In I Name Him Me—a collection of contemporary Chinese writer Ma Yan’s poetry, translated into English for the first time by Stephen Nashef—suffering is everywhere. It clings to the air after a rainy night; it suffuses the stuffy interior of a gray attic, where two lovers silently ponder over their fraying romance; it is welded, even, into the festive infrastructure of amusement parks. “The people on the rollercoaster,” she muses, “are the factory workers who build it, / hands full of wisdom, artisans / of suffering” (141).
Spare and lush in turns, Ma Yan’s lyricism conjures up an image of suffering that begets rather than forecloses. The speaker in her poems regards suffering with clear-sighted curiosity, as if discovering an especially delicate piece of pottery at a vintage shop, gently turning it over in her hands and marveling at its craftsmanship from every angle. But Ma Yan did not quite see herself as a collector of novel trinkets. Instead, as she writes in an untranslated essay: “Now that we’re talking about it, my whole life, I’ve actually always wanted to be a bard.”[1] To that end, the third piece in the collection—a prose-poem strikingly titled “Suffering Does Not Destroy What Makes Suffering Possible”—might be read as a bardic manifesto:
Suffering does not destroy what makes suffering possible; life
does not do away with the self’s art of illusion. In the space
of a life, the shellfish that pass through the cracks in the rock
are a hidden, infinitesimal music, which a huge band
is now playing, and the people march from the cracks
toward a magnificent future. Yes, it is true, light will scatter
from the lowliest of places, and all the ugliest of smells
are omens of war, but I sit on the rubbish pile singing,
singing a song about the marriage of plastic and fire, a song
that will sing the recluse underground up to the surface.
When he comes to the surface the flowerless fruit will bloom,
the shells will offer a path that looks back, and everything
once again will descend, repeating until infinity. Just like this,
he says, suffering does not destroy what makes suffering possible. (23)
Preoccupied with the ubiquity of suffering, Ma Yan’s poem recalls what Anahid Nersessian, in a recent study on Keats’s odes, describes as the “garrulousness” of melancholy. According to Nersessian, suffering crops up wherever we turn because melancholy drones on about itself and only itself, insisting on filling up every crevice of our days spent in mourning with one lament after another. Endeavoring to unlock what she refers to as “the conundrum of ‘sorrow’s mysteries,’” Nersessian finds clarity in Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” approaching the poem as a roadmap to guide us toward a path of “good melancholy” and steer clear of torpid escapism’s detours.[2] Keats’s poem, after all, begins with a repudiation that is also a directive: “No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist / Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine.”[3] If we were to call Ma Yan a melancholic, however, she certainly isn’t a very diligent one—at least not by Nersessian’s standards, and certainly not by Keats’s. Far from something that requires discipline and conscientious effort to overcome, Ma Yan’s suffering is a site for unexpected pleasures. Rather than avoid them, Ma Yan indulgently moseys through all the places that Keats alerts us to “go not to,” places built on rubbish piles that reek of the ugliest of smells; rather than tune it out, she delights in melancholy’s endless chatter, charmed by the “hidden, infinitesimal music” thrumming beneath.
Keenly aware of the light that scatters in these “lowliest of places,” Ma Yan frequently returns to the debased and the denigrated. Her poems are populated with blank characters—nameless, faceless, drifting through the world with disaffected fatigue—who drink to excess, smoke cigarettes, wander aimlessly by the lake, play footsie under the table, and make love in the marshes, taking every chance to stave off suffering with frivolous pursuits, what she wryly calls “the self’s art of illusion.” The phrase is a curious one, simultaneously suggesting mastery and gimmickry: the knowledge that a magic trick is merely a well-rehearsed act does little to smother our elated gasps of surprise. In fact, the cheap thrills that we are able to sneak in, while illusory in their fleeting half-life, nonetheless kindle within us real moments of joy and keep us tethered to the world.
In “The Paintings Are All More or Less Disingenuous,” Ma Yan writes:
The paintings are all more or less disingenuous, hung on the wall
like they’re staring at us. We’re making love on the sofa,
touching each other on the furniture. The paintings keep staring.
