Reading Poetry Along the Silk Roads

by Dr. Xurong Kong

My latest project is on musical instruments. Several popular Chinese musical instruments were from Central Asia such as pipa, harp, flute. I am curious to find answers to the following questions: how did the Chinese elite accept them? how did they transform them? what did this transformation impact on Chinese writing, history, and culture? If the Trump Administration did not suspend Fulbright Scholarship to China, I would work at Beijing University next spring to collect data and consult scholars in the fields of archeology, Dunhuang studies, philology, music, and literature. Unfortunately, the program is suspended till further notice, but this suspension won't stop my research project.

The Fulbright project aims aims to explore the first wave of globalization brought by the Silk Roads through the lens of Chinese literary writings during the third century. This project focuses on the period between 196 and 317 C.E., beginning with General Cao Cao’s capture of the Emperor Xian of Han and ending with the movement of Eastern Jin’s capital to Jiankang (modern Nanjing). This period witnessed the decline of the powerful Han Empire and the rise of the Sima clan as it gradually gained power in Cao-Wei’s time and eventually unified China into the newly formed Jin Dynasty. Afterward, the locus of Chinese culture was forced to move southward by “barbarian” incursions in the north and west.

The third-century also witnessed the end of the first globalization brought by the Silk Roads. Zhang Qian’s trips to the Western Regions laid the foundation for establishing the Silk Roads. Afterward, new ideas, unique commodities, and various people passed along these trade routes. That once busy traffic seemingly ended during the third century when a plague contributed to the fall of the Han and the Roman Empires, and it surged again during the Tang Dynasty. Because of these interruptions, the early influence of the Silk Roads upon China, particularly during the third century, is often ignored by historians and literary critics.

Surviving literary works from that period, however, includes an impressive number of yongwu fu or rhapsody on objects, describing exotic plants, animals, and crafts. These descriptive poems record the cultural exchanges with distant peoples whose goods, ideas, and technologies entered China via the Silk Roads.

The Silk Roads have received ample attention, but few scholars connect this first globalization to literary writing. Similarly, a growing interest in the study of early medieval Chinese literature seldom mentions the influence of the Silk Roads. Only a few books combine classical Chinese literature and cross-cultural studies. For example, Tamara Chin’s Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard, 2014); Tian Xiaofei’s Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early

Medieval and Nineteenth-century China (Harvard, 2012). One ends in the early years of the third century and the other begins in the fourth century; thus, together they overlook the third century.

My book project will directly and specifically deal with third-century Chinese writing and exchanges along the Silk Roads. Outstanding features of this project include:

· Uses literary writing to explore the influence of global exchanges

· Brings attention to the importance and features of a forgotten and misunderstood genre

· Analyzes nearly 30 previously untranslated poems on exotic music instruments

· Provides a more complete picture of the civilization of early medieval Chinese civilization

This book project also attempts to resolve the following puzzles: Why did Chinese elites embrace exotic goods but deny their foreign roots? Why did rhapsody on objects become prosperous during the third century and then decline during the fourth century? What was the impact of this early period of Chinese society and writing? The answers to these questions will reveal a more comprehensive picture of the third century’s cultural and literary developments.

In contrast to modern scholars who regard rhapsody on objects as meaningless and unattractive writings intended merely for writing practice, my argument is that they were used to express the profound interest and excitement of learned men for foreign objects. Therefore, these forgotten writings bear witness to the cultural exchanges between China and other civilizations.

With access to cultural exchanges and the ability to embrace new goods, the rhapsodists of the third century defined and refined the terms of the exotics, and enriched the scope of Chinese literature. Their writings proudly acknowledged foreign goods while transforming them into hybrid Chinese objects in the popular imagination. As important political figures, they surely did not miss the great opportunity to eulogize and legitimize the power of their rulers by describing various exotic goods with verisimilitude. Their writings therefore naturally but profoundly reveal a culturally diverse but politically and locally Sino-centric society.

This dualism vividly annotates Confucian Chinese Order, the sovereign-vassal relationship, as the diversity represented by tributary goods from foreign kingdoms landing at the Chinese court was meant to confirm the place of the Chinese ruler within this Sino-centric world order. This dualism explains the connection between the rise and fall of rhapsody on objects and political unity: rhapsody on objects reached its zenith during the third century when the Wei and Eastern Jin needed literary support for Wei’s political ambition to unify China and for Jin’s unified central power; the genre declined during the fourth century when China was disunified and when imperial power was decentralized. This dualism continued and had an impact on how China projected itself and communicated with others in the global setting. The style in which ancient Chinese intellectuals described their encounters with foreign cultures made it possible for Chinese elites to collectively and deliberately sanitize foreign elements from the goods and ideas imported into China.

The study of rhapsody on objects automatically locates China in a global setting, and provides a multi-perspective image of China and its relationship with the world. 

