Self-Portrait in a detail of Yarmemet Niyaz’s 2013 painting “

A good while ago the anthropologist Stevan Harrell asked me to consider the unique position of Uyghurs as heirs to an urbanism that predates the rise of Chinese cities in the region. He asked me to think through the ways in which this urban tradition has affected Uyghur social organization. I’m still thinking about this.

Uyghur thinkers are too. They are thinking about the way new urban forms reorient their lives. They are grappling with the way certain spaces draw them in by reflecting their pasts while other forms face them with a blankness that does not allow them a way in.

One of the most remarkable paintings at the first Uyghur contemporary art art exhibition in 2015 was a mixed media piece in which the artist Yarmemet Niyaz inserted a small rectangular mirror onto the side of a bright blue house next to an old coal stove (Uy: mesh) that many people use in Uyghur oasis cities. The mirror interpellates the viewer. You can literally see yourself in the painting. As you do this you imagine yourself in that place, or, for many Uyghur viewers, you imagine yourself in that past: standing in front of a mirror combing your hair with a comb that hangs on a string before walking out into the bazaar.

Uyghur urbanism is still with us. For some it exists in memory; for many it exists in the ways spaces are used. In three of Tahir Hamut’s poems, which we recently translated and published in the US-based literary journal Banango Street, we see the way a young man settles into a place like the city of Ürümchi. We see how over time he gradually comes to terms with approaching middle age. We see the way he comes to know the parameters of his life.

Like a city, life seduces. The beauty of its ugliness makes Tahir care for it. The filth of the streets, the pollution in the air, the bitterness of the cold, the blankness of the walls and the apathy of strangers, all of these elements coalesce as a strange machine. Through familiarity with its estrangement, it comes to feel like a place where making a life is possible. The jumble of Uyghur urbanism, dusty streets, calls to kebab and to prayer are still there, but the future is opening up to a concrete world of “stubborn streets, angry cars, glaring lamps, immoral roads, lonely trash, beautiful dungeons, naked concrete.” This is Tahir Hamut’s Ürümchi.

Here are excerpts from poems about the city by Tahir Hamut:

The latest issue of Banango Street is not the only place where Tahir’s work has appeared. Joshua L. Freeman, a doctoral student at Harvard University, has also translated and published his work in Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, The Berkeley Poetry Review and Words Without Borders. Many of these stunning poems from the 1990s and early 2000s are focused on Tahir’s attachments to the places he came from – Kashgar and the dusty, time-worn traditions of Southern Xinjiang. They take us out of spaces of capitalist development into the deep time of Uyghur worlds. The poems I’ve chosen to highlight here are more pedestrian. They make us think about the present condition of the Uyghur every day. But they still make us wonder, how does the past live in the present?

Beige Wind is Darren Byler, an academic in Seattle. He will be posting under his real name on his website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

In a recent article James Leibold, a scholar at La Trobe University in Australia, discussed the way ethnic minority struggles against police and structural violence has often been officially mislabeled “terrorism.” At the same time, in China, as in the United States, violent acts carried out by non-Muslims are read as acts of the deranged and mentally ill, but not as “terrorism.” In China, as in the United States, the lives of Muslims which are lost as a result of “terrorist” or “counter-terrorism” efforts go unnoticed and unmourned. All losses of life leave gaping holes in our human social fabric, but why are some more grievable than others? What happens when a population is terrified by the discourse of terrorism?

As in many other parts of the world, the concept of “terrorism” in China was strongly influenced by Bush-era political rhetoric. Prior to 9/11, Uyghur violence was almost exclusively regarded as “splitism.” Since 9/11, as Gardner Bovingdon has shown, Han settlers in Xinjiang have become victims of “terrorism” on a regular basis, according to official state reports. By 2004, “splitist” incidents from the previous decade were relabeled as “terrorist” incidents (Bovingdon, 120). Everything — from the theft of sheep to a land seizure protest to a fight with knives — can now be labeled as “terrorism,” as long as Uyghurs and Han are involved in the conflict. It appears as though “terrorism” (or the “three forces” continuum – separatism, extremism, terrorism, which are now understood as manifestations of the same phenomenon) has come to signify Uyghurs who are verbally and physically un-submissive or “unopen.” That is why a moderate intellectual like Ilham Tohti can receive a life sentence on the charge of “separatism.”

Clearly the American discourse of a “Global War on Terror” has set the terms of “The People’s War on Terror” in China. But it’s been deployed with more sweeping intensity in China, particularly in Xinjiang. Over the past couple of years, Uyghurs in Southern Xinjiang have told me that what they are facing now is much worse for them than the Maoist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. They told me that Uyghurs can be accused of “terrorist” sympathies, and once under “enhanced interrogation techniques” in detention — to borrow a Rumsfeldian turn of phrase — they often turn on their own neighbors and friends, offering them up as the “real terrorists,” etc. The way neighbors and family members have been pitted against each other through this process reminds them of the way students turned on their teachers and parents during the Cultural Revolution.

Making matters worse, real terrorism — if we define it as premeditated killing of civilians — indeed exists, as evidenced by the incidents in Tiananmen, Kunming, the Ürümchi train station, and Ürümchi green market over the past few years. These horrific acts of violence are unjustified under any circumstance and must be condemned. Yet we forget that hundreds of unarmed Uyghurs have been killed in protests, shot on the spot for arguing or fleeing, and thousands have been indefinitely disappeared following violent incidents.

As the anthropologist Talal Asad has noted in his book On Suicide Bombing, “The discourse of terror enables a redefinition of the space of violence in which bold intervention and rearrangement of everyday relations can take place and be governed in relation to terror” (28). The label “terrorism” has not only been used as a tool around the world to delegitimize instances of resistance that might be better understood as anti-colonial struggles, but it also allows for a sharp intensification of policing or “hard strike campaigns” among marginalized populations. As the theorist Michael Walzer has noted regarding the “peculiar evil of terrorism,” it is “not only the killing of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public spaces, the endless coerciveness of precaution” (in Asad, 16). The state of emergency that “terrorism” produces is especially acute among populations which have been identified as the source of “terrorism.” In this framework the anxiety that infects Uyghur lives, governed by the fear of being labeled “a terrorist,” is an example of how cruelty, rather than an ethics of care, has come to govern the world. Asad writes:

It seems to me that there is no moral difference between the horror inflicted by state armies (especially if those armies belong to powerful states that are unaccountable to international law) and the horror inflicted by its insurgents. In the case of powerful states, the cruelty is not random but part of an attempt to discipline unruly populations. Today, cruelty is an indispensable technique for maintaining a particular kind of international order, an order in which the lives of some peoples are less valuable than the lives of others and therefore their deaths less disturbing. (94)

Thinking about “terrorism,” and how it terrifies groups of people, thus opens up questions about whose lives matter. If Uyghurs are now “terrorists” until proven otherwise, when is the loss of a Uyghur life grievable?

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

Back in April, signs of the famous Uyghur restaurant chain Herembağ (Eden) began to appear on the streets of San Francisco. A few months later, a location in Fremont was opened in a renovated hotpot restaurant with promises of a third Bay Area location in San Mateo. Like their restaurant locations from Beijing to Astana, Kazakhstan, the American version of Eden serves an upscale version of the traditional Uyghur pasta, lamb, and rice dishes, as well as Hui-inspired northwest specialties such as Big Plate Chicken (dapanji) and Turkish-style döner kebab.

