‘How much you are hated is how much you are free’: how Azerbaijan’s underground writers fight for independence

Each week, two very different literary events take place in Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku. The first is a meeting of the state-funded Union of Azerbaijani Writers, founded a century ago as a body of the USSR Writers’ Union. It gathers in an administrative, white stone building lined with ornate balconies and shaded by the tree-lined streets of central Baku.

The other is organised by the Free Writers’ Union, a gathering of young writers spontaneously taking over any space they can get, in cafes and underground bookshops. Today, in a hostel hall booked for the occasion, one of the leaders of the Free Writers’ group, Rasim Qaraca, is meeting his readers. He reads poems and talks politics. His views on literature and criticism of the establishment is typical of the Free Writers, and enthusiastically received.

“Rhyming poetry is the same as nepotism. Placing words together just because they look and sound like each other, without any real poetic reason, is the same with favouring your relatives by giving them jobs,” he says. “People love those poets who write in the same ready and expected moulds. The measure of how much you are hated in our country is also the measure of how much you are free.”

Literature has always been a matter of national pride in Azerbaijan, with dozens of statues of local poets and writers scattered around Baku. A collective rebellion of writers, however, is something relatively new. The uprising began in the 2000s, sparked by a backlash against the country’s cultural policies and its mainstream definition of literature. Azerbaijan’s writing sphere had long been dominated by the legacy of ancient folklore, medieval Diwan poetry, and 19th and 20th century novelists.

The new millennium, however, also brought a new generation of writers who wanted to radically break with this accepted national norm. They started experimenting with style and narration, new themes and new modes of expression. Perhaps more divisively, however, these writers also started to write acerbic social commentary calling on society to re-evaluate itself. They declared radical disassociation from not only mainstream culture, but also from the past of Azerbaijan. “We are counter-culture,” novelist, poet, and Free Writer pioneer Hamid Herisçi, proudly declares.

As well as providing a platform for the Free Writers’ Union, Alatoran filled its pages with short stories by Russian post-Soviet authors like Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Azad Yaşar, and texts that deconstructed and rewrote texts from Soviet-Azerbaijani writers to appeal to the nation’s young readers, often saving only the title or a handful of character names from the original. But the publication is not to everyone’s taste, and backlash can be fierce. Sevinc Parvana is one of writers creating a new wave of feminist Azerbaijani literature. “I write about a woman’s body, her feelings, the most real, ordinary and natural things that a woman can live through. It’s simple,” she says. But even an unassuming text can cause writers serious problems in conservative Azerbaijan. “More than once, I’ve had to face insults, or even newspaper reviews [about my work] filled with curse words,” Parvana says.

Aqşin Yenisey, another early member of Free Writers has similar feelings. “Personally, I don’t want to earn the love of Azerbaijanis. My intention is not total recognition from the people,” he says. They loved the Soviet-Azerbaijani poets. Those poets lived a long life, got all the state awards, died, and their works died too. Is there any line by them that people remember now? There’s not even a single line left for literature”.

Times are changing for the Free Writers’ Union. Despite all its difficulties, the group has come into its own in the social media age. Writers no longer need funding or other backing to get published: instead they build a social media page, find and inspire their own circle of readers.

Alatoran is changing from a literary magazine to a publishing house, with copies bearing the label “Alatoran Books” finding their way into all of Baku’s independent bookshops. Rasim Qaraca, who once prepared the group’s first anthology, has rented his own tiny office. “All of our self-publishing means that I just found myself turned into a publisher one day, without planning for it at all,” he says. He is in charge of the editing, proofreading, and design for books (as well as any translations) before texts are sent to the prints. Their print runs do not exceed 500 copies, but the ideals which fuel those books remain strong. “We publish books only written by the Free Writers’, and translations from world literature which remain close to our ideas,” says Qaraca.

But in many ways, the Soviet model continues to live on. The Azerbaijani government still hands out free apartments and other awards to whom it deems to be upstanding cultural figures. To break from the country’s official literary apparatus, in a country where much art is bankrolled by the state, can be difficult. “Some of our fellows couldn’t withstand moral and material difficulties, some got sweet offers from the authorities and couldn’t resist,” Seymur Baycan recalls. “They changed their positions.”

But even if the Free Writers have been unable to overtake the clout of the Union of Azerbaijani Writers, then they remain steadfast that they will continue to offer an alternative. “We criticised the Soviet model for a long time. And some of the people who had campaigned vigorously for the change began to prefer the old model as time passed,” says Qaraca. “But there are still some out there who won’t [conform.] Our experience shows that there is another way of being a writer.”