Towards a cosmopolitan poetics the poetry of wong may boey kim cheng

Through close reading of the poetry of Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng through the lenses of familial connections, and travel and migration, I intend to show how both achieve different degre

TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN POETICS:

THE POETRY OF WONG MAY AND BOEY KIM

2010

Acknowledgements:

It has been a challenging journey to start my work in academia again and I could not have done it with the advice, support and mentorship of my thesis advisor Professor Philip Holden I would like to thank him for his prompt

responses to my concerns and queries (even when he was on a different

continent), for his careful and precise reading of my endless drafts and for his subtle insights on how my work could be sharper and more nuanced

I would also like to thank Professors Ross Forman, Barbara Ryan and John Whalen-Bridge for renewing my interest in literary studies and for bringing me up

to date with developments in literary theory and writing

Of course, this would not have been possible without the love, patience and the constancy of my husband Giuliano I owe him all this and more

Last but not least, this thesis is for my sons Luca and Dante, whom I hope will grow up with the benefit of many homes, languages and possibilities

Boey Kim Cheng’s deracination and cosmopolitanism 30

Chapter 2

Summary

National identity and the authenticity of a writer’s cultural and geographical origins have been emphasized in much of the analysis of postcolonial literature This thesis will investigate what happens as writers travel beyond their “native” countries and choose to disrupt the familiar patterns of exile, nostalgia and sentimentalism and de-emphasize a sense of rootedness to a specific cultural origin Through close

reading of the poetry of Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng through the lenses of

familial connections, and travel and migration, I intend to show how both achieve different degrees of cosmopolitanism that have led to difficulties in critical studies of their work Wong and Boey show us the possibilities of a new world writing which is not circumscribed by national or colonial rules and instead goes beyond more insular aims of building national identity to become individual, eclectic and mobile

Introduction

National identity and the authenticity of a writer’s cultural and geographical origins have been emphasized in much of the analysis of postcolonial literature In her

book Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Sarah Brouillette notes

that this “association between an author and a national authenticity” has become “an excessive burden within specifically postcolonial literatures, taken on as a partial requirement of the cosmopolitan function of those literatures” (177) Brouillette’s focus is on the global literary marketplace, but her analysis also holds true for

postcolonial literary scholarship Indeed she sees that post-colonial authors and their works are usually situated within “clearly differentiated political locales” and under

“the 'banners' of geographical affiliation”(145) whenever they are written about critically So what happens when these “banners” become irrelevant as writers travel

beyond their “native” countries and choose instead to not write about their origins or

write about them in ways that disrupt the familiar patterns of exile, nostalgia and sentimentalism? Brouillette’s analysis of Zulfikar Ghose’s body of work seems to suggest that because Ghose emphasizes his “deracination” and “homelessness” (153)

he has risked being forgotten critically, especially when it comes to canon formation

in the context of postcolonial scholarship Not to say that inclusion into a canon should be the goal of all postcolonial writers, but the question that must be asked is why scholars and critics consistently avoid dealing with postcolonial writers who shun their alleged responsibilities to either portray their purportedly native locales in their writing or specifically work for or against the post-imperialist nation building exercise

To this end, the cultural specificities and narrative strategies of fiction

(postcolonial or otherwise) often make its intentions more transparent and more

readily accessible for readers and critics alike to draw conclusions on the place of national authenticity and cultural origins in a piece of writing Yet, this is not always the case for poetry, which is often predicated on elusive metaphors and elliptical, non-narrative methods Jahan Ramazani argues that postcolonial poetry uses some of these methods to embed a certain hybridity in the vocabulary and syntax and that this

“distills the ambiguities, tensions, and discrepant temporalities of postcoloniality” (Ramazani 2001 184) and in doing so opens up the conversation on “aesthetic

possibility and intercultural experience in our era of transnational

imagination”(Ramazani 2001 184) My thesis, however, will take a slightly different look at postcolonial poetry that de-emphasizes a sense of rootedness to a specific cultural or geographical origin, with a view to examining how the oblique techniques described above, operate to complicate and even obfuscate ideas of culture and

identity The poets that are the focus of this thesis, Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng, might arrive at a place open to possibilities similar to the one described by Ramazani, but their methods are slightly different They do not seek to embed hybridity in their work, but instead attempt to move beyond placing culture and cultural authenticity at the centre of it There is little in Wong’s work, for instance, which suggests a mixing

of cultures as much as an attempt to show how their assignations can be unreliable

As for Boey, his poetry might at first glance seem to be full of cultural markers, but

he subsumes them in his attempt to achieve personal epiphanies and refuses to burden his poetry with a sense of cultural verisimilitude

Although the two poets write in two different periods in Singapore history, Wong and Boey both spent their formative years in Singapore, Wong before it gained independence in 1965 and Boey post-independence In my analysis of their work, I will show how through their emphasis on familial connections, diverse settings

achieved through travel and the craft of their poetry itself, both poets achieve different degrees of statelessness that have, in my opinion, led to difficulties in critical

reception of their work

Firstly, it is important to address the genre of poetry as one where form is central Like with most poets, ideas in Wong and Boey’s work are enhanced and underpinned by the form of their verse In the case of Wong May, poetic style plays

an important role in distancing her work from the reader Wong’s poetry is

fragmentary, disorienting, rich in double meanings and run on lines that serve to create multiple levels of signification and ambiguities This lack of a singular, clear message poses problems for those who would have literature be a medium to instruct

or provide higher moral guidance In some ways, her style recalls what formalist Viktor Shklovsky writes about in his seminal work “Art as Device” – there he notes that,

In our phonetic and lexical investigations into poetic speech, involving both the arrangement of words and the semantic structures based on them, we discover everywhere the very hallmark of the artistic: that is, an artifact that has been intentionally removed from the domain of automatized perception It

is 'artificially' created by an artist in such a way that the perceiver, pausing in his reading, dwells on the text This is when the literary work attains its

greatest and most long-lasting impact The object is perceived not spatially but, as it were, in its temporal continuity That is, because of this device, the object is brought into view (12)

The text itself in Wong’s poetry is central and crucially aesthetic in nature If, as Shklovsky notes, "the language of poetry may said to be difficult, 'laborious',

impeding language"(13), then in Wong’s poetry it is this labor, this impediment that produces a new way of looking at the world In many ways, through her writing, Wong pushes us to look at objects, people, places and emotions in new and interesting ways, ones that go beyond boundaries and rules of national identity building or even nations themselves Boey, as well, uses self-reflexive asides, unusual choices in

lineation and imagery that lend themselves to novel ways of perceiving his

relationships with people and places

At this juncture it is important to note that while postcolonial studies and writing have often privileged hybridity and marginality, they have often done this at the expense of reifying cultural binaries in order to create the so-called third space Homi Bhabha for instance, focuses on “the inscription and articulation of culture’s

hybridity”, wanting the “‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space [to carry] the burden of the meaning of culture” (Bhabha 1994 38-

