Waiting to Be Arrested at Night
A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Descripción editorial
A Uyghur poet's piercing memoir of life under the most coercive surveillance regime in history
***LITHUB'S #1 BEST-REVIEWED NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023***
**A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023**
**AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023**
*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK*
'Essential reading' AI WEIWEI, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
'Deserves to be read widely... Beautiful' FINANCIAL TIMES
If you took an Uber in Washington DC a few years ago, there's a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets, and one of only a handful from his minority Muslim community to escape the genocide being visited upon his homeland in western China.
A successful filmmaker, innovative poet and prominent intellectual, Tahir Hamut Izgil had long been acquainted with state surveillance and violence, having spent three years in a labour camp on fabricated charges.
But in 2017, the Chinese government's repression of its Uyghur citizens assumed a terrifying new intensity: critics were silenced; conversations became hushed; passports were confiscated; and Uyghurs were forced to provide DNA samples and biometric data.
As Izgil's friends disappeared one by one, it became clear that fleeing the country was his family's only hope.
Escape to America spared Izgil's family the internment camps that have swallowed over a million Uyghurs. It also allowed this rare personal testimony of the Xinjiang genocide to reach the wider world.
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night charts the ongoing destruction of a community and a way of life. It is a call for the world to awaken to a humanitarian catastrophe, an unforgettable story of courage, escape and survival, and a moving tribute to Izgil's friends and fellow 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.
