identity crossings and transcultural borders

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Identiy Crossings and Transultural Borders.

Yang LianÕs Choice to Live-in-between.

Sabrina Merolla

Culture is like wind and wind knows no bo undary o r center.

Mu Xin

Exile is a terrible trial that has always captured the curiosity and imagination of us all. It can be

considered as a universal truth, metaphorically experienced by everyone who feels somehow

displaced, thrown out of their home and childhood, catapulted into a world which is unknown,

therefore felt as hostile. Accompanying us throughout our existence there are both, a sort of 'ideal

sense of belonging' Ðthe feeling of communion and harmony- and a parallel and equally intense

sense of existential unease and displacement . In this obviously general view, the Òvalue of exileÓ

becomes the Òuniversal truth of exileÓ, which lies in this Òsense of lossÓ (Said, 1999: 89), which is

an integral part of every man's soul.

However, the word 'exile' recalls specific socio-political issues. Exile has historically been, the

result of a "rift between the State and an individual" (Defilippi, 2001:19), materialized as an actual

penalty imposed by the ruler to a disobedient subject, or as the escape abroad made by one or a

group persons who had well-founded fears of persecution. In the Classical World the exile was

already counted as one of the most fearsome punishments (McCarty, 1994). Seneca, Ovid, Cicero,

are just some of the well-known names in the long list of those who were forced to leave their

countries or were sent to the borders of the empire, for real or imagined crimes. If the reasons who

took them to experience exile always showed a wide variety of matrices, the very core of them has

always been strictly 'political'.



Under the international law, the protection of exiles, refugees and the like began to take an

organic form only after the Second World War, with the drafting of the Geneva Co nventio n o n the

Status o f Refugees (1951), a 'status' which was later on (1967) defined as the one of

any person who (É), owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons

of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political

opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or, owing to such fear, is

unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country (...)Ó.

Nowadays the status of political refugee in the International Community can therefore be claimed

by every individual or group of individuals, whose country of origin has failed to ensure the respect

of their basic rights and who no longer have any chance to claim the protection of these rights in

their state of nationality, since it is within the latter that they fear for their safety.

In the last decades the term 'refuge' has become topical again, not only after September, 11, or

because of the latest events in the Mediterranean Sea and around the world, but mainly in the

attempt to understand the very history of the Twentieth Century and, above all, in hope to find a

proper way to address the intellectual key issues that seem to be going to characterize the New

Millennium, through the analysis of this and other transcultural events.

The Twentieth Century has probably given the greatest hopes to mankind, though it cancelled its

ideals and illusions, too. Stigmatized as Òthe short centuryÓ by Eric J. Hobsbawm (Hobsbawm,

1996), the last century has been an age of absolutisms and revolutions and, for this very reason, it

has also been the age in which the Ôman without a NationÕ was born. Exiles, expatriates, migrants: it

seems last century's numerous phobias and genocidal intents have gendered unnumbered

persecutions and forced to flee an unprecedented quantity of persons at once. Yet, in the century of



global diasporas, refugees and stateless persons were able to carve out an important and relatively

new intellectual space, within the international intellectual configuration. Therefore, as it is

definitely clear how many great cultural and artistic works were created by refugees, exiles and

ŽmigrŽs since the end of World War II, today it seems perfectly reasonable to confute what Hanna

Arendt said sixty years ago -"a poet without a nation is inconceivable" (Arendt, 1943).

Even if it is true that in the last century there have been numerous exiles who definitively

renounced to their own art, giving up because of the distress caused to their souls by the condition

of refugee, it is equally true that there have been many intellectuals who have clearly chosen to take

advantage of their own unique perspective of displaced persons and, from the peculiar point of

view of an 'eradicated soul', have worked on themselves to create a new cross-cultural identity.

This conscious choice to transform their lives and their art in a perpetual wandering through the

boundaries of different cultures -the decision to live in-between (Vitali, 2003)- saved many of them

from alienation, by transforming their own lives and art in a mixed and free stream of cultural

perspectives and intellectual visions.

Many times in the last century it has been tried to gradually 'liberate' mankindÕs arts from the

unwritten duties of specific cultures, in the attempt to reach a new level of independence: a free

man, but also a 'universal mind', an 'eradicated' one. It is in this perspective that the postmodern

mood of many writers and artists has shown some similarities with the feelings, perceptions and

behaviors which characterize the artistic and intellectual worlds created by those exiles who

consciously chose to cultivate their transculturality. If the postmodern intellectual space often

expresses a firm commitment to maintain every belief in a liquid state (Bauman, 1991), preventing

it from freezing in a prio ri assumptions, then it does not differentiate itself from the creative mood

of many artists in exile. Moreover, this comparison possibly reveals the very roots of many

contemporary intellectuals' fascination for exile. Today we face a world which is constantly



dissipated, broken, divided into different complexities, mixed bodies, memories, languages, stories

and this vortex reveals the human inability to reach a rationalist synthesis of a knowledgeable

universe (Chambers, 1994); yet, through the fluid perspective of a 'borderline' identity, it actually

seems possible to welcome and grasp the deepest meaning of this world's entrophy and smoothly

realize its postmodern ideals.

