16 November, 2005
My father kept a vaulted conch
Last night, at my boss’s kind invitation, I was lucky enough to be at the Poet in the City event, hosted by Amnesty International. This spotlighted refugee, exiled and imprisoned poets Choman Hardi, Yang Lian and Jack Mapange respectively. I really enjoyed the poems chosen by the three poets, particularly Jack Mapange who spoke with a warm and quite blazé attitude to his four year imprisonment without charge or trial. “They would only let us shower when we stunk,” he said. “Everyday we took delight in making sure we stunk as much as possible. If you die in there,” he said gravely, “they win. You have to live.”
But I was really taken with Hardi’s poems. They are so very simple and yet say so much, using the far too often ignored principle of “show don’t tell” to maximum effect. Her verse is conversational, bare even, and yet so sharply evocative and emotive by the images she chooses to string perfectly together. There’s also an undeniably feminine voice to her writing, which I thought interesting for a modern poet, in a time where gender seems to be less and less apparent in a written piece. Afterwards I bought a copy of her collection “Life for us”, and had the chance to meet her. We didn’t talk much sadly – just general “I loved such and such” and her thanks for the compliment. It’s difficult in those situations to say much if you’re encountering their work for the first time. But it was quite refreshing to encounter the work of a successful (and living!) writer that encouraged and inspired me, rather than be frustrated and irritated with just another talentless and conceited literati hack.
One other piece I was instantly struck by was the poem “June”, by imprisoned Chinese poet Shi Tao. It describes the aftermath of the Tian An Men Square massacre in June 1989, written only last year. What was unusual about the effect the poem had, was that I heard it first in the original Chinese, read by Yang Lian. There was something about the sound of words – harsh, short and guttural – that betrayed this to be both a poem, and a poem of suffering. Peter Forbes read a translation afterwards:
June
My whole life
Will never get past “June”
June, when my heart died
When my poetry died
When my lover
Died in a pool of abandoned blood
June, the scorching sun burns open my skin
Revealing the true nature of my wound
June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea
Toward another place to hibernate
June, the earth changes shape, the river falls silent
Piled up letters unable to be delivered to the dead
9 June 2004
The whole evening – not just the poems, nor meeting their authors afterwards, nor the quite emotive look at the details of human rights, nor even the sheer volume of vol-au-vents and finger food I polished off – but the whole debate at both the table and in my own head of what made a written piece valid, what made a good poem, and the very fact that I was in a room with people discussing the very things I have set each and every meaningful goal of my life to, their own passion quite apparent, was a much needed breath of life into my slowly dulling lungs.
Sometimes, I really like my job, but it only ever seems to be after I leave the office for the day.
