There are no scenes of torture, no violence and few sweeping proclamations about genocide. Izgil writes with calculated restraint. As his title suggests, the terror is in the anticipation ... This is in effect a psychological thriller, although the narrative unfolds like a classic horror movie as relative normalcy dissolves into a nightmare ... Izgil is a soft-spoken poet, not an orator or activist; that’s perhaps one reason his understated account is so effective.
One of the best available histories of the genocidal policies in Xinjiang since 2015, and is especially valuable as an on-the-ground, first-person account ... The story is all the more powerful for the matter-of-fact way Izgil tells it ... We can only hope that with this translation, Izgil’s gripping story and Uyghur literature generally will gain more well-deserved global attention.
Lucid and quietly terrifying ... Personal experience and rumor have their narrative limits; those seeking a deep dive on, say, Xinjiang’s 2009 Uyghur-Han riots must look elsewhere. But we don’t turn to poets like Izgil for crunchy history. Instead, read Waiting to Be Arrested at Night for its many human-scale moments of sorrow and grace.
It is suffused... by a deep sense of sadness, and of despondency even amid hope ... Izgil’s memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one’s way through, a society in which repression has become routine ... The tension in the narrative flows from the dread captured in the title.
So much more than a thrilling account of a great escape. It is nothing less than a call to the West not to look away from one of the most terrible genocides of our times.
He deserves to be read and listened to widely ..
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The most fascinating parts of the book deal with the lesser-known periods of Xinjiang’s history, the decade that led up to the mass detention campaigns, when religious freedoms were gradually being eroded. It provides a lesson in how crackdowns gather momentum and, in particular, how omnipresent surveillance speeds up minoritised groups’ internalization of their oppression ...
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This is a beautiful read. Izgil’s poetic gaze, and the elegant translation by Joshua L Freeman, together produce a compact, compelling prose that pushes you to keep reading on, even as you blink back tears.
Beautifully written ... That is the violence of disappearance and displacement: millions of people removed from their communities, families abruptly and permanently broken apart. Knowing that there are so many stories we will not ever hear, it feels essential to pay attention to the words of those like Izgil who manage to make it out.
...urgent and haunting ... Written in clear, short, lyrically powerful prose for a non-Uyghur readership, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night weaves across time to illustrate the slow but steady destruction of Uyghur society. The intimacy of Tahir’s portrayal personalizes an urgent humanitarian crisis that to this point mostly has been represented by satellite images of newly constructed prisons and a widely circulated photo of nameless blue-clad inmates sitting in rows surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Tahir lets us into his innermost thoughts and his innermost quarters ... it is also a celebration of freedom (a word many of us who have not been made unfree have an uneasy relationship with), love, faith, family, friendship, dignity, compassion, place, and poetry. In fact, one of the great, albeit sobering, treats of Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is Freeman’s translation of six of Izgil’s poems.
... provides a compelling account of life in Urumqi, the regional capital, during the years in which this vast, repressive system built towards its apotheosis. The book offers a vital portrait of Uyghur cultural and social life in Urumqi – the friendships, the artistic alliances, the conversations in bookshops and restaurants – and in doing so makes clear what has been destroyed ... In the elegant, elliptical poems that appear throughout the text – translated, like the rest of the memoir, with great skill and subtlety by Joshua L. Freeman – Tahir both acknowledges and transforms the worsening political situation. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the book is its refreshing lack of political rhetoric: there are no pronouncements on the great evil of the Chinese state. Tahir lets the awful facts speak for themselves ... in the vast tragedy that is still unfolding for Uyghurs, both inside and outside China, there are no purely happy endings. Tahir Hamut Izgil is candid about the guilt he feels for escaping when so many remain captive. It is unlikely that he, and thousands like him, will get to return.
In Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, his heart-wrenching but beautifully written memoir – translated by Joshua L Freeman – Izgil, a leading Uyghur poet, recounts how the environment for Uyghurs in China deteriorated rapidly as they fell victim to one of the world’s most harrowing mass atrocities, aided by cutting-edge surveillance technology. Even for those who saw the writing on the wall, few could have predicted how brutal China’s political, social, cultural and religious persecution would become. More than a million people have been held in internment camps, prompting international criticism and sanctions – but doing little to change the situation on the ground.
...conjure[s] a tragic and unforgettable picture of the destruction of a once vibrant culture, and the brutal persecution of its practitioners ... Waiting to be Arrested at Night is a compelling account of Izgil’s ultimately successful escape to the US. It is a story of mounting fear, as friends disappear one by one, and he and others take to sleeping next to a pile of warm clothes that they can hastily put on if the doorbell rings in the night. If that were to happen, he knew that the journey would end on the concrete floor of a crowded cell ...
The author shines a much-needed light on the complex, contradictory emotions of trading a homeland for a lifetime of both safety and survivor’s guilt. A profoundly moving memoir about China’s oppression of the Uyghurs.
