Review
Galsan Tschinag's autobiographical story of a
boy living on the Mongolian steppes (prairies) offers an
evocative glimpse into a way of life in which the nomadic people
live in harmony with their awesome (in the literal sense)
surroundings, worshiping the sky as sacred. It is a record of a
time that was already vanishing in Tschinag's childhood but, thanks in part to Tschinag and others, is now being not just preserved but lived once
again.
The Blue Sky is set in the 1950s, when the
Tuvan's traditional nomadic ways were under threat from the
Communist government who, intent on producing a homogeneous and
equal Soviet people, introduced endless new rules that made it
ever harder to continue to live in the traditional ways
especially when the system rewarded the lazy over the
industrious....
Beyond the Book
To reach the homeland of the
Tsengel Tuvans one has to travel to the furthest western
corner of Mongolia, to the
High Altai mountains to a province the size of the
Netherlands, bordering China. More than 90%
of the population of the area are Kazakh
Muslims, the remaining 10% are Khalkh,
Urinakhai, Khoshuud and Tuvans.
The Tuvans are a Turkic-speaking people
(i.e. their spoken language belongs to
the Turkic family; other Turkic speaking
countries include Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan
and, of course, Turkey). Today, about
4,000 of Mongolia's approx 2.3 million
population identify themselves as Tuvan....