To understand how Herembağ has the ambition and resources to open 20 new restaurants in North America, you have to understand how it transformed Uyghur food culture in Xinjiang.

I still remember the first time I went to one of the original Herembağs in Ürümchi back in 2010. What was remarkable about that space on Solidarity Road was the way the interior brought the ambiance of rural Uyghur courtyard houses into an upscale dining experience. The lights were low, the waiters wore white gloves, everyone drank tea out of tiny Turkish style cups — but the most intriguing thing was the way the interiors had been resurfaced to evoke the feeling of adobe (kısek); the way doorways were framed with aged wood and niches were fitted into the walls. Suddenly the homes in which many feel an uncomfortable mix of nostalgia and aversion were being evoked and reconfigured in this dining space.

The main reason many Uyghurs feel nostalgic toward courtyard houses is because they grew up in them. But due to the rapid development of Southern Xinjiang over the past two decades, many have moved into apartments in the cities and towns, and no longer have the autonomy to construct homes they can pass on to the next generation. At the same time, many recall the way those old handmade houses got so cold in the winter, how they had to haul water from a communal well and use an outhouse. Traditional Uyghur dwellings are the homes of the poor and uneducated, so they say. Given that many young Uyghurs already face feelings of lack relative to Han and Western privilege, traditional housing is sometimes thought of as “backward,” or at least incomplete.

Still, the overriding feeling many Uyghurs have toward courtyard homes is pride. They remember them as places for extended family to gather, for hosting guests, holding weddings, and sharing intimate meals with friends.

This is why the Herembağ is seen as the pinnacle of “quality” (in Chinese, suzhi; in Uyghur, sapa) for many Uyghurs visiting from the countryside. There’s tasteful and romantic Uyghur and Islamic decorations, and a proud flaunting of Uyghur heritage and traditional aesthetics. Traditional knowledge is promoted as a marker of distinction.

Of course, what is considered traditional in these restaurants is often a melding of Chinese, Turkish, and Central Asian cuisines. But these spaces also take mixes of culture and make them their own. At the flagship location on Yan’an Road in the heart of the Uyghur area in Ürümchi, live jazz, flamenco, and Uyghur pop music is played in a basement lounge every evening. Every evening the place is packed.

Over the past decade, Herembağ has established locations in every major city in Xinjiang. In addition, its monumental success has had a direct influence on the typography of menus and the designs of interiors in dozens of other large restaurants from Ürümchi to small Southern Xinjiang towns such as Payziwat. As a direct result of Herembağ’s influence, a new Turkish tea culture is emerging across the province.

Herembağ Founder Zulpiqar Ebeydulla

In addition, using a unique franchise model, the founder of Herembağ, Zulpiqar Ebeydulla, has exported this source of Uyghur pride to many major cities in Eastern China and Central Asia. In order to extract the greatest amount productivity in each branch, Zulpiqar typically finds investors to put up the cash to start a new restaurant. In return for a percentage of the profits, investors become the de-facto managers of the new restaurant and, in exchange, Zulpiqar provides the brand, training, and supply network.

To date the new location in Fremont has received slightly mixed reviews. Some guests seem unsure how to engage with the food, or how to share a meal of large plates of pasta and pilaf and Uyghur-style Chinese and Turkish dishes. Since the Uyghur managers of the new branch are dealing with the typical racism of the American “ethnic” food scene, guests often come to the restaurant expecting a certain Americanized-version of Chinese cuisine at a particular price.

I’ve yet to make it to the new locations in San Francisco. But if I do get a chance, I’ll go not just for the food, but also to remember the feeling of all of those fantastic dinners I had with friends in Chinese Central Asia.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

On the top floor of the Aq Saray, or White Palace, hotel in Ürümchi is a massive reproduction of Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David. It is flanked on its left by a reproduction of Ivan Kramskoi’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman (which everyone associates with Anna Karenina). Across the expansive red room, otherwise decorated in the style of a Russian tea room, gigantic reproductions of Venetian canals and cityscapes fill out the walls. Overhead murals of clouds, star constellations, and pheasants in flight glow against the ornate heavy white archways that surround them.

The paintings are the works of Dilmurat Abdukadir – who was hired by the owner of the restaurant to produce life-sized images of paintings the owner had found on the Internet. The space is fascinating. Not only does it unapologetically embrace an amalgam of European aesthetics, but it is symptomatic of larger trends in Uyghur restaurant politics and aesthetics.

Somewhere around 2008, scholars began to notice that Turkish imports were on the rise in Xinjiang. Suddenly chocolates from the massive Turkish food conglomerate Ülker could be found everywhere; Turkish coffee products from Mahmood began to replace Nescafe. Advertisements for Turkish products endorsed by celebrity Uyghurs like Abdulla began to saturate Uyghur-language television. Non-Chinese products were suddenly the products of choice for middle-class consumers.

In the years since, the Uyghur food industry has changed in significant ways. As Uyghurs lost more and more control over the architecture of built environment, the interior spaces of restaurants became a space of potential. Inspired by what they had seen on trips to Turkey and Europe, the new class of food importers and restaurateurs began to transform the more traditional opulence of Uyghur banquet halls into spaces whose aesthetic was borrowed at least in part from someplace else.

As social scientists since Pierre Bourdieu have noted, people with disposable incomes purchase forms of distinction by cultivating a sense of taste in what they consume. Middle-class Uyghurs perform their distinctiveness as high-class Uyghurs by eating Uyghur-style Turkish food in uniquely non-Chinese spaces. They go to these restaurants to be seen by other Uyghurs. In an iteration of capitalist development around the world, new upscale restaurants are becoming sites of “conspicuous consumption.”

The expansion of Uyghur interior design to include Turkish and Western elements has translated into a substantial source of income for Uyghur painters such as Dilmurat. Although painting for hire sometimes grates against their passion to follow their own artistic impulses, since the market for their own work is quite small, it is often a primary way through which they are able to supplement their incomes. Most painters who pay their bills doing commercial art for Uyghur businessmen are formally trained. They have studied art history and can talk to you for hours about the purity of art and how it is an expression of their deepest feelings. As Dilmurat put it:

“(Normally) painting is one of the only things I enjoy in life. But when I paint on commission, like with my pieces at Aq Saray, it is just the opposite. It is absolutely depressing. I hate it. I’m copying other people’s work. It feels terrible to me, but I need the money. And having money is also something I enjoy a bit.”

Although new restaurants sometimes pay him to fill out their European or Turkish aesthetic, the same can’t be said yet about private art buyers. He said:

“Uyghurs really haven’t developed much appreciation or understanding of art so I really can’t rely on (art sales). One person who bought my work told me that he just bought it because the frame was nice. He tore out the art work and just used the frame for something else. This kind of attitude is really common.”

Part of the problem here is that given his druthers Dilmurat paints in an abstract expressionist style. When some Uyghurs look at his painting they don’t see anything other than squiggles and lines.

He said: “I came to like abstract forms of art through food. Seeing the way certain foods were displayed in different color formations is what first made me think about painting in blocks of color. I like the feeling and sense of it. I can feel a certain form of rightness as I work with the color and paint.”

He said that, over the arc of his career as an artist, the way he was able to pour his feeling into a painting became an important therapeutic practice for him.

