Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.
This month, we travel to the mountains of Tajikistan where a filmmaker remembers her grandmother, and grapples with what it means to belong to a place without ever living there.
We mark the memory of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and learn about the art and literature that’s emerged from this epoch-defining event. We also remember the long struggle towards gay rights by hearing stories about the origins of International Pride Month from three cities in very different parts of the US.
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For your sense of origin | I CROSSED THE PAMIR HIGHWAY TO FIND MY GRANDMA’S SECRET PAST
When dementia began to erase her grandmother’s memories, Alina Naza travelled across Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway with her father – “to find her village, her past, and whatever was left of her story.”
The thirteen-minute film she created about her first visit to the family home straddles travelogue, biography and memoir, and features breathtaking scenery of a country that’s 93% mountains.
As she explores the landscape that gave shape to her grandmother’s wonderful stories, she discovers what was real and what was fiction. It’s “a story about grief, ancestry… and what it means to belong to a place you’ve never lived in,” says Naza.
🔗 Watch I Crossed the Pamir Highway to Find My Grandma’s Secret Past. You can also dip into excerpts via Naza’s YouTube shorts – like this delightful one about the winged pari who, the village said, accompanied Naza’s grandmother on her adventures.
For your sense of expression | TIANANMEN AS MUSE
This month marks the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The event is still systematically censored in China and has largely been erased from the country’s collective memory.
Amy Hawkins writes about the quiet race against this forgetting, and the exiled activists – along with the children of the original protesters – who are working to preserve what the Chinese state has long tried to bury.
But it’s not only the horrors of June Fourth that are at risk of disappearing. “One of the things that gets forgotten,” says historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “was that at the early phase of the protests, there was this incredible kind of joyousness and sense of possibility.”
I tried to capture some of this optimism in a book I wrote when I lived in Shanghai, about Chinese contemporary art’s journey to market darling since Mao’s death.
“When Deng Xiaoping declared martial law in late May, something was needed to revive people’s determination. Students from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts spent the next four days creating a statue of the Goddess of Democracy – ten metres tall, pure white – which they transported to Tiananmen Square by bicycle rickshaw. At dusk on 30 May, the artists built a bamboo scaffold and began assembling the statue, while Beijing residents stalled troops ordered to prevent its construction. As the cloth was removed, people applauded and began shouting “Long Live Democracy!” The Goddess now stood directly facing Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Gate.”
By the time the sun had risen five days later, the army had cleared the Square.
The artist Sheng Qi had recently graduated from the same academy, and joined in the protests. “Since you were a child you were taught to believe in Communism because it’s like your god,” he told me. “And then, in 1989… I realised that this god is the biggest liar.”
One evening in October, after months of personal torment, Sheng took a meat cleaver and chopped off one of his fingers. The severed finger became the subject of his My Left Hand series: photographs of his cupped palm – held against Mao’s portrait, family photos, Tiananmen Square.
Ai Weiwei, another artist who I interviewed, was in New York when the tanks rolled into the Square. When he returned to China in the mid-nineties, his response was characteristically oblique: a photographic series in which he raises his middle finger towards Tiananmen Square Gate – but also monuments like the White House and the Eiffel Tower.
There’s a gap that seems to run through much of the art and literature Tiananmen has inspired, this essay reviewing three works of fiction suggests. There are those who were in the Square, and those who were not.
Tiananmen is not at risk of being forgotten, the author argues. The question might be whether it’s become a muse as much as a memory.
🔗 Read Amy Hawkins’ piece about the fight to preserve the memory of Tiananmen, and Yangyang Cheng’s essay, Tiananmen in Fiction. In this blog post, my Beijing-born friend shares his family’s memories of cycling through the city with their infant when public transport stopped running. You’ll find my book, Paint by Numbers: China’s Art Factory from Mao to Now on Amazon, where you can also preview the first half of the first chapter.
For your sense of pride | PRIDE IN NYC, KC, AND SF
This International Pride Month, we’re sharing stories from three of our favourite VoiceMaps about the origins of the gay rights movement.
Tom Darbyshire’s dramatic recounting of the night at the NYC “bottle club” that sparked the Stonewall Rebellion in June 1969 is my personal favourite. He invites us to imagine that “warm summer night” when the police didn’t leave, and the toss of a glass into the street kicked everything off. It’s got a rendition of the impromptu chant by drag queens – or “Stonewall Girls” – that riled police, and a musical score that makes you feel like you were standing there as history unfolded. Every publisher lends their own flavour to each VoiceMap, but this Emmy-nominated storyteller’s tours give me goosebumps every time.
🔗 Listen to Tom’s Stonewall Rebellion story, and browse the whole tour, Greenwich Village: Pride and Folk from Stonewall to MacDougal Street.
“If New York and the Stonewall Riots are the birthplace of the Gay Liberation Movement, then Kansas City is where it was first conceived.” That’s according to Joel Barrett, whose free tour of Kansas City takes us back to a pivotal meeting that was held three years earlier, in February 1966.
🔗 Listen to an excerpt from an interview about this historic meeting near the Barney Allis Plaza when, for the first time, “gay and lesbian civil rights leaders in Kansas City came together to figure out ways to partner and to move the civil rights movement forward.” You’ll also hear about two other events that put Kansas City on the map for gay rights. Browse Joel’s driving tour: KC Rainbow Tour: A Drive from UMKC to the historic River Market.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s VoiceMap tour of the city’s “preeminent gayborhood” puts a spotlight on Castro Camera, which was more than “just a place to get your film developed.” It was opened by Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist who served for four years in the Navy before being forced to resign from his post in 1955 because of his sexual orientation.
The store became a centre for activism and the headquarters for Harvey’s political campaigns, before his assassination in November 1978. “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet shatter every closet door,” Milk said in an audio message accompanying his will.
🔗 Listen to the story about Castro Camera, and browse the whole tour, Over the rainbow in the Castro: A tour of San Francisco’s preeminent gayborhood. For six more tours – beyond the US – that touch on the history that laid the foundations for what is Pride Month today, take a look at this post.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire van den Heever
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