In this perspective 'displacement' seems to become the world's fate, critical thinking is therefore

forced to abandon any claim to a fixed housing and to accept an unco mpleted way o f thinking

(ibidem:82). Now that it seems we cannot "travel critically" anymore, not as a wandering Ulysses

headed home, it is time to admit that we can only do as Abraham, moving away from our previous

house of knowledge, destined to never to go back (ibid.). Here are revealed the foundations of the

fascination of today's intellectual field for the word 'exile'. It resides in the 'hermeneutic value' that

contemporary scholars have started to attribute to the perspective of the exile, which resembles to

have all the advantages of wide-angle lens view, however, with an extension that, if excessive, may

distort reality. In the case of exiles and refugees, memory, pain and nostalgia are the dangerous

filters that twist this view, which is as vast as difficult to manage.

Yang Lian, who became a fleeing poet in 1989, perfectly represents those exiles who chose to

cultivate their cultural identity displacement and change it into the primary source of their artistic

inspiration. In fact his alienation of the first Nineties, combined with the constant attempt to give

voice to a timeless and spaceless perception of the world, made him develop his original style of

writing. Yang can transform the mere act of painting characters into an endless process of creation

of meaning, his writing is characterized by a profound sense of indetermination and paired with the

constant experimentation of a very personal symbolism. This way the poet can recreate the world

through art, as it usually happens with the postmodern mood.

Born in 1955, Yang Lian passed through the experiences of Cultural Revo lutio n (P.R.C.: 1966-76)



and the First Beijing Spring (1978-79). Casual experimentation has characterized Yang Lian's

poetry since the very start. Yang has always been a convinced individualist: he has constantly been

striving to forge, in that great alchemical laboratory that is made of his own body and psyche, the

key to understand the entire human world. There has always been a painful-but-necessary activity

going on inside this poetÕs inner world, being he constantly digging Ôas a wounded animal to find

his own soul', as the sense of the world hidden in it.

Nowadays Yang Lian is no longer an exile: he holds a New Zealandese passport and lives in

London. He has concluded the wandering life begun in 1989, boasts a Nobel Prize nomination

(2002) and the translation of his masterworks in more than ten languages; moreover, he finally

counts the publication of many of his works in Mainland China, where he regularly goes lecturing

and traveling. However, even if the author is not an ÔexileÕ anymore, he still loudly claims the

importance of the lessons learned through that experience, that took him to build the intellectual

space ( zhili de ko ngjian

) he inhabits today. This has actually been shaped as an

internatio nal space where no lo cal has the absolute priority.

During his exile, Yang has gone far behind the despair caused by Tiananmen Square massacre and

the impossibility to go back home, therefore becoming an international poet who lives a life

branded by liminality. It must be clear, however, that 'liminality', in Yang Lian's words, is not just

the path of a tightrope walker who moves from one point to another one in space, in the eternal

repetition of the same route: it is not without falling by either side of the bordering line that there is

the chance to enhance liminality. 'Being on the edge' does not mean to stay in balance between two

worlds without confronting them, on the contrary, it means to cross the border, scrutinizing

everything that is given us to see: ÒExile means (...) to touch the border and cross itÓ (Merolla/Yang

2004).

The 'heart of writing' is therefore concentrated in this desire to break the barriers and barricades of



our mind (Grossman ) only after this act of bravery the poet will be able to try to establish a

"international" and intercultural dialogue "open in all directions" (Yang Lian, 2003: 304) and to

accept to dive into the chaos-world, the world-whole, which allows him to rediscover his own

language and culture enriched by the comparison with the different (Glissant, 1998).

Yang Lian nowadays is a poet who is 'international' and 'local' at the mean time. He only feels

rooted to the constant uprooting of himself -a soul rooted in (and identified with) many different

cultures "other" than the original one, in a hybrid and indefinable state, whose essential feature is

the ability to develop a uniquely free thought. How much of this evolutionary process has been

achieved in a completely spontaneous and unconscious way and how much was it obtained through

a conscious choice? We will never really know it, nevertheless we can guess the answers through

the analysis of our "data equipments" -the author's works, his life, and his assertions- as well as by

pairing these materials with the insights of Refugee Studies.

Looking back to his career, Yang Lian classifies his works by locating them on a sort of world

map. He divides them into Chinese manuscripts, Manuscripts o f the So uth Pacific and European

Manuscripts (Yang Lian 2004: 291-307) and emphasizes the connection between his writings and

the places in which they were composed

I like when the places I have been to come to life and penetrate my writing without

me being aware of it (É).

