A Voice in the Sandstorm

When civilizations fall into barbarism, the arising culture fetishizes strength. So it has always been. It can feel as if the weak and sensitive have no place and no voice in a time when throwing one’s weight around is the done thing.

This was the world in which Cai Yan, a Chinese noblewoman at the end of the Han Dynasty (around 200 A.D.) found herself when her homeland was thrown into war. She was kidnapped by nomads and taken into the desert as the concubine of a chieftain. She says her captors had the practice of killing the old and weak, while idolizing the young and vigorous. By the time the Han Court negotiated her return, she had borne two sons whom she had to leave behind in the desert, never to see again.

Cai Yan is that rare phenomenon—a voice from the ancient female experience. She tells the story of her life in “18 Verses Sung to a Tatar Reed Whistle“, a lamentation with an interiority that feels ahead of its time. Though she had such little agency in a life dictated by men, there are glimpses in the poem of her power to assert herself in the world. One is her mention of her decision to raise her sons without shame, despite the circumstances of their birth. Another comes from the self-conscious reference to her own art: “As I sing the second stanza I almost break the lute strings / Will broken, heart broken, I sing to myself.”

I can imagine this woman, alone in a world of macho men, singing to herself in the nomad camp. But then I imagine another gentle soul picking up her melody on the wind, taking brief respite (as from the Cellist of Sarajevo). The whole poem feels like an act of resistance, and I find it fitting that her art is so compelling it has lasted for thousands of years while those who subjected her to violence and insults are lost to time. As deflating as it may be to create with posterity alone in mind, know that there may be others listening from neighboring tents, similarly despairing, taking heart from your humanity right now.

Image: Painting depicting Cai Yan, from Wikimedia Commons