TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN POETICS:

THE POETRY OF WONG MAY AND BOEY KIM CHENG

JOANNE LEOW

(B.A. (Honors) Magna Cum Laude, Brown University)

A THESIS SUBMITTED

FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF LITERARY STUDIES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND

LITERATURE

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

2010

Joanne Leow 2

Acknowledgements:

It has been a challenging journey to start my work in academia again and I

could not have done it with the advice, support and mentorship of my thesis

advisor Professor Philip Holden. I would like to thank him for his prompt

responses to my concerns and queries (even when he was on a different

continent), for his careful and precise reading of my endless drafts and for his

subtle insights on how my work could be sharper and more nuanced.

I would also like to thank Professors Ross Forman, Barbara Ryan and John

Whalen-Bridge for renewing my interest in literary studies and for bringing me up

to date with developments in literary theory and writing.

Of course, this would not have been possible without the love, patience and

the constancy of my husband Giuliano. I owe him all this and more.

Last but not least, this thesis is for my sons Luca and Dante, whom I hope will

grow up with the benefit of many homes, languages and possibilities.

Joanne Leow 3

Contents

Summary 4

Introduction 5

Chapter one:

Familial Connections 14

Wong May’s universality 19

Boey Kim Cheng’s deracination and cosmopolitanism 30

Chapter 2

Travel, Migration & Return 46

Wong May’s “lostness” 54

Boey Kim Cheng’s “between home and home” 67

Conclusion 89

References 98

Joanne Leow 4

Summary

National identity and the authenticity of a writer’s cultural and geographical

origins have been emphasized in much of the analysis of postcolonial literature. This

thesis will investigate what happens as writers travel beyond their “native” countries

and choose to disrupt the familiar patterns of exile, nostalgia and sentimentalism and

de-emphasize a sense of rootedness to a specific cultural origin. Through close

reading of the poetry of Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng through the lenses of

familial connections, and travel and migration, I intend to show how both achieve

different degrees of cosmopolitanism that have led to difficulties in critical studies of

their work. Wong and Boey show us the possibilities of a new world writing which is

not circumscribed by national or colonial rules and instead goes beyond more insular

aims of building national identity to become individual, eclectic and mobile.

Joanne Leow 5

Introduction National identity and the authenticity of a writer’s cultural and geographical

origins have been emphasized in much of the analysis of postcolonial literature. In her

book Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Sarah Brouillette notes

that this “association between an author and a national authenticity” has become “an

excessive burden within specifically postcolonial literatures, taken on as a partial

requirement of the cosmopolitan function of those literatures” (177). Brouillette’s

focus is on the global literary marketplace, but her analysis also holds true for

postcolonial literary scholarship. Indeed she sees that post-colonial authors and their

works are usually situated within “clearly differentiated political locales” and under

“the 'banners' of geographical affiliation”(145) whenever they are written about

critically. So what happens when these “banners” become irrelevant as writers travel

beyond their “native” countries and choose instead to not write about their origins or

write about them in ways that disrupt the familiar patterns of exile, nostalgia and

sentimentalism? Brouillette’s analysis of Zulfikar Ghose’s body of work seems to

suggest that because Ghose emphasizes his “deracination” and “homelessness” (153)

he has risked being forgotten critically, especially when it comes to canon formation

in the context of postcolonial scholarship. Not to say that inclusion into a canon

should be the goal of all postcolonial writers, but the question that must be asked is

why scholars and critics consistently avoid dealing with postcolonial writers who

shun their alleged responsibilities to either portray their purportedly native locales in

their writing or specifically work for or against the post-imperialist nation building

exercise.

