INTERVIEWER
It’s been almost a decade since your visit to Xinjiang in western China, on which you based your piece Alim Has a Problem. How have you responded to the news that has emerged bit by bit over the last eighteen months concerning the CCP’s crackdown on the Uyghur population? Has the extent of it come as a shock or were there signs that something like this could happen when you visited?
JACOB
I was shocked and dismayed, certainly, by the extent and severity of what has been happening. But I’m not sure I was surprised. There were signs that this, or something like this, could happen. When I visited Xinjiang, the established prison and laogai [work camp] systems were well known to be brutal, opaque and unjust. There were already rumours about Uyghur men being separated from their families. There had been riots and spree killings in Xinjiang, and a couple of very well publicised spree killings in Eastern China. Han businesses in Xinjiang had been supplied with batons, shields and helmets. Han tourists warned me to be wary of the ‘Taliban’. There were roadblocks and armoured police constructions all over the territory. And of course there was the ‘thought work’ element (news, propaganda, public education). Xinjiang news blackouts were common. Certain search terms would be suddenly forbidden. Experiments with the Internet – including cutting off the entire province, at one point – were already being carried out. My passport and visa was registered wherever I went; I was once briefly detained by the police; while my own movements were limited, it was also clear to me at times that I was staying in places in which Uyghurs would not be permitted to stay. Uyghur districts were being pulled down. Chinese-style developments were being built. The atmosphere in places like Kashgar and Kuche was frosty. As one Uyghur taxi driver told me, ‘They [the Han] are afraid of us’.
One other thing: the question of ‘shock’ includes trying to take in the sheer scale of the crimes being committed. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the extent of the detainment, torture, psychological battery, slave labour. Even the physical footprint, in terms of construction, is extraordinary. But mass mobilisations are not unusual in modern Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party, which rules the country, is an extraordinary entity that has an almost unfettered capacity to exercise power. For this reason, extraordinary things happen in China. Consider the overwhelming extent of the COVID-19 suppression measures: autocratic policing, thought work, spectacular project management (remember the three-day hospital?) and technology-driven mass surveillance. Some people find a lot to admire in the CCP’s approach to COVID. But on the flip side of this unrestrained exercise of power is Xinjiang. The erasure of the non-Han peoples of Xinjiang demonstrates, by sad example, the chauvinism inherent to the CCP’s conception of the Chinese state.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think we in the UK and in Western countries more generally can do to help those in Xinjiang? There are multiple tensions within our foreign policy: between an opposition to Islamic extremism (enthusiastic support of its main sponsor, Saudi Arabia, being glossed over) and wanting to ‘stand up to China’ which represents its policies as part of the self-same War on Terror; between the value of closer commercial ties with China and the compromises we are willing to make for that market access. How do you see these issues resolving themselves in the coming years?
JACOB
You make some good points about the tensions apparent in UK foreign policy, but I’m afraid I’m not well placed to make geopolitical predictions here. My focus as a writer tends to be somewhat abstract: I think about cultural conflict and thought work – that is, the partisan control of information and construction of consensus, through education or coercion. As such (and in answer to your first question), I feel passionately that the fact and scale of the abuses should not be censored, denied, downplayed or whatabouted out of significance. Testimony of survivors must be recorded and disseminated. One resource I recommend is the Xinjiang Documentation Project, provided by the University of British Columbia. The erasure (or domestication) of minority languages, customs and history is central to the execution of the PRC’s vision for Xinjiang’s future. The preservation of the Uyghur and other minority languages and promotion of their literature and culture is therefore also a valid means of resistance – and one that need not depend on (historically unreliable) foreign office action.
In practical terms, money talks. This Australian Strategic Policy Institute report details eighty-three companies that make use of forced labour from Xinjiang. These very large, very well-known companies are not immune to consumer pressure. Lastly, there are multiple grass-roots movements advocating (for example) for Uyghurs. If you feel passionate about helping, donate to them.
INTERVIEWER
Thanks Jacob – it’s really helpful to know about some of the channels that are addressing the repressions in Xinjiang in a concrete way. I want to pick up another aspect of your answer, in which you said your focus as a writer is somewhat abstract. As a characterisation it’s surprising – Alim Has a Problem strikes me as highly attuned to the specifics of place, history and especially character, the character of Alim. When you’re conceiving and writing a piece like this, what comes first: ‘thought work’ and the desire to address social and political questions, or the immediacy of first-hand experience? How do you integrate the two?
Regarding your second question: social and political questions frequently come pre-integrated into first-hand experience, to the point where it becomes necessary to evaluate the socio-political frames of any perceived phenomena before even considering the possibility of first-hand experience. In fact, I cycle between attempting to position myself and the subjects that interest me within a maelstrom of conflicting historical narratives, cultural movements, moral obligations and economic urgencies, and attempting to escape them entirely in an effort to find some kind of inner calm – retreating, frequently, into nostalgia and escapism. Writing is a consequence and product of this struggle. I write to develop my ideas. I write to escape them.
This perspective on writing does not distinguish between creative nonfiction, critical writing and fiction. In the case of Alim Has a Problem, I was arrested by the memory of the man himself, and of the strangeness of those days in Turpan, and of the heat, the sky, the city and stark landscape. It did seem important to include some element of that nostalgia in order to make the piece’s political message resonate; but ultimately the structure was determined less by rhetorical formula than by the abovementioned dialectic of engagement and flight.
