In this week of world literature, our editors cover the influence of censorship and propaganda on literature, and look back on Southeast Asian literature released this year.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Southeast Asia
What a year in Southeast Asian literature! The Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand took center stage in Penguin Random House Southeast Asia (SEA)’s catalogues, with a range of texts published throughout the year. First off in March was Bleeding Sun by playwright-novelist Rogelio R. Sicat, translated by one of Sicat’s children, the translator and editor Ma. Aurora L. Sicat, from the original Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway, which was serialised beginning 1965. Sicat, who came of age in the aftermath of the American Occupation, wrote novels which further revealed his belief in land reform and love for Tagalog as a literary language, veering away from his contemporaries who were influenced by Euro-American conventions.
Humans and Other Animals, an anthology of animal fiction that collects nine Vietnamese short stories by writers from the French Colonial Period (1885-1945) to the present-day is also unmissable. Edited by ecocritical scholars Chi P. Pham and Chitra Sankaran—the same duo behind Revenge of Gaia: Contemporary Vietnamese Ecofiction (2021)—Humans and Other Animals features stories by Y. Ban, Hoang To Mai, Nguyen Ngoc Thuan, Do Phan, Nguyen Binh Phuong, Nguyen Minh Chau, Quy The, and Nam Cao.
Thai bookseller and chef Apinuch Petcharapiracht also gives us Death and the Maiden, translated by Pimpida Pitaksonggram and Danaya Olarikded, his take on the Gothic romance genre. Petcharapiracht’s short story collection Juveniles & Other Stories is also forthcoming next month.
Besides the above, this year’s titles from Penguin Random House SEA feature writers from Malaysia (Ong Chin Huat, Vidhya Sathyamoorthy, Deborah Wong, and Tutu Dutta), Myanmar (San Lin Tun), and Indonesia (Melly Sutjitro and Ahmad Rizaq). In line with Penguin Random House SEA’s ethos in “publishing and discovering new and established, local and international voices” in English and English translation from this Asian region, more Southeast Asian titles are anticipated in the years to come.
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria
Alas, the controversy surrounding John Malkovich’s attempt to stage Arms and the Man in Bulgaria did not end with my previous dispatch. As a reminder, the American actor and director had been working on George Bernard Shaw’s play, which was expected to run in the country’s National Theatre. The Union of Bulgarian Writers, however, had condemned the text, claiming it was an insult to the Bulgarians because of its allegedly mocking portrayal of them.
On the opening night, several hundred people surrounded the building of the theatre and prevented those who had already bought tickets and were eager to spend a night dedicated to art and away from the mundane from entering the building. Some of the spectators even complained that they had been physically attacked by the protesters and that the police had not offered effective protection. In the end, the play was performed in front of an almost empty auditorium, only in the presence of a few journalists.
During the press conference that followed shortly after, Malkovich commented on the bizarre events, saying: “It’s a strange time, I think. And more and more people love to censor things they don’t agree with and I have no interest in censoring the people protesting, that’s their business, really, it’s not my business. My business in this case is to direct plays and to try and make good productions. As for the rest of it, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The incident has, at least for the time being, not been followed by further escalations. Plenty of influential and widely read writers and literary critics voiced their opinions in support of freedom of speech and artistic expression. We are now left to hope this is not a sign of an extremely shortsighted but stubborn ultra-nationalistic tendency.
Xiao Yue Shan, reporting for Chile
I’d always found it just a tiny bit grating that what English-speakers would call a “dollar store”—those vast, hauntingly florescent warehouse-shops stocking cheaply made goods in garish shades—is referred to as a “chino” in many Hispanic countries. It speaks to the prolific negative stereotype in regard to China and its objects: disposable, erratically operative, and of the lowest possible value. “Made in China” has turned into somewhat of a slur—something even Chinese companies are aware of (within the country, certain products are packaged with Japanese text to advertise their superiority). Last month, in Chile, the department store Falabella closed its Providencia location, and a “mall chino” took its place—one of the largest in Santiago. Articles heralded the hyper-low prices and the incredibly vast selection, with many local businesses expressing resentment and fear. One commenter called it a “labyrinth of plastic”.
