The Backstreets is an astonishing novel by a preeminent contemporary
Uyghur author who was disappeared by the Chinese state. It follows an
unnamed Uyghur man who comes to the impenetrable Chinese capital of
Xinjiang after finding a temporary job in a government office. Seeking
to escape the pain and poverty of the countryside, he finds only cold
stares and rejection. He wanders the streets, accompanied by the bitter
fog of winter pollution, reciting a monologue of numbers and odors, lust
and loathing, memories and madness.
Perhat Tursun's novel is a work of untrammeled literary creativity. His
evocative prose recalls a vast array of canonical world
writers--contemporary Chinese authors such as Mo Yan; the modernist
images and rhythms of Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kafka; the serious yet
absurdist dissection of the logic of racism in Ellison's Invisible
Man--while drawing deeply on Uyghur literary traditions and Sufi
poetics and combining all these disparate influences into a style that
is distinctly Tursun's own. The Backstreets is a stark fable about
urban isolation and social violence, dehumanization and the
racialization of ethnicity. Yet its protagonist's vivid recollections of
maternal tenderness and first love reveal how memory and imagination
offer profound forms of resilience. A translator's introduction situates
the novel in the political atmosphere that led to the disappearance of
both the author and his work.