9) Yet while in theory this might be possible, many writers working in the more recent postcolonial context continue, in practice, to write from the perspective of one culture at the expense of others, perhaps as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin note to first

“[assert] difference from the imperial centre” (5) Local places, histories, philosophies and languages are written with a sense of ownership and distinct belonging to a

specific geographical place Yet in a sense, writers and scholars firmly embedded in a particular culture are recreating imperialist and nationalist discourses that inevitably privilege a centre – it is merely that this centre has shifted to the countries they are writing from

Poets such as Wong and Boey have often fallen through the cracks of

postcolonial scholarship and discourse because they refuse to be categorized in

national and postcolonial canons If they are to be brought back into the conversation,

it becomes imperative to avoid the trap of an analysis that privileges a national stance

on literature written by a writer from a particular country Most crucially then in this thesis, it becomes imperative to eliminate an idea of a single origin or a fixed

definition of culture as tied to a writer Arif Dirlik points out the pitfalls of these ideas when he investigates the idea of what is “Chinese”, which he sees as a reductive

placeholder for “references to territory, nation, culture, and race, which are often thrown together without further analysis” (226) The two poets Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng are cognizant of these and other complications in their work, looking beyond the particularities of Singapore to the intersections at which culture comes to

be constructed and consumed I will show how through Wong’s musings on the instability of origins and identity and Boey’s confabulation of memory and history that they are, as Dirlik puts it, aware of “the constructedness of ethnicity and culture, which also makes them available for articulation to new circumstances” (225-6) It is the possibilities of these “new circumstances” that are the most promising as we look for new ways to approach these writers who would see culture not as a “prison-house” (Dirlik 226) but as a gateway to new ways of remembering, discovering and

experiencing

What is useful at this juncture is the lens of Bruce Robbins’ concept of

cosmopolitanism – one that has nothing to do with detachment from the national, but

is instead “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a

distance” (3) Wong and Boey’s lives and works have both been international, yet their poetry is very aware of the spaces in which the poets move in and also

emphasizes familial connections that seem in many ways to transcend simplistic drawing of national borders These multiple attachments preclude any easy defining

of these two poets, which might explain the lack of critical work on their poetry I will examine two main aspects to these multiple attachments in two parts: one focusing on familial connections, and the other on travel, migration and return By looking at these elements, I hope to show how these different ways of thinking about belonging and understanding the world might provide alternatives to a more nation-centric view

of things After all, Robbins notes how all of us are

connected to all sorts of places, causally if not always consciously, including many that we have never traveled to, that we have perhaps only seen on

television – including the place where the television itself was manufactured […] (3)

What Wong and Boey do then, especially with their poems about travel, is to lay bare these multiple connections, cultural or capital, and ways of belonging that go beyond what Robbins sees as “the childish reassurance of belonging to ‘a’ place” (3)

Whether it is Wong illuminating the contradictions inherent in the lives of Algerian garbage men in Lyon or Boey’s unease with his struggling touristic gaze in India, their work often throws up unexpected links that de-centre the text culturally and complicate relationships between people and places

I stress the importance of what cosmopolitanism in Wong and Boey’s work can achieve and not what it is because as Robbins notes, cosmopolitanism “by

suggesting that that there is no right place to stand […] can take some of the moralism out of our politics”(261) and instead “liberate us to pursue a long-term process of translocal connecting that is both political and educational at once” (261) Taken in this light, cosmopolitanism ceases to be a liability in its “full theoretical extension, where it becomes a paraoid fantasy of ubiquity and omniscience”(260) but instead functions as a “unrealizable ideal” and “produces normative pressure” on ideas like binarism and hybridity This means that the poetry of Wong and Boey does not seek

to embody the term cosmopolitanism in its strictest definition, but should be seen as a movement towards an ideal that enables us to read them beyond the constraints of fixed origins

Thus, when observed, Boey and Wong’s choices of subject matter and form frequently run counter to some of their contemporaries who see their lives and

autobiographies as illustrative of a postcolonial narrative that has national identity

building in opposition to a colonial legacy as a central purpose Wong, for example, published her poetry between the years of 1969 and 1978 and the space between these

years saw the publication of Singapore poet Edwin Thumboo’s Gods Can Die and Ulysses by the Merlion – two poetry collections that in many ways articulate the

struggles of a young nation Thumboo himself writes in his essay “Singapore Writing

in English: A Need for Commitment” that “[p]oetry is but one of the forces working towards a collective psyche”(66) Making his argument with Lee Tzu Pheng’s

seminal work, “My Country and My People”, Thumboo sees poetry as a way to “add

to the sense of our destiny as a people” (66) More interesting he delineates the

different races in Singapore, Indian, Chinese and Malay – rendering them somehow completely separate before bringing them together in an uncomplicated way as

“elements which constitute an identity, that is shored up by a historical continuity whose force is validated by the individual imagination” (66) For Thumboo, poetry has the responsibility to tie together these different races in a way that emphasizes both Singapore’s public and personal history Even though Thumboo saw it fit to

anthologize Wong’s poems in his Seven Poets, it is clear at the later time when he

writes this essay, that she no longer fits into what he feels is a canon of poetry that could create “a collective psyche” for Singapore since she does not in any way choose

to play a part in shoring up this “historical continuity” It is not just Wong’s subject matter that a critic like Thumboo would hold suspect, but her very positioning as an international writer: able to dip in and out of cultures, not necessarily exhibiting cultural confusion but instead a clear understanding of each context in which she writes Indeed, in a 1977 essay available online on his National University of

Singapore website, using Wong May’s second book Reports as a specific example,

Thumboo muses on the difficulties of charting a poetic style that is “distinctly

Singaporean” since “contemporary poetry in English has entered a phase where the style, the vocabulary, the urban preoccupations are international” However,

Thumboo views this not as an asset, but as a liability – since “poets tend to establish

an individual rather than a national identity” More significantly, the focus on

individual identity is seen by Thumboo to be the reason “we do not have

contemporary poets comparable in status to either Yeats or Eliot” With this

emphasis, Thumboo lays the responsibility of creating a national poetry with the poet and fails to note, perhaps, how the methods of critical responses and ways of reading such poets also play a role in shaping how their writing is received By insisting on the “specific elements that give it a local habitation and a name”, Thumboo espouses

a particular sort of national poetry that precludes the appreciation of poets like Wong

Boey on the other hand, writes in a period where Shirley Lim has noted that The majority of Singapore English-language writers, likewise, see the domain

of art as separate from the domain of the state (that is, expressed as the

government as national identity or as the public), and reject any attempt on the part of the state to take literature into its sphere of influence This autonomy, this rejection, in almost all cases has meant a separation of the themes and content of the work from the themes and content of state ideology (35)