They are all more or less disingenuous, unable to
reach out and stop us, unable to summon water or fire
to drive us away. (113)
As artifacts, paintings are by their very nature disingenuous; Mona Lisa’s famous half-smile that follows its visitors around the gallery is, in the end, nothing but a trick of the eye from shadows and light. In this poem, however, the paintings are only “more or less disingenuous,” taking on an ambiguous sense of agency: they “keep staring” at the couple in throes of passion, but they are also “unable to / reach out and stop us,” as though torn between voyeuristic fascination and indignation. More than inert ornaments, then, the paintings are permissive spectators, bearing witness to and thus concretizing the couple’s desire. It is worth noting that the original Chinese, xu wei, is more commonly translated to English as “hypocritical” despite not carrying the same derogatory tenor. By using “disingenuous” instead, Nashef at once softens the tone of the poem and intensifies the vividness of its titillating imagery. The lovers’ heated exchanges choreograph an amorous performance, and the paintings’ steps at the edge of the stage, while halting, are not wholly unwilling. The poem ends with a refrain: “We scratch off the craquelure / with our fingers. In short, they are all more or less disingenuous. / They cannot see all of this, they cannot see us make love” (113). To say that the paintings are sentient would be disingenuous; the dissolute pleasures that their complicitous presence overlooks are anything but.
Just as the exhilaration of a tryst becomes hypostasized through the watchful stare of a painting, suffering often feels tangible in Ma Yan’s poems, transformed into a myriad of material objects that we can see, touch, even taste. After all, the word for “suffering” that Ma Yan uses—tong ku—combines “pain” and “bitterness.” If asked to describe the flavor of suffering, however, she might say that it tastes like a cherry:
Today I eat a cherry
and remember a woman before me,
languid, holding back, then the sound of catching one’s breath.
She once was a mother
placing a glazed cherry into my mouth.
Slowly, I swallow the honeyed
crimson corpse. As red as
the blood that surges into the syringe,
as red as the desire that disappeared
from her cheeks—this charming sustenance. (67)
Like a glazed cherry, in which the fruit’s tartness and the syrup’s sweetness become indistinguishable from one another in our mouths, suffering is a “honeyed / crimson corpse.” It shores up grief and joy often in tandem, intermixing the two into a “charming sustenance” that we feed on despite the constant reminder of our own susceptibility to injury and the inevitability of decay.
The specter of death looms over much of Ma Yan’s work: in one poem, she writes, “I’m going to find them. / Every day in this city someone jumps off of a building. / My brother says he wants to slit his own throat. / He says it with a smile” (53); another is simply titled, “Yes, I Must Die”—a declaration that cuts even closer to the bone after the poet took her own life in 2010. Yet Ma Yan’s poetry is never about death, nor does it share death’s abrupt finality. As she writes in “The World Rains A Night”:
Of one thing I’m sure:
that moment I was there with you.
That night I was wet from the same rain.
You now mean what cannot be imagined;
the crows flying over the village are symbols of death
but not necessarily of bad things to come.
All that’s left now is to recall a warm hand in my own.
You became a memory everyone could share
and my work in this life is to chisel at memory. (57-59)
Death, here, becomes another facet of life itself; equally unpredictable, equally full of possibility. It leaves behind, in its wake, memories of a warm hand or a night of rain—memories that come alive every time we reminisce about them with a friend, something more enduring than a single lifespan. Fond memories are not the only things one can share with others, however. In a bittersweet twist of fate, this poem evokes the legacy of Ma Yan’s own body of work. Aside from two self-published poetry pamphlets—one of which is also titled “This Charming Sustenance” (mi ren zhi shi)—the majority of Ma Yan’s writing never went into print until after her passing; rather, it was housed digitally on her personal blog “sweetii,” where people still frequently comment to this day. “You’ve been gone for so many years already,” one user writes on the message board, “The poetry you left behind still stirs up something within me.”[4]
“Suffering is direct,” Ma Yan observes (67). It is direct because we recognize it immediately, with acute certainty, the moment that we encounter it. It is direct, too, because it is one of the few things that binds us together, not unlike sharing a jar of candied cherries or commenting on the same blog post. Suffering, then, is a desire path—a trail that emerges not from urban planning but through collective footfalls—that leads to unbidden communities. In “Bus Chronicle,” we see how these precarious commons take shape:
It’s stifling, even hotter at the back of the bus
where waves rise and fall. I mind my step.
A long time ago, in a past life, the depressive
took a note between her thumb and forefinger
from South China’s back pocket while no one was looking;
undercover and nearing the Great Tradition.
[…]
The heart of the oscillator swings inside people’s bodies
caught in the heat of the sweep. No one person
is superfluous; this is the limit of the squeeze.
