Chapter 10: Resistance Through Poetry
——Reading the Poetry of Lee Min-yung

“Island Nation”

Far away from our homeland,

our ancestors crossed the sea and came to the Beautiful Island,

enduring countless hardships and sufferings.

The strait severed the umbilical cord.

Amid the drifting and tossing of the waves,

we learned to cultivate with sweat,

and to plant hope with love.

Guided by the stars,

our dreams once secretly crossed the rainbow spanning both sides of the strait.

But that was when the motherland was still our mother.

During the era of occupation by foreign peoples,

we began to establish our own nation.

The Beautiful Island is our homeland.

The eternal benevolent radiance is the blue sky,

comforting our hearts.

“Darkroom”

This world

is afraid of bright ideas.

All cries and shouts

have their exits blocked.

Truth

exists in an opposite form.

As long as even a little light penetrates inside,

everything will be destroyed.

Taiwan's period of Martial Law lasted from 1949 to 1987, a total of thirty-eight years.

From the founding of the Republic of China in 1912 until 1987, fully half of its existence—thirty-eight years—was spent under martial law, a duration surpassed only by the rule of the Kim dynasty in North Korea.

This period has been referred to by Taiwanese historians as the “White Terror Era,” documenting the bloody and highly repressive rule of the Chiang family and the Kuomintang regime.

After the middle stage of the White Terror Era, the “Li Poetry Society” (1964) brought together Taiwanese poets of different generations who possessed a strong sense of local identity.

Together with poetry societies such as Genesis and Blue Star, which were composed primarily of mainland-born poets who had come to Taiwan, it formed a tripartite literary landscape.

Within the heavily repressive political environment of Taiwanese society during the 1960s through the 1980s, poets of the Li Poetry Society frequently used poetry as a means of indirectly expressing their love and concern for this land and its people, as well as their satire and condemnation of the cruelty and brutality of those in power.

Among them, Lee Min-yung, Lee Kuei-hsien, and Cheng Chiung-ming were all prominent middle-generation poets of the Li Poetry Society, distinguished by their strong local Taiwanese identity and cultural consciousness.