Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one’s actions, courage that could be described as “grace under pressure”—grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.
Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man’s self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man. —Aung San Suu Kyi, “Freedom from Fear”
Ask me what has been my most fortunate experience of the past two decades, and I’d say it was gaining the selfless love of my wife, Liu Xia. She cannot be present in the courtroom today, but I still want to tell you, my sweetheart, that I’m confident that your love for me will be as always. Over the years, in my non-free life, our love has contained bitterness imposed by the external environment, but is boundless in afterthought. I am sentenced to a visible prison while you are waiting in an invisible one. Your love is sunlight that transcends prison walls and bars, stroking every inch of my skin, warming my every cell, letting me maintain my inner calm, magnanimous and bright, so that every minute in prison is full of meaning. But my love for you is full of guilt and regret, sometimes heavy enough hobble my steps. I am a hard stone in the wilderness, putting up with the pummeling of raging storms, and too cold for anyone to dare touch. But my love is hard, sharp, and can penetrate any obstacles. Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with the ashes.
Given your love, my sweetheart, I would face my forthcoming trial calmly, with no regrets about my choice and looking forward to tomorrow optimistically. I look forward to my country being a land of free expression, where all citizens’ speeches are treated the same; where, different values, ideas, beliefs, political views… both compete with each other and coexist peacefully; where, majority and minority opinions will be given equal guarantees, in particular, political views different from those in power will be fully respected and protected; where, all political views will be spread in the sunlight for the people to choose; all citizens will be able to express their political views without fear, and will never be politically persecuted for voicing dissent; I hope to be the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisition, and that after this no one else will ever be jailed for their speech. —Liu Xiaobo, “I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement”
I am juxtaposing passages by two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo, awarded in 2001 and 2010 respectively, in order to highlight their faith, conviction, and the driving force behind their deeds. For Daw Suu, the daughter of modern-day, independent Burma’s founding father, it is succinctly called the freedom from fear. From whom we can begin to understand the grace and serenity in which Liu accepted the fate of his choosing. In a statement delivered before being sent to prison again for his drafting and signing of Charter 08, which calls for peaceful political reform in China, as well as his activism for basic human rights spanning more than two decades, Liu thanked his wife Liu Xia for her love and understanding for him, which he knows the evil Communist Party of China will never be able to take away from him. That partly explains why and how Liu enjoys this freedom from fear as elaborated by his predecessor.
Hopefully, my family and closest friends understand how I view art, politics, and religion, and this lens or set of principles through which I make sense of the messy world and its vicissitudes are perfectly articulated by Daw Suu’s notion of freedom from fear. I do not, for example, accommodate any political system or religious belief underwriting fear and guilt, instead of dispelling them. I tend not to, furthermore, befriend people whom I think are governed by fear, so aware of their status as an object, usually for all the wrong and superficial reasons, whose preoccupations are nothing more than themselves. I need an authentic—even if it means uncomfortable, if not suffocating at times—breath of fresh air leaving me enough energy to live and love without fear, take risks when appropriate, and reflect on myself and the world around me. I cherish the freedom of freeing myself and other people I care and love from what could look like there is no viable alternative, or the very lack of freedom which enslaves one by first eroding their imagination.
Yet, even for Liu, a man who practices what he preaches, is still feeling the guilt-ridden saudade toward his wife. In this mental state of paralysis, Liu, and perhaps Daw Suu too, reimagines themselves as a speck of dust, carried over by the wind, and falls onto the people whom they dearly miss. In his influential and very complex book on esthetic, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, Leo Bersani shows us how slippery it is to define sexuality in Freud’s work, which is supposedly the whole corpus’ subject matter. It could be construed or interpreted as borderline scandalous at best, if I claim sexual and psychic energies fuel Daw Suu and Liu’s lifetime of work. But Bersani convincingly points out that sexual excitement in Freud is more akin to the “self-shattering pleasure,” or the aimless, destabilizing, nonreferential, inchoate, agitating and repetitive shock waves akin to the dynamics of masochism. It is a stubborn will to collapse one’s own subjectivity, to embrace otherness, and to obliterate difference and deferring. Understanding the crass human expression of desire in this fashion, I cannot not notice and appreciate the intense eroticism found in Liu’s apologetic profession of his profound and almost raw love to his wife during his sentencing in a Chinese courtroom: “But my love is hard, sharp, and can penetrate any obstacles. Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with the ashes” (my emphasis), as if he were saying, right here, right now, my sweetheart, I want to make love to you.
And the Communist Party of China cannot stop him, because he already did. Liu Xiaobo and Daw Suu, your love conquered fear.
I am no martyr, and I know protesting and blogging here and there is not going to change the grander scheme of things, unless billions more souls move toward the same direction. But at least I learn something from two larger than life humans, by way of Freud. To my love, I love you to pieces.
Free Liu Xiaobo 釋放劉曉波
Free Aung San Suu Kyi 釋放昂山素姬
On the Ridge of Pratt 