Vít Havránek: What have I learned from Babi Badalov?
In Babi Badalov, Gandy Gallery catalogue, 2016.
I attended primary school, secondary school, even university. Unlike Gorky’s, my university was an institutional one – big buildings, aulas, time spent in libraries, lecturers, fellow students, deadlines, exams. Gorky’s title My University is not intended to simplify his life experience. It draws attention to the complementary dimension of institutionalized learning
that consists of the non-university world of people, their interactions and work, without
which any university (universus) or universality is incomplete. The practices, texts, actions
and speech of Babi Badalov constitute that complementary component of theorizing nomadism, language, zōē, among other things, that is.
1. What does the word NOMAD mean? The French dictionary1 says that nomas, nomadis (used
in medieval Latin to designate the nomads of North Africa) originates from the Greek nomas,
-ados, and designates members of the nomadic herdsmen, who changed their dwelling place depending on the availability of pasture for their herds. It is derived from the Greek nemein, which indicates attribuer, répartir selon l'usage ou la convenance”, as well as "croire,
reconnaître conforme à la vérité reconnue de tous et, spécialement faire paître utiliser la part réservée à la pâture . For postmodern art as well as the Jet Set nomads chasing around the world as if it were a big village (N. Bourriaud, Radicant, 2009), the footloose method of life
again appears to be an inspiring, exciting one. Discovering more and more new places,
cultures and customs, clothing, patterns, folklore, flavours and the practically obligatory
confrontation with the Other and Difference compel the traveller to acculturation and the
mastering of a sort of practice in (cultural) translation.
Nomadism perhaps indicates the lifestyle of more and more people – students, commercial travellers, managers of multinationals, artists... migrants. Although the contemporary nomad
and the contemporary migrant have one thing in common – movement between countries, ethnic groups and cultures – they are separated by a huge abyss, which radically alters the terms of acculturation and cultural translation depending on which side of the dividing line
we find ourselves. Nomadism is possible only on the condition of ownership of a passport,
which authorizes us to move in this way. In other words, depending on state citizenship we are authorized to répartir selon l'usage ou la convenance. Nomadism is possible today only as a
movement, shift, research, ritual or flight under the condition of clear identification of our
place of origin in order that we can be sent back to its borders. In feudalism people were born
subjugated to a sovereign; today they are born – free – subjugated to a state that should offer them freedom (which is one of two contemporary conceptions). A person is born without any deserts or contribution of one’s own into subjugation, which may be cruel, which may kill one immediately through lack of nutrition, water or security, or may offer one the possibility of
becoming a subject endeavouring for dignity and freedom.
Babi Badalov sits in the Babel Café. He says the migrants burn their passports, injure
themselves to pretend they were tortured and deny their native languages. They invent
non-existent languages, fictional pasts and fabulate, or simply tell the truth in order to gain asylum.
Therein lies the uniqueness of Babi Badalov’s work, which may be influenced by the historical experience of the ethnic group and region from which he comes (the Talysh region of
Azerbaijan), although he lived for many years in the conditions of an illegal and legal migrant,
a refugee and an asylum seeker, i.e. the precarious conditions of a migrant, at the same time
he never ceased to be a nomad fascinated by and decoding the languages, rhythms,
expressions and gestures he was confronted with.
2. What does the word LANGUAGE mean?
My father’s language is Azeri and my mother’s is Persian. He says.
In Czech we say mateřský jazyk – mother tongue, langue maternelle, lingua materna, originating from the mother. The child is born into the notion of the imprint of the mother,
through which the language subsequently comes. The mother tongue indicates a rhythm, a
fragrance - the fragrance of air, the rhythm of sound. It is a social institution that supposed to
endure only temporarily – up to the end of kindergarten – even though we continue to use the mother tongue and the social status of women in history predicated and delimited this very "maternal period.
What is the father tongue? Is it the language of Freud that formulates the Oedipal Complex,
but diagnoses hysteria as an essentially female (maternal) disorder? And if the nomad uses
language with the certain lightness, grace and tradition of the Renaissance traveller, whose
use of sign language or pointing constitutes an equilibristics in the realms of signs, then for
the migrant, language, the impossibility of maternal expression (or expression of maternity),
is a source of frustration and inadequacy – the frustration of lost identity, a condemnation to wander between the signifier and the signified, an identity whose depth of disconnection
between multiplicities only increases with the number of countries travelled. Paris Paris
Réel, which is the least achievable and not at all conceivable. Why have people not been working since their very origins on a common language, as if they did not believe that
speaking the same tongue would improve anything? Lazaro Ludoviko Zamenhof believed in it.
