Adil Tunyaz is a well–known Uighur poet, author of the books "Questions to the Apple" and "Manifesto of Universal Poetry". Tunyaz and his wife Nezire Muhammad Salih were arrested in December 2017. Their eldest son Imran (19 years old) also arrested. It is believed that three of their younger children are in a Chinese state shelter for Uighur children whose parents have been arrested. Adil's father-in-law, the famous Uighur scholar Muhammad Salih Hajim, died in a re-education camp in Urumqi in January 2018.
A Chinese prison officer in the Mitsuan County of Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture, where another relative of Tunyaz is being held, told family members in February 2018 that they "should not hope for Nezire and Adil" because of the seriousness of the charges against them.
Adil Tunyaz is accused of promoting terrorism and religious extremism.
Some researchers claim that Adil inherits the Gungga poetic movement – vague or secretive poetry. In modern Uyghur literature, which was born under the influence of innovative movements and political events of the 1980s, this poetic movement translates traditional Uyghur poetry into a modernist channel. Poems written in accordance with this new movement, which aims to describe the emotional world and reality of a person in a new way, are written in a free style; these are poems based on the nebula of meaning and its expression through symbols.
Communicating with Adil through his poems and my translation practice, I can say that it is really difficult to understand him. Understandable like "Water", telling about the stuffiness of office life, the boredom of everyday life, hinting at water chambers in some Chinese prisons, suddenly leads us to the tent of Bilge-Kagan, to "unemployed friends" (nomads?) it turns into steam, which takes the form of vague symbols and subtle hints (a girl and a camel, a pond with banks like a dried-up old dutar, ant tracks from childhood, etc. D.), after which it dissolves in the depth of purity, where "the water has no shadow."
In the title poem of this collection, in the "Journey to Kashgar", from the very beginning, the corpses of angels lie on the hero's path, and the stones appear to him as the severed heads of the shahids. Why is Kashgar a wound that, at the same time, has yet to open? Is it hope or pain? Both? When "clarity goes away", we turn to God, we belong "not to ourselves".
Adil's poems are an opportunity to take at least one peek at the world of a person who is forced to carefully hide his thoughts in glitch overload and mixing of symbols (which, as you can see, does not save from anything), hoping to accidentally pull out if not a frame, then a fleeting sensation. An opportunity to look at a world that is silenced and weak, unable to stand up for itself, suppressed and destroyed every day, but still breathing and alive.
Here is a selection of six poems by Adil Tunyaz translated into Kazakh, Russian and English. The translation was carried out from the subscript with the involvement of Uighur-speaking friends. We thank them for their help.
Sources:
- https://www.uscirf.gov/
- https://www.semanticscholar.org/
- http://www.uygurarastirmalari.com/
- https://www.channeldraw.org/
- https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca/