Pigs, Eagles, Archives
Robert Wood on Mervin Mirapuri
The archive is infinite. One could get lost in an unfolding of the past, in the shadows and darkness, in the dust that rises and falls, becomes mud. That sense of the world’s limitlessness is everywhere, always expanding, never ending, but here there is a different quality to the archive, one that suggests the contours of contemporary ‘Australia’, the outlines that persist even as the content seems to shift. We see it in a national—and anti-national—literature that erases the presence of writers of colour. Consciously and unconsciously, we forget, and are forgotten by, the places we call home—be that on Gadigal or Whadjuk or Yolngu Land. A great amnesia that goes with a great silence.
Through the repatriation of writing, recovering a historical sense takes on a political hue, just as we would do well to simply remember the facts of Makassar trading posts in the Top End that pre-date 1788; the presence of African convicts on the First Fleet; and the role of Japanese, Afghan and Chinese traders throughout the continent from the late eighteenth century to the present. Undoubtably, there are unrecorded others, those who evade capture, those erased altogether. The implication of those facts involves the reclamation of our ancestors, the celebration of who they are and what they brought. It also means seeing ourselves as permitted in an impermissible nation, as legitimate amidst the illegitimacy of settlement—in our work and deeds today, in our task as translators of history and writers for the future, no matter what that may look like. It includes simply reading people as diverse as Jong Ah Sing and Ralph de Boissière alongside our contemporaries.
Into that amnesia and that remembering, we can think of Asia as a special case, a place so proximate and intimate that we know it to be a sibling more than a cousin, let alone a ‘Mother England’ from a bygone consciousness. Within that 'family resemblance’, we are closer to South East Asia than most think, something truly understood only within the last generation of political discourse, with the Paul Keating-led pivot to regional engagement, or, as he put it, ‘our security in Asia not from Asia’. The bonds of affection are real, so too are what diplomats call the ‘people-to-people’ links that endure. Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Timor Leste exist within a meaningful archipelago that is present in the eyes of government and business from diplomatic visits to free trade agreements. What that means for literature, however, is still being worked out as we seek to understand a living, unfolding story that knows our presences matter as well, that knows nations are to be grappled with and not only lived in.
The same can be said for our neighbours. ‘Australia’ matters in the region even as it tries to shed its historical burdens—its ‘whiteness’—through an ongoing process, democratic and inclusive, not yet decolonial. What concerns me more than ever are the ambassadors of the written word: the people who cross borders, bringing with them languages and forms and styles that represent the practice of ‘third space literatures’. Here, I think of writers such as Omar Musa, Tiffany Tsao, Kim Cheng Boey, Eileen Chong, and many more. And yet, who do we, as Asian Australian readers, look to from a generation before, both to let go of the assumption that we are original, and to remind ourselves that we too have elders and ghosts that empower us so?
Mervin Mirapuri is one part of the answer to that question. He and his posthumous magnum opus, A Walk With My Pig, are from the infinite archive, seen by readers when we pull them from the mud and look at the texts all around us, words otherwise erased by the shouting earless we ordinarily live among. Mirapuri was born in 1945 and released one book of poetry in his lifetime with Woodrose Publications, a press he co-founded with fellow poet Chandran Nair. Moving to Brisbane in the Bicentenary Year of 1988, Mirapuri then worked in business ventures before settling into a decade of public service with the Australian Tax Office until 2011. He died in May 2020 during the height of Covid when borders were closed. A Walk With My Pig is his legacy project.