To this end, the cultural specificities and narrative strategies of fiction

(postcolonial or otherwise) often make its intentions more transparent and more

Joanne Leow 6

readily accessible for readers and critics alike to draw conclusions on the place of

national authenticity and cultural origins in a piece of writing. Yet, this is not always

the case for poetry, which is often predicated on elusive metaphors and elliptical, non-

narrative methods. Jahan Ramazani argues that postcolonial poetry uses some of these

methods to embed a certain hybridity in the vocabulary and syntax and that this

“distills the ambiguities, tensions, and discrepant temporalities of postcoloniality”

(Ramazani 2001 184) and in doing so opens up the conversation on “aesthetic

possibility and intercultural experience in our era of transnational

imagination”(Ramazani 2001 184). My thesis, however, will take a slightly different

look at postcolonial poetry that de-emphasizes a sense of rootedness to a specific

cultural or geographical origin, with a view to examining how the oblique techniques

described above, operate to complicate and even obfuscate ideas of culture and

identity. The poets that are the focus of this thesis, Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng,

might arrive at a place open to possibilities similar to the one described by Ramazani,

but their methods are slightly different. They do not seek to embed hybridity in their

work, but instead attempt to move beyond placing culture and cultural authenticity at

the centre of it. There is little in Wong’s work, for instance, which suggests a mixing

of cultures as much as an attempt to show how their assignations can be unreliable.

As for Boey, his poetry might at first glance seem to be full of cultural markers, but

he subsumes them in his attempt to achieve personal epiphanies and refuses to burden

his poetry with a sense of cultural verisimilitude.

Although the two poets write in two different periods in Singapore history,

Wong and Boey both spent their formative years in Singapore, Wong before it gained

independence in 1965 and Boey post-independence. In my analysis of their work, I

will show how through their emphasis on familial connections, diverse settings

Joanne Leow 7

achieved through travel and the craft of their poetry itself, both poets achieve different

degrees of statelessness that have, in my opinion, led to difficulties in critical

reception of their work.

Firstly, it is important to address the genre of poetry as one where form is

central. Like with most poets, ideas in Wong and Boey’s work are enhanced and

underpinned by the form of their verse. In the case of Wong May, poetic style plays

an important role in distancing her work from the reader. Wong’s poetry is

fragmentary, disorienting, rich in double meanings and run on lines that serve to

create multiple levels of signification and ambiguities. This lack of a singular, clear

message poses problems for those who would have literature be a medium to instruct

or provide higher moral guidance. In some ways, her style recalls what formalist

Viktor Shklovsky writes about in his seminal work “Art as Device” – there he notes

that,

In our phonetic and lexical investigations into poetic speech, involving both the arrangement of words and the semantic structures based on them, we discover everywhere the very hallmark of the artistic: that is, an artifact that has been intentionally removed from the domain of automatized perception. It is 'artificially' created by an artist in such a way that the perceiver, pausing in his reading, dwells on the text. This is when the literary work attains its greatest and most long-lasting impact. The object is perceived not spatially but, as it were, in its temporal continuity. That is, because of this device, the object is brought into view. (12)

The text itself in Wong’s poetry is central and crucially aesthetic in nature. If, as

Shklovsky notes, "the language of poetry may said to be difficult, 'laborious',

impeding language"(13), then in Wong’s poetry it is this labor, this impediment that

produces a new way of looking at the world. In many ways, through her writing,

Wong pushes us to look at objects, people, places and emotions in new and interesting

ways, ones that go beyond boundaries and rules of national identity building or even

nations themselves. Boey, as well, uses self-reflexive asides, unusual choices in

Joanne Leow 8

lineation and imagery that lend themselves to novel ways of perceiving his

relationships with people and places.

At this juncture it is important to note that while postcolonial studies and

writing have often privileged hybridity and marginality, they have often done this at

the expense of reifying cultural binaries in order to create the so-called third space.

Homi Bhabha for instance, focuses on “the inscription and articulation of culture’s

hybridity”, wanting the “‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the

in-between space [to carry] the burden of the meaning of culture” (Bhabha 1994 38-

9). Yet while in theory this might be possible, many writers working in the more

recent postcolonial context continue, in practice, to write from the perspective of one

culture at the expense of others, perhaps as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin note to first

“[assert] difference from the imperial centre” (5). Local places, histories, philosophies

and languages are written with a sense of ownership and distinct belonging to a

specific geographical place. Yet in a sense, writers and scholars firmly embedded in a

particular culture are recreating imperialist and nationalist discourses that inevitably

privilege a centre – it is merely that this centre has shifted to the countries they are

writing from.

