‘Let us learn how to live life with honour and dignity and a wealth of humanity.’ — Liu Xiaobo, 2000
June fourth will mark the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a tragedy which remains unacknowledged by the Chinese government except in the weakest of euphemisms. On that day, the state used martial law to repress violently a peaceful demonstration for democracy in Beijing’s city square, which translates as the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Each spring, Liu Xiaobo has written an ‘offering’ to the memory of June 4, 1989. The poems he composed until 2009 have been collected here as June Fourth Elegies. The bilingual volume, dedicated to ‘the Tiananmen Mothers and for those who can remember’, represents the first time Liu’s poetry has been published freely in English and the Chinese original.
In his impassioned introduction, the author laments his country’s ‘collective amnesia’ created, Liu says, by ‘a totalitarian state’s brutal persecution and conscienceless indifference toward society.’ He observes that China’s ‘experiences of suffering and national absurdities are rare in the world’.
This ‘callous, obscene nation’, he says, has still to undergo ‘a process of wakening and repentance’. And yet, with ‘the pretence of prosperity’ the government has been able to disguise its anxiety and fear, and keep most Chinese people numbed and silent.
Liu came to the world’s attention as the imprisoned recipient of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. He is a professor, literary critic and humanitarian activist who has devoted his life to political reform in mainland China. For his efforts, the state has detained him four times.
Currently, Liu is serving an 11-year sentence for ‘incitement to subvert state power’, following the release in December 2008 of an anti-authoritarian pro-democracy manifesto, Charter 08, which he drew up with others.
‘I long to use resistance and imprisonment as atonement, to try and realise my idealistic convictions with integrity,’ Liu says, evoking the ache of guilt that runs deep in his writing.
‘In truth, imprisonment for me, for activists working against an authoritarian system, is nothing to flaunt — it’s a necessary honour living at the mercy of an inhuman regime, where there’s little choice for the individual but resistance.’
As their translator Jeffrey Yang observes, there is something ritualistic about the poems, written year after year, about the same day, the same loss, the same grief. About, as Liu says, ‘the dream turned into a lifelong ache.’ There are phrases, even whole lines, repeated from one elegy to the next.
The poems are infused with anger, regret, despair and condemnation. There are, rarely, frail leaps of hope. For example, in the strangely beautiful fourth instalment of the 16th anniversary offering, Remember the Departed Souls. But the overall feeling is a deep, awful sadness.
Liu fits his wife Liu Xia’s description of him as an awkward, diligent poet. He writes directly, preferring straightforward imagery and emotion to oblique metaphor.
In one stanza of the sixth anniversary offering, written ‘under house arrest with the Public Security Bureau in the northwest outskirts of Beijing’, Liu asks,
‘Who was it, the one casually photographed
the young lad standing before the tank
waving his arms
moving the whole world…’
before observing that after the boy disappeared, ‘the world who cried for him/ didn’t want to keep looking for him.’
The Tiananmen Mothers is an activist group who did keep looking for their boys. They began as a one-woman campaign by Ding Zilin, a professor whose son was shot by government troops on June Fourth. The organization seeks an official apology and reparations for the victims of the massacre.
Liu’s sympathy for the mothers is apparent, even without the book’s dedication. Many of the collection’s most moving poems address their loss at a personal level, individualizing a moment in history that remains a glaring and potent symbol of ongoing human rights abuses in China.
The eleventh anniversary poem, For Su Bingxian, offers this image:
‘At Tiananmen Square an armed policeman on
watch used his leather boot to kick and break
apart a child’s snowman piled up high/
11 years ago
your child your son
was just like that snowman…’
In the tradition of poetry about conflict, the notion of a magnificent lie sits at the bottom of this collection. Most of the time, it’s clear that the lie Liu means is the one perpetrated, to this day, by the Chinese state. But there is a striking moment, during the second instalment of the penultimate offering, when Liu makes a simple observation, which reminds us of how easily glory gilds memory:
‘Some say
to die for freedom
is a kind of greatness
that a child sacrificed for freedom
attains the sacred
but maternal love, rooted in ties of blood
prefers its own child
to live an ordinary life…’
June Fourth Elegies is published by Jonathan Cape
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