The Wakhan corridor will be familiar to anyone with the distinctive shape of Afghanistan in their mind. It is the arm that juts out to the upper right, ensuring that Tajikistan and Pakistan never touch and ending in a very short border with China. The border with Pakistan is straddled by a mountainous expanse but the border with Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) is drawn by the river Panj, an extension of the Amu Darya/Jeyhun/Oxus which gives its name to Transoxania, long rendered in Arabic and Persian as Ma Warah an-Nahr—“what lies beyond the river”. The path of this river has become an acute presence in recent history as a demarcation of the Russian empire, USSR, and now the southernmost post-Soviet Central Asian republics, which remain firmly within Russia’s sphere of influence. Before the Taliban returned, the Wakhan corridor had become a destination for trekkers and adventure-seekers who wanted to experience the tranquil beauty of Afghanistan without the risk of stepping on landmines. Current efforts to attract such visitors are a bit more contentious, construed as recreational tourism set against a backdrop of widespread scarcity and oppression.
While music in Badakhshan, particularly of those regions that fall inside of Tajikistan, has been extensively researched by scholars both foreign and local, the music of the Wakhan corridor has received much less consideration, with the notable exception of the contributions of Hiromi Lorraine Sakata and Chorshanbe Goibnazarov. Musical-poetic genres specific to Wakhan have been treated very little in English language scholarship prior to recent attention from Goibnazarov and Richard Wolf. In tandem with extensive fieldwork in Wakhan, Wolf has also made a documentary film, Two Poets and a River, in which he artfully situates the musical-poetic repertoires of Wakhki communities within their natural and political surroundings as well as within the more abstract domain of the emotional life of communities and performers.
The two poets of the film’s title, Qorbonsho and Daulatsho, are centred throughout as singer-poet-instrumentalists. Living in Tajikistan and Afghanistan respectively, they exemplify the proximity of Wakhi communities on either side of the Panj (Figure 1), the titular river. As articulated in some of the poems sung over the course of the film, these communities live in a painful state of separation. Through Badakhshan and along the Wakhan corridor, the Panj is at places almost comically shallow and narrow—ankle deep and maybe twelve feet across in places. But this doesn’t mean it’s not a treacherous border to attempt to cross, as there are Russian soldiers in sniper positions at key locations, owing in large part to the threat of narcotics and jihadist militants being shuttled effortlessly across.
A cluster of trees in Tajikistan (l) inclines towards a cluster of trees in Afghanistan (r) across the river Panj, near Ishkoshim, Badakhshan/Wakhan, 2006. Photo: George Mürer.
As Wolf makes clear through interviews very early in the film, in the historical consciousness of the people of this region it is not only the absurdity of the intraversibility of the Panj that weighs upon them. Much as that in and of itself represents a major insult and source of hardship, the entire phenomenon of the contemporary neo-imperial nation-state is an oppressive force. For instance, the city of Yarkand, located in the territory today controlled by China, used to be the terminus of a major trade route from which communities in Wakhan benefited, until the relatively recent closure of the border. Archival images—illustrations and especially maps—are employed to convey this political geography.
Wolf narrates the opening but thereafter the voices of the musician-poets and their families and communities guide the film, much of which is set in and around their homes, entwining strong impressions of wilderness, domesticity, and spiritual gravitas.
The film is imaginatively edited with striking compositions, giving the viewer a visceral sense of the environment—the rugged beauty of the Pamir mountains and Panj River valley, the life rhythms and material culture of the Wakhi community. Layered exposure effects and vivid colours play significant roles in the film’s aesthetics, lending it a lush, painterly quality, sometimes sombre, sometimes hyperalert, and sometimes dreamlike. The framing of people working, speaking, singing, playing instruments, and dancing in interior settings has an almost uniform texture that derives in large part from the dimensions of their houses, whose proportions and layouts tend to be fairly consistent. But other dimensions are conveyed through dramatic shifts whereby the same spaces are shown, now threadbare and empty, with one or two people sitting and working, now crowded and alive, now quiet and disenchanted, now resounding with entrancing musical warmth.
There could be a little more background given to the Ismaili orientation of the Pamiri society of the adjacent portions of Wakhan and Badakhshan, which permeates the texts sung, the character of the music, and the design and spatialization of dwellings. There is a substantial body of earlier work on Badakhshan that can easily be consulted but a sense of these particulars still might have been illuminating for the viewer in the context of this film.
The poetry is sung to the accompaniment of instruments such as the Pamiri rabob and the Pamiri tambour/balandzikom (distinctively shaped lutes of higher and lower respective registers), the ghichak (a spike fiddle with a metal box resonator—typically a biscuit tin or cooking oil container), and rough-hewn skin-headed frame drums (daf). The dambura (long-necked lute) also makes an appearance in the hands of the popular Meri Maftun. How Wakhi culture is mounted on more public stages is demonstrated by snippets of performances in Khorog, the main town of GBAO, as well as in Yekaterinburg, one of the many Russian cities that attract labourers from Tajikistan.
It is a major asset to the film that the material was collected during multiple residencies over about eight years and we see the backdrops in all four seasons. In general, the onscreen presence of people or animals tends to be fleeting in stark contrast to the lingering gazes out at the mountains or the enveloping sounds of running water.
With such a voluminous wealth of material to draw on, the filmmaker has necessarily had to be selective with respect to what he wishes to illustrate through musical examples and how much screen time he allows a given musical sequence in doing so. However, I did feel that in places the musical performances could be unnecessarily truncated. There are several instances where a focus on music and poetry is very effectively interwoven with interviews and ambient portraits of households through crossfading and dissolves, but often I would have liked for musical performances to be allowed to unfold more thoroughly, which would also give the setting, however static, more time to be gradually absorbed. To this end, at least one musical centerpiece of say six or seven minutes would have gone a long way. The exuberant dance sequences as well, if two or three times as long, would provide more immersive experiences for the viewers. The somewhat fragmenting effect of frequent cutting works very well in sequences that highlight Wolf’s overtures to filmic auteurship but abrupt cuts can make the portraits of musicianship feel a bit impersonal. A notable exception comes right at the end when a two-minute shot of Daulatsho playing rabob and singing a bulbulik provides the film with a poignant note of repose just before the end credits.
My gentle critiques are meant to point to things that could be addressed at a future point, as I think that Wolf, like many researcher-documentarians in the present moment (myself included), produces films that even when “finished” continue to live, breathe, and evolve with time. I have seen this film presented over the course of several years, and it has followed a distinct arc of becoming tighter and progressively more visually poetic.
Whether presented in classroom, festival, or conference settings, Two Poets and a River has a great deal to offer as a cinematic work of ethnomusicological scholarship (or ciné-ethnomusicology), specifically as a portrait of Wakhi musical-poetic arts with vivid attention to their social and geographic context. It is a pleasure to watch, intimate and alive in its details and textures, and it is saddening to think of the precarity facing these communities and their arts today.
