"Hello everyone, I am now communicating with you in rapeseed ditch village in Mulei County, Xinjiang. It's still very bright here, the sunset is still on the horizon, and it should be dark on your side. Liu Liangcheng's slightly vicissitudes voice came from the WeChat group, a greeting, and suddenly opened the vast sense of time and space.
This is the first online event of "Nandu Reading Month". The famous writer Liu Liangcheng visited the Nandu Book Club WeChat group with his new work "Bemba" to tell us about "From Jianger" to "Bemba:History of Childhood, Dreams and Games".
"Bemba" is Liu Liangcheng's latest novel after being nominated for the 10th Mao Dun Literature Award, and won the 2021 Huadi Literature List Annual Long Work. It unfolds against the backdrop of the epic "Jianger" and recreates reality in a different way to trace the lost human childhood. Liu Liangcheng said: "'Bemba' is the most enjoyable novel I have written, and it is also the childhood epic I have written to myself, and the most innocent time in my writing history. ”
In the lecture, the writer talked about the great heroic epic "Jianger", he talked about how he was attracted and shaken by the "Jianger" epic in his early years, and how he used the "Jianger" epic as the soil and shoulder to conceive the story of "Bemba" in his heart. Most of the plot of "Bemba" is driven by children's games such as "moving, hide-and-seek, and dreaming", and Liu Liangcheng also solemnly talks about the "transition" of the nomadic peoples of the grasslands, as well as the practical implications of games such as moving house and hide-and-seek. Compared with the previous novel "Carrying Words", "Bemba" adopts a weight-lifting method to deal with historical themes, achieving the effect of "personalization of history". In Liu Liangcheng's view: "A writer needs to use words to understand history. Writers will place themselves in the space of history, and let the history of a place become a personal spiritual past. ”
April 23 is the annual World Book Day. At the online book conference, Liu Liangcheng recommended readers to read the three epics of "Jianger", "Gesar" and "Manas". "Especially for those who have read homer's epics, Indian epics and other world-famous epics, you may feel very kind to read our country's epics," he said. The stories in the epic poems are all native stories of this land, and in such epics you can read the mountains and rivers of the motherland, you can read about the climate, grass, trees, and horses that you are familiar with, and you will certainly read about the heroic spirit of the frontier peoples that make you feel familiar and strange. ”
Excerpts from some of the lectures:
[Host]: The heroic epic "Jianger" is mainly circulated among the Weyrat Mongols in China, Mongolia and Russia, and is produced about the 13th century, and has been preserved from generation to generation by the folk artist "Jiangerqi" who sang "Jianger". First of all, I would like to ask Teacher Liu Liangcheng, how did you come into contact with the Mongolian epic of "Jianger" and was attracted to it? Why do we say that where the epic stops, "Bemba" begins to tell?
Liu Liangcheng: Hello everyone, I am now communicating with you in Rapeseed Gou Village, Mulei County, Xinjiang. It's still very bright here, the sunset is still on the horizon, and it should be dark on your side. We have time lags in different time zones. In fact, epics have a long time difference with us modern people, when words have not yet appeared, or are not widely used, and people rely on word of mouth to remember the history, culture, ideas and imaginations that they consider important. Myths and epics were created only when people believed in God. Will we still believe it when we read the epic today? Absolutely. At least I will. By reading epics, we can go back to the things that our ancestors once believed, to that distant time with sound.
I read the Junger epic earlier. Because I work in the Xinjiang Federation of Literature and Art, the Federation has a folk art research society, which specializes in collecting and sorting out folk art works, publishing several major categories of folk art integration, and so on. I'm one of their rare readers, because such books are so few published that they barely sell in bookstores. Only a few experts will borrow it to read.
