The backstreets, p.1
The Backstreets, page 1
THE BACKSTREETS
THE
BACKSTREETS
A NOVEL FROM XINJIANG
PERHAT TURSUN
TRANSLATED BY
DARREN BYLER AND ANONYMOUS
Columbia University Press New York
Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for
assistance given by the Pushkin Fund in the publication of this book.
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
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Translation copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press
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EISBN 978-0-231-55477-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tursun, Perhat, 1969– author. | Byler, Darren, translator.
Title: The backstreets : a novel from Xinjiang / Perhat Tursun ;
translated by Darren Byler and Anonymous.
Other titles: Chong sheher. English
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021059846 (print) | LCCN 2021059847 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231202909 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231202916
(trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231554770 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PL54.69.T87 C4813 2022 (print) |
LCC PL54.69.T87 (ebook) | DDC 894/.3233—dc23/eng/20220301
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059846
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059847
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.
Cover design: Chang Jae Lee
Cover image: Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos
Contents
Introduction
The Backstreets
Introduction
Since 2017, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been “disappeared” into a widespread system of internment camps in Northwest China—a space known in Chinese by the name Xinjiang or “new frontier.” Nearly all Uyghurs, a population of around 12 million people, have an immediate family member who either is interned in a camp or has been forced to work in one. This project affects every aspect of their lives. The phrase “everyone is gone” or “disappeared” (Uy.: adem yoq) is something that I heard Uyghurs repeat on a regular basis during my last research trip to Xinjiang in 2018. Across the entire Alaska-sized region, significant segments of the adult population—particularly men between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five—were deemed “extremists” and taken away, leaving behind children who were often sent to residential boarding schools where their native language, Uyghur, is banned.
The “Xinjiang problem,” as Uyghur protest is known in Chinese mainstream society, really began in the 1990s, when large numbers of Han people, the majority group in China, arrived in the Uyghur ancestral homeland in Southern Xinjiang for the first time. These settlers came to build infrastructure and begin to extract the oil and natural gas resources in the Uyghur deserts to fuel China’s burgeoning export-driven economy. Over the next three decades, the settler populations took over local institutions—the banks, the schools, civil administration—and Uyghurs were pushed out of more autonomous livelihoods into the cities in search of work. What they found in the cities, though, was widespread discrimination. Unlike Han migrants who came to Xinjiang from across the country for lucrative jobs in construction and natural resource industries, Uyghurs found that companies often refused to hire them. Those who were hired were frequently relegated to low-level positions. Rental and house-ownership regulations often prevented Uyghurs from becoming permanent residents in the city, while Han migrant resettlement in Xinjiang cities was encouraged and subsidized by the government. Evictions, land seizures, police brutality, and religious oppression all played a role in an increase in the frequency of Uyghur protests, some of which were violent, and which in some limited cases met international definitions of terrorism. As the Chinese state took up the rhetoric of the global War on Terror emanating from North America and Europe, nearly all forms of Uyghur protest were labeled terrorism, and Uyghurs who defended their Islamic and ethnic traditions were described as extremists. The Backstreets responds in oblique ways to this atmosphere of social violence.
In 2014, alarmed by increasingly visible forms of piety among Uyghurs, which authorities conflated with a tendency toward violence, the state declared the People’s War on Terror and began to “round up” religious leaders. The mass detention of Muslims was accelerated in 2017, when local leaders received commands from central Chinese state leadership to conduct a mass evaluation of the Uyghur population to determine who was “untrustworthy” (Ch.: bu fangxin) because of their affinities to Uyghur traditions and Islamic faith. The police sent the men and women labeled “untrustworthy” either to prison or to the “reeducation” detention system.
The author of this novel, Perhat Tursun, who at the time of his disappearance was not yet fifty years old, was one of those who was first detained and then given a long prison sentence. Tursun is avowedly secular and is not an advocate of ethno-nationalism. He also opposes those who use Islam to justify violence toward non-Muslims. It is unclear why he was targeted, and the details of his detention and sentencing have not been released. It could have been because of an early edition of this novel itself, which he had published in a Uyghur-language online forum at the end of 2013. It could have been because of his other writings, or that he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to read unfiltered news and contact people living outside China. What is clear is that the “reeducation camp” campaign explicitly targeted Uyghurs in positions of social and cultural influence. And Perhat Tursun was certainly one of those people.
The Disappearance of Perhat Tursun
Perhat Tursun is a slight man with a receding hairline. To look at him, you wouldn’t know that he is one of the most influential contemporary Uyghur authors in Ürümchi. When I met him for the first time at a reception for a Uyghur-language publishing house in February 2015, his importance was clear from the way other Uyghurs looked at him as he moved through the crowd. He cut a wide swath. After we chatted for a bit, he said he was really bored. He hated formal gatherings and performing for strangers. He left immediately after the ceremony was finished, glad-handing and mumbling under his breath as he shuffled through the banquet hall. Many people stopped to shake his hand as we walked together to his house.