Lim, however, sees this decision on the part of the writers as risky since by

“depoliticizing” their poetry they risk becoming irrelevant, “in a society where many social features have become imbued with political significance” (Lim 37) I am not suggesting that Boey is “depoliticized”; the poems that he does centre on Singapore are imbued with a critique of its rapid modernization, which he feels has come at the detriment of its history and people However, as in Wong’s case, it is Boey’s

positioning which renders him suspect Even before the poet migrated to Australia, Boey’s outsider view of Singapore gives his poetry a detached style that sits

uncomfortably with those who would reify a national literature Boey, now especially, working occasionally on Singapore but distinctly apart from it, provides a jarring

clarity of view on Singapore’s rapid development that is often out of step with the city-state’s view of itself This sense of detachment sets him apart from other

Singapore poets like Alfian Sa’at and Cyril Wong who while are decidedly not of the mainstream still embed their work deeply in the context of Singapore in terms of setting, subject and point of view

More generally speaking though, the position of the English-educated poet in Singapore has been seen as suspect by some; Koh Tai Ann has written about his or her alienation, specifically how he or she “cannot deny or escape the complicating fact that he knows no other language or literature better than the English – otherwise

he would not be expressing himself in English” (17) Koh sees these writers as

embedded, albeit in a “troubled way” in English traditions in a time when “the

internationalizing of English has brought in its wake the further burden of a rich cosmopolitan body of work and tradition” (17) Koh’s fear (like Thumboo’s) is that the writer will be subsumed into a “neutral ‘international style’ […] and for the

country, a fear that writers should cease to belong to the national community, but would harbour suspect international affiliations” (17) However, Koh’s essay does not fully address the problematic of why such poets or writers should be suspect

Furthermore, what is objectionable here is the idea of the “neutral ‘international style’, the existence of which is difficult to prove Through this thesis I will argue that even though Boey and Wong have rejected a nationalistic way of looking at the world, their poetry is no less rich, specific or unique The two poets’ cosmopolitan world-views lend themselves instead to a new way of looking at world literature – one that does not have to be burdened with cultural origins

Chapter one:

Familial Connections

I will fall apart

I will become so many dogs

dogs of all directions

I will breed a whole race of lonely children,

Each dog a judgment

- “ The Judge”, Wong May

The idea of family is intimately connected to a sense of place In most cases, when one writes about home, one cannot help but write about family The converse is also true, with the concept of the family being used as an allegory for larger social communities, specifically nations One thinks of the use of words like “fatherland” or

“motherland” which allude to patriotic and nationalistic impulses in both colonizing and colonized countries This preoccupation with the family and its linkages to the nation are further complicated and diversified in the literature of post-colonial

countries Major literary works in the period leading to and post-independence refer to the family and place a great significance on the social unit For example, Chinua

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1959), posits the African family as the bearer of

traditional pre-colonial values, while Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)

takes the vehicle of an Indian family saga to work through how these relationships relate to the larger socio-political climate of the post-colonial period in India Here family is inextricably linked with country and culture There are, of course, a vast number of ways and complexities in which the family has been explored, yet one is struck by its repeated use as a way to position postcolonial literature in a particular cultural context

Before continuing, it is useful to clarify that I use the hyphenated version of the word “post-colonial” to simply refer to a historical period after previously

colonized countries gained their independence Moving on to the unhyphenated term

“postcolonial” is to talk about a movement in literature and literary studies that

examines the colonial relationships of power and seeks to dismantle or complicate them Ania Loomba cautions however that,

The word 'postcolonial' is useful in indicating a general process with some shared features across the globe But if it is uprooted from specific locations, 'postcoloniality' cannot be meaningfully investigated, and instead, the term begins to obscure the very relations of domination that it seeks to uncover (19) With this idea of specificity in mind, I want to turn my attention to the context of Singapore and its postcolonial literature Most writers in Singapore are similar to their peers in other post-colonial nations in the sense that they see their families as cultural repositories and chronicle the struggles of the family in the context of the great

changes taking place in the socio-political fabric of newly independent nations

However, the work of the poets that I am examining, Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng, represents a departure from the concerns of their peers, in ways that preserve the bonds of family but release these ties from a single culturally specific context I want to examine a certain universality in these works to look at a post-national, post-postcolonial way of understanding Wong and Boey This is not postcoloniality

“uprooted from specific locations” as Loomba fears, it is not “uprooted” but instead able to exist in multiple locations and contexts that do not lose their individual

specificity For the most part, Wong and Boey write about culturally nonspecific contexts that focus our attention on familial relationships instead of embedding these relationships in a particular place This leads to an intensification of focus on familial relationships, as cultural and national authenticities become tools in a search for a cosmopolitan identity

In order to better understand why the two poets’ works make a case for a different look at family and the postcolonial context, it is important to examine the

writings of some of Wong and Boey’s peers From Stella Kon’s play Emily of

Emerald Hill (1989) to Robert Yeo’s poem “Malacca Grandmother” (1999), to even

more recent works like Koh Buck Song’s poem “Ah Por” (2001) and Alfian Sa’at’s

“Minority Report” (2001) – the Singaporean family is always written about in a specific cultural way In earlier works like Yeo’s “Malacca Grandmother”, Yeo’s grandmother is seen as “the sole remaining representative” (103) of a time that has passed He sees her departure for Southampton as detrimental to a sense of “history, name and wealth” (103) that is conjured up by descriptions of “strangely

antique”(103) ethnic clothing and historic spaces Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill

is a record of both a woman’s life in the second half of the 20th century in Singapore and a rich document of the social and cultural elements of the time The eponymous character of the play is a matriarch whose identity is inseparable from the trappings and mores of “a modern Nonya” or Peranakan woman More contemporary works of poetry like Koh’s “Ah Por” continue to use fixed cultural details to define and mourn the passing of a certain cultural authenticity embodied in an elderly family member1,

now the only lights

you leave behind

are memories

of fragrant face powder,

snow mountain pallor,

smoothening the years,

your standard samfoo

of Samsui simplicity,

and scent of medicated hairpins (57)

One of Singapore’s most successful younger poets, Alfian Sa’at, also uses cultural embeddedness for social critique in “Minority Report,” a poem in which he

characterizes his parents by details like his mother’s preoccupation with the Muslim

1 While Boey Kim Cheng has written two poem “Remedies” and “Her Hands” in his most

recent collection of poetry After the Fire about his grandmother that echo Koh’s sentiments in

