The New Dominion

About two months ago I heard through the Mutant Palm that a certain manga had adopted a female Uyghur character to portray the heartwarming role of the “terrorist with a heart,” simultaneously struggling against an anime-esque evil world government and maintaining her ultimately humanitarian, let-there-be-no-loss-of-life values. I was fascinated about the possibilities involved when taking Uyghurs out of their most traditional depictions and presenting them in an unconventional format to an unconventional audience, in the previous case, putting Uyghurs in manga aimed at teens in Japan. In the spaces between “dancing Uyghurs,” “terrorist Uyghurs,” and “quasi-Tibetan Uyghurs” (for now, I’m going to leave out discussion and depictions of Uyghurs in academic material which I do not consider at this point, unfortunately, a popular or widespread form of media), what can people with creative license, such as artists and writers, come up with? Today, while browsing the internet I found another interesting answer to this question. Well, sort of.

KABOOM!

With only a piece of chapter 1 available for perusal (in contrast to the availability of the entire manga mentioned in the above-linked entry), one would imagine that we could piece together little about the role Uyghurs play and the greater significance of their depiction in Adrian D’Hage’s thrillingly titled “The Beijing Conspiracy.” But to put it frankly, I feel that even with this tiny sample we can construct a pretty clear idea why Uyghurs are present in the plotline. Without further ado:

The video being viewed was grainy, but the features of sixty-year-old Dr Khalid Kadeer were clear enough. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology, al-Qaeda had grown another monstrous head, and the terrorist mastermind was calm and chillingly confident. Unlike his thinner and more familiar colleague, Osama bin Laden, the Muslim Uighur from the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in western China was powerfully built. He was tall and his demeanor was menacing. His dark, oval face was etched with the lines of a lifelong Islamic struggle against the West and the Han Chinese, and his narrow, hooded eyes were black and coldly calculating. An elegantly embroidered doppa, the traditional headgear of his Uighur people, covered his fine, grey hair.

Woah! Who is this guy, are there more of him, and if so, when’s the next airplane outta Xinjiang?! While I have to express sympathy for a Clancy-type thriller writer doing everything and anything he can to deliver to his fans, as a Xinjiang enthusiast I can’t help but be tsunami-ed away by a depiction of Uyghurs that would make even the most expert doublethinker at Urumqi’s propaganda bureau raise an eyebrow. Where can I begin? In the midst of a fierce, multi-faceted battle to establish the role of Uyghurs in the international terrorism network, in D’Hage’s fictional world there’s no such ambiguity with a doppa-sporting Uyghur as bin Laden’s successor. And not just any Uyghur, mind you, an educated one, with a background in microbiology from our very own Harvard. A very dangerous, educated Uyghur in the eyes of the novel’s dashing CIA hero, Curtis O’Connor.

Even the name has a tinge of danger and intrigue – Kadeer… where have I heard that name before? I wouldn’t want to implicate the author’s creativeness by claiming he co-opted the name from a certain Uyghur leader in exile, yet interestingly enough, beyond the sameness of the name are the idiosyncrasies that have been preserved in the author’s fiction: Kadeer is actually the Chinese pinyin version of a Uyghur surname that would be best rendered as “Qadir,” and so the unavoidable conclusion is that the diligent researcher and writer of the novel did have a certain personality in mind when naming his sinister villain. However, beyond the name there fortunately seem to be no further similarities between the mad microbiologist and his namesake (“…or are there?,” interjects Wang Lequan).

While obviously there’s no real reason to heavily scrutinize D’Hage’s actions since, as with the manga, the writer is approaching Uyghurs with a set of assumptions, motives, and background knowledge entirely separate from a Xinjiang watcher like myself, but it is worthwhile to note that a significant number of people will be introduced to Uyghurs for the first time through D’Hage’s paperback novel. Specifically, a significant number of Australians, since I found the book through Penguin Australia and I can’t seem to find any evidence of the book’s availability on non-Austrlian bookshelves save for an audiobook on amazon.com for the low, low price of $96.00. Anyways, I think its fair enough to say that in this instance the Uyghurs just happened to become creative fodder for an author writing a thriller novel on a hot current-events topic for an audience that, like the Uyghurs, belong to a nationality whose role in the global war on terror is marginal and ambiguous. Just as the Uyghurs are hard to map onto the shady, shifty specter of international “Islamic extremism,” so too are the Australians hard to map onto the global forces of justice and democracy. I realize now that I think about it that Australia, unlike America, Russia, and China, and a few European nations hasn’t experienced any domestic catastrophes to weave them into the current good-vs.-evil narrative dominating international relations. Through his novel, I suppose, D’Hage is putting some folks skulking at the sidelines into the action. Vicariously.

Well, the fictional good guys are Americans in the novel, and it would be unbalanced to write a “This is what an Australian author thinks about Uyghurs” post without also throwing in a little “this is what an Australian author thinks about Americans” into the mix.

As the video drew towards to its conclusion, President Harrison fidgeted with his expensive gold pen. He’d not long returned from his ranch on the banks of the Bitterroot River in Montana, and it was clear that he would rather be back there. Instead he was being forced to sit through a video of threats from some two-bit Muslim terrorist. Harrison’s square face was tanned and his jaw was set stubbornly. The constant criticisms levelled at his Administration for favouring the rich, instead of looking after the poor and an increasingly cashstrapped Middle America, hadn’t bothered him in the least – but the disaster that was Iraq and the war on terror was taking its toll. His once dark hair was now noticeably grey. President Harrison glared at the figure on the screen.

D’Hage’s novel is set before the Beijing Olympics. I wonder who President Denver Harrison represents?