Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide

 
　　Tahir Hamut Izgil的朋友們，一個接著一個消失了。
 
　　在中共的統治下，維吾爾族人過著這樣的生活已經行之有年，但他們在2017年迎來了恐懼的巔峰，維吾爾族群作為中國境內主要的穆斯林少數族群，受到政府實施的高科技監控，超過100萬人被送進再教育集中營後，便失去消息。
 
　　Tahir作為知識分子、知名詩人，對政府的迫害手段並不陌生。他在1996年試圖離開中國，卻被公安逮捕，並施暴逼其認罪，將他送進再教育的勞力集中營。即便曾在裡面被困了三年之久，他卻也從未預料到中國政府在二十年後，竟然還能採取更極端的手段。Tahir也說不清到底喚醒他的第一槍是哪一件事了，是因為那次他和遠在荷蘭的詩人朋友通話，而被公安叫去盤問了好幾個小時？還是他的一位朋友，僅僅因為想替維吾爾族人爭取權益，而被判終身監禁？還是因為中國政府將維吾爾族對外的通訊信號全面屏蔽，使得他們與外界世界失聯的舉動？
 
　　當Tahir發現自家附近的公園之所以變得空蕩蕩，是因為鄰居接二連三被捕後，他知道公安遲早也會找上自己。某天晚上，當女兒們都入睡，他在自己的房門口放了一雙耐走的鞋子、一件毛衣，和一件大衣，他想，倘若有天半夜突然被公安帶走，他至少還能夠抵擋入夜後的寒冷。Tahir和妻子都非常清楚，逃離中國，才是一家人唯一的出路……。
 
　　Tahir是中國實施大規模拘捕後，極少數成功逃亡的維吾爾人。本書記述了發生在詩人家鄉的政治、社會和文化浩劫，以及對老友與那些被噤聲的維吾爾族人們的思念，文字中流露出作者對於離開家鄉後，擺盪在終獲安全的解脫與倖存者罪惡感之間的脆弱、掙扎，令人動容。(文/博客來編譯)

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, awarded to the best first book of the year

Named one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORK TIMES - THE WASHINGTON POST - THE ECONOMIST - TIME

A poet’s account of one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family’s escape from genocide

One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil’s friends disappeared. The Chinese government’s brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China’s establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China’s internment camps for Muslim minorities.

Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labor camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese government’s radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. Was the first sign when Tahir was interrogated for hours after a phone call with a fellow poet in the Netherlands? Or when his old friend was sentenced to life in prison simply for calling for Uyghurs’ legal rights to be enforced? Perhaps it was when the police seized Uyghurs’ radios and installed jamming equipment to cut them off from the outside world.

Once Tahir noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbors had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. One night, after Tahir’s daughters were asleep, he placed by his door a sturdy pair of shoes, a sweater, and a coat so that he could stay warm if the police came for him in the middle of the night. It was clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family’s only hope.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil’s homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

Tahir Hamut Izgil is one of the foremost poets writing in the Uyghur language. He grew up in Kashgar, an ancient city in the southwest of the Uyghur homeland. After attending college in Beijing, he returned to the Uyghur region and emerged as a prominent film director. His poetry has appeared, in Joshua L. Freeman’s English translation, in The New York Review of Books, Asymptote, Gulf Coast, and Berkeley Poetry Review, and have also been extensively translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish. In 2017, as the Chinese state began the mass internment of the Uyghur people, Izgil fled with his family to the United States. He lives near Washington, D.C.