mankurt

Mankurt is the term for an unthinking slave in Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. According to Aitmatov's fictional legend, mankurts were prisoners of war who were turned into non-autonomous docile servants by exposing camel skin wrapped around their heads to the heat of the sun. These skins dried tight, like a steel band, causing brain damage and figurative zombification. Mankurts did not recognise their name, family or tribe—"a mankurt did not recognise himself as a human being". In Aitmatov's novel, a young man defending his homeland from invasion by the nomadic Ruanruan is captured, tortured, and brainwashed into serving his homeland's conquerors. Having completely lost his memory, he kills his mother when she attempts to rescue him from captivity. In the later years of the Soviet Union mankurt entered everyday speech to describe the alienation that people had toward a society that repressed them and distorted their history. Aitmatov did not take the idea from tradition but invented it himself. N. Shneidman stated "The mankurt motif, taken from Central Asian lore, is the dominant idea of the novel and connects the different narrative levels and time sequences".