When my China, my Sidney, and all the experiences of my "international" wandering

are all contained in the lo cal of my London and become the layers below it, then this

part of the road can be the point of confluence of lives from all directions (idem,

304).



Chinese manuscripts

Yang Lian is part of that generation of 'educated youths' [ zhishi qingnian] who were the

main protagonists of the Cultural Revolution and leaded the Demo cracy Wall Mo vement (1978-9).

He began writing lyrics in occasion of his mother's death (1976), while he was still in a commune in

the north of Beijing. When he was back, started collaborating with the samizdat literary magazine

To day [ Jintian ] and the group of 'obscure poets', who gravitated around it.

The o bscure po etry [menglo ng shi, ], is generally regarded as the starting point of Chinese

contemporary poetry. This small group of poets, leaded by Bei Dao and Mang Ke, actually put

upside-down and completely re-founded Chinese poetry through the rediscovery of individuality

and symbolism. In the vibrant cultural climate of '70sÕ Beijing, this group was able to promote a

very personal poetry of modernist ancestry, for the first time since 1930s. Obscure poets tried to

experience a completely new creative mood, which went beyond the dry mechanics of maoist



slogans and tried to revive that evocative power of Chinese language that had already fascinated the

Anglo-American imagist poet Ezra Pound.In his 1980s' youthful idealism Yang preserved the historic mission that had characterized much of20th Century Chinese literature: to build a new and modern China. At twenty-three he began a very

intimate analysis of himself and the illnesses of his soul, meanwhile re-building a new Chinesecultural and historical background to be used to approach the future of the whole country. Thislandscape slowly took shape as an essential part of his poetics and became the constant backgroundof his verses, if not the major player in them. The other protagonist was the poet himself, constantlyfocused on the rediscovering of his own roots, both, as a poet and as a brave hero of Chinesecivilization. The heroic poet who wandered through desolate landscapes was a recurring image inobscure poetry. However, the heroism in Yang Lian's verses differed from other poetsÕ: otherobscure poets' heroes mainly expressed no-isms (ÒLet me tell you, world, IÑdoÑnotÑbelieve!Ó),

but Yang's hero was a 'black eyed' poet, born off the "dark night", who desperately wanted to use hisown eyes not only to overcome the night but "to seek the shining light".Since Yang LianÕs recherchŽ was not only one of the many metaphors used by his poeticimagination but his very raison d'etre, the poet frantically created his own art to pursue somethingto believe in, looking for the 'faint star, lost hope re-found among the ruins of Chinese civilization'. Yang thought Future could only be rebuilt through the Past, though it was not to restore the oldofficial culture but to embrace the set of practices, beliefs and arts that the official will had neverincorporated nor removed. To discover this unofficial culture, the poet wanted to penetrate theChinese earth with his own hands to Òtouch the dead" and bring to light the "magma" (HanShaogong 1985.) of China's cultural roots. Long before the whole country began questioning thecauses of the violence of Cultural Revolution, Yang did not feel just as a victim of it, but more asone of its executers, in fact, to him, there had never existed a 'Chinese political case', though therewas a Chinese cultural complex to be analyzed.

In September 1983, he published The Traditio n with Us (Yang Lian, 1997:151-155), a short articlethat condensed Yang's view on Chinese tradition and gave a clear depiction of his idea of culturalidentity -a conception basically unchanged till today.The poet has never had an idealized perception of cultures, he has always clearly perceived the highvariability of cultural bo rders. To him, yesterday as today, everyman's cultural identity cannot beconsidered as a curse imposed by fate, nor as the temple in which to find refuge from the bustlingmodern world: culture is a reality to rebuild, day by day, individually and collectively. From this

perspective angle, the return to the past and all the travels in the most remote areas of PRCÕsterritory, the discovery of the customs of minority cultures, the constant interest in the ancientChinese cosmogony and cosmology, clearly stood out as the starting point of a journey to discoverhimself through his own origins.

Yang Lian always understood that no one could claim to be "else" from his own tradition and

consequently tried to ÔanthropologicallyÕ meet the very heart of the "yellow earth", a choice that has

everlastingly gifted his literary and spiritual world with an immense inspiration: Ò(É) all those

distances were the Ôinner distancesÕ, all those journeys were the Ôinner journeysÕ that were making my own

literary and spiritual world bigger and richerÓ (Merolla/Yang 2004).

