Oral Tradition, 35/1 (2021):37-66 Epic Inside-Out: Qız Jibek and the Politics of Genre in Kazakh Oral Literature 1 Gabriel McGuire In spite of ourselves, epic absorbs us. And then we encounter issues that are more tangled than grass roots. For example, we have now identified two other versions of the adventures of Ajkuna, wife of Muj, and they give quite different explanations for what happened to her. It must have been the same thing for the rape of Helen in pre-Homeric poems—until Homer came along and chose one of the variants. —Ismail Kadare, The File on H Novel: A small tale, generally of love —Samuel Johnson In the introduction to the fifth volume of his Proben der Volksliteratur der türkischen Stämme, published in 1885, Wilhelm Radlov pauses to consider the differences between the oral literature of the “Kara-Kirgiz” (Kyrgyz) and the “Kirgiz-Kaisak” (Kazakh). The two peoples, Radlov wrote, “excel in eloquence and surpass all of their Turkic fellowmen in this respect,” but they differed in the kinds of orature at which they excelled. His earlier collection of Kazakh texts in the third volume of the Proben der Volksliteratur (1870) had shown the Kazakhs possessed “a rich lyrical poetry,” while “with the Kara-Kirgiz, however, epic poetry overpowered and suppressed all other folk-poetic creations,” swallowing within itself the lyric, the legend, and the folktale (Radloff 1990 [1885]:75-76). Radlov’s introduction is now primarily famous for the 2 ways in which his discussion of the creativity of the oral poet in the moment of performance This article is based on a paper presented at the 2019 biennial conference of the European Society for 1 Central Asian Studies and the 2019 annual conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. Thanks are owed to my co-panelists at these conferences, Christopher Fort, Christopher Baker, Eva-Marie Dubuisson, and Meiramgul Kussainova; to the discussant, Virginia Martin; and to the editors and two anonymous reviewers at Oral Tradition. I also benefited from the discussion of Qız Jibek with the students in my seminar on oral epic at Nazarbayev University. Lastly, thanks are owed to my good friend and colleague Imangazy Nurakhmet for his assistance in resolving questions of translation, and to my research assistant Kamilya Khamitova for her help in locating some of the books used here. For a detailed discussion of Radlov’s work, see Sinor 1967; for Radlov’s influence on Milman Parry, see 2 Tate 2011.