Republic or Death! (22 page)

He suggested we meet at the bottom of Bayterek, that tower that's meant to look like a bird's egg stuck in a tree, and houses the cast of Nazarbayev's hand. He was easy to spot. Bearded, in a turtleneck jumper and wearing mirror shades, he looked more like an Iranian secret agent than a musician, an impression which only increased when I realised he had four minders with him, all bursting out of their suits, and all incongruously licking children's ice creams, comically small in their huge fists. We walked and talked, occasionally interrupted by star-struck Kazakhs coming up to shake his hand.

I started by asking why no one here seemed surprised Nazarbayev had written the anthem, pointing out that he was the only leader alive to have done so and in the West it'd be seen as somewhat odd (I didn't say dictatorial, but the implication was clear). The question didn't cause Bekbolat any pause for thought. ‘We cannot understand each other,' he shrugged, meaning the West and Central Asian countries. ‘Our mentalities are different.' But why didn't Nazarbayev ask anyone for help, like you? I said. ‘Because he's fine by himself. If he wasn't president, he could be a poet or musician easily. His voice isn't good, so not a singer, but a normal musician? Yes. He's a relative of Zhambyl Zhabaev – one of our great poets who was unfortunately used by the Soviets – so he has a poetic soul. It's in his blood.' Bekbolat was just as positive when talking about Nazarbayev more generally. ‘I don't think there's another person who can compare with him here,' he said. ‘He's seen everything. He went to Kazakh school and Russian school. He was fighting, riding horses, working at the steel factories. He's very intelligent. He can forgive any person, but at the same time he can punish. It's very rare to find such a strong man.'

‘He doesn't like me much,' Bekbolat added. I tried to see if there was any emotion behind that statement, but could only see my own reflection in his glasses.

Bekbolat was charming and indulgent no matter what I asked him, but I don't think he actually warmed to the interview until I mentioned that I had been listening to a lot of his dombra music lately – ten-minute pieces over which he sings epic poems about nature and love. His music feels timeless, as if you could have come to Kazakhstan hundreds of years ago and found herdsmen singing songs just like it. I told him I was surprised how sad it all sounded. He smiled for the first time and nodded agreement. ‘It's a reflection of our nation,' he said. ‘The Kazakhs, we're a country who've suffered. In the 1930s, a lot of us died because of famine. In the 1950s, the Soviets tried to break us up and destroyed all our elite. All this unconsciously comes through in my melodies. You can write poems that hide your emotions, but music is always a reflection of your soul, of things that come through your heart. Confucius said you can tell a lot about a country from its music. When the nation's music is sad, she has a future. When its music is glorious, she'll terrorise everyone around her. And when it has no soul, she won't last. The Soviet anthems had no soul.'

We were running out of time, so I decided to ask him a final blunt question. Well, as blunt as is possible in Kazakhstan. ‘Why are there so many photos of Nazarbayev everywhere?' I said. ‘I'm half expecting to see him half naked soon, advertising underwear.' ‘We're in a period where we need very strong political power to guide us,' he said. ‘And you cannot change a horse between two points. We have to close our eyes and follow our leader. And to follow him, we need to believe in him, and to believe in him, we must love him, and to love him, we have to see him everywhere.' And hear his songs too, no doubt.

*

After talking to Bekbolat, I found myself starting to think that maybe Nazarbayev had done a good thing by changing the anthem, by going from a song few cared about – a Soviet relic, essentially – to one most people seem to like, many have deep connections with, and some are even inspired by. Maybe a professional songwriter would have done a better job, but then maybe they'd have made the words too complicated, or tried to be too clever, filling the song with metaphor and allusion that nobody would understand. Clearly autocrats and dictators don't just get to the position they are in solely through force – to some extent they have to know what their people want – and Nazarbayev has proven he does know Kazakhs with this song, even if he wrote it more out of ego than anything else (the fact his name's always first whenever the anthem's on display tells you that). It's a worrying realisation to come to: that a dictator can produce an anthem that resonates more than most of those chosen through the most democratic of processes (just look at Kosovo's). It makes me feel a little sick, to be honest, especially as it means the people I should compare Nazarbayev to aren't Pol Pot and Turkmenbashi, it's the handful of world leaders who weren't dictators but also wrote their anthems; presidents and prime ministers who never had such stains on them.

There's Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet and first president of Senegal, who wrote ‘Strum Your Koras, Strike the Balafons', an anthem named after the traditional instruments it should be played on. That song's not only filled with good poetry (‘The red lion has roared. / The tamer of the savannah / Has leapt forward') but is drenched in so much optimism it's inspiring (‘Sunlight on our terrors, sunlight on our hope. / Stand up brothers, here is Africa'). It's no surprise Senghor was the first African leader to step down voluntarily.

Then there's Barthélemy Boganda, the first president of the Central African Republic, who wrote his anthem also to be a focus of hope, but didn't manage to express it quite as well (‘To work!' orders his song's chorus). Or there's Thomas Sankara, ‘Africa's Che Guevara', who wrote Burkina Faso's uplifting ‘Une Seule Nuit' (‘One Single Night'), in the short time he was in power in the 1980s before being deposed in a coup by the middle classes his Marxist ideals annoyed (it's the only anthem to feature an academic reference to neocolonialism). And, looking much further back, there's Charles Rogier, the permed, liberalising prime minister of Belgium who in 1860 completely rewrote his country's anthem, ‘La Brabançonne', partly so it stopped being rude about the Dutch but also so he could get everyone to shout ‘Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté' at its end, hoping to give them a catchphrase to hold on to (looking at the state of Belgium, with many people identifying as Walloons or Flemish rather than Belgian, he did not succeed).

