Dirge of the Aral

Long ago, in secondary school, Hong Kong, I read about the Aral Sea in Asia Minor. To the young me, it was just another inland sea, a big lake, in the middle of the huge land mass of Central Asia, a remote region of the world I would never have a chance to set foot on, nor care to. Then, in 2000, I went with Mike to Kazakhstan where he taught and consulted for an NGO. That was the beginning of our long productive relationship with that Central Asian nation that had just awakened like a sleeping giant to independence as a nation, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union of which Kazakhstan was a member republic. Our romance with the Republic of Kazakhstan and its people has continued to this day.  

Even in the present time, when asked ‘Where is the Aral Sea?’ or ‘Where is Kazakhstan?’ many people would still draw a blank. The more informed would murmur oh yes, we’ve heard of Kazakhstan, but not the Aral Sea. Fact is the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth largest inland sea until human greed and lack of reverence for Mother Nature from the mid-1950s during the time of the Soviet Union drained it to one-tenth its original size within the span of a generation in the second half of the twentieth century, destroyed its ecosystem, killing the flora and fauna in that environment, wiping out the livelihood of the people that depended on the Aral Sea, and causing disease and death to men and beasts in the region. The two main rivers that had since time immemorial nursed the Aral were diverted to quench thirsty money-making cotton fields. On one of our trips to Kazakhstan, in 2016, we traveled out west to the Aral Sea and its once main harbor town Aralsk. I finally set eyes on the Aral, not the grand Aral I read about in secondary school, but a much smaller stretch of water in the heart of desert country that was once its seabed.  

Since the completion of the Kokaral Dam in 2005, built by the Government of Kazakhstan with help from the World Bank, the volume of water has increased in the northern Aral Sea sitiuated in Kazakhstan, and some fish is returning. Life and livelihood are making a comeback to the northern Aral shores although the situation would not be the same again as in the heyday when the Aral Sea was the world's fourth largest inland piece of water. Sadly, for the southern Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, the case is hopeless. The southern Aral Sea is dying. It is a matter of time before the entire southern Aral becomes desert. On that note, I composed the following poem.

        Dirge of the Aral

Once a busy town on Aral’s friendly coast,

Where canneries and markets thrived,

Home to cheery fishermen, souls content,

That famed seaport was the nation’s pride.

The sea beckoned, the west wind blew,

Summer was not too hot, nor winter too severe,

The water was clean, the air pristine,

And living conditions quite superior.

In one single lifetime, all that was the Aral vanished.

Shabby semi-ghost towns dot the once shoreline,

Harbors abandoned, canneries in the rot,

Old folks who had seen the sea,

And children who will not.

Toxin in the water,

Poison in the air

Bring on malady and death,

To the people living there.

Now a desert wasteland

In a valley of death,

Tall and haunting monoliths,

Mourning the Aral’s final breath.

Endless flats of dry seashells

That once paved the bottom of the sea,

Dismal souvenirs, collectors’ items

For the unconventional traveler like me.

A graveyard of sand, salt and toxic dust,

Windswept cemetery for ships left to decay

Horrid skeletons of once proud vessels

That went out for their bounty day to day.

Abashed they stand, broken shelters for lanky camels

From the smouldering desert sun.

Heartrending, gut-wrenching was the day

Their tearful captains bade goodbye and walked away.

The Aral, grimmest victim of human greed,

Nature altered from what it was meant to be,

All for that white gold, cotton,

That drains the rivers feeding the sea.

Death has come to the Aral,

To the once majestic sea and more,

To all life forms in her once nurturing waters

And on her previous affluent shore.

Decreed a mistake of Nature,

By ignorance and self-serving greed,

The Aral received a death sentence:

Nature’s biggest irreversible tragedy indeed.

The dying Aral Sea, once the world's 4th largest inland sea

A Ship Graveyard for abandoned fishing boats left to rot on the former seabed of the depleting Aral. White matter in the foreground is salt from the evaporated sea water.
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Writer visiting the skeletal remains of a boat abandoned on the former seabed of the Aral

Shells that once lined the seafloor of the Aral