"This Empire Must Break Apart"
Oct. 14th, 2012 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe last highlight of the Frankfurt Book Fair is the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade; this year it was awarded to Liao Yiwu. There was a lot of background goings on; not least the shameful behaviour preceding the 2009 Book Fair, when China had been the guest of honour, and the Chinese had insisted dissident writers, including Liao Yiwu, were to be disinvited. (Footnote: after the Book Fair organization caved, the German PEN instantly reinvited them as its guests, but Liao Yiwu still couldn't come. He finally made it out of China in 2011 and has been staying in Germany ever since.) Also the heated discussions about the Nobel Prize for Mo Yan, who'd been among the Chinese delegation in 2009 who'd walked out of a room whe the dissidents entered it. Mo Yan, btw, wasn't mentioned in any of the speeches, but at the lunch later a lady sitting on the same table with me expressed her disdain. "Look," said I, "you and I were born here and have nothing to fear for either ourselves or our families. It's easy for us to say 'I wouldn't have done that', and Mo Yan did call for Liao Xiabo's release in the first interview he gave after winning the Nobel." She admitted I had a point.
I have no idea whether I would have the courage to speak out in a dictatorship, but I definitely know I wouldn't have the strengh to live the life Liao Yiwu did. He'd been a relatively apolitical poet until Tianmen Square, when he'd written the poem "Massacre" which got him four years of prison. Afterwards, he lived as a street musician playing the flute dor a while and then started chronicling the lives of the poorest of the poor in China; the interviews form the basis of the books he got the award for. His acceptance speech was the most passionate J'Accuse I ever heard in the Paulskirche. Composed around the refrain "This Empire must break apart" - I deliberately don't translate it as "fall" because he said this sentence in German (the rest of the speech was in Chinese and we could read the translation simultanously), and "zerbrechen" is very different from "stürzen, fallen", plus breaking apart was a theme in the speech - it did something official propaganda also likes to do, using historical parallels, only it did it in reverse to the official interpretations. One reason why I always found the film "Hero" in its aesthetic beauty so incredibly chilling is the basic idea of the individual being nothing and the death of multitudes being acceptable a prize for a greater political goal, unity and an Empire, with the first Emperor being a misunderstood great man. Cue Mao and successors mirroring themselves there.
Liao Yiwu also used the example of the first Emperor of Qin and drew a direct line from him to Mao and current day party bosses, but the point he made was the opposite (I'm translating a translation, so sorry for a lack of style): "His name will always bear the stench of two of his deeds: the building of the Great Wall and the burning of books, which came with the murder of the scholars. Building the Great Wall was supposed to separate the people from the rest of the world and to make China a giantic prison. In order to achieve this, the entire country was forced to work as slaves. The burning of books and the murder of scholars was supposed to separate the people from their own tradition. (...) Two thousand years later he got applause from a new despot named Mao Zedong. Who boasted: Quin Shihuang only killed 400 philosophers; we got rid of tens of thousands of counter revolutionaries."
He conjured up the forty millions who died in the great hunger between 1959 and 1962, the daily degradations and brainwashings later, and what he called Deng Xiaoping's greatest trick: opening the market for Capitalism. The idea that Capitalism in any way is connected with democracy or freedom of speech being by now thoroughly disproved by China's economic success coupled with complete oppression.
"The executioners triumph, because the entire country is their slave. The country is plundered, devastated, sucked dry. To foreign investors, they say: come here, cone here, build your manufacturing plants, do business, build skyscrapers and create networks. As long as you don't bother us about human rights, you can do whatever you want. You may have laws and a public opinion, but here you can wallow in the mud. Come and destroy our rivers, poison our air, ruin our food and our water: come and get our cheap work force and make them work day and night like machines. The more you ensure the Chinese will get physical and mental cancer by destroying their environment, the higher your profit will be. China is the biggest waste hill in the world, and that offers the best business."
And again and again: "This empire must break apart." (Dieses Imperium muß zerbrechen.) At the end of his impassioned, take no prisoners speech, he presented a poem, "The Mothers of Tian'anamen". This he didn't recite but sang, and accompagnied himself on an instrument I don't know, which looked like a bowl made of bronze but worked like a very harmonious gong. His voice was melodious and powerful, and towards the end of the song the most magical thing happened: it was twelve o'clock, so the church bells began to rang and intermingled with the instument-I-don't-know, resulting not in dissonance but the strange harmony of two alien sounds. The effect was so stunning our President Joachim Gauck commented on it later, during lunch when he made a small improvised speech and toast to Liao Yiwu.
Joachim Gauck having been an East German dissident himself, the speech was inevitably personal (and in its moving clarity made everyone sigh in relief his predecessor Christian Wulff was out of the job - though I doubt he'd have come to the award to begin with). He also realistically said that no matter how moved we the audience now were, the memory would fade as it always does, and the so immensely profitable trade with China continue; but that before every democracy there were democrats, words and ideas, and these would eventually make a difference, as we ourselves had reason to know when we atypically (for Germany) managed a successful revolution in 1989. That we're now, 60 years after our own dictatorship (and in a part of the country only twenty years after the other), can offer asylum and a new home to refuges from other dictatorship proves that change can happen. Though we should, he added, work more on and relearn the opening our arms part. Topical allusion is topical.
