with Merdan Eheteli and Vanessa Frangville (ULB/ EASt)

In collaboration with The Asian Literary Festival

EASt joins the Asian Literary Festival Brussels 2025! EASt invited Uyghur poet Merdan Eheteli to share his experience on writing and the experience of migration.

Welcome to "Diaspora Diaries," a conversation that explores how the experience of migration, displacement, and living between worlds shapes contemporary literary voices. Today, we gather three remarkable writers whose works illuminate the complex realities of diaspora—not merely as geographical displacement, but as a profound transformation of identity, language, and belonging.

The migrant writer occupies a unique position in contemporary literature, serving as both witness and translator of experiences that exist at the intersection of cultures. These writers don't simply tell stories of leaving and arriving; they excavate the emotional archaeology of displacement, examining how migration reshapes memory, language, and the very act of storytelling itself.

Learn more about the Festival: https://brussels.theasianliteraryfestival.com

Merdan Ehetli, whose poetry has been featured in Asymptote Journal as their first Uyghur language work, brings the voice of a community in exile to contemporary literature. His work emerges from the displacement experienced by the Uyghur people, transforming personal and collective trauma into poetry that speaks to universal themes of oppression and resilience. His poem "Common Night" uses imagery of "pig iron" poured into spines and "hellfruit," creating a language for experiences that exist beyond conventional expression. Ehet'éli's migration story is inseparable from his people's struggle for cultural survival, making his voice essential to understanding how political exile shapes artistic expression.

Vanessa Frangville is the coordinator of EASt, research Centre on East Asia and professor in China Studies at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Currently, her research interests include cultural and artistic expressions of self and collective belonging in the Uyghur diaspora in Europe and North America since 2016; artistic and scientific migration from the Uyghur region after the 1980s; and Uyghur literature and cinema from the 1990s to today. In 2022, she published the first anthology of Uyghur literature translated into French (with Mukaddas Mijit) in which Merdan Eheteli's poems are also featured.

Saturday 4th October 2025, from 11:15 am until 12:15 pm

Galerie Bortier
Rue de la Madeleine 55
1000 Bruxelles

Free entrance

Contact : east@ulb.be