A Time that Goes Nowhere: The Resemantization of Time as an All-Human Language in Zheng Xiaoqiong's Poetry and our Contemporaneity

Abstract

Zheng Xiaoqiong (Sichuan 1980–) is a contemporary poet best known for her dagong (migrant workers’) poetry, often interpreted through subaltern or ecocritical lenses. This article proposes a broader reading of Zheng’s work, arguing that her poetry addresses the experience of time as a specifically human and embodied language. Departing from the linear, progress-oriented temporality underlying dominant modern narratives, Zheng’s poems reveal time as both physical and cognitively constructed – a rhythm inscribed on bodies and environments that exposes both the interdependence of all beings and the linguistic nature of human lives. Through an intersectional and transcorporeal approach, indebted to thinkers such as Adriana Cavarero and Stacy Alaimo, the contribution investigates how Zheng’s resemantization of time arises from her situated experience as a female migrant worker, yet ultimately speaks to the condition of human existence as a whole. Comparative readings with other Sinophone authors further highlight how her poetry transforms personal marginality into a wide-reaching meditation on the possibilities of being human in a world of supposed crises, and concrete, inevitable, transcorporeal – possibly transconscious – interconnection.