Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide. Tahir Hamut Izgil Translated by Joshua L. Freeman. London: Jonathan Cape. 252 pp.
Hardback £15.34.
ISBN: 978-1787334014.
“Sometimes I find myself thinking, perhaps it’s better to be a cow than to be a Uyghur” (69), Tahir Hamut Izgils remembers the words of his friend. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide describes under what conditions men and women lived in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Certainly, this is a significant book because it deals with the depths of their feelings; and with the fact that the writer feels a buried suffering smouldering beneath his silent revolt against the likelihood that he will be interned, and shepherded to his pen by a whole pack of hounds. “Uyghur intellectuals typically exercised great care in what they said to each other over the phone; we often joked that we policed ourselves more than the police” (14) – that is all that mattered.
Now all this, of course, is part of the question of “colonial surveillance,” in order to control/manage, punish and protect them of the “three evil forces” of “religious extremism, ethnic separatism, and violent terrorism” (25). What, in short, the state did to achieve the prodigious effort of complete surveillance were the “psychological offensive[s]” that they set upon the freedom of the mind (11), such as the (fake) walk-through scanners in buildings and even in public toilets seemed to forebode (101), and the high-tech softwares and hardwares (from the West to be exact) had already brought into being. Here, then, one would expect to find “weaponised social media,” some networked police system called “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” (88), listening devices in houses, biometric recognition (of fingerprints, blood samples, facial images, voice prints) as well as computer algorithms for “big data” analytics, so as to “monitor and predict behaviour” (xvii).
Whatever may be their use in developed societies, surveillance is essential to all violent breaches of basic human rights: of the freedom of opinion and expression, the freedom of peaceful assembly and association, the freedom of movement, and the protection of privacy, family, home or correspondence. Further, accentuating all these difficulties are the burden of endless and exorbitant layers of bureaucratic obstacles that debar them from the possession of passports or visas (Chapter 9 and Chapter 10); the censorship of the internet (28) to block the import of “unfiltered news” and international publication (105, 158), of “illegal” apps and “contraband” material (religious verses, images, songs, and so on), on electronic devices (98); and those innumerable arrests of intellectuals “with livelihoods outside the state system” (88), like Ilam Tohti, in spite of their rank, and for unknown reasons (125-126).
That is why Izgil has laid so much stress on religion, language and the cultural life of the average Uyghur man or woman. He remembers that the literacy training of the Uyghur language has been marginalised; the children sent to Chinese-language boarding schools (23). Moreover, as part of the “Integrated Settlement” and “Slum Renovation Project” (167), the Uyghur people are split up into smaller bodies, so that they are less concentrated in any one neighbourhood (208); and then the “rapid influx of Hun settlers” (22), precedes the demolition of homes and the confiscation of lands (25-26). And when the Five-star Red Flag is raised at mosques (38), and the clerics are made to look undignified, as they dance to songs, like “Little Apple” (36), still more directives were written to multimedia production companies to the effect that they needed to create “Chinese subtitles,” remove religious greetings (“peace be upon you,” or “and upon you, peace”), and add “Hun characters” to screenplays (38-39). They were dangerous ethnically, religiously or linguistically, that is to say, which was the very reason to strain off their personal and place names, and events (Chapter 4).
All this was won by decades of the most drastic punishment, like the “Strike Hard” campaign in 2009. Of all the million men and women who spend their time in “study centres” (79), some “simply vanished” (89); often, indeed, they were people who knew a particular detainee or convict (27). Similarly, the memoirist goes on, those jobseekers who were censured after “political credit” checks (5, 189), which remain the legacy of ethnic discrimination (xii), were liable to be locked up and beaten if they too had said the five daily prayers, grown facial hair, or wore a veil (95).
One has only to listen to the tone of voice in which those “genocidal” activities and exertions are written to divine that the writer is communicating his experience with diffidence. Tahir Izgil hid his hates and grievances, or covered them with circumlocutions to avoid collision with an artificial surveillance; he deleted digital items (images, documents, videos, etc.); and, moreover, he operated banned radios and VPNs (virtual private networks) “to circumvent the … Great Firewall and peruse … international news websites” (28). Some risked being illegal migrants (Chapter 11); others wrote poems and novels and histories (x).
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is a serious contribution to the study of Uyghurs besides the memoirs of Gulchehra Hoja, Nury Turkel, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, who furnish us with their histories or biographies about China’s state of surveillance. This scene is for ever leaving a shape on the mind by the regular use of the term, genocide; take, for instance, the likeness between the subtitle of Turkel’s memoir, No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs (2022)and Izgil’s memoir. Generally memoirs are written for the scrutiny of the public and the popular media. They might express the “elemental feelings” as well as the motivations of individuals. They might expose bureaucratic and surveillance processes witnessed “from below” which would be unavailable otherwise – so much so that Waiting to Be Arrested at Night consoles itself with the reflection that this is perhaps a passing phase; one that improves out of all political discourse and knowledge of repressed Uyghur voices in China.
These are informative and illustrative facts for academicians who research surveillance, or decoloniality, to generate qualitative findings. However, since the original text will be hard to come by, one must consider the whole translation more carefully. In fact, if one thinks of the editorial and sub-editorial process, it is fairly evident that even a very fine translator, like Joshua L. Freeman, cannot expect to eschew the creative simplifications and distortions of the translation. That is why Izgil and Freeman both insist so emphatically upon their endeavours to accurately recall the gallery of confessions and self-analyses by consulting the author’s personal and public records; and oral conversations too (xvi).
To conclude, as someone with a background in moral theology, the co-author, Rev. David William Parry, remained gloomy as well as mindful as this review reached its end, since the problems of autobiographical text are so easily overshadowed by the tragedy experienced by the Uyghurs daily.
Daniele-Hadi Irandoost is currently reading for his PhD and holds the College of Social Sciences PhD Scholarship from the University of Glasgow. His doctorate concerns public oversight of digital surveillance for intelligence purposes. He is a former Commissioning Editor for E-International Relations. Irandoost is also the published author of two books, On the Philosophy of Education: Towards an Anthroposophical View, and the highly evocative A New Vision of Spycraft: Or Necessary Notations on Espionage.
Rev. David William Parry currently holds the position of Monsignor in the Old Catholic Apostolic Church, while also being a gay rights activist, respected author and British theatrical. In this regard, David has written three LGBTQIA+ inspired works: two collections of poems, Caliban’s Redemption and The Grammar of Witchcraft, and a book of academic studies entitled Mount Athos Inside Me: Essays on Religion, Swedenborg, and Arts. Relatedly, his play Women in Mayhem is due to premiere in this year’s Camden Fringe. Of particular note, David is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, apart from being the first chairperson of Eurasian Creative Guild, whereas his creative and pioneering ministry was the reason he was recently added to the prestigious LGBTQ Religious Archives Network.
Hermes Risen 