SELECTED POEMS OF A.MAO. Poems in Chinese by A. Mao, translated
by Zhang Zhizhong. Published by The Earth Culture Press (USA), Chongqing City,
P.R. China. 2012. Pages 255. Price CNY 50.00; US$ 20.00
Mao Juzhen (b. 1967), pen name A. Mao, is one of the top
Chinese young writers today. She has four collections of poetry and other prose
works, including a couple of novels and collections of short stories, to her credit. It is the recognition of her
excellence that in October 2012 she was
invited to visit the USA as a member of Chinese Writers’ Association and participate in the prestigious University of
Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP) Life of Discovery exchange
program.
Mao is significant for her neat writing style, depth of voice, and sensibility. She chooses forms that help one remember her
verses that are not banal, slipshod or feckless but passionate, free and
graceful. Her poetic structure reflects
her dreams and despairs, hopes and fears, family matters and social issues that
engage the common woman’s mind everywhere.
Even as she develops her own voice, injecting her own concerns and
themes, her own subjectivity for self-revelation and revelation of the diverse
life in modern China, she evinces a larger awareness:
“First I am an individual
Then I am a collective
Finally I am the near and distant
places of a generation.”
(‘A Journal of Group
Images’)
Her interior
landscape, a record of her talking to herself, reveals
truth, conveying the experiences of her attempt to make sense of her own
existence. The poems she writes are,
therefore, not dry or abstract but rather part of a long tradition. Her introspection has an air of
disappointment as she seeks to search
for a way to recover some moment of contentment just as she seems to struggle
to reveal moments lost in time that construct her very identity: “…I unremittingly/ Go mad, write poems.”
(‘Cause of Disease’).
At a time
when “minor morals” are becoming stronger, A. Mao seeks to strengthen “major
morals” with the consciousness of woman as creator. As she asserts, she possesses eternal energy,
or
the moral sense, or Prakriti that can sustain “generations and
generations to come” (‘Heavily Snowing Day and Anna’s Train’).
Since she writes
about what she has lived or experienced – “I write about myself at present” in a tongue she loves to compose poetry in,
i.e. Chinese—and since she feels “substantial when writing poetry/ But empty
after love-making” (‘Our Epoch’), she appears a poet with sensibility for
awaking the mind, body, life, and soul (‘Waking up at Midnight’). Her various
verses testify to her physical, mental,
and emotional response to different personal, familial, social,
cultural, or literary stimuli, and memory makes these magnificent:
“We are the crowd of people who
finally remain
The light of language through
poetry
…
We enkindle ourselves
To illumine ourselves
…
To break rocks into pieces, into
stars
To break ourselves into pieces,
into a road leading to higher places”
(‘To
Break Rock into Pieces’)
and
“I have my own principle
In the night there is no species
Which is nobler than my soul ”
(‘The
Bat’)
Her quest
for the self is rooted in her understanding of the life she negotiates both individually
and collectively:
“I take overlapping photos of
life with words” (p. 219)
and
“I
have not gone to sleep
Still watching in poetic lines
How a person runs an idle
flashlight
Into searchlight”
(‘Nighttime
Beijing’)
and
“Here am I! But where is
here?” (p. 237)
and
“…I am running on the rail
In order to give birth to the
eternal you.”
(‘Rail
on Paper’)
and
“By sitting one cannot possess rivers and mountains,
By standing one cannot love human beings!
The sobbing mouth of a cave,
The sympathetic maternity.
You fill it with air or candies,
I fill it with tears or fire.”
(‘Glassware’)
As a woman
poet, who considers herself “liberated” (‘Rib’) and wants “to be a gender
bender/Growing in the middle of scale arm” (‘Muffler’), she evinces strong
social consciousness and commitment, as in poems ‘The Formation of Diamond’,
‘Our Epoch’, or ‘Playwright’. She forcibly asserts her female strength:
“The first person born in
prehistory
Or the last person at the end of
the world
Is nobody but me ”
(‘Eyes
in the Wind’)
and
“…Without knowing she is more
Beautiful and high than what we
see,
Just like the winged angel or
god.”
