Mankurt

The mankurt in the novel

Mankurts are unthinking slaves in Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, published in Russian in the Novy Mir magazine in 1980. In the novel a mankurt is a prisoner of war turned into a creature wholly obedient to its owner and remembering nothing of its previous life.

Aitmatov's account of the procedure runs as follows. The captors shaved the prisoner's head and bound onto it a shiri, a piece of hide from the neck of a freshly killed camel. His hands and feet were tied and a wooden block fixed on his neck so that he could not touch the ground with his head, and he was left in the desert for several days. Under the scorching sun the hide shrank and tightened around the skull while his growing hair forced its way into the skin, causing unbearable pain made worse by thirst. Those who survived lost the memory of their former life and became ideal slaves, stripped of their own will and boundlessly submissive to their master; such slaves were valued far above ordinary ones.

In the novel's legend, Zholaman, a young nomad, is taken prisoner by the Zhuanzhuans and made into a mankurt. His mother, Naiman-Ana, searches for him for a long time and finds him, but he does not recognise her and kills her on his owners' orders. Aitmatov writes that a mankurt did not know who he was or what tribe he came from, did not know his own name, and did not recognise himself as a human being. Never contemplating escape and obeying only his master, he needed no guarding.

Disputed etymology

According to linguists, the word may have been constructed by Aitmatov from local roots: Old Turkic munqul, 'foolish, devoid of reason', modern Kyrgyz munju, 'cripple', and Mongolian manguu, 'stupid, imbecile', with the derived verb manguurakh, 'to become stupid'. Another reading derives it from the Old Turkic man, 'to gird, to put on a belt', and qurut, 'dried', that is, a person on whose head a belt is put and who is dried out. Kazakh has the verbs mängu, 'to lose one's composure, to go out of one's mind', and mängiru, 'to be unconscious', and the noun mängürt, 'demented, mad, having lost memory'.

Aitmatov stated that he did not take the idea from tradition but invented it himself. Researchers, however, hold that the legend has a real folkloric source. In an interview the writer said that the epic Manas contains lines in which one man threatens another with stretching a shiri, raw camel hide, over his head and by that torture destroying his memory and taking away his past, and that nothing else on the matter survives in either literature or folklore.

Political metaphor

In the later years of the Soviet Union the word entered common parlance as a metaphor for a Soviet citizen affected by the historical distortions and omissions propagated by official teachings. In Russian it became a common noun for a person who has lost touch with historical and national roots and forgotten their kinship, and neologisms such as mankurtizm, mankurtizatsiya and demankurtizatsiya were coined. After the collapse of the USSR the term is used widely in journalism across the former Soviet Union, and in some former Soviet republics it has come to refer to non-Russians who lost their ethnic heritage because of the Soviet political system.

According to a survey in the Russian magazine Nauka i Zhizn, the word, though now widely used, has kept only the element of loss of memory about one's ancestors and dropped the important parts stating that this loss resulted from external intervention and that it turned a person into a slave of the master. In political usage the coercion and servitude central to the novel's legend are thus easily lost.

Separately, the Kazakh writer Abish Kekilbayev had already described the same transformation in his novella Küi (1968), an episode of the Kazakh-Turkmen wars over Mangyshlak in which Turkmen turned six Kazakh captives into mangurts.

Derived work

In 1990 the Soviet film Mankurt was released, based on the mankurt legend from Aitmatov's novel and adapting one narrative strand of it.