Great Britain (Brussels Morning) – The Uyghurs love writing and reading poems; it is an essential part of Uyghur cultural expression and plays a vital role in the continuation of creativity and development of the Uyghur language, literature, and culture.
Since 2016, over three million Uyghurs and other Turkic people in the Uyghur homeland in China have been collectively persecuted and sent to the notorious Chinese internment camps in the Uyghur Region. Soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, with the political and military support of the Soviet Union, the so-called Chinese Liberation Army illegally occupied the Uyghur homeland of East Turkistan, also known as Uyghuristan. In 1955, it announced the founding of the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” As a Uyghur living in exile, and a poet and advocator for freedom of speech and writing, my conscience forbids me from calling our Uyghur homeland, “Xinjiang”, which means “New Territories” in the Chinese language.
In spite of ongoing persecution under Chinese rule, Uyghur writers sustained their rich cultural legacy, and Uyghur poetry played a significant role in keeping Uyghur language and literature alive, and expressing criticism of the oppressive Chinese regime.
Uyghur poetry reflects the natural landscape of Central Asia, with its wide grasslands, high mountain ranges and treacherous deserts where the Uyghurs have lived for the last two millennia at the heart of the Silk Road. The frequent political turmoil, oppression, and wars that the Uyghurs have endured over the centuries as they fell under the rule of ruthless empires or were caught up in the feuds of local warlords, have all left their mark on Uyghur poetry, which is typically focused on migration and exile, war and peace, as well as universal themes of nature and love.
One important 20th century example is the nationalist poet Abduhaliq Uyghur, born on 9 February 1901 into an intellectual and business family in the city of Turpan. In his twenties he travelled to the Soviet Union and Finland, and studied Russian literature for three years. After his return to Turpan, he began to write poems to raise awareness and call the Uyghurs to fight for their freedom. He was executed by a Chinese warlord in Turpan when he was thirty-two, on 13 March 1933.
Bloom!
My flowers are ready to bloom
Soon I can wear them as a crown
The fire of my love
Is going to engulf my entire soul.
My love flirts with me
She laughs and she mocks me
You don’t know how precious this love is
She can turn the cold winter to summer.
My courageous flower, let’s bloom
All the efforts I made, let them bloom
If I am giving up my life for my beloved
It is because we will one day die anyway.
To live or die
My love, let’s bloom.
Abduhaliq Uyghur (1901–33)
Trans. by Aziz Isa Elkun
In the 21st century, the PRC began to tighten its control of the Uyghurs. Since 2016, its policies of cultural erasure and mass incarceration amount to crimes against humanity. One aspect of these policies is that the regime effectively blocked all communications between Uyghurs at home and abroad. One day in late summer in 2018, I spotted two lines of verses on Chimangul Awut’s Wechat profile. She is a prominent Uyghur female poet and senior editor for Kashgar Uyghur Publishing House. She posted her shortest ever poem just before she was detained and taken away to an internment camp. She wrote:
| جان قوزام يىغلىمىغىن سەن ئۈچۈن يىغلار جاھان ! |
“My dear son
Please don’t cry
The whole world will cry for you! “
Another well-known Uyghur female poet, Gülnisa Imin Gülkhan, was sentenced to 17 years imprisonment after staying in the Chinese camp for over one year. I have been reading her poems since 2014. She is a secondary school Uyghur literature teacher in the remote area of the Khotan prefecture in the Uyghur homeland.
She started writing her own version of “A Thousand and One Nights” in 2015. She wrote one poem every night and posted it on her Wechat profile. I was following her and reading her poems until she completed one hundred and one poems. After that, I lost contact with her. Gülnisa poems provides a powerful voice of discontent and resistance in Uyghur society. She wrote in her tenth night:
Tenth night: the sunless sky
The women’s prison
Smiles from under the snow
The women’s prison
Emerges running at daybreak.
Dirty, cracked and bleeding hands
Marked on the surface of white snow
A map of the women’s prison.
They don’t want to shed their tears
They just want to lift their heads
They just want to gaze at the sunless sky.
Their troubles, their yearning
Their nightmares and sleepless nights
They want to talk about it with someone on the outside.
Gülnisa Imin Gülkhan
Trans. by Aziz Isa Elkun
No Uyghur can escape persecution whether they live in London or Washington DC. I too was anxious about the ongoing situation and the impact on my family if I spoke out, but in 2019, I discovered from Google Earth that my beloved father’s tomb had been destroyed, and I wrote poems expressing my rage and sadness. Here is a couplet from my obituary for my father:
My sky is covered with heavy dark clouds
The sun I awaited did not rise today
You were the moon who lit my soul
Now day has become night without you.
