On September 24, 2020, Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, Twelve Gates Arts, and CAIR-Philadelphia hosted The Contest in Context: Uyghur and Urdu Poetry Reading and Discussion featuring poets Tahir Hamut Izgil and Abdul Manan Bhat and translators Joshua L. Freeman and Partha P. Chakrabartty.
At a time when their homelands are engulfed in crisis, two poets, one from the Uyghur region, the other from Kashmir, give voice to what it means to survive anguish and find a way to live, love, dream, and hope. Tahir Hamut Izgil and Abdul Manan Bhat’s struggles inflect their voices: their lines are haunted by loss, and carry the bewilderments and unmoorings of being forced to leave home. Yet their poems also contain hope, and point to the imaginative and creative resources we can marshall to contend with our world.
