“The Backstreets” is a devastating portrait of Uyghur life. The author, Perhat Tursun, is thought to be imprisoned in China
By Perhat Tursun. Translated by Darren Byler and Anonymous.was a precocious teenager. He published his first poem when he was 11 years old and started university in Beijing at the age of 14. Back then, in 1983, few books by foreign authors were available in Uyghur, his native tongue. So Mr Tursun mastered Mandarin and gained access to troves of translated foreign works. He devoured the writings of Camus, Dostoyevsky, Joyce and Kafka.
It is a strange and devastating novel, a portrait of what it means to become a second-class citizen in your homeland. “The Backstreets” has yet to be officially published in the original Uyghur. After his early works were deemed transgressive and anti-Islamic by some socially conservative Uyghurs, Mr Tursun found himself blacklisted by publishing houses in Xinjiang. But the same books that attracted vociferous critics also won Mr Tursun fervent fans.
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