Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, A Uyghur poet’s memoir of China’s genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil
What a lucky, lucky man, a reader might think. He escaped to America! His children will grow up in the land of the free! For the rest of his life, he won’t have to worry about being arrested in the middle of the night!
I believe he wrote this memoir to convince us otherwise. In his last paragraph he writes
Having escaped the terror, we are a fortunate family. Yet while we know the joy of those lucky few who boarded Noah’s ark, we live with the coward’s shame hidden in the word “escape.” We are finally free, but those we love most are suffering still, left behind in that tortured land. Each time we think of them, we burn with guilt. We will see these dear ones only in our dreams. (p. 246)
The entire book relates his struggles and sorrow, as the Chinese police state tightened its persecution of the Uyghur people. With a surveillance and identity card system that controls the entire population, Chinese Han majority has been able to incarcerate the Uyghur people, millions of them, without any other nation able to prevent them from doing so.
I found the writing, even in translation, to be quite compelling. The writer possesses an uncanny gift to evoke the steady terror of constant threat of being arrested by the police. For many months, Tahir slept with warm clothes next to his bed, because if he were to be arrested, he would be handcuffed and taken away in only the clothes he wore when he answered the door. He reasoned he could always take off the warm clothes if he were arrested in the summer.
Tahir’s family might have escaped, but all his friends and relations were arrested and imprisoned. This might have happened anyway, which is of little comfort to the survivors living in America. Relentless, brutal, inscrutable, the oppression visited upon the Uyghur people strikes the reader as merely the Shoah updated with modern techniques involving cell phones, social media platforms, facial recognition technology. The oppression started, as it did in Germany, with the exclusion of the people from most areas of employment, the forbidding of religious objects, including the Koran, onerous documentation required to establish a household, the chaining to the wall of even a butcher’s cleaver, since that might be an object used by terrorists. Then the arrests, the questioning, the arbitrary denial of permission to purchase a home, or travel to a foreign country (Tahir himself spent three years in prison in his early 20s for trying to travel to Turkey to study.) Then came the steady disappearance of friends, colleagues, relations, into a system without any due process or rationale.
All the while love happens, children arrive, careers proceed, until they don’t. Can he and his family petition to have their passports returned? Will anyone notice that some of the stamps on these passports are forgeries? His family was able to sell their house and car, before they left the country, yet somehow that wasn’t noticed at the border. Tahir does indicate how human this system was, with many of the police who questioned him being Uyghurs themselves, seeking to stave off their own persecution as capos did. Sometimes, Tahir relates how they could even be yelled at, to thwart their intentions.
Tahir traces the steady mounting fear, where at first they rejected any notion of leaving their homeland. They were deeply rooted in their place in the world, its language and culture. He was a prominent poet and intellectual of his people. But at one point his wife turns to him and says, “We need to leave the country.” (p. 115)
He includes various harrowing but inventive stories of others who escaped.
When they had applied for Kazakhstani visas, they had said they were Kazakhs. Crossing illegally from Iran into Turkey, they had introduced themselves as Uyghur Turks, and had become Turkish. When people in Greece asked where they were from, they replied that they were Korean tourists. In Athens, they had registered as Afghan refugees of Uzbek ethnicity. Only on arriving in Sweden did they feel secure in registering with their own identity. They were Uyghurs. (p.146)
There’s matter-of-fact subtlety and restraint to his prose, that permits an American reader to get both his mind and heart around the plight Tahir and his family endured. I never felt clobbered by his experiences, as if his suffering was something that only the superhuman could withstand. There’s a same-old-shit, what-have-we-got-to-do-today-to-get-around-it? quality to his tale, that invites the reader in, allowing a gaze at eyelevel. I might admire his determination and resilience, but these qualities didn’t seem to be foreign from my own life.
And I must say, for someone quite aware of the shortcomings of American society, Tahir certainly did express the refugee’s dream of this land. Talk about huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
All and all, a remarkable book, that made me wish I was still in a classroom. It offers a vision of another culture and its suffering here on our shared Earth that I really wish I could expose young people to.
August 4, 2023