Claiming the mystical self in new modernist Uyghur poetry

Abstract

By recuperating the Sufi poetics of the Uyghur past, “avant-garde” Uyghur poets such as Tahir Hamut and Perhat Tursun are claiming a right to speak as heirs to both a religious and a literary tradition. For these modernist poets, finding one’s own way forward through the past is a way of reclaiming the discourse surrounding Uyghur identity, and the cultural symbols built into it, as an extension of the self. By channeling affect in such a way that it appears to derive from conventional Uyghur imagery, these poets demonstrate a measure of self-mastery that restores a feeling of existential security in the midst of political and religious change. This article argues that the purpose of their poems is to force the reader to accept new interpretations of images of Sufi embodiment and spirituality as valid and powerful. It further claims that the new indexing of Sufi imagery in this emerging corpus disrupts the unity of Uyghur poetry in the genres of Chinese Socialist Realism and ethno-nationalist Uyghur tradition, not in a negative process, but in order to create new forms of thought and subjectivity. It forces the reader to interpret the world not by trying to return to mythical Uyghur origins or reaching for a Socialist or an Islamic utopia but instead as a means of self-determination and affirming contemporary life itself.

Full text

Claiming the mystical self in new modernist
Uyghur poetry
Darren Byler
1
Published online: 12 February 2018
#Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract By recuperating the Sufi poetics of the Uyghur past, Bavant-garde^Uyghur
poets such as Tahir Hamut and Perhat Tursun are claiming a right to speak as heirs to
both a religious and a literary tradition. For these modernist poets, finding one’sown
way forward through the past is a way of reclaiming the discourse surrounding Uyghur
identity, and the cultural symbols built into it, as an extension of the self. By channeling
affect in such a way that it appears to derive from conventional Uyghur imagery, these
poets demonstrate a measure of self-mastery that restores a feeling of existential
security in the midst of political and religious change. This article argues that the
purpose of their poems is to force the reader to accept new interpretations of images of
Sufi embodiment and spirituality as valid and powerful. It further claims that the new
indexing of Sufi imagery in this emerging corpus disrupts the unity of Uyghur poetry in
the genres of Chinese Socialist Realism and ethno-nationalist Uyghur tradition, not in a
negative process, but in order to create new forms of thought and subjectivity. It forces
the reader to interpret the world not by trying to return to mythical Uyghur origins or
reaching for a Socialist or an Islamic utopia but instead as a means of self-determination
and affirming contemporary life itself.
Keywords Sufi .Self-determination .Modernist poetry.Uyghur.Xinjiang .China .
Avant-Garde
In the Central Asian border regions of Northwest China, a new generation of Uyghur
poets are confronting an Islamic history and a Chinese-Marxist legacy which are not
entirely their own. Many of these contemporary poets are Muslims who do not pray
five times per day and often decide not to fast during Ramadan. Often these poets, who
came of age in the 1990s and 2000s, speak Mandarin with the discomfort of a second
Cont Islam (2018) 12:173–192
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-018-0413-2
*Darren Byler
dbyler@uw.edu
1
Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, 6239 Carleton Ave. S, Seattle,
WA 98108, USA
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