Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

In describing his experience as a poet deemed an enemy of the PRC because of his words, Liu Hongbin writes in China Digital Times that 

If a poet is to play a useful role in overthrowing a government of tyranny, he must do it not just through politics, but through defending the human imagination – first and foremost, his own imagination. And his success is measured in how well he can write. If writing is an act of preserving the human spirit through words – in an internal revolution which may lead to an external realisation – then in finishing a paragraph of good writing, a poet feels that he might have overthrown a regime of repression, even if from within.

This role does not mean that a poet, or any artist, should function in some theoretical realm of pure imagination in which racism, sexism, or any other oppression is not to be considered. Certainly, they may imagine and write about a utopia in which these do not exist, but the use of biased and discriminatory tropes (or simply ignoring a marginalized group) within a work of art is necessarily a failure of imagination: allowing oneself to fall into these common patterns is laziness, not imagination.

If the only way an artist can think to be “edgy” or “daring” is to hurt members of an already oppressed group, that too is a failure of imagination—and a triumph of marketable daringness over true bravery and originality. This remains true whether the work is being marketed in a capitalist system or a gift economy, as the latter is no panacea. 

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1. Rapists’ Art
2. Thursday Read Write Poem

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