Oblivious

I have been staring at the UCA Staff Directory posted above my desk for the past two months now. I look up someone's phone extension at least three times a day.  I had thought that the most noteworthy aspect of the Directory was the fact that all the staff's names are organized alphabetically by first name, not last name.  However, today, when I was searching for a name on the list, I noticed something so important and obvious, that I was startled by how completely oblivious I had been to this very essential feature of Kyrgyz culture.

What I had been so oblivious to, was the fact that almost all women have the suffixes "ova" or "eva" added to their last names, and almost all male last names end with the suffixes "ev" or "ov."  For example, Aisulu Razbaeva would be the name of a woman and Arsenbek Isanov would be the name of a man.  There are a couple of rare exceptions (like last names ending in "ich"), but the last name of a person in Kyrgyzstan is almost always based upon their gender and I hadn't a clue until it dawned on me today. All I could see before now were Russian names that only seemed to be a mish-mash of letters strung together in difficult to pronounce orderings. Oblivious.

Even worse was the fact that I had been too oblivious to notice two names in my staff directory that didn't fit this pattern at all.  One name in the directory had, what seemed to me, four random letters typed in error after the name:  uulu.  The other name had "kyzy" typed randomly after it.  Well, I realized today that our clerical staff isn't haphazard, but instead, uulu and kyzy are the suffixes that are placed after the last names of people in Kyrgyzstan who have decided to revert back to Kyrgyz custom and have dropped the Russian suffixes at the end of their names and have replaced them with the traditional uulu Kyrgyz suffix that indicates males or the kyzy suffix that refers to females. So, for example, if you see the name Aisulu Amankul kyzy, you know that person is an ethnic Kyrgyz woman. After doing a little research, I discovered that most urban Kyrgyz have not reverted back to their traditional suffixes and have retained Russian ones; one of the reasons this happens is because urban Kyrgyz feel they might be perceived as rural and uneducated if they take on a traditional suffix, which might hamper their job search and social mobility in the ferociously competitive Kyrgyz labor market.

Oblivious.  Sometimes expatriates like me forget how oblivious we are when we are abroad and making our pronouncements and judgments about where we find ourselves. I barely know six phrases in Russian.  If that isn't a recipe for supreme obliviousness when living in Kyrgyzstan, I don't know what is. Yet, here I am making judgments and observations every day based on an ignorance so monumental that it is bigger than the tallest building in Bishkek.  When I taught travel writing at the Castle in the Netherlands, now that I think about it, being oblivious was really the characteristic of my students that most hurt their writing; I still remember with great mirth the oblivious piece one of my students wrote complaining about the alleged rudeness of Parisians, citing the waiter who refused to return her Steak Tartare to the kitchen for cooking as evidence of Parisian hostility.  It was only when my students were able to find even a glimmer of the knowledge and insight about a place that can only come from hard work, time, experience, and reflection, that they were able to write something that was somewhat effective as a piece of travel writing.

Being oblivious.  It isn't just expatriates and travelers who fall victim to this state. In our everyday lives, even when we are anchored to our homes day after day, being oblivious is something that clouds our perceptions and keeps us from understanding what's going on right under our noses.  Obliviousness is so difficult to defeat because it is so easy to remain oblivious: it requires absolutely no effort.  Awareness and understanding, however, is grueling work--and there is no easy seven-step guide that one can fit on a 3 x 5 card and laminate that can bring us to a state of instant awareness and understanding.  Sometimes all you can do is stare at a staff directory for two months before you achieve one small moment of awareness and realize that the entirety of what one knows as a person can be represented by a single tiny grain of sand on a beach and what we are oblivious to is represented by all the other grains of sand combined.  That realization just might be the first step toward navigating the fog of the oblivious in which we all reside.