Migration is a potent topic in Taiwan. Who truly belongs here, and who is the intruder? The question has been asked many times, and many answers given. It is not inappropriate, then, that this week's Taipei Poetry Festival has taken 'homeland and the world' as its theme.
At the festival's outdoor offering of Taiwanese Aboriginal songs on Sunday, their ancient words seemed to breathe ghosts of the past into the very air. As the figures on stage weaved through wisps of theatrical smoke, Liao Hsien-hao, the commissioner of Taipei City's Department of Cultural Affairs (which organised the festival) reflected on the idea of homeland. He nodded towards the singers and told me that the Aboriginals were the island's original inhabitants, and that all the Chinese were the colonisers.
It is widely accepted that the Kuomintang, who fled from the mainland in 1949, came as colonisers, he said. But people needed to accept that the real invaders included Chinese who arrived up to 400 years ago. The original inhabitants were moved off their land by outsiders claiming cultural superiority, in a story that had parallels almost everywhere in the world, he added.
Thoughts of migration stayed with me as the festival progressed. Choman Hardi, a Kurdish poet originally from Iraq, said England was her adopted home and that she liked writing in English. It put strong emotions at a distance and helped her control them, she said. Poet Fadhil Al-Azzawi, another Iraqi now living in Germany, testified that he felt a citizen of the Arab world first, then the entire international community.
I met a poet from Iceland, Steinar Bragi, who told me he had been living in Scotland but was now on the road. He and his girlfriend had no permanent home, he said. They planned to stay in Kaohsiung city for several months, then move on - where to, they had no idea.
Meeting Bragi put the entire business of 'home' in a new light. The whole world was on the move, I thought. I, an Englishman, was living in Taiwan; the two Iraqis resided in Europe; the Icelanders dwelt nowhere in particular; and even the Aboriginals had come down from their mountains to perform in central Taipei.