The actress and writer of Chinese descent Yan Huang has presented her first collection of poems, Crecer como hierbas salvajes (Growing Like Wild Grasses), which opens the Lenguas Bífidas collection of La Parcería Edita.
This is a book of initiation, almost a rite of passage, which frees the author from the tight rules of a language that tries to impose itself and allows her verse to emerge from that forked thought that crosses borders and becomes fluid. The woman who doubts, the woman who looks at herself and questions her surroundings, who imagines and reconstructs the world in her head, especially in times of insomnia. The woman of strength, uncertainty, body, word, it is this woman who appears in Huang’s texts.
Liminality, a term derived from the Latin “limen” meaning “limit” or “threshold”, implies an intermediate state, which can be physical or mental. This liminality, which author Yan Huang explores in this book, is a state of transition and transformation, a crucial moment of change. It is a space of constant flux where people move without fully adhering to a place or an identity. It is the threshold to the desired destination, the exit from the place left behind, a point suspended between the past and the future. This concept illustrates the position of the traveller, the explorer of seas, lands or skies, in his or her search for new horizons or escape from suffocating realities.
The suitcase, the universal symbol of the traveller and the migrant, embodies both the weight of the “baggage” carried with him and the hope and wealth of experiences that accompany those who decide to embark on a new course. In the short term, the temptation persists to dispel the discomfort caused by the presence of the “other” with the simple phrase “go back to your country!” – an expression rooted as a bad habit – which is used impulsively and simplistically when the “other” does not fit the expected image or role.
