Chapter 1: Prologue

It is a dizzying time for those of us who have lived in the minority. For we are thrust into the unforgiving spotlight of the majority by a pace of events that risks running so far ahead of us that our bodies are all indistinguishable, a huddled mass in the unforgiving rear-view mirror of history.

Distinctions often dismissed with strange delectation – ‘obscure’, ‘minority’, or even ‘underground’ – risk becoming just that if current opportunities to re-engage with both fact and fiction are not confronted head-on. For previously minority suspicions are today menaced by the scope, scale, and activation of common sense. Whether it’s the minority conviction that complexity is to be harnessed, not dismissed, ignored, or neutered, or the minority stand that, despite an unprecedented bias towards the image, the word still matters, a lot. This common sense – be it meaning shared by a collective or an engagement with the reality of the majority – acts as a margin call to the very raison d’être of those of us who have, thus far, found a certain elegance in refusal. Nowhere do we witness the need to embrace the majority more critically and urgently than in the brutalist elaboration – of languages, landscape, and lines – better known as the Caucasus. […]

‘Jabal al-alsun’, or the ‘Mountain of Tongues’, is how Al-Mas’udi, a tenth-century Arab geographer, referred to the Caucasus in his Muruj adh-dhahab wa ma'adin al-jawahir [The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems]. Nineteenth-century Russians called it Warm Siberia. Mountain peoples themselves have as many ways as there are peoples (and at last count, there were twenty-six) to describe themselves.

If mountains make men, then they make them strong and almost astoundingly complex. We often mistake simplicity for a sign of strength, but the Caucasus is every bit an exception to the rule. The mountainous landscape has resulted in a multiplicity of ethnicities, languages, and names that seems as fit for the alternative cosmogony of a science-fiction author as it does for an anthropological study. There are Laks, Lezgins, Circassians, Kabardins, Balkarians, Avarians, and Kulmyks. Not to mention the Dargins, Kists, Aguls, Adyghe, Svans, and Laz. All this before finally coming up for air with more newsworthy, if not necessarily more obvious, peoples such as Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Dagestanis, Ingushetians, Chechens, and Ossetians. But beware those who believe we are trading in the obscure. These are the very peoples whose ethno-linguistic origin – that is, Caucasian – is ostensibly the foundation of western civilisation. A civilisation which has of late betrayed its base, to use political currency, and whose remit has been kidnapped, taken from the terrain of intricacy and intimacy to one of reductive simplicity.

With nations existing side-by-side, but isolated linguistically from neighbours only a short distance away, the Caucasus are a testament to the power and complexity of language and geography. Not because of the distance, which separates one nation or people from another, but rather because of the topographic melodrama that captivates them all, whether they number in the millions or just a handful. The inanimate gives the animate a run for its money here: take the Khodori Gorge.1 Having recently returned to notoriety due to the

Russo-Georgian war of August 2008, the Khodori Gorge’s primary firewall acted as a wedge of land between two distinct languages: Ossetian, and Georgian, with their respective Iranian and Mingrelian roots. Long before the human race was ever graced with the dyspeptic displeasure of three words in particular succession – military industrial complex – landscape and language did, and continue to wield an impressive arsenal of arms of their own.2

For the better part of the last five hundred years, the region has been caught at a crossroads between three Empires – Ottoman, Persian and Russian – not to mention the disproportionately influential outsiders (the British), and the insiders (the Caucasians themselves) if the rich term can be salvaged from its inherent racism.3 Once upon a time, of course, ‘Caucasian’ was used as a spuriously academic stand-in for whitie.4

The Russian state has always looked to the Caucasus as a sunny, if deeply isolated backyard deemed appropriate for a country of Russia’s scale. The tug of war between Russia and Persia in the nineteenth century saw the Caucasus veer progressively towards the Russian camp, with two notable milestones: the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, when Persia gave up Azerbaijan, Dagestan and Georgia, and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, when further khanates were given up.5

We would like to wrest the immanent complexity of the name from its extinguished usage. The Rotring-like precision and subsequent atomisation of peoples and identities makes the history of the Balkans look brush-stroked in comparison. Despite sharing a particular fondness for the multiplicity of languages, cultural affinities, and identities found in the geographic case study called the Caucasus, we wouldn’t wish its fractured fate on any people.

Chapter XVIII: Resist Resisting God

Defiance in front of divinity is so delectable it requires a certain fierce intelligence, at least as a starter, if not as the main dish.

For the West, it was Prometheus who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to the mortals, and whose punishment was to be chained to a mountain, which happened to be in the Caucasus, his liver being eternally torn out by the beak of an eagle.

For the Ossetians, it was Amiran who got into a rock-throwing match with Jesus. After an enormous boulder hurled past Jesus and lodged itself deep into a mountain, Jesus challenged Amiran to unearth the rock. Amiran did not succeed, and as punishment was chained to the peak of Mt. Kazbek. Amiran was a repeat offender, to use the legal lingo of his foe’s followers: the son of a sorcerer, he singled out Christians for punishment. To this day, it is said that his despair and struggle to break free of his chains is what causes the avalanches and earthquakes in the greater region.

Finally, for the Abkhaz, it’s Abrskil, who is a paradigm of complexity. An ancient hero, Abrskil killed all men with blue eyes (if ever there were reverse racism, this was it), and yet primarily spent his time combating evil for his people. He too competed with a higher being, this time the Supreme God Antsvah, claiming to be able to accomplish all that He could, such as ridding the earth of weeds harmful to the harvest. The apostles had a tough time catching him though, as he jumped between mountainside and seaside with his large bludgeon in hand. They eventually came up with a scheme: spread cow-skins where he would land so that he would slip. Chained to a deep cave for his arrogance, Abrskil warns passersby:

‘Get out! But before you leave, tell me one thing: are the evil still oppressing the weak? Are ferns, blackberry bushes and weed still plaguing the earth?’