Elinor Burkett’s So Many Enemies, So Little Time: 
An American Woman in All the Wrong Places is a travelogue-cum-geo-political-review of the Axis of Evil and the former Soviet Union was a fast and enjoyable read. Journalists are nothing if not masters of the clever twist and innovative turn of phrase. Elli spent a year in Kyrgyzstan with the Fulbright program, teaching journalism in the midst of “soft” censorship where democracy is a word without clear meaning and freedom of the press means freedom to send anything in for review by the censors. Kyrgyzstan has long been hailed as the most politically advanced of the Central Asia republics, which explains why her endeavors to teach American-style investigative reporting wasn’t met with police brutality and bureaucratic reprisals worse than slapped wrists and angry authorities. Which is not to say that her stay was anything but a stressful and horizon-expanding experience. Even a world traveler like Mrs. Burketthe would agree that no matter how many countries you’ve been to, there’s still another culture barrier to run into.
I really enjoyed the generalizations that Elli made regarding the former Soviet Union, but their very catchiness is probably their downfall. Generalizations, no matter how clever, are only useful as an introduction to dialogue. They can quickly turn into offensive statements when taken out of context, or be revealed as based on faulty assumptions. Still, some truisms are just too accurate to pass over:
“The process of moving millions of people from point A to point B was designed to produce full employment, not passenger service, which meant that dozens of clerks, all doing jobs that could easily have been handled by one person, had to pretend that they were important. At the airport in Bishkek, then, we had to wait in line to pay a $10-per-person exit tax before we could queue up for check-in. When we finally made it to the counter, a woman examined our tickets, then handed them to another woman, who stamped them before them over to a third, who checked our names off the list so that a fourth could issue our boarding passes. Since we’d been foolish enough to check our backpack, stuffed with sleeping bags, notebooks, and enough packaged food for a week, we had to wait in line for the man who would weigh and inspect it, making him the fifth human being involved in our preflight check-in.”
To be devil’s advocate for the former Soviet Union, it’s not as if the United States airport experience is a waltz through lollipops and rainbows. Passenger service isn’t the focus here anymore than it is under pseudo-communism: making money is the focus. If your passengers will still buy their tickets even if you treat them like cargo, all the better for your bottom line.
I’d say that this book’s main audience would be well-served by this book, but that people who have studied or lived in Central Asia might be a little put off. It seems that Elli’s main objective is to deflate the fear balloon hovering over Americans regarding how much everyone in the third-world and Muslim-world wants us to die, a noble effort and one well-served by this book. My only criticism is that the author makes the same grade of judgments about countries she spends three weeks in as those she spends months and years in, sometimes drawing pictures and jumping to emotional conclusions that I have a hard time following her on. I give her a lot of credit for having the ability to travel into and out of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan all within an incredibly short span of time, not to mention the desire to even attempt it. She gives her husband a lot of credit for navigating the Visa and Embassy malarkey, but I think she stops a bit short — that guy deserves the Congressional Medal of Foreign Policy Honor.
In closing, if I had to chose between the Sewing Circles of Herat and this work, I would stick with Sewing Circles, but I would give this book to my mother or anyone else that is less emotionally involved with foreign events and things happening “over there.”
This post was written by...
Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 158 posts on Registan.net.
Michael earned an MA in Central Eurasian Studies in 2011 and remains a student at Indiana University pursuing a dual PhD in Russian History and Central Eurasian Studies. He served 6 months in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan in 2005. After the events in Andijan and the subsequent closure of the program, he served 2 years in southern Kazakhstan, returning to the Midwest in 2007. His general area of interest is on post-Timur Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, centered on the Syr Darya river valley.
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{ 1 comment }
I read that book. She had some interesting observations on Iraq
such as, “Everything Is The Fault Of The United States:”
- Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait, but that invasion was the fault of the United States, either because the United States was conspiring with Kuwait to lower oil prices, which was destroying the Iraqi economy, or because the U. S. ambassador April Glaspie, gave Saddam the green light to invade.
- At a cost of more than 2 billion, Saddam Hussein built dozens of ‘palaces’ — the joke in Iraq being that he was building one for each of Iraq’s 24 million citizens: the Green Palace at Lake Tharthar that covers two and a half square miles; Qasr-a;-Arab on the waterway between Iran and Iraq, bigger than the palace at Versailles; the presidential compound at Mosul, which includes three lakes and man-made waterfalls; Radwaniyah, west of Baghdad, home to four presidential residences and 225 VIP villas. But Iraqi children drank polluted water because the United States was engaging in economic warfare against Iraq…
She also, if I remember correctly, rode a train across Mongolia (or maybe that was David Hatcher Childress), provided us with the connection between chicken legs in Central Asia and President Bush (likely the first Bush), and revealed a lot of interesting anecdotes about life and culture in the East,
especially the conflict between modernity and traditional society.
And her thoughts about being invisible in Afghanistan while wearing a Burkha (this is a common complaint by women throughout the Islamic world), whereas how buddy-buddy the Afghan men were with her husband, was especially revealing.
Her book actually made me want to visit Central Asia and write my own book. Sadly, there’s a paucity of books about Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan.