Rhyme and reason
By Richard Lea
Richard Lea reports from last night’s ‘Poet in the City’ event at Amnesty International.
The auditorium at the new Amnesty International Human Rights Action Centre was full last night as Helena Kennedy led poets Jack Mapanje, Yang Lian and Choman Hardi onto the platform for a Poet in the City reading, Tortured Language.
They sat in a line behind a table draped in black cloth perched downstage right – an audition panel that had turned to face the footlights. A lectern stood in a pool of light stage left, a chair skulked behind it at the back.
Jack Mapanje remained in his seat as he told how a petition organised by Edinburgh University managed to elicit a direct reply from the Malawian dictator, Hastings Banda. “The struggle, the fight, the letters that you write do make a difference,” he said.
He mopped his brow and took a sip of water before introducing his poem, ‘Escaping Without Ropes’, a driving, rhythmical chant which rhymes ‘rope’ with ‘hope’ to a skipping beat and builds into a ringing declaration of the possibility of resistance even in the most difficult circumstances. ‘Season’s Greetings for Celia (BC)’ brought a more meditative tone, reflecting on a postcard which was delivered to him from “overseas” while he was in prison.
Yang Lian’s outrage seemed much closer to the surface as he brought up the case of Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao, imprisoned in Chishan Prison, Yuanjiang City for distributing a Chinese Communist Party memo to websites based outside China (read about his story in full, here). “When people speak of China there are two different pictures in mind,” he said. “China presents one face to the world and another to its own people. Shi Tao is a very important symbol of this split. Western companies rush to China and shake that blood hand and shut their mouths.” He told of how protests with which he was involved in New Zealand at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre made it impossible for him to return to China, before moving to the lectern to welcome the actor Peter Forbes to the stage.
Yang began his readings with ‘June’, a poem by Shi Tao remembering the Tiananmen Square massacre, which he performed in Chinese before Forbes provided the translation. He was louder as he leant towards the microphone, suddenly more insistent, reading with an unstoppable momentum. Forbes seemed almost diffident in reply. Yang continued with a poem of his own about the massacre, ‘1989’, and a poem about the day when he discovered his work had been banned in China, ‘Banned Poem’, before finishing with ‘London’, a striking description of the texture of exile.
Kurdish poet Choman Hardi introduced herself through a sequence of five poems, beginning with the confrontation of myth and reality on her first return to her homeland at the age of five, ‘At the Border’. Her head nodded slightly as she read, counting out the stresses of each line. ‘My Father’s Books’, describing the fate of her father’s abandoned books, was balanced by ‘My Mother’s Kitchen’, describing the motley collection of kitchen implements that she will inherit from her mother. “She doesn’t think this is complimentary,” she warned. She also recited a short Kurdish poem from memory and did not translate it, leaving its music to speak for itself.
The evening ended with another of Shi’s poems, ‘Pain’. This time Forbes read first, and as Yang stepped up to the microphone again to recite Shi’s words something in the room shifted – a breath from Yuanjiang City perhaps
“If I have a message for Shi Tao,” siad Jack Mapanje, “it is this. Decide to survive, because your survival is a form of embarrassment to both western governments and the Chinese government. You need to constantly remind the Chinese government that you are there. Because giving up means that the struggle is giving up, but surviving means that the struggle carries on.”