Gay poets and the urbanism of manila and singapore

In this thesis then, I posit that the patterns which characterize the production of urban space in Manila and Singapore enter the ways in which gay poets write about what it means to be

Chapter 1:

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER Positioning the Gay Poet and/in the City

I am haunted by the sadness of men

hanging out at night

in all parks and alleys of the world Jaime An Lim, “Short Time” This thesis reads and examines the poetry of four gay writers from Manila and Singapore The study positions the selected poets as writers operating within a particular spatial context The reading of their poetry thus takes into account both sexual identity and the notion of place and is ultimately interested in locating the ways in which patterns of urban production and sexual identity inflect the creative practice of writing poetry

In this thesis, I examine the works of Alfian bin Sa’at and Cyril Wong from Singapore and J Neil Garcia and Lawrence Ypil from Manila Existing scholarship and critical writings on most of these poets as well as creative commentaries done by these writers themselves (through interviews and creative essays) often do not posit a vital connection between poetic production and the urban environment Scholarship makes mention of their sexual orientation and alerts us to the various works and instances in which such themes appear in their works Alfian Sa’at for instance is notable for works like the Asian Boys Trilogy as well as gay-themed poems in One Fierce Hour (1998) and History of Amnesia (2001) Cyril Wong is widely regarded as Singapore’s “first openly gay poet” (Ng et al 12) J Neil Garcia is an academic, poet and literary editor whose

identity and gay identity Ypil’s long poem “Five Fragments: A Confession” highlights the varied experiences of coming out as is framed by the fragmented lyric form

In this thesis then, I posit that the patterns which characterize the production of urban space in Manila and Singapore enter the ways in which gay poets write about what it means to be gay in a particular urban context The position of the gay poet in Manila and Singapore, I argue, is one where he utilizes the patterns of urbanism to write about what it means to be gay in these spaces and to offer possibilities to reimagine urban life I argue and eventually demonstrate how both sexuality and geography enter the process of poetic production

While the works of these poets can certainly be appreciated (merely) for their aesthetic merits, an examination of the poets’ various contexts can lead one to a greater understanding of poetic production itself More nuanced appreciation for a poet’s aesthetics takes into account the various threads that the writer eventually weaves into a text As far as this thesis is concerned, one finds in the poetry of these writers from Manila and Singapore an aesthetics of fragmentation/self-splitting and confinement respectively For Alfian and Garcia, there is an emphasis on the use of the everyday Everyday space for these two poets is rendered as liminal space, creating dual experiences of discomfort and transformation For Wong and Ypil, there is what I would demonstrate, a “domestic perspective” in the way they do their city writing Indeed, what is interesting in the way Wong and Ypil is how the kind of optic they use

to render urban experience Much of city writing is done from outside space such as streets (Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur is one example) My reading of Wong’s

and Ypil’s poetry on the other hand focuses on how representations of domestic space are projected into the way they view urban experience Singaporean poet Ng Yi-Sheng and Filipino Ronald Baytan whose poetic projects offer an interesting and exciting challenge to the framework I seek to establish in the next few pages will make an appearance in the concluding comments of the thesis

In this introductory chapter, I will unpack the theoretical concepts I will utilize in

my analysis In the first subsection, I draw upon Georg Simmel’s seminal work “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) to show how urbanization is an orchestration a locus

of patterns The discussion is complemented by a brief survey of how poets in the West responded to these shift in patterns The second subsection looks into the ways in which one can compare Manila and Singapore Here, I demonstrate how the patterns of urbanism which characterize the production of space in Manila and Singapore are horizontalized fragmentation and verticalized compression respectively I extend the analysis by looking at the different ways in which certain poets write about their cities The third and final subsection positions the relationship between the gay poet and urban space and problematizes the role of the gay poet and what unique forms of engagement

he may offer to this creative engagement of urbanism In all I demonstrate that the gay text draws its power from the notion of liminality, a kind of liminality grounded on the experience of eros and public practice

Ebb and Flow

The City of Pattern and Rhythm

What links poetry and urbanism is the fact that they are in many ways connected

to the idea of rhythm and form Like the poet who creates it, the poem is a play on form and rhythm As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write:

The human body itself is a locus of rhythms: the beat of the heart, the inhalation and exhalation of breath, waking and sleeping, effort and rest, hunger and satiety… Rhythm is a principle of all life and all activity and is, of course, deeply involved in the experience of, and the expression of, emotion… the very origin of language involves rhythm (Brooks and Warren 2)

Poetry is translation and appropriation of such rhythms The poem, as the Filipino poet D.M Reyes describes it “is the most enduring on the line of the world’s oldest rituals” (Reyes 7) Across time and centuries, the poet can be seen as a laborer and a synthesizer:

“poetry is the synthesizing act, no mere act but labor – attention, dedication and inevitably, love for translation of intangible energies to graceful shapes and tangible accomplishments” (7)

The human intellect is further gifted with the ability to understand these rhythms of the human body and of nature itself and to ultimately find ways to manipulate such patterns Modernity as a massive technological, social, intellectual and cultural transformation of human civilization is a testament to this idea Modern industrial cities, the spatial articulation of the logic of capitalist modernity transformed human civilization in great ways: landscapes were flattened and reshaped; patterns of production shifted; labor became organized and in many ways mechanical; man-made

goods were produced at an exponential rate These changed not only the external environment but the human condition as well

In the opening paragraph of what would eventually be a foundational reading of metropolitan life, Georg Simmel in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” posits that “the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual of his existence

in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and

of the technique of life” (Simmel 23) Urbanization marked not only a systematic and calculated re-landscaping but spurred as well a radical change in the pattern and rhythm of the human psyche This change was oriented towards the idea of progress promised by the post-Enlightenment notion of the modern and maintained by the gradual mechanization of the body The geography of the city affected the disposition of the body and how the body related with other bodies and the spaces they occupy The human heart became a clock whose beats were synchronized with particular pulses of the city: the traffic of cars, the pitter-patter of pedestrian feet, the tabulated demands of the time card As Simmel writes, “if all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication

of the city would be disrupted” (26)

Moreover, urban life is not simply about a shift in mental dispositions but also in the way an individual would relate to others, to the environment and more importantly

to himself The fissures created by new articulations of space altered and reconfigured human cognition and relations Simmel outlines these different strains that affect and

point to relations that may be personal, impersonal (as in hierarchal relations at work) and even anonymous (as in relationships with the crowd); “historical heritage” which refers to spatial and material evidence of the past; external culture which point to the material and socio-economic conditions of the present; and the “technique of life” which encompasses the cognitive and bodily practices these different relational strains entail People became each other’s employers, employees, tellers, bankers, market vendors, customer, landlord – identities and relations that the various spaces of the cities created

