Professor explores meaning of a river between countries
On opposite sides of the Oxus River border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan live two poet-singers who share a common language, faith, and family network, and yet remain separated by vicissitudes of the Great Game, the 19th-century conflict between the British Empire and Czarist Russia. Ethnomusicologist Richard Wolf has been contemplating the rupture that exists across this divide in “Two Poets and a River,” a film in progress about poet-singers Qurbonsho in Tajikistan and Daulatsho in Afghanistan. Wolf, a professor in music and South Asian studies, has a longstanding curiosity about Central Asian people and music, but his research efforts began in earnest on a Fulbright Fellowship to Tajikistan in 2012. Daulatsho, Yarqub and others playing their instruments and singing as they climb from Yur village to the ayloq (upper pasture). Upper Wakhan, Afghanistan, July 2016. Qurbonsho sitting beside his daughter and aunt in front of his ancestral home. Vrang, Ishkoshim district, Tajikistan,...