His metaphysic inner jo urneys and the philosophical ratio behind them stay as one of the main keysto understand Yang Lian's whole production till today: Ò(É) today, based on that experience oftravel in China, I think the exile life that brought me to many other countries was not that much



different from my earlier travels (É). I can say that almost since 1989 I continued this Ôinner journeyÕ(ibidem).The very concept of 'journey' has stood out as one of the main topics of Yang Lian's poetry. InYang's view, poetry production came out of an ecstatic journey which took the poet in-between lifeand death, inside Chinese culture and history as inside his own body and soul. In this scenario, hisartistic activity was a continuous dialogue between the intrinsic facto rs that characterized the

general idea of Chinese civilization, and the numerous individual entities through which, inside thesame tradition, individuals had built their personal identities.

In the 80s Yang Lian's poetry was full of positive symbols of death -the strongest metaphor of his

ecstatic journeys through poetry- a sweet death leading him to the resurrectio n of the soul. The

masterwork that best expressed this vision of poetry was the long epic poem Yi .

Composed in the second half of the 80s, Yi clearly shows the author's irredeemable individualism,

mixed with the symbolic system of Yijing , the transcendental Taoist and Buddhist traditions,

the ancestral Chinese poetic conception of nature and some forms of thought that Yang Lian still

considers basic (lighting, wu ; stillness, jing ). These elements were harmoniously integrated

with the classical regulation of poetry in a very modern theory, that gave light to a timeless and

spaceless versification.

Yi clearly reflected the strong influence of Ezra Pound's vision of epic -a poem containing the

whole world history- on the Chinese poet. In Yang Lian and E. Pound's view, what we perceive as a

linear historical evolution is only the top layer of reality, beyond which there is a very dynamic

world, timeless and spaceless, where body and spirit, past and present, flow in continuous

exchanges. Poetry has the evocative power to start this flow and, despite its limits, which are the

very limits of language, it refers to categories of thought that go far beyond the cause-effect

perception, in a multidimensio nal intellectual space. Poetry is not only a literary form then, it is a

new co gnitive dimensio n (Yang Lian, 1997).

The mystical tone of the poem perfectly expresses the journey toward self-awareness it describes.

In Yi Yang Lian goes far beyond the traditional cosmological conception of man, considered as a

microcosm created by Heaven and Earth and the mediator between the pure Yin (Sky) and the pure



Yang (Earth). According to the author, this idea was born from a misreading of Yijing , which

deleted the key role of Man in the universe. Yang believes that the complex correspondences of

hexagrams in Yijing testify a human interpretation of nature. Therefore what Yijing describes is

nature as it is perceived by Man, who stands out as the only arbiter of how the cosmos is narrated.

Consequently Man dominates nature, by virtue of the magical power of the ideograms and symbols

of the Yijing . This "new man" is the Yi , a neologism coined by the same Yang Lian, graphically

represented by man (the archaic ren) that crosses the symbol of nature, sky and sun , to indicate

not only that Man is an integral part of nature but also that he is the sole arbiter of it. Even the

pronunciation of the new ideogram has a significant symbolic value: it refers to the mutations (,

yi) of the Yijing , as well as to the archaic pronunciation of the word shi -poetry- and to the sound

of the word yi, which means "one, single, unityÓ, therefore indicating the equality of power

between Man, Heaven and Earth. Language emerges as a mystic code made up of endless

mutations and the man who constantly confronts with language, the poet, becomes a creator who

imposes his view on reality.

'This is a perfectly ordinary year': Tiananmen and the exile

On June 4, 1989, Yang Lian and the poet Gu Cheng were in New Zealand to take part to some poetry festivals. It was from far apart then, that they were horrified by the broadcasting of theimages of Tiananmen Square massacre. The immediate reaction was to openly condemn P.R.C.'s

political choices: the poets guided some demonstrations against CCP in Auckland and later on, bySeptember, organized a poetry and music festival titled China: The Survivo rs, in occasion of whichthey placed a commemorative plaque at St. Andrews' Presbyterian Church: ÒThis stone stands aswitness for those who can no longer speak . In memory of the victims of the Peking Massacre of 4th

June 1989, and all those who have given their lives for the ideal of freedom in ChinaÓ (Yang Lian,1990:7).

These actions deepened the conflict with Chinese power and gave start to the poets' exile.

Yang Lian nominally stayed in Auckland until 1993, when he acquired a New Zealandese

citizenship. The first few years of exile were marked by a perpetual wandering: Auckland, Berlin

(1991) and Italy, USA (1992), then back to Auckland and Sydney University (1993), where he was



offered a position as visiting scholar.

At the very start of his exile, the author was focused on the commemoration of the fallen, as well

as on his own pain and grief and his sense of guilt for not being home during Tiananmen riots. It

was in this state of mind that he started to randomly compose the proses ( sanwen) and verses

contained in The Dead in Exile [ Liuwang de sizhe ], first published in Australia in

1990, in bilingual edition.

This book was written in memory of the victims of Tiananmen Square, but Yang Lian did not

want to create a simulacrum of a single historical event, a new unreal icon to be worshipped, on the

contrary, he wanted to keep alive the memory of the massacre through a deeply self-grieving

artistic action, aimed to make a constant Present Tense of Tiananmen Square massacre, never

letting the living memory become Past.

