Simon Wickhamsmith
Rutgers University

   
 
 
            As a scholar of Mongolian Studies and a translator of Mongolian literature, I frequently find myself trying to explain the idea of Mongolia. I encounter questions about nomadic culture, about animals, about mining and development, about Chinggis Haan, about socialism, and (of course) I am asked, sometimes with wonder that any might exist, about Mongolia’s literature. But what sometimes most attracts people is the way in which Mongolians - who are clearly an industrialized, modern, twenty-first century society - relate so intimately and, most importantly, equitably, with other-than-humans such as their livestock, birds, plants and grasses, hills and mountains, the sun and the moon, the stars and the weather. This was, indeed, something which struck me when I first visited Mongolia, in 2006, and while I have continued to engage intellectually with the perspectives and beliefs of Mongolian nomads, as presented in their behavior as well as in their oral and written literature, their songs, and their traditions, I have also found myself changed as my understanding has deepened: my ongoing encounter with Mongolia has made me think very differently about my place as a human being within both the local and planetary ecology.
            In the west, we struggle to locate our position as humans in relation to other-than-humans. The development of humanism as a philosophical approach started during the European Renaissance, and has held sway for more than four hundred years, placing human beings at the top of the pyramid of being, and so somewhat separated from the planet’s other lifeforms. We conceive ourselves as superior because of our intellectual and cognitive abilities, because of our systems of ethics and law, and because of our propensity towards the spiritual and towards self-awareness and self-reflection. And yet we remain naively awed by the intelligence of bonobos, octapi, rats, and cetaceans, foolishly seeking to confirm their intelligence according to how we measure ours, ignoring the very different cognitive and sensory worlds which they inhabit.
            The development of posthumanism over the last three or four decades has begun to relocate human experience, to decenter it, and to propose that, rather than being at the top of the pyramid, and superior to all other forms of life, humans live in relation to them. While this perspective explicitly (and perhaps for some rather alarmingly) goes against the notion that humans are special and different, it also requires that, in order for our species to survive, we pay more attention to preserving the biodiversity in which all take part, and in particular learn how to relate as individuals to the individual lifeforms with which we share the world.
            This, however, is not a new perspective for Mongolia’s nomadic herders. As many scholars and observers, both Mongolian and non-Mongolian, have mentioned, Mongolia’s nomads have a worldview, framed by both shamanism and Buddhism, which is both holistic and detailed, both compassionate and realistic. I think that it is arguable that, just as posthumanism, in the words of Cory Wolfe, deliberately presents human beings’ “embodiment and embeddedness” in the biological world, so Mongolian nomads necessarily recognize this because of how they live their lives among, and interdependent with, the biological (and ecological) world. The Mongolian poet G.Mend-Ooyo (b1952), in his writings over the last fifty years, has been one of the leading Mongolian voices in expressing this ecological and cultural interdependence between the human and the other-than-human.
            Mend-Ooyo’s work expresses not only the immanence and intimacy of the natural world, but also the radical sense of acceptance with which that relationship is understood. The natural process of change and loss is recognized with neither bitterness nor sentimentality. In his poem “The Snow Storm” (Shuurga, 1989), Mend-Ooyo narrates his family’s experience of a severe snow storm, how he, a young boy, stayed at home while first his father goes to make sure the sheep are safe, and then while his sister-in-law and mother go looking for his father. The graphic description of the storm, and the family’s attempts to weather it, holds a healthy sense of respect, but it also implies a mutuality, an acknowledgement that a human being is, like a sheep, a small part of nature which can easily be destroyed. As Mend-Ooyo writes of his realization at that time,
               At seven, I was not a child, Балчир гэлтгүй долоон насанд
               and a realization came to me. Бас чиг ухаан төрдөг юм билээ
               I felt that, had this storm not subsided, Энэ шуурга намжаагүй бол
               we would not have been sitting here. Ингэж суухгүй дээ гэж боддог юм билээ
 
            This realization of a nomadic child, having watched his family disappear into the storm, that their survival had been dependent upon the behavior of the storm itself, rather than upon their own individual or group actions, is profound. Moreover, the lives of the sheep were important in and of themselves, and not simply because of what they provided for the family. From an outsider’s viewpoint, this could simply be a dramatic poem about how a family lived through a storm, but from Mend-Ooyo’s viewpoint as the child of a nomadic herder, this is a poem about his personal and direct recognition of the power of nature, and of the interrelationship of humans, the livestock they herd, and the weather systems which have the power to destroy as much as to nurture them.
            The respect which comes from this kind of realization is felt also in Mend-Ooyo’s writings about the changes to the world’s biological and ecological systems wrought by human intervention. In the third of his 2015 Letters From the Steppe, the work which he most clearly expresses the mutuality of his concern about human mistreatment of the natural world and his realization of ecological and planetary interdependence, Mend-Ooyo says this:
            Nomadic herders observe the flight of birds, the running of antelopes, the character of livestock, and the placement of the stars and the moon, and so they determine the phases of the moon for the coming days and the weather and natural cycles for the coming year. Observing such things as the pitch black color of the clouds, the mass like a fiery ball when the sun is rising or setting, the wind howling like a wolf, a scent emerging from the earth, the turbidity of waters and the barking of dogs, as the nomads move forward they see the land move and the world shake, and they notice how the livestock’s homeland and the wild antelope’s changes.
 
Нүүдэлч малчид шувууны нисэлт, зээр гөрөөсний гүйдэл, адуу малын аяг, од сарны байршил дохиог ажиглаад ирэх өдрүүдэд, угтах саруудад, эсэргэн жилд байгаль цаг агаарын ааш араншин, хөдөлгөөнийг мэдэж тооцоолно. Үүлний өнгө тас хар болох буюу наран шингэн мандахын үед галт бөмбөлөг мэт гэрлэн бөөгнөрөл үүсэх, салхи чоно мэт хуугин улих, газраас хүхэрлэг үнэр гарах, ус булингартан эргэлдэх, нохой гаслан гангинах зэрэг үзэгдэлүүд нь газар хөдлөх, дэлхий шилгээхийн ёр хэмээн үзээд зээр гөрөөс үхэр малын нутаг сэлгэх хөдөлгөөнийг ажиглан нүүдэллэнэ.
            The nature of what he describes as “observation” might be better described as a reckoning with awareness (мэдэж тооцоолох). The admixture of the scientific understanding which comes from living directly on the land and the spiritual wisdom which comes from their intimate closeness with the natural world, with which Mongolian nomads observe meteorological activity, the flight of birds, and the behavior of wild animals, establishes the intellectual theory of posthumanism as the necessary perspective of a lived practise, it is both a call for humans once again to live with an attitude of mutual respect and an acknowledgement that, not unlike what Mend-Ooyo had himself realized as a seven-year-old, if the storm of human mistreatment of nature does not abate, humans may not survive.
            While Letters from the Steppe is a plea for humans to reconnect with the natural world, it is written in language which celebrates the world even as it advises caution. The prayer, “We love you, Mother Earth,” (Дэлхий ээж, Тандаа бид хайртай) which ends each letter, echoes the words Mend-Ooyo wrote in 1980 for a song, set to music by P.Enhbazar, “Mother Earth” (Delhii Eej). For Mend-Ooyo, it is important to celebrate the world, but this celebration is found, not so much in loud and declarative forms, but in the simple points of contact which exist within the ecosphere. For instance, in his 2011 poem “Calligraphy, and Tea Made With the First Milk” (Uurag tsai ba kalligraf), the tea which is ostensibly the focal point of the poem is mentioned only in the final lines. The poem is dedicated to the calligrapher D.Battömör, and the organic interplay between the various liquids - the dew, a gurgling stream, spring water, the water boiling for the tea, and the calligrapher’s ink - creates a complex relationship between the natural world outside the ger, the quotidien world of tea-making inside it, and the inner world of the calligrapher. The images drawn on the paper are of “desire” (хүсэл мөрөөдөл) and “melody” (уянга), the ink is “scented with herbs” (ургамалын ханд анхилсан), the birdsong “dissolve into the pure water of the pot” (завьяатай рашаанд…уусна), and the meaning of the whole comes from the tea of the title, made with colostrum. This perfect substance, moreover, allows the livestock herded outside to contribute to the tea drunk inside by the calligrapher, but the idea of an experienced and holistic, rather than a symbolic and disputable, interrelationship stretches beyond the activity of this single ger, and encompasses the infinity of interrelationships which make up Mother Earth.
            For Mend-Ooyo, then, everything stands in an organic relationship with everything else. The posthuman, which explicitly looks at the world as a holistic, pulsating, and relational being, and in which all forms of life - including sheep, horses, rocks, air, the sun, the moon, clouds, rain, swallows, eagles, ants, spiders, willow trees, grasses, mountains, rivers, and humans - have, simply by their act of the being, equal value, asks us to look at all that exists as a whole, and to see ourselves as individuals only insofar as the realization that all of our actions affect, and are affected by, all our human and other-than-human brothers and sisters. For fifty years, Mend-Ooyo’s writing has been informed by this understanding and, as we look around at the beauty of the natural world and at the difficulties caused by climate change, the mining of minerals and fossil fuels, and the rapid decrease in biodiversity, it becomes increasingly important to learn from posthuman literature such as his.