Mo Yan - A Writer with a Social Conscience!

Mo Yan! [Don’t Speak]

One among the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Sir Alfred Nobel in the year 1895, the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually, [since 1901] to an author from any country who has ‘produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’.

Since then, each year, the Nobel Prize for Literature is fraught with high drama, much enthusiasm and eventually ends up with a lot of surprise!

Last year was no exception. Among the 210 nominations, with 46 first-timers, there were a host of celebrity contenders like Bob Dylan, [who has been nominated many times since 1997], J. K. Rowling, Don DeLillo, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, William Trevor etc, with the odds heavily favouring Haruki Murakami and Irish writer William Trevor.

In this high-stake scenario, Mo Yan was considered an insignificant entry and odds were not favourably disposed towards him.

But but but... the Swedish Academy thought otherwise! And, their decision made a ‘farm boy’ in ‘far-away China’ feel ‘like a fairy-tale’, ‘giving him a garland to grace his head and presenting him with a glorious crown’, as he himself eulogises in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.

Mo Yan, the dark horse for this year’s Nobel Prize is obviously China’s first literary Nobel Laureate. At the famous Frankfurt Book Fair, Mo, while strongly advocating the writer’s right to express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, commented, ‘some may want to shout out on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions’.

Mo Yan is his pseudonym, which translates to ‘don’t speak’ in Chinese, was because of his father’s advice to him during the time of the Cultural Revolution, and was meant to remind himself ‘not to be too frank’ when speaking in mainland China. However, his works have always been frankly crude about the darker side of Chinese society, especially the countryside and showcase the ugliness of human nature in their struggle with wars, quest for survival, and passion for sex accompanied by all its brutal aggressions. 

Mo is indeed a writer with a social conscience who deftly dabbles between being a dissident and being politically correct in a socialist state known for its no-nonsense approach towards political writing of any sort. Mo Yan gives vent, albeit cautiously to this predicament of being a writer in China, in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.

The Nobel Prize this year had its cloud of controversies too. While it has always been the case that the Nobel Prize in Literature be given to writers who vehemently oppose ideological and political repression by the state, and represent, through their oeuvre the voice of the marginalised and the oppressed sections of society, it indeed is a bolt from the blue that Mo Yan, who is in the good books of the Communist regime, was given the award, provoking a spontaneous vituperative remark by Nobel recipient Herta Muller, who not only denounced the prize given to Mo Yan, but also openly accused him of ‘complicity in Chinese political repression’. But Mo Yan is and has always been equivocal about his convictions: 

For Mo Yan, his ethical sensibilities can vibe well with the his aesthetic sensibilities, but can never foray into the political domain, which, according to him, is not the domain of the true artist. Hence it is no surprise that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was shrouded with controversies. His dissidents say that Mo Yan, has strong ties with the Chinese Communist Party, and hence this honour is not justified. 

One prominent dissident writer from China, Ma Jian was very harsh on Mo Yan. Accusing Mo of playing into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he said, ‘Writers like Mo Yan may show a little criticism of Chinese society in their novels, but when the literary community in China is hurt, as it was with the arrest of Liu Xiaobo, they don’t write about it. They say Liu Xiaobo isn’t an author, he’s concerned only with politics’. 

However, one cursory look at his oeuvre gives us a profound insight into his insightful themes, his solemn setting, and his amazing narrative style, making us commend the wisdom of the Swedish Academy in awarding him the most coveted literary prize.

As Anders Hallengren, Editor, Nobel Laureates in Search of Identity and Integrity points out, several Nobel laureates of Literature have focussed on the difference between their identity as an author and their identity as a social being. This aspect of their creative selves makes them living in, as it were, two different and quite distinct worlds. There is a distance between them that is bridged only in the literary work, where these two worlds are intimately connected and presuppose one another. Mo Yan is no exception. His novels are more of social documentaries, narrating the stories of the ordinary Chinese people growing up in poverty and repression in rural China and their untold bitter hardships endeared during World War II and under the communist regimes. His best-known novel Red Sorghum: A Novel of China, which was also made into a successful feature film, catapulted him to instant fame. He became an instant national sensation and an household name in China ever since.

