Security state
A Uyghur poet’s harrowing account of life as an ethnic minority in China
Facial recognition cameras, DNA sampling, iris- and voice-printing, algorithmdriven arrests, and machines that scan smartphones for “separatist content” — these high-tech methods have horrified the world since 2017, when we first started learning that up to two million people were imprisoned or detained in camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur region, the Central Asian territory that China annexed in 1949. But Tahir Hamut Izgil’s chilling memoir of his family’s nick-of-time escape from Xinjiang reminds us that terror in a security state is also meted out by mundane bureaucracy through forms, documents, stamps, and inspections that constrain life and liberty as relentlessly as QR codes and digital monitoring.
Izgil, a poet and film producer, belongs to a tight circle of Uyghur writers, artists, musicians, and scholars who have always worked in the shadow of a paranoid, Han-dominated party-state. In better times over the past decades, Uyghurs managed to express themselves through abstract but evocative language: A selection of Tahir’s poems, vividly translated by Joshua Freeman, are interspersed through the narrative here. (Readers may sample another Uyghur literary voice in “Backstreets,” the angsty existential novel written by the poet’s friend, Perhat Tursun, also recently translated into English.)
From the mid-2010s, however, following Xi Jinping’s rise to power, the Chinese Communist Party turned on the Uyghurs and other people not of the Han ethnicity with unprecedented ferocity. Pronouncing an official goal of assimilating Uyghurs to Chinese ways, the Party restricted, Sinicized, and eventually made illegal much Uyghur music, Uyghur history in the textbooks, even Uyghur language in the schools. Uyghur intelligentsia like Tahir Izgil and his circle became the first targets of this intensified campaign.
Readers accompany Izgil as repression ratchets up across Xinjiang. NonHan people are forced out of cities back to their hometowns. Naan bakeries are shuttered and butchers forced to work with knives chained to the wall as a supposed security measure. Authorities confiscate non-Han people’s passports. “Neighborhood committee” inspections of private homes and offices increase. Qurans published a few years previously under official Chinese auspices are redesignated extremist contraband. Couple by couple, Uyghurs are summoned for fingerprinting and facial scans in the police station’s blood-stained basement where prisoners were tortured in iron “tiger chairs.” Izgil’s colleagues, friends, and family members begin to disappear one by one, their fate mentionable only in whispered euphemisms: “She’s in hospital.” “He went ‘to study.’” “Waiting to be Arrested by Night” serves as one of the best available histories of the genocidal policies in Xinjiang since 2015, and is especially valuable as an on-the-ground, firstperson account.
The story is all the more powerful for the matter-of-fact way Izgil tells it.
WAITING TO BE ARRESTED AT NIGHT: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide By Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman Penguin, 272 pages, $28
Facing torture, indefinite imprisonment, loss of livelihood, and social death for him and his family, Izgil realized they had to try to leave. He leads us through the steps he and his wife, Merhaba, took to get out. Somewhat surprisingly, the challenge was, at bottom, bureaucratic — but that is often how problems, even a deadly serious one like this, are solved in China. To construct a pretext that might get them permission to travel internationally, they had to secure doctors’ notes, validate their ID numbers, certify their household registration, sell property, and get the proper stamps applied to everything. Assembling a backpack full of documents required countless visits to multiple administration buildings, concealing their anxiety before numerous clerks and officers, paying bribes, and treating key connections to the best kebabs in town. Running this gamut also meant surmounting the stingily cruel US visa hurdles, which required two round trips of nearly 2,000 miles each way for interviews at the US embassy in Beijing and payment of multiple fees.
The book thus also offers a frank look at what it’s like getting things done in China, especially for a group like the Uyghurs, subject to constant popular and official discrimination.
Yet many of the police and officials
Izgil and family must convince or propitiate are themselves Uyghurs — a characteristic familiar from many colonial situations, where the ruling power must exert control through functionaries who know the local language and customs of the occupied territory. Nor is this inconsistent with Izgil’s overall story of how the Chinese Communist Party since 2015 has worked to decapitate Uyghur society. Besides throwing farmers and workers into camps for 1to 2-year stints followed by involuntary transfers to factory jobs, the state quietly rounded up and imprisoned nonHan elites on spurious charges of “separatism,” dishing out sentences of 15 years to life — all with the goal of rendering the native non-Han population docile.
The official effort to erase Uyghur civilization counts among the most devastating aspects of CCP policy. Far from the cutesy but unsophisticated “minority culture” depicted in Chinese state media, Uyghur literary tradition is among the oldest in the world. Old Uyghur texts are far older than “Beowulf,” and Uyghur works were printed in movable type centuries before Gutenberg. The Chinese party-state has expurgated Uyghur literature from textbooks, pulled Uyghur volumes from bookstores, burned Uyghur books, and locked up their authors. That modern exponents of Uyghur culture such as Tahir Izgil or Perhat Tursun are persecuted in their homeland is an atrocity. We can only hope that with this translation, Izgil’s gripping story and Uyghur literature generally will gain more well-deserved global attention.