We Are Always Building
By Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Review of Burning Walls for Paper Spirits by Ann Ang, illustrated by Chelsea Sia (Singapore: Pagesetters, 2021)
Kent Chan - Tremors (2021), Film stills, Courtesy of artist
Image description: In a setting reminiscent of a tropical forest, a man stands by tall, lush grass. He wears a sun hat, a gray shirt, and blue jeans; he carries an orange backpack. He has a beard, and his hands are slightly raised. His body faces left, but his face is turned back to look straight at the camera.
Beautifully illustrated by Chelsea Sia, this debut collection of poems by Ann Ang, entitled Burning Walls for Paper Sprits, depicts contemporary Singaporean life in intricate, intimate detail, constructing a vision of the quotidian abutted against urban landscapes and the natural world. With its delicate still-life sketches of construction scaffolding, potted pandans, and laundry-strung balconies, no detail is too small to escape the artist’s gaze or the poet’s eye. Throughout the book, Ang’s poetic sensibility is attuned to the minutiae of everyday life, insisting on contemporary Southeast Asian experience as a world firmly rooted in its own cultural landscapes and rich botanical life. Addressing subjects that range as widely as the wheel of dharma and the polar bear in the Singapore Zoo, each of her poems exists in its own field of associations and longings. But, speaking together, they assert the voice of the contemporary Singaporean speaker in all her complex subjectivity.
The poems move seamlessly from moments of quiet interiority to beautifully rendered place-descriptions: “All over the estate, / tall trees applaud into windows. [...] The air is green leathered stars.” The poet’s eye evokes arresting detail wherever it turns. “This small island is full of places, anagrams of spaces,” she observes, speaking of the country’s “broad fish-belly of the northwest,” its brackish seawater and inhabitants sweltering in the evening heat. Here is a poetry that exists for and of itself, offering a vivid portrayal of Singaporean life made neither for tourist consumption nor for foreign translation. Ang, who studies post-1990 Anglophone literature from India, the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia, holds a doctorate in postcolonial and world literatures from the University of Oxford and currently teaches at Singapore’s National Institute of Education. She has remarked elsewhere of the importance of research through practice, and, in her many, varied roles as an educator, scholar, editor, short-story writer, and poet, she continually and boldly explores the ways in which contemporary, postcolonial Southeast Asian voices reinvent the English language.
Kent Chan - Tremors (2021), Film stills, Courtesy of artist
Image description: Against a backdrop of lush vegetation, reminiscent of a tropical forest, two figures are in the center foreground of the image. A man holds a purple cell phone to his right ear. Only his head and shoulders are in the shot; he is turned away from the camera. He wears a white, patterned shirt. A woman in a blue top is almost entirely hidden behind him except for her dark hair and right eye. She is looking directly at the camera. Above the two figures, in the foreground, a shadowy branch reaches down.
Ang is unafraid to venture into the terrain of conflicted relationships or scathing social critiques. In the poem “Claws,” she writes of a frustrated exchange over a meal of chili crab and gold-flamed mantou, describing with sensual violence the “shards of exoskeletons” and “the slow opera of smudged fingers and teeth gated / against a carapace cracked sharp as fangs.” Without wavering, her speaker remarks unflinchingly, “Who strikes first burns longer, / leaving the other to watch, / fire in the mouth.” Later, in “Singapore Weather,” the poet castigates “the folk / of the granite island” for their greed and heartlessness:
This fiery tribe, polyglots of this entrepôt,
have listed the sun itself on the stock exchange.
Their void decks, their linkways,
their underground carparks, their eyes
are dry. They turn with the wind,
they exchange home for house
in their ceaseless quest to trade up.
They buy and sell; sell and buy again,
devise systems they will game.
How ingenious they are,
gold always in their hearts. Rain
in Singapore always falls,
lavish as hailstones,
loud as coins,
hard as smiling teeth.
With this torrent of plainspoken, nearly aphoristic language, the poem minces no words, calling to account the developers and business tycoons who make “ravenous blood-bargains” against a backdrop of regional thunderclaps and low-pressure systems, which, in the metaphorical world of the poem, move across Southeast Asia as economic and as meteorological forces. The syntactical repetitions of the final three lines level a relentless series of trochees against the accused, the heavy stresses at the beginning of each poetic foot acting like a blunt, accusatory finger jabbed into the chest, accentuated by the angry music of alliterative and consonant ‘l’ and ‘s’ sounds.
Kent Chan - still film (2019), Silkscreen on fabric, 300cm x 160cm, Image courtesy of artist
Image description: A large, rectangular, fabric tapestry spans horizontally across a white wall. On it is a silkscreen-printed image of lush, tropical trees against a light-blue sky. The digitally processed image is intentionally flat, the trees’ overlapping leaves and branches giving the image an abstract appearance.
