Translator's Introduction

When I was preparing to translate these poems by Jidi Majia, I had the good fortune to accompany him on a trip to his native district in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, which is located in mountainous west Sichuan. In the secluded Nuosu villages of Butuo and Zhaojue counties, I was struck by the attachment of the Nuosu hill people to their time-honored ways. Where old cob [i.e., clay and straw] houses had been replaced, I could see that new ones had been built according to the spaceconserving pattern, with clusters of small buildings interspersed among gardens and pastures. The Nuosu women still sit in small groups in front of their houses, weaving strips of cloth on waist looms. I saw men wearing black capes of hand-woven wool similar to the ponchos of Bolivian Indians.

The Yi people, of which the Nuosu make up the most populous branch, are a mystery that is only beginning to declare itself to the world. There are at least seven million Yi, and several million of them still speak their own language, which belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family. They live in pockets in southwest China, in the provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan.

The Nuosu have their own independent mythology and folklore. In some ways it reminds me of Tibetan and Han Chinese ways of thinking, but it is different. They have oral epics, for instance the Book of Origins and Zhyge Alu. They have a myth of a great ancestral bird totem, which reminds me of the Tibetan garuda. They often portray the great bird in beaten silver, which also reminds me of the garuda. They have their own scriptures for sending off souls after death. The bimo (ritual priest) waves a prayer scepter and bell through the smoke of a fire while chanting the scriptures; his only incense is the smoke of this fire. Unlike the thunderbolt-shaped dorje of the Tibetans, the bimo's prayer scepter resembles a smoke-inhaling bird. The bimo does not sit in a temple when reading his scriptures; he sits on a mat out in the open. The scriptures are written in a pictographic script which is independent from the Chinese writing system.

If you spend any time around Nuosu villages, eventually you will see one of the bimos, wearing a toadstool-shaped hat of black felt. When a bimo is not doing ceremonies for healings or funerals, he goes off to a quiet spot at the edge of a village. You can never predict where you will happen upon a bimo reading his scriptures, often with an acolyte beside him tending a small fire. The scriptures are copied out on papyrus-like material or thin sheepskin. There is another kind of priest-figure, a suni, who is a kind of shaman. He drums on a waist-mounted hoop-drum(which looks very Siberian); he dances and sings for hours in a trance; he often has matted hair going down past his waist.

The Nuosu people have never accepted a religion from outside. In fact, their belief system has an inherent complexity: it is a tapestry of seasonal rituals, epics about divine ancestors, and stories of nature spirits. Perhaps because the Yi nationality remains an aggregate of branches, their beliefs have never fused into a dogmatic system. Their collection of beliefs provides a sense of belonging to the natural environment; it contains a rich variety of perspectives on the human condition. For these reasons it reminds me of American Indian religion.

The poet Jidi Majia is the child of an aristocratic Nuosu family. After 1949 his father held a leading position in the judiciary of Butuo County, in the Nuosu heartland. Jidi Majia came upon his calling as a poet in his early teens, when a Chinese version of Pushkin's works came into his hands. He resolved early upon his path in life: he would articulate the identity and spiritual outlook of the Nuosu in poetry.

At the age of 17 Jidi Majia was admitted to Southwest Nationalities College in Chengdu. During his college years his hungry mind absorbed Nuosu epics and folklore. He also read great works of Chinese literature: everything from the mythically rich ancient poetry of Qu Yuan to vernacular prose masters of the 20th century. He also read works of world literature, such as the novels of Mikhail Sholokhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

After graduation he returned to his home district; his poems soon won province-wide attention when they were printed in the Sichuan journal Stars. Before long he was hired by the Writers' Association of Sichuan, and he rose steadily to a position as secretary of that organization. He broke onto the national stage in 1986, when he won the National Poetry Award and became a protégé of the respected older poet Ai Qing. He omnivorously read the works of world-class poets: Paz, Vallejo, Neruda, Lorca, Amichai, Seifert, Szymborska, Senghor.

Jidi Majia concentrated on his vocation, without seeking rewards extrinsic to the writing of poetry, yet such awards came his way when he was given a position in the office of the National Writers' Association. He had chances to participate in conferences of writers and poets around the world; he was invited to observe the workings of the U.S. government for one month, as a guest of the U.S. Congress' International Young Leaders' Program. To appreciate the breadth of Jidi Majia's activities as a cultural figure in recent years, it helps to know that he has been creative director of musical stage productions ('Qinghai's Secret Realm' and 'White Dove') and has organized major cultural festivals (Qinghai International Poetry Festival—2007 and 2009).

Jidi Majia has never stopped being what he always was: a great soul who emerged from among an indigenous group in southwestern China and undertook to bridge his people's ethos with realities of the outside world. For Jidi Majia, the project of articulating his identities as a Nuosu, as a Chinese, and as a world citizen are in no way mutually exclusive.

The Nuosu are a proud people whose antecedents lie on the margins of Sinitic culture. Being a long-embedded element within the Sinitic cultural sphere, yet never having been fully absorbed by it, they represent a unique position on the continuum of Chineseness. With respect to influences across the Han-Nuosu cultural interface, they have contributed as much as they have received in music, folk art, and myth.