(‘Women
Dictionary’)
She
emphasizes that her goal is to extend her personal liberty, not for herself
alone but for the entire community: “A new way has to be found/To view love,
aging and grief” (‘Soliloquy’).
Her ironic
‘dreaming’ or rumination as a lonely woman, or “mortal grumbles and groans ”
offer an “x-ray vision” (‘Rib). As she points out:
“I love this mortal world,
without ambiguity of language
But with the innocence and revolutionary of
the bed. ”
(‘In
Bed’)
Perhaps,
this is intended to suggest that despite her love for tradition, A. Mao would
also like to be viewed in the company of the avant garde poets (cf. ‘Our
Epoch’).
Poems such
as ‘Midnight Poet’, ‘How Much Do I Love’, ‘Form’, ‘Singing Style’, ‘To Comfort
a Withered Leaf’, ‘The Train Ran Past My Home Town’, ‘I Cannot But Write
About’, ‘A Dedicated Poem’, ‘Anti-Order’ etc construct her aesthetics of
creation. To quote from her ‘Extreme Interpretation’:
“A good poem is not written on
velvet chair.
It was either born out of a
disaster
Or under the scalpel of a
surgeon or in the screaming of a lunatic.”
In another poem
‘Position’, she seeks to be careful, “away from the center, and the whirlpool/
To stand to one side by oneself.” She can observe from the edge “more shade of
danger and loneliness,” including
“Myriads of things are extending
and shrinking on their own positions.
Not that I retreat to the page
of spurring the horse on,
But that the horse stops its
forehooves in time.
Writing is the neighing in this
string of actions.”
(‘Position’)
True,
writing poetry is not only an exercise in self-exploration and self-revelation
but also an exercise in social action.
For example, the remarkable poem ‘When My Brother Has an Extra-Marital
Affair’ is not only a critique of the extra-marital affairs of the people but
also a visible social action on her part. As she writes:
“This is a serious matter
So much so that it is a disaster
I do not intend to be a moral
judge
I only want to be a killer”
(‘When
My Brother Has an Extra-marital Affair’)
Elsewhere,
she notes: “The pain of everything/Is the pain of some part of us” (‘ The
Stones May be Painful’). Verbal
creativity is thus not only poetic but therapeutic too: “…pain is often cured
by imagination” and “she collects the rumbling on paper/Which is sound of nature,
also the sound of breaking intestines by iron” (‘The Train is Rumbling on
Paper’).
A.Mao offers
a female perspective on social and cultural life in China and ironically
questions all that is “sorrowful”. She critically views the
post-industrial urbanization and neglect
of the countryside:
“There are a lot of colors in
the field , and its feminine form:
Rice, cabbage, chicken, duck,
fish …
To fill the huge stomach of
city.
…
Post-industrial age,
Makes those coarse throats, and
fine mucus,
Not regard it as relative.”
(‘Hometown’)
She images
the city culture as the ‘Cause of Disease’:
“…Old, those I have loved are all old,
The road is narrowed, the river
turbid.
In a city devoid of
Native accent, the lost heart is
filled with pain,
Tears, become another form of
the body.
And
“Low culture everywhere,
particularly in places of filth and
disorder.
No soil for elegance. Why do you
write in the pyramid?”
(‘On
Art’)
She desires
a return to the countryside because the cities with Western biases have
corrupted people’s taste and have been breeding low culture and
inelegance. Aware of their living in
vain, she sounds sad to find “only popular readings sell well” just as everywhere there prospers the
“popular style or Western style” (‘The Art School and Snack Booth’). She bemoans the absence of sensibility which
is the cause of all that is rotten and fractured (‘The Broken Autumn’) in the
emerging society.
Poet-translator
Zhang Zhizhong and the publishers deserve kudos for making yet another valuable
addition to the growing corpus of contemporary Chinese poetry in English. A.
Mao’s bilingual book of 108 selected poems, well-translated and competently
edited and produced, provides a fresh perspective to the Chinese women’s poetry
which inspires thinking and looking beyond the confines of the traditional
female sphere.
