Aziz Isa Elkun

Aziz Isa Elkun, Poet & Writer
Researcher at SOAS, University of London

Published by Brussels Morning Newspaper 26 June 2024 11:27 Am

The Uyghurs love writing and reading poems; it is an essential part of Uyghur cultural expression and plays a vital role in the continuation of creativity and development of the Uyghur language, literature, and culture.
 
Since 2016, over three million Uyghurs and other Turkic people in the Uyghur homeland in China have been collectively persecuted and sent to the notorious Chinese internment camps in the Uyghur Region. Soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, with the political and military support of the Soviet Union, the so-called Chinese Liberation Army illegally occupied the Uyghur homeland of East Turkistan, also known as Uyghuristan. In 1955, it announced the founding of the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” As a Uyghur living in exile, and a poet and advocator for freedom of speech and writing, my conscience forbids me from calling our Uyghur homeland, “Xinjiang”, which means “New Territories” in the Chinese language. In spite of ongoing persecution under Chinese rule, Uyghur writers sustained their rich cultural legacy, and Uyghur poetry played a significant role in keeping Uyghur language and literature alive, and expressing criticism of the oppressive Chinese regime.

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Edited by Aziz Isa Elkun
Translated by Aziz Isa Elkun and others
Published: 26/10/2023
EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY POCKET POETS
Penguin Random House

An unprecedented collection of poems spanning the rich two-thousand-year cultural legacy of the Uyghur people of Central Asia. EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY POCKET POETS.

The Uyghurs have a long and glorious history of poetry, dating from the oral epics of the second century BCE through the elegant love poetry of the medieval period and up to the present moment -and much of it has never before been translated into English. Uyghur poetry reflects the magnificent natural landscapes at the heart of the Silk Road region, with its endless steppes, soaring mountain ranges, and vast deserts, as well as its turbulent history. Turkic, Sufi, and Persian influences have shaped the poetic tradition over the centuries, and more recently the modernism of the twentieth century left its mark as well. In the face of the systematic persecution of the Uyghurs in China today, which has driven many of their poets into exile, including the editor and translator of this volume, Aziz Isa Elkun, who lives in London. Uyghur Poems is not only a remarkable one-volume tour of an ancient and vibrant poetic tradition but also a vital witness to a threatened culture.

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by Flo Marks

THE POEM ROSES is dedicated to the Uyghurs arrested and detained in the Chinese Communist Party’s 21st-century concentration camps in what is officially called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Its author, Uyghur poet, writer and academic Aziz Isa Elkun, grew up in Shahyar county, close to the Tarim river, and did not experience the freedom promised in the region’s colonial name.

Now 51, he was first arrested as a 16-year-old schoolboy in 1986 when his activism led to him being informally detained and interrogated. His home was ransacked and his earliest journals taken away. He was released after two days, but his parents’ defence of young naivety was unlikely to save him from a prison sentence in the future.

As the political climate worsened, with increasing government surveillance and censorship, it became increasingly certain that Aziz, as a young adult who favoured freedom of expression and association, would keep getting into trouble.

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