“Ah Por”, I would argue that these are uncharacteristic pieces that do not represent the larger trend in his work, which is a more complex rendering of the relationship between culture and family

head-dress and his father’s fixation with finding successful Malay scholars Alfian hints at the fact that he recognizes the problems with these fixations, seeing minority Malays as “too eager / to recognize ourselves” (20)

This is but small selection of Singapore literature from this period – yet there

is a definite thread of the familial coupled with a cultural specificity that runs through much of the work Angelia Poon sees this idea of a specific cultural and geographical location as “more than mere passive or neutral physical setting, place works with the above writers’ evocation of the past to constitute the cultural specificity and identity

of particular individuals and social groups” (372) Poon sees Singapore writers as engaged in “the production of locality” which uses geographical space as a starting point to create a powerful imaginary I posit that pursuing this strategy of cultural specificity, there is no more affective and logical way than to associate place with family and familial connections and that this has been seen in a great deal of

Singapore’s postcolonial literature

As for the two poets that are the focus of this thesis, Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng, they use the trope of the family in their work in unexpected and

unsettling ways Wong delinks her familial connections from cultural specificities while Boey emphasizes a deracination from his past and family due to a rejection of their ideals and the physical disappearance of cultural and geographical spaces, which only continue to exist in his unreliable memory Cultural references are present in the work of Boey and Wong (although they can seem to be particularly rare in much of Wong’s work), but these cultural references are not central to the poems and the works do not draw on these references to attain authenticity

By moving beyond reinforcing a sense of cultural rootedness in their poetry, Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng depart from the writing of their peers Wong’s

poetry is more universal and Boey’s work is often a conscious rejection of an easy understanding and acceptance of one’s cultural positioning Both writers are

cosmopolitan and transnational Their writing reflects a lack of connection to one particular tradition or origin, and instead, either diminishes any connection at all or draws on multiple connections that carry equal weight Wong and Boey’s

relationships with their ancestors, mothers, fathers and offspring become ways for them to either create bonds that become universal to the point of excluding the

culturally specific or repudiate existing cultural connections by creating and

imagining new ones that lead to a multiplicity of attachments No production of

“locality” occurs in the poems that I look at in this chapter, at least not a locality that exists geographically or that is easily recognizable In Boey’s poems about his family, spaces are opened up, but these are emotional, imaginary spaces, sometimes as

confabulations of history and memory or as a hybridized set of possibilities for the future In Wong’s work, we look into a universal space, devoid of a cultural compass – an almost liberating experience

The critic Carine M Mardorossian writes about the “shift from exile to

migrant” which challenges the binary logic of “here” and “there”, between a

homeland and a new country Mardorossian notes that by emphasizing “movement, rootlessness, and the mixing of cultures, races, and languages”, a migrant’s identity takes on a certain element of ambiguity and flux; she writes “her identity is no longer

to do with being but becoming” (16) This certainly seems to be the case for both Wong and Boey, as they no longer look at their past or indeed their forebears as a

“fixed and comforting anchor” (Mardorossian 16), but as I have suggested a space open to the possibilities of confabulation and free from the burden of cultural

specificity While Mardorossian writes about what she calls a “paradigmatic shift”

from exile to migrant primarily through the narrative strategies in Hispanic American fiction, Wong and Boey’s poetry also presents us with a different methods by which ideas of family can be delinked from a culture In the particular case of the family, it

is useful to observe how Wong and Boey scrutinize their relationships with family members and familial history by using poetic techniques like unusual imagery and lineation, which force a sense of defamiliarization on the reader, to either viewing the idea of family in a way that removes it from a cultural context completely or setting it against the context in sharp relief

Wong May’s universality

In this section I will be looking at Wong’s poems on her family in

chronological order to better discern the development and evolution of her treatment

of the theme Wong’s poetry is full of wordplay and self-contained, deeply evocative images, which often resist easy interpretations Some of her more immediately

accessible works, however, are about familial relations and a sense of her ancestry Wong’s mother features more prominently in her entire oeuvre than her father, with all three of her books dedicated to her The most directly personal poems that Wong writes (of which there are only a few) are also about her mother Her poems from her first two books appear to address the idea of family and specifically her mother with greater urgency than her last book, which was written after a longer hiatus What is problematic for the postcolonial or nationalist reading here is Wong’s lack of

contextual specificity But it is precisely through the absence of this specificity that Wong manages to write a poem that speaks to multiple saudiences

Many of Wong’s early poems use deceptively simple images to portray

familial connections and histories This is particularly apparent in her first book of

poetry, A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals, which has poems like “History” The poem

opens with a scene of snow at a door, an ephemeral image that plays with our

perceptions of permanence, since the snow can melt without leaving a trace The poem expands this to more consequential statements that culminate in our

understanding that history has become a series of lies, demonstrating its fallibility The unreliability of the past is extended to something as fundamental as biological origins: “[t]he lie then / I’ve got a mother” This is taken further in a disorienting turn

in the poem where child is conflated with mother and the space between different generations appears to collapse This early poem is crucial in making sense of Wong’s relationship with the idea of the past and of her relationship with her family The confusion that manifests itself in this poem is a way of coming to an acceptance that inheritance, heritage and the past are in some sense arbitrary and not predestined and imbued with a greater meaning

This theme of detachment forms the familial and the tone of bewilderment is continued in the poem simply entitled “Your Umbrella, Daddy”,

Among other things I totally lack

this propensity of a young monkey

to hold on to its old At high

noon I thought I could walk

the rest of my life with

out history geography

biology, a man

in his net weight with

out shadow 30 years

later I ran into a ditch

heard 3 bones broken

The man helped me

out said it’s your

umbrella Daddy (18)

By beginning the poem with a distinctively de-romanticized view of familial

attachments, the poem suggests that familial relationships are biological, instinctual and universal The work appears to equate “3 bones” with history, geography and biology, three words which stand in for family in the most complete way and yet are referenced in a universal way without a link to a specific culture However, she also notes her inability to “hold on to [her] old”; she does not want to be “shadow[ed]” or weighed down by the past or her ethnicity, even though she knows that these things shield her from some of the challenges in life, as an “umbrella” of sorts This short, deceptively simple poem forces the reader to pause at Wong’s ambivalent conclusions and pushes them home with the striking visual image of an umbrella, signifying a past and a belonging that adds weight and encumbrance, something that both protects and yet obscures Because of the elliptical nature of this and other poems, multiple

readings are required to come to any interpretation of the work; a style that echoes the actual complexities of pinning down the significance of one’s history, geography and biology and refuses to settle for easy, comfortable conclusions about these issues

Wong’s other poems on the subject of family suggest that she sees her poetic persona as a starting point where meaning and history explode into something that is far more complex and nuanced than a linear family tree For example in the same book, she writes in another poem “The Judge”:

Who goes on watch tonight?

