The backstreets, p.2
The Backstreets, page 2
Thinking about the way his identity preceded him, Tursun recalled one of the few times he felt as though Han intellectuals recognized him as a carrier of knowledge.
When I was in Beijing, I took a class with the poet Zhang Zao (张枣). I remember the first time I met him. I told him I liked his work and that I write Uyghur poetry. He said, “Oh, you’re Uyghur, what is your name?” I told him Pa-er-ha-ti. And he said, “No, what is your Uyghur name?” That was the first time a Chinese teacher had ever done something like that. Most of the time they would just say, “Oh wow, you have such a strange name,” or something like that, but this guy was different. That was already really good, but what he said next really got me. He said that he had just been to Tibet, and he had discovered that Buddhism was not a religion but a philosophy. He said that he really admired the Dalai Lama. Ever since that first meeting we were close. Zhang Zao has since passed away (in 2010).”
Along with the passing of Zhang, the 2010s saw a rise of Han ethno-nationalism that centered on the figure of Xi Jinping and resonated with the 1940’s plague described by Camus. To Tursun’s thinking this precipitated a profound lack of curiosity regarding Uyghur knowledge. In fact, the existence of Uyghur thought and life itself began to be perceived as a threat.
On January 30, 2018, I received confirmation that Tursun had been disappeared. In early 2020, the news filtered out that he was reportedly given a sixteen-year prison sentence. Tursun will be sixty-seven years old when he is released. The world may never see the five unfinished novels he was working on. He was disappeared at the height of his powers. What remains for now are snatches of his work, most of it yet to be published, and scenes from the world he created. The Backstreets is the first piece of his fiction to appear in English translation.
Tursun’s disappearance is symptomatic of a greater violence. As D. M., the friend who introduced me to Tursun’s work, told me in an interview in 2015 (just as the reeducation camp system was being built):
People like Perhat miss the 1980s, when no one was willing to listen to someone else’s truth. Everyone seemed to think for themselves back then, and no one seemed to be bothered by difference. Now difference is seen as a weakness.
Continuing, D. M. said:
People don’t recognize how bleak the situation is here now, because we don’t have dramatic statistics of how many people have died or disappeared. The situation is more complex than this. The way it works is by breaking people’s spirit and weakening their sense of self. Suddenly the values that they grew up with seem as though they can be replaced by authoritarian Chinese or Islamic values. People are becoming empty shells of what they were before. In prison people are taught to think like police. The prisoners are partnered up and chained together. They have to take a shit together. If one of them fucks up, the other one will be blamed. It is a kind of living hell. Although the living conditions themselves are not as bad as they used to be, the psychological torture is more and more sophisticated. Now they try to break your will to live and to have desires.
One time, my friends in prison asked if they could watch Uyghur song and dance videos and the guard said yes. So thirty or so prisoners gathered in one cell and watched the videos. After a few hours, they were happy and were ready to return to their cells, but then the warden said, “No, you asked to watch films, so please keep watching.” So they watched the videos for twenty-four hours. Then they asked again if they could leave, because now they were becoming very uncomfortable, but the warden said, “No, you asked for this, please keep watching.” In the end, they watched the videos for seventy-two hours. The room was full of shit and piss and thirty men; finally, they said they would never ask to watch films again, and he let them go back to their cells.
Now the government is trying to use education as a tool of assimilating people. But just look at the U.S. In the U.S., Native Americans were forced to forget their languages, forced by the economic system to integrate into mainstream society, but still they maintained their own cultural difference. They wouldn’t be assimilated. It will be the same for Uyghurs. All minorities are this way, particularly those that can’t pass as the majority. If you are a minority, you will always be a minority. That position cannot be forgotten.
