exile 183Out on the street, the crowd
is a forest on a giant billboard
as silence roars
I see the needle edge along
growth rings in a tree trunk
and slide toward the coreIf we read for alienation, the image in the poem’s title or, more pre-
cisely, its elaboration in the first stanza, is grist to the mill: whetting the
knife surrealistically leads to the opposite of its known effect. The de-
scription of the crowd that is out on the street as a forest on a giant bill-
board is central to the way the poem unfolds. Physically, it is hemmed
in by parallel phrases that point to the blinding and deafening of sight
and hearing: as sunlight flashes and as silence roars. This recalls the deaf-
ening book in «Notes Taken in the Rain», and the mother tongue’s
sun as an unbearable blaze that needs to be blocked in «Poison». The
equation of the crowd to a forest shows that the speaker is aware of
his deviation from “normal” perception: aware, in other words, of see-
ing things differently from what they “really” are. The word rendered
as billboard is ⁅に, ‘display window, showcase’ or ‘glass-fronted bill-
board.’ Positioned out on the street and with a glass surface it pres-
ents another echo of «Notes», emphasizing the distance between the
speaker and the world around him, with a window in between. The
poem’s title builds tension: whet the knife in order to do what? So does
the image in the final three lines, as the phonograph’s needle travels
back in time, from the outer growth rings to the inner. Once it reaches
the core, the music will cease. In an instance of iconicity, this is where
the poem ends.
«Whet the Knife» is literature in exile, in Glad’s definition, since
it was written outside the author’s native land. For its qualification as
exile literature—that is, as foregrounding the experience or the notion
of exile—we would minimally need to bring in Bei Dao’s biography.
The final poem discussed in this chapter is «Borrowing Direction»
(׳ᴹᮍ). In addition to its date of composition, likely in 1994 or
1995, some of its imagery leads to association with the physical exile
factor, including the frequency of Bei Dao’s relocations and travels
since 1989. This poem, however, qualifies as exile literature even if we
draw the boundaries of the text as tightly as possible, regardless of any
association with its author’s biography. The poem itself, in the strict