Tahir Hamut Izgil

Tahir Hamut Izgil (born 1969) is a modernist Uyghur poet, filmmaker, and activist.

He published his first poem in 1986.

A leader in avant-garde Uyghur poetry in the 1990s, he is known for poems and films strongly influenced by Uyghur life.

Originally from Xinjiang, he is currently living in exile in the United States.

His experiences as an intellectual during the rounding up of Uyghurs and his emigration to the west is described in his memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Midnight, published in 2023.

Izgil was born in a small town near Kashgar, Xinjiang and grew up in the city.

He got a government scholarship to go to Minzu University of China, a university for national minorities in Beijing.

Izgil was one of the first Uyghur poets to receive a fully bilingual education - in both Uyghur and Mandarin.

When he arrived at college, he and his fellow students from Xinjiang, including now-noted poet Perhat Tursun, knew little Chinese.

They quickly formed a study group and began reading Western philosophy, theory and criticism: existentialist philosophers, the European modernists, American Gothic fiction and Critical Theory.

They also read contemporary Chinese literature: the Misty Poets and experimental Chinese fiction writers.

Izgil was particularly drawn to modernist literary criticism, and became one of the premier Uyghur critics of Western modernism.

Upon returning to the Uyghur region in the early 1990s, Tursun and Izgil started publishing their avant-garde poetry and attracted a following.

They were among the first Uyghur poets to write in free verse, following in the footsteps of gungga (hazy/vague/uncertain) poets like Ahmatjan Osman.

Free verse was a departure from traditional Uyghur lyric composition, which has a strong emphasis on syllabic metrical forms like Aruz.

Using this new form, they wrote openly about "sex, religion, and the ongoing cultural life of shamanism and superstition that tie Uyghurs to land and embodied ritual practice."

Izgil in particular often wrote about his "attachments to the places he came from" such as Kashgar's "fierce local pride, its layout, its customs, and its slang".

Many of his poems have been said to be "filled with longing and exhaustion, enchantment and release."

The group's work revealed the "uncertainty of their religiosity".

While many opposed reformist Islam that arrived in the 1990s, they were drawn to Sufi poetics.

For them, Sufi ideas and attitudes had the power to contest ethno-national conservatism, allowing them to reclaim Uyghur identity by being "true to their own personal sense of self" and affirming "a love of contemporary life itself."

They also opposed "the close melding of life to [political] ideology, which was such a dominant feature of twentieth century Chinese cultural life."

Both these features of their poetics were departures from that of canonical 20th century poets like Abdurehim Ötkür, the father of modern Uyghur poetry, who had written traditional lyrics with a Socialist Realist ethos.

Over time, Izgil's works grew to be "more complex on both a stylistic and an emotional level".

The poems he wrote in his early life while in Beijing had had "unadorned style and syntax".

English translations of Izgil's poetry have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Asymptote, Berkeley Poetry Review, and other magazines.

His poems have also been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Swedish, French, and other languages.

Izgil has continued writing poetry after his exile.

He states that his exile has disrupted his poetic practice - he feels that he doesn't have the same poetic inspiration and writes fewer poems.

In the mid-1990s, Izgil was detained in a labor camp for three years for carrying allegedly sensitive documents, including newspaper articles about Uyghur separatist attacks, on an attempted trip to study in Turkey.

Later, he was blacklisted for jobs.

In 1998, he forayed into filmmaking and eventually directed a groundbreaking drama, The Moon Is a Witness. He founded a film production company named Izgil and made feature films, documentaries, music videos, and ad films.

Since 2005, he has turned to filming narrative documentaries and lyric poetry.

He filmed a selection of Kucha folk songs and compiled them into a single DVD called Mirajikhan.

In the 2010s, he worked as one of the principal instructors in the Film Department of the Xinjiang Arts Institute in Ürümqi.

Izgil was invited to give poetry reading nights at Indiana University in 2016, the University of Washington in 2018, and Yale University in 2020.

In August 2017, as the Chinese government began its mass internment of Uyghurs, he fled with his family to northern Virginia, where he currently lives.

He escaped under the guise of seeking treatment for his daughter's epilepsy.

Soon after they arrived in the US, the two brothers of Marhaba, Izgil's wife, were sent to a re-education camp.

He was approached to speak about this flight by the Wall Street Journal, but hesitated out of concern for his family back home.