“When I paint I lose all track of time. Ten or 15 hours can pass and I won’t even notice. I don’t stop to eat or anything. I just get lost in time. When I come out of it, I have some results, but I also feel as if that time has just vanished. I have no memory of it. You could say that I am wasting my life, but for me painting is the only thing that keeps me sane. If I couldn’t paint I would probably have a serious mental illness. Painting is one of the only things I enjoy in life.”

As one of the leaders in the Uyghur contemporary art scene, Dilmurat’s passion for art as a-way-of-life seems unmatched. He reads Nietzsche and talks about how true art is the “real expression of the artist” and that the most important thing is that “the artist gets some enjoyment out of it, that it feels good for him.” Despite their marginalization, Dilmurat and his group of contemporary artists still keep painting – if not for recognition, then for themselves. That practice and the friendships that emerge out of it are one of the things that give their lives meaning.

Friendship (2015)

Despite the way Dilmurat likes to distance himself from his work as an interior decorator, if you bring him down to the White Palace you will see that he is also a bit proud to see the atmosphere his work creates. When Uyghur diners walk into the room they are often impressed to see that a Uyghur artist can replicate masterworks of European art with so much precision. For many, entering the room for the first time is transportive. The waiters wear white gloves. A flamenco band sings in Spanish under a galloping Napoleon. The glow of the soft lights. The taste of honey in the mint tea. All of it feels refined.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

Initially many Uyghurs were excited about the Uyghur photographer Qurbanjan Semet’s book-length photo essay I am from Xinjiang on the Silk Road. They were thrilled to see Qurbanjan’s national primetime interview on CCTV News. They were astonished to see it translated into English (by Wang Chiying) and sold alongside Xi Jinping’s boilerplate biography at Book Expo America. They wanted to know why people as famous and distant as the movie star Jackie Chan and novelist-turned-harmony-spokesperson Wang Meng were singing its praises.

But when they actually had a chance to look at it, many felt disappointment.

The book (which was produced largely for Chinese- and English-reading audiences) is presented as the portraits and stories of human life in and from Xinjiang. Yet, although the majority of the 100-plus people portrayed in the book are Uyghur, only a small handful are uneducated people from the countryside. So while many Uyghurs agree that the message the book carries – that Uyghurs in general are not “Separatists, Extremists, and Terrorists” – is good, they also feel that it paints a false picture of what life is really like. To borrow a metric from another context, they feel as though the book is representing the life of the “one percent.” It presents the success stories, not the failures and blockages. It shows us an image in which everyone has a college education and a good job in a Chinese company; there are few stories of poverty or the way Uyghur bodies are violently prevented from leaving the countryside; there are no stories that demonstrate the heartache that comes from the way young Uyghur men are chronically underemployed, detained, beaten, humiliated, and jailed. Oddly, if we chose to believe the accounts we are given, most of these successful people represented in the book still seem to see themselves as representative of what everyone can and should achieve — not recognizing that they are the exception, not the rule.

But still, some interesting themes do appear.

The book is broken up into six sections: a brief autobiography of Qurbanjan, followed by portraits and biographical sketches around the themes of “Inseparable Bond of Love,” “Footprints for Future Generations,” “Home is Best,” “The Long Journey to Dream Fulfillment,” and, finally, “A Feel of Xinjiang through Differences.”

In the section on “love” people focuse primarily on love of family, their homeland, and their country. The following sections are where fragments of struggle and conflict begin to appear. A Shanghai-based businessman Perhat Kayum is one of the first Uyghur faces to break his smile. He tells us of how it was impossible for his daughter to get a Shanghai hukou and how this forced them to move back to Ürümchi where he was shocked to discover that Uyghurs are treated with even more suspicion and disrespect by security personnel than in Shanghai. He said: “To my surprise, such monitoring took place not just in the inner provinces, but was actually more frequent and in-depth in my hometown. I could do nothing but let it happen. I simply can’t explain why these things happen, nor do I know how to face them.” The struggle for Uyghurs to obtain an urban hukou and thus receive permission to apply for a passport was a frequent theme with the highly educated sample of the book. Elijan Ibrayin and his wife Mayra Ezız, among a dozen or so others, talked about the struggle to get their hukou switched to Xi’an so they could apply for passports.

Perhat Kayum

Elijan Ibrayin and Mayra Ezız

Another theme that emerged from the ideological framing of the book was about transgressing racial boundaries. There were several stories about Han born in Xinjiang who converted to Islam. About how in the 1960s and ’70s there were numerous intermarriages between Uyghurs and Han and how their families have worked out a way of living despite “opposition from families and friends on both sides.” One of the most interesting stories on this theme is the story of Ai Kezu, a 35-year-old woman who changed her ethnic status from Uyghur to Han as an adult. Born to a Uyghur father and Han mother who met in the 1960s, Ai Kezu, grew up in Kashgar “rejected, blamed and abused.” Her mother, who was one of the “Shanghai girls” that was “tricked” into coming to Xinjiang to marry a soldier, is still a devout Buddhist while her father remains a devout Muslim. Eventually, she said, her family was forced to leave Xinjiang and relocate in an area in a Han-dominated province. Other mixed ethnicity families such as Yang Xiangfeng and Mayshegul Tursunjan have done the same, although in most other cases, the Han member of the new family converted to Islam.

Ai Kezu and her parents

Yang Xiangfeng and Mayshegul Tursunjan

The last two sections of the book are the most interesting. Here we read fairly straightforward assessments of violence and racial prejudice in Xinjiang. Young Han, Hui, Tibetan, and Uyghur former residents of Ürümchi weigh in on the riots of 2009 and how discrimination was built into the fabric of their childhoods. The best stories here are Hui musician Ma Jun’s telling of how lack of respect often turns to violence in the context of Xinjiang, Ilham Izak’s profound distaste for nationalism of any sort, and the Tibetan Xinjianger Zhang Caiyun’s frank telling of how stereotypes have infected her life, and Dilraba Rehmet’s absolute disgust with state-run Chinese media. These are stories in which the subject represented in the portrait has not yet disappeared beneath the cloying cheerfulness that pervades political speech about Xinjiang. These are stories and faces that stick out.

Ma Jun

Ilham Izak

Zhang Caiyun

Diraba Rehmet

Of course, a more honest telling of the Chinese story of everyday racism and oppression is not something that can be published in China. Occasionally there were hints, in the own words of the photographed, about how Han migrants such as Liu Hongliang can be condescending to Uyghur migrants such as Repukat Alken; or how the chengguan target Uyghur street-hawkers such as Rozimurat Nahmet. But much raw feeling seems to seep through despite Qurbanjan’s and his editors’ efforts to dismiss racism as a cause for state violence and its response; and how that response has invaded the lives of everyone who comes from Xinjiang.

Liu Hongliang and Repukat Alken

Rozimurat Nahmet

The English language version of I am from Xinjiang on the Silk Road can be purchased from Amazon. The Chinese language version of the book is available in every bookstore in Ürümchi and every online Chinese bookseller.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

Many fantastic reviews have been written about Carolyn Drake’s new book of Xinjiang photography Wild Pigeon. Ian Johnson from the New York Review of Books commented on her innovative use of participatory sketching and collage. Photobook Bristol asked Drake how her participatory approach shaped her editorial process. Sean O’Hagan at The Guardian focused on Drake’s attempts to capture a vanishing culture on film. Colin Pantallat in Photo-eye congratulated Drake on “destroying” her images and in doing so destroying the solipsism that so often accompanies a heroic photographer. Rebecca Horne’s magnificent review at Daylight engages with Drake’s struggle to understand what her images might mean to Uyghurs. And the Time Lightbox review features lengthy image captions in which Drake relates the things Uyghurs told her as they looked at the images and realigned them with pencil and scissor. Numerous photography review journals selected it as one of the best books of 2014. Harper’s Magazine featured it as a portfolio in their January 2015 issue.

