All posts tagged: Farmer Poet

What It Means To Be A Uyghur Man

Watching the leaked surveillance video of two men walking with a sea of migrant workers in front of the train station in Ürümchi makes your blood turn cold. You want to look away but you can’t. You want to understand what was going through the minds of those men with their hats pulled low as they moved in step with the crowd – but you can’t. Only after the shock of the fireball and the smoke clears can you stop looking, but then you can’t un-see it. You can only play it over and over in your mind. Xi Jinping said that what those two men at the train station on Wednesday, April 30, 2014 were feeling was an “overweening arrogance.”  I don’t know what they were feeling; none of us can really know. It is in times of grief and shame like these that Uyghurs might turn to people like the late-poet Rozi Sayit for a clearer understanding of themselves and what Uyghur life should be. In his lyric (performed above by Abdulla), Rozi …