The Folk Research Institute of the Xinjiang Federation of Literature and Literature collected and sorted out the epic poem "Jianger" probably began in the late 1970s. The epic working group made records in more than 20 counties inhabited by Mongolians in Xinjiang, and successively recorded more than 100 Jiangerqi, sorting out and screening a large number of audio recording materials, and only then did we have the text of the "Jianger" epic that we now read. The Jianger epic, now translated into Chinese, has six volumes.
My interest in the Junger epic was about a decade ago. I used to just read it, but then I had the opportunity to really go to the epic hometown. At that time, I had a studio, and we did a cultural tourism project in The epic inheritance area of "Jianger", Xinjiang and Buxel Mongolian Autonomous County, called "pastoral tourism", that is, the word "nomadic" was reversed. It is very interesting to travel with the sheep, to take the ancient pastures in the mountain grasslands as tourist routes, to use the herders' felt houses as guest rooms, to move every day, to walk the sheep's road, and to see the scenery in the eyes of the sheep. Most of the herders we came into contact with at that time were Mongolians.
We also participated in the design of the "Jianger" epic square in Buxar County, where a themed sculpture was erected, and 72 warriors held a large bowl with a diameter of 9 meters to toast Jianger Khan, and the creative inspiration of this sculpture came from Jianger's epic. I also wrote this chapter in my novel Bemba.
At that time, I was just doing the dissemination work for Jianger culture, and I had the opportunity to contact the local Mongolian people and hear Jiangerqi's singing. But I did not expect to write a novel on the theme of Jianger in the future. Many years later, a novel called "Bemba" happened in my mind.
Sometimes it is felt that a writer may not really live for the sake of writing, but the life, experience, and experience of a writer may be the most important thing to make a work. A life experience that sleeps in the heart for many years, and then it is awakened in a certain moment, and it becomes a work. "Bemba" is the story that has been sleeping in the heart for many years and being awakened.
When I was writing the novel "Bemba", I had the feeling of Jiangelqi myself. I feel that I have learned another kind of story from the stories of Jiangerqi for generations. I started my story where they stopped. This is also the motivation for the writing of this modern novel "Bemba" created against the background of epic poetry.
But "Bemba" is a modern novel, and it simply borrows the pattern of the beginning of the epic to introduce the reader into the space of the epic. The next story is all created by the writer himself, and the structure of the story is no longer in the mode of epic. Epics have their own wonderful imagination and freedom, but the imagination of the ancients always has an end, and the novel "Bemba" is actually a place where the ancients' imaginations stop to unfold the writer's own boundless meditation.
[Host]: The protagonists of "Bemba" are several children, Heran and King Hari are reluctant to be born in the mother's womb for a long time, and Hongur is a child who has not been weaned and has never grown to the height of a wheel. Why did you design the protagonist of the novel as such a character?
Liu Liangcheng: When I wrote this novel, I felt that I was really back in my childhood. If the epic is the literary narration of human infancy, then through the writing of "Bemba", I have gradually returned to my own childhood. In fact, every writer will nurture a self in his heart that will not grow up. No matter what way we write, to the most affectionate place, we will always feel that there is a pair of children's eyes opening in our hearts, and a child's heart jumps out and robs us of our right to speak. He wants to stand up and perceive this time and speak out about the world. The book "Bemba" is the awakening of the child in my heart. Usually, he has been sleeping, hiding in my adult's body and adult's soul in the way of childhood. At the critical moment, he began to wake up, and he wanted to see the world with the eyes of his childhood, and to speak the world with the childish mouth of his childhood.
[Host]: The moving game that Helan brought out of the mother's womb, regarded the sheep dung eggs on the ground as sheep, the horse dung eggs as horses, and the blades of grass as a home that was broken up and built... The moving game actually imitates the "transition" of the steppe peoples, have you ever witnessed the transition of the nomads in your life? Why is it shocking? In "Bemba", why are adults and children, herders and soldiers immersed in the game?
