Liao Yiwu
Liao Yiwu is a dissident Chinese poet, novelist, and screenwriter who miraculously escaped from China to Berlin in July of this year. His epic poem, Massacre was published in 1989. Condemning the killings in Tiananmen Square, it landed him in prison for four years. His latest book, The Corpse Walker is a collection of twenty-seven interviews which are the author’s reconstructed conversations with the men and women of a China most people don’t see.
At the Sydney Writers’ Festival back in May I sat in a session called The Dangers of What we Think we Know. It was about collective historical memory and was to feature Téa Obreht and Liao Yiwu but Liao Yiwu wasn’t there because he was not allowed to leave China. It was the seventeenth time he had applied for a permit to leave and the first time in Sydney Writers’ Festival history that a writer had been prevented from attending.
A PEN empty chair marked the author’s place and convenor Miriam Cosic read aloud the heartbreaking letter he wrote to the festival’s Artistic Director Chip Rolley and to publisher, Michael Heyward at Text.
Part of the letter read: “The heart cannot be imprisoned. The heart will break through layers and layers of barriers, flying higher and higher in the sky. Therefore, at the opening of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, my heart, eager as it is, has crossed the ocean and landed in Australia to mingle with writers from around the world.”
Although it was interesting enough listening to Obreht, I couldn’t stop thinking about that letter because the elephant in the room for that entire session was Liao Yiwu’s absence and what it signified.
The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu
That’s why it was such a special experience to see the author last night at Belvoir St. Standing next to a tree on the set of As You Like It which Chip Rolley said was quite apt as here we all were in the ‘garden’, Liao Yiwu recited his poem Requiem 1989 and played music, a lamentation, on his Chinese flute. He also played a Tibetan singing bowl — it sounded like bells and has a remarkable range — in accompaniment to the recitation of an excerpt from his poem Massacre. I read later that these instruments were among the few possessions he took with him when he left China in secret, not being able to tell anyone of his plan. He also took two of his most valued books, The Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian and the I Ching. We were given handouts of translated versions of the poems but for those of us who didn’t understand Chinese, we heard anguish and sadness and pain.
Through a gifted interpreter, the author spoke about having to give up everything including his friends and family in order to be able to continue to write because without writing his life has no significance. He feels it is his mission to recount what happened, to ‘bear witness’.
When asked who he was as a writer, as a person, prior to 1989, he said he was a rebel and like many other writers at the time, full of hope and inspiration. He read a lot of Western literature and particularly loved Ginsberg’s Howl. Then came ‘the nightmare’ of Tiananmen Square and he says that nightmare continues to this day. He wrote his poem Massacre and got arrested.
Speaking about his dehumanising time in prison with murderers, hustlers and other hardened criminals, he said that after some time and in order to survive, he had to become ‘one of them.’ He endured a lot of physical torture and said that he turned into a wolf, a dog, and that it was only through writing that he was able to transform himself back into a human being.
I really wished I understood Chinese because those who did laughed a lot and I felt that Liao Yiwu’s great sense of humour was mostly ‘lost in translation’, humour being almost impossible to transport across languages.
Still, we got some of the jokes and the part where he ‘stuck it to the West’ when speaking about how deluded some people are about how great things are in China. Prosperity might exist for a privileged few but not for those he writes about, namely most people, ‘on the bottom rung of society’ where he also sees himself.
An audience member asked how he sees himself now — as an exile, as a migrant, something else? Liao Yiwu said he doesn’t know — yet. We saw immense courage, great dignity and inspirational spirit.
Grateful to Liao Yiwu, Sydney Writers’ Festival and Text publishing.
There are a lot of great articles and interviews with Liao Yiwu. I’ve posted a few.
From The New Yorker: Liao Yiwu Unbound http://tinyurl.com/3ty5d7n
From Der Spiegel: Chinese Dissident Exposes Prison Brutality http://tinyurl.com/7b5zfpf
From the Paris Review: Excerpt from Voices from the Bottom Rung of Society
© Paula Grunseit 2011