Poets such as Wong and Boey have often fallen through the cracks of

postcolonial scholarship and discourse because they refuse to be categorized in

national and postcolonial canons. If they are to be brought back into the conversation,

it becomes imperative to avoid the trap of an analysis that privileges a national stance

on literature written by a writer from a particular country. Most crucially then in this

thesis, it becomes imperative to eliminate an idea of a single origin or a fixed

definition of culture as tied to a writer. Arif Dirlik points out the pitfalls of these

ideas when he investigates the idea of what is “Chinese”, which he sees as a reductive

Joanne Leow 9

placeholder for “references to territory, nation, culture, and race, which are often

thrown together without further analysis” (226). The two poets Wong May and Boey

Kim Cheng are cognizant of these and other complications in their work, looking

beyond the particularities of Singapore to the intersections at which culture comes to

be constructed and consumed. I will show how through Wong’s musings on the

instability of origins and identity and Boey’s confabulation of memory and history

that they are, as Dirlik puts it, aware of “the constructedness of ethnicity and culture,

which also makes them available for articulation to new circumstances” (225-6). It is

the possibilities of these “new circumstances” that are the most promising as we look

for new ways to approach these writers who would see culture not as a “prison-house”

(Dirlik 226) but as a gateway to new ways of remembering, discovering and

experiencing.

What is useful at this juncture is the lens of Bruce Robbins’ concept of

cosmopolitanism – one that has nothing to do with detachment from the national, but

is instead “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a

distance” (3). Wong and Boey’s lives and works have both been international, yet

their poetry is very aware of the spaces in which the poets move in and also

emphasizes familial connections that seem in many ways to transcend simplistic

drawing of national borders. These multiple attachments preclude any easy defining

of these two poets, which might explain the lack of critical work on their poetry. I will

examine two main aspects to these multiple attachments in two parts: one focusing on

familial connections, and the other on travel, migration and return. By looking at

these elements, I hope to show how these different ways of thinking about belonging

and understanding the world might provide alternatives to a more nation-centric view

of things. After all, Robbins notes how all of us are

Joanne Leow 10

connected to all sorts of places, causally if not always consciously, including many that we have never traveled to, that we have perhaps only seen on television – including the place where the television itself was manufactured […] (3)

What Wong and Boey do then, especially with their poems about travel, is to lay bare

these multiple connections, cultural or capital, and ways of belonging that go beyond

what Robbins sees as “the childish reassurance of belonging to ‘a’ place” (3).

Whether it is Wong illuminating the contradictions inherent in the lives of Algerian

garbage men in Lyon or Boey’s unease with his struggling touristic gaze in India,

their work often throws up unexpected links that de-centre the text culturally and

complicate relationships between people and places.

I stress the importance of what cosmopolitanism in Wong and Boey’s work

can achieve and not what it is because as Robbins notes, cosmopolitanism “by

suggesting that that there is no right place to stand […] can take some of the moralism

out of our politics”(261) and instead “liberate us to pursue a long-term process of

translocal connecting that is both political and educational at once” (261). Taken in

this light, cosmopolitanism ceases to be a liability in its “full theoretical extension,

where it becomes a paraoid fantasy of ubiquity and omniscience”(260) but instead

functions as a “unrealizable ideal” and “produces normative pressure” on ideas like

binarism and hybridity. This means that the poetry of Wong and Boey does not seek

to embody the term cosmopolitanism in its strictest definition, but should be seen as a

movement towards an ideal that enables us to read them beyond the constraints of

fixed origins.