The work's title was referred to a statement the author repeated several times throughout the

book: in that very moment in which so many Chinese lost their lives in Tiananmen Square, the

Chinese who, for different reasons, were beyond the borders of PRC began to die, too. This theme

was clearly introduced by the first sanwen of the book, ' Dao ci' ("Elegy")

(...) you are dead, the Square is dead, but the executioner's voice and the shooting

goes on. They killed you (É) They want to kill off all memory.

(É) They think that death can protect their evil lives. We are living, standing here

before you. They will try to kill us, too. They do not know that we had already died

in that instant when the shooting started, in the Square (...).

(Yang Lian, 1990: 4.)



Co-written with Gu Cheng on June 6th 1989, this sanwen discloses the background of The Dead in

Exile and shows the stream of pain, mixed to a dramatic loss of consciousness, that characterized

Yang's state of mind during those heavy years. The question of historical memory and the personal

quest for a clearer perception of the new daily reality were expressed with urgency in each line and

every word The Dead in Exile. If one of Yang Lian's poetic goals had always been to express a

timeless and spaceless poetic world, the first clear change in The Dead in Exile was the sudden

presence of clear time-space coordinates. The poet, unable to go beyond the immediate cruelty of

events, stayed still in the very moment and place that had caused his suffering.

In the early '90s Yang Lian was incapable to de-touch himself from the causes of his torments, his

poems turning, day by day, into nightmares, suffocating and confusing daydreams, as he seemed

painfully and permanently alienated into a "Blind Corner" [Si jiao ]

Where you fell is a stretch of nothingness

But your body in the darkness

Curves to form a blind corner

The sound of shooting hides inside to weep

Names hide even further inside So timidly

Hoping to be forgotten

Sinking into each personEach night

At zero Blood drips again(É)

(ibidem)

Indeed many of the changes incurred in the poet's production in the first years of exile were not

indicative of a complete subversion of poetics. Yang's poetic theories continued to develop along

the guidelines already outlined. He still saw poetry as a shamanistic act, involving the terrible



struggle to obtain a 'Yeatsian mature wisdomÕ but, in fact, reality became a burden to poetic

meditation, constantly creeping into the poet's inner journeys and never letting him reach a higher

view. Therefore it seems that in the early nineties the poet might have never been fully transformed

into pure spirit, never losing his 'fuzziness'.

It is precisely in this same period of time that the painful perception of the limits of poetry pushed

Yang to start using a literary form alternative to the verse: the sanwen ('poetic prose', 'random

sketches'). The choice of a different literary form unequivocally reveals the difficulties of the

author, unable to express his new identity condition through versification.

The sanwen, is a typically Chinese genre, which does not have any match in Western literatures.

It can be considered as a cross between the essay, the poetic prose and diaristic narrative. It has

very ancient origins in China and probably comes from the aspiration to re-create and depict the

personal and deepest poetic and intellectual world of the writer, who selects and coordinates its key

elements and their evolution. If san means Òto spread, distributeÓ, while wen refers to the

Òwritten textÓ in general, we can certainly argue that the sanwen is a sort of Òscattered

writingÓ, or rather Òrandom thoughtsÓ Òrandom sketchesÓ- single images that make up a single

polychrome mosaic in order to express the author's perception of the world. Just by virtue of the

fact that the sanwen is a very subjective genre, each author has his own peculiar way of perceiving

and writing it, hence we could say that every sanwen could possibly become a sort of map of the

writer's 'inner landscape'.

The first three sanwen written by Yang Lian appeared for the first time in The Dead in Exile.

Those texts would have been part of the the poet's first collection of sanwen, Guihua "" [ Lies /

Gho st Speech], published few years later in Taiwan.

In the first of these three sanwen "The Book of Crying and Forgetting" [ Ku wang shu ],



Yang Lian clarified the terms of a question that scared him the most: oblivion, the human ability to

quickly forget events. In this prose the expression of the autobiographical pain was alternated with

fundamental considerations: although in China there had been many deaths before and after

Cultural Revolution, in the late '80s they had already been forgotten. To Yang this natural but

harmful process was realized thanks to tears. Crying, the very expression of pain, was considered as

a medium to exorcise suffering and therefore as the first cause of oblivion. Crying, since

increasingly blurring away every real memory of pain, was considered a devilish threat, a trick

unable to teach to human race how not to fall again and again into the same mistakes of the past

("Forgotten, the dead eventually die. The world is immaculate, as if there had not even been any

crying").

The tears actually wash the memory away and, to me, actually itÕs terrible. I want the

memory, I donÕt want the memory to be washed away.

(...) It was because they forgot all the deads of the time before that they were cryingin Õ89 and because they have cried so much in Õ89, this cryingÕs actually preparing

them for the next forgetting, in order to allow them to cry again.