Perhat is a very interesting guy. His novel The Art of Suicide was actually put on a list of 100 greatest works of Uyghur culture. But when he heard about this, he was furious. He wrote the Cultural Bureau a letter and demanded that his work be taken off the list. He said he didn’t want that sort of recognition. He didn’t want his work to be listed beside all the other propaganda bullshit. Also, he said that his greatest work had not yet been written. He wrote that book when he was twenty-four, and it was just an exercise for him to learn how to write. It should not be taken seriously, he said. He said he didn’t want to be famous or popular. He wanted to be a shadowy, marginal figure.
Sometime in 2017, D. M. disappeared into the camps too. In 2018, I found a DVD set of his lectures for sale in a private bookstore in Ürümchi. That was the last time I saw D. M.’s face. Around the same time, the co-translator of this novel, A. A., was also taken. Many of the other young men who taught me how to read The Backstreets disappeared into the camps as well. No one knows why, exactly, but it likely had something to do with their digital behavior. For some of them, it was because they prayed and fasted during Ramadan. None of them advocated violence, they were far too terrified. They just wanted to live and think.
Like Tursun, they have become numbered detainees who have to ask permission to take a shit. One by one, the intellectuals who made Perhat cackle with uninhibited laughter began to disappear. Then the young men disappeared in the hundreds of thousands.
The news of Tursun’s own disappearance leaked out in coded messages. A mutual acquaintance told Hamut that Tursun had been “hospitalized”:
When I heard this, that he had been “hospitalized,” I had a really ominous feeling. I felt very sad. I tried to give myself some comfort by thinking that this may be temporary, that Perhat might be released after a while, because I couldn’t think of any reason why the authorities would detain and punish him. But I was also very worried because I knew the situation was quite serious at that time and anything could happen. I still remember the anxious insomnia I felt that night. The last time I saw him was around July 10, 2017. No one really knows what has happened to him since.
An image from one of Tursun’s most moving poems, “Elegy,” rhymes with his own disappearance:
When they search the streets and cannot find my vanished figure
Do you know that I am with you.
(Translation by Joshua Freeman)
Reading The Backstreets
Like all great works of art, The Backstreets strives to create a world that rivals the reality that confronts it. And in doing so, it also supplements the reader’s understanding of history in the making. What I am suggesting is that, like the works that Perhat Tursun was thinking with—Camus’s The Stranger, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K., and others—The Backstreets should be read simultaneously as a slice of history and a prismatic literary fable of the ethnic and racialized outsider. Like these three writer intellectuals, Tursun is using fiction to think, to spin out the logics of a world that he himself has experienced and see where it takes him. Although he does use specific images and scenes of encounter, he is not so much providing documentary evidence of Uyghur life under conditions of colonization as much as portraying it at a symbolic level. Here he is following Camus in showing racial antagonism through forms of existentialist questioning, a kind of idea-driven realism that is both at the level of human experience and beyond it. He is trying to capture something about life that is simultaneously invisible and all too visible. This strategy—at times deadly serious, at others laugh-out-loud absurd, moving in and out of foggy illusory coldness in a kind of waking dream—is precisely what puts Tursun in conversation with authors like Ralph Ellison. The flourishes of language, vivid images, and stream-of-consciousness complexity of the protagonist’s inner thoughts define Tursun’s style as one that rhymes with Ellison’s. But for all of this playfulness, at the edges of his florid speech is a solemnity. Like Ellison—who famously broke with the Communist Party over their failure to address racial prejudice—Tursun is suspicious of ideology that masquerades as truth, suspicious of violent resistance, of false altruism, of easy solutions. He is conscious of who is authorized to speak and for whom. Underneath all of this is a Uyghur lifeworld demanding to be recognized as inextinguishable. Like Coetzee, Tursun uses silence to evoke, but not ventriloquize, those who gaze at the life of the outsider. These silences, too, are full of meaning. The blankness of the gazes that confront the protagonist allude to something deeper, more fundamental to the way Uyghurs experienced the Chinese city.
