Dr Tan Chee Lay

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Abstract

This paper investigates the post-exile works of the renowned contemporary Chinese poet, Yang Lian, who was exiled from China after the 1989 student movement. His poetry was labelled as 'Misty poetry' (Menglongshi), which emphasises polyvalent imagery and irregular syntax, often leading to interpretational indeterminacy. This paper will provide a background of Yang Lian's exile experience, and proceed to argue that his post-exile poems are based on his increased theorisation of the Chinese language, such as the lack of subject markers, and the non-specificity and synchronic capacity of the Chinese language, which enable his poems to encompass the totality of experience, time and space while embracing diversity. Besides applying more foreign and universal imagery, Yang's challenge of the borders of Chineseness may signal his unique way of progressing towards a Borderless poetics: his later works attempt to integrate "with the modern", the foreign and the universal, and even a new-fangled Chineseness beyond contemporary linguistic boundaries. "Borderless" poetics here refer to one that challenge the conventional boundaries between private and public domains, native and foreign cultures. Borderless Poetry displays a kind of poetics that encompasses the multiplicities of the transcultural, transnational and transpolitical which stresses universal humanity and internationalization. Yang's Borderless poetics has exemplified how he attempts to transcend the temporal, geographical and cultural borders while maintaining self-conscious as the core of his poetry and anchoring his poetics in Chineseness.

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Keyword(s) :  Yang Lian, Misty poetry, post-exile poetry, Chineseness, Borderless poetics