I’m here to judge

My father the lonely man

My mother the lonely woman –

People who have never met

and are harsh on each other

I tell you before daybreak

I will fall apart

I will become so many dogs

dogs of all directions

I will breed a whole race of lonely children,

Each dog a judgment (6)

Wong here focuses on the arbitrary tragedy of her parents’ union as she sets the poem’s persona firmly above them, as a “judge” The poem discusses the

consequences of this loveless relationship: a multiplicity of identities, “dogs of all directions”, “a whole race of lonely children” The subject confusion in these lines is particularly poignant; “dogs” and “children” become interchangeable even as they signify both the persona of the poem and her progeny Ironically, the repetition of “I” ultimately seems to suggest a fixed identity that is illusory

The major relationship that is returned to continually in Wong’s poetry the bittersweet and complex bond between mother and child and consequent meditations

on mortality:

Mother, this is not even it

If I say the day is

Beautiful, it probably is

I don’t affect it Nor

Does it affect me If I

say I love you, love

You, I probably do

I cannot live with

Out you, yet I do

Failing that, it doesn’t

Make me feel the

grapes are less sweet

Or cool The insignificance,

mine After yours

Or anybody’s funeral,

the world is not made

Ugly for me, it is (11)

This particular poem, “A Letter”, infuses these musings on death and maternal

attachment with a pragmatic sense of a lack of control Wong does not want to

pretend to be responsible for creating a narrative about her mother’s death, and thus she eschews a controlling sense of the situation that might make sense of the tragedy

of “yours/Or anybody’s funeral” Instead, Wong conveys her “insignificance”, her inability to “make” a world ugly, since it already “is”, and “I don’t affect it” This surrender of authorial control over her narrative is important, because it shows

Wong’s understanding of the reality of her mother’s impending death on multiple levels Even her choice of using couplets in run on lines also reinforces this

impression as she breaks and opens up meanings in each pair of lines, “I cannot live with/ Out you, yet I do.” This poetic technique punctuates the reading of the poem, forcing the reader to stop and consider the multiple ways of understanding each line and emphasizes the idea that a singular meaning would be suspect Wong has an unwavering understanding of her context in a world that cannot be altered by her or her writing, it is a world that she keenly observes, where the non-specificity of her context is also one that is universal

Continuing to write about her mother in the poem “Dear Mama”, Wong sees herself as “a grafted green”, using an image of biological descent that permeates the entire work:

By the same token I leave you,

I leave myself (with you) The

for my return: Your

big eyes,

short arms that I inherited, failed (59)

Wong uses a familiar trope of parental-child separation, but detaches the reader ever

so slightly by using the startling image of the “grafted green” The image conveys the feelings of liminality; between attachment and separation from the maternal (“… I leave you, /I leave myself (with you)”) and between life and death: the “waiting” that

is in the middle Wong returns to the idea of biological inheritance at the end of the poem “Your/ big eyes, / short arms/ that I inherited, failed” and these disembodied body parts seem to echo the image of the plant that pervades the poem This piece, like so many of Wong’s other poems, bears repeated reading in spite of its cryptic restraint Yet, it does not readily yield the culturally specific reading encouraged by a conventional postcolonial analysis Wong’s relationship with her mother is not

allegorized to a larger social context; it simply is what it is

Wong’s portrayal of the familial is sharpened in her second, arguably best,

collection, Reports In the poem “To My Mother”, the themes of mortality and

detachment remain and are more clearly articulated:

Does the hair feel pain

Do the fingernails complain

All right pain

is what connects me to myself

but your pain is yours

and brings them back in slightly different permutations that play out almost like musical variations on a theme Her line breaks are significant as she uses form to echo meaning, “but your pain is yours / It separates us” This poem starts out fairly

coherently as Wong writes about the inherent alienation of the human experience with lines like “How much of you has failed / to reach me” and “But already I understand less and less / I can separate nothing from nothing” Her persona yearns for clarity of vision and simplicity when it comes to her relationship with her mother, “May you at last occur to me / as a glass of water by my bedside / Yes we have loved” The poem reaches a tipping point when Wong finally gives the reason for her mother’s pain:

“Beginning September / I should be expecting your cancer report / which I will never get”(108), the implication being that her mother will be dead by then At this point, Wong begins to push the repetition in the poem further, consistently beginning each sentence in the poem with “I”, emphasizing the inability to understand anything from any perspective but her own, leading to an almost litany like effect:

I remember

as a child I began to be aware of language

only when I began to be aware

painfully

how I cannot write without a pen

about you

Yes, even about you

I will perhaps never write about you

to this day I consistently write about other things

I wish so often love were otherwise

I wish so often to completely enter

the bark the stone

to part-take

a scheme

so vast, so minutely hopeless

perhaps one does not even have to call it love

I go on (109)

The spareness in Wong’s poetic language and her use of monosyllabic words and uncomplicated phrasings bring home the universality of losing a parent, of the

helplessness when we are confronted by the death of a loved one and the tragic

inability of language to convey the totality of human experience The introduction of the physicality of objects like “bark” and “stone” in a poem about abstract emotions serves here to draw a reader to the material reality of Wong’s desire to comprehend her relationships Further, the poem is stripped of any references to culture or

ethnicity; it is not mediated by any of these contexts and this makes it a more

immediate, visceral experience

In contrast, one poem that does insert some cultural context is “Letter to the Dark”, a hallucinatory, nightmarish vision of pregnancy, progeny and mortality Yet,

it is a cultural context that does not anthropologize the subject matter; the reader has

no sense that he or she is entering a “different” culture In the poem, Wong makes references to “the young of a fox”, “a phoenix” and the idea of “break[ing] out of my form”(92) The lines about foxes call to mind the Chinese myths of female foxes who disguise themselves as women to lure unsuspecting suitors and the image of the

“phoenix” has both Western and non-Western meanings However, Wong’s poem does not seek to alienate a more general audience; there are no overt cues to

traditional rituals or myths, or even italicized words to signal a translated sentiment or idea Someone without any prior knowledge of Chinese culture would still be able to negotiate this poem without a cultural guidebook The poem is a disturbing meditation

on cycles of life and the inevitability of loss, “as I weep over my parents / I weep over

my children now / the rows of teeth in the churchyard / and their slow decay” (93) Wong also returns repeatedly to the idea of deracination or as she puts it “lostness”,

The space that I am

I still cling to: my lostness

where the chromosomes dance like small bent nails

the music of the sad cosmos and its ruined stars

I am stretched upon nothing (93)

These lines create a vision that is simultaneously on a microscopic and cosmic scale, revealing how Wong sees her deracination as fundamental from the “bent nails” of her biological makeup to the cosmos in general The alliteration between

chromosomes and cosmos cannot be accidental, given her generally careful choice of words It is this leap that confirms, then, that Wong is not just concerned with the personal loss here – it is a larger existential “nothing[ness]” or “lostness” that

preoccupies her, something that is both more biologically fundamental and universal than culture or ethnicity

