Druzhba:
A Uyghur Village Behind Highrises
I don't know how I first noticed that something was different about Druzhba. Maybe it was all the wolves that I saw in windshield decals or the abundance of crescent moons. Maybe it was the dome-shaped samsa cooked streetside in tandyr ovens, or the blue-tipped minarets of the mosque behind the stands. Or maybe it was the people I encountered, like the white-bearded men sitting on handcrafted benches outside their homes, their heads bedecked in skullcaps. It wasn't until I told local friends where I was walking that I learned what Druzhba was known for: "Oh, that's a Uyghur neighborhood," they said, giving the word Uyghur a certain strange intonation to accent its otherness. Ah, Uyghur. I had travelled amongst these Turkic-speaking Muslim people in Western China earlier this year, and I had grown fond of their shreddy music and natural ebullience. I went back to Druzhba two more times, now armed with this crucial context, trying to connect the dots between those moons and wolves, to try to grasp what that phrase "Uyghur neighborhood" should even mean.
"No, it's not a Uyghur neighborhood," one woman named Gulraushan told me emphatically. "It's called 'Druzhba,' after all." Druzhba [Дружба] means "Friendship" in Russian, as in "Friendship of the Peoples," and she went on to say that these days this region in western Almaty was quite diverse. Yet she also admitted that there were several different generations of Uyghurs just on her street, some like her whose relatives came decades ago and speak "clean" Russian, and still others who are more recent arrivals from China and send their kids to the Uyghur language school nearby. She came from a Soviet age where all "peoples" should be melded into a homogenous Sovietman, and so when she told me she was Uyghur, she said it offhandedly, like she was nervous about revealing any national pride.
"No, it's not a Uyghur neighborhood," one woman named Gulraushan told me emphatically. "It's called 'Druzhba,' after all." Druzhba [Дружба] means "Friendship" in Russian, as in "Friendship of the Peoples," and she went on to say that these days this region in western Almaty was quite diverse. Yet she also admitted that there were several different generations of Uyghurs just on her street, some like her whose relatives came decades ago and speak "clean" Russian, and still others who are more recent arrivals from China and send their kids to the Uyghur language school nearby. She came from a Soviet age where all "peoples" should be melded into a homogenous Sovietman, and so when she told me she was Uyghur, she said it offhandedly, like she was nervous about revealing any national pride.
Gulraushan was probably right to downplay the "ethnic enclave" angle, anyways. Sure, there were those little visual clues I had first picked up on, the Muslim and Turkic imagery and so on, but many other differences were domestic and indoors, like the languages spoken inside these homes or the backgrounds on their family photos. Mostly the streetscape was anonymous and familiar; homes had the same maroon tin roofs I've seen elsewhere, the same plaster diamonds, the wooden filigree. The differences, like the shoddy benches running along the fences, could be easily overlooked if you weren't vigilant. Yet I was sensitive to these things, always looking for a way to distinguish one place from another. After walking in so many corners of the city, that's what I hungered for: some way to keep every place distinct in my mental travelogue. So for me, Druzhba became a Uyghur village, and in my mind I branded it so convincingly that I might as well have called it "Little Kashgar" and put up a kitschy gateway arch.
Maybe it was that "village" part that also got me set on Druzhba's otherness. After all, it never even used to be part of Almaty. Talking to some other men down the street from Gulraushan, I learned that it was once upon a time a collective farm called, in that herky-jerky Russian way, "The Collective Farm Named After Stalin," and they could remember when there used to be stables where giant gas pipes now stand, and when the highrises next door were just corn fields. As those microdistricts sprouted to the east, it became Druzhba, and it became Dostyk as private landownership blew up in the independence period and big homes started to hedge in the former farm from the west. Yes, it was now officially called Dostyk, the Kazakh translation of Druzhba, "friendship," but nobody seemed to use the word so I won't either. Calling it "Stalin" would be just a little too nostalgic, so Druzhba it has stayed. Just as the old name has stuck, so has its old reputation. Though it had been surrounded and become a suburb, it is still a village in the imagination of Almatians
Maybe it was that "village" part that also got me set on Druzhba's otherness. After all, it never even used to be part of Almaty. Talking to some other men down the street from Gulraushan, I learned that it was once upon a time a collective farm called, in that herky-jerky Russian way, "The Collective Farm Named After Stalin," and they could remember when there used to be stables where giant gas pipes now stand, and when the highrises next door were just corn fields. As those microdistricts sprouted to the east, it became Druzhba, and it became Dostyk as private landownership blew up in the independence period and big homes started to hedge in the former farm from the west. Yes, it was now officially called Dostyk, the Kazakh translation of Druzhba, "friendship," but nobody seemed to use the word so I won't either. Calling it "Stalin" would be just a little too nostalgic, so Druzhba it has stayed. Just as the old name has stuck, so has its old reputation. Though it had been surrounded and become a suburb, it is still a village in the imagination of Almatians