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As a scholar of classical Chinese poetry, I have published peer-reviewed articles in Journal of American Oriental Societies, Early Medieval China, and other leading journals; have translated two historical books for China Book company: Selections from Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government 資治通鑑選譯and Selections from the History of the Later Han 後漢書選譯. I am also an educator, which encourages me to keep thinking about how to connect what happened in the past with what is happening in our own time.

~Dr. Xurong Kong

An NEH Seminar on the Aftermath of Atrocity

by Dr. Dennis Klein

Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I will be leading a two week seminar in June, 2021 (dates TBA), for university and college faculty, as well as for public servants and public intellectuals, on ideas for restoring a human bond after radical social collapse. While the seminar will deal with the aftermath of genocide and other atrocities, it will speak to extreme disruption in the United States, and elsewhere, due to the pandemic crisis, economic volatility, political conflict, severe climate change, and profound racial disquiet. Entitled “The Search for Humanity after Atrocity, it will draw on memoirs written by Holocaust survivors to explore the physical and emotional demands of survival and survivors’ reevaluation of a world that was governed by the craven behavior of perpetrators, their collaborators, and most everyone else who lent tacit support by remaining on the sidelines.

Historical inquiry will frame discussion and debate because many Holocaust survivors wrote about the radical betrayal of their neighbors and others who they believed could have intervened but remained silent. What they wrote about was the shocking violation of their historical trust – their neighbors’ silence if not collaboration with their assailants. Their accounts bear agonizing witness to the rupture of relationships they had come to rely on.

But they would not have recorded their testimonies in the first place unless they believed their memoirs would make a difference as a warning, a lesson, or a plea for justice. This belief pointed in another direction: a renewed if tenuous faith in humanity. Seminar participants will examine memoirs for evidence of this faith and try to make sense of how survivors could condemn their neighbors and seek to renegotiate relationships with them in the same account. By paying special attention to survivors’ perspectives, destruction, as the defining feature of atrocity, is both an outcome and a precondition of cautionary reconstruction. Their perspectives will suggest a path forward for the US as well.

Survivors’ testimonies have recently acquired renewed scholarly attention for their unique interpretive insights into the legacies of the Holocaust and, by extension, other extreme situations. For several decades since the 1960s, when Holocaust witnesses’ accounts entered the public domain, observers generally have not recognized their prominence: Lucy Dawidowicz and other seminal scholars dismissed them for their inaccuracies or, as Hannah Arendt commented in her report on the Eichmann trial, their blinding emotionality. In common polemics, scholars used them derivatively to confirm or illustrate arguments they already documented.

Significant exceptions emerged with the publication in 2001 of Jan Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.

The fatal journey of Jews in Jedwabne, Poland, who, in 1941, were coerced by their neighbors to a local barn where they were incinerated. 

Though Gross’s main purpose was to show the local, open-air settings of genocide, his reliance on survivors’ testimonies suggested dimensions of destruction that historians, largely depending on perpetrator and official documentation, have missed. Besides observing fanatical violence, survivors deeply ruminated over their neighbors’ violation of what survivor Jean Améry had believed was an implicit durable social contract. For him and others, the violation was entirely unexpected. Survivors often regarded, with the advantage of hindsight, their expectations as naïve and, indeed, European Jews were generally so assimilated to their homelands that they disregarded the evidence of ascendant social tension or, more commonly, regarded incidents of social conflict as exceptional. But as we will explore in this seminar, their expectations were historically rooted in realities of social integration that were sufficiently stable. Turning their attention intermittently from perpetrators to bystanders, betrayal emerged as a considerable testimonial preoccupation.

The historical framework for this seminar offers distinctive parallels with research on psychological resilience, psychological flexibility, and posttraumatic growth. These fields presume varying degrees of personal recovery from or resistance to the calamitous effects of misfortune. The seminar will benefit from two half days of presentations by Dr. Donald Marks, the Project Scholar who is a member of the Advanced Studies in Psychology program at Kean University with whom I have collaborated and who is an expert on the behavioral dynamics of resilience.

A close reading of Holocaust survivors’ memoirs will take note of passages that were notably forward-looking but, in historical context, expressed a distinct longing for humanity and not only a quest for personal convalescence. As we will come to see, their longing for a human connection was embedded in ancestral memories of an attachment to European society. At the same time, their memoirs make clear that the effects of traumatic injury persists – something that theories of posttraumatic resilience and growth downplay – and shadows if not overshadows the search for humanity, suggesting that survival after atrocity is a heterogeneous experience alternating between aspiration and dread, hope and despair, faith in renegotiated human relationships and resignation to the world’s abject moral and physical collapse articulated, as this seminar will consider, at the level of what historians and other scholars call “deep memory” that reenact, in the words of Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “the continuing presence of the past.”