There's even Pedro I, the Emperor of Brazil, who wrote the gently operatic music to his country's first anthem, ‘Hino da Independência', in 1822 – although I expect he did that less out of patriotism than for his own entertainment. He used to spend a lot of his spare time making up songs with his wives and, after his death, ‘some bawdy verses, illustrated with pornographic doodles' were found in his papers.

Maybe those men actually wrote their anthems because they were even bigger egotists than Nazarbayev, determined to brand their names into their countries, but it just doesn't feel anywhere near as awkward praising their songs as it does praising his.

*

It's my final morning in Kazakhstan, and I decide to make a quick return to the top of Bayterek to beg the staff to turn on Nazarbayev's golden palm so it plays the anthem when I touch it. Their English isn't great and my Russian is non-existent, but I manage to get them to understand what I want after a lot of pointing and awkward singing. ‘Wait for electrician!' one of them shouts. I assume there's a problem with the hand that needs fixing but when he arrives ten minutes later it turns out that he's simply the person with the remote control. He hits play before I even have a chance to put my hand in the cast and the music suddenly bursts out at us from every angle, shockingly loud – a cacophony of women's voices, distorted by the volume. All the tourists adopt a shocked look of ‘What the hell is that?' And I do too, not because of the noise, but because what's playing isn't Nazarbayev's anthem. It's not Zhadyra's old one either. Or even the USSR's. It's ‘My People' – the poem Nazarbayev allegedly stole. ‘The day of our dreams has come true,' the women sing, their voices flying so high it's like they're trying to shatter the glass of the golden egg. So, he's made sure it's the anthem somewhere, I think, until deciding I shouldn't leap to judgements like that. If you're building a capital, you can't be expected to keep tabs on everything, can you?

 

EVER SINCE STARTING
this book, there's been one chapter I've been dreading. This one. The one telling the story of my own anthem, ‘God Save the Queen'. It's because I know what's expected – a personal journey in which I'm converted to the joys of the world's most important anthem. It's meant to be the turning point in the book.

This chapter should, of course, start with me looking back at my first moments with the song: half-remembered Cub Scout jamborees where I'm told we sang it around a pile of damp logs, none of us having been able to rub two sticks together vigorously enough to turn them into a campfire. It would then move on to more vivid memories of the Italia '90 World Cup, of being glued to the TV and seeing fans belting the anthem out at stadiums in Naples and Turin, full of blind optimism (they were usually drunk, something my nine-year-old self couldn't really identify with, but definitely wanted to). Back then I was probably a little in awe of the song, if I'm being honest, as I was of the Queen herself. She was the woman on my pocket money, after all.

From there, I would have to stumble through a few sentences about my awkward teenage years, a time when I read too much and suddenly thought I knew everything. I was the kind of teenager who formed a Communist Party to run in the school election, and it should be no surprise that once I learned about colonialism I decided I couldn't be proud of a song that had been imposed on half the world, translated into Sanskrit for Indian schoolchildren and sung by British officers as they shot Zulus. I would probably also feel the need to mention that I grew up on the rim of east London, not far from the then homeland of the British National Party, and that once you have seen such flamboyant, racist nationalism, it tends to put you off songs like ‘God Save the Queen' for life. Having said all that, I actually played the anthem a lot as a teenager. I was a member of my local symphonic wind band, and on memorial days we would sit in wet bandstands and run through it for a handful of pensioners. I played the euphonium – a mini-tuba, basically – which doesn't so much glide its way through songs as stomp over them like a frightened elephant, so my playing was never going to make me feel ‘happy and glorious' about the anthem. God knows what it did to the people listening.

After that, I would have to move on to how I feel about ‘God Save the Queen' today, as a belligerent music fan who makes far-too-snap judgements about every song he hears. And I would feel the need to explain that I can't stand the way that first word – that ‘God' – thuds into the melody like a boot into mud, sticking the song into its plodding rhythm. I'd also need to ask, is this really the best poetry the United Kingdom has to offer? I mean, it rhymes the word ‘queen' with, well, ‘queen' three times in the first verse alone (‘God save our gracious Queen! / Long live our noble Queen! / God save the Queen!'). By the third, it seems to have given up on rhyme altogether (‘May she defend our laws, / And ever give us cause, / To sing with heart and voice'). I might even decide I'd have to talk about the fact this song means nothing to me; how it doesn't say anything, really, about the UK or the people who live here.

But once I had put all those feelings out there, I would still be expected to – somehow – undergo a conversion. Maybe I'd dig through my great-grandfather's diaries. He was a sergeant major, a well-liked one at that (‘I have never met anyone who could be more sarcastic,' wrote one of his men), and he fought all over Africa – against the Boers in the 1890s, in Egypt during the First World War. He was also stationed in Palestine, India and Ireland. Surely it isn't beyond the realms of possibility that he wrote about locals singing ‘God Save the Queen' to him, as if he were their saviour, coming to bring them railways, milky tea and the gentlemen's game of cricket? Okay, it is, and not just for reasons of colonialism – my mum says he didn't keep a diary, but I could always forge one, dipping the pages in tea to make them look old, burning the edges with a lighter. And after I'd had my stirring encounter with those forged words, I could sit down with my trusty euphonium and play the anthem once more. It would feel like I was hearing it for the first time again. Fresh. New. Until someone banged on my door and told me to stop that bloody parping.

The problem is, when I started this book, I couldn't envisage that journey. I still can't. When you dislike a song, you dislike it. There's no going back, especially when you are talking about one you have heard hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. If it's not for you, it doesn't matter how other people have experienced it or how their lives have been changed by it. I couldn't go on any such journey and be genuine.