Ahmatjan Osman

Ahmatjan Osman (; born 1964), also spelled Ekhmetjan, Exmetjan or Ahmetcan, is a Uyghur poet and Uyghur independence activist who writes in both Uyghur and Arabic. A leader of the Uyghur New Poetry (gungga) movement in the 1980s, he is considered one of the "foremost Uyghur poets of his generation". His use of free verse was influential in subsequent Uyghur poetics. His poetry has been described as trying to "capture the sacred and philosophical, the ineffable and the transient, in a wholly unique lyric voice".

In 1982, he went to Syria to study Arabic literature at Damascus University. He returned to Ürümqi in 1990. The action was condemned by international Arabic newspapers in London and Lebanon. His impeachment came after controversy regarding several public statements he made regarding Islamic faith in the Uyghur movement. In particular, Ahmatjan claimed that Oghuz Khagan, a legendary figure for various Turkic groups, should be considered an Uyghur prophet.

Despite his involvement in the Uyghur independence movement, Ahmatjan doesn't write poems explicitly about politics; his poems don't claim a particular political ideology.

Poetry

Influences Early on while in Xinjiang, Ahmatjan was influenced by Uyghur folk poetry sung to him by his mother, Uyghur poets of the previous generation like Qurban Barat and Boghda Abddulla, classical Uyghur poets like the eighteenth-century Sufi poet Shah Meshrep, and what he could find in Uyghur-language translations: collections of Tang poetry and Lao Zi, the contemporary Misty Poets writing in Mandarin, early nineteenth-century English and Russian Romantic poetry, and the essays of Vissarion Belinsky, the critic who originated of Russian social realism in the 1840s. According to critic Andre Naffis-Sahely, Adunis seemed to have a significant effect on Ahmatjan's work: "many of Ahmatjan's poems marry lyrical descriptions of the natural world with the human need to ask metaphysical questions" and he "seems to have adopted Adunis's use of the qit'a (or fragment) as one of the primary vessels for his poetics, juxtaposing images to create a vortex of sights, sounds, and ideas that always circle back to raw emotion".

The movement started a fierce debate around tradition and authenticity in Uyghur letters. Ahmatjan's work has also been anthologized in The Heart of Strangers, a collection of exile literature edited by Andre Naffis-Sahely.

Works

Poetry collections

Al-Suqût al-thânî (The Second Fall or The Second Stumble, Arabic), 1988 Roh Pesli (Moroccan Soul or Moroccan Spirit), 1996 Al-wasiy Ala Al-thaat (Guardian of the Self), 1997

Anthologies including Ahmatjan Osman's poems The Heart of Strangers, edited by Andre Naffis-Sahely, 2020