Perhat Tursun | Columbia University Press (New York, 2022). $25.74 | 136pp.

The unnamed protagonist of Perhat Tursun’s The Backstreets is a homeless Uyghur man wandering by night in a surreal version of the capital city of China’s Xinjiang region.

“… in Urumchi, the sun never really rises. It feels like it’s always sinking into an overbearing darkness,” he tells us on the first page.

The rest of the book can be read as an exploration of the “overbearing darkness” imposed by the Chinese state on Xinjiang and on the Uyghurs, its Turkic-speaking, largely Islamic and savagely persecuted ethnic minority. It is also an exploration of psychological obsession and alienation.

In this nightmare vision, the backstreets of Urumchi are filled with a cold fog of pollution and with shadowy figures that ignore or insult the protagonist. The politics of China’s colonial occupation of Xinjiang and racist Han supremacy are not often named, but they are present in the beautifully rendered despair and existential ennui in every line of this remarkable text. Think Kafka or Camus, but less cheerful.

Tursun, a leading Uyghur intellectual, completed this slight, sorrowful, tone-perfect novel in 2015. In 2018, the genocidal policies implemented by the Chinese state against Uyghurs escalated, with over a million Uyghur victims confined to slave labour and “re-education” camps, and hundreds of thousands of Uyghur women forcibly sterilized. In 2018, Tursun was reportedly detained by Chinese authorities and sentenced to 16 years imprisonment, presumably on one of the more than 380 camps created to implement Beijing’s anti-Uyghur policies.

Tursun is no mere insurrectionary. He is something far more dangerous to autocrats. He is an independent artist. We can only hope that government oppression will not silence this eloquent and important voice, but even if Tursun never emerges from the prison camp that currently houses him, he has given the world a new masterpiece that defies the grey-faced, grey-souled bureaucrats who took him away.

And what a literary legacy this author has created here! As deftly translated by an anonymous Uyghur scholar and by Simon Fraser University scholar Darren Byler, himself the author of 2022’s Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City, Tursun’s novel sings with a kind of lyrical despair and anomie, all rendered with sensual depth and persuasiveness. The author is particularly good at evoking the pungent smells and ambiguous noises of Urumchi, and his similes, while dire in tone, are strikingly original.

Highly recommended.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net