A SMALL COUNTRY

We have all come across the hackneyed phrase "The family is a social unit". Everyone agrees on this, but in practice for some reason or other one seldom experiences it. The fact is that in western society the concept of the family is long gone; now we have "partnerships". Ordinary people are horrified by this expression. A man and a woman meet and start living together - it's simple, no need for any rituals - and they part just as easily. Then they race through life, meet a new "partner", and again start living together…A simple Brownian motion! So we end up with no family, no society. The family as a social unit is understood only in the East, in the Caucasus and in Azerbaijan. Here you will not find it so easy to start living together: neither the laws of Islam, nor a patriarchal upbringing will allow it. Here the family is the basis of all life. The laws of the family at times outweigh even juridical laws and industrial laws: if you need to attend a funeral, a wake or a wedding, all you have to do is see your boss and say: "I'm off!" And the boss says nothing because he realizes that tomorrow he will need to go somewhere, too.

I remember on one of my first visits to Baku I had occasion to meet some official, but the meeting was postponed and could only take place a week later. I was terribly annoyed. He had been tied up somewhere in the area - it was either a wedding or a funeral. I often got upset at such times, until I started living here and realized that everything else fades in comparison with family commitments.  

Once a family has been created (often with great difficulty) one treats it with due care. Also because public opinion, and the notorious "what will people say?" is of huge, if not fundamental importance. Because the "people" around are not just neighbours, but also relatives, and it would be a big disgrace if things led to divorce. Of course, in Azerbaijan, as everywhere else, couples argue and they shout "I'm leaving you!" but is it really worth the wife leaving to go to her father's house whilst the relatives and parents of the husband immediately start organizing "political principles". Sometimes a husband is sick to death of family life, but mothers, aunts and sisters work feverishly to get the family together. And usually they get their way. But if there are children, then in 99 times out of a 100 there is no talk about a divorce whatsoever. For Azerbaijanis children are sacred. A man can suffer the torment of an unloved wife for as long as he has to, even take a lover, but he will never abandon his children - especially if they are girls. For the vast majority of Azerbaijanis a child is an id?e fixe. 

Although children in the family are just as important for women, too. You will never here this from women here: "First of all we want to live a little, stand on our own two feet and then think about children." If there are no children in a family for a year or two, relatives start to sound the alarm, and the young couple themselves will run off to the doctor, spend ridiculous amounts of money on treatment, and usually the child appears anyway. And not just one. Of course, nowadays no-one gives birth to eight or ten children, but two to four is now the norm and not the exception. Having just one is an exception. And so, children immediately become used to having a lot of sisters and brothers - they create a model for them and they start to build their lives according to this model. And you will never hear older children saying "I am not going to sit with my younger brother!" or "you gave birth to them - you bring them up, I'm going out to play!"

Brothers have a very touching attitude to their sisters. A boy of 13 is not ashamed to tell his friends that he can't come out and play because he has to look after his younger sister. They will not think about going out if there are younger ones to mind. If the children are relatively grown-up, the brother will never leave his younger sister on her own, especially in the evening - they must go together. Although I cannot understand this excessive concern if you bear in mind that Baku is a very calm place, and it is even more so in the smaller towns and villages where everyone knows one another: you can be out together at night for as long as you like, whether you're just a little girl or a granny! I don't understand, but I admire them. I think about my own country: does a brother really care where his sister is? But here they watch over their sisters even if they are the older ones. They watch over, not in the sense of following them, but caring for them. Sometimes the vain attempts of a boy to tell his older sister what to do are rather amusing, but in any case they inspire respect.

In Azerbaijan people have a very tender attitude towards children: other people's children, like their own, inspire tenderness and a desire to play with them and comfort them if they cry or start acting up. If you are travelling on a bus here you will never hear, when a mother's child is crying, people saying to her in anger: "Can't you quieten your baby down?" I once took a trip round the country. In our bus there was a family with a three-year old daughter. Naturally, the little girl occasionally played up a bit. Nobody got angry, nobody grumbled - on the contrary: they played with the little girl, and tried to divert her attention. Everyone tried to feed her when she refused to eat. And bear in mind that all these people were strangers - it was an ordinary bus journey.

A great deal of attention is given to educating children by example. There is a saying: "Do as you would have your children do." If from the time he is born a child can see that his father is tying to do the best he can and his parents show respect for their parents and listen to their opinions, the child, when he grows up, will behave in exactly the same way.

