Dimitar Anakiev
QUASI LITERATURE CALLED "GLOBAL HAIKU"
1.Definition
What is "Global Haiku"? This question has been raised since mid-April 2000, when the famous "Global Haiku Festival" was held in Decatur, Illinois, at which guidelines for "global haiku" were adopted. for a haiku that will “cross state borders,” as it is officially written. In other words, "global haiku" is haiku, which, contrary to International P.E.N. regulation, does not recognize national haiku literature, creates a surrogate of Japanese haiku, with a pretension to speak on behalf of Japanese culture as its colonial representative, and embodies the principles of liberal politics in the most popular poetic form of the world. “Global haiku” (the euphemism for this term is ELH – English Language Haiku) is thus the name for the strategy of American imperialism in culture and literature.
1.What way does “global haiku” achieve its goals? Here are the basic elements of this strategy:
1.Destroy the form 5,7,5 which is the bearer of the definition of haiku and at the same time the bearer of national sovereignty in haiku literature, because 5,7,5 has different characteristics in each national language.
2."Poetic license", the ancient individual right of poets to use the poetic form at their discretion, is replaced by the policy of liberalism ("everything is allowed").
3.Haiku is abolished as a form and declared a "genre", ie. introduces rules concerning the definition of style and content ("internal definitions"). Here are the internal definitions of the haiku "genre":
-form 5,7,5 is abolished as a definition of haiku
-haiku is a pastoral verse about nature (kacho fuei)
-whose method is an objective sketch ("shasei"), ie. imagism
-(in order to emphasize the objective character, a capital letter is dropped at the beginning of the verse and all "global haiku" are written in lower case, thus emphasizing the break with the imaginativeness of poetry and emphasizing its supposed indistinguishability from reality, ie documentary character).
-all haiku of a different style and content are declared another "genre" called "senryu".
-Japanese contemporary haiku (gendai) is not recognized (it is ignored) and is kept in a kind of hibernation while "Japanese haiku" is considered only a haiku from the past.
2.Goals and role models of "global haiku"
A good connoisseur of haiku can see with the naked eye that the goal of “global haiku” is the political adaptation of this literary form to the ruling liberalism. In the first place, it is political censorship, extinguishing the freedom of creativity and creative pluralism both in the choice of topics to be written about, and the reduction of writing style to a single one - "objective" - expression only through images and suffocation of authorial subjectivity. Expressing only through images aims to prevent the free exchange of ideas through poetry because the image is an "ideologically inactive" substance. An author who, instead of talking, has to paint, looks like a saddled horse. The root of this restriction lies in the history of American imperialist policy, because it has been shown that freedom of expression in literature can provoke great mobilizations of the masses and hinder the policy of imperialism, as happened in the case of Vietnam war. Therefore, this freedom is no longer allowed i the most popular form. Many of the actors in the “global haiku” policy are former government officials. It is not difficult to recognize that the main inspirer of the global policy of haiku censorship is the imperial censor in the era of the imperial wars of Japan, Kyoshi Takahama.
However, there is also an economic dimension. "Genre" is a commercial category in art, created with the development of the market. American publishers of haiku literature are becoming owners of the global haiku market.
3.What way the form was destroyed and how the genre of "global haiku" was constituted?
It should come as no surprise that in this dirty business of destroying one precious and unique literary form, damage from the arsenal of imperialist politics has been used, before all, the racism. Contrary to the standards of the International P.E.N. the conceptual creator of the concept of "global haiku" Bill Higginson announced that the Japanese "on" ("onji") are not syllables, and that the Japanese "kanji" are not letters, and therefore the form 5,7,5 should not be used in English . I think this is the only case of racist deal with the culture in the history of world literature. William Higginson is a former U.S. Army officer in Japan, probably because his authority was undeniable. All subordinate editors and culturologists began to repeat his "professional" assessment as a mantra. Only world renown poets could raise their voices against this barbaric practice. The English poet James Kirkup has repeatedly stated that these are "Bill Higginson's inventions" ... I called one text dedicated to this topic the "Taliban of haiku community" comparing the destruction of the haiku form with the destruction of Buddha statues in Bamyan, Afghanistan. For the point is that form 5,7,5 is both an important artistic tool, and a means of educating the spirit and thought (to those who wish to use it). The most vulgar presentation of this process of breaking down the form was invented by the British poet Michael Dylan Welch in his NaHaWriMo by making a traffic sign "Forbidden 5,7,5". At the time he lived in Britain he was an advocate of the 5,7,5 form. With his move to the United States, he became the CEO of "Global Haiku". However, it is similar with Bulgarian poets who moved to the United States.