But how have Xinjiang photographers and critics received the book?

When I viewed and talked about the book with groups of Han photographers many of them noted the way Drake mixed high and low forms of art in the book. The images by Uyghur portrait photographers appended to the back cover of the book struck them as particularly interesting. The images are introduced by the words: “I see everything clearly now – the sky is still such a deep blue.” And concluded with the text: “And the world remains so beautiful and so quiet and still.”

“Why did she include these?” they asked.

Looking at the obviously Photoshopped images of rural Uyghurs inserted into exotic landscapes, they told me, “We could never do that here. If we did, people would just laugh at us. They would say, ‘You are a master photographer, and those people you are taking pictures of don’t know anything about art. Why are you acting as though their pictures are as good as your own?’”

But after we flipped through the book a few times and really looked at those pictures of Uyghurs posing in Mecca, on the beach in Varadero, Cuba, in front of Arashiyama in Kyoto, or awkwardly straddling a galloping steed, they said: “Wow, this book really is about the dreams of people. The idea is not to achieve some high standard of beauty, but to understand the desires of people.” They felt as though she had received access that would be very hard for them, as Han photographers, to gain.

Uyghur photographers were universally thrilled with the book. One told me, “These collages are really deep. I can stare at them for hours and still find new ideas and feelings in them. The colors and the way different images are positioned in relation to each other makes this a really profound and deep image.”

Even Uyghur migrants deeply identified with the images. For instance, an image of a young Uyghur man sleeping in an Internet café sparked long conversations about his own experiences as a desperado living on the streets of Ürümchi without a place to stay. He told me he had slept in a Internet café for more than 2 months back in 2011.

“I didn’t even have enough money to buy naan at that time,” he said. “I could just eat one bowl of Chinese instant noodles every day. Eventually a cousin helped me find another job as a security guard, but until I had enough money to rent a room I just stayed at the Internet café. That was one of the hardest times in my life.”

Wild Pigeon is a special book. It is of the moment and simultaneously untimely. It distills the dreams of millions of Uyghurs who live without the legal right to move beyond the borders of their home prefecture in southern Xinjiang. It shows us glimpses of these dreams; and in the strength of their numbers, the poignancy of their looks, the feelings of their words, they wear us down – wounding our hearts a thousand times.

In her commentary near the end of the book Drake mentions that the grandson of one of the old men she interviewed, a young man she knows well, is still “shuffling paperwork, stamps, and fees, hoping to obtain a passport to travel abroad. He wants to learn about what’s happening in other parts of the world beyond China. Despite the numerous obstacles, he trusts and believes he will eventually get there.”

This same dream was the dream that was hooded and shackled 109 times last week in Thailand. As those dreams are tortured, they will begin to name the family members and friends who helped them escape, and within a few weeks hundreds more will be hooded and shackled. The cycle of fear and violence will continue to unravel; pigeons will continue to flail against the iron bars of the bird cage.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

Last weekend I went to Gulsay Cemetery at the south end of Ürümchi, back behind the power plants right next to the lowest foothill of the eastern section of Heavenly Mountains. Many Uyghur, Kazakh, and Hui heroes are buried in this cemetery; people often just refer to it as “the Muslim cemetery.” Looking at the markings around you, it feels as though you are in a completely Muslim world. In the Uyghur section of the cemetery all of the signs are only in the Arabic script of modern Uyghur. There is little sign in this community of the dead that we’re in the largest Chinese city in Central Asia.

A few hundred meters away you can recognize how the city reaches even this last stop on the 308 bus line — giant earth-moving machines prowl the nearby city landfill, sunlight reflects off of the CITIC tower at Little West Gate — but the people here still seem at rest in the earth.

Looking through the Uyghur photographer Ali K.’s 2013 project “Burial,” a viewer gets a similar feeling. Writing about the project, Ali K. said his original intention was “to create a cautionary visual representation of customs that had not yet fallen to the wayside.” He wanted to note the way the many phenomena of Uyghur faith remain embedded in the present life practices of urban Uyghurs. His sense was that many practices, particularly in burial, are related to quite ancient ideas about the way “the earth is the source of meaning.”

To his thinking, the way Uyghurs still plant trees, insert flags, or tie strips of cloth to tree branches is related to the practices derived from the belief systems that predate the overlay of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Islam.

There is a gritty darkness to Ali K.’s images. The images are underexposed in shades of deep gray. There is a rough graininess to many of them which adds to the feeling of blurriness and sorrow. Figures bent in grief and exhaustion form dark figures against the snow and dust. Grave markings which are built out of care by the families of the dead stand in sharp relief against the sky and high-tension electric wires. There is a murkiness to the images which draws the viewer in and makes them enter a mood of contemplation mixed with sorrow. What does it mean to rest in peace?

Ali K. says that now when he walks in the cemetery he “feels free from anxiety,” but that Uyghur cemeteries were also a space where he came to terms with his own specific relationship to tradition and culture. He began the series in June 2010 after his mother died, but already he had been thinking about his own position in the Uyghur world. Since he was trained in Chinese language schools his whole life and has spent the majority of his life in a northern suburb of Ürümchi where Uyghurs make up a very small part of the population, Ali K. has always felt detached.

He said: “For a while I had a serious identity crisis (Who am I? Where do I come from?). In 2009 I went to Beijing and when I returned I had a desire to look into the source of my own culture… at the same time, for me, the cemetery is also dedicated to my mother.”

This series is thus his attempt to come to terms with his own place in the Uyghur world. Like his 2014 “Nan” photo series he is placing his own position in relation to a history of the present. He buried his mother in one of these cemeteries and now he is looking for his own place on the edge of a Chinese city under the shadow of the power plants and the lower reaches of the Heavenly Mountains.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

The first Uyghur contemporary art exhibition was launched at Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum on May 16, attended by several hundred people from across the province, including most of the represented artists. Since the majority of the painters were teachers or professors, many leading administrators from local universities were also present. Aside from them and a few Han painters from local art schools that the museum’s leading curator, Zeng Chunkai, had invited for the opening, nearly everyone was Uyghur. Even a famous Uyghur public intellectual, Yalkun Rozi, came and praised the artists – although he clearly didn’t understand contemporary art.

Everyone I spoke with was thrilled by the opening. Several viewers were amazed to see Uyghurs given voice in a professional contemporary art space. Just seeing their work on the wall was a major thing. The artists I spoke with felt as though the exhibition — which will last until June 16 — was a turning point in the Uyghur contemporary art scene. To them it presaged greater recognition and further development outside of Xinjiang and into the world.

Actually the exhibition was made possible by an earlier one in Berlin, which included many of the pieces shown in Ürümchi. That show gave a group of five Uyghur artists an opportunity to travel to Europe, show their work, and become acquainted with the European art scene. They were given the confidence to later join the Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum exhibition.

Although organizers received some push-back for not including Han artists, the show was allowed to go forward. (And to be fair, Han artists’ group exhibitions rarely include Uyghur artists.) This might have been due in part because of the exhibition’s diversity – several female Uyghur artists and non-Uyghur minority artists are included — and because of the artists’ previous success in Europe.

