Sadik Graduation: A Bit of Cultural Context

I posted a video clip and some photos today from Anya's preschool year-end pageant. There were a whole lot of dance numbers and a wonderful spread of food, with the landlord's plov as the centerpiece. The evening was a lot of fun, not least for us personally because of how Anya showed to what extent she has come out of her reserved shell in the last several months, capping this year in preschool with a dance "solo."

I guess I feel the need to explain a bit, though. There was one number that made us feel a bit uncomfortable for the way race played a role, and although I loved Anya's own Eastern dance number, it occurs to me that it's possible someone unfamiliar with the cultural context might wonder what was happening with her short routine.

First, race. The kids did a group routine to the tune of "Chunga-Changa," a song from the Soviet-era cartoon "Katerok (Little Boat)." You can see the original 1970 animated version here. When we saw Anya come out together with her classmate O. to dance in costume amid their peers, we were a little surprised that the one child with an African parent was cast in a piece with that name, in outfits made to look like classically imagined "native dress."

The song is a little paean to a simple life of plenty on the desert isle to which the Little Boat in the cartoon gets blown off-course in a storm: the lyrics celebrate the "miraculous island's" blue skies, year-round summer climate, and the diet of coconuts and bananas that one apparently adopts once one is grounded there. On that level, one can probably read the song and the cartoon scenes as a simple daydream about escaping the life of shortages and difficulty in the Soviet Union. The trouble for a person born in the post-Civil Rights United States comes in where the somewhat stylized figures of black children enter (which is almost immediately), complete with curly heads of hair and what look like grass skirts. To me this looks like the product of a centuries-long distance from African and Afro-Caribbean colonialism, and the twentieth-century relationship of the Soviet state to the Third World and Africa and the Caribbean, with a dash of Russian old-school Romantically informed views about the immutable and inherent qualities of race (and, for that matter, gender).

Obviously, cultural relativism in this situation could be seen as no different from agreement and support. I'm still honestly not sure what to think of the way the teachers staged this piece, but I guess for now I think it's best to assume that this is primarily about a fondly remembered Soviet-era cultural artifact and that the bit was being staged with all the best intentions, and basically to leave it at that. (After all, so much of what the kids in our sadik do, especially at their pageants, comes from exactly the same nostalgic place: witness fondness for the Soviet incarnation of the Ded Moroz-Baba Yaga story that people in the post-Soviet world are truly loathe to part with.)

(I should mention too that this dance number at the preschool was preceded by an intro about how delightfully international our particular group of kids is, and more generally praising in broad strokes the multitude of difference kinds of people and nations in the world, complete with each kid waving the flag of his or her parents home country. Never mind that that becomes complicated with so many of our preschool's families in dual national households: the point was just to do one of those simple celebrations of the "thousand flowers" blooming together, to praise the "friendship of the peoples." More Soviet-era concepts re-imagined in the post-Soviet (re-)developing world, where expat NGO and diplomatic families and some locals can afford to pay for a better quality private day-care/preschool than what is offered officially on the local market.)

True, after seeing the dance number, there may be a place for commenting to the teachers about the role they chose for O. (I will note that O.'s European mother didn't seem to mind a bit that her son was cast in the piece, although she could have simply been keeping her reaction inside. When I talked to some of our fellow parents about it later, we all agreed that she and her family have to be used to the very different views about race that people hold in the former Soviet Union. Whether that makes it OK is a different question, but I wouldn't be surprised if in fact she wasn't phased by it.) But are our own American views and cultural associations with race so perfect that we can go around lecturing to Tajiks or Russians about their assumptions?

It might also be appropriate for us to engage our kids in conversation about race after the performance, but I tend to think that 3 and a half is young to have a talk about these things. I think my view is that here, as in other aspects of our social relations, it's probably better just to model tolerance and openness to our kids, rather than to have overt discussions about how the world works (and ought to work), to show by doing rather than to instruct by talking. (Part of that I hope is the way we interact with O., and I do think that part of the reason it took me a split second to notice the weirdness of the casting in the dance number precisely because I don't notice O.'s race. It's only because of the dance number that I'm even thinking about his skin color, really.)

Incidentally, if you want to know more about how race is discussed in Russia and in the former Soviet Union's cultural sphere, this Russian-language article on Wikipedia is actually quite insightfully written. There are a few spots where I start to wonder what the author's own biases are, but for the most part I think it explains really well the differences I've noticed in over 20 years of direct contact with Homo sovieticus and visiting his (and her) habitat.

OK, with all of that as prelude, just take a look at the photos and videos for yourself. I will try to explain my position on 3-year-olds doing something that resembles belly dancing next time, but in the meantime I'll just say that I look at the whole belly dancing thing as an art form, and one whose moves and shiny costumes truly fascinate kids. I'm really glad that Anya, whose dancing always has an Eastern flair to it, probably because she's spent these formative years in Central Asia, did this particular dance for her little year-end solo.