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Title details for Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil - Available

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide

by Tahir Hamut Izgil
Joshua L. Freeman
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
Winner of the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    August 1, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593671238
      • File size: 221198 KB
      • Duration: 07:40:49

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 1, 2023
      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. Agent: Adam Eaglin, Cheney Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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