Thus, when observed, Boey and Wong’s choices of subject matter and form

frequently run counter to some of their contemporaries who see their lives and

autobiographies as illustrative of a postcolonial narrative that has national identity

Joanne Leow 11

building in opposition to a colonial legacy as a central purpose. Wong, for example,

published her poetry between the years of 1969 and 1978 and the space between these

years saw the publication of Singapore poet Edwin Thumboo’s Gods Can Die and

Ulysses by the Merlion – two poetry collections that in many ways articulate the

struggles of a young nation. Thumboo himself writes in his essay “Singapore Writing

in English: A Need for Commitment” that “[p]oetry is but one of the forces working

towards a collective psyche”(66). Making his argument with Lee Tzu Pheng’s

seminal work, “My Country and My People”, Thumboo sees poetry as a way to “add

to the sense of our destiny as a people” (66). More interesting he delineates the

different races in Singapore, Indian, Chinese and Malay – rendering them somehow

completely separate before bringing them together in an uncomplicated way as

“elements which constitute an identity, that is shored up by a historical continuity

whose force is validated by the individual imagination” (66). For Thumboo, poetry

has the responsibility to tie together these different races in a way that emphasizes

both Singapore’s public and personal history. Even though Thumboo saw it fit to

anthologize Wong’s poems in his Seven Poets, it is clear at the later time when he

writes this essay, that she no longer fits into what he feels is a canon of poetry that

could create “a collective psyche” for Singapore since she does not in any way choose

to play a part in shoring up this “historical continuity”. It is not just Wong’s subject

matter that a critic like Thumboo would hold suspect, but her very positioning as an

international writer: able to dip in and out of cultures, not necessarily exhibiting

cultural confusion but instead a clear understanding of each context in which she

writes. Indeed, in a 1977 essay available online on his National University of

Singapore website, using Wong May’s second book Reports as a specific example,

Thumboo muses on the difficulties of charting a poetic style that is “distinctly

Joanne Leow 12

Singaporean” since “contemporary poetry in English has entered a phase where the

style, the vocabulary, the urban preoccupations are international”. However,

Thumboo views this not as an asset, but as a liability – since “poets tend to establish

an individual rather than a national identity”. More significantly, the focus on

individual identity is seen by Thumboo to be the reason “we do not have

contemporary poets comparable in status to either Yeats or Eliot”. With this

emphasis, Thumboo lays the responsibility of creating a national poetry with the poet

and fails to note, perhaps, how the methods of critical responses and ways of reading

such poets also play a role in shaping how their writing is received. By insisting on

the “specific elements that give it a local habitation and a name”, Thumboo espouses

a particular sort of national poetry that precludes the appreciation of poets like Wong.

Boey on the other hand, writes in a period where Shirley Lim has noted that

The majority of Singapore English-language writers, likewise, see the domain of art as separate from the domain of the state (that is, expressed as the government as national identity or as the public), and reject any attempt on the part of the state to take literature into its sphere of influence. This autonomy, this rejection, in almost all cases has meant a separation of the themes and content of the work from the themes and content of state ideology (35).

Lim, however, sees this decision on the part of the writers as risky since by

“depoliticizing” their poetry they risk becoming irrelevant, “in a society where many

social features have become imbued with political significance” (Lim 37). I am not

suggesting that Boey is “depoliticized”; the poems that he does centre on Singapore

are imbued with a critique of its rapid modernization, which he feels has come at the

detriment of its history and people. However, as in Wong’s case, it is Boey’s

positioning which renders him suspect. Even before the poet migrated to Australia,

Boey’s outsider view of Singapore gives his poetry a detached style that sits

uncomfortably with those who would reify a national literature. Boey, now especially,

working occasionally on Singapore but distinctly apart from it, provides a jarring

Joanne Leow 13

clarity of view on Singapore’s rapid development that is often out of step with the

city-state’s view of itself. This sense of detachment sets him apart from other

Singapore poets like Alfian Sa’at and Cyril Wong who while are decidedly not of the

mainstream still embed their work deeply in the context of Singapore in terms of

setting, subject and point of view.

