exile 171«Another Landscape» (ϔ辵亢᱃, 1993), called «England» (㣅Ḑ
݄), begins and ends like this:^56
England, empty, with no one there. Wherever you go, there’s only the sky for a
companion... As it turns ever gloomier, it responds to the language of a mute,
in the soul of an exile....Even more emphatic, becoming almost expository in nature, are these
passages from «Prague» (ᏗᢝḐ, 1993)—this time echoing Duoduo’s
«None» (≵᳝, 1991):^57
The exile carries his homeland on his body
there is no homeland, only dusk bursting from the wounds of the earth...
There is no homeland
the homeland has risen to the skies, taking its giant rocks with it
the homeland is but a momentary, painful flash
the homeland is above, higher and farther away
pressing down on you to the end of your days
Another series of short prose poems called «Moving Cliffs» ( ࡼ␌
ዪ, 1993) includes a poem that repeats the final line of «Autumn in
Europe»:^58
«Soil»
When you’re homesick, it’s not in foggy London but in your homeland that it’s
raining, inside you. It’s not the driving rain, it’s some kind of soil inside you that
flows down heavy: it will almost make you fall over paralyzed, to touch death,
and that lost earth....
This is the most helpless moment of your life: the soil is dragging you back.
Who will you ask for help?—In that relentless driving rain, you sink deeper
and deeper into the thing that makes you ever darker, and moves you ever further
beyond redemption....«Soil» (⊹ೳ), again, contains explicit exile markers: homesick and home-
land. At the same time it shows Wang Jiaxin tapping into the poten-
tial of the imagination, in the soil inside you that flows down heavy and is
(^56) Wang Jiaxin 1997: 114-127.
(^57) Wang Jiaxin 1997: 106-107. Today 1992-2: 143-144; included in Duoduo 2005:
174-175.
(^58) Wang Jiaxin 1997: 129-142.