Words from the Fire: Poems by Jidi Majia (MĀNOA 30:1)

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Bbahxa Ayuosse by Qubi Shuomo. Bbahxa Ayuosse by Qubi Shuomo.
This Nuosu ritual painting is of the magical python Bbahxa Ayuosse or Bbahxa Arrysse, one of the supernatural helpers of the Nuosu hero Zhyge Alu. Bbahxa Ayuosse by Qubi Shuomo. Object #1998–83/102—Scroll, Painting. Gift of the Blakemore Foundation, courtesy of Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, University of Washington.

The new issue of MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, volume 30 number 1, is a collection of poems by Jidi Majia, translated by Jami Proctor Xu.

Jidi Majia is a member of the Yi ethnic minority group, one of the fifty-five officially recognized minorities in China and the sixth largest, comprising about nine million people. The subgroup to which Jidi Majia belongs, Nuosu, is the largest. For centuries Nuosu people have held on to their language, culture, and social structure, staving off assimilation by the majority Han.

This collection of more than 125 of Jidi Majia’s poems opens with an editor’s note and concludes with a translation of Jidi Majia’s speech for the 2017 Xu Zhimo Poetry and Art Festival at Cambridge University. More than a dozen images featuring Nuosu scrolls and paintings accompany the poems. Continue reading “Words from the Fire: Poems by Jidi Majia (MĀNOA 30:1)”

Eyes of the Heart (MĀNOA 29:1)

Accompanying artwork in Eyes of the Heart: The Selected Plays of Catherine Filloux from Camille Assaf, a French and American costume designer for theater, dance, opera, and film, and lead design editor at Chance, a photography magazine that looks at the world through the lens of theatrical design.

Eyes of the Heart presents six of Catherine Filloux’s plays.

Playwright, librettist, teacher, lecturer, and activist Catherine Filloux has been writing plays about human rights, social justice, and individual freedoms for over twenty years. Her plays often incorporate actual people and events, but are never merely biographical. By reimagining real-life characters and situations—employing temporal shifts, dreams, hallucinations, soundscapes, and other theatrical techniques—she explores the characters’ thoughts and emotions as they struggle with moral and ethical dilemmas, resist evil while searching for goodness, and react to assaults on human dignity. Her plays also question the fallibility of our collective memory, and the ways our interpretations of the past change and become distorted over time.

— From Editor’s Note

The following notes provide some historical background to the plays: Continue reading “Eyes of the Heart (MĀNOA 29:1)”

Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China (MĀNOA 28:2)

From this issue: Duplication, Image 5 , 2003 by Xing Danwen.

Red Peonies is the first English translation of The Woman Liu and The Woman Yang—two novellas by Chinese writer Zhang Yihe.

In 1970, when she was 28, Zhang was convicted of being a counter-revolutionary and sentenced to two decades in a remote prison labor camp. With empathy and grace, Zhang tells the stories of Liu Yueying and Yang Fenfang, two women she met at the camp.

Of her novellas, Zhang says, “They are not about politics or the system but about the tragic destinies of these young female prisoners.” Continue reading “Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China (MĀNOA 28:2)”

UH Press Journal Editor Ames Receives Huilin Culture Award

University of Hawaii News
Roger Ames at the 2016 Huilin Prize Award Ceremony on the campus of Beijing Normal University in China.

University of Hawai’i Press is pleased to announce that Press journal editor Roger Ames has been recognized for his expertise in Chinese philosophy as a recipient of the Huilin Culture Award. Ames, the editor of Philosophy East and West, recently ended his tenure as editor of China Review International over a decade after founding the publication, and accepted the award in Beijing on February 27.

UH News announced the award:

The award committee cited Professor Ames’ extensive work in comparative philosophy, research on Chinese philosophy and his publications on Confucianism, including The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence, Sun Tzu: The Art of War, and a philosophical translation of the Daodejing. Many of his titles have become classics in the study of Chinese philosophy.