On April 26, 2014, Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, urged the general public to turn terrorists into “rats scurrying across a street, with everybody shouting, ‘Beat them.’ ” Over the fifteen years that Perhat Tursun wrote The Backstreets, he observed the way this framing of Uyghurs as potentially subhuman was called into being. He watched the way local Communist Party committees, across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, began an art campaign depicting religious Uyghurs as rats being chased by mobs through the streets. He experienced the way Uyghurs were terrified, that is, made the target of a global discourse on terrorism. In China, it is only minorities who are ever referred to as terrorists. A genocidal rage toward Uyghurs—which Tursun depicts by repeating the word “chop” more than 200 times—was generated by the terrorism slot associated with “dangerous” Uyghur masculinity and Islamic practice. This rage, and the smiling condescension of the functionaries who led this campaign, pushed Uyghurs deeper into the gray zones of the city.
The world of The Backstreets is a colonial city at the frontier of the Chinese nation, and the book explores the way that city creates dislocated life through the simultaneous pull of beauty and sweetness and the repulsion of hatred and fear. Moving between the big city of Ürümchi, where he tries to find a life; the “stage set” of Beijing, where the protagonist goes to school but does not interact with the Han-dominated city; and a village in Southern Xinjiang where he experienced his first love and violence, the novel develops the themes of the dehumanized outsider and native belonging. Both themes respond to the dispossessing effects of life in the midst of a city that is hostile to Uyghurs. The conflict between these two themes comes together in the form of more general questions about the meaning of life itself.
The Dehumanized Outsider
The Backstreets follows a night in the life of an unnamed Uyghur man who came to Ürümchi from a village in Southern Xinjiang after finding a temporary job in a government office as a kind of “diversity hire.” Because Xinjiang is the ostensible “Uyghur autonomous region,” government offices are often legally required to offer a small proportion of jobs to Uyghur employees. Yet, although the region bears the name Uyghur, members of the native or yerlik Uyghur population are very rarely placed in positions of real authority.
Over the course of the novel, the sinister smile of the protagonist’s Han boss and the revulsion of the urbanites he meets signal that the unnamed man is being dehumanized, seen less as a person and more as a category of being. Slowly, through subtle allusions, The Backstreets reveals that it is narrating the experience of being slotted into a subhuman category. Tursun writes:
Suddenly a rat ran out in front of me like a bullet and disappeared in the garbage. I was stunned for a second, but then kept walking. I was afraid that other people might see the way I had been startled by a rat, so I immediately looked over my shoulder. Just like the rat was skittering around in the trash, I was always skittering around the city. Like him, I would look for food, and after my stomach was full, the greatest desire I had was just to sleep.
He takes on an affect of fear as he scuttles through his office and through the street. Throughout the novel, he appreciates the acute sense of smell that seems to be associated with his difference. The term smell appears over 100 times in the novel, often in association with his memories of village life—the turnip cellar, sheep manure, the candy-scented liquor, the neighbor girl’s breath—but also with the smell of disease and death that he associates with his office and the atmosphere created by his smiling boss. The freedom that comes from claiming his power of smell and the interior life it inspires has limits. It is made clear that the uniqueness of his self is being stripped away. Over and over, he repeats that he has no friends or enemies, no social relations. He is deeply, and profoundly, alone.
At its heart, then, the novel appears to be about those creatures whose existence is always outside, unwanted. It is about the conditions in which racialized ethnic others always-already know their place in the world. This is shown to them through their social encounters and the structures of power that prevent them from succeeding. To paraphrase the scholar Sara Ahmed, ethno-racialized institutions always take the shape of those in power and make the bodies of minoritized people feel “out of place.” In order to prove their worth, minorities often try to prove themselves, over and over again, only to find each time that they are still considered unworthy. Their identity precedes them, a seemingly immutable obstacle to their recognition.