The changes in physical, cognitive and social landscapes introduced a new environment for the poet This new relationship between the poet and the city however was not exactly a happy one The poet was gradually taken from the allure and imaginative fertile fields of the pastoral and was thrust into the arid world of the concrete streets In this new environment, poets offered various ways which, according

to Ellman and O’Clair in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1993) “called into question” the “reality of the objective world” (Ellman and O’Clair 1) In their renditions

of urban life, the modern poets creatively transformed urban experience through image and language In “The Crisis of Language,” (1978) Richard Sheppard presents the poet’s socio-cultural context of the early modern age as one characterized by a sense of

“linguistic aridity” (Sheppard 324) wrought from the “suppression of an aristocratic, semi-feudal, humanistic and agrarian order by one middle-class, democratic, mechanistic and urban” (325) He thus argues that what characterizes modern poetry is its “sense of homelessness” (327) and that the task of the modern poet:

… becomes the creation of a redeemed, visionary world of language in which

‘something fundamental’ is given back to form and in which the lost dimension

of language and the human psyche was rediscovered or preserved… the Modernist poet [ceased] to be the manipulator of fixed quanta and [attempted] to liberate the repressed expressive energies of language; ceases to be the celebrant

of a human order and becomes the experimenter who searches for barely possible ‘redeemed and redeeming images.’ (328-329)

Language thus became a critical means to represent the poet’s vision of modern life The task of the modern poet thus was to “explode language” before he can create an adequate “‘verbal ikon’” (328) T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) and “The Love Song

of J Alfred Prufrock” (1917) as examples explore the various notions of ruination and decay in urban experience Prufrock’s city “is a murky place” where his sense of social refinement is balanced by a sense of vulgar temperament (Versluys 176) “The Waste Land” on the other hand somberly depicts London as a fractured and fragmented city (Versluys 179) Eliot’s play on language which incorporates various dialogues, linguistic play and use of obscure word play – “Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug” (“The Waste Land” 203-204) – highlight this sense of fragmentation Walter Benjamin in his reading

of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry on the other hand utilizes the idea of the flaneur and sees urban experience as essentially a successive sequence of fleeting, fragmentary moments that paradoxically are but repetitions within the same system Such experience, Benjamin argues forms the cause of ennui or “boredom” (Gilloch 211) Baudelaire specifically looked at crowds and how such crowds elucidate an experience of loneliness (Hyde 337)

The list of poets, their works and the unique ways in which they engage the

poets utilize image and more importantly language to engage the complex materiality of urban experience As Versluys points out “The poet, therefore, could no longer look at the city from a distance… The flaw became the fabric” (Versluys 18) Indeed, there is a vital connection between the poet and the city The poet in the city is seen to have transformed this sense of aridity and lifelessness into viable poetic material Poetry mirrors and refracts the language and patterns of the streets As G.M Hyde in “The Poetry of the City,” writes “the city is inherently unpoetic and yet the city is inherently the most poetic of all material” (Hyde 338) The city can be poetic, or at the very least a valuable source for poetic material precisely because in many ways it is an amplified mode of patterns

In the next subsection, we zero in on Manila and Singapore and explore the ways in which one may read these as comparative cities We will also look into the ways

in which certain poets not included in the thesis respond to these spaces in their works

Push and Pull

The Case of Manila and Singapore

More than a century after its first publication the insights in Simmel’s seminal work still hold merit In today’s increasingly fast-paced, wired and globalized world, Simmel’s metropolitan man is more and more adept at absorbing the audio-visual shock

of the city landscapes as well as registering within his body the cognitive demands of late and globalized capitalism In this subsection, I demonstrate how Simmel’s analysis

of modern industrial cities in the West can be applied specifically to cities in Southeast Asian cities

Though the thesis does not take a post-colonial approach, it still necessitates the drawing of works that are concerned with scholarship framed by post-colonial and globalized discourse if only to illustrate in detail the spatial and urban growth of these cities Manila and Singapore make for viable samples for comparative study precisely because the patterns of their spatial production and the implications generated by such rhythms highlight the various complexities of post-colonial, globalized urbanism Both cities were once colonial port cities and in varying degrees now share dispositions as postcolonial cities in an increasingly globalized world More than that, the various characteristics which define the logic of capitalist modernity can be seen in the way these poets render urban experience

The urbanization of Manila and Singapore as two postcolonial Southeast Asian cities is grounded by a constant negotiation between two opposing forces – first in their colonial past and secondly by their orientation towards globalized narratives In

“Perpetuating Cities: Excepting Globalization and the Southeast Asia,” (2003) Ryan Bishop, John Phillips and Wei-wei Yeo contextualize this interplay by positioning the

“identities” of Southeast Asian cities precisely through tensions and contestations of various narratives:

[Cities] in the region have a unique relation … insofar as they went from being colonial cities serving the material bureaucratic, technological, ideological, and imaginative needs… to explicitly modern, international cities in a matter of years, with the concept of national playing an important but oddly peripheral

This statement challenges Peter J Rimmer and Howard Dick’s assertion in The City in Southeast Asia (2009) which argues that cities in Southeast Asia have already undergone a period of “decolonization” and must be read in the same way one reads other global cities of the world All global cities, they argue, are oriented and guided by one particular pattern and as such “any attempt to explain the historical or contemporary urbanization of Southeast Asia as a unique phenomenon is therefore doomed to absurdity” (Rimmer and Dick 48-49) The problem with Rimmer and Dick is that they look at malls, superhighways and Starbucks branches and make the claim that Southeast Asian cities can be read and placed alongside global cities in the west What is important to highlight and call attention to I conjecture, is how these malls are juxtaposed with other sites that in turn form the much bigger picture of a city’s urban production Rimmer and Dick’s reading of Southeast Asian cities does not take into account the active participation of local dynamism in the production of city space As William S W Lim in Asian Alterity (2008) writes:

In Asia, chaos uncertainty, pluralistic richness and evolving complexity are now accepted as essential elements of its urban dynamism… In Asian cities, the introduction of modernist planning and spatial and usage separations are constantly contested and defied by the dynamic human interactions taking place

on the streets everywhere This fluidity and the rebellious attitude of Asian urban dwellers in interpreting spaces in response to evolving demand are precisely what fuel the vibrancy and dynamism of Asian cities (Lim 114)