Wong seeks to extend this sense of physical, cultural and familial

displacement that runs in an unbroken fashion throughout Reports to describing an

emotional and intellectual state as well In the final poem “Blessings” she starts with the lines “I run cold water/ to forget everything I have learned” (139) This clean slate

is one that is devoid of acquired culture, of history and literature The poem instead values the moment “a bird’s shrill voices/ say more than all the poets / through the centuries / put together” (140) and it is one of the clearest instances where there is a rejection of a literary canon, “the poets through the centuries” and instead a nod towards life as it is experienced Going on to paint a slightly ghostly tableau through a bathroom window, where “[t]he houses take on a/ chalked look The washing/ on the

clothesline dances/ like apparitions”(140) and the poem ends Wong’s second book

Reports with this sinister vision:

I see my grandchildren

Nothing is stranger

than Spring I smell blood in the wind

I accept the offerings

of one who died for me

in the Tang Dynasty I do not know him

I do not know him (140)

In an almost prophetic voice, Wong’s poetic persona envisions progeny and yet finds that this “Spring” is strange She also harkens back to her ancestors and yet, quite honestly ends with the repetition of “I do not know him”, as who can truly claim to

“know” one’s familial ancestry and history? In doing so, Wong shows up the

arbitrariness of inheritance and cultural belonging; she highlights the gulf that exists between personal experience and the historical past of the “one who died for me / in the Tang Dynasty”

In her third and last book Superstitions, Wong barely touches on the subject of

her family at all, instead the main theme in the collection is travel, which will be addressed in the next chapter However, one vivid portrait of her mother stands out in the poem “Homage to Matisse”, where it is as if the poet has thrust us into a canvas that becomes an impetus to her memory of her late mother It is a still-life, a

retrospective glance at her childhood memory of her mother:

her astonishing

forehead radiance of the brow

candid eyes at ease with each object

one arm resting on the chaise-longue while some large leaves, as on an espalier,

look on of a hushed green) that I stood to-day in the museum

gazing into that interior

as if her happiness belongs there (109)

The poem’s unusual spacing and lineation forces the reader to pause to absorb the tableau and the careful choice of words that create it Words like “regal”,

“astonishing”, “radiance”, “espalier” allude to a classical setting and of Western traditions in portraiture painting Wong is paying homage to Matisse not necessarily for his own skill, which “looks like / furnishing fabrics”, but because he connects her

to the memory of her mother’s happiness The physical painting becomes mere

“furnishing fabrics”, whose “sea-green & oleander- / reds” bring to mind pieces of furniture The real painting here in this poem is the portrait of Wong’s mother Wong distances herself from this fairly emotional revelation by placing herself firmly

outside the frame and by sharply acknowledging, in the penultimate line, that it is an illusion that her mother’s happiness could belong in a canvas by Matisse

At this juncture, it is important to consider why then, in spite of her obvious masterful command of the poetic medium, Wong May has not been the subject of more critical studies by both Singaporean and international scholars An attempt to locate secondary sources of research on her only turns up two brief works A negative

review of Superstitions by Valerie Barth seems to undervalue Wong’s love for

wordplay by paradoxically calling her writing “irritatingly circumloctionary” and

“prosaic” (100) Robert Yeo has also provided a rare close reading of one her earliest

poems “The Shroud”, yet it is a work that is not illustrative of her later pieces, which have a greater sense of complexity and nuance The same source that gives these citations lists thirty-three studies on Edwin Thumboo, most of them in-depth analyses

of large selections of his work2 While Thumboo is undoubtedly the more prolific poet, I believe this is a valid comparison given the similar time frames that Wong and Thumboo were writing in and given Wong’s astute command of the medium Was her choice to write in what Thumboo would call the “creeping internationalism of

idiom”(63) the reason? Wong writes about maternal attachment and descent in a deeply personal voice, without any hint of the national or postcolonial, and when she does write about ideas of belonging and rootedness, she tends to emphasize the

opposite This undoubtedly poses problems for scholars who might seek to position Wong within a postcolonial Singapore canon whose aim, as Thumboo notes is to create myths that work towards a collective psyche Yet, I believe Wong’s work is crucial in showing how the family can be delinked from the contexts of nation and culture

Boey Kim Cheng’s deracination and cosmopolitanism

While Wong May erases place in her poetry to focus on the timelessness of relationships, Boey Kim Cheng inserts place into his work, but it is always secondary

to his familial relationships Boey does connect certain narratives of his family

members with Singapore’s history and progress, especially in his earlier work, yet these only serve to re-emphasize his feelings of detachment and ultimately

2 The source that I am citing is the National University of Singapore’s library website

< http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/bib/singlit/poetry-indiv.html#Wong%20May > 2 October 2009 While it is certainly not exhaustive, it does provide an interesting observation on the dearth of secondary sources on Wong May Further research into the matter on my part only found three more fairly brief studies on Wong May, by Elizabeth Su, Shirley Lim and Anne

Brewster

deracination from Singapore Boey very self-consciously sees himself as an outsider,

an interloper who has come not to belong where he was born and raised This tactic makes Boey’s work significantly different from Wong’s when it comes to their focus

on their relationships with their immediate kin

In this section I will look at Boey’s poems about his family in a chronological

fashion – starting with poems from his collection Another Place, from which poems have also been collected in Boey’s volume of selected and new works After the Fire

Boey’s early poems about his family often present conflicted relationships with his immediate family members, set in the context of his position as an outsider in the Singapore context of material gain and pragmatism Unlike Wong’s poems, Boey’s work seems at first to be grounded in the Singapore context through his family, yet closer examination reveals that Boey uses this position to firmly reject his roots and open up new geographical and cultural horizons that go beyond what he feels are the narrow constraints of Singapore life I will go on in my analysis to look at his work in

After the Fire, published in 2004 where Boey’s later poems show a definite evolution

in his view of the family; in contrast to the earlier more conflicted tone, the poet’s later work speaks of his familial relationships in a tender fashion and opens up a world of memory with his father as the central figure While there is some reference

to place in these poems, Boey here is more concerned about giving an impressionistic vision of what has been lost through the urban development in Singapore and using this to create an imaginary, emotional landscape which serves to foreground his central theme of familial loss Boey, however, does adopt an optimistic tone when he looks forward in his relationship with his daughter Arguably, his most recent poems about her anticipate the hybrid spaces and histories that she will inhabit and create

