Hong Kong without Us: A People’s Poetry
The Bauhinia Project
University of Georgia Press: 2021
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By now, there have been dozens of non-fiction books, long-form essays, investigative folios and other printed materials on the events of 2019 in Hong Kong. Each an attempt to fix—to translate—an event to paper, they have entered into the annals of something resembling an archive of the city’s recent political history. To call Hong Kong without Us: A People’s Poetry, the latest offering, a transposition of those same events, would be incorrect. False, too, is the idea that it merely acts as custodian to found Cantonese texts, synthesised by the anonymous Bauhinia Project into English. ‘This work refuses language as commodity,’ the editors write of the compositions. ‘Each poem is like—to paraphrase Walter Benjamin—a call from outside the high forest to produce a corresponding echo from within it. And because the leaderlessness of the protests made for a kind of guerrilla chorus, producing gargantuan volumes of personal testimonies that vanished as swiftly as they appeared, we would say that the source text was never an individualistic, identifiable “I”. Rather, the source text was the high forest itself: it was the human condition in Hong Kong.’

These transformations reveal not only the interior thoughts of anonymous figures, but also ask pertinent questions about what is meant by a ‘people’s poetry’, and why translation is a concept, not a genre, of the volume. With these questions, the readers are introduced into an autotelic space: present in the high forest itself, we are invited to engage in the translations, to understand what is being unsaid.

• Tags: Hong Kong, Issue 25, The Bauhinia Project, Ysabelle Cheung