This is to me a terrible circle Ðcrying and forgetting, this means that there will be

nothing left in human history. (Merolla/Yang 2004)

Forgetting was then paralleled by the disturbing thought that, after forgetting, mankind could

have constantly reproduced the same cruelties, as in a grotesque and unbearable samsara, where

'the banality of evil' (Arendt, 1963) could have smoothly continued to lead the course of human

history

Another slaughter blood

Still the same familiar scenery

(...)



This was indeed another very ordinary year.

(Yang Lian, 1990:13)

In this book, the year 1989 started to symbolize any and every year. The year 1989 became an

year like any other -same desolation, same cruel human condition- as Tiananmen became not an

"event" anymore but a "situation" (Merolla/Yang 2004), as permanent as fatal. Tiananmen was the

symptom of a never ending truth: the banality of everyday's man-made aberrations and the

testimony of our habit to them.

The same events were recalled in Guangchang (ÒThe SquareÓ). In this sanwen the author,

primarily focused on those who during governmental reprisals had claimed to have not taken part to

demonstrations. The text thus became a long reflection on the "absence" from the square, by a

guilty narrating voice, confessing to have taken part to the imposition of a historical oblivion on

reality (ÒIt is absolutely certain that no-one had lived in, crowded together in nor died here. In June

the Square did not existÓ. Yang, 1990: 22).

Going back to the poems in The Dead in Exile there is still a new unique feature caraterizing them

to be noticed: they are very short lyrics, yet by a poet who had always stood for the production of

relatively long epic poems. The very cause of this choice was its immediacy: the short poem was

able to fit more Yang's random inner monologues and his linguistic frustrations.

All the short poems and sanwen in The Dead in Exile clearly depicted those perceptions that are

anthropologically regarded as typical of the experience of refuge: the sense of rootlessness, the

impression of having lost the right place in the world, a strong displacement, nostalgia for an

undetermined idea of home. They testified to the poet's psychological displacement and his

inability to relocate himself in the real world



This street is not real Nor are the footsteps

Even though the moon still slowly rises

And falls The light is not real (É) (Yang Lian, 1990:11)

The condition of exile causing the painful feeling of being a ghost floating midway between the

new environment and the memories of the past, in a no man's land that apparently made the poet

unable to reach the perception of the present tense and gave him the feeling of watching from the

distance:

We can only look from afar

Look at Wandering shadows of our lives

(...)

Yet still living Shouting

Look Beyond thin memory beyond the yellow earth

A face gradually blurs

And all scenery is reflectiont (É) (Yang Lian, 1990:11)

exile was then perceived as a deadly trickle

(É)

Screaming and sliding towards Hell

Every morning

Dying more deeply (Yang Lian, 1994: 11-12).

as Tiananmen started to symbolize a point of no return, the literary death of the poet.



To Touch the Border and Cross it

Exile life led o utside habitual o rder.

It is no madic, decentred, co ntrapuntal;

but no so o ner does one get accusto med to it than its unsettling fo rce erupts anew.

E.W. Said

In the '80s Yang Lian used to welcome the recurring image of death as a liminar phase of his

metamorphosis, but between 1989 and 1990 the metaphor of death became a common symbol of

pain. This evolution was evident in No n-Perso n Singular [Wu ren cheng ], a collection of

poems composed between the mid-eighties and 1991.

An interesting feature of No n-Perso n Singular was the temporal organization of the materials:

while in The Dead in Exile the author had deliberately erased the dates of composition, in this

collection the poems were organized in a strict chronological order. It was a symptom of the brave

attempt to 'return to a linear time' in order to re-built his own life and art. Since 1990-91, the author

chose to assume a new behavior and the poetic manifesto of this commitment were the verses of

"The City of Dead Poets [Si shiren de cheng ,]Ó. There it was expressed the idea that

everybody has his own psychological knots that must necessarily be untied, because "every word

you deleted in your life comes back to delete you (...)". In this perspective Yang Lian would have

tried to look at exile with new eyes.

From the questions derived from this new attitude to reality, it was born that peculiar poetic of

cruelty featuring his works of the '90s. The continuous search for a meaning turned the poet into a

bird of prey, intent on torturing and dissecting his own body, language and poetry. Many poems in

No n-Perso n Singular , as in all his works of the 1990s, increasingly dwelled on the grim images of

lacerations of the corporeal matter, showing the author digging in his own identity.

It was precisely in this very period that Yang Lian started to constantly experiment the writing of



sanwen (). At the root of this choice a serious concern about the expressivity of language, as

the will to put an end to the artistic exile caused by the impossibility to express through poetry the

multifaceted and floating identity perspective of a displaced person.

