November 4 Tiger Tracks: Poetry and Performance from Southwest China
Aku Wuwu (Aku Vuvu), also known as Luo Qingchun, is a well-known poet of the Yi ethnic group in southwest China. A professor of Yi Studies and ethnic minority literature at the Southwest Nationalities University in Chengdu, Aku hails from Mianning County, located along the Yalong River in the Greater Cool Mountains Yi Nationality Autonomous Prefecture in southern Sichuan Province. Aku’s unique contribution to the poetic world of China, is a corpus of poems written in the revised Northern Yi script – a system of writing based on the ancient Yi writing system, once used only by Yi ritual priests. Aku both writes and performs his poems in Northern Yi dialect (also known as Nuosu). His themes include cross-cultural intersections in the developing world of southwest China, between humans and the environment, and between the world of dreams and reality. Many of his poems are deeply ethnographic, rooted in the culture to such an extent that he regards them as “textbooks” for future generations of young Yi. Among his best-known works is a long poem based on a ritual chant to call back the wandering souls of the ill. Entitled “Calling Back the Spirit of Zhyge Alu,” the poem is a cry for cultural revival among the Yi people of southwest China, who today number over 7 million. Writing in both Yi and Chinese, his works include several collections of poems and works of literary criticism. A number of his poems have appeared in English translation in Manoa, Rattapallax, Basalt, Poet’s Café, and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. A small anthology and C-D, entitled Tiger Tracks: Selected Nuosu and Chinese Poetry of Aku Wuwu was published in 2006 by Foreign Languages Publications, at The Ohio State University.
This event is cosponsored by the Folklore Program, the Asian Studies Program, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Arts and Administration Program, the Department of English, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. Fore more info, please call (541) 346-1521.
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