The position of Jidi Majia as a Nuosu poet writing in Chinese reminds me of Irish writers who emerged on England's literary scene in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Irish writers and poets brought a tremendous vitality to the English language. Though the Queen's English was a borrowed language for them, they were able to make it fresh, perhaps because of Ireland's strong oral tradition. This tradition gave them an eloquence which we sometimes describe as the 'gift of blarney.' Several examples spring to mind: W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett.

In the U.S. we also have examples of ethnic groups whose historical position as embedded outsiders lent strength to their literary expression. These include black American writers such as Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, as well as writers from the Jewish immigrant community such as Isaac Singer and Saul Bellow. More recently, we have heard strong voices from the native American poet Sherman Alexie and from the ethnic Chinese immigrant Li-Young Lee.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Jidi Majia has a strong affinity for figures of America's Harlem Renaissance. Only a great-souled poet could have succeeded in the project that Langston Hughes attempted: to revive a people's identity, from the roots up, in a modern setting of cultural dislocation and anomie. The Harlem Renaissance figures started from a position on the margin, but their voices were eventually heard and felt by the cultural mainstream. Such was also the mission which Jidi Majia settled upon as a poet. But his affinity with the Harlem figures also lies on a more elemental, symbolic level—in the phenomenon of blackness. The most populous branch of the Yi call themselves the Nuosu, which in their language means the 'black people.' Their holy men wear black hats and capes. Their formal decorative scheme features a black background with red and yellow patterns. In one poem Jidi Majia writes: 'I write poems, because it seems to me that the spirit of our introspective, ruminative tribe is shown outwardly in a melancholy color. For a long time this color has been harbored deeply in our souls.' ('One Kind of Voice') The color black, as a symbol of an emotional atmosphere, indicates an awareness of suffering and death; it is also the color of spiritual knowledge and depth.

There has been conflict and suffering in the history of the Nuosu's dealings with their Han and Tibetan neighbors. Of course, they have more often co-existed peacefully. In recent times, the timber cutting practices which scarred the Nuosu homeland were an unfortunate side-effect of modernization that was basically imposed upon them. This is part of the Nuosu burden of sadness, a loss of harmony with the environment which they feel keenly because of their attachment to traditional beliefs and values.

Jidi Majia accepts suffering as part of the human condition: it is the underlying melancholy color on which the hopeful patterns of creative expression appear by contrast. In his poems about crises of the modern world, he denounces violence but does not seek to attach blame or exact retribution. His attitude toward suffering can be seen in his praise for the people of Chongqing: '...this great city/ Like its kind, generous people/ Always keeps its eyes on the future/ Never seeking to duplicate vengeance/ .../ This city's reflective attitude toward war/ And its longing for peace/ Is no other than what today's China/ Gives as its answer to the world!' ('I Admit It, I Love This City')

In our post-modern context, it is no surprise that a poet of worldwide vision would emerge from a minority people in the isolated mountains of southwest China. After all, nothing could be more fantastic than what has already happened in our 20th-century reality. History has shown that major civilizations produce systems of thought which trumpet certain fundamental categories as standards of truth: God, Buddha-nature, the Dao, the realm of ideal forms, the ground of Being, material forces. These are ideas which tend to deny each other or swallow each other up. In contrast to such monolithic thought systems, the cultures of indigenous peoples possess still-living myths which have room to grow. Indigenous cultures have a responsive emotional attachment to nature; they are quite observant about changes in their natural environment.

Unfortunately, the fundamental thought-categories valued by major civilizations are dislocated from nature. When the danger and absurdity of such dislocation is impressed upon civilized people by one crisis after another, they realize it is time to 'deconstruct' their systems of thought. But 'deconstruction' is yet another absurd exercise which only prolongs their detour from the task of getting oriented to life on planet earth. People with indigenous belief systems don't have to bother deconstructing anything. The detailed structure of an intact indigenous belief system includes a dose of skepticism. Indigenous people have a connection of gratitude and reverence toward nature, but they can take their own beliefs with a grain of salt. As I read Jidi Majia's poetry, I experience the perspective of an indigenous belief system with its windows thrown wide-open to the modern world.

When indigenous people are dispossessed, they grope for memory because the continuity of life across generations has value for them. This theme is addressed from many angles in Jidi Majia's poetry. In 'Sun' he writes: '...Looking at the sun always makes me miss/ Those people before my time/ Who once could feel this warmth/ And are no longer in this world.' As specific traditional customs fade away, the great mythic ancestors come to stand for inheritable values. Thus Jidi Majia writes: '...Time has rays to illumine a vanished river/ As a column of riders approaches along a dream's edge/ The silvery brightness of saddles disappears/ Deep into a word-string, whereupon I see them/ Elders and wise men we are not justified in forgetting/ In fact they signify truth and dignity on this land/ .../ I think back, not to dwell on sad losses/ Just being human I am drawn/ To relive all beautiful bygone things!' ('Glowing Embers in the Fireplace') This is a healthy response toward cultural dispossession. Out of the ashes of loss, at least the poet can rescue moments of clear vision to light the way for his successors.

February 2010
White Canvas Gallery, Nanjing