Through the mediums of memoir and poetry, Uyghur poet and memoirist Tahir Hamut Izgil and Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail challenge dominant political narratives and preserve stories of displacement, exile and perseverance. In his memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, Izgil documents the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uyghur people and his time in a labor camp. In Mikhail’s poetry collection, Tablets: Secrets of Clay, she explores her family’s exile from Iraq while looking back at Iraqi history.
In a dynamic discussion at the PEN World Voices Festival, Writing as Resistance, moderated by novelist Mojgan Ghazirad (The House on Sun Street), Izgil and Mikhail delved into the urgency of documenting personal and collective experiences, and how the act of writing both engenders change and urges us towards the future.
On how they became writers:
Mikhail shared a humorous anecdote about how when she was younger, a teacher asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. Mikhail responded that she wanted to be a “prophet.” Her teacher was not happy about that, explaining, “There’s no prophet after the prophet Mohammed.” But as Mikhail explained, “I was not religious, but I think I wanted to be a writer. And I thought only prophets write.”
Izgil, whose answers were translated for the audience by his daughter, said, “My passion to write also began with storytelling and story making…When I was a child, in those long winter nights, I listened to stories from my parents. Later, I became a poet, and in my poems, there’s also storytelling embedded.”
Every poem is a smuggled truth.
On resisting surveillance:
In response to a question about whether it was or is still possible for the Uyghur people to resist Chinese surveillance, Izgil explained the many high-tech ways that China has to surveil the Uyghur population, but emphasized how writing can be a form of resistance: “As a poet and writer in exile, I believe that the best way I can resist such systematic oppression is to document it, and tell the truth to the world.”
On the format of Mikhail’s poems:
Mikhail’s book presents her poems in a mixture of text, image, and handwriting. She explained that her poems were inspired by ancient Sumerian clay tablets: “They recorded stories, emotions, laws, gospel, truth, and the human condition at that time.” She was trying to “touch history…as something that’s still speaking, present…to allow its brokenness to speak to us.” The cracks in the tablets “do not erase the message, they enhance it. So, a broken tablet may lose a line in the poem, but that fracture adds meaning. It adds to the poem…I’m trying to imitate those cracks.” She also conceived of her handwriting as a “living script.” “I was having this living script knotting together languages—Arabic and English; histories—Sumerian and contemporary; themes—exile and belonging.” Tying it all together, she theorized that “every poem is a tablet, not only in form, but as a function…something to be held and broken, buried, found again, something to be held as a secret.”
Because I’m a poet of a group of oppressed people, because of this identity, I can never escape politics. So even though I only document or describe my own individual feelings, a lot of the time these feelings resonate with broader collective memories. I slowly realized that I am on the path of, sort of, combining individual feeling and collective destiny in my poems.
On writing about politics:
Izgil: “I am a poet who doesn’t like politics at all. But because I’m a poet of a group of oppressed people, because of this identity, I can never escape politics. So even though I only document or describe my own individual feelings, a lot of the time these feelings resonate with broader collective memories. I slowly realized that I am on the path of, sort of, combining individual feeling and collective destiny in my poems. And maybe this path will give more layers to my poems, and make [them] more powerful.”
On the role of writers:
Izgil highlighted writers’ ability to be truth tellers, saying “Oppression is oppression, no matter where it happens, or by whom, or who is suffering. Oppression is always that fundamental thing. As a writer, our obligation is to tell the truth, and say the truth to everyone, because the [people who commit] oppression [are] most afraid of truth.”
Mikhail explained that a poet’s concern is “the moment before and the moment after, not the moment of destruction.” She explained, “I am a poet of small details. I feel they are more effective than the big ones. I call them the small things with big shadows…I feel these details of life are more effective than slogans.” She went on to highlight the power of a poem, saying, “Every poem is a smuggled truth.”
Want more?
Check out the panelists’ books:
- Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil
- Tablets: Secrets of Clay by Dunya Mikhail
- The House on Sun Street by Mojgan Ghazirad
