What We Do Not Know We Know

A few weeks ago, I attended a reading with a title that stayed with me for days: The Library of Not-Knowing. A library is supposed to preserve and organize what we know, yet this one was built around forms of not-knowing, around things we may already know without being consciously aware of that knowledge. The notion suggests that some knowledge resists easy articulation. It cannot always be neatly categorized, explained, or passed on to others, even when it quietly shapes the way we see the world.

For nearly two centuries, Azerbaijan was subjected first to Russian imperial rule and later to Soviet rule. Throughout this period, the Azerbaijani people “in one way or another manifested opposition to that rule” (Altstadt xiv). Yet after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this history was rarely examined through the language of colonialism and the understanding of Soviet rule as a colonial experience never became well established in mainstream public consciousness. Much of contemporary Azerbaijani social life therefore seems to run on a similar structure of “not-knowing”: we live with the traces of colonial history without fully acknowledging them as such. It was this same condition of knowing without knowing that I recognized in Dihaj’s Eşqini Aşağı Sal. This recognition also left me wondering how a work that never names coloniality can nevertheless make it visible.

By destabilizing traditional gender roles, subverting canonized traditions, experimenting with vocal production, and using subversive lyrics, Dihaj’s Eşqini Aşağı Sal acts as a counter-creative tool that exposes how post-Soviet Azerbaijani identity remains caught within colonial patterns it does not fully recognise. Although its sound and lyrics offer equally rich material, in this essay I focus only on a small part of its visual world. Nothing in these images is remarkable on its own. Yet the way these familiar elements are placed in relation to one another belies their apparent ordinariness. The person who gives this transformation its visual shape is Sitara Ibrahimbayli, the video’s art director. Ibrahimbayli did not establish a career as a traditional music video director and Eşqini Aşağı Sal remains a rare exception in her filmography. Her background in photography and visual arts shapes the entire video, giving it a distinct aesthetic and intellectual tone. Directors with training in visual arts and photography tend to produce music videos that move between commercial and artistic spaces, and perhaps this is why Eşqini Aşağı Sal is easy to imagine beyond YouTube, in a gallery or a museum (Vernallis 98). It does not offer what a commercial music video usually aims for, which is immediate clarity on the first watch. Instead, it remains open, ambiguous, and layered, allowing different readings to exist at the same time.

When I spoke with Ibrahimbayli, she described the work as a collage of the absurdities, contradictions, and social stereotypes she and the team observed in Azerbaijani society. Neither she nor the creative team consciously set out to produce a decolonial work; rather, they responded to what made them uneasy. That brought me back to the idea of knowing without knowing that this essay began with. The “knowledge” of how to resist coloniality is first experienced and expressed through the body, long before it is clearly articulated through words (Tlostanova, What Does It Mean 29). The knowledge was already embedded in the work before its creators had the language to call it decolonial.

The video unfolds in two distinct parts without any explicit transition between them, as if daring the viewer to notice the contradictions the country carries but refuses to acknowledge. The video opens with a lateral tracking shot of the male protagonist (Tamerlan Khalilov) sitting alone in a densely ornamented living room. The camera travels upwards from his tiger-patterned slippers and white trousers to a partially unzipped Adidas tracksuit top revealing his tattooed chest (Dihaj 0:07–0:23). Several iPhones rest on his lap, a shiny gold watch circles his wrist, and women’s sunglasses cover his eyes. What matters here is the discrepancy between Tamerlan’s body and the space in which he is placed. By decentering masculinity and placing him within a domestic space traditionally coded as feminine, the video encourages an unlearning of fixed, culturally determined gender roles. Yet the image does not simply weaken or damage masculinity; instead, it also presents the male subject as a victim of the patriarchal order that demands he appear strong, successful, and invulnerable at all times. This pressure is rooted in a colonial history. Russian imperial discourse often presented the Caucasian man as excessively masculine, violent, and incapable of controlling himself in order to compensate for its own sense of inferiority toward the West. These characterizations were later recycled into Soviet models where colonized men were often treated as sub-human and they continue to be reproduced in the post-Soviet era as rigid, inherited behavioral models (Tlostanova and Mignolo 4; 126–28).