Mirapuri’s debut book, titled Eden 22, appeared in 1974, six years after he had joined the Singapore Armed Forces and four years before he left that workplace. It was the first decade of the Singaporean Republic following Independence in 1963, a world historic moment that involved race riots and other violences. Mirapuri's Eden 22 does not focus on political events, but concerns itself with everyday life, including his Christian faith. An excerpt from ‘requiem for non-creation’ reads:
from hospital windows
sick people
people sick
watching
red flowers bloom on green trees
counting
distant grey slabs of life
listening
for bus sounds, car horns
alone, alone
seeing rain fall
through holes in roofs
saying
maybe no one lives there
this evening her lover comes
he carries no red flowers
At the level of form, style and tone, the poem is typical of the book as a whole, which features direct and simple language, social observation and short lines. Here, the repetition allows us to be immersed in the rain itself—‘sick people / people sick’, ‘red flowers’ and ‘alone, alone’—and so the reader becomes aligned with the poem’s sombre tone, which concludes with that sense of loss—‘this evening her lover comes / he carries no red flowers’. ‘From hospital windows’ we sense that pervasive feeling with ‘grey slabs of life’ and ‘holes in roofs’ where ‘maybe no one lives there’. It is a poem of isolation more than solitude, of watching and seeing the world go by, a life that might be lonely. This tone is particularly significant for where Mirapuri’s work goes with A Walk With My Pig, and also allows us to reflect on what we see and read beyond parochial frames of reference, where ‘Australian’ ideas of ‘Asia’ invariably describe it as ‘dense’, ‘teeming’, ‘hot’, ‘crowded’. By contrast, ’requiem for non-creation’ is a corrective to how many see and experience Singapore through the lens of neo-colonial tourisms, one written from within banal lived experience.
Mirapuri’s second book was released posthumously in 2023, almost fifty years after his first, when he would have been 78. Found in fragments in a bedside cabinet in his family home, stacked neatly with other manuscripts, A Walk With My Pig has been a conscious act of recovery, a family-led project that repatriates a husband and father into a changed and changing Singapore, and a little later Australia. As the national daily newspaper The Straits Times reported:
Although Mirapuri’s life was split between Singapore and Australia, [his daughter] Dawn says: “At his very core, there was a proud Singaporean—and then he was a very proud Australian too. And there was no tension in that whatsoever.”
For the family, they always wanted the book to be published in Singapore, and given their father died during Covid, it functioned as a way to put him to rest, an in memoriam, published in deep collaboration with poetry specialists Ethos Books and their Pagesetters imprint. But what does that recovery mean for us here, as readers, as émigrés, as people beyond his family? What is at stake when reading A Walk With My Pig from within the Australian literary bureaucratic establishment?
As Gwee Li Sui writes, ‘He became a very different poet when he moved to Australia. His voice changed completely. He’s this very absorbent poet and the experiences all fed into his technique’. That experience, in broad terms, was migration, and with it a sense of loss, of change, of racism, of displacement, and the associated ideas we have of contemporary movement from lush homelands to deserted wastelands—a different loneliness from a different hospital window. And yet, quite simply, Mirapuri as a poet was politicised by his migration.
In that same Straits Times article, journalist Shawn Hoo writes:
A Walk With My Pig originated in an e-mail his daughter Dawn sent him when she made a conference trip across the Israeli checkpoint to the West Bank in 2005, as part of her research with the American University at Cairo in Arab women’s writing in English.
Dawn had shared her outrage at the suffering of the Palestinians with her father, and Mirapuri had replied—as he was wont to do—with an untitled poem that eventually became an integral part of the final poem.
She says: “Those initial blocks of words responded to some of those things – being in Jerusalem, seeing this injustice, just that whole juxtaposition of universes clashing, that there were different people living under different conditions. All of those truths were in that one place.”
That connects the poem to family, as mentioned before, but it also connects it to Mirapuri’s own service in the armed forces, and to the global conflict of our contemporary age. All these factors bring forth the political realities of the book. It is, however, unlike Eden 22, less a plainly spoken, directly addressed work of observation, but a single grand 100-page long poem that is ultimately allegorical.
Drawing on the Bible, on Dante, and on Whitman, A Walk With My Pig is spoken from the perspective of a dead pig. The pigs in the book wander through consumerism, adrift from real homelands; they are complex and sometimes sinister characters inside hellscapes of invasion and settlement. Violence is done by them and to them, with piercing moments on streets and in courts, deracinated contexts of suffering and mourning all around. As Mirapuri writes, ‘Monsters / Some ready to blast their heads off’. This is a place where they ‘Eat the flies and sewered rats’, where ‘War keeps me going’. Here, the harvest is sour and rotten.
