*As an author of Oirad-Kalmyk origin, I am writing specifically in the context of Kalmykness, but these thoughts and principles apply to other peoples as well.
We national activists are often accused of being radical, aggressive, and even hateful. The public mind’s image of us is of people who are always dissatisfied, always criticizing, always
in opposition to others, even in oppositional circles. Often simply labeling someone's racism and colonial views is perceived as aggression, causing to come into play: “Given that racism recedes from social consciousness, it appears as if the ones who ‘bring it up’ are bringing it into existence”1.
This is similar to the image of the angry feminist who spoils everyone's fun or that of the angry black woman. These groups are similar to us in that we are all oppressed and expressing our discontent with it ruins people's fun. Ten years ago, despite ridicule and disdain, feminists in russia tried to explain to even a seemingly progressive society that a short skirt is no excuse for rape, that hitting women and children is fundamentally bad, that harassment at work is not normal. So today we are trying to explain that colonialism still exists, that russia is a colonial empire and not a friendly family of nations, and that colonialism is actually bad.
Many books and texts have been written about evil activists which problematize accusations of unjustified anger and aggression by oppressed people: “The oppressed are often required to smile and look happy. If we comply, we show submission and acquiescence to our situation”2.
... But then in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by anger. Your anger is read as unattributed, as if you are against x because you are angry rather than being angry because you are against x.
Sarah Ahmed. Feminist Killjoys
So, the fact that we national activists also seem evil is expected. But in this text I want to present the following thesis: national and decolonial activists are primarily driven by love, not anger (although anger often manifests in response to oppression and this is normal). Moreover, this love is something we need to recognize and spread in our communities as a method for resisting our oppression.
Other activists may say, “How can we defeat such a terrible system with love? Are we supposed to love everyone and then we'll be free?” I'm not suggesting we love everything, the whole world, singing songs about abstract love for the universe, pretending that problems simply don't exist. I'm talking about specifically directed love, backed by concrete actions that will help our traumatized communities at least begin to heal the many wounds to their collective body and mind.
Radical Acceptance Against the “Anti-Non-russian Status Quo”
In the early 2010s, Iike many Kalmyk high school graduates, I went to Moscow to study. In my family we were sure that this would give me more opportunities in life than I’d have otherwise, but I also had the conviction that “Kalmykia is too shallow a pond for me”. For me, attending Kalmyk State University would have counted as failure. Staying in my home region was the worst-case scenario in my mind. From where did I acquire so much disdain for my native land and native culture?
Living in Kalmykia, loving my ultra-Kalmyk, hardworking, tanned, smiling relatives with rough hands from physical work, I did not like Kalmykness in myself. I was ashamed of it. Only by “conquering Moscow” with my intelligence and diligence did I think that I would realize myself. Only the white society of the “center” could validate my value.
After taking a bus from Kalmykia to Moscow, I checked into a dormitory where my roommates were all Russian girls. I was the only Asian in my academic group and one of probably two or three Asians in my course. We didn't socialize.
Living among other Kalmyks at home, I rarely thought about my otherness, about how I looked to people outside of Kalmykia, about how my name sounded to these people. During my first week in Moscow, I realized that everything about me was wrong: my name was incomprehensible, strange, unpronounceable, my face “flat”, my eyes narrow. No one even knew about the existence of my republic and nation. Or people assumed that we lived in the Far North and that everyone breeds reindeer and no one uses the internet.
I don't remember much from my time at Moscow University, but I do know that in the first few years I learned to become ashamed of my Kalmyk identity and even sometimes make fun of it with other people. My beautiful Kalmyk name, given with such care and love, distorted, chewed and spit out of other people's mouths, became my nightmare. There were even times when, during job interviews, I was rejected because my name was “impossible to pronounce”, and I sometimes thought how nice it would be to change it in my passport, to make my life easier.
From time to time, I encountered everyday racism on the street or in the subway. I subconsciously realized that walking down the street in a group of non-Russians meant there was a greater chance I’d attract judgmental looks or that people would shout out racist epithets. But walking in a pair with a Russian person, it was as if I was protected: “See, one of you is friends with me!” When I made eye contact with other Asians on the subway, I looked away. I thought this situation was just a given. It was simply that some factors I didn’t understand converged to create it.
