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Chasing the Sea: Lost among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
Chasing the Sea: Lost among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
Chasing the Sea: Lost among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
Jul 1, 2004
Antioch Review
by Kyle Minor
Chasing the Sea: Lost among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia by Tom Bissell. Pantheon, 388 pp., $24.95. The former Soviet Republics of Central Asia-Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan-are situated in a part of the world little understood by Americans. Seven decades of Soviet domination failed to completely submerge local cultures; instead, Central Asians did what Central Asians have done throughout history and pragmatically reinvented the definition of each regional nationality. The resulting sprawl of people groups, many claiming the heritage (and in some cases the names) of groups that inhabited the same land in prior centuries, has contributed to a social schizophrenia, which Tom Bissell unravels through a skillfully woven Uzbekistan travelogue that integrates within its narrative a history of the region, Bissell's personal story of lost love and failure as a Peace Corps volunteer, and a detailed account of the destruction of the Aral Sea, which might be the worst ongoing ecological disaster on the planet.
Uzbekistan's human-rights violations and strongman government play a role here, too; and although Bissell leaves many conclusions to the reader, one is chilled with the realization that Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan, is now an official ally in America's global "war on terror" and that the newly emboldened Uzbek government has recently taken to further domestic belttightening in the name of its own war on terror.
Kyle Minor
Copyright Antioch Review, Incorporated Summer 2004