Much of Burning Walls for Paper Spirits is written in free verse, and the poems have an intuitive sense of form and internal music. At its best, this openness of the form is an energizing force, lending incantatory power to descriptive moments like this eerie image that appears in the middle of “Burnt Poem”: “my ghost-eyes hunger— / and you are here, shoulder to mine, // burnt ingots in your smile.” Here, as in other poems, the white space at the end of each line gives the language a taut concision, forcing a brevity that sharpens the impact of the poem. Elsewhere, Ang arranges sound patterns to remarkable effect, as in the linguistically inventive litany that appears in “Turning”:
Voices and choices:
here, there; Singlish, English; lions, logic;
pulau, pura; trees, forest; apples, Gods;
sleeps, deaths. A breath
intercalculated between each pair
The poet wields a deft hand in moments like these, allowing herself the freedom to experiment with rhythm as an artistic medium in its own right. She also invents her own forms, as in the spare stanzas of “Monday in the Jungle,” which alternate across the page, haiku-like in their pithy, imagistic observations of city life.
At other times, Ang’s prosody is more formal, gesturing toward the influence of traditional English verse on contemporary Anglophone poets. In the context of these poems, however, the poet’s distinctive locale revitalizes the tradition, suggesting that the English-language poem, when written in Singapore, exists as its own literary genus. The poem “Minding the Guava” opens with the injunction:
Mind you, listen to this heavy fruit.
The guava strikes the ear, when held
one-handed, ringing, pouched pulp.
Guavalava, the vowels fill your palm
The poem’s opening lines, of course, refer to the literal guava, its “cool peel” and “many-seeded globe.” But they also gesture expansively toward that which the fruit represents; an occasion to pay attention to the rich, idiosyncratic features of regional literary and creative expression. Minding the guava, in all its textural and textual richness—vowels filling the palm (and the mouth), pulp ringing against the ear—yields a fullness, a relationship to its land and people, a “fever republic” sweltering in the soup of humid evenings. Accompanied by Chelsea Sia’s drawings, which are simultaneously exacting in their botanical detail and whimsical in their gestural quality, this poem insists that we not only listen to the guava but also attend to its surroundings—political, cultural, and human geographies that must not be ignored if one is to fully apprehend the significance of this fruit’s ear-striking sounds.
Kent Chan - still film (2019), Silkscreen on fabric, 300cm x 160cm, Image courtesy of artist
Image description: A close-up shot of a silkscreen print depicts palm leaves. The digitally processed image is intentionally flat and pixelated. On the right side of the picture is a large, green, palm leaf. Towards the left of the image are similar leaves in green and softer, brown shades. The outline of the leaves are clear and linear. The texture of the fabric surface on which the image is printed is visible, with horizontal lines running across the image.
In the tradition of poets like Derek Walcott and Eavan Boland, Ang reaches beyond mere mimicry of English poetry, seeking instead to recontextualize its prosody through the lens of postcolonial experience. For instance, in “The Tabebuia Falls,” a poem dedicated to the late Ho Poh Fun, beloved teacher and celebrated Singaporean writer, she writes:
She has run ahead, our falling flower.
One blossom descends and life runs over
down the years, in words sung slower—
mauve silence of the trumpet flower.
[...]
So stand aside, as she has stood for us,
in sorrow as we seek exacting words:
pink poui showering in garlanded song,
sea-wind prayers for Katong.
Following in the long and decorated tradition of the English elegy, Ang’s pentameter lines and rhymed quatrains reference canonical works like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” which employs a clasped abba rhyme scheme, wherein the end-rhymes of the first and fourth lines of each stanza reach for one another like a pair of hands reaching for those of a departed friend. Yet, while she allows this legacy to drift across the surface of her stanzas, by no means does it define the reach of her poetic vision. In fact, the poet enjoins the reader to “stand aside” and make space for the mourners’ words, a garland of pink poui that drifts prayer-like on a sea breeze originated from distinctively Southeast Asian waters. With this poignant image of trumpet flowers cascading to the ground in memory of the departed, a vision of seasonal beauty only known to those who live in the tropics, Ang asks us to attend to the botanical features of the speaker’s locale and to the writer whose life she is commemorating, whose work manifested a deep interest in Singapore’s wildlife and flora.
In the quietude of Burning Walls for Paper Spirits’ closing pages, Ang returns to the measured restraint of her opening poems, ushering us into the lamp-lit privacy of dusk. “All roofs are temples when remembered in the rain,” she observes, turning quietly inward. Here, the poet’s spiritual interiority becomes a kind of artistic landscape in which “days past / wash by as watercolour rain” and a band of sojourners to Bhutan, the Land of the Thunder Dragon, appears as “six brushstrokes on paper.” In the world of this poem, spiritual questions about the nature of being are also deeply aesthetic, though ultimately the mind, which “touches the wheel of dharma,” finds these mysteries to be a “script beyond reading.” Against the stunning background of the Paro valley, the poem asks: What artistic vision does this landscape of chanting hills and unscrolling clouds offer? What forms of literary and cultural creation might be possible through the frame of a uniquely Asian context and subjectivity? Perhaps, like all good questions, these must remain unanswered, but it is precisely around these curiosities that Burning Walls for Paper Spirits is so artfully constructed. As the poet says, “We are always building in these islands.”
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Notes from the Birth Year, winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Chapbook Contest, and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. She is the recipient of the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, Indiana Review, and The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit.
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Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. The works and practices of others often form the locus of his works, which have taken the form of film, text, conversations and exhibitions.
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Yin F Lim reviews The Second Link: An Anthology of Malaysian & Singaporean Writing edited by Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Hamid Roslan, Melizarani T. Selva, William Tham.