Early in 2017, I found myself back in hometown Chishang, caught between finishing my PhD and the uncertainty of what came next. Through that interval, I shared a correspondence with Badai, a Puyuma Indigenous literary elder. For five weeks, every Monday, our exchanges appeared in United Daily, exploring what Indigenous literature meant to each of us. Yet I hadn’t even published a book—so I simply wrote down my memories of Taiwanese Indigenous literature, one that, for me, weaves together distance and intimacy. It was no rhetorical device, but an unadorned truth, shaped by the slender threads of thought and the scarce feelings I could muster.

 

One May evening, just days before the Dragon Boat Festival, I traveled north to Taipei for a reading tied to that exchange. On Ketagalan Boulevard, the Indigenous land rights protest was nearing its hundredth day. I had been following the movement mostly through social media—especially the posts of a young poet named Cidal, someone I had never met, whose words carried the living pulse of the protest. The reading was held near the Presidential Office, and before it began, I detoured to Ketagalan Boulevard. There, two Thao canoes sat marooned on the hot, dry pavement—a quiet reminder that in a festival honoring an ancient Chinese poet with dragon boat races, few ever pause to consider the waters and lands Indigenous peoples have long called home.

 

I wandered under the tent, trying to catch fragments—words, signs, images adrift in the protest air. Yet I was wearing a blazer, out of place in both setting and moment, and I knew no one there. I lingered at the edge, wary of crossing an invisible threshold—a quiet estrangement that felt deeply familiar. Though the talk was over and I was home again, I kept tracing Cidal’s posts on Facebook.

 

Seven years on, Cidal published his first poetry collection, Talatokosay A Kapah: The Mountain in My Body (2024)—a work trembling with both fury and grief. Comprising four chapters that resist immediate comprehension, the book unfolds as follows, though what I offer here is more impression than summary: As If Confusion Begets Feeling begins with existential shards of life in Taiwan; Street Singing Context moves through politically charged call-and-response; The Unanswered Call of Crows entwines his laboring body with the wounds of collective objectification, turning the colonial gaze back; and Your Backpack Slows My Pace ends with the ache of disrupted, dispersed, and disoriented memory across Indigenous nations.

 

Reading Cidal’s poetry holds me near to the pulse of anger. Perhaps he is the mirror I’ve been searching for all along. I often shy away from fury and anger, yet they persist as potent affective faculties that bind us to others. In Where Night Knows No Border, written for Indigenous activist and singer Panai Kusui near the end of her thousand-day protest sleeping on Ketagalan Boulevard, Cidal traces grief across geographies, marking where heartbreaking protests in Hong Kong and beyond have fallen. It reads:

 

Who kills the crowd?
Who watches the crowd be killed?
In the crowd—singing, reciting,
Arguing, sleeping on the streets,
Wishing only to become a ghost.
Wandering: from Admiralty, Yuen Long, to Prince Edward.
Drifting: from Laipunuk, Atolan, to Ketagalan.

 

“Knows no border” speaks not only to the torment of stretched time and space, but also to a reimagining of boundaries—one that, in other cases, takes the form of rage disrupting emotional distance by piercing through indifference, as seen in I Don’t Wanna Talk To You.

 

The youth who adapt too well to society—
how is it that the past keeps brushing against you
without stirring your angry heart?

 

At a time when governments are falling apart, confusion reigns, culture feels flattened, life loops on repeat, and decay creeps ever closer—poetry cannot stay silent. The anger in Cidal’s poems is multifaceted, not only because the poet is deeply engaged in the political activism—always present, always involved—but also because anger isn’t something you simply smooth over or explain away. Poetry offers no tidy way to process fury. Nor is fury merely an affect to be theorized or resolved in retrospect—it is a generative impulse, propelling the emergence of new aesthetics and social realities.

 

Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) similarly explores how anger circulates, moves through us, and connects us.

 

In Shall We Just Assimilate Already?, Cidal not only skewers the usual rhetoric imposed on us by Han settlers—the condescension, envy, assimilation, and bias—but also warns against the seductive pull of the so-called “big family,” even when it’s dressed up as an “Indigenous big family.” This offers a way to understand what I call outbound becoming: when anger pushes you out of the circle, it is that very distance that reminds you of who you believe yourself to be.

 

Moreover, beyond the public pulse of his poems, Cidal crafts dense, intimate fragments—tiny grief-maps of everyday existence—mostly in the opening chapter. These aren’t just private memories held close; they gesture toward the possibility of outbound becoming—a kind of becoming-other, a refusal or suspension that opens a space beyond the familiar scripts of politics and manifesto poetries, inviting a reimagining of self and world.

