Join Haverford College’s Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, Twelve Gates Arts, and the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Philadelphia) for a Uyghur and Urdu Poetry Reading (5-6pm est) followed by a Discussion and Q&A (6-6:30pm est).
At a time when their homelands are engulfed in crisis, two poets, one from the Uyghur region, the other from Kashmir, are giving voice to what it means to survive anguish and find a way to live, love, dream, and hope. Tahir Hamut Izgil and Abdul Manan Bhat's struggles inflect their voices: their lines are haunted by loss, and carry the bewilderments and unmoorings of being forced to leave home. Yet their poems also contain hope, and point to the imaginative and creative resources we can marshall to contend with our world. Come hear these two poets read their works in the original Uyghur and Urdu, while their translators, Joshua L. Freeman and Partha P. Chakrabartty, read their English renderings.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Partha P. Chakrabartty is an independent columnist, occasional editor, activist, and translator. His writing can be found at the Mint, the Wire, Firstpost and Open Magazine, among others. His poetry and translations can be found at the Alipore Post, nether, Soch, and Saaranga. He completed his MFA in Creative Writing from Temple University.
Joshua L. Freeman is a historian of China and Inner Asia and a translator of Uyghur poetry. He is currently a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and a lecturer in Princeton’s East Asian Studies Department. He received his PhD at Harvard University, and is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled Print Communism: Uyghur National Culture in Twentieth-Century China. His translations of contemporary Uyghur poetry have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Southern Review, Asymptote, Crazyhorse, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.
Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of the foremost poets in the Uyghur language, grew up in Kashgar, an ancient city in the southwest of the Uyghur homeland. After college in Beijing, he returned to the Uyghur region and in the late 1990s and 2000s emerged as a prominent film director, perhaps best known for the pathbreaking drama The Moon Is a Witness (Ay guwah). His poetry has appeared in English translation in The New York Review of Books, Asymptote, Gulf Coast, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. In 2017, as the Chinese state began the mass internment of Uyghur intellectuals, Izgil fled with his family to the United States. He now works as a producer at Radio Free Asia while continuing his literary work.
Guangtian Ha is a professor of religion at Haverford College. He works on Islamic mysticism in Asia and beyond, sound and smell, ashes and other remains of civilization, and in general what it means to survive in a world that is no more and how we can imagine and live differently. His interest in satire and humour and their role in building community and politics fits into this general picture. His book Fragile Transcendence: Sound and Saint in Sino-Sufism will be out from Columbia University Press in 2021.
Aisha Zia Khan is a cultural producer and arts administrator and has been the executive director of Twelve Gates Arts since co-founding it in 2009. Ms. Khan has extensive experience in curating art exhibitions and organizing collaborative art-related events. With a degree in Social Work, there is a socially aware angle to her work.
Abdul Manan, a Kashmiri, is an Urdu poet and writes under the pen-name ‘Alam.’ Much of his poetry, written in the lyric form, ghazal, explores notions of exile, love, loss and return. Abdul Manan has published internationally and has recited at multiple literary forums, including the annual Faiz Literature Festival, London. Some of his poems have been sung by prominent ghazal singers in Kashmir. Currently, Abdul Manan is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he works on Indo-Persian literary and Islamic modernities.
The Contest of the Fruits will consist of an array of activities with Slavs and Tatars through fall 2021 that will bend borders, tickle tongues, and fracture fixed identities. It is an extended project including an artist residency, film premiere, exhibition at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, and a publication.
This event is part of the The Contest in Context event series. All events are free to attend and require advanced registration. Full event schedule and details can be found at: exhibits.haverford.edu/slavsandtatars/.
This event will take place virtually via Zoom. A login link will be emailed to you prior to event.
The Contest of the Fruits is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
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