“Two Rivers,” Carolyn Drake’s upcoming book, is a photographic record of the area in Central Asia that follows the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the region’s major rivers. Elif Batuman, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who wrote the text for the book, explains, “Drake’s Central Asia is a place where political allegiances, ethnic bonds, national borders, and even physical geography are in such flux as to seem, at times, like fictions.”
The region, which lies at a cultural and geopolitical crossroads, is a study in contradictions. “A lot of the clichés that help us talk about the world are connected with geography,” Drake said. “The decline in the Soviet Union, the ascent of China, the ongoing social and economic and military strife in Afghanistan, the threat of Iran. What happens when you turn your attention to a place that lies in between all of these engrained stories and places?” This tension runs through Drake’s work: “Paying attention to Central Asia and these elusive rivers was a way for me to challenge my assumptions about the order of the world and rethink what’s important in it.”
“Two Rivers,” comes out next month. Here’s a look at photographs from the book, with descriptions by Batuman. Click on the red arrows 
for a full-screen view.
In the park of Khudayar Khan’s palace, the swirling barbecue smoke obscures a veiled woman, unless it’s the veiled woman who reveals the smoke. Local businessmen, travelling to Mecca, have been bringing back headscarves. Under Soviet rule, ideological committees paid house visits to lecture women on the evils of the veil. When Carolyn’s host, Farakhat, sees women with their faces completely covered, she visits them at home and tells them to cut it out. Carolyn has been reading Ibn Battuta who, travelling through this region in the fourteenth century, described people knocking on doors to call men to prayer. If they didn’t go, they were whipped. A lot has changed, but the doors haven’t caught many breaks.
The wild goose, object of so many chases, sticks out its neck. A “wild goose chase” was originally a horse race with no fixed course: the rider in the lead improvised the route, until someone passed him. Human history is a lot like that.
It’s a warm April day in Shakhrisabz, where, six hundred and seventy-four years ago, Tamerlane was born. In Turkish, Shakhrisabz means something like “city of vegetables.” Those girls’ heads are sprouting foliage: the old, old story.
In the great ecosystem of the free market, Moskovich cars will be edged out by tiny Korean models, products of the Daewoo plant in Andijon. They only come in white. A car window can resemble an executioner’s block.
A disused Soviet factory—it might have made shoes—is being converted into a Chinese warehouse. Photography isn’t allowed inside. Blossoms surround a headless Lenin. The law of conservation is at work: for every bodiless Lenin head, there is a headless Lenin body.
Foreigners are forbidden from travelling in Turkmenistan without an official guide. Carolyn is accompanied by a Turkmenistan-born Russian who specializes in adventure tours. No student of human nature, he enjoys racing through the desert with his four-wheel drive. In a town called Mary, Carolyn prevails upon him to stop at a public pool. He won’t help her talk to the swimmers, who are jumping and flipping into the pools from all directions. The swimmers’ faces speak volumes, but what they speak of is mostly other faces. Scythian, Tocharian, Sassanid, Sogdian, Parthian, Alexandrian, Avar, Xiongnu, Rouran, Khitan, Timurid, Oirat, Ghaznavid, Karakhanid, Seljuk, Uighur, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh.
Above the light bulb, above the ceiling, above the house, the sky is heavy with stars. Those might be bullet holes in the door.
Manipulating some sugar, a candle, and a dagger, a shaman cures a bereaved girl of weariness.
There’s a man in that car in the rain in Naryn. It’s April.
The Hizb ut-Tahrir is said to be active in Karasu, but nobody seems to have heard of them. Carolyn can scarcely find a single Islamist. Finally, one woman says that her neighbor sometimes wears the paranja. They visit the neighbor at her home. She’s wearing regular clothes, but changes into traditional dress. How open and closed people are at the same time! It seems ironic that any culture should seek to conceal women’s sexuality in a garment that bears such a close resemblance to a vagina.
The gaping flame-filled crater has been this way since 1971, when Soviet geologists tapped into a cavern of natural gas and decided to burn it off so it wouldn’t poison anyone. They thought it would take a few days. Four decades later, locals refer to this pit as the Door to Hell. In Turkmenistan, many people leave their gas ranges burning all day and all night: why bother turning them on and off, when gas is inexhaustible?
In Andijon, a Russian car is loaded with Chinese furniture.
Is the travertine pool cold or hot? It looks like ice, but must in fact be warm. The baked Alaska was actually invented by the French, who called it a “Norwegian omelet.”
The shaman reads cards for men and women who want to understand their lives. She’s a wealthy woman. Explaining people’s lives to them is a good business model.
This village is named Karimov, after the Uzbek President who controls the national cotton industry. Farmers subsist by smuggling: flour, grain, and bottled water. There’s no point in smuggling cotton, unless you’re getting married and need to sew a stack of cotton mats for the new home.
Photographs by Carolyn Drake.
