Tonight Ha Jin delivered the first of three lectures at Rice University in the second annual Campbell Lecture Series. The lectures of each speaker (including last year’s inaugural speaker, Robert Pinsky) will be published by the University of Chicago Press. Ha Jin’s subject was “The Writer as Migrant”: the writer who may be a refugee, in exile, or an immigrant.Ha Jin began, in some sense, with a retraction. In the preface to his first volume of poems, Between Silences: A Voice From China, Ha Jin claimed to be writing in English for his downtrodden in his own homeland. Tonight, in a lecture called “The Spokesman and the Tribe,” Ha Jin referred to this gesture as ridiculous for failing to recongize the complexities of speaking for others. What Ha Jin explored instead was the guilt of the exiled writer and the paradox that seemed to dictate that exiles and immigrants fleeing for political reasons would not come to be known for their political stances but only for their literary legacies.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn loomed large in the talk, of whom Ha Jin argued: “Few banished giants return to their native soil. He is in this way Odysseyan.” Solzhenitsyn did return home after, Ha Jin reminds us, deciding at the last minute not to accept US citizenship at a ceremony in Rutland, VT. Of course, once Solzhenitsyn did return to Russia he experienced the state of being, as Ha Jin put it, of being “a spokesman for a nation that didn’t want him.” Only literature, Ha Jin argued, allows a return to the homeland; as such, he argues, the role of the spokesman is one he needed to set aside.
More from his next lectures soon.