thesilkroadtoday
The Silk Road Literature Series hosted its Three Continents Creative Meeting on Wednesday, 3 September 2025. In an hour online gathering, six authors from across three continents presented their works translated into Arabic by their host, the Egyptian poet and novelist Ashraf Aboul-Yazid.
Representing Taiwan, poetess and artist Miao-yi Tu shared her poem “They Are the Daughters of Siraya”, in English and Taiwanese. This poetry collection has been introduced in Arabic, and presented in The 2023 Kaohsiung World Poetry Festival, Taiwan.
Miao-Yi Tu is a writer, poet and painter. She has a degree in Literature from the National Chung-Hsing University of Taichung (Taiwan), and a master’s degree from the Dharma Realm Buddhist University in California, USA. She has published essays such as The Earth Is Still the Garden; poems such as Longing, The Standing Epiphany and The Black Ghost; and documentaries such as Sakura’s Ruby and The Golden Bat.
The author is a descendant of the Siraya people, a native population of Taiwan. She is a well-known environmental activist who has fought for the protection of the Takao Hill Nature Reserve in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She has devoted more than three decades of her life to the cultural study of her people in a conscious search for herself through the knowledge of her origins.
In her narrative, readers will encounter spirits and ancestral beings who will reveal to the reader the chronicles of her land. Through legend that becomes reality.
In Taiwanese and English, Miao read her poem which has the same book title:
They Are Siraya’s Daughters
They are Siraya’s daughters
They do not know
Their eyes are hollow
Even when encountering ancestral spirits under the coral tree
They still cannot converse with each other,
Great-grandmother only speaks the Siraya language,
They speak Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, English,
But simply cannot speak the Siraya language
They gaze at each other
But cannot converse
Great-grandmother lived in an era where herds of deer ran free
She liked to sing and herd sheep on the hillsides
She grew accustomed to wearing flowers upon her head
She would plant yams in the fields
She gave birth and raised her sons and daughters in thatched huts
She died in a sparse lonely woodland without herds of running deer
Her grave has already become a splendid large building
The girl that raised sheep sings no more after death
No one understands her song anymore
Even her grandchildren do not understand
Daughter of Siraya who has lost her language
Dances dance steps of colonists in the square
Ignorantly drinking alcohol
The host read a poem in Arabic, and showed some of the paintings the author illustrated to accompany her poetic words.
The six celebrated authors were Hemant Divate (India), Cao Shui (China), Miao yi- Tu (Taiwan), Esther Adelana (Nigeria), Inna Natcharova (Russia), Mexosh Abdullah (Azerbaijan). The Creative meeting took an hour to host the 6 authors, from 10:00 to 11:00 AM (Egypt local time), corresponding to 9:00–10:00 AM in Nigeria, 11:00 AM–12:00 PM in Russia (Moscow), 12:00–1:00 PM in Azerbaijan (Baku), 1:30–2:30 PM in India (New Delhi), and 4:00–5:00 PM in both China (Beijing) and Taiwan (Taipei).
Together, these voices underscore the Silk Road Literature Series’ mission to bridge cultures through translation and shared creativity.