More generally speaking though, the position of the English-educated poet in

Singapore has been seen as suspect by some; Koh Tai Ann has written about his or

her alienation, specifically how he or she “cannot deny or escape the complicating

fact that he knows no other language or literature better than the English – otherwise

he would not be expressing himself in English” (17). Koh sees these writers as

embedded, albeit in a “troubled way” in English traditions in a time when “the

internationalizing of English has brought in its wake the further burden of a rich

cosmopolitan body of work and tradition” (17). Koh’s fear (like Thumboo’s) is that

the writer will be subsumed into a “neutral ‘international style’ […] and for the

country, a fear that writers should cease to belong to the national community, but

would harbour suspect international affiliations” (17). However, Koh’s essay does not

fully address the problematic of why such poets or writers should be suspect.

Furthermore, what is objectionable here is the idea of the “neutral ‘international

style’, the existence of which is difficult to prove. Through this thesis I will argue

that even though Boey and Wong have rejected a nationalistic way of looking at the

world, their poetry is no less rich, specific or unique. The two poets’ cosmopolitan

world-views lend themselves instead to a new way of looking at world literature – one

that does not have to be burdened with cultural origins.

Joanne Leow 14

Chapter one: Familial Connections

I will fall apart

I will become so many dogs dogs of all directions I will breed a whole race of lonely children, Each dog a judgment

- “ The Judge”, Wong May The idea of family is intimately connected to a sense of place. In most cases,

when one writes about home, one cannot help but write about family. The converse is

also true, with the concept of the family being used as an allegory for larger social

communities, specifically nations. One thinks of the use of words like “fatherland” or

“motherland” which allude to patriotic and nationalistic impulses in both colonizing

and colonized countries. This preoccupation with the family and its linkages to the

nation are further complicated and diversified in the literature of post-colonial

countries. Major literary works in the period leading to and post-independence refer to

the family and place a great significance on the social unit. For example, Chinua

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1959), posits the African family as the bearer of

traditional pre-colonial values, while Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)

takes the vehicle of an Indian family saga to work through how these relationships

relate to the larger socio-political climate of the post-colonial period in India. Here

family is inextricably linked with country and culture. There are, of course, a vast

number of ways and complexities in which the family has been explored, yet one is

struck by its repeated use as a way to position postcolonial literature in a particular

cultural context.

Before continuing, it is useful to clarify that I use the hyphenated version of

the word “post-colonial” to simply refer to a historical period after previously

colonized countries gained their independence. Moving on to the unhyphenated term

Joanne Leow 15

“postcolonial” is to talk about a movement in literature and literary studies that

examines the colonial relationships of power and seeks to dismantle or complicate

them. Ania Loomba cautions however that,

The word 'postcolonial' is useful in indicating a general process with some shared features across the globe. But if it is uprooted from specific locations, 'postcoloniality' cannot be meaningfully investigated, and instead, the term begins to obscure the very relations of domination that it seeks to uncover (19)

With this idea of specificity in mind, I want to turn my attention to the context of

Singapore and its postcolonial literature. Most writers in Singapore are similar to their

peers in other post-colonial nations in the sense that they see their families as cultural

repositories and chronicle the struggles of the family in the context of the great

changes taking place in the socio-political fabric of newly independent nations.

However, the work of the poets that I am examining, Wong May and Boey Kim

Cheng, represents a departure from the concerns of their peers, in ways that preserve

the bonds of family but release these ties from a single culturally specific context. I

want to examine a certain universality in these works to look at a post-national, post-

postcolonial way of understanding Wong and Boey. This is not postcoloniality

“uprooted from specific locations” as Loomba fears, it is not “uprooted” but instead

able to exist in multiple locations and contexts that do not lose their individual

specificity. For the most part, Wong and Boey write about culturally nonspecific

contexts that focus our attention on familial relationships instead of embedding these

relationships in a particular place. This leads to an intensification of focus on familial

relationships, as cultural and national authenticities become tools in a search for a

cosmopolitan identity.

