Island Inheritance, Mother Material
By Judith Huang
Review of Dinner on Monster Island: Essays, by Tania De Rozario (USA: HarperCollins, 2024)
In Dinner on Monster Island, a collection of personal essays, Tania De Rozario bares intimate details of a difficult adolescence and young adulthood in Singapore, interlacing memoir with pop-culture criticism and social commentary to searing effect. De Rozario, who was born and lived in Singapore for more than three decades of her life before emigrating to Canada, is an established poet and essayist with three books already under her belt. Dinner on Monster Island is her fourth, and her first book published internationally. The collection grapples with questions of inheritance—what one receives from family, even when that family is estranged, and from one’s country of origin, even when one has emigrated, and whether the more troubling of these traits make us monstrous.
Let’s get one thing out of the way—the “Monster Island” of the title is, indeed, Singapore. Although it is also Level 15 of Zombies Ate My Neighbours, a vintage Sega game in which “you get plonked in the middle of a little island armed with a trusty water gun, primed to shoot any meanies that come your way”. This gleeful juxtaposition of pop-culture horror with the very real traumas that De Rozario documents on the island state of her origin becomes a way for her to tell it slant—whether it’s fantasizing about how a Singapore overrun by zombies would expose its inequitable treatment of foreign workers or, perhaps more personally, working her way up to describing the horror of being gay-exorcized by her mother.
In the essay “Salvation”, De Rozario relates her experience of exorcism (supposedly of her lesbianism), always skirting the full description of the seven-hour ordeal she lived through and instead approaching it through the lens of cinematic horror. She replaces the images of her suffering with those of characters from pop culture: Carrie White of Stephen King’s Carrie, who returns home from destroying the school gymnasium with her superpowers to “her mother wait[ing] for her at home, knife in hand”, evoking the cruelty of De Rozario’s own mother. The effect is distancing, giving the horror of her experience a filter. And yet the final realization she has at the end of the exorcism, “You are a sinner. And you don’t care”, still lands with an exhilarating impact, even as it is superimposed on Thomasin of Robert Eggers’s The Witch floating naked among the pine trees.
The troubling inheritance from the family De Rozario escaped haunts the memoir, and this theme often yields the book’s best writing. When she writes about her family of origin, she is brutally honest, and the intimacy this honesty creates with the reader is thrilling. Perhaps one of the most affecting essays in the book is “I Hope We Shine On”, in which De Rozario addresses a half-sister she has never met but who emailed her after their mother’s death. Sharing about the depressive and suicidal tendencies that run in the family, De Rozario is both discomfited and moved by how her writing leads her half-sister to reach out. In a deeply religious family, their brother “only ever gave away two bibles while he was a missionary, but he’s given It away as a gift thirteen times. He tells her that the story is a tale of the war each of us wages against our personal demons—that demons exist and that they can be beaten”. This little found link (perhaps suggesting that a taste for horror is also inherited?) is vivid and devastating, and affirming of the will to live even in the face of the darkest of suicidal depressions.
The essays are also a precious time capsule of growing up queer, brown and fat in the ’90s and ’00s in a Singapore that was actively hostile to all three of these things. It documents the particular modalities of queerness young queer people expressed themselves in, as well as the moral panics, such as the one stirred up by newspaper articles claiming girls’ schools gave rise to lesbianism, a panic that resulted in what De Rozario nicknames the “Lesbian Elimination Squad” in her convent school. And in an important act of journalism, De Rozario looks into the Trim and Fit (TAF) program that was implemented in the ’90s and, according to accounts De Rozario collected on Twitter, amounted to institutionalized fat-shaming. This Singaporean certainly remembers TAF as a kind of hanging sword that explicitly punished difference and coded the fat body as deviant in Singaporean society.
Tellingly, De Rozario notes that “no one spoke up about the TAF club because it was not an aberration, but a norm”. As with many government programs that were introduced and discontinued without any accountability to the public about possible harms, there is little documentation about the effects of the TAF program, and De Rozario notes that “the sparse amount of content I encountered when I started my research made me doubt my own memories” — which makes this public account of the experience of being in the TAF club all the more important. It not only validates the memories of others who have been harmed by it, but also ensures it does not disappear down the memory hole.
