#YISHREADS December 2024

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

It’s been my custom to wrap up the year with some kind of holiday message, some kind of ironic observation of Christmas. But 2024’s been a year of horrors—not just because of the Palestinian genocide, but because of the tide of fascism and the exposure of liberal complicity that’s come with it—and the prospect of a happy new year feels bleak, with a second Trump presidency on the horizon, with the expansion of Israel’s war beyond Palestine, into Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

What can we, as self-styled intellectuals, do? I’ve tried to bear witness, to be the killjoy at every cultural event I’m invited to: bringing up Refaat Alareer at a translation symposium, blurting out an obligatory “free Palestine” at Singapore Writers Festival when I introduce myself as an activist writer. Yet it feels so facile and performative—perhaps because the good people of Singapore actually applaud me when I do the bare minimum. Felt bloody twisted when folks at the SWF Debate—a comedy event—brought up genocidal colonialism: despite their best intentions, it immediately became part of a greater joke. And how do I begin to hold space for the parallel genocides of the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and West Papua? How do I justify writing for a site based in the USA when this country is the sponsor of these atrocities?

But despair isn’t an option. As I’ve heard activists say: we’ve got to learn from the resilience of the Palestinians, and to stay healthy out of spite, so we may outlive our oppressors. Helluva Nnew Yyear’s toast.

So let’s give ‘em hell in 2025. To quote Beckett: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Ang Swee Chai
The Other Press, 2023

Some readers will know this author as the widow of Francis Khoo, the Singaporean human rights lawyer who fled to the UK in 1977 after his clients were detained under the Internal Security Act. Those of us in the pro-Palestinian movement, however, will know her from her incredible activist work: how she began volunteering as an orthopedic surgeon in Lebanon in 1982; how she witnessed the atrocities of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, leading her to set up the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

This work, first published in 1989, is her memoir of that experience [1]. And damn—even though I heard a lot of this at her 27 March talk at NUS School of Medicine, I didn't quite grasp till I read this how bizarre and bad-ass her situation was—a young, tiny, under-five-foot Chinese woman (she got mistaken for a sex worker in Beirut, and got bullied by white male volunteers who felt she didn't know her place), risking life and liberty and reputation in refugee camps, just because she felt a need to help the most oppressed. The "to Jerusalem" bit concerns her journey to testify before the Kahan Commission as to whether Israel should bear any guilt for the massacre—her colleagues at the Palestine Red Crescent Society were 100% against her mouthing off to the press, fearful that she'd get them in deeper trouble, but refugees appreciated it: the next time she returned to the camps, folks lauded her in the street for her courage. (She also writes about her work in the late 80s, managing MAP, having to deal with similarly defiant staff, but utterly respecting them.)

I’m also moved by her documentation of her husband’s work. He was her helpmeet rather than vice versa: he lost 15 pounds out of grief, believing she was dead after Sabra and Shatila; in an addendum written after his 2011 passing, she reveals how he encouraged her to set up MAP and helped her with recruitment and lectures across Britain, and finally managed to visit Beirut the year before his death, immediately recognising all these people from his wife's work. (Gotta say, however, that the two poems by him in the book aren’t actually very good.)

I won't dwell on the descriptions of Israeli cruelty—we've seen enough of that of late, after all. What's wonderful are scenes of Lebanese and Palestinian hospitality—coffee and gifts of embroidery—and the sheer number of amazing women working for liberation, from nurses taking up arms to defend Gaza hospital to Red Crescent Director Um Walid to Ellen Siegel, a Jewish American whose image I've seen on Tumblr, protesting against the injustice of Israel’s Aliyah policy [2].

I’d also argue that this work needs to be understood as part of the Sing Lit corpus—like Stella Kon, Joan Hon and Lee Tzu Pheng, Ang's part of a wave of Baby Boomer women who were able to access education and a career in an age of decolonisation, and who was deeply inspired by Christianity in her work. Plus, she keeps referencing Singapore: how Middle Eastern hospitality reminds her of Chinese and Malay customs back home; how the Palestinian resistance parallels her own mum's anti-Japanese activities; how the Israeli claim that there's no room for everyone is rubbished by Singapore 's own management of multicultural urbanism. 

Which is to say that despite everything, she still looks to this island as a place of fondness, of care, of hope. And it makes me bloody proud that we—even as a nation that lost her!—can say we’ve any connection at all with a hero like her.

Destination Chungking, by Han Suyin
Jonathan Cape, 1953

I’ve been reading my way backwards through this author's semi-autobiographical novels. First, her multi-perspective Malayan Emergency piece And the Rain My Drink [3], then her post-war Hong Kong romance A Many-Splendoured Thing [4].

