Waiting to Be Arrested at Night
A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A Uyghur poet's piercing memoir of life under the most coercive surveillance regime in history
*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK*
*WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE PRIZE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS WRITING 2024*
'Essential reading'
AI WEIWEI, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
'Deserves to be read widely'
FINANCIAL TIMES
As his friends disappeared one by one, it became clear to Tahir Hamut Izgil that fleeing his home in Xinjiang was his family’s only hope.
In this unforgettable story of courage and survival, Tahir charts the Chinese government’s ongoing destruction of the Uyghur community and way of life in spare, gripping, finely tuned prose.
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is an urgent call for the world to awaken to a humanitarian catastrophe, and a moving tribute to those Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and activist Izgil delivers an astonishing account of his experience surviving the Chinese government's genocide of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province. After being imprisoned under false pretenses for carrying "sensitive documents" on a study abroad trip in 1996, Izgil found work as a filmmaker, started a family, and became accustomed to constant police harassment and surveillance. When police began the mass internment of Uyghurs in 2017, Izgil and his wife made plans to leave China—a lengthy, expensive, and dangerous process that would also mean permanently severing himself from his homeland. "While we know the joy of those lucky few who boarded Noah's ark, we live with the coward's shame hidden in that word ‘escape.'... We will see these dear ones only in our dreams," he writes of being unable to contact his loved ones after fleeing to the United States, where he still lives. Interspersed throughout the narrative are flashes of Izgil's stunning poetry, much of it themed around diasporic rootlessness. This is a spellbinding account of personal resilience and an eye-opening exposé on the humanitarian crisis in Xinjiang.
