Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide

"It’s a very personal story, framed partly around looking back at get-togethers that he had with other artists and intellectual figures involved with film and poetry, and the way that the space for them to live kept on narrowing. They had to become more and more cautious. And then, some of them began disappearing into camps. He is intensely aware that he was one of the lucky ones who managed, along with his family, to get out at a time when the space was disappearing. He tells his story through these amazing vignettes. He talks about a group of poets and other intellectuals getting together, and there’s this intense watchfulness of any signs of any growing connection to Islam, which would then put them in a category of potential terrorists. They’re aware they’re being watched, and so they make a point of drinking alcohol during the get-together, just because simply to not drink alcohol starts to become interpreted, by people who are looking for any excuse to get you, as increased religiosity. It’s very strange. When people talk about Xinjiang now, there are references to all kinds of dystopian fiction, and 1984 gets talked about a lot. Darren Byler , an anthropologist who worked there, talks about how one of the first people he met in Xinjiang brought up the Hunger Games . Another one is Minority Report , where people in an imagined dystopian future get arrested before they’ve done anything because of the imagined clues that they will be doing something. This memoir captures that in a very personal way. There’s a Minority Report side to the idea of that group saying, ‘Let’s make sure there are bottles of alcohol clearly visible at our meeting, so that people won’t put us in this other category.’ “A poet in exile is a poignant thing” The rationale for the harsh detention camps created across Xinjiang was that they were ‘vocational’ institutions where people were being put so they could be offered skills, and they could be educated. If you look at the figures in this book, what you actually had was the intellectual and artistic and educational elite ending up in these places. That really undermines the official story about these detention camps being about education, something also undermined by the harsh treatment of leading Uyghur academics. Joshua Freeman is the translator, and he wrote a wonderful introduction to the book. He’s translated a lot of Uyghur poets, including Tahir Hamut Izgil, the author of this memoir. Poetry has an important place in Uyghur culture; it’s a highly respected art form. I think there’s something very powerful about making the poetry from Xinjiang available to the world. It gets you out of the box of thinking of the population of a place only in terms of oppression and resistance. It gives us a sense of the real lives being led there, the dreams and aspirations. Some of the poems have to do with oppression, some have to do with attachment to the landscape and things like that. A poet in exile is a poignant thing. If the poetry is rooted in a local language and meditations on a local landscape, and you’re set apart from there, it makes the human catastrophe relatable. I think the way that people relate to something comparable with Tibet is via the religion and the figure of the Dalai Lama and an idea of spiritualism. I think with this book, the power, in a sense, comes from having a poet’s life at the center of it. Freeman begins by writing that if you had taken an Uber in Washington, D.C. a few years ago, you would have had no idea that the person driving it might well have been this extraordinary poet. When you hear about his life, and the lives of his friends – Izgil was involved with filmmaking, and he and others in his circle were studying modernist literature in Beijing and introducing the works of other writers to the Uyghur population – you are taken far away from the stereotypes of a faceless suffering, as well as far away from Beijing’s story of everybody in Xinjiang being a potential terrorist. It explodes both of those tropes. That’s a challenge with both Sparks and Red Memory . Both authors try very hard to give you enough information that you can have a sense of what’s going on without having read anything else, but, in both cases, there’d be value in reading them together with something that gave you a brisk walkthrough. I’d suggest a book that I recommended in a previous interview: Linda Jaivin’s The Shortest History of China . If you were going to read one book along with those, that would be valuable. That’s not the official version so it fits in, interpretively, with these others. Susan Shirk’s Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise is very valuable. It’s an accessible book by a political scientist and came out in 2022. A book that I was tempted to recommend but didn’t (in part because it’s co-authored by a student that I co-advised) is Taiwan: A Contested Democracy Under Threat , by Lev Nachman and John Sullivan . It’s short and accessible. It goes well with Made in Taiwan . It talks about the way that Taiwan often is approached as a geopolitical problem and gets beyond that. If we’re talking not just about books, Evan Osnos had a long piece in the New Yorker recently about his return to China post-COVID that deals well with US-China relations. And though I’ve largely been focusing on Thailand and Hong Kong lately for a book project, I have a very short piece on US-China relations coming out any day now myself. It’s part of a Wall Street Journal year in review series. Historian that I am, though, I manage to talk not just about 2023, as I am supposed to, but also about an earlier year when it similarly looked like US-China relations were in free fall but then in the autumn heads of the two countries had a surprisingly cordial summit meet up."