Bill Higginson also worked hard to ensure that Japan's Gendai did not find its place in the concept of “global haiku”. For the first book by Ban'ya Natsuishi, published in the United States, Bill Higginson wrote a negative review in the leading American haiku magazine "Modern Haiku" and said that "this is not haiku." To satisfy the truth, it must be said that Bill Higginson did not act only destructively. He is the creator of the first global haiku saijiki "Haiku World" (a publication of the prestigious Kodansha International), which called on the followers of "global haiku" to build a Western surrogate for Japanese culture. This created all the conditions for the existence of a substitute for Kyoshi's "kacho fuеi" (I will explain this term at the end of the text in the glossary of terms), ie. writing poetry only within the frame of nature. However, the "kigo" in the West does not have the function it has in Japan, namely to mobilize the local culture that has been deposited in China and Japan for more than 2,000 years. "Kigo" in the West mobilizes neither culture nor emotions, so it is much more important for true haiku poetry to learn the "technique of writing kigo", fundamental to the art of writing haiku, by compiling a "Dictionary of Keywords", as the Japanese masters of Gendai do, than to create a Japanese cultural surrogate that has no poetic significance. That is why the creation of various "lists of kigo" serves only to deceive the poets, creating the illusion that they are doing something important. In fact, they are doing just that, not dealing with topics that are vital to them, and that is the goal of Higginson's endeavor. "A Game of Glass Pearls" can be said by Hermann Hesse.
4.How does the haiku world react to the concept of "global haiku"?
Although Bill Higginson's ideas were known before they were officially published and took years to mature and take shape (for example, Higginson first argued that "amorphism" is a negative phenomenon in haiku - which is undoubtedly true - and that a fixed form is needed, but for English haiku it requires a fixed form 2,3,2 instead of 5,7,5) after the Decatur festival there were attempts to reduce the effect of the idea of "global haiku" and still keep it haiku as a poetic form. Two organizations were established and two declarations were written. The World Haiku Club (WHC) was established in August 2000 at a conference in London-Oxford, the idea was given and the conference organized by Susumu Takiguchi, and the World Haiku Association (WHA) was established in early September of the same year in Tolmin, Slovenia. The WHC's essentially good idea was to informally link Western haiku with Japan. The weakness of this idea is the attachment to that part of Japanese haiku that is contradictory in the West: to the work and ideas of Takahama Kyoshi... The WHA is the only world organization established in the Balkans. Our idea was to create an organization that would be a kind of International P.E.N. for haiku. Unlike global haiku, as the first president of the WHA, I advocated the idea of "international haiku," i.e. an organization that respects national haiku literatures. Sixty-four official participants from different parts of the world (about 30 of them from Japan) and a dozen other unofficial guests (local poets) speak best of the interest in the ideas launched by the WHA. Although our goals have not been achieved in the way we envisioned them, today the WHA is the only organization that connects the Western world with conteporary haiku (gendai) in Japan, and this guarantees its vitality... The Matsuyama Declaration, written in 1999, expresses the official Japanese position on the problem of globalization of haiku (it uses the word "internationalization"). It was signed by, among others, the president of the Association of Traditional Haiku Poets, Arime Akito, and the president of the Association of Contemporary Japanese Haiku Poets (Gendai), Tohta Kaneko, the two largest associations. The content of this statement is available on the Internet, so here I highlight only two statements related to this text:
1.-5,7,5 form is possible in all languages of the world
2.-There are many different types of haiku.
