Translation of Jenia Saikina’s post from the Russian-language neweurasia.

A Frenchman, who was following his girlfriend at the time, planned to write an amusing book about our country and continue travelling afterwards. But circumstances changed: instead of staying one year, he stayed three; he has a new girlfriend – a Kazakh girl who speaks no French; and if anyone has wanderlust now, it’s not Nicolas. The comic book he was working on acquired a reflective tone, meditating on how dreams change when they become reality.

I was running down Arbat at night, afraid I’d be late to a meeting with the author of a comic book about our country. I was nervous because of the mad taxi driver who had brought me there, because I didn’t know anything about the man I was going to be interviewing, and because I couldn’t find the café, where we were supposed to meet.

“Excuse me; do you know where the café is around here?” I ask the first man I see. He is strolling leisurely down the street.

“I’m headed there myself,” he replies with an accent.

“Nicolas?”

He smiles broadly, and we walk together.

“You’re not from around here?” Nicolas asks. He is much taller than I am.

I get a bit embarrassed, but he gallantly reassures me:

“Tourists always know cities better than their inhabitants.”

I’m having trouble with my voice recorder. Plus, it’s noisy in the café, and it’s difficult to understand Nicolas. His Russian is very good – precise, idiomatic even – but because of the accent his words come out as a sort of melody that disrupts meaning. Slowly, I get used to it.

The interview turns out to be pretty strange: it consists entirely of preparing me for a conversation, as if it were very important to Nicolas that I understand who he is before we talk, rather than after. Later, I realize what he wanted – that I lose the “framed view,” that I cease to see him as just a Frenchman who wrote a comic book about Kazakhstan.

How did he get here? His girlfriend, Tida, with whom he had been living in Lyon, was invited to teach French in Kazakhstan. She offered him to come along, since they had always wanted to travel together.

“We were dreaming about Thailand, Japan… but Kazakhstan?” Nicolas acts out the great surprise he experienced then.

He opens up his laptop and shows me a picture from his comic book. I see a little man with a little cloud coming out of his head. There’s a rocket ship drawn on the cloud, with the letters “USSR” on the side. There’s also a camel in there, and the man is riding a bike for some reason. This is Nicolas first imagining what Kazakhstan is like.

“For me, at that point, Kazakhstan meant Baikonur, Aral and Vinokurov. Baikonur is awful, Aral is awful, and Vinokurov is on steroids!” Journoud exclaims. I didn’t want to go, but I was in love with my girlfriend. And then we…” he gesticulates to show how their life paths diverged. Then he adds, suddenly:

“Six months after I got here I started really paying attention to Kazakh girls!”

“Really?

“Seriously. Once, in the Istanbul airport I saw a Kazakh girl for the first time. She was very beautiful. I thought she was one of a kind. There are attractive and unattractive women everywhere, but if in Paris the ratio is 9:1, then here it’s 1:1.”

“Impossible!” I exclaim. “All around the world people admire the beauty of French women!”

“It’s just an image,” Nicolas says, “what’s in your head.”

Kazakhstan showed Nicolas that “what’s in your head” is not an absolute truth, but something dependent on context. Thus, in his relationship with Tida he realized that love had gradually turned into habit.

About his new girlfriend, a Kazakh, he says she was his free choice:

“Before, she was choosing between Semipalatinsk, Uralsk and Almaty. Now, after travelling with me, she has those options, plus Delhi and Paris. When you see and know more, it is harder to choose, but you are also more confident.”

Nicolas remembers his uncle, who has been an accountant all his life and by now knows his daily schedule down to the minute. In a different country, it is easier to change one’s life and decide what is necessary, Nicolas thinks. In Kazakhstan, he’s worked as an art director for a magazine, a teacher, and is now an artist, a freelance designer with more time for himself and his creative work. That, too, is a choice.

On Journoud’s laptop, pictures from his comic book flash, one after another. On one there is Nicolas, looking at three pictures. The first is some dressed-up, exotic creature, the second is clearly Joseph Stalin, and the third is an ordinary couple riding a bus.

“This is how I saw it: these are ordinary people, but for me they are Kazakhs, so there has to be something ethnically distinctive about them. We’re in the former USSR, so there’s the KGB. My character is a typical foreigner in Kazakhstan. He sees the real picture through these layers of stereotypes. When the protagonist of my comic book comes here, he expects to see yurts and camels and hardly believes that ordinary, normal people live here, like everywhere. Before coming here, he thought everyone was poor and used their backyard as a toilet; now, he refuses to believe it isn’t so.”

