When Memory Becomes Resistance: CPL Fellow Reflects on a Session with a Uyghur Human Rights Activist

I walked into this session thinking I knew enough about the world, about justice, inequality, and human rights. But Harvard has a way of humbling you. It reminds you how much you still must learn. Until that day, I didn’t know of the Uyghur people, their rich history, their stolen laughter, or the quiet courage that now defines their existence. I didn’t know Xinjiang, renamed “New Frontier”, was once East Turkistan, a homeland of music, prayer, and community before it became a place of grief and survival.

Sayid Abdull MC/MPA 2024, a Gleitsman and Social Innovation and Change Initiative (SICI) fellowship alum, stood before us not as a victim, but as a vessel of memory. Through the My Uyghur Origin initiative, he carries the stories of those silenced, weaving them into the world’s conscience. His work collects testimonies, songs, recipes, and fragments of lives erased from their land, not as a historian, but as a son preserving the last whispers of his people.

Listening to him, I was struck by the question we seldom ask: Who takes care of the activists? The ones who give until there’s nothing left, who bleed truth, who grieve loudly for a world that looks away. Sayid’s strength is not in how loudly he speaks, but in how he refuses to stop remembering. His work reminds us that memory itself is a form of defiance, that when we remember, we resist erasure.