The Old Testament recounts that God brought confusion to language because people were
building a tower so high that it would reach heaven, which He regarded as arrogance. But not
even modernism or communism had the ambition of the Bush Brush Bush God to polemicize
this in a different way to the old colonial one. Because, like national borders, language – not the maternal, but paternal language – is an enslaving bond from which there is no escape other than to become a migrant, a foreigner in the country of the Other. Babakistan Badalov,
the migrant, is a nomad in the realm of language. The Latin Lover, Sensitive Cyrillic, Hearty
Hebrew letters, glyphs that facilitate mechanical labelling, have as many alternatives are there
are languages in the world. Languages are interchangeable even though some people
understand some of them and others not at all. In Turkey, Azeri is a village dialect of mountain
shepherds, in Britain or in Indonesia it is the rustling of leaves in the wind. The physical
component of signs that connect us to our mother tongue is interchangeable, even though we
are born only once, if we exchange our country for another and still live in another country.
The ur-poem is therefore a poem that cannot be recorded in writing and only a transcription
can later be made of it. In the heard and in its repetition, as in a Chinese whisper, everything is
transmitted on the basis of consonance and dissonance, the associations of the roots of words
are more evident, nuances are eroded and the common emerges. Speaking by ur, however, is
not about seeking archetypes, about a return, but about testing a language emerging on the
borderland in between migrant and nomadic experience, repeating the repeated again and
again, trial and error, a deed of trivializing the millennial history of language into its
contemporary form of permeability between languages in the trans-local era. It is the
language. Ur-words are like pebbles polished by constant repetition in the mind; the
ur-language that emerges in front of us appears at moments in its monumentality, and at others
vanishes in unintelligibility.
3. What does Poezōē mean?
Mishaps and events, traumas, misfortunes and fractures would, even without its assistance,
themselves collapse into an extremely varied, tragic story telling of the oppression of ethnic
minorities, punishment of the counter-establishment, discrimination against homosexuals and
which foreign mouths will not recount here, because Babachan does so himself, Maj Lajf, My
Life, the voice of Babi Badalov speaks of these events and decisions and testifies in collages,
utters them in ur-language, though, utters them daily in conversations with anyone he meets
in the overpopulated metropolises and thus creates a flux current of dialogue and testimony;
the testimony is that of one man, but it is a dialogue and polylogue about zōē, which is known and understood by those who are existentially affected by it and do not know how, who are
afraid to travel on a bus without a ticket; zōē comes to the surface here like a grille that has firm bars with gaps between them, and if we do not want to fall through, we must place our
feet on the firm lines of reality of the migrants, which for the sensitivity of the nomads and the
ears of the sedentary settlers sounds course, giving weight to details that the sedentary
bourgeois take for granted and are bored by, talk of searching for food on the streets without
money, wandering through police prefectures. The practices of migrants, their (my, our)
interests in travelling, walking and moving through the same places, are quite different,
because we feel, see and take an interest in what is happening in the towns from the waist up,
while the eyes of Babi Badalov are fixed on the pavement, seeking posters, shreds of images
and signs of civilization littering the street, and are fixed on the faces of the people of the
metropolises, in which he is seasoned at reading what ethnic group they belong to and what
distant part of the planet they come from. In 2014, migrant´s zōē is, unsurprisingly, subjected to total state control and depends on the state administrative practices of the apparatus
judging and controlling migration. We can hardly expect that the control apparatus will
lighten its surveillance; with the digitization of every sphere, surveillance becomes more
effective. Life itself, not just deportation, but very life itself depends on something that in the
pre–digital era looked like a round, red, purple or black ink seal, a stamp, the pound of soft rubber on the paper of a protocol, today it dissolves in a chain of decisions that have to be
recorded in digital online forms, to which perhaps the entire state administration has access,
and which are collectively evaluated at closed-session and committee meetings, and this
system conducts biopolitical surveillance of health, skin, internal organs, mental state (Babi
Badalov, My Life Report in Paris), nutrition and provision of a roof over the mortal coil. That is
the Poe Zōē material of Babi Badalov.
4. Was Tolstoy a Punk? trappa trappa trappa Was Tolstoy a Punk? Was he or was he not?
