When mass detentions swept China’s Xinjiang province in 2017, Tahir Hamut Izgil was one of the rising Uyghur writers of his generation. Now safely settled with his family in Washington, he’s one of the few who escaped.
It seems fitting, then, that Izgil’s lucid and quietly terrifying memoir, “Waiting to Be Arrested at Night,” while alive with heartbreaking tributes to writer friends now vanished into the camps, repeatedly returns to moments of eerie silence.
Names of the disappeared are whispered on the street. Conversations end abruptly, and children vanish from school. Izgil, a groundbreaking poet and filmmaker whose work blends a love of Uyghur traditions with “that murky abstract stuff,” in the words of a Chinese police officer, cuts dangerous lines from his own verse. In a neighborhood police station, a tortured man screams, and a policeman hurries to shut the basement door.
That stifled cry, which Izgil hears while waiting to complete yet another form, haunts the book. Through its years-long crackdown, China has sent 1 million or more Uyghurs and Turkic minorities to a sprawling network of reeducation centers while subjecting them to sterilization, forced labor and torture. Outside the camps officials have razed mosques and bulldozed cemeteries. How does one surviving poet tell the story of a campaign to erase his entire culture?