He lived on the twenty-sixth floor of a new apartment building owned by the Uyghur grocery franchise Arman. Many Uyghur celebrities lived in the building. While we were waiting for the elevator, we nodded at Qeyum Muhemmet, the TV actor who was later sent to a reeducation camp, along with Tursun and more than 400 other public figures, in 2017. Tursun’s house smelled more of cigarette smoke than most Uyghur homes. He had some abstract paintings in yellow by a celebrated Uyghur artist, which seemed to reflect the complexity of Uyghur traditional urban architecture. Otherwise, his living room was filled with carpets and a coffee table covered with dried fruit.
In 2014, when I went to Ürümchi to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on the experiences of Uyghur rural-to-urban migrants, one of Tursun’s friends, someone I’ll refer to as D. M., suggested that I read Tursun’s novel The Backstreets as a way of understanding how the Uyghur migrant experience had been staged for a more general audience. Over the course of that year, as I read the novel, I began to discuss it with a young Uyghur man who was in a position very similar to the protagonist: an underemployed, alienated young migrant who had recently left his job due to systemic discrimination. Eventually, this fellow reader, A. A., became the co-translator of the novel. We began to meet often to read and talk through some of the more challenging passages of the text.
As the translation progressed, it became clear through both my reading and the responses it elicited in A. A. that this representation of Uyghur male migrant lives resonated across a broad spectrum of experiences. By shifting the frame of the narrative of colonial violence away from the authority of the state toward the work it takes for the colonized to live, The Backstreets gave A. A. a new way of speaking and being heard. He said, “I feel as though this book was written just for me.” It resonated so strongly with him because the feelings in the narrative were his own feelings; the voice of the protagonist felt like his own voice. Nearly all Uyghur migrants I interviewed said that the experiences of alienation and rejection that I described from the novel resonated with aspects of their own lives: the cruel smiles, the open hostility, the bureaucratic indifference. Reading The Backstreets became a method of helping young men to tell their own stories and explore their own life paths. As I wrote in a book titled Terror Capitalism that emerged from this research, it enabled them to narrate their own stories as part of a larger shared experience of social violence. The story of The Backstreets made sense to them and helped them make sense of their own lives. It also taught A. A. and me the value of friendship and storytelling in coping with isolation—a life practice that became the center of my ethnographic practice and one of the chapters of the book.
D. M. had told Tursun that A. A. and I were working on a translation of the novel. This was why he invited me to visit him after the publishing house reception. He told me he was ecstatic that we were interested in the project and in introducing what he saw as one of his most significant works to the English-speaking world. Over tea and cigarett es, we talked about the way the fog of the city acted as an ambient character. How, in the novel, dehumanization—a process that comes from the way Han Chinese people, the majority group in China, see the Turkic Muslim protagonist as valueless because of his appearance and the language he speaks—was folded into this cold sensation. He said the story drew from his own experiences in Beijing as a college student and in Ürümchi as an office worker. In Beijing, where he was part of the first generation of Uyghur students educated in Chinese outside of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, five of his Uyghur classmates had mental breakdowns due to experiences of dislocation and racialization in a university that was dominated by the norms and values of the majority.
Tursun said he himself had not been mentally stable at times. The experience of seeing this happen to his classmates had an impact on him. It made him want to explain the way alienation is related to mental illness and ethno-nationalism. “I was really influenced by The Plague,” he said, referencing Albert Camus’s existentialist novel about the way ethno-nationalism swept across Europe in the 1940s. “I read and reread it. When I come back to it, I always feel as though every line says something important.” He gestured a lot as he talked. When he laughed, his smile looked like it was going to break his face in half. He seemed very honest, with everything appearing on the surface. He listened intently when I spoke, a blank stare mixed with a burning alertness. He seemed like a man starving for life.
Tursun was born in 1969, in a village near the twin cities of Atush and Kashgar, just across the mountains from Kyrgyzstan. Like the majority of his fellow Uyghurs, he grew up at the southern slope of the mountains, among farmers whose lives were shaped by the rhythms of sheep herds and the demands of cotton fields. Images in his prose of the way villagers marked space by the length of songs and the time of day by the slope of the sun and the muezzin’s call from the mosque reflect this experience.
Tursun grew up in a Uyghur world, but he was also the son of a schoolteacher who was imprisoned as a suspected counterrevolutionary during the Cultural Revolution. Chinese political history directly shaped his personal biography and his family life, pushing him to think beyond the village and reimagine his place in the world. When Mao Zedong died, China opened up to a new era of market and ideological reforms that allowed Uyghur-language publishing to flourish. By the early 1980s, Uyghur translations of Chinese literary and philosophical texts began to reach even Tursun’s small village. It was through these books that Tursun, an aspiring teenage poet, was first exposed to world literature. But it wasn’t until he was selected to be in one of the first cohorts of Uyghurs trained in Beijing at Minzu University that he immersed himself in language and thinking outside of Uyghur traditions.