INTERVIEWER
As well as for writing, we could say engagement and flight are motivators for travel – going away from home in order temporarily to immerse oneself somewhere else. The risk when you write about travel is, I suppose, the risk of not enough or the wrong kind of engagement with a place. I think this is one source of colonial attitudes in some travel writing. How do you mitigate against this risk? Or does a foreign perspective present benefits that a local one might lack?
JACOB
I have read very little travel writing – and am reticent to call myself a travel writer – because I have historically suffered from the preconception (based on my own personal blend of colonial prejudice and anxiety) that it is uniformly written by some unbearable character who got there first.
But to answer your question – to a travel writer, I might say: develop an awareness of your position within the socio-economic reality of our post- and neo-colonial present; avoid lazy ethnocentrism; be humble. But these prescriptions raise further questions: how do you demonstrate self-awareness without indulging in navel-gazing, apologies or sermonising? How do you prevent ethnorelativism from devolving into lazy moral relativism? How do you balance humility with the confidence necessary to engage critically with the world, wherever in the world you happen to be? Because the supposition made above, about the value of outsider perspectives, is absolutely undeniable. We would not demand visitors to this country to acquiesce passively to its injustices.
I may not feel comfortable calling myself a travel writer, but I believe that what travel writing faces head on, all writing must grapple with eventually: failing to address injustice (in all its myriad forms) will expose any writer to valid criticism, most often due to objectionable representation. I’ve tried to take this lesson into my fiction.
INTERVIEWER
I’m intrigued by the argument that all writing must grapple with injustice. It makes me think about James Baldwin’s criticism of protest novels: that their concern with pointing out injustice blinds them to the full reality of a situation, meaning that what they have to say as a result is shallow moralism: ‘This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves [for tolerating it]!’ In fact, I feel its absence (or at least subduing) often makes for more powerful writing. Take Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, which despite being written during a far less tolerant period for homosexuality, presents homophobia not as a social ill but only as a motivating factor (unmentioned by name) in personal decisions: the narrator abandons his male lover for his fiancé because he wants be a ‘real man’; she leaves him in disgust when she finds out he is queer.
I suppose my concern is this: that there are better ways of exposing and solving injustices than through literature. Pamphleteering, campaigning, protest, and activism are all much more effective than writing essays and stories. I worry that the elevation of injustice is a trick writers play to convince themselves they are doing something ethical by sitting alone at a desk for hours turning sentences around. This can end up being a trap, in which the writer no longer concerns herself with full human beings, but just with those who can be identified as victims of some social or political ill, and then only with what concerns the victimhood of such people. What I value about the depiction of homosexuality in Giovanni’s Room comes from the fact that it does not place the injustice of society’s homophobia centre stage. We see the characters in a fuller light, as flawed, often objectionable human beings, not just victims. Many masterpieces never address injustice at all: War and Peace, Borges’s Fictions, The Odyssey etc. I find this hopeful. It would be unbearable if injustice was the sole or primary fact of human life. But these books show there is far more. I think Alim Has a Problem shows that too. When I think of Alim, I think of him as a drinker, a proud man, a slightly ineffectual rebel.
I wonder what you think about the opposite possibility to what you said above: the possibility of writing being great without ever addressing injustice. And on a more moderate note, what you think of the argument that to be great, writing must look past injustice as a shallow or surface-level part of life, towards more idiosyncratic truths, which news cameras and campaigners cannot unearth.
JACOB
Wow, what a long question! I don’t think I can address everything in it, but I get the impression that you are advocating for a version of writing – or any art – that is somehow separate from the socioeconomic or political background in which it arose. I sympathise. I feel very keenly the desire to believe in art for art’s sake, as an entity that somehow transcends the economically compromised reality of its production. However, it is important to remember that the belief in art that transcends politics is itself a cultivated (bourgeois) attitude, and to the extent that it encourages the consumption of a particular type of writing or art, it is not socioeconomically disinterested. It is a type of consumer taste.
Also, you cannot ignore the perspective of the reader. It’s possible to hold lofty ideals about transcendent art, and indeed aim to produce transcendent writing, but that writing won’t count as transcendent until your readers have agreed that it is. When I write, and read what I’ve written, I might think to myself, wow, what a great example of transcendent art, aloof of the fallen material world. Then a sympathetic reader – a relative or friend – might read it and say something like, Jacob is writing about his life. And, grateful as I am, this puts me out a little. Because I can’t make them read the way I want them to read. Then I might put my writing on the Internet for strangers to read, at which point there is no reason for me to assume people aren’t saying, what is this English guy talking about and why should I care?
Certain established writers get their work elevated above economics and its attendant injustices. Big-ticket publishing, with its established ways of grooming the readership, cushions certain authors lucky enough to be deemed canonical. For the rest of us, trying to make our names on the Internet, it is necessary to state who we are and where we stand in order to have a chance of being read at all, let alone the way we want to be read.
So I want to address your point about writers engaging with issues only to assuage their own guilt for writing. Personally, I feel guilty about a lot of things – but never about writing. That kind of guilt is for successful people, who’ve already got what they want (maybe one day, once I’ve established myself as a writer, I’ll take some time out to feel really guilty about it). But what I do feel right now about writing is anxiety. Perhaps other early-career writers feel the same way: when people make the mistake of addressing injustice badly (for instance, in terms as you say of shallow moralism), it might be a product of the anxious need to be relevant, to be heard amid a cacophony of ideas, and to be validated as a moral and economic agent.
Jacob Rollinson was interviewed by Mathis Clément. Jacob’s novella Late King in Yellow Woods will be published by Muscaliet Press in June 2021. Click here to read his piece Alim Has a Problem.
