EMBLEMATIC FESTIVAL OF ECUADOR

JIDI MAJIA

Jidi Majia has published more than twenty books of poetry and is president of the China Minority Literature Association and vice president of China Poetry Association. Most of the Yi are concentrated in the mountains of Yunnan, they consider the soul as a spider that lies on the outer surface of the human body and have houses built of wood, earth and bamboo, which, also, in the style of a spider web, they are liable to become a place for grazing and agriculture. His creation myth centers on the element of water; it was in her that a creature called Ni originated, which in turn began to engender the various forms of life. Their original social system distinguishes castes and clans, and they burn their dead so that the ghosts do not return, a tradition that has sometimes ended up being assimilated by the Han who live among them. Even today, the Yi celebrate the torch festival in honor of the god of fire, which, although it is also celebrated in other ethnic groups, has variations in its founding legend. Apart from fire, there are the gods of the valleys, rocks and rivers. That yi universe of forests, mountains and sacred fire is consigned by Jidi Majia in her poetry book Words of Fire, translated into Spanish. Due to its melancholic tone, it sometimes recalls the ancient Chinese poetry of the Tang dynasty, but nostalgia no longer exists so much with respect to geography but to symbols of the lost and forgotten and to an imaginary that disappears under the noise of modernity. Like other contemporary Chinese poets, he portrays the detachment of the roots and the arrival of the uncertain, a point where it is necessary to rescue that seemingly useless world but which is at the same time, the germ of the contemporary human being, thus his way of life. current situation takes him away from those ties: “Proverbs and sayings have crept down to earth / never echoing in the real world / I am shocked that reality has died / for these shadows, and yet / time continues to pass / in his sacred realm / his alternate realm ”. The own need of the yi to continue and honor the legacy of the ancestors, is reflected for the poet in the word. Like an oracle, it summons and names the colors of the yi, the voice of the bimo, buckwheat, the color of the skin of a tribe, coexistence with an ancient nanny of the Han ethnic group and the Bodhi tree that brings together lovers. under its shadow: "Let each word that I write, each song that I sing / lend its most authentic voice to the spirit of this soil" But Jidi Majia does not stay alone in the depths of his roots, but investigates places, places and characters that he seems to recognize as his own. It evokes the alpacas, the grandmother Rossa, the last member of the Kawéskar tribe of Chilean Patagonia, the Andes mountain ranges and cries for Mandela and for poets and characters whose life experience has been fractured and enriched by exile and convictions. Tributes to Czesław Miłosz, Aimé Césaire, Desanka Maksimovi, Tomás Venclova, among others, are not disjointed from the rescue of the ethnic traditions of the Yi, but rather an extension where compassion and the word as an expression of the mother tongue overflow limits of separation from homeland. Jidi Majia begins a dialogue with those whose vision is a mirror of their own need to cry out for the disappearance of values, traditions and customs: “Forgive me, I realize now, standing before my deceased ancestors, that our wisdom and knowledge have given a step back, and that our dreams / have vanished in the sky of the so-called civilization / The language of Biashillaze is about to die / in a season of concrete and steel ”. However, the need to express the anguish of that sudden break with the past is no longer only his ethnic group but a universal call to peace and care for nature; The latter is closely linked to the expressions that the Nuosu has for the care and protection of resources by the ethnic group as a search for preservation and continuation of the family legacy. The impulse then seems to emerge to bring back what is traditional that will allow people to understand each other better, whether in China or anywhere in the world: “I write poems because I want to tell myself / and others that life is very cut / write poems because Colombia has a man named García Márquez; Chile, a man named Pablo Neruda… ”In this way, Jidi Majia, who was in Colombia at the 2011 Medellín Poetry Festival, goes beyond the borders of the merely Chinese to talk about the current desires of the world.