Originally published on Darren Byler’s Xinjiang Column on SupChina, March 6 2019
Shared with authors’ permission, Sep 22, 2019
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever.”
Edward Said writes the above in his Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. For Uyghur poets in exile, this estrangement is compounded by the constant shocks to horrifying news from Xinjiang, pain and anxieties wondering about their families’ life and death. Here are three poems by Uyghur poets. See original post here.
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