To compare Manila and Singapore then is to locate the ways in which the cities spatially negotiate the reoccurring tension between various forces –local color and global orientation, informal and formal economies etc –and how these dialectical forms of

articulations shape the cities’ forms and patterns What differentiates their modernities however is how these negotiations are done In the case of Manila and Singapore, what orients their urbanization has to do with a horizontal, outward spinning force for the former and a verticalized kind of compression for the latter These notions of fragmentation and compression define and orient the production of multiple spaces and the patterns of spatial practices

In what follows then, I will discuss how such notions can be used to describe the urbanization of Manila and Singapore respectively I then extend this by discussing the potential implications of such generalizations

Manila’s Modernity as Horizontalized Fragmentation

In arguing that the pattern of urban production of Manila is fundamentally horizontal, I do not simply point to horizontality in the mundane sense that Manila is essentially a sprawling metropolis Horizontality points as well to the pattern of spatial experience in the city

Manila is a messy city In her analysis of the city’s new metropolitan form, Neferti Tadiar regards Manila as essentially a “flat city” where one goes around like someone “swimming underwater in a shallow metropolitan sea” (Tadiar 77) Indeed, to the inexperienced untrained foreigner or probinsyano (non-Manila residents), the city can

be a difficult place to swim around in Wading through its polluted streets where the perennial sight of garbage and the glaring honks of frustrated drivers stuck in 2

kilometer per hour traffic are among the flotsam and jetsam of urban mismanagement, one encounters an urban experience that is severely disorienting and confusing

The disorientation and fragmentation of Manila’s metropolitan form reflect the city’s violent and tumultuous history Sitting in the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, the city

is battered by typhoons and is a potential ground zero for a devastating earthquake The city was one of the most devastated cities after World War II (Zaragoza 13) Widespread poverty in the city mutates into a pandemic of crime Australian academic Trevor Hogan writes that one vital way to understand Manila is thus is to see it in terms of “violence, suffering and loss” (Hogan 105)

The idea that Manila is a fragmented city is a notion which also stems from its post-Second World War fate: that it is a city without a clear center To understand this,

we first have to briefly examine the history and fate of what was considered by Filipino writer Nick Joaquin as the “original Manila,” (Joaquin 354) the walled city of Intramuros The genesis of Manila was essentially a narrative of compression Like most colonial communities in the Philippines during the Spanish occupation, the population

of the walled city of Intramuros grew largely because of the relocation project called the reduccion where “dispersed barangays were… reduced into compact and larger communities” (Caoili 28) Intramuros was deemed the seat of the economic and ecclesiastic power of colonial Philippines and from 1580 to 1625, Manila became “the foremost capital of Asia and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity” (34) In this respect, the tall walls of Intramuros did not just help repel invasions They also compressed people

as well the narratives of guns, gold and God Colonial Manila’s urbanism thus

materialized the logic of colonialism and inserted the archipelago into the enterprise of colonial trade and geopolitics American occupation in the Philippines saw massive change in economic policies on tariffs and as well as political and cultural structures

This sense of compression would later on “explode” (almost literally and figuratively) during the Allied liberation at the end of the Second World War As Zaragosa writes in Old Manila (1990):

Modern facilities in transportation, communication, electrification, and port works were established Massive urban and rural development and town planning marked the beginning of the modernization of Old Manila… All these developments came to a halt during World War II with the Japanese Occupation

of Manila from 1942 to 1945 At the end of the war, Manila was considered the most devastated city in the world… Manila lost its centre [emphasis mine] (Zaragoza 13)

This notion of Manila as a city having no center is mentioned in other critical and creative materials In Malate: A Matter of Taste (2001) a coffee table book on a site known for its unique bohemian subculture, Rafael Ongpin echoes Zaragoza’s sentiment: “[In] the post-war era, Manila’s population exploded outwards from the rubble of the center Instead of there being an increasing population pressure on the core city, there was a vacuum” (Ongpin 49) Thus, the liberation did not just obliterate a good number of Intramuros’ basic infrastructure The explosions that ruptured the core city spurred as well a massive exodus towards the fringes and enabled what were once communities and spaces in the periphery to develop into more urbanized spaces For instance, Makati and Ortigas once suburbs are now regarded as the business districts that integrate Manila (and the Philippines) into the economic global network of nations

The “vacuum” that created an open space in Manila’s center would function as the bedrock for Manila’s modernity and spatial articulation As Caoili writes, the post-war reconstruction and brief economic boom of Manila saw the rapid migration of families from the provinces (Caoili 161) Having no money to buy or to lease living spaces, these workers lived as informal settlers in what used to be the center of the city Erhard Bernard in his study on urban poverty in Manila Defending a Place in the City: Localities and the Struggle for Urban Land in Metro Manila (1997) writes that “In Metro Manila… we find a high percentage of squatters and slum dwellers relatively close to the city center” (Berner 161) What is interesting however is that these informal settlers are not much of a nuisance as they are a necessity They take on the hard jobs (cooks, waiters, carpenters etc) They are the ones that keep “the heart of the city throbbing” (Duldulao 46) Indeed, what was once the powerful center of Manila now has two paradoxical functions: on the one hand, it is no longer the center of formal economic power – Makati and Ortigas are Yet on the other hand it still functions as a critical center in that this space now houses workers who provide necessary the cheap labor that maintain and support much of Manila’s infrastructure

In her analysis of Manila as essentially a “flat city”, Neferti Tadiar argues how flyovers were used as a way of separating the producers of informal economies (treated

as “excess”) represented by the urban poor with the formal/transnational ones (Tadiar 81) Flyovers provide those travelling through flyovers easy access to spaces of transnational narratives while keeping those representing informal labor and practices (street peddlers, the urban poor) literally below Flyovers physicalized Manila’s global

dream by means of easy access and unique perspective (Tadiar 84) Flyovers were a way

of “discharging” but not necessarily eliminating the so-called urban excesses (Tadiar 96)

Using this survey of various critical writings on the urbanization of Manila, I argue that the urban production Manila’s modernity is fundamentally horizontal in two ways First I point to the dispersal wrought by the literal explosion of the center This migration does not simply refer to the rapid urbanization of the geographical fringes but

to the development as well of multiple internal narratives and systems that often compete with the narratives of other spaces in the metropolis Tangential to this is the so-called ruralization of Manila The occupation of informal settlers in the center has both physical and socio-cultural implications This presence influences much of the policies and patterns of urbanism that spatially articulate the tension between the increasingly ruralization of urban space and the need to function as a city in a globalized world Such influences include the construction of infrastructures that negotiate, partition and space out the conflicting and contesting narratives within the city In a city with no clear, physical center, it can be argued that, as Tadiar would posit, the center is network more than any downtown center (Tadiar 84)

