ABDUSHUKUR MUHAMMET

 

 

To my friends from Chile

 

I had two friends from Chile,

Both of them have since passed away,

One was a poet, and another was a poem.

The poem is named Eduardo Morales

The poet is named Pablo Neruda.

Pablo wrote poems his entire life

Earned a Nobel Prize,

Eduardo lived his whole life like a poem,

Yet, no one gave him any prizes.

Pablo wrote poems, but did not live like one,

At night he emerges from his writing,

Assists the murderer of Trotsky.

Eduardo has never written poems

But he washes his heart with poetry.

He is poetry

He always walked beside me like poetry.

He passed recently,

However, the poetic life he lived remains.

He introduced Chile to the Uyghurs,

However, Pablo Neruda is not aware that the Uyghurs exist.

 

My Name

 

I am Abdushukur Muhammet

but my name is a stranger to me,

draped over me like a spider’s web.

 

Perhaps it had run away

from a land I had never visited

and happened on the Taklimakan.

 

It’s misspelled too

like the kiss of the wrong first love,

And too long

like my longing,

like my never-ending thoughts,

like my unverbalised anguish.

 

Sometimes it looks like the demolished mosques,

Sometimes like the old grave left to me by my father,

and other times like the circular naan of Kucha.

 

Its twisting lines, like a state border

turn me

into the pair of elm trees at my father’s grave.

 

My father was not the prophet when I was born,

but we were chased from our country like the prophet

bearing the name “Muhammet.”

 

Like the stones worn down from aeons of winds

you are hung up like a forgotten museum piece.

O museum, passed through by the living and settled by the dead

O world, where truth and lies are one and the same,

In the bloodstains of those diseased eyes,

may names scarify in the colour of sand.

 

Bathe me with my name

When I die

If it still wants me.

Winter

 

The poem

Takes the grey street

Walks with it along the edges of the winter.

The bald wind caresses

The swollen faces of the street corners

With its cold and frozen hand.

The void inside me that I cannot contain

Standing dazed for a moment

In front of libraries and cafes

With eyes full of sorrow.

Maybe the lost Persian cat

Is happier than the poem.

On the opposite side of the road

The girl is looking for her cat

What a resemblance she bears to the poem.

The cat, the girl, the poem, and me

We do not know each other

Nonetheless, we are one and worthless.

 

An Ear On The Wall

 

As soon as we arrived

Our parents convinced us the walls had ears

It was only later that we realised everything else did, too.

The story was, as the elders said, mouths pressed to ears,

The youths we had grown up playing with

Had vanished one night as if abducted by jinn

They had been standing under a wall with ears.

Until the day we arrived in Sweden

We lived a thousand years per day surrounded by them.

There were no eared walls here

In fact, the people had none either

You may try to tell them something

On the streets and squares with loudspeakers

Yet no one listens

They did not believe that walls could have ears,

That there were ears around us.

But in the homes of Swedish Uyghurs

Every wall is covered with them

Carrying ears inside themselves, they had smuggled them in

From where they came from

Where they were from

If a person laughed, they looked angry

If a person smiled, they looked sarcastic

They believed the tea they drank and the food they ate had ears.

They were too anxious to dream, to think

Because they had ears on themselves, too

They could not live without them

They did not believe the Swedish walls had none

Unable to imagine an earless life,

Scared to death of standing below an earless wall

They lived. Eventually,

Part of them became an ear on the wall.

 

 

The Road Home

 

I keep on going

since I stepped out my door, years ago.

These roads are marked by my footprints, no name.

Each day

I encounter only my heart.

The street gutters littered with withered leaves of memories,

the inscriptions carved into gravestones,

sit on the edges of my dreams,

watching me closely.

My black tears fall,

synonymous with my name.

I keep on going.

A night longer than these roads

stands lit like an empty oil lamp.

I keep on going

carrying to my birthplace

pieces of my body I haven’t yet shed.

The road home.

Of all the paths to take,

is it not the most beautiful?

 

You And I

 

Between us, a long border,

The Great Wall separates our blood.

 A long history

 wrote our names in two different places.

 Your homeland, the middle of the world,

 the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers

 were your edges when you were formed.

 

 Deception as soft as silkworm, damp like water,

before making your night a home.

 A drop of blood had yet to be shed in the Taklamakan,

Nurhaci and Hong Taiji

brought you to these lands.

 In Junggar, a reddened tamarisk tree,

 in Tarim, a lush poplar tree,

 in Taklamakan, a flying tumbleweed

 witness us, and who you are.

At no time have we been alike,

nor have our Gods been the same.

 Your God, wealth and criminality,

my God, the entire cosmos.

 

Today, while you

live in the house my father lived in,

eat the bread my mother baked,

 I am an exile, eating my worries,

 living far from them.

 When you are demolishing the graves of our ancestors

and arranging a burial for your father,

I am aggrieved, unable to visit my mother’s grave.

 When you devastate the mountains and wilderness of my homeland,

I mourn, unable to show my son my home.

 While you visit your family within the Great Wall,

 I bemoan, unable to hear from my relatives.

 Of this I am sure–

we can no longer live as one

 

ABDUSHUKUR MUHAMMET

(Qumtur)

 

ABDUSHUKUR MUHAMMET (Qumtur) is a writer and poet from Kucha, Aksu, who has been living in Sweden since 2003. Fascinated by poetry, Qumtur studied to become a teacher in Uyghur literature, poetry, and history in his twenties, and by the 1990s, had become a well-known poet among Uyghurs. After working as a teacher for thirteen years, Qumtur was subjected to severe control and harassment during the chaos of the mid-90s for his role in promoting Uyghur language and culture, until he was eventually forced into exile. To date he has written thirteen books, including collections of poetry, essays, and translated work. Currently he is a member of the Swedish Writers’ Union, Swedish PEN, and he vas the Chairman for the World Uyghur Writers’ Union, which he founded along with Uyghur writers in diaspora.