To hear more from Dr. Klein about Survivors' Memories, check out this radio interview: Red River Radio Tales from the Pages Welcomes Dennis B. Klein.

Email inquires about the seminar to Dr. Dennis Klein, dklein@kean.edu.

A Poem by Susanna Rich

2020 is the centennial of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, making women's suffrage--the right to vote--the law. Shout! is a collection of original poetry and dramatic dialogs written from the points of view of core suffragist figures ranging from the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention to the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920. In these pages, Elizabeth Cady Stanton strategizes with Susan B. Anthony, who, in turn, argues with Frederick Douglass over who should get the vote first: blacks or women. Matilda Joslyn Gage tells us how she became the model for the Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, imprisoned and on hunger strike, are tortured and force-fed for the cause. Defying attempts to exclude her, Ida B. Wells marches for suffrage among 6,000 white women in 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade. And key figures retell the passage of the amendment as it comes down to one dramatic vote in Tennessee. These more than 40 courageous women and righteous men populate Susanna’s first-person, present-tense narratives that bring us into four-dimensional, you-are-here experiences of the 72-year fight for women’s suffrage. As John F. Kennedy said at the inauguration of the Robert Frost Library, “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

With Shout, Susanna Rich brings out the broom, the bucket, and the brush.

With COVID-19, 2020 also uncannily marks the centennial of has been called "The Spanish Flu"—a pandemic that killed more than 50 million between 1918 and 1920. “I am Lavinia Lloyd Dock (1858-1956)” is a poem written from the point of view of a 20th century pre-eminent nurse and suffragist battling Woodrow Wilson who ignored both The Cause of suffrage and the ravages of the flu, in order to promote his agenda in World War I. The parallels between 1920 and 2020 will amaze readers.

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I am Lavinia Lloyd Dock (1858-1956)

Photography of Lavinia Lloyd

“The Spanish Lady,” they call it, “Purple Death”— the January 1918 to December 1920 flu pandemic— “German Pest,” “Blitzkatarrh,” “Flander’s Fever”— “The Blacks’ Disease,” “White Man’s Disease”— all scapegoating practiced by the ignorant and craven.

Europe doesn’t start the flu. Woodrow Wilson does when he declares America for World War I. Plagues are spread by commerce and war. Our plague starts in Camp Funston in Kansas; and Camp Devens, Massachusetts—

tens of thousands of conscripted men in close barracks, dropping as suddenly as if they’ve been shot. Still, sick recruits are crammed into troop ships, deployed to the European front. The war is all to Wilson—dismissing the flu

that kills 50 million, our young soldiers drowning in their own mucus and blood— vigorous constitutions unknowing what is host, what invader—attacking themselves— mustard-colored suppurating blisters,

mahogany spots on their cheeks, blue as huckleberries, wild blind eyes. At home, la grippe—flamethrower, grenade, machine gun—burns through mass gatherings— Liberty Bond parades and conferences

to finance the war. 675,000 Americans die. And in churches congregants collapse in their pews. I have no religious belief and I have no need of it. It’s not about God. It’s about human politics, the rape of Mother Earth.

The First World War starts not for lofty ideals but for worldwide reactionary elements— monarchies over there, millionaire corporations here— wanting oil, land, and the subjugation of workers and women.

I am born into wealth, but choose to be a nurse, 20 years in New York’s Henry Street Settlement, with poor, immigrant women and laborers— those most likely to succumb to yellow fever, typhoid, the flu; syphilis, infant and childbirth mortality.

The antidote to the disease of war is women’s voices, women’s votes— the very women who man the farms, the munitions factories, the old and young; who, as mothers and nurses serve the war—

the Sallies of the Salvation Army, the Red Cross Nurses, and the women officers frying doughnuts in helmets for the soldiers. Women, who birth human cannon fodder, who clean up after men are truly invested

in ending all wars. Unrelenting, we suffragists campaign, tour the country, persist. I walk from New York to Washington, DC, to march in the 1913 Woman’s Suffrage Parade. 1917-1920, through the worst of this ravaging contagion,

through the raging war, we wage our peaceful battles for all humankind. Through ice, and heat, and the angry spittle of hecklers, we stand, Silent Sentinels picketing Wilson’s White House. Wilson ordains that we be arrested, jailed, tortured

into silence. No matter: It is a great joy to do a little guerilla war in the cause… going to jail gives me a purer feeling of unalloyed content than I’ve ever had in any of my other work.

“Spanish Lady”—what a blind misnomer for this raving, rampaging disease embodied by those who rule; best, with 20/20 vision, call it “The American Lord.”

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Specializing in writing historical poetry, Susanna is twice an Emmy-Award nominee, a Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing, and the recipient of the Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Teaching at Kean University. Visit her at www.wildnightsproductions.com.