One
As a generation that has lost its roots, Taiwanese poet Xi Murong, like other Taiwanese literati, expresses nostalgia, nostalgia and nostalgia, which has become the most moving page in her poems and constitutes the spiritual resources of her creation.
Expressing nostalgia has always been a theme in the writing of Chinese literati.
Hometown can be a concrete city or village, or it can be extended into an abstract sense of homeland and hometown. Tao Qian's "Birds Love the Old Forest, Pond Fish Think of the Old Abyss" is to seek the destination of the soul; Du Fu's "Tears are splashed when I feel it, and I hate to say goodbye to the birds", which is a deep regret for the country's break; Li Yu's "Xiaolou had a spring breeze last night, and the old country is unbearable to look back at the moonlight", which is a nostalgia for the past family and country; Cui Hao's "Where is the Sunset Township?" Yanbo River makes people sad", which is the nostalgia of the travelers who are abroad. Hometown is often the spiritual home of long-distance travelers, and it is a spiritual return that can never be let go.
Two
Xi Murong left the mainland at the age of 11, and her childhood memories are vague, and she spent decades guarding an island in the south. Her eternal questioning and root-seeking consciousness of her spiritual hometown have enabled her to create nostalgic poems with unique charm.
Her short poem "Homesickness" expresses her deep love for her hometown: the ethereal words "clear, vague, foggy, and parting" emerge in this poem, indicating that the hometown in Xi Murong's heart is imaginary and illusory, but with lingering melancholy and deep attachment.
Her nostalgia is not only different from that of Taiwanese poets Yu Guangzhong and Zheng Chouyu, but also different from the nostalgia of the female poet Rongzi, which can be said to be Xi Murong's nostalgia.
Reading Xi Murong's "Homesickness", you will naturally think of "Homesickness" in Yu Guang: this is Yu Guang's Chinese-style nostalgia, which is a specific emotion based on physical objects.
Yu Guangzhong left the mainland in 1949 at the age of 21, almost half a century, and the roots of his nostalgia are in the mainland, and his memory of the mainland is clear and considerable.
Rongzi was born in 1928 and went to Taiwan after working in the mainland. Her nostalgia is also with a palpable emotional memory of the mainland where she lived in her early years, and her "Homesickness in Late Autumn" writes about homesickness:
In contrast, Xi Murong's nostalgia is "vague melancholy", a painstaking pursuit of roots, a passionate yearning for returning home, and a deep love for ancestral culture. At the same time, the special charm of her nostalgic poems is also reflected in her special life experience, with national colors. She is a Mongolian, and her full name is Mulun Xilianbo, which means "mighty river", that is, the Xilamulun River. Her grandmother is Princess Borgit Guanglian, a descendant of Genghis Khan, whose parents and uncles grew up in her hometown in Mongolia, and she has been imbued with deep national culture and national feelings since she was a child. She said: "I am a Mongolian, and I have long had an almost paranoid love for all things related to my own people. ”
Therefore, with a romantic and imaginative heart, she constantly asks about her hometown, depicts the appearance of her hometown, and sings about the beauty of her hometown.
When she studied in Europe in her early years, she took her hometown as her spiritual sustenance, and the poem "Destiny" wrote: This is a homesick picture full of romantic feelings, with the intersection of time and space (Europe-Saiwai), with ethereal visions (I am shepherding sheep on the hillside in a red dress, meeting with my beloved), and the colorful imagery increases the charm of the poem (blue, daisy, white in dreams, fragrant grass, red dress), although I am overseas, my heart has never stopped calling for my distant hometown.
Three
The melancholy of not being able to be a complete Mongolian and the regret of not seeing his hometown make Xi Murong's nostalgia and poetry ethereal, full of beautiful and moving sorrow, such as "Afternoon on the Highway", "Out of the Stopper", "Ballad of the Great Wall" and "Stormy Sand", which are the most emotional songs.
"Highway Afternoon" uses surreal techniques and peculiar imagination to express the feelings of homesickness:
"Out of the Stopper":
"The Ballad of the Great Wall" has a sense of historical vicissitudes, and expresses the longing for his hometown outside the Saiwai with great passion: this nostalgia is not only for Inner Mongolia, but also extends to the whole of China, symbolized by the Great Wall and the Yellow River, with a wider and richer capacity of time and space.
"Stormy Sand" expresses the infinite fascination for the hometown of his parents, with a touch of melancholy: "
This thorn exists everywhere, I want to hide it in the corner of my heart, but I can't do it anyway, every time I touch the scene and think of the name of my hometown, the thorn in my heart will ache faintly. This is also the mentality of the poet in a dilemma: he has no roots, nostalgia arises, he wants to find his own place, but he is unable to return to his hometown, he is a wanderer in a foreign land, and he is a stranger to his homeland, highlighting the painful struggle of the soul that has lost its roots as a modern person.