At the opening, much of the commentary revolved around what made art “contemporary” or “modern.” Many of the Uyghur artists had difficulty distinguishing between the two, but to a curator like Zeng it was an important distinction. For him modern art is uncompelling because it is derivative of earlier works or styles. Of course, it’s interesting to see a Uyghur artist in conversation with someone like Gustav Klimt, but for Zeng it doesn’t push the boundaries of what can be represented far enough.

“Waiting” by Ablikim Ghini

One of the leading Uyghur artists, Dilqun Ghazi, said much of the same thing at a reception following the opening. “What makes something contemporary?” he asked. “I’m a contemporary person. I’m living right now. But that is not the same thing as contemporary art.”

He went on to say that to be contemporary, art had to meet certain criteria:

First, it has to be consciously in relationship with the art that came before it. “What we call contemporary art just began in the 1980s, so we need to be aware of what has been painted over the past 30 years,” he said.

Second, and for him most importantly, “contemporary art needs to be an expression of an individual’s idea.” It can’t pander to an audience or borrow its style from some other painter.

Ghazi, who is the son of the pioneering painter Ghazi Exmet, mentioned that, over the past decade or so, Uyghur painters have developed an affinity for painting thousand-year-old houses using the same palate over and over again. He felt that they have decided certain shades of brown and beige are beautiful. He also noted that Xinjiang painters have also gotten used to signaling their subject matter by putting a doppa on their subjects. This seemed lazy to him, and was a clear indicator of a painting that was not really contemporary. “Actually, what we take to be traditional painting is really just modern art,” he said. “For us modern art was where tradition comes from.”

Another painter, Dilmurad Abdukadir, spoke up at this point to talk about his own work and how he doesn’t really care about his audience. What was most important to him was whether or not he himself was happy. He said that, if he starts worrying about whether or not his paintings have “ethnic characteristics,” he starts to limit himself. If he just stays within his own mind though, he feels “limitless.” This gives him a kind of freedom in his painting to paint toward the affect of his inner world. For him, painting becomes a release.

Untitled by Dilmurad Abdukadir

The painters were all intrigued by a Uyghur painter from a nearby town called Changji who goes by the pseudonym Ali K. His work focuses on the dreams of children and how they are shifting under global capitalism. Although he is clearly focused on Uyghur subjects – the school children at the middle school where he teaches — his themes were quite contemporary.

Over the course of the evening, other Uyghur artists peppered him with questions regarding his process and how he came to his current place in regards to contemporary art. For them, what stood out about his work was not only its aesthetics, but also its message: a commentary on the contemporary world and the endless commodification of everything around us, and a meditation on what is going on in the minds of children at this moment when everything that had appeared solid is melting away. Even naan, a staple of the Uyghur diet for more than 1,000 years, is now being commodified and sold on Taobao.

“Naan” by Ali K.

A painter named Bakhtiyar Abdurahim, one of the organizers of the exhibition, said that what they are painting needs to come out of the experience of urban living. It must reflect the changes they themselves are facing. As Dilkhun Razi put it: “What we are painting now is not merely an ‘ethnic spirit’ but the ‘spirit of our grandchildren.’”

By Xinjiang standards, the exhibition has already been a tremendous success. A group of Uyghur artists is participating in a space that has up to this point been the domain, nearly exclusively, of Han artists. Now their images are being seen by the wider cultural community. Shows like this build confidence. They amplify the visions of people not usually noticed. Even the Party Secretary of the Province, Zhang Chunxian, is coming to see the show. Uyghur contemporary art is now officially alive.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

A few weeks ago when talking to a Uyghur acquaintance, I was told: “One the biggest problems among Uyghurs today is the rate of divorce. I think it is as high as 70 percent. Most of it is the fault of women. They have misunderstood what women’s equality is all about. They think that it means that they should be equal to men in every way; or that men should be just like them. They try to control men, stop them from going to bars. They order men to do housework, and then spend all of their money. They don’t understand that that is not their place. If they would be encouraging to men, than men would never cheat on them.”

When I mentioned this conversation to the filmmaker Memetjan Semet, he said: “That’s not true. The main reason people get divorced is because of men. Many men don’t understand just how difficult and stressful women’s work can be. They have to take care of the household, cook, clean, and take care of their children. And they never get paid for any of this. The men go outside the home to make a living so they get the most recognition and then think that they have a more important role in society. If someone tells me that the problem of men cheating on their wives is the result of ‘women not being welcoming and submissive’ to their husbands, I would tell him right to his face that it is his attitude toward women that is the real problem. A real man and a real Muslim would never talk like that.”

Unfortunately, Memetjan’s perspective is rare among urban Uyghur men. Many smart, well-educated Uyghur men fail to see how gender inequality is produced. It is precisely because of this lack of awareness that Memetjan made a new film titled Dad, I Love You. Set in Ürümchi, the film shows us how fathers and husbands fail to prioritize their time in a way that supports their family. Using a realist (if, at the end, slightly melodramatic) narrative it shows us how men often don’t listen to what their children and wives are telling them.

Memetjan said: “These days in the city more and more people are getting divorced. One of the main reasons for this is that men are spending more and more time away from the family. Men might say that it is the result of a misunderstanding of feminism and women’s rights, but actually it comes from the kinds of work urban men are doing and the kind of income that this produces. My feeling is that it is actually quite rare to find people getting divorced in the countryside. Most farming families get married for life. Their life revolves around the world of the farm, and they really don’t have the money to go to bars and meet mistresses. Of course, sometimes women are also at fault; they aren’t satisfied with what they have and so on, but I really feel that most of the problems in Uyghur families comes from a lack of real respect for women.”

Another thing Memetjan was trying to address was the tendency in Uyghur society to privilege the position of mothers over wives and children. His critique was particularly pointed at short films such as With Me, which portrays this tension, but portrays the wife in the family as a dissatisfied, privileged city girl who fails to respect the bond her husband has with his mother. In the end, the wife abandons the family and her young child and goes back to her parents’ home.

As Memetjan said: “I had a teacher who told me that it is never good to compare your wife to your mother. Nothing good will ever come of a mother asking her son who he loves more. There is a story that we often discuss about a man who sees both his mother and his wife drowning in a river and has to decide which one he will save. This is just a stupid idea. That is what that film With Me is about.

“Actually, it reflects perfectly the way wives are treated by their husbands; how they so often have a voice that isn’t heard in a marriage. The problem with the film is that it reinforces these power dynamics, rather than giving voice to a wife’s perspective. The teacher who told me never to ask those sorts of questions was not someone I would call a feminist. It is just that when she sees a problem like that, she thinks rationally about how it can be fixed. She is not just saying that because she thinks women are always right. She is saying it because it is the proper way to address this problem.”

Memetjan’s film Dad, I Love You has received more than 100,000 views since it was released a few weeks ago. Filmmakers across the country have commented on the narrative construction, the realistic use of dialogue, and how it shows the deftness of Memetjan’s direction. Some viewers complain that there is not enough music in it, that the tension building moments of reflection that begin the movie are too long. But overwhelmingly the feedback from viewers has been positive. Particularly from female viewers.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

In the short film Rahime, the Uyghur ethnomusicologist and filmmaker Mukaddas Mijit portrays a moment in the life of her grandmother. When she was coming up with the theme for the short film, Mukaddas was feeling dismayed by the many events happening in the world around her. Since she herself was born in an Islamic culture, she felt it her obligation to frame that world in a way to give voice to the humanity and wisdom of that world. She felt that her 88 year-old grandmother could do this by drawing out the richness of her knowledge of Sufi mysticism.

