When Sarah Howe was born, her maternal grandmother took a jade bracelet, designed to fit a baby’s arm, to the temple to be blessed. In Chinese tradition, the loop of jade is a kind of talisman given to children learning to walk: if they tumble, the bracelet shatters, protecting them. She also asked a fortune teller for her grand-daughter’s future.
Was she told that this child, born to a Chinese mother and English father in Hong Kong, would one day become a poet in another country on the other side of the world? That, in her early 30s, she would win the TS Eliot Prize, arguably British poetry’s highest accolade, the first poet ever to win it for her first collection? Or that one day she would travel to St Andrews for StAnza, Scotland’s poetry festival, to share a bill with the Scots makar, Jackie Kay?
Howe’s grandmother died when she was still very young, taking to her grave many secrets, including what the fortune teller said. “I know all families have silence in them, but it sometimes seems to me that Chinese families have an extraordinary amount ofsilence in them,” she muses. However, she still has the bracelet, the “loop of jade” which gave her first poetry collection its title, a precious material link to a past which is full of silences and shadows.
I meet Howe, who moved to England with her family when she was seven, in a London cafe. She speaks carefully, as if testing each word to make sure it is the right one before moving on to the next, fitting, perhaps, for a woman fêted as one of the country’s finest young poets. But when she describes her beginnings in poetry, it sounds almost accidental that she ever put pen to paper.
She describes her Hong Kong childhood as colonial, “perhaps one of the very last”, reading English books at an English school, learning to count in pounds and pence. Her family were among many ex-pats who left in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, and watch with concern as the freedoms of the Hong Kongese appear to be being eroded under Beijing rule. When Howe visited recently for a literary festival, pro-democracy protesters marched past her hotel window.
In this context, literature takes on a political charge. Like the protesters 25 years before in Tiananmen Square, the students in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement scrawled poetry on their placards. Early in 2016, five Hong Kong booksellers were “disappeared” by the Chinese after continuing to sell books which had been banned in China. Howe’s latest project, ‘Two Systems’ (the phrase “one country, two systems” was used by the Chinese as a way to imply that Hong Kong would keep its freedoms) has become more charged than she intended. The concept was simple, and metaphorically resonant: to take the text of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s “mini constitution”, and erase words and letters from it to make poems. Now, she is wondering if the metaphor of constitutional erosion might be a little too powerful.
“When I was in Hong Kong in November, I was putting out the word for collaborators and avenues of publication. Some people were extremely enthusiastic, but others were quite wary about what that work would mean being put out into the political climate there at the moment. I think they were just letting me know that it would be quite a major intervention and maybe a larger one than I was quite ready to make.