I was born in a small town in Shayar County, Aksu region in the south of the Uyghur homeland. I graduated from university in Urumchi in 1991, but soon after I found a job, I was persecuted because of my participation in a student protest. After that, I struggled for eight years under regular harassment. I left my homeland in 1999, and I settled in London in 2001.
I have a memory of listening to folk stories and reciting rhymes when I was a child. My early memory was in the mid-1970s during the Cultural Revolution. At its peak, everywhere was poverty, there was not enough to eat and we could not afford new clothes to wear. When I grew older, I learned that this revolution had devastating consequence for Uyghur culture. Now the Chinese government has embarked on a new war against the Uyghurs, which threatens to have even worse consequences.
Sometimes, I reflect that I could have been one of the millions of Uyghurs who suffered in the region’s notorious internment camps, or that I could have been among my poet friends who are now spending their lives in a dark Chinese prison. Instead I am fortunate to be living in London, and able to do some work to help my culture survive.
I received an email from Everyman’s Library director David Campbell in November 2021, asking me if I could act as editor for a Uyghur poetry anthology. I replied thefollowing day saying yes. Over three years I have worked on this book, and finally, it is going to be published on 7th of November 2023.
Since I lost contact with all my family members and friends in my homeland, I often go to Central Asian countries where I can learn and conduct my research, and stay close to Uyghur culture. Over one million Uyghurs live in Central Asia, including almost half a million Uyghurs in Kazakhstan, which is one of the largest Uyghur diaspora communities outside the Uyghur homeland. These days, Uyghur youth in Central Asia are very enthusiastic about learning their culture and language. Thanks to social media, Uyghurs worldwide can be easily connected and Uyghur news spreads very fast.
I was in Almaty city in Kazakhstan in September this year. Some leaders of the Uyghur youth group had learned about the forthcoming publication of a Uyghur poetry anthology, and they organised a book talk event. Around 40 Uyghur writers, Journalists and community leaders, as well as some young Uyghur poets, gathered at a cafe in the Dostluk quarter of Almaty where many Uyghurs live. I introduced the book and talked about the importance of translating Uyghur poems for English-speaking readers. After my presentation, there was open discussion, and a Journalist named Rakhmetjan Israpilov gave a speech:
“In 1958, Murat Hemraev, translated the revolutionary Uyghur poet Lutfulla Mutellip’s poems into Russian and it was published as a small book with 100,000 copies. When he returned from Moscow, bringing that book, several hundred Uyghurs came to Almaty airport to welcome his achievement with flowers. Now you too are now giving an opportunity to the world to know about the Uyghurs and their poems… God bless you!”
Over the past seven years, the Chinese government has carried out mass arrests of innocent Uyghurs, and has deliberately targeted Uyghur intellectuals, including academics, writers, poets, artists and teachers. The targeting of Uyghur intellectuals reveals the aim to destroy Uyghur cultural and ethnic identity. Today, there are an estimated 500 Uyghur intellectuals kept in Chinese internment camps or sentenced to lengthy prison sentences. They include Professor Rahile Dawut, sentenced to life imprisonment, Professor and poet Abduqadir Jalalidin, writer and educator Yalkun Rozi, singer Ablajan Awut, poets Perhat Tursun, Adil Tunyaz and his wife Nezire Muhammad Salih.
The” Uyghur Poems” anthology includes a wide range of poems divided into three large sections: classic, contemporary, and modern poetry. The book ends with one of my own poems titled “Roses” written in 2021 while I was sitting in the garden filled with sadness for my mother, and grieving for my father whom I lost in 2017. I wanted to end the book with a note of hope that comes out of grief:
Although it’s autumn
The leaves in my garden are still green
The first rose I planted three years ago
To mark the destruction of my father’s grave
The second rose I planted
On Mother’s Day last year
The third rose I planted for the unknown Uyghurs
Who survive inside the camps
My roses are blossoming with hope
Singing a song of freedom
Without waiting for the spring
They remind us
How beautiful it is to be alive
To live in peace in our beautiful world.
This book tries to capture the souls of the Uyghurs; it expresses their joy and sadness, their journey and their ongoing struggle to survive. It is tragic and inhumane that the Chinese government is trying to destroy this heritage and culture by banning teaching in the Uyghur language and burning Uyghur language books. This Uyghur poetry collection also stands against the Chinese government’s crimes of cultural genocide against the Uyghurs.
But this book is not full of sadness; it is filled with love and optimism for the future. I hope you will enjoy reading it, and I ask you to remember the Uyghurs and their poetic voices which speak out for humanity, love, freedom, and justice.
