Poetry
｜Behind the Poetry｜
The summer in 2024, I swear, intuitively and seriously, grants me something that I could never ask for: striking conditions that the local people are in, enchanting culture practices that I feel myself connected to and my own culture aligned with, and muti-dimensional perceptions that leave me pondering what it means to be a field worker, a poetry composer, and a Wayfinder.
Out of nowhere we stopped in front of a bustle house in the Shihui Village at Cangyuan and were given a warm welcome by the Wa family. Gulping the special-processed meat that could hardly be tasty for foreigners like us, I urged to finish this unexpected Wa meal and escape from the house, until I started to notice what was going on inside another room. There we witnessed a village-based ritual ‘Calling the Soul’, during which relatives and family members gathered for a feast, taking turns to eat at the table and to chat around the fire pond, after a collective praying rite hosted by a revered elder. In the chaotic voices collided in the heavy mid-air, I saw the Wa people, as if they were living their life once upon the Awa Mountain. For words fell short to delineate the intricate sentiments derived from this impressive experience, I just sketched down the fragments of perception deposited in mind. Those fragments turned out to be poetry, poetry that was more pathos-narrative than poetic-elegant.
Throughout the journey in Cangyuan, academic exploration and poetry composition weaved across me, not inter-hindering but mutually creeping. The stories the villagers told with a ingenuous smile, the sigh for regulations from the government, the feeling of home and the breath of love that thrives…… Unconscious resonance as such left me contemplating upon the identities that distinct the Wa and the Han and the collective memory that unites us. And I was not alone. In our discussion about the locals’ struggles in holding the power to interpret the Wa culture, a senior field worker and I eventually arrived at the idea to construct a visual-acoustic art creation based on reflections of ‘Cangyuan experience’ and the individual sentimental flows that we share.
There’s too much to talk about my composition process. One thing that I intend to note down here is the sentimental collision between artists portraying the world with different kinds of art languages. I still remember the moment when the senior cooperator, the composer of In Echoes Off Embers music score, expressed how my poetry had evoked his ‘creation flow’ to reconstruct the details that boosted the coherence of what we try to convey through poetry narrative and musical emotions. And I still remember the euphoria of expanding a piece of poetry into a set of them as his tune enchanting about the fire pond took me back to Cangyuan. I still remember this great emprise taken by a field poet who encountered diverse Wayfinders toward possibilities of life and is now on her own way.
Prattling, treading, roaring, whimpering, my words so silent, so loud. I know I was there. I know I am here.