5 Questions with Amanda Chong, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Daryl Qilin Yam, Joshua Ip, and Shivram Gopinath
A spoken word performer, a playwright, two poet-translators and a novelist. These 5 writers from Singapore are a cross-section of a thriving scene that's just waiting to be discovered, and they'll be speaking on 22 May at the Wheeler Centre as part of their tour across New Zealand and eastern Australia.
The evening is supported in part by Sing Lit Station, an arts charity co-founded by writers Joshua Ip, Daryl Qilin Yam and Jon Gresham. As a writers' centre based in Singapore since Jul 2016, its flagship national programmes have come to include Singapore Poetry Writing Month, Manuscript Bootcamp and Book A Writer. Its vision is to be a platform where readers and writers can meet.
Venue: The Wheeler Centre
22nd May 2024, 6.30pm
No.1
What first drew you to the form(s) you work in now, and what’s helped you sustain this initial interest?
Joshua Ip: My fascination with poetry began via music and lyric— [whether that was] through rewriting the words for showtunes and pop songs [or] messing around with satirical takes on commonly read texts. In a way that obsession with the lyrical quotidian is something I have never strayed from, and which has grown ever stronger with age.
Daryl Lim Wei Jie: I am a poet because I am a failed novelist. When I first started writing, I had the foolish ambition of writing the “Great Singapore Novel”. Then poetry seduced me and led me astray, so here I am. It perverted me, and so like every kinkster, what excites me are newer and fresher forms of perversity. I am happiest when I am in the borderlands of language, pushing the limits of sense and meaning to their breaking point.
Shivram Gopinath: I first tried my hand at something resembling poetry sometime in 2013 at SPEAK, a spoken word night at the now defunct Home Club in Singapore, organised by Vanessa Victoria and Deborah Emmanuel (ArunDitha). It was an exhilarating experience—mostly because of the rush of sharing your work and getting instant, visceral feedback from a lovingly rowdy crowd. That feeling kept me coming back. I was able to witness the spoken word community in Singapore grow to receive new work and experiments into an inviting and critical space. Venues like Blu Jaz and Artistry opened their doors to budding poets. So many poets—Marc Nair, Pooja Nansi, Jennifer Anne Champion, Stephanie Dofgoot, Nabliah Husna, Charlene Shepherdson, Ng Yi-Sheng, Marylyn Tan (just to name a few)—became co-conspirators and yardsticks simultaneously, [when it came to] evolving my own work. This playful, competitive, and ultimately caring community definitely played the biggest part in keeping my interest alive.
Daryl Qilin Yam: I have always been a reader first, writer second. When I think of why I write I think of the texts and the authors that compelled me to do so as an adolescent: Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, David Hare’s The Blue Room, and all of the Haruki Murakami and Michael Cunningham I could devour. I was bullied as a teen and sought retreat in the Kinokuniya at Takashimaya, browsing through the ficiton shelves very methodically from A-Z.
But dreaming is not the same as doing, and the doing [only] came after much encouragement from educators and editors at a handful of literary journals, but also when I chanced upon a chapbook of four, tightly interlinked stories. Without Stephanie Ye’s The Billion Shop, I don’t think I’d have the permission to write my first novel, and to think of publishing something like that in this country. While I find the novel to be one of the most freeing spaces one can inhabit as an artist, there is also much pleasure in marking out its rooms, its corridors, its many entrances and exits.
Amanda Chong: As a confessional poet, I see poetry as a cartography of moments. I love using memory and imagination to chart the inside of a single moment. The music and colour of poetic language is necessary to capture the tensions.
[My other form] Playwriting is the perfect antidote to the role of the solitary observer I occupy as a poet. I love that my script is just the canvas for other artists to practice their craft. The universe of the play is a convergence of multiple imaginations. I am always convinced that my collaborators (directors, actors, designers) make every idea I have better.
No.2
What influences and spectres have living in Singapore had over your creative practice?
AC: The pragmatism of Singapore society has led many writers to preserve our day jobs. So the spectre of living in Singapore is that I am a lawyer alongside [being] a poet and playwright. Most of my days are spent thinking in a mercilessly linear and logical way; I need to reset my brain every time I write creatively. This often means long periods of staring into space and doing nothing at all. Mentally, it’s like doing lazy stretches in my brain, so it can freewheel and make inventive associations—an agility necessary for any sort of creative work. But still the lawyer in me persists: I often find myself editing and paring down my poetry even before I have set it down on the page.
A better kind of spectre is that the scene is small enough for you to be in actual dialogue with other writers and to be familiar with their concerns. I enjoy seeing how we each contribute to the plurality of stories in Singapore. There’s also an immediacy to reader and audience reactions to your work and those moments of mutually feeling seen can be magical.
