The Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil reflects on the slow creep of authoritarianism.
 | By Cornelia Channing Editorial Assistant, Sunday Opinion |
In Yōko Ogawa's 1994 novel "The Memory Police," things on an unnamed island start to disappear. The first things to go are relatively minor — stamps, perfume, ribbon — but, pretty soon, bigger things begin vanishing. One day, there are no boats. Then no birds. Then no photographs. |
Curiously, most of the island's inhabitants seem not to notice the losses, forgetting each as though it had never existed. But a select few people are somehow able to remember, and the plot of the book unfolds around their struggle to preserve that memory as the world around them disintegrates. |
Like Ogawa's novel, Izgil's essay begins with a series of mysterious disappearances and changes: not of objects, but of people. And, like in the novel, no one really seems to pay attention at first. |
Izgil — one of the most prominent writers and activists from his community right now — recalls the slow creep of authoritarianism in his homeland with a certain poetic eeriness. |
"It began slowly, quietly. The editors of a well-known literature textbook were suddenly nowhere to be found. A friend of mine left for work and never came home," he writes. "The political situation in our region had been growing gradually more tense for several years, but still, we hoped and assumed that these disappearances were isolated incidents," he confesses in the next paragraph. |
It wasn't until he saw armed police officers raiding Uyghur homes and dragging people off to "re-education camps" that he fully recognized the gravity of what was happening. |
"In the end," he reflects, "many of us — even intellectuals like me, who think of ourselves as being highly attuned to politics — failed to see what it was we were becoming inured to." |
Izgil, who fled to the United States with his family in 2017, has since dedicated his career to speaking out about what is happening to his people, and his piece offers a warning and an urgent appeal for us — all of us — to take notice when our everyday freedoms, no matter how small, begin to disappear. |
"This catastrophe does not end with our community," Izgil writes. "The defense of Uyghurs' human rights is the defense of human rights everywhere." |
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