Indeed, De Rozario leaves no stone unturned in revealing the dark underbelly of her “Monster Island”, Singapore, beneath its shiny exterior, and in so doing, she paints a discomfiting portrait of the monstrosity that is our normality. The work is at its weakest when addressing some of these issues, at times reading like op-eds on a grab bag of news headlines about Singapore, from Crazy Rich Asians to the controversy over the “gay penguin” children’s book And Tango Makes Three. De Rozario’s book is, after all, a kind of anti–love letter from an exile looking back. However, De Rozario’s escape from “Monster Island” came after two decades of diligent labor in the arts under a system that worked against anyone different, and her ambivalence to Singapore is eminently relatable as well.
The arts system in Singapore comes under examination in her essay about her research into the intersection of visual art and activism in post-2000s Singapore. For the research project, she interviewed “artists, activists and administrators whose practices involve themes or elements relating to social justice or change”. In her essay she notes that many of her transcripts were filled with the black boxes of redaction, signs of self-censorship by these artists and activists not wanting to go on record about the struggles they faced. In the final section of this essay, “Black Boxes & Penguin Pulp”, De Rozario herself presents a redacted account of her time as a Singapore writer and artist. The long stretches of black between islands of text—“The truth is, I am terrified…. I’m terrified…. I’m terrified….”—hammers home like nothing else. the terror of having to walk on eggshells around the island’s censors.
An excerpt from Dinner on Monster Island, redacted by the author.
To be an artist and writer in Singapore and to write about her often feels like one is speaking the wrong love language to an indifferent lover. Can Singapore receive this kind of love? In “Looks Like the Real Thing”, De Rozario poignantly juxtaposes the city’s appearance in the show Westworld with modified lyrics from the Radiohead song, “Fake Plastic Trees”, that soundtracks the show: “If only I could have been what she wanted”, “She looks like the real thing”. When Singapore appears like a simulation of a simulation, can a writer write about Singapore without alienating herself? And yet the love one feels for the place of one’s birth is indelible and irrevocable, and even through the hate and trauma that bleed from the pages, it is palpable in this refrain of longing. Perhaps this, too, is a kind of inheritance.
Perhaps the most disturbing observation of the monstrous in Singapore occurs when De Rozario turns her lens on its people. “How do you avoid the police when the police are everyone?” she asks, when relating an incident in which activists were caught by ordinary citizens identifying them by stalking their social media. When a former student of hers is sentenced to caning for drug trafficking, she is sickened by the public glee in the comments section of newspaper articles. She reflects on her own ingrained attitudes towards corporal punishment that arise in her head when she hears a noisy child in public. “Every time the thought surfaced, I would push it away, scold myself…but there it was again, like a reflex, this ugly voice not my own but also, all my own.” Throughout the book, she paints Singapore society as claustrophobic and punishing of difference. When the normality you inherit is monstrous, how do you survive? Is the only solution escape?
No review of Dinner on Monster Island would be complete without the mention of its final essay, “Letter to My Mother”, a true tour de force that ensures the reader is left reeling when they close the book. Saving the best for last, De Rozario offers a searing letter to her dead mother, whom she refused to see when she contracted cancer because of the abusive upbringing she had escaped as a young person. “The minute I understood my trauma had currency, you stopped being my mother and started being material. This icy attitude is how I survived”, writes De Rozario. In this moment, De Rozario reveals the monstrous inheritance her mother’s abuse heaped upon her. In precise and spare sentences, De Rozario takes a scalpel to the relationship, and the results are devastating. She also contemplates the legacy of suicidal depression when she finds a noose among her mother’s effects. Then she weeps, not for her mother, but for a lesbian couple who committed suicide by jumping from their block, “found clad in red — a message to anyone fluent in local Chinese superstition: if you died by suicide dressed in red, it meant that you intended to return for revenge”.
As we are left with the red-clad couple haunting its pages and perhaps the island she left, Tania De Rozario’s Dinner on Monster Island makes us just a little bit more uncomfortable with what we call normal in the island city that we perhaps call home, or perhaps leer at, haunting it from a distance as exiles.
This dinner is not parsimonious, it is lavish. Indeed, De Rozario says she wants “to leave a feast”; she has, and what a feast.
Judith Huang is an Australian-based Singaporean author, poet, science-fiction translator, serial arts-collective founder, and multimedia artist. Her first novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, was shortlisted for the EBFP 2017 and the Singapore Book Awards 2019. A three-time winner of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award, Judith graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in English and taught creative and academic writing at Yale-NUS College. She has also been commissioned to make VR artwork for the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) and has an interactive artwork slated to show in the National Gallery Singapore. She has published original work in Prairie Schooner, Asia Literary Review, Portside Review, Creatrix, QLRS and Cha. Her website is www.judithhuang.com.
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