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
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