Both statements deny the postulates on which the "global haiku" is based.
5."Global haiku" in action - the case of an anthology
Just a moment before the official announcement of the "global haiku" strategy in Decatur, I published an anthology of the Balkan haiku called "Knots" in my publishing house Prijatelj ( "Friend"), based in Slovenia. The anthology was published in English and was co-edited by me and leading American editor and publisher of haiku literature Jim Kacian. The anthology includes 166 haiku by 125 Balkan poets. The way we worked was as follows: I chose haiku and translated them into English, and Jim brought my translations to the final English form. I didn't bother much with his "polishing" (Jim's expression) of my English translations until I noticed that some of my favorite haiku had changed significantly. To my remark, Jim replied "logically": "We make the book in English, mostly for the American market. We in America have a rule that metaphors do not belong to the haiku, so we must discard all metaphors, ie. to change them in an objective expression. American readers will react negatively to metaphors. They will say that this is not a haiku, the book will receive a negative assessment and our endeavor will fail. So we have no choice, it has to be done this way ... "
In this way we discarded metaphors from 37 haiku. 23% of the poetic content was stylistically changed, ie the subjective expressions became objective. Approximately 90% of the discarded metaphors are personifications, metaphors, which are most common in Japan, but also in the Balkans, and which express the most important characteristic of haiku poetry: equating the subject with the object and turning the object into a subject. Our anthology breaks the natural (pagan) connection between the Balkans and Japan and includes Balkan's haiku poetry in the corpus of American "global haiku." Knots was the first, perhaps the most important step in the Americanization of Balkan's haiku poetry, I must admit, with sadness. Balkan's haiku has lost its character, its ness, its primary color, in which it is much more similar to Japanese haiku than to American of "global" haiku. The Knots anthology was a worldwide success, the first step in a "global haiku" even before its strategy was officially announced. Now let the reader imagine, for example, a Bulgarian writer whose novel is translated into English (or another language) and on this occasion the translator rewrites 23% of its content. It is clear that this has nothing to do with literary practice and that it is an ideological, political, domination over literature, whose conquest ambitions over other nations are not too hidden.
I learned a lot from this collaboration with Jim Kacian, the Knots anthology, and everything that followed later led me in the opposite direction.
Later, other envoys of the "global haiku" came to the Balkans too, so its firm reign in the inaccessible Balkan mountains is more than obvious.
6."Global haiku" in action - the case of a haiku
After I wrote and published the text "Women's Handwriting in Bulgarian Haiku", a famous Bulgarian haiku poetess contacted me by letter. It seems to me that part of this letter is typical of the views of the "global haiku" and should therefore be considered and commented on publicly. Here is this part of the letter:
"The example you give with Venelina Petkova's three-liner demonstrates a really natural attitude towards sexuality. But the most important thing for me in this three-liner is that she forgot to do it really good, explaining the image and the idea. In my opinion, this is exactly the weakness of the Western author, who cannot learn to be more indirect in his messages (indirect transmission of information is embedded on many levels in Japanese culture), and the transmission of ideas through images is what most -I really like in haiku. The first line of "summer tan" speaks of external influences that change us; the second line "behind my white mature breasts" conveys the idea that there is a place hidden from view, protected from external changes, despite the passage of time - the place under which the preserved pure, still girlish heart beats - but why should the author tell us it to destroy all the magic of artistic discovery. Doesn't the image itself speak enough and how much better the third line would sound if it was just "my heart beats" - let the reader guess that the heart is preserved."
What is typical of "global haiku" in these words? Let's take a look at:
1.A stereotypical view that simplifies and reduces Japanese culture only to a certain feature. In essence, Japanese culture has hundreds and thousands of faces that the protagonists of the "global haiku" want to hide and reduce to one face only, a surrogate they call "Japanese culture," but that culture is not that simple as presented by globalists. This prevents poetic pluralism in haiku.
