Features

The Lovely Sea

Nadia Shira Cohen & Paulo Siqueira

Published on 23/09/11

© Nadia Shira Cohen & Paulo Siqueira

She stood amid the boat car­casses, in a wide stretch of waste­land, at what was once the bot­tom of the sea in her brightly colored hijab. She covered her­self only when pray­ing, a seem­ingly lib­eral prac­tice for someone so devout, but dur­ing Soviet Rule most Kaza­khs had been for­bid­den to pray. Mira’s reas­ons, how­ever, were more com­plex; she hoped to one day adorn her­self in hijab when she felt worthy of it. Life had become mired in end­less doc­tors vis­its and trips to Rus­sia for expens­ive eye oper­a­tions for her five-year-old daugh­ter, Inabat. Since birth, Inabat has suffered from a rare con­gen­ital mal­func­tion known as Mar­fan Syn­drome, an ill­ness that causes excess­ive growth of the limbs, as well as heart irreg­u­lar­it­ies and sight prob­lems. Many in the sur­round­ing vil­lages and towns of the Aral Sea suf­fer from chronic health prob­lems after one of the worst envir­on­mental dis­asters of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury caused the world’s fourth largest lake to shrink to one quarter of its ori­ginal size. Mira attrib­uted her mis­for­tunes to this col­lect­ive tragedy. She couldn’t even remem­ber the last time she had been to see the sea, believ­ing now that it was only a myth, some­thing to hope for but not to expect. But she told us the sea had been call­ing her.
In the 1960s, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers were diver­ted by the Sovi­ets to irrig­ate cot­ton plant­a­tions. Deprived of its two main trib­u­tar­ies, the shores of the Aral Sea, which spanned from the North in Kaza­kh­stan to Uzbek­istan at its South­ern tip, began to recede—taking with it the fish­ing industry, as well as much of the sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture of both coun­tries. The dam­ming also left behind miles of desert where fresh water had once flour­ished, with sand­storms now becom­ing fre­quent dur­ing the increas­ingly hot, dry sum­mers. And what remained of the waters of the Aral was turned into an hyper-salinated pool of agri­cul­tural pesti­cides, killing off most remain­ing fish and sur­round­ing wild­life as well. Health prob­lems and unem­ploy­ment pushed droves of people into neigh­bor­ing cit­ies and towns. Such was the case with Tac­tubek. A once thriv­ing fish­ing town of more than a hun­dred houses near the water’s edge, it now rests twelve kilo­met­ers away, with just twenty houses occu­pied primar­ily by fish­er­man and their fam­il­ies. Camels, roam­ing the dirt roads, out­num­ber inhab­it­ants.
Aralsk, Kazakhstan-July 2011: A young boy plays in an abandoned boat in what used to be the Aralsk harbor...Nadia Shira Cohen (Nadia Shira Cohen & Paulo Siqueira)

