At present, one of the most active Post-70s poets and poetry critics in China has paid long-term attention to the group of workers’ poets, edited and published the contemporary workers’ poetry dictionary, and filmed the documentary “my poetry” with the same name. The film won the golden Jue award at the 2015 Shanghai Film Festival and two nominations for the Golden Horse Award.

Poetry of migrant workers: cry and outbreak from the bottom of society, October 17, 2015

I Foxconn worker’s sudden death

Hello, I’m Qin Xiaoyu. Today, I’d like to talk to you about the somewhat remote topic of workers’ poetry. On October 3 last year, I received such a shocking and sad news in my wechat: “the post-90s migrant poet Xu Lizhi fell and died on September 30. The police judged it to be suicide.”

Just a month ago, we contacted him and invited him to participate in the shooting of the worker’s poetry recording film “my poetry”. I don’t know what happened in a short month to make such a young poet decide to say goodbye to the world?

From the beginning of last year to July this year, I have been editing an anthology of contemporary workers’ poems, also called “my poems”. Xu Lizhi was the youngest poet selected in this anthology. At that time, he worked as an assembly line operator at Foxconn, the world’s largest foundry of apple.

This poem is generally sorted by age. I hope this book can form a social epic about China’s transformation written from the perspective of ordinary workers as a whole. I very much hope to select the works of the new generation of migrant workers who have become the mainstream of workers, so that the historical structure can be complete.

However, among the post-90s working poets, I didn’t find one who wrote particularly well, and I didn’t want to be inferior. Until I happened to read some of Xu Lizhi’s works in Xu Lizhi’s blog, I was a little overjoyed at that time, because I knew that I found the poet who killed the end of the whole worker’s poetry.

In order to let you have a general understanding of workers’ poetry through Xu Lizhi’s works, I will briefly introduce his two poems here. The first song “terracotta warriors and horses on the water line”:

Standing along the line

Xia Qiu

Zhang Zifeng

Xiao Peng

Li Xiaoding

Tang xiumeng

Lei Lanjiao

Xu Lizhi

Zhu Zhengwu

Xia pan

Yan Xuemei

These day and night workers

Put it on

Electrostatic clothing

Electrostatic cap

Electrostatic shoes

Electrostatic gloves

Electrostatic ring

be fully equipped for

Waiting for military orders

Just ring the bell

All return to the Qin Dynasty

This poem is a masterpiece of Xu Lizhi. Many years later, when people look back on this round of miracles made in China and the sacrifices and costs paid by countless workers behind the miracles, they will probably quote this poem.

We look at the first sentence “standing along the line”, “line” of course refers to the assembly line, and this poem is a slender work that imitates the assembly line in shape. Therefore, the names cannot be listed side by side, because they are arranged in this way on the assembly line of “one radish, one pit”.

Then there are six words “Jing”. These six words highlight and emphasize the killing atmosphere before construction. When the bell rings, a labor force begins to act. In a twinkling of an eye, migrant workers in the era of globalization return to the ancient and autocratic Qin Empire and become a new force of production and martyrs.

On Foxconn’s assembly line, the names of workers were actually erased. They were referred to by a series of numbers as job numbers, and Xu Lizhi restored their names one by one. I think of the sentence on the Benjamin monument: “it is more difficult to commemorate the unknown than the famous. The construction of history is dedicated to the memory of the unknown.”

Let’s look at the second poem, the death report of a peanut:

Trade name: peanut butter

Ingredients: peanut, maltose, white granulated sugar, edible vegetable oil, edible salt, food additive (potassium sorbate)

Product Standard No.: QB / t1733 four

Eating method: directly eat after opening the cover

Storage method: store at room temperature, away from light, ventilated and dry place before opening the cover. Please cover tightly and refrigerate after opening the cover

Producer: Shantou xiongji Food Co., Ltd

Address: workshop B2, Far East Industrial Park, Beizhong village, Xinxi Town, Longhu District, Shantou

Tel: 0754-86203278 85769568

Fax: 0754-86203060

Shelf life: 18 months origin: Shantou, Guangdong

Website: www. stxiongji。 com

Production date: 2013. 08。 ten

You may be a little strange. Isn’t this the product manual? Why is it a poem? The production manual of peanut butter is the death report of peanut. When we examine this manual from such a perspective, it has a shocking defamiliarization effect: the production of peanut butter means the death of peanut, the manufacturer is the murderer, the plant site is the place of death, and the production date at the end is obviously the date of death.

Production was originally the antonym of death, but Xu Lizhi used production to write “death”. Moreover, this poem is not only about the death of peanuts, but also uses Bixing to express his feelings by borrowing things. Xu Lizhi uses the crushing of peanuts into peanut butter to metaphor the fate of workers being squeezed to death.

II The value of workers’ poetry

Unlike many contemporary poets, working poets like Xu Lizhi have never created in an elegant literary laboratory constructed by various theories and schools; Their poems are inspired by reality. Speaking of this, I would like to briefly summarize the main values of workers’ poetry.

First of all, they have considerable literary value. In the history of Chinese poetry, identity is sometimes an important poetic opportunity, such as frontier fortress poems written by those garrisons, fairy poems written by Taoists, Zen poems and landscape poems of monks; Tao Yuanming created a great tradition of pastoral poetry after returning to the countryside and completing the transformation of his identity - this kind of poetry is the symbol of our classical agricultural civilization, just as worker poetry is to modern industrial civilization.

Compared with many well-known contemporary poets, excellent worker poetry is not inferior, and even has the thickness of experience and the power of pointing directly to the hearts of the people. However, this part of literary achievements are often ignored and underestimated.

Secondly, workers’ poetry also has the significance of making statements for the bottom and the value of historical testimony. The proposition of how to speak at the bottom is related to social justice and historical truth. But this sound