To speak then of Manila’s modernity as one of horizontalized fragmentation is not simply a matter of seeing it as a sprawl or even a city without a center but to see it as

a city in constant flux It does not just refer to the earlier exodus towards the fringes but

to a perspective characterized by distance, dislocation and fragmentation

Writers whose poems creatively engage urban experience draw their themes and

Doble in his poem “The Sky Over C-5 Corner Kalayaan Avenue” (2005) traces the chaotic flow of the city as he comments on the impoverished state of a small community

in Manila The disorientation is seen as the subject matter of the poem shifts from line to line, describing children playing hopscotch on a busy street (3) with “a pebble stolen from the construction site nearby” (5-6), illustrating the lack of a decent playground and the danger of having children playing near hazardous sites; an old “carpenter” who counterflows with traffic (7) Representations of luxurious brands mock the poverty as towering “advertisements boast of the good life” (26) The poem ends with the image of dogs commenting on the inhumanity of the chaos and impoverishment:

Two mangy dogs leashed on a rise

bark at all the confusion

Their agitation lifts up to the sky,

to the clouds forming myriad masks,

of colors shutting out the very sun

(31-35)

Doble’s rendition of urban space in Manila lies precisely in how the line cuts attempt to trace the contours of confusion and chaos in a highway that ironically cuts through the wealthier parts of the metropolis The poem in itself is a highway and the images that are presented counterflow this attempt to create a coherent and central picture of the city The incoherence is thus highlighted by the idea that Doble chooses two dogs that

do not possess in any way the ability to interpret human activity, as the final focalizer for this chaos

In Conchitina Cruz’s “What is it about tenderness,” (2005) the woman-persona (presumably an undertaker) attempts to gain dominion over a dead body by means of

anatomical geography – by naming the different parts of the body the way an urban planner would assign street names This familiarity with the body is contrasted with the unpredictable city portrayed as a dark and savage jungle where “streets sprouted overnight like weeds and snaked their way into each other’s aimlessness” (2-3) The personal control is lost when the urban jungle invades the body through the descent of maggots (12-13) There is no sense of control and cohesion and the body in time will absorb these narratives The “bodies” of Cruz’s different poems which experiment on form reflect this Particularly interesting to this experimentation are “Geography Lesson” and “News of the Train.” Here the reader does not find any body text but footnotes to a blank page Her experimentation on the different forms of poems which shapeshift into different forms reflect this idea of a fragmented city whose form ironically rests is precisely in its formlessness

Singapore and the Modernity of Verticalized Compression

In this subsection, I unpack the idea that Singapore’s mode of urban production

is characterized by a notion of verticalized compression by drawing upon critical writings on Singapore urbanism, most notably from Robbie Goh’s Contours of Culture (2005) Critical analyses of Singapore’s urbanism focus on the notion of wholesale erasure of certain urban structures (Luck 2004; Yeo 2003; Powell 2002) My reading of Singapore’s urbanism does not seek to dispute this notion but focuses instead on the production of certain spaces Verticalized compression I would demonstrate is the

Verticality is not just about the significant presence of high rise buildings and the need to accommodate a growing population of locals and migrants within more limited space It points as well to its upward-mobile movement that is hierarchized, controlled top-to-bottom management of urban production Verticality is a critical subtext that grounds the patterns of Singapore’s urbanism, one characterized by a sense of compression In the case of Singapore, the idea of the vertical cannot be separated from the notion of compression The compression I speak of, however, does not just refer to meticulous economics of space but to the compression of narratives as well To illustrate, I focus on two prominent and critical spaces: the typical Housing Development Board (HDB) community and the Civic District

HDB communities exemplify this notion of verticalized compression HDB communities are clusters of buildings within a relatively small number of hectares Walking around a cluster of HDB community buildings, one encounters a sense of tightness in the way high-rise buildings appear as walls The height of a typical HDB building can range from 10 to 30 stories The typical HDB community then can accommodate (and compress) as many as thousands of residents within such a small space Moreover, the HDB community compresses not just people within its space but more importantly the dual narratives of cosmopolitan and heartland culture As Goh writes:

The spatial semiotics of ideology of the HDB is a crucial part of this modernist collectivity, and its changing directives towards the millennium reflect the new ideological battleground, and the new project of reconciling cosmopolitan individualism with heartland collectivity (Goh 77)

Goh extends this analysis further by zeroing in on void decks Open-spaced void decks ironically compress the different state policies and other privileged narratives As he argues:

… void decks played a more complex role in social construction… Beyond this physical openness and its facilitation of gazing, mingling and informal (though necessarily legitimate and approved) socializing, “community bonding” in the Singapore context is ever mindful of racial/cultural, neutralization, the creation

of “empty spaces” (voided of vernacular, ethnic historical and local cultural particularities) in order to remove grounds for racialized politics and social tensions (Goh 78)

Open spaces in void deck therefore materialize the logic of the HDB narrative in that they compress and articulate notions of surveillance as well as state policies on racial harmony

The busier parts in Singapore, the Civic District as well as Shenton Way, articulate and physicalize as well this notion of verticalized compression Like the HDB community, the notion of verticality becomes immediately evident to the casual pedestrian who are encounters the walled, overt presence of high-rise buildings which compress and articulate Singapore’s posture as a global city Peggy Teo et al in Changing Landscapes of Singapore (2004) list the different areas in which Singapore chose to excel in:

In particular, Singapore promoted itself in the following areas:

• cruise and air hub of Southeast Asia;

• convention centre;

• education hub;

• medical centre; and

• arts and entertainment (Teo 155)

Walking along the busier districts in Singapore, one eventually encounters particular buildings and sites within proximate distance which physicalizes this vision: Suntec for

conventions, the Esplanade for entertainment and the Singapore Management University along Orchard Road

The city center compresses not only the different promises that Singapore offers but as in the HDB community, the growing tension between local color and global identity as well To illustrate, I use as an example Goh’s discussion on landmarks Goh outlines how historical architecture, cultural symbols are located within proximate possible space:

Key landmarks in this Civic District – a roughly ‘L’ shaped area on the north side

of the Singapore river, up to Bras Basah Road and stretching to the foot of Fort Canning – include the Singapore Art Museum, Raffles Hotel, the Armenian Church, St Andrew’s Cathedral, the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, and other buildings from the colonial period (Goh 30)

More than just preserving and maintaining these sites within the small geographic, cultural and political center of Singapore, these sites simultaneously articulate Singapore’s identity as a Southeast Asian nation and a global city What the Civic District thus conflates within the small space are imposed meanings as well Landmarks:

