"The Backstreets" by Perhat Tersun

Perhat Tursun is a writer and poet. To read his short novel The Backstreets is to be reminded of The Plague by Albert Camus, or Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It’s a disturbing, unsettling kind of book, and it becomes more so when you realize it’s largely autobiographical. 

Tursun (born in 1969) is a Uyghur, the large Muslim minority that for generations were farmers and herdsmen in Xinjiang in western China. Life became difficult under Chinese communist rule, until the death of Mao Zedong. Life became easier, until about the turn of the century. Then began what became a systematic effort by the Chinese government to submerge the Uyghurs into Chinese culture and life and, barring that, eradicate their society. Persecution began in earnest when the Chinese began to borrow the language of the global “War on Terror.” The Chinese deny the charges of genocide, but it’s becoming increasingly impossible to say it’s anything but that. The evidence is too strong, and it’s growing stronger. That the Uyghurs occupied land that contained sizable energy reserves didn’t serve their security in a Chinese state desperate for energy to power factories.

 

Tersun had been one of the favored few to be educated at a Chinese university in Beijing, but he began to arouse the government’s concern with the publication of his work, like his poetry collection One Hundred Love Lyrics, his novella collection Messiah Desert, and his novel The Art of Suicide which led to his blacklisting as a writer for the next 15 years  The manuscript of The Backstreets was completed in 2015 but never published in China.

 

The main character, a man, is never named. Trained at a university in the east, he works in a western Chinese city that is dominated by ethnic Chinese, although it wasn’t always so. His boss is the “smiling man,” whose smile increases the angrier he gets. And he gets very angry with the narrator, who intentionally and unintentionally doesn’t conform to expectations. 

 

Perhat Tersun

The man spends a great deal of the novel walking the backstreets of the city, trying to find his room. He’s frustrated by both a thick, almost impenetrable fog and the fear of the few people he meets. The search for his room symbolizes the search to find (and understand) his place and thus his own identity. But it never happens, and he never learns who he is, because it’s been taken away. He has memories, pleasant and unpleasant of his childhood, but his family seems to exist only in a distant past. 

 

The novel draws from Tursun’s own life – his education, his childhood, and his work in the city of Urumchi in Xinjiang. And he’s lived the experience of the Uyghurs in China. In early 2018, he disappeared. It was heard later that he’d been sentenced to 16 years in prison; the charges were unknown. 

 

The book has its own story. The translator, Darren Byler, teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and has published several books on China. He met with Tursun before the writer’s disappearance, a meeting arranged by a source only known as D.M. Another person, known as A.A., was helping with the translation. Both D.M. and A.A. also disappeared.

 

Reading The Backstreets is a sobering experience. Tursun depicts the alienation, the fear, and the persecution that happens when a person, and a people, are objectified by the state as terrorists or extremists. It’s a difficult book to read, but a necessary one.

 

Related:

 

A Uyghur Author and Translator Were Detained. Now Their Novel Speaks for Them.