Somewhere between my bachelor’s degree and my master’s, something shifted in my soul, and I became angry at this widespread racism, instead of accepting it as normal. I began to argue with racist professors, defending my republic, which they called “beggarly.” But I did so not out of love for it or for my people, but rather from a desire to rebel against their stereotypes and arrogance toward me. Being angry at this anti-Kalmyk world, I thought that if I achieved great success in it, I’d show everyone that they underestimated me for nothing. But I was still far from loving “Kalmykness” at that time.
It took me many years to get to where I am today. Now I study Kalmyk culture, traditions, language, and history. I am not trying to whiten my skin or draw the once-cherished creases on my eyes, I am not trying to dress in a “European-style”. I am proud that I can say things in my native language and understand it. I have Kalmyk and other non-russian friends. Living in Kalmykia and working to benefit my people is my primary life goal. I am still not sure I have accepted and loved my “Kalmykness” completely. I think it’s a lifelong process.
But it is important that I am no longer driven by anger and resentment as I was in graduate school, although anger and resentment certainly remain in me and often flare up. It seems unlikely that activism can draw solely on anger, or at least not for long. To be a national and decolonial activist, you have to love your people, want to build a bright future for them, and be willing to devote a significant part of your life to that. Now the goal of my actions is not to prove something to Muscovites or to anyone else. I take action for Kalmykia, for the sake of Kalmykia. Not because I am angry, but because I love my homeland and my people.
In an anti-non-russian country and an anti-white world, one of the most important radical and effective strategies for resistance is to love your non-russianness and non-whiteness, in my case, “Kalmykness”. To love Kalmyk women and men (in the broad sense, not related to Kalmyk blood quantum) in all their manifestations, to love their community, and if there is no community, to create one and love the people in it. To trust Kalmyk men and women, to help each other without expecting reciprocity, to create opportunities for Kalmyks, and to share resources and knowledge.
When you help a fellow Kalmyk without expectations, you are doing what they have tried to wean us from. You are performing an act that is disadvantageous to the centuries-old colonial system. When our people were deported, we were dispersed in small groups across the expanse of Siberia to divide and weaken us. We survived, probably only because we acted against this division by uniting and helping each other. To divide, to bicker, to devalue each other, to compete unnecessarily, to exclude—all this reinforces existing power systems.
Certainly, it's okay to criticize each other's actions. We just need to separate productive discussions and criticism from dehumanizing each other and maintaining the systems in place to oppress our people. We need to analyze our actions and consider whether they benefit the people and the community or the colonial systems in power. For example, if a Kalmyk man publicly ridicules a Kalmyk woman, even if she is doing wrong, he runs the risk of crossing the line from valid criticism to dehumanization, which the patriarchal racist system manages all too well without his input.
When a Kalmyk woman, for example, says that Kalmyk men are aggressive and “uncouth”, she supports an already-existing stereotype about the danger and “savagery” of Kalmyk (or non-russian) men in russia. But it is worth considering that perhaps she is doing this because a Kalmyk man has abused her, and she is demonstrating her perspective based on this experience.
When we accuse each other of , when we ridicule someone for not knowing the Kalmyk language (which ignorance is so widespread, not because of specific individuals’ laziness or stupidity, but because of colonization, russification, and the trauma of , this only strengthens colonization. The colonizers have always divided and dominated: when you support discord among our people, it benefits them.
It is important to realize that the fact that we may want to separate from our “Kalmykness”, to become “citizens of the world”, cosmopolitans, or people without nationality, is not a coincidence, an accident, or an original thought that arose in a vacuum. These desires stem from ideas imposed on our people for centuries that have been strategically and deliberately inculcated. To give in to them does not signify personal subjectivity and independence of thought, as it may seem at first glance, but, on the contrary, doing what the current system expects of you: everything is arranged in such a way that it is more profitable to break away from your people than to stay with them and join forces.
In the anti-Kalmyk world, to want to forget about your Kalmyk identity is to float downstream. To love it is an act of resistance.