In order to better understand why the two poets’ works make a case for a

different look at family and the postcolonial context, it is important to examine the

writings of some of Wong and Boey’s peers. From Stella Kon’s play Emily of

Joanne Leow 16

Emerald Hill (1989) to Robert Yeo’s poem “Malacca Grandmother” (1999), to even

more recent works like Koh Buck Song’s poem “Ah Por” (2001) and Alfian Sa’at’s

“Minority Report” (2001) – the Singaporean family is always written about in a

specific cultural way. In earlier works like Yeo’s “Malacca Grandmother”, Yeo’s

grandmother is seen as “the sole remaining representative” (103) of a time that has

passed. He sees her departure for Southampton as detrimental to a sense of “history,

name and wealth” (103) that is conjured up by descriptions of “strangely

antique”(103) ethnic clothing and historic spaces. Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill

is a record of both a woman’s life in the second half of the 20th century in Singapore

and a rich document of the social and cultural elements of the time. The eponymous

character of the play is a matriarch whose identity is inseparable from the trappings

and mores of “a modern Nonya” or Peranakan woman. More contemporary works of

poetry like Koh’s “Ah Por” continue to use fixed cultural details to define and mourn

the passing of a certain cultural authenticity embodied in an elderly family member1,

now the only lights you leave behind are memories of fragrant face powder, snow mountain pallor, smoothening the years, your standard samfoo of Samsui simplicity, and scent of medicated hairpins (57) One of Singapore’s most successful younger poets, Alfian Sa’at, also uses cultural

embeddedness for social critique in “Minority Report,” a poem in which he

characterizes his parents by details like his mother’s preoccupation with the Muslim

1 While Boey Kim Cheng has written two poem “Remedies” and “Her Hands” in his most recent collection of poetry After the Fire about his grandmother that echo Koh’s sentiments in “Ah Por”, I would argue that these are uncharacteristic pieces that do not represent the larger trend in his work, which is a more complex rendering of the relationship between culture and family.

Joanne Leow 17

head-dress and his father’s fixation with finding successful Malay scholars. Alfian

hints at the fact that he recognizes the problems with these fixations, seeing minority

Malays as “too eager / to recognize ourselves” (20).

This is but small selection of Singapore literature from this period – yet there

is a definite thread of the familial coupled with a cultural specificity that runs through

much of the work. Angelia Poon sees this idea of a specific cultural and geographical

location as “more than mere passive or neutral physical setting, place works with the

above writers’ evocation of the past to constitute the cultural specificity and identity

of particular individuals and social groups” (372). Poon sees Singapore writers as

engaged in “the production of locality” which uses geographical space as a starting

point to create a powerful imaginary. I posit that pursuing this strategy of cultural

specificity, there is no more affective and logical way than to associate place with

family and familial connections and that this has been seen in a great deal of

Singapore’s postcolonial literature.

As for the two poets that are the focus of this thesis, Wong May and Boey

Kim Cheng, they use the trope of the family in their work in unexpected and

unsettling ways. Wong delinks her familial connections from cultural specificities

while Boey emphasizes a deracination from his past and family due to a rejection of

their ideals and the physical disappearance of cultural and geographical spaces, which

only continue to exist in his unreliable memory. Cultural references are present in the

work of Boey and Wong (although they can seem to be particularly rare in much of

Wong’s work), but these cultural references are not central to the poems and the

works do not draw on these references to attain authenticity.

By moving beyond reinforcing a sense of cultural rootedness in their poetry,

Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng depart from the writing of their peers. Wong’s

Joanne Leow 18

poetry is more universal and Boey’s work is often a conscious rejection of an easy

understanding and acceptance of one’s cultural positioning. Both writers are

cosmopolitan and transnational. Their writing reflects a lack of connection to one

particular tradition or origin, and instead, either diminishes any connection at all or

draws on multiple connections that carry equal weight. Wong and Boey’s

relationships with their ancestors, mothers, fathers and offspring become ways for

them to either create bonds that become universal to the point of excluding the

culturally specific or repudiate existing cultural connections by creating and

imagining new ones that lead to a multiplicity of attachments. No production of

“locality” occurs in the poems that I look at in this chapter, at least not a locality that

exists geographically or that is easily recognizable. In Boey’s poems about his family,

spaces are opened up, but these are emotional, imaginary spaces, sometimes as

confabulations of history and memory or as a hybridized set of possibilities for the

future. In Wong’s work, we look into a universal space, devoid of a cultural compass

– an almost liberating experience.

