Confusion

"Ala, tomorrow I am sure that there will not be the normal lesson at school."  I'm sitting on my counterpart's sofa around 8:30 pm, just another normal Monday night.  I nod, slowly, glad for the information and fighting the wave of frustration for the fact that I still need to be told at all.  Not instinctively knowing the pattern of social movement often makes me feel like I just signed up to spend two years wandering around a dark house-- bumping into every wall and step.

As I already feel like I've spent the whole day tripping over figurative steps, the frustration quickly dissolves into something much closer to resignation and perhaps a little too similar to defeat.  Our school's beloved math and physics teacher passed away two days ago, and my whole community is mourning.  This is the first time in Georgia that I have been to a wake for someone I felt like I knew.  Sadly, his death was caused by what appears to have been the result of a botched stomach operation, although nobody is clear on the details.  There is, at least, a theme I can cling to here-- when it comes to medical problems, nobody is ever clear on the details.  Everyone regards my pointed American questions with pity.  They know that I was not raised with the concept of resignation to lack of information.  They can see that "nobody knows" is something I struggle to accept.  In a way they're correct, of course, and in a way I think that they just don't see how much "gray area" I have already resigned myself to.

When there is a wake like this, for example, the students and teachers split into groups and travel together.  People often forget to tell me where they are going, when they are going (or that they are going at all), and even more than that I am confused as to "how" I should go.  As a student with my students?  As a teacher with the teachers?  Certainly I more naturally fall into the "teacher" category, but I am so much closer with my students both in age and comfort level that I always hesitate.  I've lived the past two years in the sidewalk crack between child and adult, family member and guest, teacher and student, American and Georgian, alien and familiar.  I am clearly independent and also clearly helpless.  I am cherished help and a huge responsibility.  I can clearly speak Georgian and communicate ... and I also clearly cannot.  In the category box of my life, I check "Other: Please Describe" and write nothing on the line below.

And so I float.  Or stumble.  Or sit static and feeling useless until I can see another path to traverse.  The first time I go to the wake, I go with my students piled in a marshutka trundling up the mountain to the house of our deceased teacher's family.  On the way back down, my seventh grade host sister sits in my lap.  The second time I go, I elect to wait for the teachers-- I am unsure as to exactly why I do it, but I think it has a lot to do with my general discomfort with the situation.  I feel less guilty when I am quiet and noncommittal around the teachers.  Like less of an awkward social burden.  I finally leave the wake alone, after seeing our math teacher in a casket in the living room.  He is so transparently white and he's dressed in an immaculately pressed iron grey suit.  It seems to me as if the suit has more substance than he does.  Seeing him lifts me from my own self-centered confusion to remember a man who was exceptionally kind to everyone and deserved far more than doctors who refused to explain their mistake.  So much confusion.

Confusion pervades life here.  

Adjara, specifically.  I have come to learn that is its own beast in terms of Georgian culture.  I remember in training we had a session on "regional stereotypes"-- one region was full of "fast talkers", one was "hick", one was known for silly things-- like having lots of donkeys.  I had just gotten my site placement, so I was eagerly awaiting what they had to say "about us".  When they got to my region, though, the people at the front of the room just shrugged.  "They were invaded by Turkey."  I remember thinking, even then, that that was a strange, distant way to characterize a region.  All of the other ones were personal, but not Adjara.  They had nothing on Adjara.

Then I got here and slowly realized that it wasn't just that Adjara didn't have a stereotype: people in other parts of Georgia have no idea what is going on in these mountains.  In my first year here, I often tried to describe social patterns and attitudes that I encountered to other Peace Corps volunteers as potential barriers to joint projects.  My understanding of my village and our culture here was often met with disbelief, puzzlement, and occasionally hostility.  After all, the rest of Georgia is quite homogeneous in terms of cultural attitudes and religious practices.  Other people naturally thought that I was crying wolf, being too sensitive, or just generally completely misunderstanding my surroundings.  Then, when my friend's host grandmother died here, he called Peace Corps to ask about local funeral traditions.  The staff replied that they honestly didn't know what they were.  The things he described were strange to them.  They could tell him about traditional Georgian practices, but what they were saying had no bearing on what was happening in his house.

It was asking about funeral practices that solidified another growing realization: people in these mountains have no idea what is going on in these mountains.  That the region has a Muslim history due to centuries of Ottoman control, everyone knows.  Most elderly people in the village are Muslim and most younger people are converting to Georgian Orthodox in order to return to their own cultural roots.  This, we know here.  After this we begin to tread on suppositions and observation.  Most people high in the mountains do not have internet and do not communicate with communities outside of this mountain range.  This means that the independent religious movement of these mountains, although vaguely self-aware, is not progressing in any kind of organized fashion.  What it is is a group of people returning to roots that their great grandparents can no longer describe to them.  Even more confusing is the fact that so many people here were forcibly converted to Islam long ago under Ottoman rule and many did not adopt a "pure" version of the religion.  Thus the practice of Islam varies from village to village throughout the region.

Even more, Georgians in these mountains have a general rule of thumb about funerals and the deceased: regardless of the religious beliefs or religious conversion of the younger members of the family, all older members should be remembered and mourned in the religion that they practiced during their lifetime.  This means that even with the conversion to Georgian Orthodox, younger family members are still socially required to celebrate Muslim holidays in order to properly honor the dead.  This causes confusion when a Christian family is unsure of how to perform an old Muslim tradition.  Even more, the middle generation acts as a kind of "gap year" and generally isn't very religious.  All questions about how to properly perform Muslim rites must be asked to the elderly themselves-- and their opinions may differ greatly from village to village.  So in light of all of this, in order to perform funeral rites that families are unsure of, what should they do?

Side-by-side with the Muslim holidays, we celebrate Georgian Orthodox holidays here-- sometimes with the reluctance of people who are only converting for social purposes and sometimes with the fervor of those who are determined to reconnect with their "stolen" culture as deeply as possible.  Sometimes one attitude evolves into the other.  To my fascination, in the span of only two years I have watched the culture of my own house shift from the former attitude to the latter, although, admittedly, we are still not particularly fervent, just noticeably more so.  

When talking with my counterpart about the passing of our school math teacher, I asked her if he would be buried according to Muslim traditions or Christian traditions.  She told me that without doubt his burial would be done according to Muslim tradition.  Within the Georgian mountain understanding of Islam, this means a lot of things, but one major difference is that Muslim funerals are closed-casket.  Georgian wakes are open-casket.

Certainly you can see where I'm going with this now, but I have even another detail to add.  As I went to the wake yesterday as well, I can tell you that yesterday the casket was closed.  Today it was open.  

And although this may sound like it has devolved into a cold, clinical dissection of the anthropological history that surrounds me, let me assure you that that is not the case.  I am incapable of being so absorbed in these mountains and not feeling tied to the lives around me.  I am constantly seeking similarities between my life and theirs because I am convinced that the more parallels I can find, the more I will feel like I belong.  I want to feel like I belong. 

I can’t say that I was magically cured of my frustrations and loneliness by meditating on the confusion of funeral practices in Georgia and how they relate to my own perspective, but in dealing with my own despair at being the only one in my little world who doesn't instinctively understand the culture that I have so long been immersed in, the understanding that nobody around me is instinctively sure either calms me.

Rest in peace, Enveri Mas, you will be greatly missed.