Mukaddas writes: “During my fieldwork on Sufi music in Xinjiang, I had a chance to encounter some extraordinary men and women. They taught me profound values about my culture and history. They are the ones who encouraged me to be open, tolerant and humble (even if it’s very hard and challenging).” It was with this in mind that she decided to put together a short film in which her grandmother communicates some of this call toward openness and understanding. “I just loved the idea of sharing my grandmother’s request to the world: ‘We should not forget our humanity; being kind, generous should be the basic value for us all.’ My grandmother’s name ‘Rahime’ means clemency, mercy, kindness. Her name itself felt like an urge, a duty for me, to make this film and share these beautiful ideas.”

The film we see is straightforward. It follows her grandmother through her home in Ghulja as rain pours down on the northern slopes of the Tian Shan mountains near the border with Kazakhstan. As the rain falls we hear Rahime tell us a story about bread and a boy – a story about the basis of moral human action. At its core, morality is about sharing the pain of others.

The film also highlights the ongoing regeneration of tradition, initially in the figure of Mukaddas’s grandmother and then in the sound in the film itself.

Rahime herself is a testament to what it means to be a modern educated Uyghur – a citizen of the world in the fullest sense. As Mukkadas puts it: “She was born around 1927 to a bourgeoisie family. She went to a Russian girl’s school and educated until high school. It was still the peak moment in the Jadid or ‘new education’ movement. At the age of 17 she was married into an important Sufi Jadid family. She had eight daughters: five of them had a college education and two of them continued on to doctoral studies. She traveled in her later age. She went to see her daughters in Australia and Turkey. And she accomplished a Hajj pilgrimage (which was important for her) several years ago.”

The film demonstrates the ongoing renewal of tradition in other ways as well. In a departure from the usual sounds of Uyghur folk or traditional music, we hear a soundtrack from “The Contemporary Voice of Turkish Music” with Atilla Aldemir on violin and Şevki Karayel on piano. This use of music was strategic. Mukaddas writes that the idea was “to break the fixed, almost frozen image of ‘Uyghurness,’ which has been shoved into all kinds of films about Uyghurs. This systematic stereotypical image of being a ‘traditional,’ ‘frozen in the past’ and ‘exotic’ kind of society has always bothered me a little. And also, I wanted to challenge, (maybe provoke) Uyghur opinions by telling a story with music other than our own. In all my films, I have loved working with music. Because I believe that music has a powerful way of narration, almost all of my work rhymes with some kind of music. I try to let the melody tell the story in a way that exceeds words. And when I searched for music to work with this film, I felt a delightful connection. This piece had some traditional elements close to Uyghur music, but at the same time was completely expressive and avant-garde.”

For Mukaddas and her grandmother, representing Islam and tradition is about living in the present. As in her earlier documentary about Perhat Khalik’s band “Qetiq, Rock’n Urumchi,” Mukaddas also presents an attention to detail, relationships and beauty that is often missing in filmic portrayals of Xinjiang. Through Mukaddas’s lens we see a Uyghur world that is profoundly feminine yet authoritative, melancholic yet unsentimental. Her voice is clear and provocative. Male Uyghur filmmakers and critics who view her work with me frequently mentioned the oddness of hearing a “common” woman’s voice in a position of narrative authority. For them it struck them as provocative in its humility and its unwillingness to conform to Uyghur narrative conventions.

It is for all of these reasons that I am thrilled to see Mukaddas producing new work and excited to see what she will produce in the future. In her words: “As much as I love my tradition, I wanted to try some new ways of showing it. For me a culture should never stop reinventing itself, if it becomes ‘fixed’ it is an announcement of its own death.” As long as Mukaddas is filming, it is clear that Uyghur tradition will never freeze in place.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

One of the driving forces in the Uyghur film scene is a filmmaker and poet named Tahir Hamut. A graduate of Beijing’s National Minorities University, Tahir began his academic career as one of the premier Uyghur critics of Western Modernist literature. Throughout the 1990s he, along with Perhat Tursun and others, were the leaders of a Uyghur avant garde poetry movement. Then in 1998 he turned his attention to filmmaking. Now Tahir serves as one of the principle instructors in the Film Department of the Xinjiang Arts Institute in Ürümchi.

Tahir’s first films were feature-length fiction films. Although in many ways straightforward romantic dramas, even in this early work we see flashes of ethnographic detail that give us hints of Tahir’s previous life as a poet and the way he was beginning to translate that vision into visual form.

Tahir is a brilliant poet. His 1998 poem “Return to Kashgar” is punctuated by a haunting imagery that tackles both the timelessness of loneliness and disillusionment of youth. It feels both forever contemporary and particular to a place and location in time. It is filled with “icy stones,” “low skies,” and “power lines.”

Since 2005 Tahir has turned his attention to filming lyric poetry and narrative documentaries. One of the projects that came out of this turn in his career was a selection of Kucha folk songs compiled in a single DVD titled Mirajikhan. The imagery of each of these short films is stunning.

The short film above is titled “Beautiful Lover.” In Tahir’s narrative the poem centers around the story of an itinerate bread maker. As the film begins we see him walk by the centuries old watchtower on the outskirts of Kucha. The city itself of course predates this Yuan Dynasty marker; and the Kucha-style bread that he makes – as large as a family-sized pizza, pressed with carrots and onions – might be as well. Over the arc of the film we see the young baker fall in love with a beautiful young girl, only for their secret love to be crushed by the arrival of an older, wealthier suitor – who hires him to bake bread for his wedding with the beautiful young girl.

The look of despondency on his face is piercing. The constant refrain of the song is “I am in a lonely situation. I’m in a desert alone crying.”

As the film ends we see the baker walking away from the city; away from the girl he loved; away from another dream thwarted. Like so many migrants to the city, he can only stay for a while before he wanders on.

When I ask young Uyghurs why they like Uyghur folk music they often say that they feel as though they are tuning in to something timeless but at the same time something comforting and familiar. When they walk the streets of Ürümchi, with their iPhone earbuds turned all the way up, they feel like the problems they face in their lives lift a little. They feel like they are not all alone, that others have faced the same anxieties. They feel like they are territorializing the strange world around them and making the alienation of city life more tolerable.

In Tahir’s narratives I feel this timelessness. He is showing us how to bring traditional experiences forward into the present, how to translate poetic form into visual form, how to make life in the village relevant to city life. By making the feeling of migration come out of the earthen streets of Uyghur traditional cities, he is making us understand that the problems of the present are new, more tightly woven variations of older themes of poverty, exploitation, and desire.

Tahir is one reason to feel confident about the future of Uyghur visual arts. There is a depth of thought in his work that will shape a future generation of Uyghur filmmakers.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

One of the emerging trends among young Uyghur film directors is a new attention to documentary filmmaking. This approach has long been a part of Uyghur cinema, but previously it was often part of a larger public relations presentation sponsored by the Chinese Culture Ministry. These new documentary short films are independently produced on limited budgets by young filmmakers who have an intimate knowledge of their subjects.

Part of the new emphasis on documentaries is due to the increasing affordability of cameras, lenses, and digital editing software. Another element is the way the expanding Uyghur and Chinese Internet has made forms of international and national documentary – from Werner Herzog and Lucien Castaing-Taylor to Wu Wenguang and the New Chinese Documentary Film Movement – more accessible to film students in Xinjiang. But perhaps an even more important factor is the way students from the rural countryside are seeing more and more of the way-of-life they grew up around vanish before their eyes.

