Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry

59 | 2023

“…On the other hand, however, the intercession of a spokesperson of the system guarantees migrant workers access to resources, sponsors, publication channels and governmental support at the local level through a kind of cultural brokering, whereby people like Yang Honghai act as intermediaries and create opportunities not only for dagong poets to be known and their voices to be heard, but also for the dagong community to strengthen and unite through sharing and confrontation (Sun 2012; What about the actual voices of migrant workers, then? They rise in the form of literature (poetry seems to be the prominent genre) and other cultural practices (van Crevel 2019a). The value of migrant workers' poetry is complex and layered:…”

In Search of Singularity

“…I will not engage extensively in the migrant worker poetry, for many insightful studies of the phenomenon are available in English;64 one can also reach for the anthology translated by Eleanor Goodman, titled after Xu's best-known poem Iron Moon (2017). Instead, using Zheng's work as a mini case study, I wish to say a few more words about "photosynthetic" poetics in order to address-or, 64 See, e.g., Gong Haomin 2012;Jaguścik 2014Jaguścik , 2017Goodman 2017; van Crevel 2017avan Crevel , 2017bvan Crevel , 2019avan Crevel , 2019bPicerni 2020. in a sense, circumvent-a problem that is arguably specific not only to the discourse of migrant workers' writing, namely the dichotomous and often indeed antithetical reception pattern of certain (types of) poetry as having "high social significance and low aesthetic value," as van Crevel aptly puts it.65 My thesis, provisionally formulated in the preceding discussion of Małgorzata Lebda, is simple and may sound naive, but I believe there is sufficient reason and textual evidence to argue for its accuracy. Plants that grow in a devastated environment do not produce a different (or worse) oxygen; usually they produce less as they wither and lose their green parts, but there is no connection between the health and the appearance of the plant and the quality of the oxygen.…”