In an interview with Jack, the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin stated that he now considers himself primarily to be a novelist: if he had concentrated on poetry, he remarked, his poetry “might have been better.” Nevertheless, he continues to write and publish very interesting poetry. His books of poetry include Between Silences (1990), Facing Shadows (1996), Wreckage (2001) and A Distant Center (2018).
Previous shows have dealt with Ha Jin’s excellent biography of Li Bai (Li Po), The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai. Today’s show is a consideration of Ha Jin’s own poetry. The focus will be on his most recent book, A Distant Center, though Jack will read from other works as well.
Jack writes:
In his introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Mallarmé or the Poet of Nothingness, Ernest Sturm writes, “In a theater full of empty seats, poets became their own favorite audience…From 1850 to the early 20th century, from the post-Romantic generation to the last Symbolists, writing meant exile.”
Exile or—to use Ha Jin’s term—“rootlessness” is the “existential condition” of this marvelous poet whose highly problematical language tells us that poetry simultaneously connects us to the world and isolates us, whose very successes are necessarily in some sense a whirl-a-gig of failures. For the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the poet “becomes the strangest of all beings because, without issue on all paths, he is cast out of every relation to the familiar and befallen by atē, ruin, catastrophe”:
Pre-eminent in the historical place, [creators of the polis] become at the same time apolis, without city and place, lonely, strange, without issue amid the essent as a whole,…without structure and order, because they themselves as creators must first create all this.
(An Introduction to Metaphysics, 1953)
“So many doors close once you pass them,” writes Ha Jin, “Don’t turn around….” A Distant Center is a book by a poet who understands poetry to be, precisely, apolis in Heidegger’s sense and, in Ernest Sturm’s terms, a theater of exiles. He writes,
You don’t know how I hate networking.
Banquets of a dozen courses
and endless parties cannot shrink
the distances between people
and declares, in pain—and in classic iambic pentameter—“I dream of becoming a scar on China’s face.”
This is from Wreckage (2001):
BETRAYAL
Come, you can’t forget those days
when the foreign rebels surrounded us.
There was no food left in the town.
Parents exchanged their babies—
to have them at other homes
bathed, killed, cooked and eaten.
When someone died of hunger or disease
people would rush over
to cut him up for meat.
Our starved troops were losing their morale,
so you had me dragged out. I still hear
you speak to the officers and soldiers:
“You all defend this city with
one heart for our Emperor.
I cannot offer you my limbs to eat
because I have to lead the defense,
but I dare not keep this woman.
Please have her.”
Have you forgotten what I said?—
“I’m still useful although
I’m merely a concubine.
Unlike your wife, I can read to you
and copy your writings.
Remember how I pleased you.”
Some of the men seemed uncomfortable
whispering that I was too young
and too pretty for the blade.
But you gave orders—
they took me apart.
Afterward they began butchering
girls and women; then boys
and old men ended up in kitchen pots.
My father too became a meal.
By the time the imperial army came to
break the siege, how many people had gone
through their countrymen’s bowels?
Over four thousand. Even
the rebels might not have killed so many.
The Emperor promoted you to court
and awarded you a two-page biography
in the Royal Records of Loyal Men,
yet I’ll never recant my words
that inflamed your mind
and cost me my flesh:
“You ought to surrender
so as to save the civilians.
To be human, we may have to face
the charge of betraying our country.”
Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. The June 4th, 1989 incident at Tiananmen Square influenced his decision to remain in the United States and to write in English. He is the author of eight novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, and a book of essays—all in English. He has received the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in the Boston area and is a professor at the creative writing program at Boston University.