It was these elements that prompted the young student filmmakers Abdukadir Upur and Dilmurat Tohti to go to Qargilik in southern Kashgar prefecture and film the ways in which craftsmen transform raw materials – reeds, wood, and rocks – into something they can sell at the local weekly market. The film they made was called The Edge of the Bazaar (with Chinese and decipherable yet at times inaccurate English subtitles). In Uyghur, the word “bazaar” itself is synonymous with the word for “town.” If someone says they are going to the bazaar, it means they are going to town. What the film title suggests, then, is that the movie is a look at life on the outskirts of town.

In the film we see men who have been working for decades in the same trades. While they received little formal education, we see the skill with which their hands can work with wood and reeds – using very few tools – to produce something precise and beautiful. We see men who know the desert, plants, and trees with an intimacy of someone who has lived close to the earth over the long duration of their lives. There is a beauty to the pace of life we see in the film; a poetics of movement, of form, and of the stark reality of the environment at the edge of an oasis town.

When I viewed this film with a young farmer from this area, named *Sadiq, he watched it with rapt attention. Throughout the film he had a strange smile on his face. It was strange, he said, to see his normal life represented on film. “I have some relatives who make mats just like that,” he said. “Those mats are used for the ceilings of Uyghur courtyard houses, or sometimes outside on top of the supa (raised platform) that is outside a house. Actually that work is a bit dangerous, if you trip and fall while you are walking among the reeds that you have already cut they can puncture you and kill you. I know of some people who have died from that kind of accident.”

When we got to the part where the farmer Ahmet carves spoons with a hatchet and chisel, Sadiq again noted the danger. Like Ahmet himself points out in the film, it is really easy to mangle one’s fingers when doing this kind of work. Sadiq showed me how he himself had also lost a joint from one of his little fingers by doing something similar.

When we got to the third part of the film and we watched the farmer named Osman going out to the desert to search for rock salt, Sadiq told me that in recent years the sale of this kind of salt has been regulated by the government. Now, he said, only government-approved companies are permitted to sell it after it has been processed and packaged in boxes in Qargalik and nearby counties. The local officials say that rock salt contains harmful substances, so in order to guarantee the safety of the people, it has to be regulated. Sadiq said this regulation was just another way for the local authorities to make money and control the population, but that people like Osman still find ways to sell it. They just hide what they are selling when they see police patrolling the bazaars.

Sadiq was really happy to see his way of life represented in this documentary. For him, the film was an illustration of the visceral experience of pain, a common experience of family life, and the long hand of the state. He, and the filmmakers, see the villagers as an important symbol of life in the rural Xinjiang countryside. The diegetic sound, the way the narration is limited to inter-titles, the way the farmers are able to speak for themselves, and the raw beauty of the desert oasis environment makes The Edge of the Bazaar a powerful way of amplifying, in high-definition living color, what life is like for millions of Uyghurs in Northwest China.

*Sadiq is a pseudonym.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

When Memetjan Semet first came to Urumchi he remembers being shocked at how isolated everyone felt from each other. For the first time in his life he didn’t have his family and childhood friends to lean on for support. He also noticed that he wasn’t alone in this condition. No one in the big city seemed to care about the others around themselves. Instead, people kept their heads down. They focused on their smartphones, chatted with friends in the virtual world, and ignored the difficulties of people nearby. The problems of strangers were not something they needed to feel.

One time, while waiting for an elevator in a large office building in the Uyghur section of the city, he noticed a disabled woman hobbling down the hallway. No one held the doors for her. Everyone pushed her to the side while getting on and off. Over the next few minutes he watched her grow more and more defeated. Eventually she gave up, and began the long painful process of climbing the stairs rather than fighting to get on the crowded lift.

For Memetjan, watching this unfold was like watching a silent drama that was symptomatic of everyday big-city life. Since he was a young film student at the time, he decided to turn the microcosm of an Urumchi elevator into a short silent film. Using student actors and an elevator at the Xinjiang Arts School, Memetjan recreated that scene in a short film called Lift. Since it was posted on the popular social media site Muzikam last week, the short film has received around 5,000 views.

The lessons one can learn from a film has always been among the main reasons Memetjan is crazy about cinema. Growing up in rural Aqsu prefecture, he used to live for the monthly outdoor movies that were shown by generator-power in his local village. He loved the sound of the film reels whirring, the excitement of another world in full color. Everyone who could afford the 2.5 yuan ticket would come to watch movies and learn about the world. They watched Chinese blockbusters and Indian musicals and saw how other people dressed, danced, what they ate, and how they loved.

One time, when he was around 10 years old, Memetjan’s family didn’t have even one fen in the house on the day before a big movie’s showing. His mother, older brother, and he went to a local Han farmer’s house and asked if he would pay him for a day’s work. After hoeing the fields for the entire day, he and his brother received 2 and half yuan each while his mother received 5. They went to the movies as a family that night. Memetjan says of that time, “If I couldn’t go to watch the movie I would cry for days. I didn’t care if I couldn’t eat or sleep, but if I couldn’t watch the movie I would be inconsolable.”

By the early 2000s, electricity reached his village, and one of his neighbors bought a TV. Soon a new ritual emerged. After dinner, 30 Uyghur villagers would crowd into the neighbor’s house and watch historical dramas on CCTV, soaking in the commercials that advertised all the things one could buy in the city.

Perhaps because he experienced cinema firsthand in such a powerful way, Memtjan’s directing style aims to be pedagogical. He wants people who watch his films to see their world in a new way. While still keenly aware of the power of aesthetics — the cinematic effects that frame and heighten the sounds and colors of a scene — Memetjan always draws the viewers’ attention to the reality around them. He uses what he has: natural light, amateur actors, and — in his more recent work — an innate sense for realistic Uyghur dialogue to turn the Uyghur everyday into pure cinema.

Like many in his cohort of emerging Uyghur filmmakers, Memetjan is a fan of Iranian realist dramas from directors such as Asghar Farhadi and the fantastic soundscapes and worlds of color in the work of Hollywood filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers. The revolution in digital film-production technology as well as easy access to international cinematic worlds through online video streaming sites have given dozens of young filmmakers like Memetjan a chance of build their own cinematic styles. These young filmmakers are educated in Uyghur, Chinese, English, and often Turkish; unlike previous generations of Uyghur filmmakers who were much more limited in what they could see and study, they are cultivating a strong cinematic acumen; they don’t just watch Hollywood blockbusters, they also watch obscure art films.

Over the next decade new forms of Uyghur cinema, which are influenced by American cinema and the films of the Islamic world, will emerge in Chinese Central Asia. These films will feature Uyghur voices that speak first to Uyghurs, but they will also open up Uyghur society to the outside world in a way that it has never before been seen.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

A recent Uyghur-language short film called “Dream From the Heart” (English and Chinese subtitles) tells the story of a group of boys from Qaraqash, a county of more than half a million people in Southern Xinjiang. Shot as part of China Southern Airlines’s new ad campaign by the award-winning director Zhang Rongji (张荣吉), the film references the true stories of how self-taught and underfunded young people from the deep poverty of Hotan and Kashgar prefectures struggle to compete with more privileged opponents.

