Growing Up Happy (Paperback)

My Uzbekistan is not merely a collection of poems; it is a tremor of the soul, a cry that rises from the very marrow of the land and refuses to be silenced. In the hands of Mavluda Azimova — a twenty-year-old woman born in the Balikchi district of Andijan region, a student of preschool education at Andijan State University — the ancient voice of Turkestan has found a new, fearless tongue. This book, published in India under the academic auspices of the Centre for Persian and Central Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, is the first full-length English-language poetry collection by an Uzbek woman to appear on the Indian subcontinent. That fact alone is historic. What lies inside its pages is nothing less than a revelation.
The collection opens with the titular poem “My Uzbekistan” — a sweeping, blazing hymn that gathers a thousand years of memory into a single heartbeat. Here march the ghosts of Tomaris and Alpomish, of Cyrus fallen beneath an Amazonian queen, of Ulugh Beg measuring the heavens with his astrolabe, of Navoiy’s nightingale shot dead in the darkness of tyranny. Here, too, are the nameless millions who queued for bread beneath a pitiless red sky, whose books were drowned in the Amu and the Syr, whose tears made the cotton fields saltier still. And here, finally, is the eagle of liberty descending in 1991, alighting on the head of a people who suddenly remembered who they were. “Yet I praised you with every breath, every heartbeat” — in that single line Mavluda distils the entire paradox of loving a homeland that has both cradled and crucified its children.
This is not nostalgia; it is exorcism and resurrection at once.
The book moves between two great currents. The first is epic and public: the Uzbekistan of steppes without horizon, of Temur’s thunder, of a nation that declares, through its young poet, “There are no cowards in Turkestan.” The second current is intimate, almost unbearably private: the Uzbekistan of fathers who mourn the birth of daughters, of husbands who board planes southward and never return, of mothers who stitch torn dresses and torn lives with the same patient needle, of women who wait, who forgive, who burn quietly in rooms that grow colder with each passing winter.

Alexia Barrable is an experienced primary school teacher with a passion for applying scientific research in her classroom. She taught in private schools in London and in Athens, Greece, where she now lives. She is also mum to two young boys. Inspired by the ever-growing field of positive psychology she enlisted the help of friend and neuroscientist Dr Jenny Barnett to write this book. Dr Jenny Barnett is a psychologist and neuroscientist trained at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard universities. She is particularly interested in the practical applications of cognitive science to practical problems. The two have been friends since meeting at school twenty years ago, but this is their first collaborative writing project.