| E.L. Doctorow reads from Charter 08, the December 10, 2008 declaration calling for political reforms, greater human rights, and an end to one-party rule in China, and a poem by Liu Xiaobo, as part of the 2009 event Writers Rally for the Release of Liu Xiaobo. |
Readings of Liu Xiaobo’s poems
Daybreak • Longing to Escape • One Letter
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From Charter 08:
“[We need] to establish China’s federal republic under the structure of democracy and constitutionalism.”
Liu Xiaobo wrote the following poem in 2000, near the end of his so-called “reeducation through labor” that he received after calling for political dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama of Tibet. The poem is dedicated to his wife.
One Letter
one letter is enough
for me to transcend and face
you to speak
as the wind blows past
the night
uses its own blood
to write a secret verse
that reminds me each
word is the last word
the ice in your body
melts into a myth of fire
in the eyes of the executioner
fury turns to stone
two sets of iron rails
unexpectedly overlap
moths flap toward lamp
light, an eternal sign
that traces your shadow
Such events as this have been necessary for as long as I can remember. PEN Members marched around the Czech embassy to protest the jailing of Vaclav Havel. Twenty years ago, we rose in judgment against the fatwa applied to Salman Rushdie. The attack is always directed to the creative mind, and when we take note as we do today, it always seems to be snowing. Liu Xiaobo’s country has a sorry record of artist intimidation. China supposes to lead the world into the future as superpower in the 21st century, but when it jails its people for their thought, it is mired in the past with the ghosts of emperors and dictators and kings, and along with military thugs and theocracies like Iran’s that rigs its elections and shoots down its people in the street. The civilization of China cannot lead when its revolutionary government simply changes the style of despotism, can’t move forward when its poets and writers and artists, its thinkers and intellectuals, are muzzled in silence. Under such conditions, the genius of a nation withers and dies. Liu Xiaobo writes in the interest of a just enlightenment. That is not to slander or subvert or overthrow. It is to ask for constitutional realization. It is to ask for a country true to itself. That is all that Liu Xiaobo has done, and that is why we call for his release. |
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