Boey’s first references to his family are mostly about being in conflict with his relations In Boey’s poem “Letter to my Brother” for instance, he positions himself firmly in flux, “halfway through now / in life and travel”, traveling almost aimlessly and writing maniacally, “gush[ing] forth like mountain streams, / words tumbling over one another, a lunatic / with cataracts of thoughts” (161)3 In contrast, Boey sees his brother as having taken the ideal route to success in the eyes of the nation of Singapore:

Yes, I can see you now A race

brilliantly run A job, wife and home

for trophies You trained hard for all that

I have been running too A difficult race though

While you clock the track they laid for you,

I am doing it cross-country

I rest when I please Enough

of these odious comparisons (161)

Boey uses the metaphor of a race on a closed track to emphasize the competitiveness and rule based nature of his brother’s life, which is full of expectations and rigid measures of success This is also borne out as well in the short sentences that this verse is composed in, full of abrupt breaks that seem to draw on a quiet sarcasm The tone of the poem mocks his brother, and yet Boey frequently undercuts himself as well He shows up what he feels is the weakness of his own poetic metaphors,

“enough / of these odious comparisons”, and in doing so disorients the reader

Further, he reveals his own follies, writes about the realistic nature of his travels and notes his inability to automatically absorb cultures and countries: “This note rings false The truth is / such beauty leaves me cold / Like churches with shut gates” (161) The poetic persona here becomes an unreliable voice, highlighting its own

3 Unless otherwise noted, references to Boey’s poems will be taken from After the Fire: New

and Selected Poems Singapore: Firstfruits, 2006

weakness and creating believably complex and ambivalent emotions within the

context of the fraternal relationship described in the poem Another point of note is how Boey does not use specific cultural markers in referring to his brother; for

example, his final line “Hope you keep the flag flying at home” (163) is universal enough to be understood by readers without prior knowledge of the Singapore

context

The companion piece to this poem, entitled “Letter to His Mother” is clearer

in its conclusions Evoking travelers of every era, but especially Bruce Chatwin, whose influence permeates his oeuvre, Boey tells his mother that he has no desire to return:

No thoughts of home for me here

All roads homeward peter out in the desert,

like footprints emptying into the sea;

tides of sand erase the tracks of our past,

give rootlessness its proper place,

lead to beginnings where no paths exist,

and short of turning us into mystics,

transform emptiness from curse to gift (164)

This landscape of liberating emptiness and a-historicity where there are no signs to follow or marks to leave is gravely contrasted with the constriction and

claustrophobia of what Boey’s mother seems to represent,

This landscape loves everything in it, yet

does not cling to them, the way

we hoard our feelings, freeze them

in fixed deposits, expecting rich returns

That is to say I am unrepentant,

and celebrate my departure everyday

You held me so tightly I couldn’t breathe,

couldn’t grow I was a plant that resented being potted

on your sill, reviled the constant shower of affection,

the unfailing attention I didn’t just want

to lean into the light I wanted to run

with it, pace it across the globe, reach

its very source (164)

Boey uses the vocabulary of finance to illustrate family relationships in Singapore, a nod to the country’s capitalist leanings Words like “hoard”, “freeze”, “fixed

deposits” and “rich returns” add texture to his descriptions of these relationships, crucially though, without adding a layer of cultural detail Coincidentally, like Wong, Boey uses the metaphor of plants to describe his relationship with his mother Wong’s images of “grafted green” hint at the inherent alienation at the heart of familial

relationships Boey on the other hand uses the conceit of the potted plant, unable to thrive within the confines of his familial life Again, these images are removed from culturally specific ideas Unlike Wong, whose mother is completely unconnected with ideas of nation and place, Boey’s mother appears for a moment to stand in for an authoritarian Singapore that Boey ostensibly rejects,

I didn’t want to be useful, at least

not for a term, until I knew what that meant

I wanted to go without the privileges of name,

wanted to lose the country’s damaging interest

in everybody’s welfare (164-5)

In lines that give new meaning to the term “motherland”, Boey also draws the

connections between the idea of a family “name” and citizenship The rest of this particular poem suddenly becomes fragmented and disjointed Boey writes

increasingly shorter stanzas that appear to have little or no relation with one another

In a way, the disorientation in the poem can be read as Boey’s ambivalent relationship with his mother While he certainly ties his mother to Singapore, he is also capable of looking beyond its borders to draw more general conclusions about freedom,

capitalism and environmental degradation, and his place in the world, “swinging in a hammock / hung in the sky / between singing stars”(165) Boey opens up the poem’s and his own possibilities beyond the claustrophobic confines of his mother’s and country’s expectations

After these references to his family early on in his poetic career, Boey does not return to the theme of familial relationships until his poems in the volume of new

and selected poems After the Fire While his earlier poems about family eschew direct

cultural references for the most part, Boey’s later poems about his father and his daughter do situate his subjects However, these are spaces that are not burdened with excessive or essential cultural detail Instead, Boey’s poems about his father recreate a past imaginatively, taking license with details in order to flesh out his father’s

personality and life, while the poems about his daughter open up imagined pasts and futures that are cosmopolitan and hybrid

At the time of the publication of After the Fire, Boey had been in Australia for

about twelve years and his new work centres on the family, with the majority of the poems (thirteen out of twenty-one) having some connection to family members The book is dedicated to his family, and the titular poem refers to the cremation of his father’s body “After the Fire” is a Lazarus-like resurrection of his father’s cremated remains, an eerie deconstruction and re-assemblage of a loved one’s parts Boey conflates the physical and spiritual, the scientific and the religious,

[…] He pieces you

together, his post-mortem

reconstructing your life

A broken man, he says, picking

the slivers, the bits that sum up

the whole man He wants us

to go through the pieces

to make sure you are all there

He has a responsibility

to the living and the dead, he says,

to get it right He starts from the base,

an anatomy lesson in Hokkien,

showing us what we didn’t see

in life, where it went wrong, the rot

attacking the tibia, the fatal flaw

in the scaffolding A smoker

and drinker, and a fracture

that never healed, he adds

The cranium piece completes

you and the ash is poured

into the urn He says we have to rig you up

in sequence, from the feet,

so that in afterlife, you will be upright,

standing on even feet and ground (16)

Boey’s description of the Buddhist medium’s careful handling of his father’s ashes is

a strange yet appropriate mixing of Chinese cremation traditions and scientific

jargon Words like “post-mortem”, “ anatomy” “tibia”, “cranium”, and “fracture” are contrasted with the almost mystical reconstruction of Boey’s dead father, “in

sequence, from the feet” Biology and moral character become quite literally

inseparable, with idea of “a broken man” taking on actual physical manifestations Again as with Wong’s poem “Blessings”, Boey doesn’t italicize (literally and

figuratively) any of his references to Chinese culture His poem might be imbued with

a sense of culture, but it is one that is readily accessible and does not seek to exoticize its subject What is even more interesting is the Christian references that are

interlaced with the Chinese ones For example the lines “I take his word like

sacrament, / take the jade-green stone urn, / and cradle its surprising weight”(17) have definite references to both Christian and Chinese traditions Boey seems to suggest an interchangeability between them and this hybridity suggests a more

complex rendering of cultural traditions in Boey’s family In the last stanza of the poem, when he poetically recreates what the Buddhist medium seeks to do with his father’s remains, one cannot help again but notice the Christian references to the resurrection and Jacob’s ladder, the idea of ascent heightened by the short run-on lines,

