Mong and the National Reproduction of Collective Sorrow
“Do you see this duck? It is made out of fine filigree gold. It represents a Tatar myth about the creation of the world. The duck pulled the islands that make up the earth out of the sea and that’s how the world came into existence.”
Güzel, Tour guide at the Tatarstan National Museum, November 2000
The myth about the duck pulling the earth out of the sea may be understood as a metaphor for how a significant number of Tatar-speakers see their position as inhabitants of the Russian Federation. Many Tatars say they feel surrounded by an undifferentiated sea of Russians—who speak a language Tatars don’t feel comfortable speaking; operate according to social rules incomprehensible and often offensive to them; and are emotionally constructed in ways that simply do not make sense.
What does make sense, by contrast, to Tatar-speakers is something they call mong. Mong is a generalized feeling of grief-sorrow, a type of melancholy song, the sorrowful melodies that animate the melancholy songs, the sentiment singers singing those songs tap into and transmit, the emotion audience members experience while listening to them, and a topic of ideological talk.1 Mong taps into, produces, and reproduces a feeling that unites Tatar-speakers as a nation of people who have suffered collectively. It successfully generates a unifying feeling of collective suffering because individuals are encouraged to understand mong in diverse ways. Flexibility in interpreting mong’s meanings allows Tatars to experience a feeling of collective inclusiveness even while expressing their own individuality. Mong creates a continuous emotional connectedness that serves to separate Tatars ideologically from people they perceive as comprising an un-differentiated “Russian sea.”Always sung in a minor key and often accompanied by accordion music, mongful songs are marked by long-held, deeply resonant notes carried best by strong, clear, versatile voices (sometimes with professional operatic training) that sonorously sound the songs’ sad lyrics. Typical mong lyrics concern feelings of sorrow and loss expressed metaphorically through an emotional description of a scene from nature. Their lack of specificity connotes that they belong to the nation as a whole, as opposed to individuals. In being laden with an untranslatable mournful nostalgia, mong bears a similarity to the Portuguese musical genre fado. And while mong’s musical qualities differ profoundly from those of American blues, young Tatars aware of parallels between US and Soviet history sometimes refer to mong as “the Tatar blues.”
Mongly jyrlar—mongful songs—are highly conservative in form, even though understandings of mong’s meanings vary widely. Mong is still most frequently produced when groups of people sit around a table drinking tea and singing. Despite mong’s role as an everyperson’s practice, like other surviving Soviet folk arts, its songs have been fixed as texts in books, professionalized by conservatory-trained artists, and commodified as purchasable recordings. While Tatar-speakers considered my research on Kazan’s school system a well-intended acknowledgement of their efforts to create social equity, their eyes widened with delighted surprise when I started asking questions about mong and they said I was really onto something important. Although singing mongly jyrlar is losing popularity among urban youth living at a remove from the rhythms of village life, it nevertheless remains part of the habitual activities of their city-living parents and those relatives who remain in the villages. Moreover, even young urban Tatar-speakers feel that mong is a core feature of Tatar identity.
Perhaps mong’s most significant quality is that it is generally understood to be something Russians do not have nor care to learn about. Russian indifference to mong mirrors other relationships between Tatars and Russians, colonial in that Tatars know all about things Russian, while Russians are largely unaware of any but the most superficial aspects of Tatar culture. Tatar-speakers habitually say that Russians do not have a word equivalent to mong and therefore they cannot understand what it means. Though mong is not part of Tatar culture Tatars feel they can explain while speaking Russian, the word is nevertheless rendered in Russian most frequently as “melody,” and occasionally as “nostalgia.” However, recognizing mong does not require knowledge of Tatar, just curiosity about its existence.3 Thus, saying that Russians have no word for mong in actuality glosses Russian indifference to mong and the insult to Tatar cultural values that that indifference implies.
The first time I heard the word mong was in September 1999. I had just been introduced to the Tatar class of eleventh-graders at the Lab School by their head teacher, Hayat apa. After they realized that I spoke very little Tatar, they started speaking in Russian. We talked about the Tatar language and they began to explain to me how rich and unique it is. One girl exclaimed, her eyes widening, “Tatar has the word mong.” When I asked what mong was, they told me, as Tatar-speakers did every time the word came up in a Russian conversation, that mong cannot be translated. “Mong,” another girl declared, wonder lighting up her eyes, “is everything. Ask our teacher and she can tell you all about it.”
While mong is both the song and the feeling the song evokes in singers and listeners, it is also a vehicle for reproducing particularly Tatar feelings about the fate of “the nation.” To be considered knowledgeable about and therefore fluent in mong, a person must be able to manipulate all three of its modes—channeling mong as an emotion, singing mongful songs, and talking about mong’s meaning. Not everyone possesses all three abilities in equal measure.
My exploration of mong relies upon formal taped interviews, supplemented by ethnographic observations, written sources, and informal conversations. I conducted formal interviews with Sveta apa, a talented singer and authority on mong, Sveta apa’s niece, Hayat apa, and her friend, Venera apa—both women skillful in producing the affect of mong and discourse about it, two teenage girls through whom the feeling of mong flows, but who neither sing nor talk about mong eloquently, and four Tatar men in their 20s and 30s who call themselves millätchelär or nationalists. Because I positioned myself as a married woman while doing research, I have more detailed information about mong from other women. However, mong is not gendered—neither in its affect, ideology, character as a folk art, nor as a professional music genre.
8How mong is superficially defined and deeply experienced serves to unite Tatar-speakers on an emotional level. That is, the flexible interpretation of an experience largely inflexible in form by individuals who all consider themselves members of the same nation reinforces their sense of collective belonging. All Tatar-speakers define mong identically at a superficial level. However, deeper probing reveals that how Tatars variously comprehend mong highlights the diversity of their social positions and individual perspectives in relation to their nation and the world. Tatars first define mong as grief-sorrow or kaygyi xasrat—the word’s dictionary definition.4 When asked to elucidate—What is mong? Who has it? Where does it come from? What relation does it have to iman or religious faith?—the people responding, who all circulate through interconnected Tatar-speaking urban social networks, provided diverse answers. This phenomenon presents an important counterexample to Benedict Anderson’s near-axiomatic definition of how nationalism is supposed to be experienced."
- excerpt from Chapter 7: Mong and the National Reproduction of Collective Sorrow from Helen M. Faller's Nation, Language, Islam: Tatarstan's Sovereignty Movement (entire book is online from the press in this link)