When the International Book Fair of Santiago/Feria Internacional del Libro de Santiago (FILSA) announced that China would be its annual guest of honour, there seemed immediately to be a secondary plot at play. While it is always wonderful to see Chinese literature being celebrated beyond its borders, I couldn’t help but consider the motivations behind this decision. Though China and Chile have always enjoyed an amicable and mutually beneficial relationship, the last few years have exacerbated the asymmetry between the two nations. Currently, China has holdings in significant sectors of Chilean industry, buying 70% of the nation’s copper exports, and the two countries have mutually agreed to continue strengthening their relationship in trade and development—which indicates a growing Chilean dependency on Chinese money. So when the Fair unveiled ostentatious displays of work that could perhaps best be described as Party-approved (the central exhibition was of Xi Jinping’s selected works), the market that is always puppeteering such large-scale events shook off its bad disguise, and shamelessly took centre stage. The classics and the popular reads were there, but almost daunted by the bold red tomes of economics, politics, and Chinese Communist history. And just to stave off any ambiguities, there was also the melodiously titled “Forum on Chinese-Style Modernization and New Opportunities for Cooperation in Publishing between China and Latin America”.
Chile knows literature’s power better than most. China knows it just as well. Most of their writers would place this power in the phenomenological extensions of language, but it occurred to me at FILSA that there was also an immense force in the commodification of literary objects and of the image they fortify. In this alternate vision of the pen’s prowess, the content on the pages is greyed over. What’s important is their presence—in enormous quantities, with unwavering conviction—substantiating a united front of politics and culture. You don’t have to read the four volumes of The Governance of China to get the message; you just have to look at Xi’s placid, smoothed face smiling at you from the covers, trace the perfect bindings, and listen to someone telling you that his thoughts are the only Thoughts in China that matter. The Chinese writers at the Fair were led by the head of the Propaganda Department. The Beijing Publishing Group stated its careful curation in bringing texts that spoke purely to Chinese development and the “unique path” of China’s growth. The onus was on telling “good Chinese stories”. When cultural exchange came up—as it did often—both sides stood poised as if on either side of a negotiation table.
The strange sadness of “made in China” came to me there in Santiago—of what happens when a nation is separated from its consciousness, when story becomes script, when language is used to extinguish its own knowledge, and we are able to build our conceptions of a country out of the little icons of plastic and paper it sends over the sea. I wanted to tell everyone at FILSA that what they saw was simply that—the stuffed-animal and single-use-utensil version of writing—and beyond it was so much brightness, illuminating China not as a country, not as a producer, but as a greatly various constellation of experiments, of intelligences, of windows. The poet Raùl Zurita said that “the work never was to write poems or paint pictures; the work was to make of the world something decent, and the pulverized remains of that work cover the world as if they were the debris of a battle atrociously lost.” Sometimes, as writers, we see our craft as so integral and substantial, as if our most beloved texts are the columns holding the world up—but that’s only true in brief glimpses. You blink, and the battlefield pieces itself back together before you.
Many Chilean publishing houses have chosen to distance themselves from FILSA, claiming that its management by the Chilean Chamber for Books prioritises commercial interests over all else, and opting instead to engage with the public through events like the Festiva de Autores Santiago or the Primavera del Libro. Asking around, I was told the FILSA is a charade, and that there exist many spaces and platforms far more suited to our ideations of literature, our “pulverized remains”. Still, when I browsed the shelves in the many excellent bookshops around Santiago, I noticed very few translations from the Chinese. It didn’t come as a surprise, of course, but it goes without saying that I preferred to see the shelves void of Chinese names than to witness them branded with the symbols of an arrogant ideology. The latter will only stratify a mutual alienation, whereas the void is at least a site of possibility—just as Nicanor Parra told us.
*****
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