"Toward the Sea" was written in the 7th Youth Poetry Society of the Poetry Society in August 1987. It is Liu Hong's early masterpiece
The female voice of Liu Hong's poetry
——From "Toward the Sea" to "To the Breasts"
There are always some people in the music world who are neither popular nor dim and quiet. They rely on their steady strength. Similarly, in the Chinese poetry circle, there are also some poets who are not moved by the trends, and despite the winds of east, west, north and south, they still move forward steadily. They rely on a firm stance in poetry writing and a clean spirit of poetry. Liu Hong is one of the singers who is sneaking in the bustling poetry world. We can examine her masterpieces "Toward the Sea" and "To the Breasts" from the perspective of female speech, in order to outline her transformation process in spiritual perseverance.
"Towards the Sea" was written in August 1987 at the 7th Youth Poetry Society of the Poetry Society. It is Liu Hong's early masterpiece. The character of the poem is not at all artificial, but full of rough and vigorous strength, which promotes the value of both sexes to the extreme. "The sea" has become a symbolic carrier of the ideal male in Liu Hong's heart. The "male blood" filled with "deep suffering" emits "deep sighs" and "heroic monologues", which strongly shakes the poet's soul. "The sea" is a metaphor for the strong male soul forged by suffering:
"When the ship's plow points and the whips of thunder and lightning take turns/Write violence across your skin/When the afternoon sun strangles your vocal cords into epic fragments /And the faces that are used to worshiping from strangers/are all exposed by you at once -/with a calm glance/your uninhibited freedom is the rejection of the rope!"
This masculine song sung in the 1980s is still exciting to read now! Her "admiration" of ideal men even gives people a misunderstanding, as if women have given up their female self in front of men: "I only surrender to your command, as a queen facing the abyss." I hope this misunderstanding will be eliminated soon, because what I want to say is exactly this - this is poetry in the true female sense! We have always had a misunderstanding, as if women's liberation must reflect women's hegemonic posture. In fact, what we are pursuing is neither the dragon oppressing the phoenix nor the phoenix oppressing the dragon, but the androgynous poetic space where the dragon and phoenix are in auspiciousness, which is the concentric circle completed by the male and female sex.
“When the storm stirs up your strong passion, it surges in like a tide/With the arm of the shore, I lift up the male caress/I tremble, lying down with unprecedented docility/The beach that never fails to promise/Bring the bright and clean The body unfolds into a paragraph of a love letter/The lines of my youth are as smooth as the moon/Be read carefully by you, or excerpted.”
This is not a one-way dedication, but a two-way mutual integration based on self-independence: on the one hand, it is the entry of men into women: "You will become an obsessed wanderer/lifelong." "Singing in my tangled blood vessels"; on the other hand, it is women's tolerance of men, and the realization and expansion of women's self in men: Facing the sea-like man, "I can outflank him from all directions." ", "Your vastness/is just a catharsis of my soul." However, this ideal state is not so easy to obtain. It is "love that deploys painful pain on top of death." This kind of awakening on the blade and the light of humanity born in suffering both imply a kind of love. The "unique nobility" in spirit also contains another kind of "sadness". If this ideal state cannot be achieved, "it will be a disastrous failure in my life!..." This kind of sad secret is so deeply hidden in Liu Hong's soul. Perhaps the more idealistic she is, the more sadness lurks deep in her soul. It is in the sad living situation that makes her idealism more dazzling.
