An article in the Observer has drawn attention - as has another recent article in the New York Times, pictured - to the fact that Uighur poetry is now facing extinction as the Chinese government detains and silences poets in its campaign to assimilate minority populations of Xinjiang into mainstream Chinese culture.

Outside of China, Uighurs are battlling to keep the art form alive. The article quotes Mamutjan Abdurehim who said he had been trying to remember a poem that he and his wife used to teach their four-year-old daughter. The rhyming couplets were easy to remember instructions on etiquette at the dinner table. Abdurehim has not been able to see or speak to his family in Xinjiang in almost five years. He believes his wife has been detained in an internment camp or sent to prison. Abdurehim, now living in Sydney, asked his friends on Facebook if anyone knew the rest of the poem but no one could remember.

In an article for The New York Times, Joshua L Freeman says: “I last saw my old professor Abduqadir Jalalidin at his Urumqi apartment in late 2016. Over home-pulled laghman noodles and a couple of bottles of Chinese liquor, we talked and laughed about everything from Uighur literature to American politics. Several years earlier, when I had defended my master’s thesis on Uighur poetry, Jalalidin, himself a famous poet, had sat across from me and asked hard questions … It was a memorable evening, one I’ve thought about many times since learning in early 2018 that Jalalidin had been sent, along with more than a million other Uighurs, to China’s internment camps. As with my other friends and colleagues who have disappeared into this vast, secretive gulag, months stretched into years with no word from Jalalidin. And then, late this summer, the silence broke. Even in the camps, I learned, my old professor had continued writing poetry. Other inmates had committed his new poems to memory and had managed to transmit one of them beyond the camp gates.”

You can read this poem in the NYT article

The Observer article says that for decades poetry has been part of regular life for Uighurs. At book markets, volumes of poetry often made up the bulk of the selection. Most district and county newspapers featured sections for residents to publish their poems. Writers posted their most recent verses on their WeChat accounts. Today poets continue to be some of the most influential and celebrated public figures in the Uighur-speaking world.

“Every generation has their own poets and their own styles and comes up with something newer. It’s almost like pop music. If you are a really good poet, you are almost as popular as the most popular singer,” said Fatimah Abdulghafur, a Uighur poet and activist who grew up in Kashgar and now lives in Australia.

Modern Uighur poets have taken to free verse, heavy with symbolism. Throughout crackdowns and tightening control throughout the 1990s and 2000s, poetry thrived in the region. Uighur poets wrote about a longing for spring, a symbol of freedom or new life.

“Poetry is the genre that kept us going,” said Abdulghafur. At the age of nine she read ‘I am not a white flag’ by one of the best known Uighur poets, Abdurehim Ötkür, and saw resistance in his description of a majestic snow-capped mountain.

In 2017 bookshops were shut and a once vibrant publishing industry ground to a halt. Tahir Hamut Izgil, a poet and filmmaker, got word from family in southern Xinjiang that Uighurs were being rounded up. “Every day we heard of people being taken, of schools and government offices being turned into camps, of people’s passports being taken,” he said.

Izgil, who fled to the US with his family later in 2017, knows of at least 20 poets who were detained. A list of almost 400 detained writers, teachers, scholars and other intellectuals maintained by activists includes more than 33 poets, one of the largest categories. Among the detained poets are Abdurehim Heyit, a singer, musician and poet, whose rumoured death in 2019 forced the authorities to release a video of him saying he was alive but under investigation.

The NYT article goes on to say: “Poetry permeates Uighur life. Influential cultural figures are often poets, and Uighurs of all backgrounds write poetry … Uighurs have lived for a millennium at the crossroads of Eurasian civilisations, and their poetry draws on the artful concision of Turkic oral verse, the intricate meters of Persian poetry, and modernist currents from Europe, the Arab world and China. For generations, this vibrant poetic culture has allowed Uighurs to hone verse into a source of communal strength against colonisation and repression.”