2.In these lines we see the idea that haiku is a "genre" and not a "form" (the form was successfully destroyed and we see why). The genre has its own internal rules that keep haiku on a very narrow path. I used to call this "genre" view of "globalists" "pornographic" because just as pornography reduces a very complex phenomenon of human sexuality to the genitals only - for practical reasons - so the "haiku genre" reduces haiku, "the heart of poetry " to something very banal. So the genre banalization of haiku works.
3.Like all "globalists", the author of these lines gives himself the right (the colonial?) to speak on behalf of Japanese culture. She calls her Bulgarian compatriot a "Western author" and does not call her haiku "haiku", but only "three-liner". Very typical. Her diction is high, authoritative, and her point of view is "quality," as if she were talking about an industrial product, not poetry, the speech of the human heart.
4.Obviously, the position of the author of these lines is not poetic, but ideological. Poetry is not respected here, but the rules of the "genre", ie. poetry is equated with "genre."
5.The consequence of the ideological approach to poetry is that the author of these lines is not at all able to understand this haiku and makes a very banal proposal to "correct" this "three-liner" (to turn it into a "haiku"), which in fact, destroys both its message and its poetics. Also very typical. Let's look at the original and the surrogate.
Summer tan.
Behind my white mature breasts
there is still a girl's heart.
Venelina Petkova
The "correction":
Summer tan.
Behind my white mature breasts
my heart beats.
The "Bulgarian globalist"
First from a purely poetic aspect: the last verse is the point of haiku, it must be convincing and full of meaning - in the corrected version we see that the third verse is completely banal and does not convey any meaning. Secondly, more importantly, the author of the surrogate does not notice the meaning and this is that the "heart" of Venelina Petkova is actually a metaphor that means "spirit". The transformation of the human spirit into a physiological function of the heart means the destruction of a beautiful haiku. And that's exactly what all the actors of the "haiku genre" or "global haiku" do.
Here I would like to say a few words about the mantra about the "imagery" of haiku and the "indirect" expression, ie. that haiku should not be a "direct expression". These are the statements of various half-learned "authorities", non-poets who do not understand poetry. Namely, the bearer of "imagery" in haiku is not painted images, but symbols, ie. keywords. And this means that even a completely one-way statement acts as a metaphor if there are two symbols in it. But working with symbols in haiku is the work of the master. And this is a much, much higher level than the actors of the "global haiku" can imagine. In a text written more than twenty years ago, The Dimension of Line, published in the American Frogpond, following the example of Santoka Taneda's verses, I explained how the images in Santoka's verses work. So the mantras sold to us by globalists through their "rules" and "genres" have no poetic or intellectual value. These are just ideological constructions.
7.Conclusion
For American ideologues of the policy of liberalism in culture and their followers, haiku is obviously a bed of Procrustes, and also the whole of Japanese culture has become its colonial surrogate.
The so-called "Global Haiku" violates all the rules of the International P.E.N. for cultural exchange and thus the “global haiku” is transformed into quasi-literature. This quasi-literature, called "global haiku", destroys all national haiku literatures and turns them into cultural colonies.
Glossary of some lesser known expressions:
"Kacho fuei" - Kyoshi Takahama's concept that defines the thematic spectrum of haiku - Kacho fúei (花鳥 諷 詠, "birds and flowers") that many in the West swear is the "only true haiku" is in practice from the Chinese principle of Buddhist art from the Song period Huā, niǎo, yú, chóng (花 ， 鳥 ， 魚 ， 蟲), which means: flowers, birds, fish, insects and which is a Buddhist dogma for writing and drawing small, harmless creatures instead of poets and artists worshiping force. Contrary to Shintoism, which celebrates the power and vitality of nature.
"Senryu" in Japanese means "willow". This was the poetic pseudonym of the 18th-century poet Karai Hachimon, who was known for his love of satirical haiku and made anthologies of satirical haiku. If the poets of that time called some haiku "willow", it means "This is the haiku that our Willow has to love for its anthology." Only in 20th century Japanese imperial censor Kyoshi Takahama began to use the word "willow" as a means of censorship, to make poets write only about nature. Gendai abolishes censorship, any haiku poet can write whatever he or she wants, so it is strange that this means of censorship has remained in the English speaking world.
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