Another thing that first delighted me and to which I am now accustomed is an aunt and uncle's help for a child. For example, an elder sister got married and had a child. She could at any time telephone her sister or brother and say: "I need to go out, can you baby sit for me?" I find it hard to imagine someone in Moscow ringing her sister, never mind her brother, and asking the same thing. Where we live sometimes brothers and sisters don't see each other for years! And if he does ring her, then his whacked-out sister will say: "Sorry, I'm up to my ears, I haven't got the time!" Some people might say: "That's life, that's the way things are, everyone's busy!" I want to say this to them: are you trying to say we aren't busy here? So their argument about the way life is in Moscow just doesn't stand up. Being a Russian myself I can boldly say that we, Russians, have lost our sense of family. I don't say we all have, but many of us. I noticed one thing here, which again made me feel awkward about Russian men. Say someone upsets a child in Russia. What does he say? "I'll tell my mummy everything!" But in Azerbaijan you will hear: "I'll tell my daddy everything!" I don't think that requires any further comment!

When it comes to the family, one has to speak about the elderly. I swear that in Russia I have never seen this concern for the elderly and this respect for them! How many abandoned, lonely old men are there? But throughout Azerbaijan there are only nine (!) homes for the elderly where just 1,100 people live. These are elderly people who, in the main, have no relatives. Usually, if there is a cousin several times removed, she would undoubtedly take the old man in. There is a significant Azerbaijani saying: "The family looks after the elderly".

According to the American National Centre of Care for the Elderly, one in three Americans over the age of 65 living with relatives is subjected to psychological pressure from them. Therefore either they go and live in an old people's home or they "shove" him into one. You cannot imagine this happening in Azerbaijan! This is what the leading historian Moisey Bekker from Baku writes on this subject: "Whatever they may say in Europe that in some old people's homes things could be better for the elderly, I am certain that nowhere can it be better for a person than to be among his own family. The most important thing in the lives of the elderly is the family. There should be a joining of generations, continuity at family level, the younger ones should be in contact with the elderly every day and the elderly should pass on the experience of life that they have accrued. Grandsons should be able to see and feel the problems of the elderly that are linked with health, empathize with them and walk with them. In such families the elderly can live long and young people do not become hard-hearted. Often in large towns (especially in Europe), one can see young families making more fuss over their dogs and cats than their elderly relatives. This doesn't happen here." That last sentence is key.

Of course, there are exceptions, because people are different. But these are precisely that - exceptions - and if young people do not show respect for the elderly and don't care for them they are universally condemned. The inseparable link of generations makes the institution of psychoanalysts virtually unnecessary in Azerbaijan. The celebrated Azerbaijani psychiatrist Agabay Sultanov claimed that "in view of the fact that in our country there are traditionally large families, there is no particular need to have a large number of psychotherapists: their role can be played perfectly well by grandmothers and grandfathers".

Incidentally, a word about grandfathers. In Russia statistics show that there are far more elderly women than elderly men. Men die at an earlier age. In Azerbaijan there are roughly the same number of elderly men and women. There are many reasons for this: there is the concern on the part of young people which helps the elderly to live longer, and the fact that men do not have vices like alcoholism. Another reason for the early mortality of Russian men is loneliness as a result of divorce or being abandoned by their children. Here neither of these things exists.

Elderly men, for their part, strive to be as useful as they can. You will never hear from a young grandmother (and in Azerbaijan a grandmother at 40 is a very normal thing) that she has nowhere to sit with her grandsons, that she has work or a private life. The older generation takes an active part in the life of the young family, sometimes arguably too active. Because too much concern about children who are no longer young frequently makes them puerile. This comes out in the actual language: Russian-speaking Azerbaijanis, being by no means young, speak about the older generation as "adults", thereby as it were considering themselves not to be adults. When you hear the definition "adults" from a young person this sounds normal, but when you are already approaching 40 and someone is still an "adult" to you it sets you thinking.

From the point of view of the Azerbaijanis, I at 40-something am not quite elderly yet. In this I can see a certain puerilism.  Incidentally, there is an amusing saying in Azerbaijan: "It is the dream of every Azerbaijani to be buried by his parents", i.e. he all the time wants to remain a child and to live under the protection of "adults". At the same time, he does not tire of looking after his own children. For example, in the days of entry examinations, outside the institutes you could not move for the crowds of parents who for several hours would mount guard over the doors from the start to the end of the examination.

Sometimes Russian parents do not know what the institute building in which their children are studying looks like. The father of a 30-year old daughter might come to her at work and try to protect her from the unfair attacks of her bosses or try to resolve some other problem she is mixed up in. In Russia this is not just difficult, it is impossible to imagine.

Whether this is good or bad cannot be judged from the side but, in any event, this again sums up the nation perfectly: the interests of the family are paramount here and these interests are defended by all possible means.