time, she roamed around the duty-free area which was right beside the conveyor belt. As expected, she saw some books on Baku, and she skimmed through the books on the shelf to find a book in English language. However, she could not find any, which surprised her a bit. Anyway, she went out with her baggage, and with some difficulty in broken English, she managed to get a mobile sim. The address on the printout of the hotel booking was in Azeri, which was all that the cab driver cared about. Otherwise, it would have been unimaginable to explain the name and address of the hotel to the driver. It was confirmed by the fact that from the airport to the hotel, which took around forty minutes, the driver spoke only after stopping the taxi. While taking the bag out from the trunk, he said something which obviously she couldn’t understand. But the rubbing gesture of fingers with each other told her that he wanted the fare, which she gladly paid as decided at the airport. However, the gesture didn’t stop, which she understood to mean as a tip, so she paid perhaps five manat more.

After putting her baggage in the hotel, she immediately went out to search for a bookstore. Actually, she wanted to buy a book for her thesis on the Cold War, so she thought that in Azerbaijan she should be able to find plenty of books on the Soviet era. She found a bookstore near her hotel that also had a small café inside. Since she was tired, she decided to have a cup of coffee first. As she spoke, her gestures became animated, as if she were about to present evidence to support her earlier claim that Azerbaijan is a Soviet country. She asked for the menu, which was completely in Azeri followed by Russian. Fortunately, the waiter understood basic English and she managed to order a cappuccino. It arrived ten minutes later, and she was relieved to receive only what she had ordered.

After drinking her coffee she asked for the bill and the entire bill was in Azeri and Russian language. At this moment she stopped and commented that this language issue at first, like at the airport, seemed like some minor issue, but as her first day was progressing the language issue was gaining gravity. At this point she stopped and rather than continuing the whole narrative, she now turned on her analytic mode to summarize and make the main point. She listed down: restaurant bills, posters, house names, mosque names, people’s names, billboards, street art, tour guidebook, in short everything that she could see that had some Russian element in it. There was no book in English in the bookstore, perhaps a shelf or two at other bookstores. If you had to survive in Azerbaijan, you had to be lucky enough to know someone truthful enough who can speak English and think about your interests. There were hardly any channels in English language, in the end she even ended up saying that perhaps a handful at the university would be able to speak proper English. Such distance from English clearly depicted the Soviet’s hatred towards the American. Azeri people are usually calm and happy, they do not worry too much if you do not disturb them, well, she said, quite condescendingly, they are always happy and smiling and going to the clubs and partying because they do not have a clue of what is going on in the world because they can’t even watch an English news channel and understand what is going on in the world. Every piece of information that reached them was filtered through the Russian perspective, a product of the country’s Soviet past. In today’s terms one can say that every news about the world is ultimately drummed into the head of an Azerbaijani layman through the Russian perspective.

A small language-related incident was significant for my friend. It not only took her back to the Soviet era but also to the first half of the twentieth century. This incident highlighted the confusion in Azerbaijani culture, or perhaps a lingering animosity towards old enemies. While on a tour to the Burning Mountains, she arranged a trip with an English guide. In the group of around 20 people, only she and one other person could speak English. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the group spoke Russian. During the entire seven-hour tour, which included the Burning Mountains, the Zoroastrian temple, and the mud volcanoes, the Russian tour guide spoke in Russian. The English guide spoke only when they disembarked from the bus. This was another reminder of the pervasive Russian influence. The real incident, however, had nothing to do with the Russians directly. Throughout her time in Baku, no one could explain this influence clearly. It was either because they did not know or did not know how to explain it to her. Whatever the reason, the way she explained it was interesting.

During the tour, while the group was visiting Burning Mountain, the tour guide asked my friend what she did for a living. She replied that she was a French professor at a university. The tour guide was astonished and seemed hostile, as if she were an enemy. He told her that the Azeri people do not like the French and asked if she spoke German. She said no. After reconsidering her role as an ambassador of Azeri culture, the guide composed herself and explained that the problem with the French is their support for Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which has been ongoing for almost thirty years. She stretched history by suggesting that the Azeri people still think in terms of Axis vs. Allied Forces, dating back to the Second World War, when the Soviets fought against the French until Germany attacked them. What she actually meant was that during the Cold War, the English-speaking public and the French-speaking public sided with the English, leaving the Soviets feeling cornered. This helps to explain why many Azeris are reluctant to learn English. It is not just the government, but also the public in general. After all there are around ten million people living in Azerbaijan, so there must still be families who still have memories of that notorious century. After all, what is history but a collection of prejudices recorded with pen or transmitted orally.

Kolakowski once said that those who criticize the Marxist emphasis on the principle that we are historically contingent beings, should focus on their own selves and judge through the choice of language that they speak. The first historical contingency attached to our being is the linguistic dress worn by our thoughts from the beginning of our lives. Whenever we think or say something we say it in a language which has rules and provides a way of expression which differs from other languages. My friend recounted this Kolakowski adage and then reconfirmed that the prevalence of the Russian language is not just a chance occurrence that does not matter to the way she has perceived Azerbaijani culture, it is also a historical and geographical fact that Russia, or the Soviets in former times, has always had a big say in how the Central Asian and Eastern European countries are still run. It is understood that the majority of the countries where the Russian language is still spoken as a secondary language at the expense of every other language shows that the public are deliberately, by their own selves or by the government, kept in the dark from the English perspective. This linguistic analysis looks too far-fetched, so my friend continued with another analysis to convince me that what she saw was not as obtuse as it appears, this time she turned her attention to the media or the culture industry in general.

Media:

Adorno wrote extensively on the culture industry and media, and his critiques have been followed by Noam Chomsky, whose concept of manufactured consent through media is a contemporary corollary of critical theory. A friend of mine analyzed the two functions of media, combining Adorno and Chomsky. According to Adorno, she said, the media has to entertain and produce a certain kind of national public; which essentially means that the daily life of any nation is nothing but an extension of what is shown in the media. Secondly, according to Chomsky, the media is the thinking source of the public. A layman has outsourced his or her thinking to the media, the TV thinks and speaks for the public, which means that all of us are human subjects who think through an ideology, and that ideology is produced in the closed rooms of media houses. It should be remembered that anyone who has encountered any thinker of the Frankfurt School for the first time and liked what they have written would immediately become prejudiced against any kind of media, and so was my friend. Even though she was talking her heart out because she was talking to an acquaintance, in general a stranger would also criticize the media in the same vein if he has closely read Adorno.

To continue her narrative, which now required a bit of a kickstart again, she reordered a small cappuccino as if she was about to get to the main point. She always acted like this, as if she was about to say something important. It happens with the reader of philosophy, if they find someone to whom they can speak without hesitation they pour out all the philosophy that they have amassed in the whole year. She pointed towards the television first and said that this is the real culprit in Azerbaijan. She pointed out that here you can see hundreds of local channels shouting at you about what is happening here and in the world, how many people have been killed, how many bombs have been launched in Gaza, the atrocities of Israel, the Russian missiles crossing in to Ukraine, and whatnot, but there God forbid if you  get to know about a natural disaster even in Turkey. Pretty sure, she was exaggerating. A disaster bordering on fifty thousand deaths must have been reported somewhere in the local news, but again her point was not so much about the deliberate negligence of the media about the earthquake, she was trying to highlight the working of the Azeri media as a propaganda machine, that also of a Russian kind. She explained in detail. Firstly, she could hardly find any variety of English newspapers in the bookstores or on any stands in the old city of Baku, that really worried her at first, because she is used to reading newspapers with her morning coffee. Actually, she is more interested in reading different kinds of newspapers to get different perspectives on the same news. She is well aware, as we all must be, that newspapers are not ‘objective’ in their reporting of even a natural disaster. Everything that is produced in this world is owned either by a human or an organization run by humans, therefore the interests of the owners must be apparent in the text of the newspapers or in the voice of the journalists. Therefore the more the variety of newspapers, the more the probability of getting all the leftist, rightist and centrist perspectives of an event.

