230: Aq Beliq (White Fish), by the London Uyghur Ensemble

London Uyghur Ensemble (East Turkestan/Kyrgyzstan/United Kingdom)
Aq Beliq (White Fish) (2009)
13 tracks, 50 minutes
Nowhere to listen or download online, I’m afraid, but you can buy the album from the London Uyghur Ensemble website, or take a listen to the band together with assorted clips of Uyghur music on their YouTube channel.

What I really hold close to my heart about the London Uyghur Ensemble is what it represents in terms of the city in which it resides.

The Ensemble itself is rather a nebulous thing, with members coming and going often (hey, even yours truly was once a member, playing the dap frame drum and occasionally the long-necked tämbur lute). At the time of recording, though, the ensemble was a quartet of Rahima Mahmut on vocals, Nizamidin Sametov on the tämbur, Rachel Harris on the dutar (another long-necked lute, but with silk strings instead of steel) and Stephen Jones (who we’ve met before) on the ghijak spike-fiddle. Of those four, there are members from East Turkestan, Kyrgyzstan and the UK; they’re university lecturers, writers, translators and bricklayers. They may be amateurs in the strictest sense, but these are all people for whom the music of the Uyghurs is incredibly dear, whether in terms of personal heritage, familial or friendship ties or just an intense personal interest. As such, their performance is almost that of a professional ensemble, and they must surely be one of the top Uyghur ensembles in Europe.

But, as I said, it’s what the LUE represents that I especially love. London is such a huge place, with an unimaginably large population. Seriously, if you shook hands with one Londoner every second without stopping, it would take you 101 days to meet them all. London is also home to people of every single nationality in the world. In this environment, anyone, from anywhere in the world, can find a community to be part of in London. When you think of the Uyghurs, a people that are little known in the UK, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people of what is currently part of China, the fact that a professional-standard musical ensemble can coalesce is absolutely beautiful, and I can’t think of many other places than London that it would be possible. But it’s not just the ensemble. The Uyghur community in London, small as it may be, is nevertheless culturally active. One of the most exciting, humbling and confusing afternoons in my time in London was being invited to attend a meshrep, a traditional community meeting where there is food and music, but also notices, prayer, discussions and even a miniature court of peers. The fact that these people from all walks of life – teachers, construction workers, bouncers, shop workers and chefs – used to conducting their daily life in (mostly) English or Russian can get together regularly with people of the same heritage, to speak Uyghur and eat Uyghur food and listen to Uyghur music – and dance to it in the traditional way – is one of the magical things about London. And I have little doubt that similar gatherings happen involving people from their own respective communities from all over the world every single day in this big, beautiful city. When I listen to the London Uyghur Ensemble, that is what I think about.

⁂

Like the last time I talked about Uyghur music, I need to bring (or keep) to your attention the plight that the Uyghur people face in their homeland of East Turkestan – known by China as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Estimates say that over two million people – mostly Uyghurs, but also from other minority ethnic groups – are detained in the disgustingly euphemistically-named ‘re-education camps.’ These are concentration camps, and people kept there are usually held without charge or explanation, and quite often they simply ‘disappear’ there, with no word to their families until somehow (months, years or never) a rumour leaks out about their whereabouts. The people in these camps are political activists and scholars, but they’re also musicians, poets, comedians, sportspeople, writers and actors. Some never make it out again. This is an attempted cultural extermination of the Uyghur by the Chinese government and the world should not only be outraged, but should be following that with action to change this wrong. If you are interested in learning more about this, have a look at the links below:

• The CESS Blog - Securitisation and Mass Detentions in Xinjiang
• The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, a blog by Daniel Byler
• BBC - China's hidden camps: What's happened to the vanished Uighurs of Xinjiang?
• Human Rights Watch - “Eradicating Ideological Viruses”: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims

Thank you to Rachel Harris for the links and advice.