The rando m tho ughts collected in Guihua have a highly variable and fragmented form, hence they

seemed appropriate to Yang to express his new kaleidoscopic perceptions of reality. Then Yang

Lian's growing postmodern attitude to formal experimentation took him to experience the deep

connection between literary and linguistic forms and contents (ÒThe form is contentÓ).

Therefore, sanwens echoed every theme already expressed in poetry, in a constant dialogue in

which, once expressed in a different form, the same topics took on completely new meanings.

Through the randomness of sanwen the author was able to express his exile in a form that was itself

an exile and, in Guihua, he took his readers to experience the exile with him, as his sanwens were

permeated by the experience of writing on a formal and linguistic borderline.

Between 1992 and 1993 Yang wrote Where the Sea Stands Still [ Dahai tingzhi zhi

chu]; the work showed an exuberantly rich vocabulary (Pozzana, 2004) in which the painful

process culminated in the existential cruelty to himself, concluded an essential poetic and human

season (idem). The balanced alternation between lines and spaces, the perfection of the

compositional structure, which divided the entire volume in five concentric circles composed in

different places, challenged his subjective displacement, renewing his poetic language and giving it

new capabilities. Through these experimentations the poet arrived to a certainty: the reality o f

being without ro o ts can be a ro o t and a ho me fo r the spirit.

Wandering among different continents and pushing the limits of poetry, as of his own identity, the

author was clearly reinventing himself in his own lines and was reborn as a Yi. The acceptance of

exile and its fluid form finally gave Yang Lian the means to have a new vision of himself and

perceive his own identity as 'extended'. Exile actually became the poet's new borderless home



country and Yang acquired a new mother tongue, a literary language not unfolded in a static

Zhongguo xing ( 'Chineseness'), but rooted in what Yang calls Zho ngwenxing [ :], a

Chineseness which does not emphasize Zho ngguo , Mainland China, as central, instead puts in

evidence the value of the bond of identity conveyed by language, highlighting the contribution of

the individual artists to it. Chineseness, once so defined, gave the poet the chance to keep alive his

Chinese identity as a phenomenal reality -uprooted and constantly evolving.

Meanwhile, the very reflection on language that had engendered the dialogue between poetry and

sanwen led to the composition of Yang Lian's 'perfect poem' (Where the Sea Stands Still ) Yang Lian

said the collection corresponded to Òone long run before the jump into the seaÓ. Then Where the

Sea Stands Still , the last poem in it, expressed 'an end that looked like a new start, the very moment

of the jump, and showed an ÒIÓ that had finally managed to touch the sea in and outside itself.

The poem described how, once recognized the need to question itself, the Ego of the author had

become itself both, literary form and language, expressed in an uninterrupted flux of changes and

interrogations. Once decided not to dwell any longer on observing the waters of the shipwreck, the

survived poet had chosen to "stop the sea" and find again the place where poetry could exist as a

singular form of thought: meeting point between the depersonalization of the poet and his

detachment from his own texts

we hear ourselves fall elsewhere and shatter

(...)

this shore is where we see ourselves set sail

Yang Lian's poetry was then reborn in that particular intellectual space in which the boundaries of

language and thought were continuously pushed, a new promised land arisen from the expressive



impossibilities of poetry and language (ÒPoetry was born from the impossibleÓ).

After all, what Yang Lian seems to have learned from exile is that the relationship between a poet

and his language is a dialogue in which the artist should never be afraid to make requests. More

often than what we might imagine the language realizes, through a particular form or structure, that

very metamorphosis that creates the perfect balance between form and content.

Works Cited:

Aciman, AndrŽ (ed. by), (1999), Letters o f Transit ÐReflectio ns o n Exile, Identity, Language and Lo ss, The New Press,

New York.Arendt, Hanna, (1943), ÒWe RefugeesÓ, in Robinson, Marc (ed. by), (1994), Alto gether Elsewhere ÐWriters o n Exile, A

Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego-New York-London: 110-119.

Bauman, Zygmunt, (1991), Intimations of Postmodernity, Routledge.

Bei Dao, (1998), ÒFrom The Founding of ÔTodayÕ to Today (trans. by Perry Link)Ó,

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/dao/.

Chambers, Iain, (1994), Migracy, Culture, Identity, Routledge.

Caridi, Paola, (2003), ÒStorie ai confini della follia -Colloquio con David Grossman, LÕEspresso , n¡ 35, anno XLIX, 28agosto 2003, Roma, 110-112.



Cioran, E. M., (1956), ÒAdvantages of ExileÓ, Robinson, Marc (ed. by), in (1994) Alto gether Elsewhere ÐWriters o n

Exile, A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego-New York-London: 150-151.

De Filippi, Simona, (2001), Rifugiati po litici e co struzio ne dellÕidentitˆ, Universitˆ degli Studi di Torino, Facoltˆ di

Lettere e Filosofia, Anno Accademico 2000-2001.