Liu Liangcheng: In fact, the big geographical environment of Xinjiang itself has a vast epic flavor. I often encounter the transitions written in "Bemba", especially in the transition season, I often encounter thousands of cattle and sheep crossing the road, and your road crosses the middle of people's pastures and blocks the way of the sheep. When the sheep pass, the car has to stop and let the sheep pass. In some places, the way of man follows the path of cattle and sheep, and the shepherd's path coincides with that of sheep. Man must also be patient and wait for the sheep to pass, because this road was first walked out by the sheep.
In Xinjiang, you can still see some ancient pastures embedded in the mountains, forests and grasslands, and many sheep have walked for thousands of years. For the cattle and sheep who have transferred, there are actually not many roads to take, and they will all turn along the original pasture. Therefore, the annual cattle and sheep transition may be the magnificent landscape of the only remaining nomadic civilization in Xinjiang. I have been to Kazakhstan, and there is no transition in the vast steppes of Kazakhstan, and their cattle and sheep have long been kept in captivity. Many of the current transition pastures in Xinjiang have also been blocked by farmland, and many of the transfer sites are now transported by car.
In the past, the herdsmen's transition was actually a hard but very happy thing, because the transition road was far away, and the long pastoral road was hundreds of kilometers. Shepherds herd their own cattle and sheep, eating other people's grass along the way, growing their own cattle and sheep. In the summer, drive the cattle and sheep up the mountain and go to the coolest mountain, and the cattle and sheep and people are all sheltered from the heat. Before winter comes, they drive cattle and sheep down the mountain and go to the open land of the desert Gobi, because the open land is windy all year round, which will blow away the thick snow, and the cattle and sheep will eat the grass under the snow.
When I was a child, the village where I lived was always next to the agricultural and pastoral areas, and the village was near the farmland, and the Gobi grassland was outside the farmland. Peasants and herders have always been contradictory, because farmers need to reclaim pastures to cultivate land, and reclaim pastures into farmland, and the competition between farmers and herders for land has never been broken. This scramble may have been going on for thousands of years. In the past few thousand years, the biggest thing that has happened on our land is that the sea has changed into a mulberry field. The sea, which was once the land of horse herding, has all been turned into farmland.
Famous writer Liu Liangcheng
The moving game in the novel Bemba may have come from a nomadic transition. But like the game of hide-and-seek, it is a game that we must play when we are young, from childhood to teenager, and sometimes adults follow suit. At that time, the games available were limited and even monotonous, but they were never bored. It's obviously a very old game, just like kittens practice catching mice at a very young age, and our children actually learn to put a home in the moving game and learn to move the house around. For this generation of young people who live in urban rentals, moving may be a common occurrence. Moving can be a heavy game for them.
The relevance of hide-and-seek games may lie in anticipating real-life hiding and searching. The games that these children learn before they become adults have the meaning of skills training in themselves. These ancient and simple games have accompanied generations of people through their childhood. They began practicing moving in childhood, moving from one place to another, practicing hiding and seeking.
Perhaps the most thrilling thing about Bemba is that Herland is trapped in a game of hide-and-seek. In the beginning, he set up a moving game to let all the adults on the prairie return to childhood in the game. Because in the novel "Bemba", both games have a special function. People relapse when they play the game of moving, and soon return to childhood in the game. In the game of hide-and-seek, people will hide again and not be found. It was in the game of hide-and-seek that Herland was forgotten. At first he hid deeply, afraid of being found. Later, when he knew that no one was looking for him, he deliberately showed his figure. In fact, the generation with whom he played hide-and-seek games left the game, and he was left alone in the game, never to come out again. Later, Herland tried to get out of the game of hide-and-seek with the help of various methods, but the children who played hide-and-seek with him had long since grown into adults and had long forgotten the game. Until he finally returned to his mother's womb, he did not come out of the game. With the regrets of the game, he turned back and hid in his mother's womb.
[Host] In "Bemba", The Herans replaced the heavy life with games. I remember the German philosopher Immanuel Kant saying that art is essentially a free game. How should we understand the relationship between art and life?