This is the type of feeling that Tursun evokes when he says that the gaze of the protagonist’s co-worker “whose skin had a tallowy glow” felt “like rat poison” and prevented him from spending a night in the office. It is also present in the boss, with the ever-present, cruel smile, who gives him assignments as tests of respectability: making him write official letters, forcing him to donate his blood for philanthropic causes. In the voice of the narrator, the hatred that is generated by life in this structure sometimes elicits reactions, “occasionally pushing some to carry out murders and acts of violence, their depression mixed with fanaticism.” These reactions are what lead to the “terrorism” label, a self-fulfilling prophecy called into existence by the institutions that excluded Uyghurs in the first place.
For the protagonist of the novel, the inhumanity of the Chinese city builds a deep sense of foreboding. He grasps for anything that might provide him a sense of ownership. The narrative centers on his endless struggle against the pull of social death. His primary strategy is to retreat into his mind, seeking what Søren Kierkegaard, one of Tursun’s influences, might refer to as a “negative liberation.” But this liberation is always incomplete, always partial; a delay tactic and form of palliative protection. The more the narrator uses a mysticism of numbers—a theme that, like smell, appears in the novel more than 100 times—as a game that might transcend his poverty and his lack of belonging in the ethno-racialized city, the more he realizes his inability to speak and affect the world. His is the choked voice of the trapped. His obsession with numbers is perhaps a way of combating the infinity of the world, the inhumanity of the city. It seems to offer him a path forward, but not a way out. Despite his will to live, his environment continually tells him that he does not deserve a place in the world of the city. The blank silences of the people he encounters suggest that he does not deserve a place anywhere. His inability to even rent a room “the size of a grave” or write his own letter of guarantee, in either Chinese or Uyghur, forces him to conclude that his only and greatest power is simply to live. After all, what outraged his smiling boss the most was that he “was alive.” Therefore, his ability to live “must be of great value” and his “existence itself was the greatest source of frustration.”
The narrator’s lodestar becomes a single drawer in an otherwise locked desk and the numbers on a paper inside the drawer. He is holding on to the promise that the language of science and math might offer a way of overcoming the perceived lack associated with ethnic and rural difference. Yet as the story progresses, it appears that even that source of social belonging—the drawer and the numbers it contains—is under threat. The “respectability” of his education is always unrecognized by his smiling office manager, his gleaming colleague who hisses her morality, even a janitor with perfect Mandarin elocution. Together they remind him constantly of his inadequacy and conspire to complete the process of his social death. In desperation, he begs those he meets on the street to help him, but it is as if his appearance always precedes him, and they either recoil in revulsion or simply ignore him.
Native Belonging
Yet, if the inhumanity of Uyghur life in Ürümchi is the dominant theme of the novel, the beauty and longing the protagonist expresses by reliving memories of his childhood also form a holding-on-to-life. As he translates the Chinese world around him in his mind, he brings Uyghur knowledge into the present. The narrative of the novel—alternating between the damp office, the foggy street, the postcard-like Beijing, where he and the other Uyghurs never even tried to have a social role, and the beauty and terror of the Uyghur village—is a strategy that pulls time and space in different directions but does not build a fully reliable grounding to the world of the novel. As the protagonist himself notes, “If a mirror is broken into several shards the reality of a scene is also fractured into several pieces, and its reality can never be fully reassembled.” Nevertheless, through juxtaposition and flights of the mind, the narrative provides imagistic views of Uyghur village life, placing mundane stories, myths of the desert, the smoke and rituals of village shamans, on the same stage as the philosophers he read in a library in Beijing. In doing this, the narrator constructs a vivid Uyghur sensory experience of objects and actions—a broom fragment, an abandoned shoe, the smell of candy, the sound of a folk song, cracks in the sidewalk. And, to return to what Tursun learned about Schopenhauer’s thinking of the world as comprised of objects and their representation, these imagistic portraits of the will or essence of Uyghur things, evoke, from the stage of the novel, the care practices, libidinal norms, relationships with space, and fears at the edge of existential control. Collectively these phenomena represent a world of contemporary Uyghur experience.
