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".
Early life
He grew up in Ürümqi, the largest city in Xinjiang. His father Osman Bey, a coal mine manager, was imprisoned for six years during the Cultural Revolution for being "bourgeois capitalist". He spent years in and out of the hospital after his release and passed away from lung disease. His mother, Cemile Hanım, taught him Uyghur folk tales and took care of their family, which included Ahmatjan's two siblings. His father's death and his mother's singing folk poetry to him influenced his work. Ahmatjan started writing poetry when he was twelve or thirteen years old. His work was first "published" when three of his poems were read on air by a radio station in Ürümqi when he was thirteen. After going to a famous experimental high school in Ürümqi, he entered Xinjiang University's Faculty of Language and Literature in 1981. His first Uyghur-language poetry collection was published in 1982.
In 1982, he went to Syria to study Arabic literature at Damascus University. He completed bachelor's and master's degree in Arabic literature. He returned to Ürümqi in 1990. He struggled to find work due to his meetings with Uyghur separatists abroad. (In 1984, while studying in Syria, he secretly traveled to Istanbul and met Uyghur separatists. Later, he visited Uyghurs in Saudi Arabia, too.) He was even unable to get a job at Xinjiang University, his alma mater. For a year, he worked with Rebiya Kadeer, a Uyghur businesswoman and a senior figure in the Uyghur World Congress, in a company that restored ancient houses. He also worked as a journalist and continued to write. He made a splash with his controversial essays on literary theory.
Exile
In 1994, he was arrested by the Chinese government for two months and then fled to Syria. While in Syria, he reoriented himself toward Arabic poetry and occasionally contributed to Radio Free Asia's Uyghur service. While in Syria, he married a Syrian Alawite woman.
In 2004, he was deported from Syria under pressure from the Chinese government. Upon learning of his expulsion, 270 figures from the world of Arab poetry (including renowned Syrian poet Adunis) signed a petition and staged a demonstration against the deportation order. The action was condemned by international Arabic newspapers in London and Lebanon. He left for Turkey, where he spent a few days, but again was deported due to Chinese government pressure. He finally received asylum in Canada, where he has been living since October 2004. There, he found work at a grocery store, a coffee factory, and as a forklift operator in a warehouse.
Activism
Ahmatjan met Uyghur separatists in Turkey as a college student in Syria and visited more in Saudi Arabia later.
He served as the president of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile from November 2015 to October 2018, when he was dismissed for violating the East Turkistan Government in Exile's Constitution.
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. Later, he picked up modernists like Paul Celan, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud.