Description - For a Song and a Hundred Songs by Liao Yiwu
In China, the government continues to erase and distort the collective memory of the country tosuit its all-encompassing political agenda. However, an individual's memory, with its psychicencoding and indelible scars of oppression, will forever hide a deeply etched record in bloodand intellect. Its imprint, like history, can never be erased.
In June 1989, Liao Yiwu witnessed the Tiananmen Square protest. The young poet, who haduntil then led an apolitical bohemian existence, found his voice in that moment and proclaimed hisoutrage in the poem 'Massacre'.
For a Song and a Hundred Songs captures the four brutal years Liao spent in jail for writing hisincendiary poem. He reveals the bleak reality of crowded Chinese prisons-the harassment fromguards and fellow prisoners, the torture, the conflicts among human beings in close confinement,and the boredom of everyday life. But even in his darkest hours, Liao manages to find thefundamental humanity in his cellmates.
Liao Yiwu presents a stark and devastating portrait of a nation in flux, exposing a side of Chinathat outsiders rarely get to see. For a Song and a Hundred Songs will forever change the wayyou view the rising superpower.
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