My other example of literary creation with a similarly strong moral nucleus, as could be found in the work of the founders of Estonian national literature, K. J. Peterson, F. R. Kreutzwald, comes – maybe surprisingly – from China, from the era that in the West under the dictate of its centers has been called “postmodern” (from the 1980s to the early 21st century). It is inspired by my recent translation into Estonian of a poetry selection by Jidi Majia (born in 1961; his first personal anthology appeared in 1992; by today his poetry has been translated into a number of Western languages, including two selections in English translation: Time (2006), translated by Yang Zongze, and Shade of Our Mountain Range (2014), translated by Denis Mair (Jidi Majia 2006, 2014).
Jidi Majia’s poetry is originally written in Chinese, in free verse without end-rhymes. Its moral nucleus is the same as Walt Whitman’s. It is the defense and praise of natural diversity of cultures and peoples, the bio-totality and natural-telluric integrity as the very source and basis of human existence. However, differently from Whitman, the son of a big nation (by today, one of the world superpowers and principal “centers”), Jidi Majia’s pathos does not derive from the greatness of a super-nation, but, on the contrary, is almost exclusively devoted to the traditions, history, culture and spiritual values of his native ethnical minority nationality (one among so many “others” in China), the Yi nation.
Yis whose population, according to different sources, varies between two and six million people do not have their own autonomous region. Besides their historical center in the southern part of the Sichuan province, the Yis live dispersed also in other nearby provinces.
Jidi Majia’s poetry is thus written from the basic position of a historically humiliated and neglected “other”, the smaller and weaker whose existence and culture (above all in the (post)modern socio-economical turn of globalization) is destined to be pushed to the verge of extinction. Jidi’s poetry is not really a cry of protest against historical injustice towards his own nation, the Yi, but he addresses at the same time all other numerous smaller nations, who in so many parts of the earth have shared the same fate in a distant as well as the recent history.
My country Estonia has fared somewhat better, at least since the collapse of the Soviet empire, at the end of the 20th century. Yet the roots of historical wounds are exactly the same as those of the Yi people. Philosophically, the closest to Jidi is our Estonian poet Juhan Liiv (1864-1913). The younger generation of Liiv’s contemporary Estonian writers would have liked to see him as a forerunner of symbolism (or the early modernism) – the fashion that came from the Western centers, especially from France. Liiv rejected it and assumed a thoroughly independent existentialist position, combined with holistic philosophy of life’s spiritual integrity, in which all parts of nature, the smallest and weakest included, are equally indispensable for life’s continuation.
Both for Jidi and Liiv the highest moral goal for a nationality, as an individual, would be embodied in its freedom to be fully conscious of its identity, to represent and provide continuity to its traditions, language and culture. At the same time, both advocate for a dialogue and a symbiotic relationship of that traditional “other”, their native minority nation and culture with all other nations and cultures, small and big.
Within the respective contour of the ethnic-linguistic “other”, both poets, Liiv and Jidi, make stand forth the generic “other”, woman, as the bearer of highest moral values of a nation, such as love, generosity of soul, faithfulness, tenderness, infinite self-sacrifice, peacefulness and the fullest possible harmony with nature.
The “infra-other” of literary creativity
As the question goes about literary scholarship and criticism, in all cases concerning CL, WL and ELC one should not neglect one more “other” – if not an inalienable “self” – within any literary creation and poetics as such. I would say it comprises literary creativity’s infra-ontology, despite the fact that under the pressure of different times and socio-historical circumstances its position has varied. That “other” is the aesthetic dimension of a literary work. I can hardly imagine or mention any masterpiece of WL either in its active, passive or potential canon, that would have failed to bind its philosophy with a search of a proper aesthetics, capable of generating ideas in the way that they are not perceived as mere thoughts, but are just felt as something that concerns the individual life of a receiver, or the very self of a receiving culture.