All in all these were very moving hours and one of the most political of awards. For the first time ever, even the flowers weren't just set decorations: instead of the usual bunch of flowers, there were two yellow chrysanthemes behind bars of iron.
ETA:pujaemuss told me the instrument is a Tibetan singing bowl.
I have no idea whether I would have the courage to speak out in a dictatorship, but I definitely know I wouldn't have the strengh to live the life Liao Yiwu did. He'd been a relatively apolitical poet until Tianmen Square, when he'd written the poem "Massacre" which got him four years of prison. Afterwards, he lived as a street musician playing the flute dor a while and then started chronicling the lives of the poorest of the poor in China; the interviews form the basis of the books he got the award for. His acceptance speech was the most passionate J'Accuse I ever heard in the Paulskirche. Composed around the refrain "This Empire must break apart" - I deliberately don't translate it as "fall" because he said this sentence in German (the rest of the speech was in Chinese and we could read the translation simultanously), and "zerbrechen" is very different from "stürzen, fallen", plus breaking apart was a theme in the speech - it did something official propaganda also likes to do, using historical parallels, only it did it in reverse to the official interpretations. One reason why I always found the film "Hero" in its aesthetic beauty so incredibly chilling is the basic idea of the individual being nothing and the death of multitudes being acceptable a prize for a greater political goal, unity and an Empire, with the first Emperor being a misunderstood great man. Cue Mao and successors mirroring themselves there.
Liao Yiwu also used the example of the first Emperor of Qin and drew a direct line from him to Mao and current day party bosses, but the point he made was the opposite (I'm translating a translation, so sorry for a lack of style): "His name will always bear the stench of two of his deeds: the building of the Great Wall and the burning of books, which came with the murder of the scholars. Building the Great Wall was supposed to separate the people from the rest of the world and to make China a giantic prison. In order to achieve this, the entire country was forced to work as slaves. The burning of books and the murder of scholars was supposed to separate the people from their own tradition. (...) Two thousand years later he got applause from a new despot named Mao Zedong. Who boasted: Quin Shihuang only killed 400 philosophers; we got rid of tens of thousands of counter revolutionaries."
He conjured up the forty millions who died in the great hunger between 1959 and 1962, the daily degradations and brainwashings later, and what he called Deng Xiaoping's greatest trick: opening the market for Capitalism. The idea that Capitalism in any way is connected with democracy or freedom of speech being by now thoroughly disproved by China's economic success coupled with complete oppression.
"The executioners triumph, because the entire country is their slave. The country is plundered, devastated, sucked dry. To foreign investors, they say: come here, cone here, build your manufacturing plants, do business, build skyscrapers and create networks. As long as you don't bother us about human rights, you can do whatever you want. You may have laws and a public opinion, but here you can wallow in the mud. Come and destroy our rivers, poison our air, ruin our food and our water: come and get our cheap work force and make them work day and night like machines. The more you ensure the Chinese will get physical and mental cancer by destroying their environment, the higher your profit will be. China is the biggest waste hill in the world, and that offers the best business."
And again and again: "This empire must break apart." (Dieses Imperium muß zerbrechen.) At the end of his impassioned, take no prisoners speech, he presented a poem, "The Mothers of Tian'anamen". This he didn't recite but sang, and accompagnied himself on an instrument I don't know, which looked like a bowl made of bronze but worked like a very harmonious gong. His voice was melodious and powerful, and towards the end of the song the most magical thing happened: it was twelve o'clock, so the church bells began to rang and intermingled with the instument-I-don't-know, resulting not in dissonance but the strange harmony of two alien sounds. The effect was so stunning our President Joachim Gauck commented on it later, during lunch when he made a small improvised speech and toast to Liao Yiwu.
Joachim Gauck having been an East German dissident himself, the speech was inevitably personal (and in its moving clarity made everyone sigh in relief his predecessor Christian Wulff was out of the job - though I doubt he'd have come to the award to begin with). He also realistically said that no matter how moved we the audience now were, the memory would fade as it always does, and the so immensely profitable trade with China continue; but that before every democracy there were democrats, words and ideas, and these would eventually make a difference, as we ourselves had reason to know when we atypically (for Germany) managed a successful revolution in 1989. That we're now, 60 years after our own dictatorship (and in a part of the country only twenty years after the other), can offer asylum and a new home to refuges from other dictatorship proves that change can happen. Though we should, he added, work more on and relearn the opening our arms part. Topical allusion is topical.
All in all these were very moving hours and one of the most political of awards. For the first time ever, even the flowers weren't just set decorations: instead of the usual bunch of flowers, there were two yellow chrysanthemes behind bars of iron.
ETA:
pujaemuss told me the instrument is a Tibetan singing bowl.
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