… are thus characteristically sites of narrative overlays by virtue of a combination of their long history and wealth of associations, their co-option by different institutions, discourses and media and their foregrounded experience in everyday urban experiences… In the context of Singapore, landmark designation is a project of tourist promotion, the attempt to create a national discourse and identity of global progressivism and the management of multicultural and multi racial relations all at once (29)

Now, a good counter-example to further illustrate the comparison between Manila and Singapore would be present-day Intramuros Like the Civic District in

Singapore, Intramuros is still preserved as a colonial city where one still see bungalows, crafts and weapons from the colonial period Unlike the Civil District however (and this perhaps emphasizes the notion of distance and fragmentation), Intramuros is very much distant from the spaces that articulate Manila’s global economic stature Intramuros in fact is surrounded by spaces of poverty and impoverishment whereas in the Civic District one encounters a sense of compactness where compressed spaces articulate narratives of privileged cultural memory and nationhood

In contrast then to how Manila replicates the notion of dispersal in the spatial articulation of urban space, Singapore addresses the perennial problem of lacking space

in how it negotiates the reoccurring tensions by compressing space and condensing meanings In the case of the HDB community, the tall buildings that can accommodate a considerable number of people conflate and compress narratives of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity As Goh points out, the open spaces of void decks ironically and almost invisibly compress these policies on racial neutralization as well as notions of surveillance The central district on the other hand functions not only as narratives of national identity but viable objects for tourist consumption Verticalized compression is not only evident in Singapore’s physical landscape in that the towering buildings of the city not only stand as a testament to the city’s economic prowess but as a series of walls that seem to encase the crowd that walk between them It is also more importantly seen

as an overarching narrative that orients and directs urban and cultural policies to accommodate the tension between global and local forces

The poets of Singapore who write about their city respond to this kind of pattern The idea of the vertical and the image of towering things seem to be a reoccurring image

in several works of Singaporean writers We can go back to Edwin Thumboo’s much quoted “Ulysses by the Merlion” where he describes the urban landscape of the growing Singapore as one filled with “towers topless as Illium’s” (“Ulysses by the Merlion” 25) Alfian Sa’at, one of the poets included in the main body of this study, utilizes the image

of the elevator in “The City Remembers” (2001) as a metaphor for mechanization of urban life in the city

In his foreword to No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Poetry (2000), Dennis Haskell quotes Philip Jeyaretnam who says that “the Singpore writer’s situation is claustrophobic; in a city-state there is no escape from the city, there is no country to go to” (Haskell 18) This sense of claustrophobia is not only seen as a response to enclosed physical space but also to the suffocating aridity wrought from the experience of an overtly controlled modernity The poets in this collection lament the loss of identity as a cost for this upward mobile direction of progress This yearning for escape is exemplified by Paul Tan (1994) in “Train Rides” where writing about a ride “out of a country drugged with / its modernity and its self-image” (1-2) he explicitly states how Singaporeans have spent too much time in “claustrophobic comforts” (16)

In both cases, I sought to demonstrate how the patterns of Manila and Sinapore negotiate various often contesting narratives that move around in their particular spaces I also surveyed the ways in which certain poets write about their cities with

particular emphasis on these patterns What of the gay poet then? In the third and final subsection of this introductory chapter, I look into creative possibilities opened and offered by gay poets

Sex as Text

Positioning the Gay Poet in the City

Utilizing sexuality as a way to examine urban life is especially useful because sexuality is relational itself Sexuality practices are not merely private acts in that they ultimately play vital roles in the production of urban space Heterosexual intercourse leads to birth and population growth within urban space Economic activities generated from consumption of various cultural texts (fashion, film, tourism) rely heavily on advertisements that are in many senses inflected by representations of sexuality

Homosexual identities and practices make for an interesting case because of the kind of fluidity and interrogation they offer to these patterns and to urban space As Alan Collins in Cities of Pleasure: Sex and the Urban Landscape (2006) writes, “[The] milieu

by which the clustering of homosexuals has long been a discernible feature (as least since the classical era of ancient Greece) is the city environment” (Collins 8) What makes homosexuality and its relation to city space interesting is essentially an experience of liminality Examination of this relationship between homosexual identity and space exemplify this kind of ambiguity and fluidity In “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983) John D’Emilio discusses how structural changes wrought by capitalist social relations and urban migration enabled individuals to move out of the structure of

the family, establish their own identities and create spaces that develop, sustain and nurture such identities His essay cites bars, YMCA gyms and living communities (103)

as places where gays and lesbians may commune and interact For D’Emilio, space functions paradoxically in both enabling and at the same time minoritizing identities Lawrence Knopp (1995) echoes the idea as he argues that “heterosexuality is still often promoted as nothing less than the glue holding these divisions of labor (and indeed, Western society) together But on the other hand, “these divisions of labour create single-sex environments in which homosexuality has the space, potentially to flourish” (Knopp 149) Both Knopp and D’Emilio position space as ambiguous one which simultaneously opens possibilities for forging new identities but also oppression and violence

Other critical works focus their attention not on homosexual men and women in space but the notion of what is called “queer space.” Unlike D’Emilio’s YMCA gyms and neighborhoods, queer spaces are not defined but are in a way created or “activated.” Sites, often public and open ones such as malls, bathrooms, streets and parks may be used for gay sexual practices Cruising was one of the ‘earliest’ ways in which “the city was rewritten by men… refusing to accept its strictures” (Betsky 12) Queer space then is

“something that is not built, only implied” (17) Sally Munt in “The Lesbian Flaneur” (1995) connects her own experience of wandering with flaneur figures in literary history The experience of homelessness for the lesbian flaneur is not a lack as it is as an opportunity to create and recreate special experience As she writes at the end of the

essay: “Space… is never still… I zip up my jacket, put my best boot forward, and tell myself that ‘home’ is just around the corner” (Munt 125)

The relationship between space and homosexuality highlights the idea that the relationship is indeed an ambiguous and fluid one The relationship between space and homosexuality discussed by Knopp and D’Emilio points to the opening and widening of thresholds for possible new identities as well as narratives of repression and even violence The notion of “queer spaces” on the other hand points to those spaces that require “activation” and reveals how narratives of spaces are impermanent and destructible

