The Politics of Poetry and the Poetry of Politics
/ Poetry Note by Daryl Lim Wei Jie
When I was asked to curate this issue of SingPoWriMo, there was a furore over Elizabeth Haigh’s “Singaporean” cookbook Makan, and how it had plagiarised not just recipes, but personal memories, from an earlier cookbook, Growing up in a Nonya Kitchen, by the Singaporean author Sharon Wee. (My role in this was publishing an Instagram post comparing sections of the book, demonstrating the extent of plagiarism.)
The incident was instructive in the inequalities of social media and influence. Haigh’s a rising star, with a fan base. (She has appeared on several “Uncle Roger'' videos.) Wee’s not as well-known, with little prior social media presence. Without the reporting of the international media and those who publicised the matter, it was entirely possible that the matter would have been buried and forgotten. (Bloomsbury, the publisher and Haigh initially made no statement. Haigh still has not.)
Digging deeper, issues of cultural representation arise.¹ That Haigh presented her recipes as family heirlooms – rather than, say, the product of research and experimentation – can be attributed partly to the demands of the cookbook industry, which prizes seeming authenticity and the need to tell one’s story. Figures like Haigh have been invited to become simplified representative avatars of a whole culture – a mantle she readily took up. In reality, Singaporean cuisine is too diverse to be represented by a single cookbook or chef, and Makan could not have been a “time-capsule of a cuisine”, as described in the synopsis.
Elevating personal stories and narrative over hard work, research and study; over-eagerness to claim to represent a whole group; serving up a bland, flattened conception of identity; publishing at all costs. I reckon the lessons of Makan apply to more than just the writing of cookbooks.
Fittingly, this issue of SingPoWriMo.com showcases how the poets of SingPoWriMo have engaged with politics, especially the situations individuals face when interacting with larger constructs and systems which threaten their sense of self.
We start off by looking inwards, with Stephanie Chan’s piece on Facebook, “Zombie Cicada”, highlighting the complicated (and implicated) nature of SingPoWriMo itself: as a community-driven creative writing community hosted on an increasingly troubled platform, with its damaging algorithms and its tendencies to encourage vanity and self-absorption.
There are poems which map this current update of capitalism we’re operating under, such as Jack Xi’s “You are a Chain Manager in a Similar Field”, a perfect articulation of the morose angst of a Sandwich Artist in a certain fast food chain. Wahid Al Mamun’s “Humiliation at O’Hare in Nine Parts” then shows us that surveillance is first practised at the border before it is extended to productivity at the workplace.
There are a clutch of poems which comment on the national-political, such as Sarah Mak’s clever erasure poem “An Early Version of the Singapore Pledge”, which works off an early draft of the Singapore Pledge by S. Rajaratnam, which can be read as a comment on the politics of national forgetting. (Rajaratnam had actually once said that “Being a Singaporean means forgetting all that stands in the way of one’s Singaporean commitment.”) I was particularly moved by Al Hafiz Sanusi’s “Lorry”, which speaks for someone not spoken for in the national conversation about migrant worker transport – not the migrant workers who are still ferried around in lorries, but the complicated position of their drivers, one of whom happens to be the poet’s father.
There are poems which attempt to illustrate and demonstrate the revolutionary potential of the body. As Anurak Saelaow writes:
But suppose in its writhing
a gnostic cadence —
some selfish conviction
of the body
as fulcrum
to a fuller universe.
This is vividly illustrated in Jolene Cheong’s heart-breaking shape poems, where the showering body becomes a site of revelation and reckoning.
In this regard, two poems translated from Chinese and Tamil, originally written by Stray Birds and Harini V, and translated by Sophia Huang and Jonathan Chan respectively, may seem exclusively personal, but to me they brim with the potentiality for change, and speak of taking charge of one’s own narrative: “from flesh, from pale,/ i learn again to weave these tales.” And to remind us that even the most petty-political is still political, we have all-too-recognisable aggravations in Elizabeth Fong’s Chinese New Year poem and Gabriel Sim’s office email poem.
We end off with Miguel Barretto Garcia’s magnificent poem, “The Crime”, which is really about the power of words, and perhaps, the accompanying responsibilities:
The poet fills the poem until margins are capsized
With letters, until ink becomes the dye
of bartered fabric. The poet lies
a truth. The poem calls fiction, history.
This brings to mind an incident that happened in the Qing dynasty, during the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor (1678-1735). Zeng Jing was a minor Chinese official who tried to instigate a rebellion after reading the works of the anti-Manchu poet and scholar Lü Liuliang. Zeng published a tract attacking the Emperor, and was imprisoned. Instead of executing Zeng, Yongzheng carried out an extended correspondence with him, and convinced him to recant his views. Zeng was pardoned and let go, and even given gifts. Zeng’s confessions, together with the Emperor's responses and annotations, were then disseminated as a book, throughout the kingdom. However, Lü, who had already been dead for 50 years, had his remains disinterred and pulverised.²
That the Emperor saw it more important to claim a moral victory, in writing, rather than executing a traitor, is perhaps instructive of the power of words to shape perception. That a dead poet had to be dug up and punished is instructive too, of the dangers of poetry and writing. Lü’s anti-Qing poetry had succeeded (and failed) beyond his wildest imaginings.
If the lesson from this is that poetry, like politics, is the art of the possible, then the lesson of Makan might be that one should have a healthy scepticism about the existing structures of cultural production before committing too deeply to the enterprise. Poets should not underestimate the possibly subversive power of our words; nor should we let it get to our head. Readers can judge whether the poets of SingPoWriMo have exercised their powers judiciously in this issue.
Notes:
¹ Some of this has been well-explored in an Eater article, by James Hansen.
² You can read more about this incident in Jonathan Spence’s wonderful historical account, Treason by the Book.