Turghunjan Alawudun: Imprisoned Souls — Poems by Uyghur Prisoners in China

Turghunjan Alawudun’s Speech at the Imprisoned Souls Book Launch

16 December

Dear esteemed colleagues,

It is a privilege to join you for this important book launch.

This book is not simply a collection of poems. It is evidence.

Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have feared many things—but they have feared writers the most. Because poets do what prisons cannot contain: they name truth, preserve memory, and imagine freedom. That is why, in today’s China, Uyghur poets, writers, scholars, and intellectuals were among the first to be targeted, beginning with the so-called “Strike Hard” campaign launched in May 2014.

Over the past decade, an entire generation of Uyghur thinkers has been systematically silenced. Poets who wrote of love, exile, faith, and homeland. Professors who taught language and history. Editors, translators, musicians—people whose only crime was to think, to write, and to belong. Many were sentenced in secret. Many disappeared without trial. Some were forced to recite political loyalty instead of poetry. Others remain imprisoned today, their whereabouts unknown.

Several cases of targeted Uyghur intellectual and cultural figures have drawn international attention: folklore scholar Dr. Rahile Dawut; university president and professor Tashpolat Teyip; economist and Sakharov Prize laureate Ilham Tohti; renowned medical scholar Halmurat Ghopur; and singer Ablajan Awut Ayup, among many others. Each name represents not only an individual loss, but an assault on a people’s collective knowledge and cultural continuity.

Since 2017, the Chinese government has gone further—rewriting history itself. Previously approved Uyghur-language textbooks were retroactively criminalized, their editors and publishers prosecuted. Materials once used in primary and middle schools were suddenly rebranded as symbols of “extremism” or “separatism.” 

Culture was turned into evidence of guilt.

What makes this repression especially cruel is its precision. The goal was not only to control Uyghur bodies, but to erase Uyghur thought—to sever language from its speakers, and to make culture itself unsafe. When a poet is imprisoned, the message is clear: imagination is forbidden.

And yet, this book exists.

These poems survived surveillance, censorship, fear, and prison walls. They remind us that even under the most extreme repression, the human spirit insists on speaking. Every line in this collection defies erasure. Every poem declares: we were here; we thought; we felt; we wrote.

Reading these poems tonight is not a passive act. It is an ethical one. To listen is to bear witness. To share them is to protect memory. And to name the fate of their authors is to reject silence as complicity.

I would like to express my deep appreciation to Aziz Isa Elkun for translating these poems of resilience and courage. Our responsibility does not end with listening. It begins there.

Thank you.

Turghunjan Alawudun is the President of World Uyghur Congress