Under their bodies the engine is still creating new lives
when depression places a foot on the Earth’s meager crust
and a doubt that is hard to dispel erupts in the chest. (87)
Between these two stanzas, the subject of the poem shifts from “I” to “the depressive” to “depression,” first depersonalizing the speaker’s voice and then diffusing it into a general mood that gathers together all passengers—“no one person / is superfluous.” Inundated by her suffering, the depressive capitulates to the affective bonds around her, nascent and in flux. The sweep of the oscillator, the tight squeeze of the horde of commuters, and the doubt that erupts in her chest gradually settle into a similar tempo. Buoyed by this lilting rhythm, the depressive returns to her own body and begins to speak as an “I” once more:
The heat in their bodies
is a smouldering conspiracy, dumbly stewing.
I become brusque, no longer sunk in my thoughts.
Like the ice coursing through the heart of the Great Tradition,
I melt. Now I mix into the dirt of the earth (87)
Spilling out beyond the confines of the back of the bus and into the world, the renewed “I” of the speaker could just as easily be read as the first-person plural “we”—as a body of individuals, mixed into the dirt of the earth, simultaneously disparate and inextricably, intimately connected.
At the same time that a sense of community rescues us from the flood of our own thoughts, it is also itself a “smouldering conspiracy,” one with its own perilous affinities, “dumbly stewing” and ready to scald. According to Ma Yan, we are never not vulnerable to suffering; as she writes, “warmth can also be pain,” and there exists “that kind of sweet, that turns out to be salty and tart” (77). Every chance for happiness also runs the risk of heartbreak, the poet bluntly cautions us. Ma Yan’s language is often plain spoken, but its matter-of-factness underlies a visceral, shredded intensity. As Stephen Nashef remarks in his “Translator’s Note,” her poetry is singular in its wide range of linguistic registers, which span from “the terse grammar of classical Chinese” to “the colloquial expressions of the Sichuanese dialect,” orchestrating an evocative polyphony that amplifies even the most minor keys of alienation, belonging, and the strident chords of when they collide (148). “Smooth Talker,” for instance, frames itself with facetious colloquialism: the original Chinese title literally translates to “Central Air” (zhong yang kong tiao), an internet slang term that refers to emotionally unavailable flirts that dote on each of their lovers indiscriminately but without commitment, as if an air conditioning unit that can be plugged into any electrical outlet, providing impersonal comforts to whomever is around. The glibly titled poem, however, concludes on a note of spiteful distress: “seven days, only seven days / either hand over your body to the people dressed in white / or pay up now, buy heart-shattering potion” (127).
For Ma Yan, these discordant collisions double as a definition of love. The final stanzas of “Rite of Passage” read:
bitterly spitting out secrets
some simple
youthful sentiments
and those things inside ambiguity
that collide can
be named love
dramatized transformations that fall
all of a sudden, caught off guard
unfolding, unfolding… until
they open up, bit by bit, raining down
countless loves seen dancing in the sky
you can’t not sing, not go with it
and if there is nothing left to say
remain silent maybe this is the way,
like this, dancing, as though commanded
or named (17-19)
The bitter facts of life and the wide-eyed idealism of youth are here held in tensile equipoise, the center of which foments possibilities of intimacy and alterity. Deploying a pair of double negatives—can’t not sing, can’t not dance—Ma Yan makes explicit that these possibilities are not flights of fancy but rather something more akin to an order or an oath, something that interpellates us into being by naming us. Perhaps there is no rite of passage more significant, Ma Yan suggests, than the one through which we finally respond to this call and accede to the inevitability of suffering—not with abject fatalism, but with equanimity and even delectation.
To return to the prose poem with which this review begins, “suffering does not destroy what makes suffering possible”; on the contrary, it marks the moment when “everything / once again will descend, repeating until infinity” (23). “Everything”—including the illicit joys of clandestine affairs, the banal commiseration of daily commutes, and the countless forms of love that unfold from the injuries of being in a world, but especially this world. As Ma Yan postulates elsewhere: “Let us take life’s hurt. If I present you with this, / perhaps we will have a variable” (57). Let us take life’s hurt, because we can’t not take life’s hurt. We might find hidden within it, however, a glazed cherry, that charming sustenance, tart with suffering and honeyed with love.
Notes:
[1]Ma Yan, Ma Yan San Wen Ji (Beijing: New Star Press, 2012), 332. Translation mine.
[2]Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 80-81.
[3] John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy,” in Nersessian, Keats’s Odes, 77.
[4] weiji, November 10, 2022, comment on Ma Yan, “Ma Yan’s message board,” translation mine, https://site.douban.com/108373/room/46340/