Walis Nokan explains how writing poetry is a way to free one’s imagination in Taipei June 8, 2012. (Courtesy of National Taiwan University Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Resource Center)By June Tsai
Walis Nokan fits many descriptions: aboriginal activist, prolific writer and critic, elementary school teacher. But in the eyes of many local authors, he is most of all a poet of Taiwan.
According to poet and professor Xiang Yang, Walis deserves recognition in Taiwan’s Han Chinese-dominant society not because he is aboriginal or because he has won just about every important literary prize on the island, but because his work speaks for Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.
“Moreover, his writing will not let his contemporaries ignore the country’s aborigines, who have been marginalized for four centuries by a succession of colonial powers, and forces them to reflect on their own Han Chinese identity,” Xiang Yang said in a literary salon June 8, 2012.
Walis’ recent publication, “Couplets the World Has Left Behind,” integrates his dedication to poetry and concern for aboriginal culture and education.
The two-line form allows one simple metaphor to be formulated in each poem, Walis said. “It can evoke imagination from the most homely things, and offers easy access to literature for everyone.”
Walis’ own first encounter with literature was serendipitous. One day while preparing for the senior high school entrance exam, he chanced to read the literary supplement of a newspaper at the office of the borough chief in Mihu, his home village in the mountains above the Da-an River in central Taiwan. He was 15.
“That such a different thing could have been composed using the same characters that appeared in our Chinese language textbooks—I was totally amazed,” he said.
Following the test, he entered the five-year teachers training school in urban Taichung. He read as much literature as he could from the school library, feeling as if he were discovering a new continent.
It was also in this period that he first became aware of his ethnicity. “I didn’t know the Atayal were an ethnic minority in the Taiwanese population until I went to study in Taichung, where I also met someone from another indigenous tribe for the first time. He was a Bunun.”
Walis began scribbling poetry, too. “I wrote things that were very vague but looked beautiful,” he said. He was influenced first by modern poetry of the 1960s, which adopted esotericism in the face of the propaganda and censorship that dominated Taiwan’s cultural scene at the time.
Then, from the grassroots literary movement of the 1970s, “I learned that a good poem is not necessarily difficult to understand,” he said. After more reading, he developed a clearer idea about good poetry. “I appreciated the rich possibility of rhythmic modulations in neatly arranged lines.”
After completing his schooling in 1980, Walis served in the military before taking up a teaching job in 1983. All this time, he continued to go by his Chinese name, Wu Jun-jie—as was required by law.
Soon teaching and literature were not enough to keep the young poet satisfied, as he became more aware of the economic and cultural predicament of Taiwan’s aborigines.
He wrote incessantly about the situation, with his articles appearing in newly established newspapers after the government lifted martial law in 1987.
Many aborigines of his generation became activists, riding on the wave of open political opposition. They called for the return of aboriginal land and correction of unjust treatment of aborigines imposed through government policies and legal decisions.
In 1990, Walis and his wife, Liglove A-Wu of the Paiwan tribe, began to publish the bimonthly “Hunter Culture,” which helped educate Xiang Yang and other contemporary writers about indigenous affairs. As the major contributor, Walis visited aboriginal villages throughout Taiwan to collect stories.
“The journalistic work at the grassroots level made me realize how cultural bankruptcy and the social collapse of tribal villages had been ignored,” he said. “Traditional cultures and languages were swiftly being lost, outside developers were making inroads into tribal areas, and almost all traditional land had been sold to nonaboriginals by the 1990s,” he continued.
“During the two years we put out the magazine, I was sleepless almost every night, eager for a revolutionary change. But I knew a cultural campaign would go a longer way than a political one for the indigenous peoples.”
In 1994, the government changed the official reference to aborigines: “Shanbao,” or “mountain people,” with its discriminatory overtones, was replaced by “yuanzhumin,” which literally means “original inhabitants.” It also allowed indigenous people to use personal names in tribal languages, although they had to be written in Chinese characters. Ten years later, Romanized names could be registered alongside the version in Chinese.
Walis had been using his Atayal name since 1990.
He decided to leave the city to return to Mihu in 1994, to be a language teacher in the elementary school. Following his homecoming, his books—collections of poetry, essays and journalistic works—began to come out one after another.
After the Sept. 21, 1999 earthquake carved a cliff out of the mountain on which the village stood, community reconstruction work became another major project for Walis.
Today, he continues to stick to his belief that cultural work is the key to making positive changes in the lives and future course of indigenous communities. Poetry is his latest tool.
“Couplets the World Has Left Behind,” divided into 14 thematic section on topics ranging from mundane objects and places to daily activities and international events, evolved from a homework assignment Walis gave his class in early 2010, requiring students to put down their thoughts on the top 10 international events of the previous year.
To demonstrate for the children, Walis produced some couplets on Palestine. In “Last Words,” he writes: “Dear children, our home and country/are over there on the side of Israel.” In “Identity”: “Our history is contraband/the diaspora cannot be recorded.” In the forum, Xiang Yang used this poem to introduce his comments on the situation of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.
A later poem in the book’s “Study” section, by playing with the title of the authoritative Chinese lexicon, “Ci Hai,” or “Ocean of Words,” urges students to be as creative as possible: “After we bid farewell to the ocean/the land of writing emerges.”
“If you ask me, I’m the worst poet in our village,” Walis joked, indicating that the Atayal, with their oral tradition, are natural poets.
“I just wanted to show my students that they too can write poetry, and about anything they see, feel or read.”
According to Walis, Chinese literature, as it is taught in school, may have just the opposite effect. A formal Chinese essay, for example, is supposed to comprise four movements: the opening, follow-up explanation of the theme, further development and conclusion. “For me, that is too rigid a formula.”
Couplets help liberate thought, feeling and expression, Walis believes. In the past few months, he has been invited to libraries across the nation to demonstrate how he uses the two-line form to encourage students to write.
Poetry in Taiwan, Walis said, has been made a thing for the academic elite, and distanced from the average reader. “People end up reading no literature after school, and lose the ability to appreciate it,” he noted.
“It’s just like modern people with their shoes on all the time—they’ve become strangers to the feel of earth and stone.”
Fortunately, as Taiwan’s aborigines have become aware of the importance of cultural diversity, efforts to revive their languages and traditions have borne fruit in recent years, he said.
The literary exercise, in which students associate the world with words, helps them improve their Chinese language on the one hand, and learn to value what they have from their indigenous roots on the other.
“Today’s world is characterized by full-blown globalization and capitalism, which are impossible for aborigines to resist entirely,” Walis said.
“More language skills will help children adapt better to the larger society, absorb different cultures more easily, and speak for themselves, so that the exploitation of the past will not be repeated.”
(This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today July 1, 2012.)