Finally, I’ve arrived at her debut work: a memoir of the Sino-Japanese War, characteristically full of her gorgeous prose and fascinating character studies… yet admittedly not quite as complex nor as overtly literary as her later works. She first published this in 1942, well before the end of World War Two, so the book's purpose is in many ways propagandistic (she apologises for this in her 1953 foreword!): to explain to Western readers the great suffering that took place as a result of the Japanese invasion of China; to insist on the great humanity and civilisation and hope of China that makes it worth saving.

She begins with her childhood in Peking (this is all pre-pinyin; even “tofu” is italicised), where she was playmates with her future husband Pao (this really seems to have been his name, Tang Baohuang, whereas Han Suyin was a pseudonym) amidst the chaos of post-Qing feudal warlords. Then their encounter again in England (there are so few Chinese in London, she says, which is pretty funny in the 21st century), where she studied midwifery while he was at Sandhurst, and their realisation that they must marry, almost as a meeting of two minds, and thereafter their return to China amidst the unfolding war: the struggle to find trains and transport from Hong Kong to Hankow to Wuhan and witnessing a temple they'd just visited getting bombed in Hengshan, through Kweilin and finally to her ancestral family in Chungking/Chongqing, where they endure as the splendid city gets bombed into rubble and squalor.

Much of the story's devoted to suffering: waiting endlessly for trains or buses that may never come, getting covered with dust or sprayed with piss in train compartments, fleeing falling roofs, walking until her feet bleed, panicking at the thought that her husband may be dead. Yet she's 100% aware of the fact that she's had it better than so many other Chinese, and takes time to describe the luxury she suddenly experiences when her rich Chongqing family shelters her (before the war touches them, too). And every now and then the delicious irony of her later books creeps in too—her observation that ancient mourning restrictions say nothing about perming your hair; her admission of her great disgust at being squeezed in a bomb shelter next to sweaty shirtless coolies, despite her attempts to dwell on democratic principles.

Most fascinating of all, perhaps, is the spirit of change: her and Pao's conviction that they're the children of a new China that's going to be better than the old one, where young people can choose their own partners, where girls can be educated and even run off and join the Communist army, where Christians and Communists debate their cause fiercely over watermelons at the Mid-Autumn Festival amidst the ruins of a bombed-out house. 

Frickin' moving to read this, in a future when the two Chinas are both thoroughly post-revolutionary, and remember how exciting the promise of modernity was for our foremothers.

And of course, deep resonances with Palestine and Lebanon with this narrative of survival, a woman writing while the war is still exploding around her, of citizens returning to the same blasted cities they abandoned, of the great love of a people for their homeland amidst tides of invasion. War never ends; it only holds its breath.

Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba, ed. Basma Ghalayini
Deep Vellum Publishing, 2019

You'd think that an anthology of Palestinian sci-fi might be full of uplifting futures when occupation and genocide are ancient history, but alas, this isn't the case. This book's a bummer, guys. It's routine, these days, to understand that Israeli violence makes the everyday untenable—here, one gets the sense that it also kills hope.

Still, that doesn't mean the collection isn't worth reading! There's a whole lot of variety among these twelve tales, written in both translated Arabic and English, by residents and emigrants of Palestine. There's weird, magical realist/slipstream stuff, e.g. Mazen Marouf's "The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid", in which the last Palestinian is reduced to being a mutant mud ball in a glass box, watching his Israeli handlers experience absurd misfortune. There's paranormal horror, e.g. Anwar Hamed's "The Key", in which a 100% digitally secure Israel is haunted by phantoms turning their keys in the locks of people's homes. There are futures in which occupied Palestine manages to develop, e.g. Selma Dabbagh's "Sleep It Off, Dr. Schott", in which they're developing a hyperloop transport system (this tale's more focussed on patriarchal misogyny and the surveillance state); also Ahmed Masoud's "Application 39", in which Gaza wins the bid to host the 2048 Olympics. (The way Israel reacts to this is heartbreaking, and given current events, utterly believable.)

I remember Emad El-Din Aysha saying at Worldcon 2023 that he was the only author in the book who imagined an end to the occupation—in his "Digital Nation", hackers gradually take over all electronic media, first creating seductively decolonised game worlds, then turning Hebrew into Arabic on all forms of media, ultimately peacefully absorbing Israel into the land it should have been. But his isn't the only vision like this: Talal Abu Shawish's "Final Warning" imagines deliverance coming via extraterrestrial fiat; Samir El-Youssef's "The Association" unsettlingly speaks of a nation that can keep the peace only because all history is banned—manifesting in the form of the case of a murdered historian.

