commune with one another and trade secrets, that secrecy itself is also
draining for the narrator. Attendant to this sense of fatigue is a sense
of foreboding and impending death: “I suddenly remember: this is the
season when all the fish die.” As aquatic creatures, fish live in water,
inhabiting, like women, the yinpart of the world.^9 The natural world
is simultaneously rich in signs and unreadable, and thus it colludes in
the women’s secrecy, with the paths of flying birds constituting a sort
of invisible history, like that of women.
In the second stanza, the darkness is powerful enough to con-
sume even the mountains, and, in the darkness, the narrator can
hear the faint heartbeat of a plant, a small and vulnerable life. Still,
she feels threatened by the human eyes of huge birds that look down
from the male realm of the sky, and the struggle continues into the
narrator’s own yinterritory of winter, where a “cruel and masculine
consciousness” is invading. The “raising and lowering” of that con-
sciousness invites numerous interpretations—from rapaciousness to
tentativeness.
By the third stanza, the narrator is challenging the masculine power
of daylight, asserting that she can see “dark night in the daylight.”
Comparing herself to a baby, she calls attention to her own innocence
and ability to see the world with fresh eyes. The image of dreams ties
in with other images of night, and here as in other poems, dreams are
invested with superior powers of truth-telling. The reference to dusk
suggests that the narrator may be reaching a turning point of some
sort: night is coming, the daylight is about to be supplanted by the
women’s world of the night. And even if the night gets off to a fitful
start (“convulsing,” “choked back”), the narrator is already on her
way to another state at the end of the poem.
The subsequent poems continue the poet’s journey through a sym-
bolic landscape. The third poem, “An Instant” ShunjianË (Zhai
1994: 9–10), takes the narrator back into the night by way of a dusk
that “spits blood,” in which she claims for herself a “black-stained”
sun. By superimposing black on the sun, she is essentially revising its
meaning from a woman’s point of view and contesting its supremacy.
This night is to be a night of revelations, as “all of the constellations
on [her] face are rearranged.”
Note that although Zhai Yongming’s work marks a dramatic break
with tradition in her use of imagery, the experiences she describes, and
her attitude to those experiences, much of her imagery is drawn from
the traditional repertoire of yin陰and yangÍ(female and male) sym-
bolism, which she reinterprets and turns to her own purposes. A case
in point is the imagery of darkness and night that runs throughout
The Poetry of Zhai Yongming and Xia Yu 117