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A poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide
One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China's establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China's internment camps for Muslim minorities.
Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labour camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese government's radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. When he noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbours had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. It soon became clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family's only hope.
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.
©2023 Tahir Hamut Izgil (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Recenzijas
An urgent tale of survival and subversion * Economist, *Books of the Year* * Deserves to be read and listened to widely... This is a beautiful read. Izgils poetic gaze, and the elegant translation by Joshua L Freeman, together produce a compact, compelling prose that pushes you to keep reading on, even as you blink back tears * Financial Times * So much more than a thrilling account of a great escape. It is nothing less than a call to the West not to look away from one of the most terrible genocides of our times * Sunday Times * Izgil's memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one's way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. The book's restraint is also its strength * Guardian * I devoured it in one night. It is a stunning work with its lyrical prose and elegiac translation, a page-turner that stands alongside any thriller for the skill with which it builds tension as a noose tightens round an entire community Tahir reveals again the banality of evil * i * In the elegant, elliptical poems that appear throughout the text translated, like the rest of the memoir, with great skill and subtlety by Joshua L. Freeman Tahir both acknowledges and transforms the worsening political situation. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the book is its refreshing lack of political rhetoric: there are no pronouncements on the great evil of the Chinese state. Tahir lets the awful facts speak for themselves * Times Literary Supplement * A heart-wrenching but beautifully written memoir * Daily Telegraph * More than just a memoir... It is also the story of the Uyghur people and the political, social, and cultural destruction of their homeland by the Chinese state * TIME * To call this merely 'a good book' is an understatement - it is essential reading -- Ai Weiwei, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows An outlier among books about human rights. This is in effect a psychological thriller, although the narrative unfolds like a classic horror movie as relative normalcy dissolves into a nightmare -- Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy
Tahir Hamut Izgil is one of the foremost poets writing in the Uyghur language. He grew up in Kashgar, an ancient city in the southwest of the Uyghur homeland. After attending college in Beijing, he returned to the Uyghur region and emerged as a prominent film director. His poetry has appeared, in Joshua L. Freeman's English translation, in the New York Review of Books, Asymptote, Gulf Coast and elsewhere, and has also been extensively translated into Chinese, Japanese, French and Turkish. He lives near Washington, D.C. Joshua L. Freeman is a historian of twentieth-century China and a translator of Uyghur poetry. His writing and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. He is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan. Joshua L. Freeman is a historian of twentieth-century China and a translator of Uyghur poetry. His writing and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. He is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan.
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