The Dickensian trait of social realism is indeed the hallmark of his novels. Most of his novels are set in Gaomi County, the semi-fictional landscape reminiscent of the Northeast Township of Shandong where he grew up. Critics have also drawn parallels between his Gaomi County and William Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi County of Yoknapatawpha.

Growing up amidst repression, deprivation and brutality of Maoist extremism, Mo had dropped out of school at the tender age of 11, and by age 18, joined an oil factory. And while he was just 20, he was recruited by the People’s Liberation Army. His literary endeavours first saw the light of day in the form of a short story which came out in 1981 under the pen name of Mo Yan. From then on, it was no stopping Mo. Mo Yan indeed has an amazing sense of artistic description, and he was highly prolific with words.

He wrote his most famous novel Red Sorghum in 1987. The novel is based on a young woman in a rural village in China’s eastern province. Set against the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese war, the novel extols the bravery of the village-folk in combating the Japanese soldiers, and the ‘liberation of the individual spirit’ from the repression of the proletariat spirit.

His most important novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips, brings out the feminist in Mo. Being a feminist in mainland China is not easy, and Mo rather weaves with aplomb the predicament of the anxieties of the protagonist, Mother, who was born during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, at a time when a woman got her value and status in society only if she got married, and had male children. Mother, has nine children, and only one among them is a boy. The author contrasts the pampered, spoilt boy with his strong and sprightly sisters. The epic story which extends to more than 60 years, finally revolves around mother who continues to raise her children and the children of her children without much ado, in spite of the bleak economical circumstances and the devastations caused by the wars.

His next important novel The Garlic Ballads talks about the hand-to-mouth existence of the garlic-farming peasants in rural China, and about the organised state-sponsored violence against the farmers of Paradise County. In the first place, the communist regime goes about encouraging farmers of the county to plant garlic, promising attractive yields. But, due so surplus yield, and because of high taxes coupled with the high-handedness of the government, the crops are left to rot in their fields, eventually resulting in mob fury, the consequent storming of a government compound and how the government steps in with horrifying effects, forms the crux of the story.

It has always been the tradition of the Chinese government to censure all forms of writing. Hence, writers who failed to integrate with the Communist ideologies of the government have always been ‘hauled up’ and given harsh treatment. Take for example the case of his fellow laureate from China, Xiaobo, [dubbed as the ‘Chinese Mandela’ by his avid fans], who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. He was accused of subversion, imprisoned without a proper trial and is now undergoing a 11-year prison sentence. 

Mo, in his Nobel Acceptance Speech, speaks about this stifling sense of subterfuge unleashed on the writing community by the communist government and the challenges he had to face to put across his ideas daringly to the mainline readers.

Says he: ‘My greatest challenges come with writing novels that deal with social realities, such as The Garlic Ballads, not because I am afraid of being openly critical of the darker aspects of society, but because heated emotions and anger allow politics to suppress literature and transform a novel into reportage of a social event’. It’s no wonder then that all his novels are placed in the past, with a touch of hallucinatory realism, interweaving myth, folk tale and magic, so as to avoid confrontations of any sort with the current communist establishment is a question that remains to be answered!

 ‘I am the sum of my books’, says Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul. Mo Yan and his books fit this quote to a tee. One who had this deep conviction for social change anchored within his identity as an author. The very fact that he identifies with his plethora of characters in his works makes his works all the more endearing to his avid readers and the world community at large. Indeed, his works reflect a wider vision of emancipation of the individual emerging from a local conclave, subsuming social realism, transcending the tyranny of politics, and painting with conviction in the process the black humour that blends bitterness and sarcasm the absurdities and corruption that plague modern China.

- Samuel Rufus, S. “A Farm Boy in Far-away China”, Cuckoo, International Literary Magazine, Department of English, V. O. C. College, Tuticorin, January 2013. Print. 6-13. ISSN: 22309691