Poets Imprisoned for Speaking Out - Some contemporary poets whose poems or public speech put them in
A poem can contain a dangerous power—certainly some governments see poems as threats to their authority, and through the centuries many poets have been rebels, agitators and advocates—in their poems as well as their political acts. Way too many news stories in recent years have featured poets being thrown into jail in government attempts to suppress their poems, or to punish the authors for speaking out.
To anyone who wants to believe prison can diminish the power of a poet’s words, we’d suggest reading Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Wilde never regained his fame, his fortune, or his creative spark as a playwright after he served two years at hard labor, and he left England as soon as he was released from prison, never to return—but the poem he wrote about life and death in a Victorian prison is very powerful indeed.
Take note of these contemporary poets who have suffered imprisonment for saying the wrong thing in public:
The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, an unwavering (some might say stubborn) advocate for human rights and freedom of expression who is also a poet and literary critic. Liu Xiaobo was at the time, and still is, in prison in China, serving an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” The Chinese government reacted angrily to the awarding of the Peace Prize, calling it “blasphemy” and Liu a criminal. It was several days after the Nobel Committee’s announcement before Liu Xiaobo’s wife Liu Xia was permitted to visit and tell him of the award, and he dedicated it to the victims of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy movement demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.
Our profile of Liu Xiaobo includes links to the very few of his poems that you can read online in English translation—all of which were written in the late 1990s, a period when he spent three years in a rural labor camp for “re-education” and all of which are dedicated to his wife Xia. She, too, has suffered imprisonment and suppression in the form of house arrest:
from The Washington Post:
Liu Xiaobo’s wife describes his imprisonment, by William Wan
“After more than two years of house arrest and government-imposed silence, the wife of China’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo spoke Thursday to reporters who had sneaked in to see her during an apparent lunch break by the guards watching her apartment.... Kafkaesque.... ‘I really never imagined that after he won I would not be able to leave my home,’ she said, describing her new life as restricted to an apartment with no Internet, phone or trips outside, except to buy groceries and visit her parents. ‘This is too absurd.’”
Even while Liu Xiaobo remains in his prison cell and his wife remains under house arrest, however, his writings are reaching across the English-speaking world, thanks to Harvard University Press’ 2012 publication of No Enemies, No Hatred, selected essays and poems with a foreword by Vaclav Havel.More »
Tsering Woeser is not in a government jail, but she is imprisoned in her own home in Beijing. She was born in Lhasa, Tibet, but grew up in Sichuan province and was educated in Chinese—she speaks Tibetan but never learned to read and write in her native language. She was an apolitical poet of the “art for art’s sake” school before she returned to Tibet as a young woman and found her personal connection to Tibetan identity and culture. Her early explorations of Tibetanness in poems did not generate much fuss, but when she wrote about Tibetan life under Chinese rule in more direct and literal prose stories and essays, her books were banned and she lost her job as editor of a Chinese-language journal of Tibetan literature. Now she is married to dissident Chinese writer Wang Lixiong and lives in Beijing, where she has devoted her blog to documenting the Tibetan experience. She has received several international awards for this work, but has never been allowed to travel outside China, or within, for that matter, to receive them.
In 2012 she was given the Prince Claus Award, sponsored by the Netherlands foreign ministry for “individuals or organisations whose cultural actions have a positive impact on the development of their societies,” but she was not allowed to attend the ceremony at the Dutch embassy in Beijing, and she was placed under house arrest after the announcement of the award.
On International Women’s Day in 2013, she was among the 10 women honored by the U.S. Department of State as International Women of Courage, with this citation:
Zhu Yufu, a longtime democracy activist who had previously served time in prison for his dissident work, was arrested in China in January 2012 for publishing a poem urging people to make their voices heard:
from The New York Times:
“Crackdown Continues on Activists in China,” by Michael Wines
“Zhu Yufu, 58, a writer and democracy advocate, was charged with subversion in Hangzhou for writing a poem that urged citizens to gather to defend their freedoms.... Mr. Zhu wrote the poem early last year, as uprisings in the Middle East led a small number of activists outside China to issue an Internet call for a ‘Jasmine Revolution.’”
English translations of a few of Zhu Yufu‘s poems appear on the Ragged Banner Press Web site.
from The Los Angeles Times:
Qatar poet gets life in prison after ‘insulting’ emir, by Emily Alpert
“A poet will face life in prison in Qatar after penning verses that state officials deemed insulting to the nation’s emir and an incitement to topple the government.... Rights activists say Mohammed Ajami was arrested over his ‘Jasmine Poem,’ which skewered governments across the region, at one point declaring, ‘We are all Tunisia in the face of the repressive elite.’”
from Associated Press in The Guardian (UK):
Chinese poet Li Bifeng jailed for 12 years
“A dissident Chinese poet whose detention has sparked an international appeal for his release has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for contract fraud.... Li Bifeng—formerly imprisoned for five years for involvement in the Tiananmen Square democracy movement—was sentenced at Shehong county court in Sichuan province, south-west China.... The exiled dissident Liao Yiwu, a friend of Li, said the 48-year-old was targeted because he was suspected of financing Liao’s escape from the country last year. Liao said those suspicions were false.”
