Category: Work by Haitian Ma

View a video translation-response to “Dear Writer,” by Xiao Liang

Thank you so much, David, for sharing the two pieces with us. (人民的艺术：记录33个版本 and Dr. Ai Fen, 艾芬, the Wuhan Whistle)

I cannot but feel quite emotionally difficult when reading the piece “Whistle-Riptide.” Being in the moment with Ai Fen through every happening, or metaphorically, “witnessing” that happening makes me feel embarrassed by my former astonishment at the different translations in their forms and styles. That fascination with the aesthetic expression seems trivial and indifferent when I thought about the loaded narratives and shaken lives it has carried, and continues to carry in the present moment.

Since the outbreak in January, I remembered myself trying at multiple times to unpack the event, to think about the latent mechanisms at work—how the virus is spread, how media operated in generating different (often conflictive) stories and viewpoints, how symbols of “borders” and “checkpoints” have become evident as socio-political instruments in response to the crises, how we must hold restlessly onto these “borders” to stop ourselves from moving, how one voluntarily performs and re-signifies patterns of imprisonment in ourselves, but also how that imprisonment is done out of care and indeed, out of extreme kindness.

At the same time, I feel there is something wrong in what I am doing—that gesture to interpret and unpack, to make “something” out of a process that is still ongoing, to hypothesize an observation about the way we relate to each other as lives when there are lives that are already lost and still losing and to be lost. The attempt to make sense has an uncomfortable sense of cruelty, coldness and privilege, however ironically the training of critical thinking has taught us to debunk privilege and embrace empathy. To begin to talk about the situation, I already have to abstract it, compress it, treat it as a totality—and lose track of individual happenings, lives, deaths, struggles, confusions. In a conversation with friends, someone posed a question of how one might look at the event from a historical standpoint. I don’t know. I cannot imagine historicizing “COVID-19” as a marker in its temporality, not simply because it is difficult to see clearly at this point, but also because it is painful to see from that lens.

Even my emotional turbulence when “witnessing” Ai Fen’s testimony—did I ever truly witness? What does it mean to “witness” an event as such in a confined but sterile space, through the screen of a smartphone? By no means do I feel entitled to claim that I understand or “go through” the situation that is still ongoing, no matter how emotional I feel.

In a vague way, that dilemma working itself inside me bears some phantom similarity with two other dilemmas in two other times. The first was the intellectual muteness about the Holocaust after WWII, epitomized with Theodor Adorno’s remark that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.” The trauma of muteness extends itself as far as to the aesthetics of postmodernism and Lyotard’s coinage of The Differend in the 80s. Elie Wiesel breaks that impossibility by writing and talking about the Holocaust as a survivor. Still, the question of who can claim to witness and what it means to witness remains difficult, while memories fade as generations pass on. At some point, one will forget the emotional texture of that particular historical temporality, whether the trauma sticks is another story.

The second dilemma was the felt demand from historians and museum collectors to gather materials immediately after the 9-11 terrorist attack. In their 2002 piece “September 11 and the Mourning After: Reflections on Collecting and Interpreting the History of Tragedy,” James B. Hardner and Sarah M. Henry ask two questions with regard to the October 4th 2001 meeting at the Museum of the City of New York:

“First, how do we fulfill our obligations to future audiences and future historians by collecting and preserving the raw material that can tell the stories that they will want and need to hear and tell? And, second, how do we fulfill our obligations to current audiences by telling stories that they want and need to hear now, in the aftermath of these apparently history-transforming events?” (38)

Undoubtedly, it is problematic to compare the two events to the ongoing COVID-19 crises, but in some ways, they beg the same questions about negotiating the crisis moment for the here-and-now, for a futurity yet to come, as well as the stakes of art in this difficult negotiation. I felt the impulse of answering these questions as I went through the evolving situation like every other person, until at one point I put down the pen, because of the felt cruelty in absenting myself from the immediate experiences and taking a say, “theoretical” or “generic” interpretation of the event. Personally, I love working and playing with theory, but it feels like a limited mode of expression at the given moment.

But I still wonder, I wonder if that limited reality should stop one from writing, creating and expressing. Whether staying muted is the effective and enabling condition in the long run, whether taking up the position of Bartleby is sufficient as an engagement with the world, however significant and valuable I still consider that position to be. It is with that intuition of insufficiency that I find the different translations of the blog post about Dr. Ai Fen powerful in their linguistic and aesthetic qualities. These translations in one way or another bears an appearance of muteness through the complexity of their forms and the gesture of encoding that they typify. At the same time, I wonder if these pieces of encoding are offering me a channel to negotiate the present crisis through an alienated tongue, an unhomely time and space of language. I also begin to think about the act of translation in general as a strategy of engaging the crisis without imposing one’s own (often privileged) sentiments. By being a surrogate speaker for someone else and something else, one engages the crisis personally by abandoning her personhood and individuality, by moving into the testimonies and voices of another heart, and transforming it for a future (or past) audience. That transformation has something inherently artistic and creative about itself, perhaps without loss of integrity and concrete engagement with the present moment.

There is much, much more to be fleshed out about that vague strategy/gesture/act/metaphor of translation as an engagement with the crisis, but hopefully, it offers us some courage and assertiveness to be the vulnerable speaking subject in a vulnerable global happening.