Glissant, ƒdouard, (1998), Po etica del Diverso [The Poetic o f Difference], Meltemi.

Gu Cheng, (2005), Sea o f Dreams, The Selected Writings o f Gu Cheng (translated and selected by Joseph R. Allen) ,

New York, New Directions.

Han Shaogong , ÒWenxue de ÔgenÕÓ [ÒThe Roots of LiteratureÓ], Zuo jia ÇÈ, 4, 1985.

Hobsbawm, Eric J., (1996), The Age o f Extremes, the Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, Michael Joseph (UK),

Vintage Books (U.S.).

Lee, Gregory B., (1996), ÒExile and the Potential of ModernismÓ, in Lee, Gregory B., (1996), Troubado urs,

Trumpeters, Tro ubled Makers, Hurst & Co., U.K.: 128-148

McCarty, Mary, (1985), ÒA Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Inner EmigrŽsÓ, in McCarty, (1985), Occasio nal Pro se,

Harcourt Brace Company.

Merolla, Sabrina/Yang Lian, (2004), To To uch the Border and Cro ss it -An Interview with Yang Lian,

http,//www.yanglian.net/yanglian_en/talk/talk02.html

Said, Edward W.,

(1984), ÒReflections on ExileÓ , in Robinson, Marc (ed. by), (1994) Alto gether Elsewhere Ð Writers o n

Exile, A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego-New York-London, 137-149.

(1999), ÒNo Reconciliation AllowedÓ , Aciman, AndrŽ (ed. by), 1999, Letters o f Transit ÐReflectio ns

o n Exile, Identity, Language and Lo ss, The New Press, New York, 87-114.

Toming, Jun Liu/ Mu Xin, (2004), ÒA Dialogue with Mu XinÓ, Wo rds without Bo rders, www.wordswithoutborders.org.

Vitali, Ilaria, (2003), ÒIl mancato ritorno ÐIl mito dellÕesilio e le sue demistificazioni nellÕopera di Milan KunderaÓ,

http,//www.sagarana.net/rivista/numero13/ibridazioni3.html

Yang Lian,

(1983), ÒSelections from The Poem-cycle Bell on the Frozen LakeÓ (Trans. By John Minford), in,

Renditio ns n. 19&20, Spring & Autumn, 249-265.

(1983a), ÒChuanto ng yu wo menÓ ( La tradizio ne co n no i), Yang Lian zuo pin. 1982-

1997 , 151-155.

(1990), The Dead in Exile (trans. by Mabel Lee), Tiananmen Publications, Australia.

(1994), No n-Person Singular , trad. B. Holton, London, Welsleep Press.

(1997), Yang Lian zuo pin. 1982-1997 , Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe, 156-161.

(1999), Where the Sea Stands Still- New Poems (trans. by Brian Holton), Bloodaxe Books.



(2002), Yi, Green Integer, Los Angeles.

(2004), Do ve si ferma il mare [Where the Sea Stands Still, Dahai tingzhi chu],

trilingual edition, Libri Sheiwiller-Playon, Italy, 297. Toming Jiu Liu, 2004:2. U.N.H.C.R.(United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), Conventio n and Pro toco l Relating to the

Status o f Refugees.

Yehudi Menuhin, apud Hobsbawm, 1995: 13.Jodorowsky Alejandro, 1998: Di ci˜ di cui no n si pu˜ parlare, Citylights Italia.

Liminality is one of the three phases in which Van Gennep divided the rites o f passage. L. it is the central phase:when the individual involved in ritual is in an intermediate status between the old and the new, still to be acquired(Arnold Van Gennep, 1909).

Apud Caridi, 2003: 111.Bei Dao, 1988.

ÒEven with these dark eyes, a gift of the dark night/ I go to seek the shining light. Gu Cheng, Yi dairen ,(ÒOne GenerationÓ), Gu Cheng , 2005.

Yang Lian, Dansheng (ÒBirthÓ), Yang Lian, 1983: 249-265.

[Ò Ba sho u shenjin tu

] Yang Lian, 1995: 104-105. Yang Lian, 1987: ÇÈ Fo rewo rds, Yang Lian, 1997.

Yijiubajiu nian , Ò1989Ó, Yang Lian, 1990: 13, 50.

P.R.C. will be called 'PRC' all along this article. Chinese Communist Party, C.C.P., will be called 'CCP' all along this article. Brian Holton, 1999, in Yang Lian, 1999: 175.

Yang Lian 1990: 21. Edward W. Said, 1984: 149

Ibidem: 72-73.

Ibid.

Merolla/Yang 2004. Yang Lian, 1999.

Yang Lian, 2004: 297. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Yang Lian, ÇÈ Zho ngwen zhi nei [Inside Chinese], Yang Lian, 1997 : 60-61.

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identity crossings and transcultural borders

Documents