GREG GIRARD/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES FOR TIME
Chinese authorities told Abdurihim his beard was 'too religious-looking' |
COVER STORY
China's Other Oppressed Minority
Since Sept. 11, Bejing has been cracking down in Xinjiang. Decades of repression have already made native Uighurs strangers in their own land
Culture Wars
The Bob Dylan of Xinjiang
Photo Essay
Life Under the Crackdown
Timeline
The Uighurs in China
|
|
 |
Man of Constant Sorrow
One Uighur makes music for the masses
By MATTHEW FORNEY
Abdurihim should be the Bob Dylan of Xinjiang. The cover of his latest popular cassette, Legacy, shows the 40-year-old musician with heavy beard and embroidered Uighur garb standing before a camel train in the desert of far western China, his gaze in search of a culture fast receding beyond the vanishing point. He's a virtuoso on the teardrop-shaped dutar, an instrument Uighur boys almost universally learn on the way to becoming men. He sings about touchy subjects such as servility and reawakening.
But in a Xinjiang dominated from far-off Beijing, there's not much of a place for a local Dylan. Abdurihim hasn't performed in months. He should be booking gigs, touring, becoming the dutar hero of Xinjiang. Instead, when he does play, it is as a member of song-and-dance troupes controlled so tightly that for years he wasn't allowed to play the instrument of his choice. Some of his lyrics have religious overtones, but he can only sing them in his living room—censors won't allow them on cassettes and apparatchiks forbid them to be performed in public.
Like other oppressed peoples in history—the Irish, Gypsies, Jews—Uighurs draw strength from music. They sing religious songs at the tombs of their relatives, sentimental songs when they drink. An instrument stands in the corner of nearly every rural home, dust-free and in tune. Uighurs distinguish themselves from other Central Asian groups through the Maqam, a canon of 350 songs collected by a Uighur princess in the 15th century that sets moments of Uighur history to music. Even with the limits imposed by the Chinese government, Uighurs still express themselves through music in which they hear messages of unity—and sometimes of separatism.
Abdurihim's struggle, he says, is purely artistic: to perform the music he grew up with. He was born in Kashgar 40 years ago, long before teahouses on the oasis yielded to new Chinese neighborhoods. He began studying the dutar when he was six years old. "I'd walk the streets hearing music and strumming the air," he says. At 17 he enrolled in a state-run music school, but the education was too foreign. "They wanted me to sing like an Italian opera star, which isn't what Uighur music sounds like. I learned nothing."
His innate skills were so apparent the school sent him to Beijing to join the Central Minorities Song and Dance Troupe, a kind of It's a Small World review meant to celebrate China's diversity. For two decades, he performed alongside such acts as Tibetan trumpeters and Mongolian khoomei singers, who can produce two tones at the same time.
Two years ago, Abdurihim arranged a transfer back to Xinjiang and released the stark Legacy, which features only his voice and dutar. The publishing house, controlled by the provincial government, wouldn't allow him to sing about Islam, but Abdurihim, who prays five times a day, still considers the collection the best of the dozen that he's released, and it has sold briskly across the province. His best song on the cassette, he says, is Knowledge: "Among the world's offerings/ There is no lover like knowledge/ Rise above doubt/ Tomorrow will have no poor men like you/ Only rich men, and no one to collect debts." Another song, Rooster, is about waking people up after a long and dark night. University students forced to speak Mandarin and imams in patriotic education classes can read what they like into it.
Abdurihim's hands are full these days. His troupe had a performance last year in Kashgar and he followed his 45-min. act with an encore of equal length. He is currently recording a new batch of songs. But he's still forced to compromise, and not just on his lyrics. On a blackboard outside his office the party committee of his new troupe has written its latest slogan in pink, yellow and blue chalk: RESOLUTELY RE-EDUCATE IN THE BATTLE AGAINST SPLITTISM. Two years ago, after he had been photographed for the Legacy cover, the leaders of his new work unit made him shave his beard. It was too religious-looking, they said. When you're a voice of the Uighurs, you've got to stay very low-key.
|
|
|
advertisement
|
|