In the case of Singapore, the gay and lesbian movement has been increasingly tied to the creation and appropriation of space In “Tipping Out of the Closet: The Before and After of the Increasingly Visible Gay Community in Singapore” (2001) Russell Heng Hiang Khng traces the formation of gay and lesbian community in Singapore from the 1960’s to the present While his focus lies primarily on the formation of the gay and lesbian movement, Heng’s comparison between the liberation movement in the west to the socio-political situation in Singapore reveals albeit tangentially the necessity of space Space and more importantly the creation of space become a necessary determinant in the creation and production of identity Indeed, the gay and lesbian movement in Singapore has become a constant struggle to the creation and legitimization of space Heng cites that the earliest indications of such articulations were the opening of a bar called Niche and the beginning of cruising culture in the 1980’s

The social movement of the gays and lesbians however has also moved from the creation of space to a movement of integration to the imagined space of the nation Kean Fan Lim in “Where Love Dares (Not) Speak Its Name: The Expression of Homosexuality in Singapore” (2006) cites that one of the more prominent activities for the gay and lesbian scene were the Nation coming out parties in 2001 and 2002 organized by the administrators of Fridae.com (Lim 145) The naming of the events are not incidental for what the events truly wanted to show was that Singaporean gay and lesbians do have a place in the city-state This interplay between gay and lesbian identity and a place in the nation is carried out further in the way the month-long pride season of Singapore is named: IndigNation Presently, a major event in the LGBT movement in Singapore is Pink Dot In one afternoon, members and supporters of the LGBT movement wear pink shirts and gather in Hong Lim park When seen from above, the human pink dot creates an interesting contrast to the green and gray of Singapore’s cityscape Appropriation of space thus functions as a critical, discursive act for identity

This liminal relationship of LGBT practices and identities to space in Singapore is not only seen in the periodic appropriation of space but more importantly in the notion

of citizenship As Lim writes, “homosexuals are apparently tolerated only to the extent that they remain interstitial spaces, invisible to public eyes,” (Lim 137) There is also that possibility that increasing tolerance to gay practices may have to do with discovering the economic possibilities of the so-called pink dollar (Lim 130) highlighting then the rather shaky ambiguous nature of gay identity: invisible yet relevant to the structured narrative of the Singapore state

This notion of fluidity in relation to space is also seen in Manila’s LGBT scene The annual pride march in Manila cuts through the different busier parts of the metropolis The most recent march held on 4 December 2010 saw gay and lesbian women marching through the streets of Tomas Morato in the middle of local and multi-nationally managed shops and restaurants (Ang Ladlad Pride March 2010) Malate is a site not only known for its unique bohemian culture but also in how it houses gay practices The temperature of homosexual pleasure reaches an all-time high in the annual White Party On this night where gays and lesbians may “come in [their] fiercest and most luminous white costumes,”(Task Force Pride 2010) the spaces of already bohemian Malate are transformed into a topsy-turvy carnivalesque articulation of LGBT identities

There are certainly many other ways in which homosexual men and women in Manila and Singapore find ways to appropriate and “activate” space In the examples mentioned, we find how such homosexual identity in many ways reveals the instability

of space Space when appropriated can be a means to articulate varied kinds of identities Possibilities of resistance are activated from below, from the spatial practices that articulate desire and eros Homosexual experience of space highlights the contradictory nature of space itself In highlighting the ambiguous and fluid nature of homosexuality, I argue that sexuality provides us with possibilities of engagement precisely because it reflects the instability of space Homosexual identity thus enables a peculiar type of positioning: of being both simultaneously inside and outside the

discourses that operate, of being within and outside these patterns, offering various perspectives in the way urban practices are rendered

The focus of this thesis as I have said in the earlier part of this introductory chapter however will be solely on how four gay poets exemplify this sense of liminality

in experiencing urban space The choice is more of a practical one and not an attempt to say that what these poets in question articulate can stand for all homosexual or queer folk in Manila and Singapore for indeed the ways in which homosexual artists (through other artistic genres) have articulated this notion of liminality are varied and plentiful

By practicality, I mean that for one, works by gay writers are more prominent in terms of the actual number of poetry collections produced Singaporean poets like Cyril Wong and Alfian Sa’at already have several books The same can be said for Lawrence Ypil and J Neil Garcia Collections do more than just anthologize a writer’s works and allow one easier access to an extensive number of their poems Collections also allow one to create a more generalized picture of their concerns as poets Collections are often thematically arranged and so as far as this study is concerned, the convenience of having collections in hand allowed me to construct and develop a stronger comparative dimension to the poets’ works

In reading texts produced by these gay poets, emphasis will be placed on how this notion of liminality is activated and rendered in the way they respond to metropolitan space My reading of these four poets will look into the ways in which such liminality is engaged and utilized through poetic technique such as imagery, tone and enjambments

The thesis will be divided into two chapters that address two themes: the everyday and the domestic The first chapter analyzes the works of J Neil Garcia and Alfian Sa’at by looking into the ways in which they utilize everyday narratives as poetic material and as a form of engagement In this chapter, I look into the ways in which the notions of verticalized compression and horizontalized fragmentation are seen in the poems of Alfian and Garcia respectively Notions of fragmentation and compression are seen in the way Garcia and Alfian write about particular experiences and unsettling conditions of difference in their poetry I then extend the analysis and look at the gay-themed poems In the same way that gay sexuality offers creative possibilities to re-experience and redraw space, the gay-themed poems of Alfian and Garcia utilize the same notions of the everyday to render gay experience In both the everyday is seen as spaces and that become the cause of unsettlement but also of liberation and freedom In the case of Alfian, there is a movement in the way the everyday is positioned from an experience of compression to one of safe enveloping In Garcia’s case, gay experience moves from an experience of homelessness and fragmentation to one of fluidity In the gay-themed poems of Alfian and Garcia, everyday space is seen as liminal and can be inflected to articulate gay desires

In my analysis of the poetry of CYyril Wong and Lawrence Ypil in the second chapter, we move from the streets to the home By making vital connections between autobiographical sketches and a close reading of their poems, I demonstrate how the interplay between space and sexuality is interiorized and how such a disposition is

functions as a critical mediator for personal and public narratives The private poem especially through the lyric mode functions as a kind of domestic space in itself, a space different from the houses that have in many ways expelled them, where Ypil and Wong negotiate and creatively render notions of home and city life

The poem and the city as I have said in the introduction are essentially made works of rhythm and form In this thesis, we will now look into how such the patterns of the city are translated into an art form and how such a translation is inflected

man-by gay identity In all these readings, I demonstrate how poetry is rendered as a critical space where these patterns of spatial production are utilized and repositioned

Chapter Two:

The Gay Poet and the Urban Everyday Alfian bin Sa’at and J Neil Garcia

“To not serious consider sexuality in one’s writing is to unwittingly inscribe heterosexuality in

one’s work and assume it’s ‘natural’ superiority over all forms of desire”

J Neil Garcia, “Should Writing be Gendered?”