 

Cidal’s poems teem with animals—but he’s neither a cat person nor a dog person. Maybe more simian: human-adjacent, never quite human. Or a member of the crow squad, often marked as ominous by settler’s eyes. This is the second pulse of outbound becoming, where settler colonial critique meets Taiwanese theorist Cathy Huang’s notion of “becoming other-than-human.” In Cidal’s work, animals are never just decorative motifs in poetry. He navigates the dense, tangled webs of ecological, economic, and social relations that bind Indigenous bodies and nonhuman kin together. Across colonial landscapes worldwide, Indigenous peoples have endured twin violences—dehumanization and bestialization.

 

Yet Indigenous oral traditions and sacred knowledge enfold animals as kin, as intimate companions. Today, this fragile kinship is battered by the forces of modernity. In The Death of a Baboon, these tensions surface with piercing clarity. But there’s more. Consider the idea of animal “cuteness”—a notion shaped by centuries of domestication and colonial possession. In a poem responding to the far-right, anti-pride Family Guardian Coalition, Cidal lets cuteness crash into anger. Through the voice/poise of a cat, from the vantage of someone outside the LGBTQ+ community, he unleashes a fantastical cry for marriage equality and gender justice: a call that is at once other-than-human and other-than-self (To the Guardian Cutelition).

 

Deborah Bird Rose’s Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (2011) and Chilean filmmaker Hans Mulchi Bremer’s Human Zoo: The Final Journey of Calafate (2011) open vital conversations that resonate with Cidal’s work.

 

Cidal’s street-born, dissonant voices recall Maljaljaves Mulaneng—the pioneering Indigenous poet who emerged from the racial justice movements of the 1980s—though that voice now feels somewhat distant. Like him, Cidal often carries an inner cry or is shaped by landmark events that fuel their writing. What deserves closer attention, however, are the itinerant nature and the intentional mourning woven throughout their poetry. If we’re listening for more recent echoes, I’d point to Gang Huang’s Who Cuts the Tribe in Half (2014), a settler ally grappling with our societal fractures. Or Temu Suyan—his Khu Ka Qaraw Qulih (2024) envisions Indigenous poets as the bone in the settler’s throat: refusing to be swallowed, demanding to be choked on. Yet it’s Cidal’s engagement with death—his almost palpable fixation—that sets him apart, making me wonder: is the afterlife itself another kind of outbound? His sharp political satire often transcends even that. If we shift our focus from technique to temperament, a natural point of dialogue emerges with Ljavuras Girings, a poet active throughout the 1990s whose work draws its power from the collision of disparate worlds. Consider his Walking Through Dizziness:

 

Walking cracked fields—
days of rats, scrambling for scraps.

 

Walking through first buds—
villagers asleep in the parks.

 

Walking the streets—
you wave, urgent—

 

only the eyes
call back.

 

Walking through the only town—
bridges, broken.

 

Walking the lone mountain path—
vines, falling stone,
waves against cliffs.

 

Walking winding ways,
walking into dizziness.

 

This resonates with Cidal’s Life Chronicles— Thus, We Reached March:

 

Passing narrow asphalt lanes, a wallflower lifts her arm.
Through a right-leaning world, memory clings—
each sharp bend, named again and again.
Like phantom speed traps, I resist
my love of left-lane passing. Lost in the curve.

 

The richness of Ljavuras’ poetry arises from the collision of linguistic and experiential terrains—tribal and urban, oral tradition and modernity, familial and professional spheres. Cidal takes up this lived context—not as a straightforward literary inheritance, but through conscious political engagement, intensified linguistic experimentation, and the interplay of internal and external narratives, crafting a poetic landscape of greater complexity. The “walking” or “passing” in their poetry transcends a scripted journey of identity formation or regulation; it embodies the fraught possibilities of choosing tools, alongside the reflective movements prompted by the surrounding environment.

 

Last but not least, I want to shine a light on Cidal’s knack for Mandarin wordplay and puns—a move that grows out of a wider circle of Taiwanese Indigenous writers who’ve been unsettling the colonial language from the inside since the ’80s. My essay on Talatokosay A Kapah doesn’t conclude so much as linger—like the memory of me intentionally passing the protest on Ketagalan Boulevard, or scrolling through Cidal’s Facebook posts again and again. It is an attempt to preserve a certain bodily sensitivity, recognizing that beyond the private face, beyond the poet’s presence and online persona, there remains someone else—further out, and much further still. Cidal’s poetry owes no reflection to the ideals of others.