For an exiled poet, an apricot tree in London is a way of remembering his father and his youth in East Turkestan (Ch. Xinjiang).
by Aziz Isa Elkun*
*Edited by Ruth Ingram
One of my strongest childhood memories was following my father around our family orchard and closely watching him as he tended the trees. I helped him plant apricots from the age of six or seven.
Our family owned a large tract of land in Xinjiang (also known as East Turkestan) north of the Tarim River, (south of Shayar County), the principal water source of the Tarim Basin that sweeps from the Karakoram Mountains in the West across the northern edge of the Taklimakan Desert to Lop Nur in the East.
My father had set his heart on growing a family orchard. I remember there being no water for the small apricot saplings after we planted them and I would follow my father, carrying a little bucket to bring water from the lake in the village to help the apricot and other trees grow.
I learned how to plant, graft, and look after fruit trees. We had one of the largest and most unique orchards in our neighbourhood. Everyone admired my father’s dedication as he struggled to grow fruit trees in the dry desert climate.
He collected fruit trees for our garden from far and wide; even as far as Kucha, 65 kilometers to the north, and brought them home to grow. We had fig, pomegranate, apricot, pear, apple, peach, and hundred-meter-long vine trellises.
One summer, when I returned from my secondary boarding school I would help my father in the orchard. I remember one particular day grafting an apricot tree with three different kinds of fruit: apple, pear, and plum. They all took successfully giving a harvest the following year of three different types of fruit on the single apricot branch. I earned notoriety in my village for this feat of horticultural ingenuity.
My father devoted his entire life to being a village doctor but threw his energies into his hobby of growing trees in his spare time.
But the story of our family orchard has a tragic ending. My beloved father passed away on 4th of November 2017, and since that time, the Chinese state has blocked all contact with my family. On 15th April 2019, I discovered on Google Earth that my father’s tomb and the graveyard it was in had been destroyed. My father had lain in his grave for a mere 623 days. The Chinese government claimed this destruction was to modernize us, but their true aim was to destroy the Uyghur ethnic, cultural, and religious identity.
I felt as if my father’s body had been brutally wrenched from its resting place in our ancestral land.
After discovering the fate of my father’s tomb, I immediately checked whether our family house was still intact. Our home it seemed still existed, but the orchard had vanished. I could trace the destruction by comparing Google Earth images over the previous 15 years.
As I have grown older, my hobby has mirrored that of my father. I have spent 24 of my 26 years in exile in London. A couple of years ago, we moved as a family into a pleasant house with an attractive garden in which I started to create my own Uyghur-style (Central Asian) orchard. I have handpicked every plant and tree to evoke memories of my childhood and help me to reconnect with my lost homeland and restore a sense of belonging.
Two years ago, I grew a melon in the garden. The plant I tended lovingly in the greenhouse produced three melons all of which we ate in early September. They were sweet and juicy and brought back memories of the time I used to spend fertilizing and watering our melon fields with my grandfather in the early 1980s. A distant memory perhaps, but it brings me joy and hope.
Three years ago, I ordered an apricot tree online. It was a one-meter tall, minute specimen when I opened the box. But this year it has fully grown, and after a stunning display of Spring blossom, many tiny apricots have begun to grow.
Today, I picked one of its ruddy-orange fruits; it was sweet and juicy. This was the first time I had tasted an apricot that I had grown in my North London home.
I remember spotting a tall banana tree once in Brixton’s Brockwell park and guessing that the owner must have originated from somewhere in the Caribbean. I couldn’t at first understand why they would grow such a large banana tree in front of their house but as the years pass and I become increasingly homesick for my mother who I will never see again and a land that has been taken from me, I have begun to understand that exiles will always have a strong sense of melancholy for the land of their birth. They will never be able to shake off the identity that formed them from childhood; an identity that will cling to them until the day they die.
Since 2017, the Uyghur people in our homeland of East Turkestan or Uyghurstan (occupied since 1949 by China and renamed the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 1955), have been experiencing a slow and steady cultural and ethnic genocide carried out by Beijing; a genocide that more than ten Western Parliaments have agreed is being inflicted on my people at the hands of the Chinese state.
While the world looks on and exiled Uyghurs mourn the loss of their homeland and their families, I return to apricots; to the burnished red and orange fruit in my exile garden that taste almost as sweet as they might at the edge of the vast Taklimakan Desert, more than 6,000 kilometers from my new home; where my father’s orchard once flourished, and as a wild teenager I once performed a bizarre experiment on one of his beloved trees.
And, every year, when the apricot tree blooms, I will feel both excited at the approach of Spring but sad and filled with longing not only for my homeland, but especially for my beloved widowed mother who I might never see again.
I will end my story of apricots here with the poem I wrote in 2021, dedicated to my mother:
“You Did Not Return…”
My mother said:
“You will come back
When the apricot trees start to blossom
When the birds sing their spring songs.
But you didn’t come back
Instead, all the swallows have returned….”
My father said:
“You will come back
When autumn leaves fall….”
But demons didn’t wait until that day.
In the end, he fell.
My father has merged into the leaves.
My anchor has disappeared.
But still, I have not yet returned.
Aziz Isa Elkun was born in East Turkistan (Uyghur Autonomous Region, China). He spent his childhood in Shahyar county, which is located close to the Tarim River on the northern edge of the world’s second largest desert, the Taklamakan Desert.
He graduated from Xinjiang University majoring in Chinese and Russian languages. He has been living in London since 2001. He studied at Birkbeck University in London. He has published many poems, stories, and research articles in both Uyghur language and English. In 2012, he published his first book “Journey from Danube River to the Orkhun Valley” in Uyghur language. He is a research affiliate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
