Post Tagged with: "Uyghur PEN"
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On World Poetry Day, do not forget imprisoned Uyghur poets
Today, March 21st, while celebrating World Poetry Day, please do not forget hundreds of innocent imprisoned Uyghur poets lying in Chinese prisons. Their only crime was writing poems in their God-given mother language, Uyghur. World Poetry Day is celebrated on 21 March, and it was designated by UNESCO in 1999 “with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard”. Since 2017, China has arrested and persecuted more than 500 Uyghur poets, giving them lengthy prison sentences for their “crime” of writing poems. These poets, including prominent figures such as Abduqadir Jalalidin, Perhat Tursun, Ablet Abdureshid Berqi , Rahim Yasin Qaynami, Adil Tunyaz, and Gulnisa Imin Gulkhan, now find themselves behind bars, their only offence being the courageous act of sharing their voices through verse. The subsequent examples serve to illuminate the severe extrajudicial persecution endured by Uyghur poets at the hands of the Chinese government. Below, you will find excerpts from their poignant works: Abduqadir Jalalidin is a renowned Uyghur poet, scholar, and literature professor at Xinjiang “Normal” University. He was detained without reason in 2018 and since then his whereabouts are unknown. News that he was sentenced to 13 years in prison has sickened the Uyghur world, says Elkun. His poem, No Road Back Home, composed from his cell, was memorized by cellmates who, upon their release, recited it to prove to his family that he was still alive. An excerpt, translated by Munawwar Abdulla, was a rare glimpse of life behind bars in China, talking of a “broken heart, aching and longing” to be with his love, “tormented with no strength to move,” “watching the seasons change through cracks and crevices.” “I have no lover’s touch in this solitary corner, I have no amulet for each night […]
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For PEN’s Poets: reflections by Jennifer Clement, President of PEN International
PEN International Sat 20 March 2021 Today the world marks World Poetry Day, an opportunity to celebrate and promote poetry and the power and creativity of language. Each year on this day, PEN International highlights the case of poets who face great challenges across the globe simply for their work, and asks its members and supporters to take action on their behalf. When I think of the poets incarcerated in the world and punished, I think of poetry. Poetry is almost the only thing that has no monetary value. You cannot sell a poem. Nobody wants to buy a poem. Poems are not for sale in the market by the apples and peaches, or in the auction houses by sculptures and paintings. I confess that it gives me a strange wonder and shock to think that a poem is so powerful and so dangerous that a poet can be locked up and sentenced to death for rhymes and couplets, for metaphors and symbols. When contemplating how dangerous poems have become, I recall the words of British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy: ‘If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone’. In our times, if Galileo had inked his discoveries in free verse with stanza breaks, he might be looking at the sky- his round, telescope-shaped sky- from a prison cell. Mahvash Sabet, imprisoned in Iran in 2008 and freed 10 years later in 2017, penned impassioned poems to Fariba with whom she shared a cell at the beginning of her incarceration. Sabet wrote: ‘O my companion in the cage! How many cruelties we saw together; how many favours too and blessings in our isolation. […] They tied your wings to mine, feather to feather, and you rested your head beside mine every night’. The poet Li Bifeng, […]
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