This chapter examines how Alfian bin Sa’at and J Neil Garcia utilize the notion

of the everyday in their poetry The everyday consists not only of streets or flyovers that cut through the metropolis and Housing Development Board (HDB) communities that articulate a city-state’s multicultural vision, but also people and events that embody everyday narratives of space The everyday makes a viable point of analysis because it is

“a problematic, contested terrain, where meanings are not to be found ready-made” (Highmore 1) The everyday is the site where differences and commonalities are performed (2) and where narratives are materialized and transformed into habits The everyday is also invisible As Ben Highmore reminds us, “it is to the everyday that we consign that which no longer holds our attention Things become ‘everyday’ by becoming invisible And if familiarity does not always breed contempt, it does encourage neglect” (21) To go back to the everyday is not merely to reexamine material culture but to return to seemingly insignificant cultural objects that nevertheless orient particular articulations of urban life

The chapter thus extends the theorizing ofthe introductory chapter which compared and contrasted the urban production of Manila and Singapore as horizontalized fragmentation and verticalized compression respectively Here, I look

into the ways in which Alfian and Garcia respond to such patterns of production The ensuing discussion is grounded on Michel de Certeau’s notion of spatial practices in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) De Certeau in “Walking in the City,” privileges the act of walking because it allows the walker (likened to writers of figurative language) to open creative possibilities of spatial practices:

… the walker actualizes some of these possibilities In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements (De Certeau 100)

De Certeau likens urban planners and architects to grammarians and linguists who develop the language of everyday space In contrast, “[the] long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations” (101) For de Certeau, individual practices function

as a form of creative resistance De Certeau’s notion of creative resistance positions the walker in a liminal position in that he is in the street planned by the urban walkers yet devices unique ways to personalize his individual traffic While most of the poems to be discussed later on are not necessarily “walking poems,” the greater importance of de Certeau’s analysis lies in his emphasis on the role of individual practices in the production of meaning within and through spatial practice

He makes this clearer in “Spatial Stories,” where he distinguishes place from space by positing that the latter is essentially “practiced place” (130) in that what transforms these places into spaces are narratives Personal narratives develop individual spatial experience and allow one to generate new experiences of place:

In a pre-established geography, which extends (if we limit ourselves to the home) from bedrooms so small that “one can’t do anything in them” to the legendary,

long-lost attic that “could be used for everything,” everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it They are treatments of space (122)

This chapter then looks into the different ways in which Alfian and Garcia utilize everyday spaces and events in the way they render their own experiences and transform these into unique spatial experiences Alfian and Garcia make for viable comparison precisely because of the way they put an emphasis on the importance of the everyday in their writing Alfian is a Malay Singaporean playwright and poet After being the top Malay student of his Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) cohort, Alfian was admitted to the Raffles Institute and Raffles Junior College (Interview with Klein 16-17)

He then moved on to study medicine at the National University of Singapore but did not finish his studies He is currently a student of Communication at Nanyang Technological University His plays include Asian Boys Volume 1 (2000), Landmarks: Asian Boys Volume 2 (2003), Happy Endings: Asian Boys Volume 3 (2007) while his collection of poems are One Fierce Hour (1998), History of Amnesia (2001) and the unpublished The Invisible Manuscript Critical scholarship on Alfian’s works highlights the presence of everyday imagery in his poetry In Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature (2009), Poon et al write that “[poets] like… Alfian Sa’at… train an eye on everyday images so naturalized they escape notice, mining them for poetic potential” (Poon et al 373) Alfian affirms this idea in his interview with Ronald Klein in Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature Volume 8: Interview II, (2009) where the enfant terrible of Singapore (Interview with Klein 33) mentions the vital connection between the everyday

and the construction of political rhetoric: “I tend to see a lot of political action being done every day by people who are not even aware of it” (Interview with Klein, 35)

Alfian’s poems demonstrate this kind of critical engagement His position is one which provides an alternative vision of Singaporean society As David Birch (2009)writes, “Alfian is intent in much of his writing to expose the artificiality, pretence and dishonesty of those people, policies and practices which deliberately deceive and obfuscate in the name of the state.” (Birch 148) In his poem, “Trawler” for instance Alfian likens election propaganda to trawlers that throw rhetoric “in four directions / and four official languages” (“Trawler” 7-8) The poem is a critique not only of election propaganda but of Singaporean society who according to him are “mouthless [fishes]” (19-20) that are hooked by such rhetoric The connection to the everyday is seen in how Alfian utilizes the street and images on the street to render this form of political criticism

Critical scholarship on Alfian’s works seems to establish a connection between his ethnicity and its impact on the notions of identity in his works While we can thus argue that Alfian speaks more as a marginalized Malay man than as a gay individual we also find that two of his longer and more emotionally charged works ( such as

“Singapore You Are Not My Country” and “We Are Not Yet Free”) are informed precisely by the experience of homosexual repression In his play, Asian Boys Volume 1 Alfian “stages both Singapore’s handling of queer capital and its posture as a traditional Asian state” (Lim 390) The play follows the journey of gay characters as they time travel through pivotal events in Singapore’s history which include the “Chinese migration to

Nanyang (Singapore) in the nineteenth century, [the] Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the detention of several local presumed Marxists under the Internal Security Act in 1987” (391) Alfian’s play “[pits] these Asian boys in their varied manifestations against the city-state’s national history, ambiguous cultural policies and postcolonial sexual mores” (391) In this play, Alfian uses gay characters and everyday objects (such as a carpet from IKEA) and historical anecdotes to articulate a rather humorous yet nevertheless alternative vision of Singapore society

J Neil Garcia on the other hand is an academic and a poet His book colonialism and Filipino Poetics (2003) is a collection of these essays on issues related to Philippine literary criticism and culture He has also written and published works concerning gay culture in the Philippines His Philippine Gay Culture: From Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM (2000) is a foundational work on gay studies in the Philippines as it

Post-is one of the first to critically explore the formation of gay identity within metropolitan space Together with another poet Danton Remoto, Garcia edited the three volumes of Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing (1992, 1998, 2009)

As a poet, Garcia sees gender and sexuality as a consequential aspect of his individuality In “Should Writing be Gendered?” he writes:

My homosexuality has never, for one second, struck me as been immaterial and inconsequential to my very being inasmuch as everywhere I look, whatever I do, whomever I speak with, everywhere I go, I am reminded of the unlawfulness of

my desire, of the demonic difference ascribed to me by my sexuality (Garcia 163) Garcia insists on the need to thematize homosexuality in his works for he believes that