Liu Liangcheng: Literature is a being on the other side of the real world. When you feel that this real world is too real, too hard, too disappointing, too disheartening, then you just open a book and you will enter another world. In this literary world, there are all the emotional patterns of our real world, and there are all the ancient and modern Chinese and foreign stories that you can think of or cannot think of. When you are reading a work, your relationship with this work is that what you read from literature is your own touch, you shed your own tears, and the characters in the book are also you. When you read the most moving place, the world in that book is your world. You sigh in it, you smile happily in it, you suffer in it, you shed tears in it, you have a lot of hope in it, and you have a lot of disappointment and dissatisfaction in it. This is how literature relates to us.
It doesn't take up much of this world, it's just a book, usually placed on your bookshelf, it looks like an ornament. But once you have the leisure to open it, you open up an infinitely wonderful world. There is our spiritual home in that book.
[Host] The story of Ben Ba Dong Gui is an additional chapter added to the single book of "Bemba". In fact, the real history involved in "Bemba" is also full of blood and slaughter, which is very heavy, but the novel uses a heavy brushwork, deconstructing history with games, dreams, and paused time, and explaining aging, death, war, and human suffering in a very spiritual and poetic way. Can you talk about your own view of history? How do you think literature should present history and life?
Liu Liangcheng: This question mentions the weight and heaviness of "Bemba". In fact, how to write a novel is the strategy of the writer. My last novel, "Carrying Words", wrote about the battle of faith between the two countries that took place a thousand years ago in the western region, which was extremely cruel. The book writes about one war after another. "Bemba" actually writes about the history of Turgut's return to the east, and the plot of 12 heroes dying one by one is not a game. I presented the process of each hero's death in an epic way, and this piece is heavy. It balances the "lightness" of the entire novel game. My novels "Carrying Words" and "Bemba" take place in Xinjiang, where I live. Those historical and epic place names are still there today, the Altai Mountains, the Irtysh River, and so on, these great place names have also traveled through the whole history. The beginning of the jianger epic reads: "When the Altai Mountains were still small mounds, Jianger was born. ”
The novel "Bemba" also borrows the beginning of Jianger's epic poem. I live in the middle of the Tianshan mountains and the Altai Mountains, with a view of the distant horizon to the west and a history of the stories that took place in this vast area. In fact, all historical events may not have passed. I once said that history does not pass. The life we live in today may be the result of an event in history. For example, "Carrying Words" writes about the battle of faith a thousand years ago, because of the end of that war, there is the faith of the people in our district now. It is a war that determines people's minds in the future. The two faiths are at war. I set the story at that point in time to see how the human body reacts when faced with the choice of faith and the mind.
In "Carrying Words", many bodies choose to sacrifice their lives for faith, and many lives convert to faith and survive. I wrote a lot about divided lives in that book. Why do so many fragmented things appear in novels? Because that's how I really feel about the history of this area. We have always felt the fragmentation of this land, but we have been bridging it in the form of literature. So literature's understanding of history represents a writer's true feelings about history living in the here and now. No matter how far history has gone, those pains in history, we will feel.
But "Bemba" is different. I read history in a different way in Bemba. Although we can feel the pain in the depths of history from today's lives. But as a writer, you need to understand history in words. Writers place themselves in the space of history, turning the history of a place into a personal spiritual past. Xinjiang is a place inhabited by many ethnic groups, with different ethnic groups, religions and cultures. Writing in Xinjiang, it is easier for a writer to perceive the differences and commonalities of these cultures. This is also the meaning of writing the book "Bemba". I use the heart of a Han writer to feel the great charm of the Mongolian heroic epic. Take it as soil, take it as your shoulder, and from it, write a childhood epic that belongs to me personally. This is my "Bemba", which is also another inheritance and development of the Mongolian heroic epic "Jianger".
Nandu reporter Huang Qian