The following two pictures are nearly identical: they show Nicolas standing on a balcony and looking off into the distance. The difference is in what he sees. In reality, it’s a big city, but to his internal eye it’s all sand dunes with yurts and nomads.

“Here’s another one. It’s a photograph of a man in a market. He was wearing an ethnic costume, so I took a picture. I chose this particular shot, and cropped out everything else, because people in France who see this photo will imagine a completely different market than it is in real life. You see and show reality through your personal lens,” Nicolas says. “This is why we all bring the same photos back from abroad – we’re only capturing what we think is exotic.”

Nicolas’ comic strip is based on combining the view through his personal lens with pictures of real life. Initially, he just wanted to make a funny comic book about travel, about a foreigner’s amusing encounters with unusual details of local life. But it turned into a story of love and of a changing worldview. It turns out that Nicolas had been dreaming of making a comic book for 10 years. In France, he didn’t manage to, but in Kazakhstan he did.

“Because Kazakhstan revealed my true nature to me,” Journoud explains. “Here, I understood who I was.”

There is also another reason. According to Nicolas, there are some 5000 different comic strips and books published in France. There are celebrities of the genre. This enormous number is oppressive – it is impossible to imagine what original contribution one can make to this multitude. “Ex-Patria” will come out in France on 1 October. The publisher is «6 pieds sous terre», the run – 1600 copies.

“Are you afraid of getting lost among the other comic books?” I ask.

“Of course it can happen. This will be a test of whether readers are interested. But I’m confident that “Ex-Patria” has a chance, if even a small one, because it’s a book about travel, which the French are very interested in. Besides, it’s about Kazakhstan, which people know very little about. They don’t distinguish between it and Afghanistan. They think there’s a war going on in every ‘-stan.’”

“Are you planning to publish your book in Kazakhstan?”

“No, comic books are not a part of your culture; for the time being, there’s no future for them in Kazakhstan (author’s note: those who are interested may sneak a peek here). You think they’re funny books for kids, but in Europe it’s an art.”

Nicolas recounts how he got to teach at the Zhurgenov Academy. He explained to students what comic strips were, and how to draw them. They came up with the idea to write a Kazakh fairytale in the form of a comic strip, but a major Kazakhstani publishing house, where the pioneers submitted their proposal, took no interest. There will be no demand, they explained.

The book is Nicolas’ first independent work in the genre – the first that he conceived of and produced. Before this, he was a freelance artist.

“Writing a comic strip is very difficult. I sat over every speech bubble for hours, thinking to myself, this is shit, and this is also shit,” he pantomimes crumpling up pieces of unsuccessful drafts and throwing them out. “You go out onto your balcony, and see people hanging out, girls, beer, fun… And here I am, sitting in front of the computer and drawing and drawing… Other artists, with whom I communicate using facebook, do the same thing. Each one has his publisher and a personal psychologist, but no girlfriend, and no life.”

The first volume of “Ex-Patria” took Nicolas six months.

“I had doubts the entire time,” he confesses. “Up to the last moment. But now that I’ve submitted my book to the publisher, it’s as if a load has been lifted off my shoulders. Now, I can see what kind of author I am really.”

I ask Nicolas about his plans, including a second volume.

“I don’t know yet. I want to live and enjoy life, too, not write all the time. But that will be a new story. The first was about me and Tida coming to Kazakhstan. The second, perhaps, will be about how my life here continues. Or, maybe, we’ll write a book about my girlfriend – also an artist. Through pictures of her memories, we could show how Kazakhstan has changed.”

“Will you return to France or stay here?”

“I was invited to a Travel Log Festival, which takes place on November 13-15 in France, in the city of Clermont-Ferrand. It’s our Karaganda,” Nicolas laughs. “It’s cold and has lots of coal. I’ll go there and then come back.”

“Will you be living here permanently?”

“My future in life is Kazakhstan. My girlfriend is here, and I write better here. But my future in work is France. In Kazakhstan, they don’t value quality and they don’t pay for it. Everything I do here meets one kind of response: Oh, Great! Super! No criticism. This is why staying in Kazakhstan is both pleasant and dangerous. I’ll probably divide my time between France and Kazakhstan.”

Photo Credit: Gali Anikeev.