Representation of Different Positive Kalmyknesses
Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
Audrey Lord. The Master’s Tools3
Our history is full of tragedies. Our nation, which has experienced , , and wars (one of which ), is collectively traumatized. We have been influenced by a society that perceives our “Kalmykness” as an aberration, an exoticism, a narrow frame from which to escape into “whiteness” and thus achieve success. At school, we read literature that, if it mentions our people, does so through an Orientalist lens, from the perspective of the colonizer. , “Kalmychka”, is probably stuck in every Kalmyk girl's mind as a description of how the outside world sees us. It presents an image of an idealized Kalmyk girl as the savage, exotic, momentary infatuation of a white man (although Pushkin himself had non-white roots), who contrasts her with russian court ladies, identified as the norm from which we Kalmyks deviate in everything. Pushkin creates a binary: civilization vs. savagery, white vs. dark, elegance vs. rudeness, fashionable lodge vs. nomadic yurt. We Kalmyk women usually read this poem for the first time as children and learn that we are always on the “bad” side of this binary.
None of this can be changed. But what we can do is to create as many of our own texts, poems, sounds, narratives and images of Kalmykness as possible, with our own eyes, for ourselves and about ourselves. Not against anyone, not out of spite, but for our own sake.
No matter how much creative people may like to rise above their Kalmykness, to “go beyond it”, to be not a “Kalmyk artist” but just an “artist”, no one but us will create representations of us as we can, because we are the bearers of this unique Kalmyk experience.
There are such images, but they are few. I often notice how happy I am when I see an aspect of Kalmyk life or identity I have not seen before, and I wonder why I have not seen it before or not seen it much. A great deal of literature is devoted to the sufferings of our people, of which there are certainly many, deserving of attention, but we also need positive images – images of happiness, joy, love, and beauty. Not idealized, not exoticized but ordinary images of Kalmyk people in all our beauty and diversity through our own eyes.
Speaking of beauty, we seem to lack representations of very dark Kalmyk people (of whom, in fact, there are quite a few among us) as examples of Kalmyk beauty. Instead, there is a prevailing admiration for pale faces and proximity to whiteness, although that is also a version of Kalmykness.
Our large, talented creative class can accomplish all this without risking political persecution, nonetheless challenging and swaying colonial narratives. If you can't create, it's enough to simply support Kalmyk creativity: share it, like it, contribute by posting positive comments.
The more different versions of Kalmykness in the public consciousness, the better: young generations will not feel confined in the same images and scenarios of life as the old ones. And they will not want to abandon Kalmykness because it won’t seem so restrictive.
For example, our men often find themselves shrouded in images of the warrior because we have so little representation of other kinds of Kalmyk masculinity. We are proud of our military history. We look up to images of ideal men in the form of the hero , but a Kalmyk man is much more than a potential warrior, even one endowed with wit or wisdom. He may want nothing at all to do with war and physical strength.
Therefore, we need to accept and even welcome different versions of Kalmykness. If our society is homophobic, we will lose the unique perspectives and experiences of LGBTQIA+ people and thus lose some of our diversity. Kalmykness should encompass a broad, multidimensional spectrum, not a narrow frame.
Another theme is the difference in experience between “urban” Kalmyks and Kalmyks and rural people. There is a significant gap between these two parts of our society, and even some discrimination and neglect on the part of our urban residents. We have accepted a colonial view that urban life is superior to rural life, even though we as a people only recently began to live in cities and are essentially all of non-urban origin. Perhaps one way to combat this is, again, representing rural Kalmyk experiences and rural people positively because they are positive in reality.
We can also work with the past by highlighting aspects of our history that are usually overlooked. For example, we can discuss Kalmyk women's friendships, our people who did and do not conform to narrow gender roles, those who fought against colonization, activists, protestors, and women in general, because the patriarchal system often erases their legacy.
Although capitalism and colonialism try to make us compete with each other, we can act together and help each other. We can radically trust each other, radically accept, and radically love each other and ourselves. This is the only way we can overcome the sad road we are currently traveling on. Without overcoming it, we will probably disappear. But I'm certain we have a chance.