Tahir Hamut Izgil and a warning
A few days ago, PEN Català (which is the name in the Catalan Countries of the international PEN Club, the entity that brings together writers from all over the world) awarded Palma, at the Colectiva venue, the Ve Libre award to Tahir Hamut IzgilTahir Izgil, one of the leading contemporary authors writing in Uyghur, a language spoken by seven million people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of western China, has been awarded the Veu Lliure Prize for fifteen years. This prize recognizes a writer from around the world who has distinguished themselves in defending the rights and freedoms of individuals and communities. Tahir Izgil more than fulfills the criteria for this award, and has endured a degree of personal suffering that should not exist.
Tahir Izgil is a filmmaker and as a writer he is best known for his poetry, although the book of his that we have available in Catalan is in prose: When they come to arrest me at midnight —translated by Marc Barrobès and published by Empúries— is a powerful account of the genocide perpetrated by China against the Uyghur people and the terrible political persecution suffered by the author and his family—as well as most writers, artists, and intellectuals of the Uyghur nation—in recent years, especially since 2010. Tahir Izgil managed to escape this hell and go into exile in the US, where he currently lives, never leaving, because he would risk never being able to return. He had to accept and express his gratitude for the Ve Lliure Prize remotely.
Tahir Izgil's account is one of a siege, a circle that gradually tightens around each member of a community—in this case, the Uyghurs—until it literally suffocates them. Silenced voices, confiscated passports, biometric and DNA monitoring, and then the horror of internment camps, where more than a million people have disappeared in just a few years. The lost freedoms, the coercion, and the humiliations are initially a disturbing, terrifying trickle, but what follows is a leap into the void, into the horror of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.
The political and cultural coordinates of the conflict between the Uyghurs and Xi Jinping's China may seem distant to us, but they are not. The horror described by Tahir Izgil is not essentially different from the great narratives of 20th-century figures who suffered under fascism, such as Stefan Zweig, Primo Levi, and Władysław Szpilman, among others. If we read these authors' books as warnings against the dangers of the far right and fascism that emerge from the recent past (the 20th century, in historical terms, is not yesterday; it is today), Tahir Hamut Izgil's book is even more urgent, more pressing, because it is from today, from another time, in a country with a government that the West also dares not challenge for its continuous human rights violations. On the contrary, everyone in Europe and America wants to strengthen ties with China and Xi Jinping and do business, cynically ignoring the horrors being perpetrated.
We read Tahir Hamut Izgil and take it as a warning. It's not an exotic or distant story; it's the present of our globalized, dark, and ugly world, in which liberal democracies are in real danger. Being a tourist destination accustomed to presenting a permanent, fake smile to the world doesn't absolve us of being part of it: on the contrary, it exposes us more starkly.