DQY: The sheer density and intensity of human relationships here is a big influence for me, as is the everyday landscape, which entire swathes of the local populace tend to disregard, but [which] I find [to be] endlessly fascinating.
And while I also find the question of “spectres” really intriguing to think about, I’ll do so by bringing up two recent instances, both located abroad, in which the state of Singapore literature was essentially denigrated to my face. The jumpscares in question came in the form of a large conference of writers in Gwangju, South Korea, when one of them asked what me what could be so interesting to read and write about my country if it was so boring for tourists. The second happened over dinner, in New York City, when I was asked to consider how works in Singapore generally “had no teeth and drew no blood” in its confrontations with politics and hard-hitting issues in everyday life. At moments like these, all I can do is smile and show people how beneficial braces have been for me.
JI: Singapore is a fine country of finely-honed constraint: a rules-based society with countless restrictions and regulations instituted by the most anal and analytical bureaucracy in the world. This is manifested in my work through engagement with poetic form—yet I like to think that writing creatively within the exacting constraints of form is my way of simultaneously embodying and satirising the experience of being a creative in Singapore.
DLWJ: A fascination with exchanges between cultures and languages and the heady melange that is often produced; monocultures and monolingualism terrify me. A deeply rooted existential fear that manifests as productivity and efficiency. An unhealthy obsession with the state. An unhealthy obsession with food.
SG: I have lived in Singapore for more than two decades. It has been [a] home away from [the] hometown. It has witnessed most of my adult life, and I, in return, have observed its growth too.
The idiosyncratic news cycle, the food (oh the food), the almost-always hilarious people, the heat, the rain, the multi-tongued manner of speech that carries so much meaning in such small parcels, the taxi uncle, bureaucracy, migrant trails, the many shades of humanity, all these patterns that point to a larger picture that is still forming in my head—what a trip! Every day in Singapore heaves with meaning, doubt, possibility, frustration, hilarity, familiarity and absurdity. It's enough to make anyone a poet, or at least a ranter of some kind.
No.3
What did you read growing up? And how did your tastes evolve over time?
DQY: I was the kid browsing all the Mr Kiasu and Chin Cha Lat comics at the Popular [bookstore] at Thomson Plaza while my family went grocery shopping at FairPrice. I was then the teen queuing up at Borders for the new Harry Potter book, and then the slightly older teen haunting the shelves at library@esplanade. None of these places exist anymore.
Now I try to read with as much openness and deliberateness I can muster. Life is short but my pile of unread books is a growing mountain in my bedroom. There are seasons, of course, when I find myself reading for the sake of supplementing whatever new creative project I’m involved in, and then alternating those long stretches with periods of pleasure, which I need like sunlight and oxygen. Then there are also the books that your friends publish.
AC: I grew up reading a lot of women writers such as Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood, but mainly poetry and novels. As an adult, I enjoy creative non-fiction. I think that a good essay bears great similarity to a good poem: both draw surprising links between disparate subjects and lead readers into their own quiet epiphanies. My favourite essayists are Leslie Jamison and Rebecca Solnit. They use their personal lives as a way of dissecting historical forces and social phenomenon, which feels both intimate and expansive.
SG: Hardy Boys, Famous Five, Secret Seven, Nancy Drew and the like were childhood staples mostly because I was the grateful recipient of hand-me-downs from older cousins (as well as Enid Blyton who seemed to be an unshakeable force in early 90s English-speaking middle class households). I would also read newspapers, architecture magazines, grocery receipts, et cetera … anything I could get my hands on in order to ‘catch up’—surely an effect that came from growing up with a feeling of lagging behind in language.
Over the years, kind and clever friends started influencing my reading, and thank god for that. I enjoy being introduced to works from their home countries. I am currently touring Indonesia (Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan) and Palestine (Minor Detail by Adania Shibli).
JI: In school I had the Anglo-American canon forcibly imprinted, and as a result Shakespeare's iambics still echo in my writing. But I preferred to read fantasy, sci-fi, and the Chinese equivalent: martial arts novels. My favorite book is still Jin Yong's《笑傲江湖》(The Laughing, Proud Swordsman), a kungfu epic that has shaped my worldview, particularly when it comes to (not) minding my own business.
DLWJ: I also loved fantasy and science fiction growing up. Looking back, I think, like so many queer, introverted nerds I was searching not just for escape, but the promise of transcending the limits of the prison that the physical body seemed to be. (In Dune, when the Reverend Mother Helen Gaius Mohiam first sees Paul Atreides, she asks, “Is he not small for his age?” In the Lord of the Rings, the diminutive hobbits hold the fate of Middle-earth in their hands.) I still love these genres, but I no longer view them as avenues of escape. Increasingly, I am taken by how horror has the ability to help us see that our ordinary lives—and the premises of the world that we readily accept—are suffused with horror. In The Thing (1982), which I watched recently, how people behave when they are faced with an shape-shifting alien turns out to be the most scary part of the movie. Humans are the most horrifying thing.
