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

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is a product of the collaboration between one of the leading Uyghur poets, Tahir Hamut Izgil, and one of the most prolific English-language literary translators of works in Uyghur, Joshua Freeman. Izgil has become known in the West for his testimony before the US Congress regarding the atrocities the Chinese government is committing against Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. Less known is his status in his homeland and throughout the Uyghur diaspora as a well-known writer and poet, and even less the risky journey he embarked on to escape China in 2017. By then, the Chinese government had confiscated the passports of nearly all Uyghurs, and the campaign of mass detention had begun. Most of his friends and relatives would be detained, and some, including the famous Uyghur writer Perhat Tursun, eventually were sentenced to lengthy terms in prison.Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is an account of what Izgil witnessed in Xinjiang from the early 2010s to his departure with his family in 2017. Despite the heavy emotional burden that has accompanied the steady onslaught against Uyghur society, throughout the book Izgil remains a sober observer. His story begins prior to the campaign of mass detention, when there was already a heightened effort by the Chinese government to erase Uyghur language and culture and to eliminate any possibility of resistance. In fact, all the way back in 1996 Izgil had been arrested at the border while leaving for Turkey on the spurious charge of taking state secrets out of China. Given his criminal record, seemingly he should never have been able to leave China again. It was due to a fortunate glitch in the hukou household registration system that Izgil's past record, including his three years in the prison, became dissociated from his identity. It was a blessing, as he writes candidly, that at the time police stations were not yet connected through networked computers. He describes this incident to a dramatic effect, conveying how—in a system designed to restrict their freedom—luck often plays a decisive role in the lives of Uyghurs in a China.Although Izgil was free of his past criminal record, he was far from at peace. As an intellectual, he actively organized poetry and literature groups. For that, he was often watched, followed, and sometimes questioned by plainclothes police. Izgil witnessed many of the events that later became known in the West, such as the banning of Islamic names, the chaining of butchers’ tools and confiscating of axes and knives, the raising of the PRC national flag at mosques, the banning of Islamic greetings, the change of Islamic place-names, and the collection of biometric data. He describes the full horror of being a Uyghur in Xinjiang's capital Ürümchi as well as the individuals, including many Uyghurs, who were complicit in carrying out state violence. Many of his friends and acquaintances were detained or had been sent to “study” (81), as he puts it euphemistically. And, as became a common practice among Uyghurs waiting to be arrested, Izgil stayed “ready,” keeping a set of warm clothes by his bed so that he could take them if he, too, was taken into custody. The title of the book captures well this ongoing horror many Uyghurs experience.In a testament to his remarkable resilience in the face of constant horror, Izgil sought ways to leave China with his family. To reobtain both his and his family members’ passports, which had been taken away by the government, Izgil had to submit an application to the police on the pretext of seeking treatment for his daughter's illness. For that, as he describes, he used the gray avenues available in the Chinese system, bribing doctors for fake proof of his daughter's “illness.” Through that arduous process, he was finally able to get their passports returned and obtain US visas. Most Uyghurs have not been so lucky.Izgil and his family arrived in the United States in 2017. Despite having reached safety, he continues to often find himself paralyzed by conflicting feelings. Like most Uyghurs abroad, he is tormented by the memory of his friends and relatives: “Munire sobbing, or Perhat hurrying off into the dark”; his cousin “weak and emaciated in his cell; Eli stooped over in an interrogation chamber; Almas undergoing political reeducation; Arman, forced to labor in a cotton mill; Ismail with a group of prisoners in the camp yard, shouting red songs of praise for the party in Chinese” (245). He was unable to write poetry for a time and often burns with a sense of guilt for not being able to help his friends. Izgil thus captures the traumatic effect of the crisis in Xinjiang on the mental health of many in the Uyghur diaspora and the fact that it is impossible for many of them to find peace as long as their homeland and the people they care about are not safe.Both the author and the translator are very much involved in the Uyghur cause and perhaps no one is better fit than Freeman, who is also a historian of modern Xinjiang, to render Izgil's prose into English. As Freeman recounts in his introduction to Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, their personal and intellectual relationship began in Ürümchi in 2008, well before the mass arrests of Uyghurs had begun. He was a member of Izgil's circle of friends and acquaintances in Ürümchi who frequently met to discuss literature; many of these men were later detained by the Chinese police. Over the next decade, Freeman personally observed and experienced the deterioration of the conditions for Uyghurs in their homeland, which Izgil has eloquently and melancholically captured in this book. In addition to having a strong command of Uyghur, Freeman therefore is quite familiar with both the political context of the crisis in Xinjiang and Izgil's literary style and way of thinking. The Uyghur language is grammatically different from English and other European languages. Relatively few works from Uyghur have been translated into English so far. A translator does not have readily available conventions when working in the Uyghur language. In this respect, Freeman has made a unique contribution. However, we will know more about the stylistic solutions he applied when translating Waiting to Be Arrested at Night if and when the Uyghur original is published.In reports about the Uyghur crisis, the Chinese state looms large as a mechanism ruthlessly crushing any possibility of resistance. The Uyghurs also often appear as a group victimized by state violence. Not many writings have described how individual Uyghurs experienced the crisis and how others in the community have carried out state violence. In this regard, Izgil's work makes a significant contribution for our understanding of the individual aspect of the crisis.1 In Freeman's words, although “the system of state terror in Xinjiang is orchestrated by inhuman bureaucracy, the individuals running that system—and those crushed by that system—are human in full, and their complexity is present throughout Tahir's narrative” (xvii).