Waiting to Be Arrested at Night
Tahir Hamut Izgil
Jonathan Cape, £18.99, 272 pages
This poet’s account of life under intense surveillance in Urumqi, the capital of the Uyghur autonomous region of Xingjian, between 2009 and 2017, is crystalline and urgent. The author learns early on that his people’s “customs and beliefs” will not survive, purely because they have been “cherished for a thousand years”. His warning should resonate with any person of faith.
The book follows Izgil and his wife’s gradual reluctant acceptance that they cannot survive unscathed amid intensifying mass arrests, which begin in 2015. Interlaced with his own story are the parallel stories of friends and family. He has changed the names of most of the characters we encounter: they remain either under surveillance or lost somewhere in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “study centres”. The sentences of those already caught are indefinite: it is not clear that they can ever go home.