“to not seriously consider sexuality in one's writing is to unwittingly inscribe

heterosexuality in one's work and assume its ‘natural’ superiority over all forms of desire” (164) Most of his poems demonstrate this sense of awareness in that they map out the life and melancholy wrought from gay life along the contours of the metropolis Gay love and desire can be found in the jeepney (“Cypher, 2”), the cinema (“Subtheatre” and “Subtheatre 2”) The temptation and the desire for warm bodies can be found as well in the streets (“Bakal Boys”) and in the beauty parlor (“Real Men: A Cycle”)

The discussion for each poet will first begin with an analysis of poems which highlight the ways in which Alfian and Garcia experience these notions of compression and fragmentation through everyday images In this chapter, I demonstrate that there is

a difference in the way Garcia and Alfian utilize the everyday in their gay-themed poems In the case of Alfian, there is a movement from the way the everyday is positioned from confinement to enclosure In the case of Garcia, the movement is from fragmentation and placeless to a sense of fluidity where identity in flux is seen not as a circumstance for lament but of opportunities for creating new forms of identities I demonstrate how everyday space is rendered as liminal space by Alfian and Garcia As

in de Certeau’s notion of spatial practices, everyday space is utilized as material to articulate difference, unfamiliarity and pain but also as possibilities for creative individual practices

Forever Each Other’s Ghosts

Compression and Fragmentation in the Poems

of Alfian and Garcia

De Certeau argues that spatial practice rests on a creative negotiation between the concrete space and individual practices The ensuing discussion looks into the ways

in which the notions of compression and fragmentation are seen in the poems of Alfian and Garcia Spatial experience for Garcia and Alfian are fraught with experiences of discomfort and aridity

These are seen on the level of theme and language use Alfian’s poetic technique can be likened that of Allen Ginsburg’s whose political critiques and eroticization of desire are crafted and creatively sustained by the utilization of everyday objects and ordinary language In the case of Alfian, the notion of compression is seen in the way everyday images and often place-specific scenes (such as an HDB flat in Simei and a specific secondary school) are utilized to create a sense of confinement Everyday images are seen as objects that materialize the confining experience of routine Alfian’s use of deceptively simple language helps create this irony

For Garcia on the other hand, the notion of fragmentation is seen in the reoccurring trope of self-splitting in his poetry Garcia’s poems, unlike those of Alfian, are set in non-specific places There is in Garcia’s poems a sense of disorientation and placelessness This is seen not only in the recurring trope but in the thick and rich poetic language that Garcia utilizes

In what follows, I read several poems which demonstrate such notions I begin with poems that explore the concept of family and domestic space While it can be said that domestic space is private space, the emphasis of the ensuing discussion is on how

subsection with a discussion of several poems on outside space in which the notions of fragmentation and compression are evident in their creative vision of spatial experience

in Manila and Singapore

The City as Portrait: Confinement and the Notion of Framing in Alfian Sa’at’s Poems

Most of Alfian’s poems in One Fierce Hour and A History of Amnesia do not reflect the kind of glitter and glamour found in Singapore tourist brochures Alfian’s Singapore

is not a city where neon lights drape the shopper’s street of Orchard Road His

“alternative vision” of Singapore society is fraught and littered with dark images and posits that whenever there is light, there are shadows Alfian’s use of dark and often grotesque portrayal of the everyday is hinged upon the idea of confinement as this is through everyday objects Alfian develops this through listing and framing Everyday objects are introduced one by one, line by line and at the end of the poem, confine the poem’s subjects Framing is an appropriate term for this idea of confinement because the scenes painted here are, in many ways portraits themselves: images of people frozen

in time and in the everyday narrative that has confined them

The challenge in these critical illustrations is to locate the ways in which gay sexuality inflects poems which at first sight have nothing to do with issues in sexuality

In my close reading, I demonstrate that these illustrations of confinement reproduce dominant narratives We find in Alfian’s poems an overt disgust and ultimately resistance to the depiction of the typical As an enfante terrible, Alfian is the resistant and rebellious son who refuses to reproduce the narratives of the ideal constructed through

images of the typical Alfian utilizes the materiality of the everyday as poetic material to craft this lucid aesthetics of confinement

Poems on domestic space illustrate this notion of confinement within the notions

of everyday domestic routine In “View From A Window (Simei St 1, 11:22 PM), Alfian does not only show that one is trapped by routine but also utilizes dark and rather imagery to develop this rendition We find two frames in the scene:

looking out

at the next block

at the curtains on the next block

at shadows opening cupboards

and closing them, noiselessly

at housewives washing dishes

framed by socks on window grilles

at wooden slots for air-cons

at rusty holders for washing poles

(“View From A Window, 1-9)

The first frame is the speaker’s window where he observes an HDB flat across and the second one is a portrait of the housewives as they go about their routine Here, materializations of everyday domestic routine are the ones that do the framing and confinement The speaker calls our attention to objects that drape the scene as the routine of “housewives washing dishes” (6) is framed by “socks on window grilles / at wooden slots /… at rusty holders for washing poles” (7-9) The commonplace objects do more than just provide us with a literal frame for the scene but prepare us as well for the way in which the speaker perceives the housewives as lifeless individuals trapped

within the frame of domestic routine Their movements are limited precisely and only

by the cyclical and repetitive act of cleaning

The speaker’s own frame thus covers the entire scene as the speaker regards the housewives as faceless shadows (4), then as soulless individuals “… viewing a wall / at a columbarium / at ghosts behind their plaques” (11-13) The poem thus ends with the speaker commenting on the lifelessness of the scene as he likens the scene to looking at

“gravestones” (19)

“Family Portraits” likewise illustrates Alfian’s vision of lifelessness in routine Here, Alfian’s position as a rebellious (and gay) son is more evident and his notion of resistance, clearer In the poem, we find snapshots of daily lived experiences of three family members that represent and play stereotypical roles: the son in school; the housewife mother who takes care of the house and the father who works That this poem in itself is divided into three “sub-poems” which focus on one member of the family develops this idea that they are somehow framed by routine While the son, the mother and the father are all given voices (i.e each section poem is told from a different first-personperspective), the choice of identities given to each character (mother, not wife ;father, not husband) reveals that this very much about the son (who perhaps represents Alfian himself) and his attitude towards the stereotypical representations of familial roles

The son is stuck in school with a marked “badge [with] a Latin motto / Hope for the future / The future is hope / Or something” (“Family Portraits” 1-4) The specificity

of the place and the autobiographical reference is evident in that the motto seems to