So many teams of young confident athletes, musicians, speech competitors, and scientists in Southern Xinjiang practice all of their lives to reach the big stage in the city, only to find themselves blocked by the logistics of getting across the country or traveling across the globe. Many times they don’t have the equipment, the coaching, worldly knowledge, or the political support of people in the cities – all they have is a will to succeed and the toughness that comes from life in the desert. This struggle to have their skills recognized has been most widely reported when it comes to young footballers. Many stories have been written about the way Uyghur players sleep on the floor with “standing only” tickets as they make the long journey East.

In this film, a group of kids from Qaraqash dream of competing against their peers in a provincial tournament in Ürümchi. Since they don’t have the funds to travel, one of the boys sends a handwritten letter to China Southern Airlines asking them to sponsor the team and give them plane tickets. Miraculously the plan succeeds and the company sends them uniforms and tickets. At the tournament they compete against teams sponsored by such companies as Herembag – the Turkish-style restaurant franchise which has taken Xinjiang by storm over the past few years – and other well-funded urban teams. Due to their “camel-like” toughness they succeed in scoring a goal, but they are not able to beat the taller and stronger players from the city. In the end they come to realize that with hard work and the help of others they can begin to achieve their goals, but that achieving dreams takes continual practice and dedication.

The kids in the film are really from Qaraqash – they pronounce the word “one” as only a Qaraqashliq can: a drawn-out “burr.” I have no reason to doubt that the life goals they describe – footballer, doctor, policeman – at the end of the film are anything other than truly their own. Qaraqash, which is one of Hotan’s most densely populated counties, is jammed full of farmers whose lives revolve around weekly horse-riding competitions and the giant farmer’s bazaar that takes place every Sunday. People there live in a smaller world where gossip about the newest regulations and the phenomenal abilities of the local Uyghur traditional medicine doctors circulate over neighborly teas.

But people are also connected with the outside world. People watch the Voice of the Silk Road religiously every Friday night and they debate which professional European team (many of whose matches are shown with Uyghur-language commentary on Xinjiang Channel 10) is going to take the championship. The market for smart phones in Qaraqash is thriving. Many people dream of a different kind of life.

Despite being a bit overly melodramatic and fitting neatly within Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” political rhetoric, this short film demonstrates the way a private industry leader can help build a path from the countryside to the city. It shows how compassion and sympathy for the less fortunate can help people cross a desert and achieve things that they could only dream about. The film shows us that with a little bit of effort and a willingness to listen, filmmakers like Zhang Rongji can make a big difference in how lives of the poor and ethnically different are perceived.

Of course the film doesn’t show us how people from places like Qaraqash are cordoned off into a special line when they arrive at the Ürümchi airport. It doesn’t show us how people that don’t have a Uyghur-specific “People’s Convenience Card” or, as Uyghurs refer to it, a “Green Card” are sent right back to Hotan. It doesn’t show us how, for many kids whose parents don’t have special connections or money to bribe local officials, it is impossible to get this travel permit. It doesn’t show us the way government regulations during the “People’s War on Terror” is making Southern Xinjiang inescapable. Then it would be an altogether different film.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

This week is the screening of the seventh segment of the first round of The Voice of the Silk Road – a show that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs watch every Friday night at 8 pm local time on Xinjiang TV Channel 9. People like the contest because they can watch their favorite performers joke around with each other; they can see people they know perform or imagine themselves performing in their place. Uyghurs see themselves trying on a performance mode popularized by mainstream English and Chinese-language versions of the show, but instead of English or Chinese pop ballads and American and (largely) Han stories of unrecognized talent, on this show they see the reverse. They largely see Uyghur folk songs, classical muqam and pop music; and they mostly hear Uyghur stories of personal triumph.

The Voice of the Silk Road is a celebration of an amateur love for Uyghur music. The contestants sing because they love to sing; they sing because they want to be famous; and they sing because they think their voice is a voice of the contemporary Silk Road.

When 16 year-old Perhatjan shuffled onto the stage, everyone in the Xinjiang Arts Institute Concert Hall knew there was something special about him. The four judges — the famous flamenco player Arkin, the king of Uyghur pop Abdulla, the hyper-masculine pop rocker Mahmud Sulayman, and a little known female opera singer named Nurnisa — couldn’t see him; their tall red swivel chairs were facing the audience. Although he later said he was 16 years old, Perhatjan looked like he was about 12. Also, he was blind.

When the audience saw him being helped onto the stage, they saw that his pants were two sizes too large, and when they heard his clear, full-throttled voice, they knew immediately how to place him. He was one of those disabled kids from a poor family in the south. He was one of those singers who sings all day, every day.

He barely got through the first line of his song titled The Desire for Knowledge before everyone in the audience leapt to their feet. Nurnisa was the first to turn and join them on her feet. Erkin was the last to turn, but when he did, he too stood and applauded. As the crowd watched little Perhatjan sing his heart out, there was hardly a dry eye in the room – even Abdulla was wiping his eyes by the end of his performance. By the time he ended the song at the 4:10 mark the crowd was on its feet chanting.

The song he sang was based on a much longer lyric written by the poet Nimesehit in 1936. As a song it was first put to music by Abdurehim Heyt and then popularized by Mominjan. In Uyghur the last line of each couplet ends with the word “yoq” or “not to be.” If we translate Perhatjan’s version of the poem into English it goes roughly like this:

Among the beauties of the world, there is none as beautiful as knowledge,

A lover other than knowledge will be with you only for a short while.

If you desire becoming friends with something other than knowledge,

When hard times come there will be no one as miserable as you.

If you seek a life of ease, choose no other friend (love) than knowledge,

No other partners will be as good as knowledge in maintaining your worth.

Black eye-browed full-faced moons will accompany you for only a few days,

If you lose your money, they will leave you without shame.

Do not hope for the universe to revolve around your happiness,

Today you’re wealthy, but tomorrow you might be a beggar, or even a debtor.

In the dialogue that followed his performance the judges asked Perhatjan if he knew their songs. He said “of course, everybody does” and immediately launched into Mahmud Sulayman’s famous ode to Uyghur masculinity followed by a few lines from songs by Abdulla and Arkin.

Each of the judges tried to persuade him to choose them as a mentor. Arkin was clear in his description of who was in the room and how much everyone had enjoyed his performance. He told Perhatjan that he had worked with young singers before, and that as a young father of triplets, helping children was something very close to his heart. He and Abdulla told Perhatjan about how they would give him rides in their cars and help him overcome any problems.

It was on this point that Mahmud Sulayman asked Perhatjan directly about his family situation (a section that was curiously omitted when the performance was finally screened on Xinjiang TV). Mahmud asked him where exactly he lived and how many people were in his family. Perhatjan said he lived in the “new city” section of Kashgar and that he and his mother tried to help his father with the family business. He said that recently his mother had not been well and was no longer able to work. So mostly it was up to him to help his father as best he could.

In the end Perhatjan of course chose Abdulla to be his mentor and will compete in the following rounds under his guidance.

Perhatjan probably will not win this contest. He might make it through the next round or two but he will probably lose in the end to someone with a more mature and cultured voice. He may not win, but his voice is still echoing in the minds of thousands of listeners. The video of his performance has been viewed by more than 50,000 viewers on the Chinese Internet. His sound is the sound of what the Silk Road has become for millions of Uyghurs living in the isolated poverty of the “new cities” that are being quickly built on the stretch of the New Silk Road from Korla to Hotan.

Thanks to A. for his help with the translation of the lyric.

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|