You Don’t Have to Believe Me

“You don’t have to believe me,” wrote Langston Hughes in Uzbekistan in 1932, “But we are stronger/ than thunder cutting heaven.” Who? “We who feed and dress /everyone else… The pack mules of the world./ Only now you’ll follow us,/ Past and Future watching our dust.” Writing that, he was in the throes of faith that the world was changing, especially the notion that cotton farmers would now pick not for feudal governments, but for themselves. To Hughes, these were harbingers of a future not just for Central Asia, but for the States. Since Hughes’ visit, of course, not only the American Dream but the Soviet Promise have dried up like raisins in the sun. Artist Farrah Karapetian traces Hughes’ play Blood on the Cotton to his encounter with Uzbek playwrite Umarjan Ismailov’s play Spoilers of Cotton. She describes her own trajectory from cameraless photography through physical theatre to contemporary interviews with people impacted by Uzbek and Northern Mexican cotton production. Hers is a relational philosophy: when she, as an author, works with subjects, she engages them in the process of their own representation. How they work together is a shared responsibility.