No.4
Tell us a little bit about something you’re working on at the moment.
SG: I have just finished work on the “touring edition” of Dey—my debut collection of poetry. It was brought to life by the collective efforts and patience of my dear friend and brilliant editor Divya Victor, publisher Ethos Books, and illustrator and artist extraordinaire Brenda Tan. It just had a cute launch in Amsterdam, and I am working on releasing the book in Singapore at some point this year.
DLWJ: A friend (& writer) and I went on two walks recently. In one, we revisited an old military camp where we'd both served our national service (which all Singaporean males do) at different times. In another, we walked around an area which was well-known as a cruising site for gay men. We've started writing to each other about these walks. Something is brewing, but I don't want to say more as I do not wish to jinx it.
AC: I am working on my third all-woman play, after staging the one woman show Psychobitch and a two-hander #WomenSupportingWomen. I see this as part of a trilogy exploring the stories of women in Singapore. I am currently in the process of listening to as many stories I can about female friendship. This may also be the first time I’m breaking the Aristotelian Unities in my plays. Hardly revolutionary, but I’m using this as the excuse for my writer’s block.
JI: ownself say ownself: new & selected poems is my latest collection. It gathers 44 poems from my first five collections, and 44 new pieces—mostly experiments in translation that capture my almost-completed practice-based PhD journey of the last five years. The oddest thing is that I wouldn't have referred to myself as a translator for the bulk of my poetic career; translation is something that I wandered to in the middle of the pandemic as a way to write myself out of extended writers' block through using other people's words.
Engaging with translation and expanded ways of looking at it has given me new perspective on the rest of my oeuvre: my proclivity for writing in form leading me to privilege form over meaning in the act of translation; my fascination with group-based literary activities extended to the multiple/repeated in translation; and engaging with my Chinese Singaporean heritage by shanghaiing my distant literary ancestors into a contemporary context.
DQY: A while ago, the multimedia production company Fiction Shore optioned the audiovisual rights to my novella Shantih Shantih Shantih. After some back and forth, I agreed to take a gander at adapting the work for the stage. I’m daunted (duh) but I’m also very excited: one of the protagonists in my third novel is a playwright, so I’m using this experience as a very good excuse for research.
I’m also awaiting line edits for my fourth title, a short story collection titled Be Your Own Bae. It’s forthcoming from Epigram Books later this year, I’m very very proud of this book, as it collects short stories that I’ve been publishing at literary magazines and journals for more than a decade at this point. It’s got queer folk, it’s got hipster culture, and it’s got ekphrasis. It’s got a lot of me.
No.5
Who is your favourite local Singaporean writer?
JI: The late Arthur Yap is still, in my view, the greatest poet ever to write in/around/under/about/through/despite Singapore.
SG: Waaaaayyyyy too many over the years, but if I were to hazard a temporary guess: Alfian Sa'at, Sonny Liew, Mediocre Haircut Crew, Marylyn Tan, Bani Haykal—not necessarily in that order.
DQY: The real privilege is having more than you can count with both hands. But it does bear mentioning that Be Your Own Bae would not have existed without Cyril Wong. I owe a great deal to him, both artistically and personally. I don’t make emergency calls to him any longer when a boy ditches me, but he will always listen.
AC: I’ll also cite the confessional poet Cyril Wong. I had the great privilege of having him as my mentor when I was working on my poetry collection, Professions. He taught me that the greatest act of generosity as a writer is to be emotionally honest. There’s a fearlessness and precision in that which he embodies and I admire. He raises the stakes by putting himself on the line.
DLWJ: Our late founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew is certainly one of our best-selling writers and I would love to see more discussion of his work as writing. After all, the first volume of his memoirs is titled The Singapore Story. When someone says he's written the Singapore story, I think we're entitled to ask him (and in his absence, the text) some hard questions.
There are five stars arising out of the stormy sea, and they just so happen to be Singapore’s most vital and exciting writers at work today touring Australia. At this once-in-a-blue-moon event, hear from an incredible slate of Singaporean writers practicing across a wide range of genres and artistic modalities, as they discuss their work and writing practices in a special cross-cultural exchange.
The evening will open with a performance from spoken word artist and poet Shivram Gopinath, followed by insights into the Singaporean literary scene from Amanda Chong (poet and playwright), Daryl Lim Wei Jie (poet, editor, translator), Daryl Qilin Yam (novelist, arts organiser), and Joshua Ip (poet, arts organiser). Hosted by RMIT’s Sreedhevi Iyer.