This year’s Macau Literary Festival, the first part of which was held from Friday through Sunday at the Portuguese Bookshop, will continue with its second and final part this week from Friday to Sunday in Macau Art Garden, paying tribute to several literary geniuses from the past while showcasing the latest works by local authors, and a local female author spoke to The Macau Post Daily about women’s issues on Friday.
The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival was founded in 2012 by local Portuguese language newspaper Ponto Final. Based in Macau and held annually, it is the world’s first and largest gathering of literati from China and the Portuguese-speaking countries.
Series of activities to highlight local literary work
The festival showcases local writers’ latest works and presents the themes that concern them, covering topics such as love, jealousy, social observation, the pandemic, identity and gender issues, as well as women’s issues.
The featured authors’ new collections of work explore a range of themes, with Lawrence Lei’s (李宇樑) latest novel, Masked Faces (半張臉), focusing on the pandemic, and Cheong Kin Han’s (張健嫻) debut novel Yin (陰性) about the issue of miscarriage. Both books won prizes at the 13th Macao Literary Awards.
Local author Cheong Kin Han told The Macau Post Daily her first book “Yin”, a mid-length novel about a woman’s traumatic experience of miscarriage, sharing how, through her literary work, the heroine of her novel comes back to life, walks through her darkest places, accepts the smallest longings of her heart, feels the wordless poetry of the living universe, and opens up a path to live without right or wrong, and in doing so, completes herself.
Motherhood is not just a domestic role
The book tells the story of a mother’s journey, looking at miscarriage from the perspective of both mother and daughter. In her 80,000-character-novel, she describes what happened over three or four days, when she realised her baby had lost its heartbeat, and the subtle changes that took place around her.
“Miscarriage is not something we can just run away from because our bodies suffer from it,” she said, adding that when it happened to her, she realised that miscarriages happen more often than people think, but few people talk about it.
As for her motivation for writing, she says that apart from wanting to turn it into a work of art in the form of a novel as an outlet for her emotions, she also discovered a strange phenomenon: the closer her friends or family are, the more they are not willing to talk about it.
As a columnist and mother of a daughter, she decided to write a novel that explores the inner landscapes of women from a female biological perspective, documenting her own journey from trauma to healing.” Motherhood is not just a domestic role from a male perspective, but a state of connection with a woman’s body, mind and spirit,” she said.
Cheong also said that she is actually quite introverted and due to the miscarriage, has been stuck in a circle of thought for a long time. She said that as an introvert, she is interested in the motivations and psychology of human behaviour, which triggers her feminine psychological subtleties and allows her to see her own way of feeling the world in her work.
Series of activities to further focus on women issue
A series of activities will be held this weekend to further explore women’s issues, where the festival’s two-year-project “A Room of One’s Own” will be launched.
Based on the work of Virginia Woolf, the pioneering female British writer of 20th century modernism and feminism, and celebrating her 140th birthday in 2022, “A Room of One’s Own” is a series of talks, workshops, music, poetry and dance performances exploring the theme of “Women’s Conditions”, according to the statement.
Led by writers, scholars and artists, it draws on a variety of artistic mediums including literature, poetry, theatre, dance and music in a series of lectures, performances and workshops that will engage audiences and members of the public and target groups in future collective works, the statement said.
The workshop will combine literary and theatrical elements from social and therapeutic experiences, aimed at women and male participants interested in women’s conditions and issues, as well as those interested in the arts, to learn more about themselves, society and drama therapy through literature.
Anyone interested in the activities can visit the festival’s official website https://www.facebook.com/macaulitfest for tickets for the activities and more information.
