ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the use of blogs and social media by two elderly Taiwanese poets who post poems and prose in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, and sometimes English translations that often include reflections on local and international politics. By using new media to reach out to audiences around the world, they seek sympathetic understanding for the visions they assert for Taiwan, as well as readers for their poetry. As their positioning depends on the prosthetic and networking possibilities blogs afford, this text situates their poetry in light of the work of Jodi Dean, Alain Badiou, and various posthuman theorists. Though postwar generations were educated to be citizens of the Republic of China, time continues to flow for these poets from a longer view of history in Taiwan, a view distinct from that of mainland China, which indeed existed apart from Taiwan during the period of Japanese rule. For these poets, time flows from a colonial past, with all its ambiguities, uncomfortable ironies, and inherent inequities still visible to them in a complicated postcolonial present. Both Ngo Chiau-Shin (吳昭新) (Wu Jau-Shin in Mandarin), who also uses the Japanese pen name Ōbō Shingo (オーボー真悟) (b. 1930), and Lee Kuei-shien (李魁賢) (b. 1937) depend on international affiliations as poets to broaden their audience, influence, and support received for their poetry and political positions. Each poet to varying degrees includes historically contested and politically controversial commentary in their poetry, often circumspectly engaging core questions regarding the unresolved status of Taiwan as both de facto an independent nation and an alternative China (ROC, not PRC). In short, both poets are patriotic Taiwanese reaching out to international others to embody a richer diversity of possibilities than the binary Cross-Strait relationship would seem to allow. The blogs are shown to continue to reorient the legacies of colonialism, including not only Japanese rule but also the takeover of Taiwan by “Chinese of other provinces” (外省人) after the KMT army retreated to Taiwan in 1949. Both occupying regimes together had the effect of excluding Taiwanese from sitting in positions of power until the late 1980s, and both poets lived through these eras, so that attendant events remain part of their lives (not historical abstractions).