When my friend was tired at night and decided to go to her hotel to rest, with the expectation that she would turn on the TV and she would get to know the news. She reached her hotel and there she turned on the TV and lo and behold! No English news channel on the TV except for BBC news. She was curious why there were no English channels at all, so she decided to retune all the channels, perhaps the previous residents had changed the channels to local news and Russian channels. Out of curiosity she searched for other English channels, something related to entertainment or movies, but nothing, or she said Nyet! Now the language problem, the media critique of Adorno, the deliberate distance from the English language, the ingrained, subconscious hatred of everything English came together for her. An Azeri barely seems to know any other perspective than the Russian one. Their minds are produced by the Russian language for the Russian purpose. What my friend earlier guessed wrongly as a non-deliberative act of ignorance, now became clear to her that it was a deliberative strategy of the government to keep them away from the Western perspective. There is a strict media control in Azerbaijan, or at least that is what it seemed to her.

As my friend was visiting from Pakistan, she was struck by one more thing. She tried to get as much as possible to talk to the locals, in Uber or in shops or in her hotel, to guess the mental state of the youth and the working class. She was staying within a five minute distance from the old city, right in the middle of the city center. At night, she roamed around the streets of the city center and found young people going in tropes for outings, probably clubs, karaoke, and dinner. They were happy and going out without any concern. But those who were working looked not too satisfied, as is often the case with the working class. Mostly because of the COVID pandemic the economic hardships seemed to weigh them down, but despite all of this they at least have relentless access to basic necessities. At this point she made a morbid remark: “If any of these youth who looked downtrodden because of poverty were asked to live for even a week in Pakistan, they will commit suicide.” In other words, she understood the main principle that one considers oneself poor only in relation to others around them, there is no absolute standard of poverty. The ever-present means of deluding oneself with pleasure allowed the people to smile there, but once probed a bit about the conditions of life, it looked like there is no nation that is as much in trouble as them. Again, this remark may be said to be true of any nation. The real cause of frustration according to my friend was that the youth had to cut off on leisure, not that they had to forgo basic necessities.

Despite the strict media control and the limited exposure to Western pleasures in Azerbaijan, and the persistent positive image of Azerbaijan in the public eye, and despite the closely controlled and manufactured consent, there is still a sense of disillusionment among the Azeri youth. This disillusionment is not unique to Azerbaijan; rather, it is a universal phenomenon that affects young people worldwide. For instance, my friend could only find channels from Turkey, Russia, and Eastern Europe on TV, which is reminiscent of the Soviet influence of the past.

Conclusion

After having heard such a scathing critique of Azerbaijan, I asked her: “Did you find anything there that was good?” She said, yes. There was a street near the old city by the name of Leo Tolstoy street, where she used to go to see if there is anything related to Tolstoy there, but just the street name satisfied her, at least they have adopted something good from the Russians. When I inquired what else? She gave a long pensive pause and after that just shook her head. Maybe the boulevard across the Caspian? Maybe shopping malls? Maybe anything worth going to in Baku? She couldn’t answer in an affirmative. The most peaceful place she visited was the Zoroastrian temple near Baku, which was ironic for her. The most peaceful place in a Muslim majority country is a Zoroastrian temple.

Now since my curiosity peaked I asked her if she would prefer Pakistan over Azerbaijan. To which she gave a very mathematical answer: Pakistan is at minus 10 grade, Azerbaijan is at zero. Make whatever you can make of that. It should be clarified that my friend visited Baku for just three days and it does look like her account of that country is very prejudiced, but certainly an interesting one to be recorded.