exile 167sion,’ the interpretation of «The Square» as a confession is open to
debate. If we imagine the text as a document determining its author’s
treatment at the hands of the authorities, what it does is to help him
survive by denial. If there is anything to which it confesses indirectly,
this would have to be complicity with the perpetrators of the violence
in Tiananmen Square.
In «The Square», in the statement that is the poem, you systemati-
cally denies that June Fourth ever happened, describing the square as
empty and paradoxically noting in great physical detail how people
were not shot and did not die, to powerful effect. The poem’s final para-
graph reads:
You replace the paper, and the screams go far away. Write yourself up as another,
and you will live. Writing stroke by stroke, you personally erase one month from
the years of your life. You are lighter than before, you feel empty inside. That
person has gone. Long before the square was covered in characters miswritten, it
had been torn to pieces. Shreds of paper flying, fluttering down. The locust trees
have always had white leaves.The most plausible interpretation makes you a resident of Beijing who
was in Tiananmen Square when the army opened fire; and, in or-
der to survive, is later forced to deny that there ever was a massacre,
thus betraying both the victims of the violence and that person, a for-
mer self that saw them being shot. The identification of you with the
act of writing, and the image of the past as (mis)written—in this case,
Tiananmen Square as an unspeakably or unwritably painful lieu de
mémoire—operate just like they do in «The Book of Exile», composed
barely a fortnight later.
At the same time, however, a pivotal moment in the final paragraph
invites an alternative reading. The sentence Write yourself up as another,
and you will live reverberates with Yang Lian’s biography, even if that
means cutting it off from its local context. By way of justification, the
image captures what happened to the poet precisely around the turn
of that fateful year, when the decision to stay abroad was forced upon
him.
Wang JiaxinThe fatefulness of 1989 is palpably present when Zang Di, writing in
1994, shows how “the year 1989” both redirected and catalyzed Wang