I can see you in heaven

materializing from the urn,

the scraps and dust

assembled into a ladder

of bone and flesh, up

on your feet, the limp gone,

dusting the ash off,

and ready to walk

back into our lives (17)

Boey embeds multiple ways of looking at death and an afterlife in this poem, in ways that make the urn that contains his father’s ashes “heavier / than the sum of its sifted contents” (17) Transitioning from the difficult physical reality of receiving his

father’s ashes to a transcendental meditation on a redemptive afterlife, Boey’s poem reconciles the various strands of religious and cultural beliefs in his life in a way that shows how they are intimately and irrevocably entwined Boey does not privilege any set of beliefs and traditions, choosing instead to combine them, embedding this

hybridity in the imagery and vocabulary of the poem

This sense of flux and liminality is even more apparent in another poem about Boey’s father entitled “Kelong” Boey uses the idea of the fishing outpost to illustrate the central theme of the liminal nature of this space in his memory:

My father carries me into the hut

where I sit and find equilibrium

on a floating world of water and air

The smell of salted fish everywhere

and through the gaps of the worn timber floor

you can see the threadwork of the tossing tides

and imagine the kelong’s legs stretching

miles to the ocean bed You feel the pulse, the tug

of the depths at the kelong frame and wonder

if it will hold (18-9)

Arguably, Boey is aware that at this point in his career, he no longer writes just for a Singaporean audience and has developed strategies to prevent cultural translation from being obtrusive in his work One sees this impulse when he chooses to use fish names like “trevally” and “whitebait” where the fishermen of his childhood would probably have very different names for these fish in their own Chinese dialects The effect of this is a sensorial immersion into Boey’s memory, without the lens of

extraneous explanations It seems natural then to draw parallels from Boey’s liminal position as a poet writing from outside the culture he grew up in for an audience wider than the Singapore context, and the idea of the kelong as “hovering in a realm / neither water nor land” (19), in a space that is in a way outside the borders of a

country It is this space where Boey truly finds his father, “buoyant, free / from debts, going for the big catch”(18) It is also through the memory of this space that Boey comes to an acceptance of the lack of fixity in his life, as he notes that it is here that

he learnt “to trust the aerial walkways, / fit my tread to the swaying sense of things, / the planks bending but holding firm with each step” (19) The memory of a borderless world is where Boey hopes to find his father again through his own poetry, “In my dream I cast about for the word / that will reel in the sea hoard in one haul: / starfish, seahorses, and my father” (20) This moment of revelation also brings to mind the Christian references that continue to run deep through the preceding poem “After the Fire” and now “Kelong” Boey talks about “walking on water” and connects the fishermen in the kelong and those in the New Testament when the “nets are reeled in, like a retiarius / ceiling, and there is a heaven of fish / heaving, thrashing scales, and mouths / agape in hosannas of death” (20) Life and death are seen as intrinsically linked with the plenty of the fish coupled with their necessary death – the

undercurrent of mortality becoming all the more evident in this poem about Boey’s late father There is of course, also the redemptive idea of this fishing, echoing the biblical salvation that is tied to the apostles and their role as “fishers of men” Boey’s father is somehow rehabilitated through this memory and seems to thrive in this liminal space Furthermore, the poet’s use of Christian imagery here and throughout the rest of his work provides a layer of imagery and meaning that is not easily linked with a particular ethnicity Boey’s references to Christianity, along with his use of

Buddhist mythology, jazz vocabulary and a whole host of other cultural references create a nexus of cosmopolitanism that does not lend itself to simplistic definitions of ethnic belonging

For Boey, it appears that the “word” itself or poetry is the most important in negotiating the murky waters of history, identity and belonging As such, the poem immediately following “Kelong”, “Placenames” extends the theme of the ability of words to breathe life to a forgotten past or deceased person What is interesting here is Boey’s usage of the italics when naming specific historical Singaporean locales like

“Buffalo Road, Robinsons / The Arcade and Satay Club” (21) Where before Boey

resisted the use of italics, perhaps seeing that they distance the reader from the text, he uses them specifically for the place names Yet the effect here is not one of

distancing, it is merely one of emphasis, to show the power of these words for Boey’s father A reader of the poem who is unfamiliar with these places, a category that also includes younger Singaporeans, is still able to understand and appreciate this piece Even though, someone with a first hand knowledge of Singapore history might have a more profound connection to this poem, what is evident here is that place becomes secondary to Boey’s meditation on his father’s demise Boey uses the idea of these long vanished places, “now remote as the stars / in a galaxy already extinct”(21) to illustrate his father’s failing memory and return to the past The narrative of the

“ruined city” is direct parallel to the father’s “vanished self”, and Boey writes,

I don’t know if it is the dead places

calling him to come home

or my father summoning them

for a last walk He intones

Johnson Pier, Malacca Street,

Old World, New World,

as if piecing together the alleys,

the streets and neighbourhood

of his body, reassembling

the ruined city

of his vanished self (21)

It is a meditative litany of forgotten places that Boey says he will inherit, in a way emphasizing his deracination since he is attached to something that no longer exists Yet Boey does not romanticize versions of his supposed origins, that he is completely aware of the finality of the disappearance of these “dead places”, like his deceased father they have been “erased”, with only the poem left to remember them

re-Boey’s preoccupation with his late father continues in the poem “Prodigal” Beginning with its title, the poem continues with Boey’s use of Christian imagery; Boey sees his father’s corpse as a “formaldehyde body / hard like the plaster St

Anthony / close to the coffin, removed / from life as the preserved saint / I once saw

in a Siennese Church” (31) Boey seems to be hinting at the deadness of Catholic iconography through its macabre fascination with a saint’s corpse Instead of religious revelation, Boey simply sees

His face a blank map,

arctic peace, no trace

of the errant ways

scarring the image

in the funeral photograph

under Anthony’s watchful eyes

He had left for the last time,

eluding us again,

for the country

where all fathers wait (31)

These lines show how Boey’s ideas of space and country exist in the realm of the imagination, memory and emotion His grasp of geographical space and cultural specificity in these poems is far more tenuous than many of his peers who write in more realist ways about their country and living environment This points us to

finding a different way of locating Boey’s poetry about his father, one that does not tie itself to a specific locale or culture