The choice of the pig as the central icon of Mirapuri’s book is crucial. Australian readers will know that pigs are derogatory slang for ‘police’, but also used for that common epithet ‘capitalist pigs’. And yet, it also bears keeping in mind that pigs in China, and hence Singapore, are regarded differently—they can symbolise good fortune and wealth. In A Walk With My Pig, this lovingly tips over into excess, a caricature of what astrologers see as the fun-loving and generous sign of the lunar zodiac. The pig here, of the title, refers to the cultural mocking of authority, yet is also used, somewhat paradoxically, as a compassionate epithet. Reconciling the pig with those two cultural contexts is done with humour and rage in Mirapuri’s work, and also more clearly in their juxtaposition with eagles. Eagles for Mirapuri soar and succeed; they are noble even as they too are complicated by their complicity in a world in which commodification, hyper-productivity and transactionality debase us all. When read together, Gwee is right to say:
Mirapuri’s twin devices of pigs and eagles are references not so much to immutable types of human nature as to socio-cultural stances. His pigs suggest an unrestrained form of crass, servile existence people choose simply to “Come Sleep Walk”. Eagles, on the other hand, are expert opportunists, achievers psyched to outperform others by sensing and seizing every occasion to thrive.
This allegory matters, and ties in with a long history of animals in literature, from Aesop’s fables to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It has implications here when read alongside the complexity of tone and style in the poem as a whole. Pigs and eagles are characters in a narrative, of course, which Jonathan Chan details in a review of Mirapuri’s book in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. But they are also embedded in a linguistic world that combines high and low, Singaporean and Australian Englishes, antiquated and contemporary speech, and a range of other rhetorical styles. Of the high, which connects us to Whitman, Mirapuri writes:
I am the emptiness
of the heavens
you do not want
I am the fullness
of the clouds in colourful skies
that brings you rain
I am the rainbow
with the promise of a new beginning
That swallowing ‘I’ expanding outwards, a self as it carries the world has a sense of both ‘emptiness’ and ‘fullness’, of the whole and the part, of the new beginning. It brings with it a spiritual sense and refers to the poet’s migration too. In a specific way, it also recalls his poetry from Eden 22 some fifty years before with its short declamatory lines, yet delivered in a heightened register of feeling and hope. There are other lines of high poetic intent like this in A Walk With My Pig, which are a stark contrast to passages such as the following:
Granma there are lots of new things to mack on
Tandoori Thai Mediterranean and many many many more
All fat free with your choice of salads
all garden fresh
In this passage, the colloquial slang of ‘mack’ meets the advertising phrase ‘all fat free with your choice of salads’, which is then reinforced by the coda ‘all garden fresh’. There is slang elsewhere—‘dunnies’, ‘boobs’, ‘royal commission’, ‘jiggers’, ‘Macca’s’, ‘half-pissed’, ‘oddball’—and it often combines with pop culture: Disney, Alice in Wonderland, Backyard Blitz. As readers living in consumer societies, we recognise this phrasing from the sales pitches of late night streaming, the posters on buses and billboards, the digital tiles that want us to buy, buy, buy.
In these two primary modes we see A Walk With My Pig’s contribution to poetic discourse—the tessellation of rhetoric we recognise from elevated literary contexts alongside the debased clichés of contemporary capitalism, canonised poetry of the nineteenth century and a free verse that collects the linguistic detritus of our age. That central allegory of pigs and eagles matters for what they say about character—and indeed personhood and individual morality—but what Mirapuri gestures towards in his tone and style, in this meshing of words and phrases, is that our whole structure has indeed lost something. We have fallen from a garden of Eden 22, and with it, exiled from our selves and our historical homelands too. Mirapuri’s tone is defiant, raging, mournful, and funny by turns, but overall the linguistic style allows us to read into the text something true about the ‘double consciousness’ that accompanies migration and capitalism in settler societies. The poem, and the poet, knows that real violence is papered over by commercial public rhetorics: of our superficial leisure pursuits like shopping and eating, having sex and waiting for death while bartering on distant shores.
