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Paper short abstract

As examples of “myth-ways” and the “now-ness of myth,” Aku Wuwu invokes the “palmate ones,” and other creatures with defining features, from myth-epics of the Yi ethnic group, suggesting existential anxieties over cultural sustainability and evolving conceptions of ethnicity in China today.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary Chinese ethnic minority poet Aku Wuwu utilizes nature imagery drawn from the “story worlds” of traditional oral and oral-connected narratives in his poetic works. Recent poems invoke imagery of the “palmate ones” and other creatures with defining features that relate to traditional origin myth-epics of the Yi ethnic group and suggest existential anxieties, including cultural sustainability and evolving conceptions of ethnicity in China today. The poems, written in Northern Yi dialect (Nuosu) and meant to be orally performed, draw heavily on the Book of Origins of the Nuosu Yi, a key ritual narrative still strongly present in the local culture. This paper explores Aku’s intentional use traditional imagery that includes environmental (climactic and biospheric), eco-genealogical, interspecies relations and hybridity, and supernatural/mythical content in these poems, other of his contemporary poems, and related digital media. In particular, are passages of the epic about the creation of the “Twelve Snow Tribes,” of which five of the creatures “with blood” exhibit appendages (hands, paws, wings, etc.) that figure in traditional nature taxonomies, are invoked. The poems exemplify what Yoonhee Hong of Yonsei University calls the “now-ness” of traditional myths in contemporary mediums (2024). The paper further explores how the story worlds of myth-epics and folk narrative, with their rich environmental and folk cultural content, have imprinted ethnic poetry and other expressive mediums or “myth-ways” in Southwest China and adjacent borderlands today (Bender 2017).