The female protagonist (Nigar Samadzadeh), meanwhile, is introduced through a spatial intrusion in a public space. She poses on the hood of a Lada, next to a tattooed half-naked man, with offshore oil rigs in the background and a beach almost entirely filled with men, where the absence of female beachgoers is obvious (Dihaj 0:37–0:40). Her presence can be understood as a form of occupation, though not as a protest in the conventional sense. She neither chants a slogan nor negotiates for acceptance within the existing order. Her occupation operates through her presence itself. She changes how the space is perceived simply by being there, exposing who is normally assumed to belong while making her presence seem “out of place”.

The scene exposes the masculine framework reproduced through post-Soviet nation-building. This era, shaped by a “modernist male-normative” project, has often placed women’s achievements at risk by tying their freedoms to prescribed roles as guardians of “cultural authenticity” (Tohidi 3). The Soviet state weaponised women’s bodies as a symbol of “progress,” which led local populations to view female behaviour as the ultimate battleground for their cultural survival. Consequently, the post-Soviet order reproduces many entrenched gender restrictions in a new form, allowing old patterns of oppression to continue.

The video continues to unsettle this inherited gender order in its second part, where the band members appear for the first time. One of the most unapologetic moments in this section is the performance of the traditional yengəlik ritual, in which an older female relative carries a candle and monitors and polices the bride’s virginity. In the video, however, the person performing the ritual is a man. By simply reversing the gender of the supervisor, the video shatters the “sacred illusion” surrounding the tradition, exposing it as a system of social surveillance designed to regulate women’s bodies via strict gender divisions. With this scene, the video moves beyond being a passive mirror of society to function as a counter-creative act inviting viewers to also challenge the status quo.

After the Soviet collapse, many nations sought to reject Soviet modernity by turning to a form of nationalism built around a supposedly “authentic” culture. The colonizers controlled the colonized not despite tradition but through it, suppressing what threatened their authority while celebrating a carefully curated version of “authentic” culture that created the illusion of autonomy among the colonized people. Madina Tlostanova argues that what is defined as tradition is never the whole of a culture. It is a selective version of culture, shaped by the anxieties and political needs of the present (41). Once something is defended simply because it is “ours,” asking whom it harms can begin to sound like an attack on the nation itself (Tlostanova, Gender Epistemologies 76). This places women in a precarious position, as they are expected to carry and protect the culture with their bodies and behavior. However, by presenting old hierarchical forms of power as imponderable indigenous tradition, societies reproduced colonial power structures rather than achieving genuine decolonization. Genuine decolonization must restore our ability to decide what deserves to be carried forward, what needs to be adapted to the present day, and what should be left behind.

At the end of the clip, the image rewinds, and everything begins to return to where it started. This reversal makes it clear that motion does not necessarily mean transformation. History circles back on itself when the colonial structures that shaped the present remain unacknowledged and unchallenged. Unless we, as a society, confront our colonized past and address the systems it has produced, we remain caught in the same return. By exposing the absurdity of gender constructs and their heterosexist expectations, and by subverting canonized traditions, the video makes the inherited structures suddenly impossible to ignore.

The video also works as a tool that brings erased and silenced subjectivities into view and places them within a frame where they can be collectively identified, discussed, and questioned. It creates a virtual space for cultural and social unlearning. What remains is the viewer’s responsibility to finally acknowledge the coloniality we have always known, though we were never given the chance to name it.

Works Cited

• Altstadt, Audrey L. The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule. Hoover Institution Press, 1992.
• Dickinson, Kay. “Music Video and Synaesthetic Possibility.” Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, edited by Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton, Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 13–29.
• Dihaj. “Eşqini Aşağı Sal.” YouTube, uploaded by Dihaj, 28 Dec. 2016, https://youtu.be/qATZfQt0QYE?si=cAHNrONXbYnAo_2S. 
• Tlostanova, Madina. Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Tlostanova, Madina. What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Duke University Press, 2018.
  
• Tlostanova, Madina V., and Walter D. Mignolo. Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. The Ohio State University Press, 2012.
• Tohidi, Nayereh. “Gender and National Identity in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan: A Regional Perspective.” Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 3, no. 2, 2000, article 1.
• Vernallis, Carol. The Media Swirl: Politics, Audiovisuality, and Aesthetics. Duke University Press, 2023.