And so, A Walk With My Pig benefits from a contrapuntal reading—an allegory of pigs and eagles told in the tone of high poetics and colloquial politics concerning Singapore and Australia, two animals with two modes having implications for two nations. However, I want to update Edward Said’s use of ‘contrapuntal reading’ in Culture and Imperialism, where he uses that term to reinsert a forgotten Other into the ‘cultural archive’, in his case the never-mentioned sugar plantation in Antigua to explain the wealth of British aristocrats, the Bertrams, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. This is necessary to speak back to our great amnesia, but here, I also use it to complicate the relationship between Singapore and Australia beyond Mirapuri’s work. Mirapuri is, of course, a son of both nations, but more than that. This is especially true given Mirapuri’s Sindhi heritage: as a minoritised person in both locations, a person of Indian origin in Chinese and white majority societies; and even within that designation, a poet whose ancestral country spreads across the lines of British Partition between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Into that complexity of territory we can read the very bloodlines of history itself. When we go further back, it is not enough to simply add a colony into a metropolitan story like Said’s contrapuntal, but to re-route our criticism into ternary readings, into those three-way 'family resemblances’ a long way from England and a Queen’s English that was shared by colonial schoolchildren across the Commonwealth. This is where the Singlish of Mirapuri’s birth nation and the Ocker inflections of Queensland matter most of all—elevated by their very integration, a grand combination plate at the local food hall—a thali with roots in the Asian subcontinent as a whole. Perhaps then, at the end of the day, the homeland that the poet and his book belong to most of all is simply that of Poetry, a country capricious and expansive enough to imagine a community of people whose narratives do not easily fit into nationalist shibboleths, an archive of infinite expansiveness. These threads remain omnipresent in A Walk With My Pig: a reminder that poetry nourishes us no matter the trauma, provides us with life even after death, and is a place that accepts us especially when we fall. It is a relief from taxes, bureaucracy, the alienation we feel not only for leaving homelands but finding ourselves in suffocating contexts of settler colonialism, capitalism and other global ills.
I agree with Chan then that ‘the discovery and reconstruction of Mirapuri's poem is a remarkable achievement, one that Singapore, as well as Australia, will be all the better for’. We are better for it in a poetic as well as a political sense, not as discrete nations, but in the cracks within the superficial facade where we glimpse the depths of the everyday lives of poets who work among us and are too often forgotten. We are, then, better off seeking truths that can only be told in allegories, allegories which are so self-evident that we often fail to see them—a great amnesia that continues only if we let it, a mirror and a reflection, a premonition of the days to come after our own deaths on a continent that isn’t ours and will never be ours. And into that space, from the poets of old until today, we can only murmur a ‘thank you’, as if language was enough simply because it is all we have to hold onto, like pigs with turnips in mud and eagles flying high on the clouds above, both with a hope of the heavens to receive us after all these years of unseen love in an archive that was so invisible to others.
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Works cited
✷ Adam Aitken, ‘Adam Aitken Interviews Alvin Pang and John Kinsella’, Mascara Literary Review, 2011.
✷ Jonathan Chan, ‘Loss and Discovery : The Important Reconstruction of Mervin Mirapuri’s Last Work’, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, QLRS Vol. 23 No. 1 Jan 2024.
✷ Siobhan Hodge, ‘Siobhan Hodge Reviews Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia’, Cordite Poetry Review, 2010.
✷ Shaun Hoo, ‘Singapore writer Mervin Mirapuri’s 100-page poem posthumously published’, Straits Times, 2024.
✷ James Jiang, ‘James Jiang Reviews To Gather Your Leaving’, Cordite Poetry Review, 2020.
✷ Timothy Yu, ‘Timothy Yu Reviews Contemporary Asian Australian Poets’, Cordite Poetry Review, 2013.
Robert Wood lives on Whadjuk Country. He works as the Director of Writing and Publishing at the Centre for Stories—an arts non-profit that shares stories for social justice. The author of four books, Robert is a Dunlop Fellow with Asialink in 2024 and volunteers at his children's school P&C. He likes going to the beach and has ongoing family links to Singapore and South India.