The prayers of exiles are heard in Elkun’s ‘Uyghur Poems’
Aziz Isa Elkun is a British poet and academic. He is also a Uyghur.
He grew up in Xayar County, near the Tarim River, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China that comprises roughly one-sixth of the country’s territory. The Silk Road bisects this region of windswept steppes, towering mountain ranges and vast deserts. It is a cross-pollinated part of the world, where traditionally all sorts of people have mingled and clashed.
If you follow the news, you probably know that the Uyghurs are being persecuted by the Chinese government. Uyghurs — the name means “unity” with connotations of “union” and “coalition” — speak their own language, similar to Turkish, and see themselves as culturally and ethnically distinct from the Chinese Han majority. Most of them are Muslim.
Over the past 40 or 50 years, there has been a mass migration of Han into Xinjiang, presumably orchestrated by the state to dilute the minority population there. The Chinese government has allegedly arrested Muslim religious figures and banned Muslim religious practices in the region. Some 16,000 mosques have been razed.
Since 2014, the government, under the administration of Xi Jinping, has — without any legal process — imprisoned about a million Uyghurs in “re-education” internment camps.
The camps started to close in 2019, and Amnesty International reports that most of the detainees have been transferred to the formal penal system.
In addition, the Chinese government has forced the sterilization of Uyghur women and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools with the intent on assimilating the Uyghurs into the general population. The U.S. and other foreign governments describe China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide, while the UN human rights office says there is evidence the Chinese committed crimes against humanity.
For their part, Chinese officials deny they have infringed on Uyghurs’ rights.
When Elkun was 16 years old in 1986, he was arrested for activism and held in custody for two days. His home was ransacked and his journals confiscated. Frequent investigations and threats of imprisonment drove him to flee China in 1999. He went to the United Kingdom in 2001.
In 2017, he learned his sister and cousins were interred in the camps. He found the grave of his father by searching on Google Maps — the marker was later demolished by the Chinese. He has no way of communicating with or knowing the circumstances of his mother, with whom he
hasn’t spoken since 2017.
Elkun has become one of the most important voices in the Uyghur diaspora, having set up 10 websites dedicated to promoting understanding of not only current atrocities but of Uyghur identity, culture and history.
He’s also the editor and translator of the Everyman’s Library volume “Uyghur Poems,” which reveals a long and rich tradition dating from the oral epics of the second century through the love poetry of the medieval period and up to the present day, ending with 10 poems by Elkun — the latest one, “Roses,” dedicated to his mother, dated October 2021.
Elkun has said he wrote the poem while sitting in his garden in England, grieving the death of his father and filled with hopeful sadness for his mother, who he hoped was still alive.
The place where I was born Has turned into a heap of ghostly relics
It exists only as a memory In this world full of selfishness …
The monster has left countless scars
It has pierced me with needles
But I still call for justice for those
Who have suffered more But my spirit is still fighting My hope is still alive Each time I find new courage
It brings the joy of a smile Elkun, who writes in Uyghur, has assembled a handsome, compact volume, about 270 pages in a pocket-sized full cloth case. In his foreword, he lays out a concise history of the Uyghurs, explaining how Turkic, Sufi, and Persian influences have shaped their poetic traditions.
Until Uyghur poems began to be transcribed in the ninth century, “[t]ales of kings, saints and heroes, wars, pilgrimages and miracles were told by bards in the marketplace and at holy shrines or sung by musicians at social gatherings,” he writes. “Enriched with each retelling, these tales were passed from generation to generation, and have played a hugely significant role in transmitting Uyghur history.”
Elkun devotes roughly the first half of the book to traditional Uyghur works — love songs and tales of dragon-slaying, a survey of the tradition he seems to admit is necessarily skimpy, given that he means
to cover “millennia of Uyghur poetry” which “reflects the joys and pains of the Uyghurs, for their long struggle to survive.”
Although many of these works — even in translation — retain a kind of lovely power, many driven by a kind of raw metaphoric force that reflects the turbulent history of a people living in a constantly contested territory, for the casual reader the more interesting section may be the “Modern Poems,” those dating from 1922 and later, collected in the second part of the book.
Here we see how strong the poetic tradition is in the Uyghurs. They write with passion about their love for the motherland. There is a strong strain of unrequited nationalistic fervor running through the book, as most modern Uyghurs are displaced and homesick. The book is largely made up of the poetry of exiles — the prayers of exiles.
It is a beautiful little book on several levels — the Everyman Library has given it a beautiful jacket and finished it with fine details, acid-free paper and a silk book mark. It is not all we need to know about the Uyghurs, but it is a fine place to start.