Since ancient times, poets have used acrostics to embed “secret” messages in their poems (not so secret, actually—an acrostic poem spells out its subject in the first letter of each line or stanza, and once you’ve seen the vertical message, it’s impossible to ignore). It seems quite natural that modern-day poets living under repressive regimes might turn to acrostic coding as a means of bypassing government censors. In 2008 popular Burmese poet Saw Wai was jailed for publishing a seemingly innocuous love poem that contained an acrostic complaint about Burma’s military dictator.
from BBC News:
“Burma poet held for secret insult,” by Steve Jackson
“The Burmese authorities have arrested a well known poet, who published a love poem with a hidden message criticising the country’s military leader. Poet Saw Wai’s work—titled ‘February the Fourteenth’—was published in a Rangoon magazine, The Love Journal. Taken together, the first words of each line read: ‘General Than Shwe is crazy with power.’”
from The Guardian (UK):
“Poet held after coded attack on Burmese leader,” by Ian MacKinnon
“Saw Wai’s seemingly innocuous lines were printed in the weekly Love Journal. But read vertically, the first word of each line forms the phrase ‘Power crazy senior general Than Shwe.’ The issue of the magazine containing the eight-line poem entitled ‘February 14’ was published last month, but the author was only arrested on Tuesday after censorship board officials deciphered the message. The publisher and editor of the magazine, which printed the words under a picture of heart-shaped balloons inscribed ‘I Love You,’ were also questioned.”
To anyone who wants to believe prison can diminish the power of a poet’s words, we’d suggest reading Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Wilde never regained his fame, his fortune, or his creative spark as a playwright after he served two years at hard labor, and he left England as soon as he was released from prison, never to return—but the poem he wrote about life and death in a Victorian prison is very powerful indeed.
Take note of these contemporary poets who have suffered imprisonment for saying the wrong thing in public:
•Liu Xiaobo, China
The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, an unwavering (some might say stubborn) advocate for human rights and freedom of expression who is also a poet and literary critic. Liu Xiaobo was at the time, and still is, in prison in China, serving an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” The Chinese government reacted angrily to the awarding of the Peace Prize, calling it “blasphemy” and Liu a criminal. It was several days after the Nobel Committee’s announcement before Liu Xiaobo’s wife Liu Xia was permitted to visit and tell him of the award, and he dedicated it to the victims of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy movement demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.
Our profile of Liu Xiaobo includes links to the very few of his poems that you can read online in English translation—all of which were written in the late 1990s, a period when he spent three years in a rural labor camp for “re-education” and all of which are dedicated to his wife Xia. She, too, has suffered imprisonment and suppression in the form of house arrest:
from The Washington Post:
Liu Xiaobo’s wife describes his imprisonment, by William Wan
“After more than two years of house arrest and government-imposed silence, the wife of China’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo spoke Thursday to reporters who had sneaked in to see her during an apparent lunch break by the guards watching her apartment.... Kafkaesque.... ‘I really never imagined that after he won I would not be able to leave my home,’ she said, describing her new life as restricted to an apartment with no Internet, phone or trips outside, except to buy groceries and visit her parents. ‘This is too absurd.’”
Even while Liu Xiaobo remains in his prison cell and his wife remains under house arrest, however, his writings are reaching across the English-speaking world, thanks to Harvard University Press’ 2012 publication of No Enemies, No Hatred, selected essays and poems with a foreword by Vaclav Havel.More »
•Tsering Woeser, China
Tsering Woeser is not in a government jail, but she is imprisoned in her own home in Beijing. She was born in Lhasa, Tibet, but grew up in Sichuan province and was educated in Chinese—she speaks Tibetan but never learned to read and write in her native language. She was an apolitical poet of the “art for art’s sake” school before she returned to Tibet as a young woman and found her personal connection to Tibetan identity and culture. Her early explorations of Tibetanness in poems did not generate much fuss, but when she wrote about Tibetan life under Chinese rule in more direct and literal prose stories and essays, her books were banned and she lost her job as editor of a Chinese-language journal of Tibetan literature. Now she is married to dissident Chinese writer Wang Lixiong and lives in Beijing, where she has devoted her blog to documenting the Tibetan experience. She has received several international awards for this work, but has never been allowed to travel outside China, or within, for that matter, to receive them.