© Nadia Shira Cohen & Paulo Siqueira

In 2001, though, after years of failed attempts by loc­als to con­struct a man­made dam, the World Bank together with the Kazakh gov­ern­ment respon­ded with the thir­teen kilo­meter Dike Kokaral, an $86 mil­lion pro­ject, designed to raise the water level of the North­ern Aral Sea by con­tain­ing flow into the severely dimin­ished South­ern part of the Sea. Extirp­ated spe­cies of fish were rein­tro­duced back, and a Dan­ish NGO donated fish­ing nets to local vil­la­gers. “This pro­ject has taken eight­een years to real­ize,” Sagi Aidarali recoun­ted as he untangled the flounder flap­ping in his nets. His father had been a fish­er­man on the Aral Sea, but, like many a fish­er­man of his time, he was sent by the Sovi­ets to fish on the Irgiz, another great lake in Kaza­kh­stan. He was not so sen­ti­mental as many Kazakh men who grew up under Soviet Rule, but as he recalled in a low voice the days when his father would take him to the Aral Sea by motor­bike to fish, in a wooden boat sim­ilar to his own, using the same kind of nets that he held now in his hands, I saw his lips curl slightly into a smile.
The fish­er­men of Tac­tubek are a test­a­ment to the human desire to cor­rect the wrongs of the past. Mira’s cousin, Texiran, who began fish­ing while in high school, first touched the sea when he was thir­teen. His fam­ily was from Tac­tubek but moved to the neigh­bor­ing vil­lage of Sak­saylsk when the sea “closed down”—as loc­als say. Texiran’s mother sold goods on the inter­city trains to bring in income while his father was unem­ployed, but Texiran led his fam­ily back to Tac­tubek when he began fish­ing. Up before the sun, men like Texiran sur­face from their hand­made bun­ga­lows carved from the sand. Jury-rigged with elec­tri­city and sun­roofs, these homes are noth­ing more than humps dotting the beach with antanae-like chim­neys. The fish­er­men mix their chai with Rus­sian Vodka and head out in hopes of heavy catches—and sub­stan­tial earn­ings from the fish­mon­gers sent from Aralsk.
Aralsk, Kazakhstan-July 2011: A woman heading to an evening wedding...Nadia Shira Cohen (Nadia Shira Cohen & Paulo Siqueira)

© Nadia Shira Cohen & Paulo Siqueira

Aralsk, once a stra­tegic port town, at the North­ern tip of the Aral Sea, thrived on the trad­ing of com­mod­it­ies between Rus­sia and Cent­ral Asia at large. Although the dam has brought the shoreline to within 25 kilo­met­ers from what was once the Aralsk Har­bor, one would never know it. “We heard about the sea com­ing back,” Bakit­gul Koren­ova, a pen­sioner had told me, loun­ging in her daybed out­side her home in the Dosh­niazov neigh­bor­hood, “and we hope that it’s true.” Dosh­niazov is a con­glom­er­ate of government-subsidized hous­ing, built in the early 1980s on top of what used to be the sea. Bakitgul’s sons, save for one who is men­tally dis­abled, have all moved away to find oppor­tun­ity in lar­ger cit­ies in Kaza­kh­stan. Most of the young men of Aralsk have found work in the oil com­pan­ies in Kyzlorda, if they are lucky enough to find work at all. They would rather be fish­er­men, but fish­er­men must have their own boats and nets, as well as a car to reach the sea.
Catch levels are also still very low, with yearly pro­duc­tion hov­er­ing around 10,000 met­ric tons pro­jec­ted for 2012. The main fish­ing plant, a sleek new struc­ture, sits behind a large wrought iron gate, seem­ingly out of ser­vice for the moment. Just across the sandy road, camels graze around a pool of water cres­ted with brown foam and ringed with garbage. From here the sea seems far from returned. Though brides still ride around in wed­ding cars in this tra­di­tional mar­riage town, there is some­thing about Aralsk that has died. It is a beach town with no sea, a sur­real end­less expanse of sand. Women push their baby car­riages through mounds of white grain sand; aban­doned boats dot the har­bor, half-submerged in shal­low ponds. One can’t help but won­der how Aralsk will respond when and if the sea actu­ally does return. More than a gen­er­a­tion has grown up here in the arid desert; they have never known life on the water.
I won­der about Mira. When I first met her she was so resigned to the loss of the Aral—something I would later real­ize was due to the pain its absence had caused her. She had long hoped the sea would come back; she lived on this dream. Maybe in some ways it would vin­dic­ate her life sac­ri­fices. I watched her as we approached the shore and the thin sliver of tur­quoise grew big­ger along the hori­zon. I wrapped my arms around her stom­ach as we jostled through the sand dunes on the motor­bike. Although she was nur­tur­ing and moth­erly, I saw Mira, in this moment, as a free spirit, unshackled from the bur­den that had become her life. Her feet sank into the wet sand and a serene smile crept upon her face. She reclined into a fisherman’s boat and let her­self, if only in her dreams, drift out onto the new depths of the Aral Sea. (By Nadia Shira Cohen)

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