Four
The nostalgia in the poem is inseparable from the traditional concept that the Chinese are inseparable from the land. As Mr. Xiang Ming said, "Trees root the roots into the heart of the land, so the land becomes the final destination when the leaves fall; People handed over their soul dreams to their hometown for safekeeping, so their hometown became a call to linger when they were wandering. Xi Murong's homesickness and nostalgia complex is built on the cultural value system with "home" as the core, reflecting the idealistic pursuit of home-country isomorphism.
Compared with her love poems, Xi Murong's poems expressing nostalgia and nostalgia not only share the magnificent and tender feelings, but also reveal a sense of pride, which is not unrelated to the Mongolian blood flowing in her body. The yearning for these beautiful scenes, such as the fragrant grass outside the plug, the camel shadow of the sand waves, the hunting wind and sand, and the Wanliguan Mountain, add to the romantic mood of the work.
Xi Murong, as a poet with a profound traditional Chinese cultural heritage, connects the impermanence of fate, her own growth experience with the history of the nation and family in the common theme of "nostalgia", which makes her nostalgia poems not only a simple expression of nostalgia, but also a sense of historical vicissitudes and cultural nostalgia.
At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the "Nineteen Ancient Poems" written by a group of displaced and chaotic Chinese caused a strong shock in her 13-year-old heart, and in her subsequent life, she also experienced wandering.
She said: "In the anxiety and helplessness of years of separation, let yourself find the final balance." I still remember eleven years ago, when "Qili Xiang" was just published, there were many reactions, and some people thought that people like me who lived happily should be carefree, how could they write these poems? Only the strings said something to me, and he said, "'What does it mean to be carefree?'" A Mongolian living far away from the ethnic group in the world of the Han people, never seeing their hometown, not knowing their own language, this survival itself is a tragedy! ’”
Therefore, Xi Murong felt that "she played the role of an eternal stranger in her homeland". This is the projection of the constant predicament of life and the predicament of the local in her heart, and it is also the condensation of loneliness and concrete nostalgia experienced in modern society.
In Xi Murong's heart, there has been a song lingering, what kind of song is this? One day, she heard her 3-year-old daughter sing a song in Hsinchu Kindergarten, which caused her to feel sorry for her family and country for decades and the bitterness of wandering. She wrote "There is a Song" in a tumbling mood: "I can't say its name, I can't sing its tune, but I know where it is, in the deepest and softest corner of my heart, every night when the moon is particularly clear, when the wind and sand are particularly strong at dusk, or when I walk around the corner of a mountain road, or through a vast field full of wild flowers, or in a city that has just turned on the lights, or on the platform where the train is slowly moving; At a given moment, a familiar sadness would hit me, and the slow, yet familiar tune would come out on time, and I knew it was my song—a song of wanderers. ”
From this, we deeply understand the eternal regret and eternal pursuit in the heart of the sensitive and affectionate poetess, her nostalgia is no longer an ordinary, narrow sorrow of leaving the homeland, but has extended to the entire history of mankind, with lofty feelings, deeply touching and tear-jerking.
20 April 2008
(This article is excerpted from "The Heart is the Root of Happiness", with the subtitle added by the editor.) Minor changes to the original text, not reviewed by the author. ）
About the Author
Zhao Wei, Master of Arts, Chief Editor, Writer. He has published more than 100 essays, review articles and poetry works in many newspapers and periodicals, and some of his works have been selected into various prose anthologies across the country. He is currently working at Zhengzhou University.
Recommended Books
Title: "The Heart is the Root of Happiness"
Author: Zhao Wei
Publisher: Henan Literature and Art Publishing House
Publication date: November 2023
Introduction:
The book "Heart is the Root of Happiness" includes more than 90 works written by writer Zhao Wei in more than 20 years from 1995 to 2022, divided into 4 volumes: "The Light of Literature", "Wandering in the Light", "The Beauty of Harmony" and "The Fragrance of the Way".
Qiao Ye, winner of the Mao Dun Literature Award, once commented: "Zhao Wei's prose has a pure temperament, which is condensed by the purity of temperament and the purity of perception. Her writing is concise and graceful, exuding an intellectual and classical bookish atmosphere. Cultural thinking, artistic pursuit, life care, soul search and other elements constitute her rich spiritual dimension, making the fragments of ordinary life glow with moving brilliance. ”