In 2012 she was given the Prince Claus Award, sponsored by the Netherlands foreign ministry for “individuals or organisations whose cultural actions have a positive impact on the development of their societies,” but she was not allowed to attend the ceremony at the Dutch embassy in Beijing, and she was placed under house arrest after the announcement of the award.
On International Women’s Day in 2013, she was among the 10 women honored by the U.S. Department of State as International Women of Courage, with this citation:
“In a period marked by increasing self-immolations and protests in Tibetan areas of China, Tsering Woeser has emerged as the most prominent Mainland activist speaking out publicly about human rights conditions for China’s Tibetan citizens. Born in Lhasa, Tsering Woeser’s website, Invisible Tibet, together with her poetry and non-fiction and her embrace of social media platforms like Twitter, have given voice to millions of ethnic Tibetans who are prevented from expressing themselves to the outside world due to government efforts to curtail the flow of information. Despite the constant surveillance of security agents and routinely being placed under house arrest during periods deemed to be politically sensitive, Tsering Woeser bravely persists in documenting the situation for Tibetans, noting that ‘to bear witness is to give voice to,’ and asserting that ‘the more than 100 Tibetans who have expressed their desire to resist the forces of oppression by bathing their bodies in fire are the reason why I will not give up, and why I will not compromise.’”More »
•Zhu Yufu, China
Zhu Yufu, a longtime democracy activist who had previously served time in prison for his dissident work, was arrested in China in January 2012 for publishing a poem urging people to make their voices heard:
It’s time
It’s time, Chinese people!
It’s time,
The square is ours,
The feet are ours,
It’s time to use our feet to go to the square and make a choice.
from The New York Times:
“Crackdown Continues on Activists in China,” by Michael Wines
“Zhu Yufu, 58, a writer and democracy advocate, was charged with subversion in Hangzhou for writing a poem that urged citizens to gather to defend their freedoms.... Mr. Zhu wrote the poem early last year, as uprisings in the Middle East led a small number of activists outside China to issue an Internet call for a ‘Jasmine Revolution.’”
English translations of a few of Zhu Yufu‘s poems appear on the Ragged Banner Press Web site.
•Mohammed Ajami, Qatar
from The Los Angeles Times:
Qatar poet gets life in prison after ‘insulting’ emir, by Emily Alpert
“A poet will face life in prison in Qatar after penning verses that state officials deemed insulting to the nation’s emir and an incitement to topple the government.... Rights activists say Mohammed Ajami was arrested over his ‘Jasmine Poem,’ which skewered governments across the region, at one point declaring, ‘We are all Tunisia in the face of the repressive elite.’”
•Li Bifeng, China
from Associated Press in The Guardian (UK):
Chinese poet Li Bifeng jailed for 12 years
“A dissident Chinese poet whose detention has sparked an international appeal for his release has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for contract fraud.... Li Bifeng—formerly imprisoned for five years for involvement in the Tiananmen Square democracy movement—was sentenced at Shehong county court in Sichuan province, south-west China.... The exiled dissident Liao Yiwu, a friend of Li, said the 48-year-old was targeted because he was suspected of financing Liao’s escape from the country last year. Liao said those suspicions were false.”
•Saw Wei, Myanmar
Since ancient times, poets have used acrostics to embed “secret” messages in their poems (not so secret, actually—an acrostic poem spells out its subject in the first letter of each line or stanza, and once you’ve seen the vertical message, it’s impossible to ignore). It seems quite natural that modern-day poets living under repressive regimes might turn to acrostic coding as a means of bypassing government censors. In 2008 popular Burmese poet Saw Wai was jailed for publishing a seemingly innocuous love poem that contained an acrostic complaint about Burma’s military dictator.
from BBC News:
“Burma poet held for secret insult,” by Steve Jackson
“The Burmese authorities have arrested a well known poet, who published a love poem with a hidden message criticising the country’s military leader. Poet Saw Wai’s work—titled ‘February the Fourteenth’—was published in a Rangoon magazine, The Love Journal. Taken together, the first words of each line read: ‘General Than Shwe is crazy with power.’”
from The Guardian (UK):
“Poet held after coded attack on Burmese leader,” by Ian MacKinnon
“Saw Wai’s seemingly innocuous lines were printed in the weekly Love Journal. But read vertically, the first word of each line forms the phrase ‘Power crazy senior general Than Shwe.’ The issue of the magazine containing the eight-line poem entitled ‘February 14’ was published last month, but the author was only arrested on Tuesday after censorship board officials deciphered the message. The publisher and editor of the magazine, which printed the words under a picture of heart-shaped balloons inscribed ‘I Love You,’ were also questioned.”
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