If "Toward the Sea" is an outward expression of Liu Hong's idealism on gender discourse and a pursuit and appeal for an ideal object, then "Toward the Breasts", which has been widely reproduced at home and abroad, is a reprint of A self-examination of the fate of introverted women. In the 16 years from 1987 to 2003, the land of China has traveled through so many seas, and Liu Hong’s soul has surged through so many mulberry fields! In Shenzhen, where material desires are highly inflated, Liu Hong still adheres to her purity and desire for truth. "To the Breasts", which contains all the painful experience and despair of an idealist, represents Liu Hong's latest thinking: starting from gender and arriving at the in-depth analysis of the value foundation of "capitalized people". The "breasts" in her writing are not the "handful of breasts" in the poem about the lower body, but the symbolic carrier of female personality. This poem was written on the night of March 8, 2003, when the poet was suspected of having breast cancer and had to undergo surgery the next day. This scary and lonely night was the day when the poet bid farewell to her "female beauty". This night she experienced all the peak experiences of life. How absurd is the juxtaposition of "killing" and "elegance" in the opening chapter! And this is the poet's real experience. Life begins to kill an idealist in an "elegant" way. "Perhaps love is so illusory that the dust has settled, so you leave / Either all or nothing, you believe in idealism like me." This is the decisive attitude of an idealist! In the poem, the poet abandons the "moon model" prescribed by traditional culture for women. She abandons "warmth, softness, perfection... and other decorative images that describe the moon, so that the essence of "breasts" can be reached.
Not only did she see the persistence of the self-worth of "breasts": "it is the rhetoric of beauty in the night", "maintaining narcissism and admiration for the flawless things", but more importantly, she glimpsed the inner "self-immolation and self-destruction", I saw the deep "conspiracy". The poet expanded his private pain into a historical examination of the nation and country:
"I have a scarred body, like this country//And you are history, and you will eventually immigrate the trauma in your heart to your skin / And retain dual nationality so that I have obligations wherever I go."
This "breast image" of "the Yellow River comes from you and the Yangtze River comes from you" is not only a witness to the perseverance and defeat of personal ideals and ethics, but also a historical metaphor for the scars of our nation. The underlying value meaning has been sublimated from gender consciousness to consideration of human intrinsic value. "Your curtain call on the blade will be reopened in my poems..." Yes, the poet effectively transformed her poet's survival experience into human experience. The beauty of the body disappeared, but it was gained in the poem. Another essential sense of rebirth. Therefore, this poem is very different from the current lower body poetry, and has become a successful example of in-depth poetry writing, reflecting Liu Hong's firm idealistic poetry writing stance. As Liu Hong said, what her poems reveal is "high standards for the secular world" A person in capital letters, a review and heroic song of life and the world, especially conveying the profound self-identification of a woman with a noble heart, rich spirit, and perseverance of the soul in this land, and her understanding of pain. The responsibility of destiny."
Liu Hong's theme of examining gender also runs through other poems and enriches her thinking in many aspects. She has always been clearly aware of the embarrassing situation of women being "looked at", refusing to be reviewed by men, calling for "returning to one's own eyes" ("Review"). She made a penetrating attack on the harm of life caused by feudal secular concepts ("Imagination on the Windowsill"). Her virtual "daughter" in "To My Daughter" is actually her ideal self: "I have been planted in the mountains since I was a child, talking to the sky / looking for my true self... Unwavering, not obscene, more unyielding, supporting my head and bones / "Become a woman first. Become a human being first." What is revealed here is the integrity of a liberal intellectual. Liu Hong especially likes words and phrases such as "spiritual mysophobia", "pain", "persistence and resistance of human nature", and "deep compassion for the world" in her creative talks. It can be seen that she has strict requirements for her own spiritual realm. If we examine "The Name of the Worker" which she created at the same time as "To the Breast", we can more easily grasp her humanistic care. This is also the transition between her later creative theme "Pain of Existence" and her early theme "Earth". The rebirth and deepening of "worry".
Reading Liu Hong’s poems, I remembered Zang Di’s words: “Poetry is a kind of slowness.” We can also understand that poetry is not so much revolutionary or radical in nature, but rather a slow and profound accumulation. When the waves of poetry rolled by one after another, and when poetry groups were named one after another, Liu Hong did not follow the trend, but firmly took root. The reason why she is able to do this is because she has a solid foundation in humanistic philosophy. She constantly draws nourishment from humanistic philosophy, constantly opens her soul, and accepts the "pilgrim's soul" in Russian literature. It is the poetic spirit of "persisting in nobility in suffering" that creates a spiritual "cultural communication" between Liu Hong and Russian masters. Therefore, some critics call some of her works like "Chinese Akhmatova" makes sense.