Herta Muller on the Poetry (and Prisoner’s Life) of Liu Xia

The following is adapted from the introduction to Liu Xia’s Empty Chairs, from Graywolf Press.

Liu Xia’s poems are inevitably lyrical and inescapably documentary. They take her real life and put it on poetic record. Their sentences oppress, their images are both matter-of-fact and full of despair:

When the show is over,

I stay on stage with myself:

one of me is tearful

the other laughing loudly.

Or: “I’ve been looted.”

Or: “My mind is filled with straw.”

Or: “You love your wife and are proud she stays with you.”

Of course, we realize this woman is the wife of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel laureate from China and that country’s most famous political prisoner, now in the fifth year of his eleven-year sentence. His crime: the Charter 08 manifesto, which far from making aggressive demands offered measured, even cautious suggestions for converting China’s communist, one-party system into a free and humane society. For that, he was given eleven years of prison, and his wife is subjected to constant surveillance, house arrest, isolation. Day in and day out she is unable to take a single step that goes unwatched. And this is the merciless substance of these poems, their point of departure.

Meanwhile, the regime is not content to torment Liu Xia alone for her husband’s outspokenness, but has extended its retribution to other family members. To unsettle her further, they have arrested Liu Xia’s brother on a ridiculously trumped-up charge. Despotism plain and simple.

In her poem “Snow,” the author evokes her brother’s birthday. I freeze on the inside when I read the sentence:

it must be hard to be my brother.

Out of this pain come the pangs of conscience, the creeping guilt, simply because nothing can be done about the groundless punishment this big state is inflicting on this small brother, this “little brother” who was born on the “Day of Great Snow.” Simple contrasts on a steep poetic slope. Clear in their helplessness, lapidary but still tender. A quiet imploring is also a loud clamor. Liu Xia’s poems are a mix of silk and iron. Because while iron political despotism rules outside, intimacy with all its hardships reigns within, the enigma of strong emotion.

Over and over we read about time, “the ladder of time.”

Or: “Death from twenty years ago returns– / it comes and goes like time.”

Here in these poems, time is exactly what it is in the everyday life of the author: stolen by the state. No matter how many details we examine, the longer we look at the particulars, we cannot escape the horrifying insight: the full length of stolen time is nothing less than stolen life.

Liu Xia’s poetry is about self-assertion in a stolen life. Her poems possess a dignity that always manages to arise anew whenever it is battered down.

–Herta Müller, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Translated from the German by Philip Boehm

Poems by Liu Xia, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern

From Empty Chairs: Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2015)

Shadow  (for Xiaobo)

One morning as I was sleeping,

a shadow hovered over me like a dream.

This shadow still blocks my vision.

Time goes by, seasons change,

but that long, cruel morning

hasn’t ended.

A chair and a pipe

wait for you in vain.

No one sees you walking down the street.

In your eyes, a bird is flying,

green fruit hangs from a tree without leaves—

since that morning, the fruit refuses

to ripen in the fall.

A woman with burning eyes

starts writing day and night

with endless dream-words while the bird

in the mirror falls into a deep sleep.

4/1997

Nobody Sees Me

Nobody sees me

helpless.

I’m not being cursed. I’m just easily

attracted to unattainable things—

things that reject me,

that are outside what’s real.

My life steals from me.

I believe in a life that is an absurd

fantasy and is also hyperreal,

a life that hides behind death masks

and looming shadows.

I cry out to my own thoughts

that are spinning

on the floor.

I see a shadow walking on death’s path—

slowly, rhythmically,

calmly. Nobody

speaks a word.

I wave—nobody

sees me.

5/1998

Misplaced

Fragile and unprepared, I’ve been tossed

into a play with no dress rehearsal.

Betrayed by the shimmering lights,

I see myself standing on the stage

in an absurd posture; I see

the fool’s sharp teeth gleaming.

The character, assumed

sad and weak,

loses control: her hungry veins

burst into surging waves.

So I become a red-eyed evil witch,

and, under watchful eyes,

brew wine inside skulls.

No costume or makeup

can disguise me.

When the show is over,

I stay on stage with myself:

one of me is tearful

the other laughing loudly.

7/1998

Speechless

Over and over I hunt for shoes

inside my memory, shoes

to put on the dolls

but the ones I find are too big and heavy.

The owners of the shoes look back at me

from photographs, silent.

I become a piece of burning wood.

Give me all the water on earth,

and I will still refuse to float.

Is there a force somewhere in the sky

that can turn the clock back?

I stare blankly, wait

for the final moment.

There were Jewish children

who wrote poems before dying.

In silent recitation,

I carve lines on my bones.

Inside empty shoes

my bones

are piercing flesh and skin,

those bare feet

ice-cold.

1/1999

Entrapped  (for Xiaobo)

As soon as you got on the train,

I started waiting by the phone, filled

with anxiety. There are things

I can’t escape.

You disappeared suddenly,

leaving behind a shadow that

lingered.

Each time, your departure

made me nervous.

While sleeping, I’d see you

in places

I couldn’t recognize.

You’d lose your way home,

which filled me with dread.

Every night I needed

to hear your voice.

Before the arrival of that terrifying train,

I chewed and swallowed every word you uttered.

This is a disease.

7/29/2000

Snow  (for Liu Hui’s 44th birthday)

It’s your birthday today, little brother,

the Day of Great Snow on the lunar calendar.

I open a bottle of wine

and think about what gift I’d give you

as a form of embrace.

I set a glass out for you.

Let’s drink, the two of us, and chat.

Once you gave me a photograph for my birthday—

it’s right here—

a day we were both laughing.

Without you, our home

is distorted.

Daily, father becomes quieter,

mistakes your son for you.

Mother cries her eyes dry.

Now, your son is off in a foreign land.

Our big brother is busy; his feet hover above the floor.

Your brother-in-law asks about you every month,

and I dream of you all the time.

In my dream you quarrel with me—

it must be hard to be my brother.

I remember the summer of 1976.

After the earthquake in Tangshan

we went to Changsha on a green train.

When the train started,

I was afraid to tell you

how frightened I was

to leave home for the first time.

If possible, brother,

trust me now, unconditionally,

like when you were a small child,

that this will be over soon—

our train will reach the final station.

12/7/2013

Liu Xia is a Chinese poet and artist, born in 1961 and raised in Beijing. She started writing poetry and short stories in 1982 and published in major magazines such as Poetry and People’s Literature in China, but she stopped publishing after the 1989 Tiananmen incident. She met the writer and critic Liu Xiaobo in the early 1980s at a literary gathering; they married in 1996 while he was serving a prison sentence. Liu Xiaobo was first jailed from 1989 to 1991 due to his involvement with the June 4th student movement. He was detained without trial in 1995, then sentenced to a three-year imprisonment from 1996 to 1999. Because of his participation in drafting Charter 08, a pro-democracy manifesto, he was sentenced to an eleven-year prison term in 2008, which he is still serving. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, at which time Liu Xia was placed under house arrest. She remains unable to leave her home and with very restricted contact with the outside world. Selected Poems by Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia was published in Hong Kong in 2000, which was Liu Xia’s only official publication after 1989. Empty Chairs: Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2015) includes her poetry over thirty years from 1983 to 2013.

Ming Di was born in China and lives in the United States as a poet and translator, author of six collections of poetry in Chinese and four volumes of translation. A selection of her poetry has been translated into English, titled River Merchant’s Wife (Marick Press, 2012).

Jennifer Stern is the pen name for an American poet and translator who has published one volume of poetry in English. She has worked as an editor and has translated poetry from several languages.

Photograph by Liu Xia