In her intro, Ghalayini notes the paucity of Palestinian sci-fi, because of the sheer pressure to document the present. And it's a theme reflected in the first story, which is perhaps the most haunting: Saleem Haddad's "Song of the Birds", set in what seems to be a prosperous decolonised Gaza—revealed later to be a digital simulation, a fact which young people perceive through glitches and dreams. Here, suicide is a heroic act of awaking to reality to join the intifada. No escapism allowed, the author seems to be saying. Wake up; walk into the sea.

Reminds me of what I said to an overseas friend when I discovered she was still both-sidesing the conflict. It's ridiculous, I said. But once you decide it's worth caring about, you'll be sad every day. We join the cause not out of hope for victory. Only because there's no other moral thing to do.

Toward Eternity, by Anton Hur
HarperCollins, 2024

A curious addition to this list, perhaps: an artificial intelligence-themed Korean sci-fi novel. In fact, hearing the author talk about it at the Singapore Writers Festival, I'd got the impression it was a genteel thought experiment: what if a programmer trained an AI to appreciate poetry and thereby inadvertently created a soul; and what if you created immortality by Ship-of-Theseus-ing a body, replacing its cells gradually with nanotech until none of the original remained? 

Through the early chapters, too, the story is a gentle, pacific view of the future, told by the scientists and test subjects as they experience the world in idyllic Cape Town, London, Phuket, playing cello and listening to lectures on Milton, struggling with the everyday grief of the death of loved ones, of broken marriage.

Then midway through the book, war rears its head—apocalyptic, species-annihilating war, as the same techs that our characters invented and cultivated transform (via amoral capitalism and the folly of AI leadership) into a dystopian hellscape of vat-grown soldiers committing genocidal murder. It’s a horrifying perversion of everything that came before it: the South African orchestra playing together in celebration of their rainbow democracy; the little children running on a beach, playing at destroying their sandcastle. But amidst the carnage, poetry and music rear their heads again in the coding of the AI souls, awaking some to humanity. AI destroys us, but AI also saves us, because (as Ken Liu pointed out) AI is us [5].

So yeah, I get why this book is receiving all the awards. It's so thoroughly human, which makes the shift into dystopia so much more alarming—both literary and genre, beautifully written but a breezy read (Liu Cixin could never) and also incandescently queer, with the love between women and between men (Yonghun/Prasert is a clear parallel of Hur's own love for his Thai husband) echoing down through the astronomical ages. 

Wish I'd bought a copy at the SWF bookstore in time! Instead, I've got Hur's autograph on Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, which he translated, but I didn’t even like!

A River Dies of Thirst, by Mahmoud Darwish
Archipelago Books, 2009

This was the last published collection by a man who's often seen as the greatest poet of Palestine, comprising not only mourning for the trauma of Occupation but also intra-state violence, everyday meditations on poetry and love and travel—seems he got to explore quite a few cities as a writer, even having the chance to be terribly disappointed at Derek Walcott's ignorance about the political situation of his homeland.

Something fascinating: the poet’s understanding of himself, in pieces like “Nero” and “The Essence of a Poem”, as being part of a vast literary tradition, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Naguib Mahfouz. Something tragic: the datedness of the poems—when in “Two Travellers to a River”, he writes of a French boy and Japanese girl in love in an airport, I can’t help but wonder if it’s still possible for Palestinians to voyage as cultural representatives, the way Ramallah-based Al Kasaba Theatre and Cinematheque did when they presented The Wall at the Singapore Arts Festival back in 2006. Also, the fact that he can speak of everyday life amidst despair, of the Palestinian bearing some fault for the conflict, feels out of step with the ravaging, ongoing disaster that's happening right now.

I’ve considered posting about this book before, but I’ve hesitated—these are fragments posthumously gathered from Darwish’s journals, after all, and many are prose poems, so it's unclear what's meant to be poetry, what's meant to be simply notes and meditations. But when’s a better time for fragments than the end of a year? We gather what’s fallen apart. We move forward. At least a part of us survives.

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[1] Bizarrely, there’s another 1989 memoir, also titled From Beirut to Jerusalem, authored by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. It’s execrably Zionist.

[2] “I (Still) Cannot Return.” The Palestine Poster Project Archives. https://www.palestineposterproject.org/posters/i-still-cannot-return

[3]  Ng Yi-Sheng. #YISHREADS May 2022. 27 May 2022. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2022/5/27/yishreads-may-2022

[4] Ng Yi-Sheng. #YISHREADS March 2023. 31 March 2023. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2023/3/31/yishreads-march-2023

[5]  Ken Liu. AI, Aliens & Imagination: An Evening with Ken Liu.” National Library, Singapore. 27 August 2024. My summary is here:  https://www.facebook.com/ng.yisheng.9/posts/pfbid0BFapWZq2fFmXgT8MMpdmXRbhUWiZGBBKediTRsysiRN31bUKx8qw6hjGcwY8mr5Gl

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Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

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