Tahir Hamut, one of Tursun’s closest friends, who was also in those first cohorts, remembers those years of discovery very well. Hamut, a prominent poet, filmmaker, and literary critic who found a way to come to the United States in 2017, told me:
I met Perhat for the first time in February 1988. The first time I met him, I found him to be very melancholy, pessimistic, and restless. But still, he was very warm toward me and other students, who were three years behind him. He suggested that we read more Western literature. This was the first time I heard about modernist literature, Freud, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and so on. That is how it began.
This training led Tursun to a PhD in Turkic literature and a dissertation that grappled with the Sufi poetics that formed the basis of Uyghur literary traditions. It also pushed him to become a celebrated poet, novelist, and essayist, often pushing the boundaries of modernist form and, like his Sufi predecessors, the limits of Uyghur propriety.
Tursun never stopped thinking. He had a burning curiosity and aptitude for experimental thinking. Thinking itself, he felt, was the highest human calling. Tursun’s office was filled with hundreds of books that helped him do this. He had the works of all of the contemporary Han poets, translations of even the most obscure Nabokov novels and Kafka notebooks. Some of his books were in English, which he read slowly, with great determination and focus. When he lived in Beijing in the 1990s, he became obsessed with going to international bookstores and buying everything he could find. He said:
I learned a lot from Western philosophy and literature. Particularly Faulkner and Schopenhauer. In high school, I had read a Uyghur translation of Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism. In that book, they talked about how Plato, Hegel, and Schopenhauer were terrible ideologues. This idea really intrigued me. I thought that because of the way the Marxist book presented them, that there would not be any metaphysical writing available in China. But when I got to Beijing in the mid-’80s, someone told me that these kinds of philosophical works were available in Chinese. I immediately started studying Chinese so that I could read Schopenhauer. I read The World as Will and Representation in Chinese. It made me feel as though Chinese was the language of Schopenhauer.
He paused to dwell on this image of the Chinese translation of Schopenhauer’s treatise on the essence of objects in the world, his laughter making his words come out like a stutter.
That is really . . . funny . . . to think about now. After that I read Faulkner, then Camus and Kafka. Eventually I read Freud and Jung and all the other psychoanalytic thinkers too. What I am trying to write about is human experience. I am interested in every form of human thought. I read the scriptures of every faith. I think religion is beautiful. It’s like poetry. I believe there is no final truth. And I believe that mental illness has always existed. Mostly it exists in forms of normality. Actually, people that don’t fit in with the norms are people who are the least mentally ill. People who see themselves as normal are actually much crazier. I like to write about strange individuals at a particular place and time in order to show how abnormal mainstream society really is. I use psychology and literature in my own way in order to diagnose the diseases of normality.
Tursun’s focus on mental illness, suicide, and alienation—and his determination to write about obscenity and sexuality in Uyghur—often made him the target of criticism from more mainstream Uyghur writers. It made it difficult to publish, but as work consciously striving to probe the limit of Uyghur thought, it also made it useful to think with.
In March 2015, Tursun invited me to his house again to discuss progress on the translation and edits he wanted to make to the text. His wife made us hand-pulled noodles. We ate and talked for eight hours. Along the way, we drank two bottles of whiskey. The drunker he got, the longer his stories became. During one of his rants, early in the evening before things began to blur and I forgot to keep notes, he told me, “Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, is also writing about human experience, but because of his circumstances, his fiction gets read as somehow political. Actually, it doesn’t start with politics, it just gets pulled into it. Human relationships are the center; they just get blocked by politics. The same is true for most writers if they’re really honest.”
But some writers get pulled into political readings more than others. Because the Uyghurs have been the focus of “counterterrorism” campaigns since that way of framing Muslim political life arrived in China following September 11, 2001, nearly all Uyghur cultural production is viewed as “sensitive.” Unlike novels written by Han authors such as Xu Zecheng, who depicts Han migrant life in Running Through Beijing, any depiction of Uyghur interactions with Han society must account for the way poverty and ethno-racialization produce a cascading effect of alienation. For Uyghur contemporary authors, urban life is not simply a question of rural-origin class difference, it is a question of epistemic difference and the way their bodies themselves are read. Because Uyghurs speak a different language, cannot pass as Han, and claim a nativeness (Uy: yerlik) to their ancestral lands in southern Xinjiang, their encounter with urban Han people is more than simply one of class difference. It is a question of colonial possession and domination, and the way discourse—the permitted speech that shapes social norms—has the power to produce a banal normalization of othering. In this context “Uyghur terrorist” or “extremist” replace older words such as “savage” or “barbarian.”