The critic Carine M. Mardorossian writes about the “shift from exile to

migrant” which challenges the binary logic of “here” and “there”, between a

homeland and a new country. Mardorossian notes that by emphasizing “movement,

rootlessness, and the mixing of cultures, races, and languages”, a migrant’s identity

takes on a certain element of ambiguity and flux; she writes “her identity is no longer

to do with being but becoming” (16). This certainly seems to be the case for both

Wong and Boey, as they no longer look at their past or indeed their forebears as a

“fixed and comforting anchor” (Mardorossian 16), but as I have suggested a space

open to the possibilities of confabulation and free from the burden of cultural

specificity. While Mardorossian writes about what she calls a “paradigmatic shift”

Joanne Leow 19

from exile to migrant primarily through the narrative strategies in Hispanic American

fiction, Wong and Boey’s poetry also presents us with a different methods by which

ideas of family can be delinked from a culture. In the particular case of the family, it

is useful to observe how Wong and Boey scrutinize their relationships with family

members and familial history by using poetic techniques like unusual imagery and

lineation, which force a sense of defamiliarization on the reader, to either viewing the

idea of family in a way that removes it from a cultural context completely or setting it

against the context in sharp relief.

Wong May’s universality

In this section I will be looking at Wong’s poems on her family in

chronological order to better discern the development and evolution of her treatment

of the theme. Wong’s poetry is full of wordplay and self-contained, deeply evocative

images, which often resist easy interpretations. Some of her more immediately

accessible works, however, are about familial relations and a sense of her ancestry.

Wong’s mother features more prominently in her entire oeuvre than her father, with

all three of her books dedicated to her. The most directly personal poems that Wong

writes (of which there are only a few) are also about her mother. Her poems from her

first two books appear to address the idea of family and specifically her mother with

greater urgency than her last book, which was written after a longer hiatus. What is

problematic for the postcolonial or nationalist reading here is Wong’s lack of

contextual specificity. But it is precisely through the absence of this specificity that

Wong manages to write a poem that speaks to multiple saudiences

Many of Wong’s early poems use deceptively simple images to portray

familial connections and histories. This is particularly apparent in her first book of

Joanne Leow 20

poetry, A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals, which has poems like “History”. The poem

opens with a scene of snow at a door, an ephemeral image that plays with our

perceptions of permanence, since the snow can melt without leaving a trace. The

poem expands this to more consequential statements that culminate in our

understanding that history has become a series of lies, demonstrating its fallibility.

The unreliability of the past is extended to something as fundamental as biological

origins: “[t]he lie then / I’ve got a mother”. This is taken further in a disorienting turn

in the poem where child is conflated with mother and the space between different

generations appears to collapse. This early poem is crucial in making sense of Wong’s

relationship with the idea of the past and of her relationship with her family. The

confusion that manifests itself in this poem is a way of coming to an acceptance that

inheritance, heritage and the past are in some sense arbitrary and not predestined and

imbued with a greater meaning.

This theme of detachment forms the familial and the tone of bewilderment is

continued in the poem simply entitled “Your Umbrella, Daddy”,

Among other things I totally lack this propensity of a young monkey to hold on to its old. At high noon I thought I could walk the rest of my life with out history geography biology, a man in his net weight with out shadow. 30 years later I ran into a ditch heard 3 bones broken The man helped me out said it’s your umbrella Daddy (18)

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By beginning the poem with a distinctively de-romanticized view of familial

attachments, the poem suggests that familial relationships are biological, instinctual

and universal. The work appears to equate “3 bones” with history, geography and

biology, three words which stand in for family in the most complete way and yet are

referenced in a universal way without a link to a specific culture. However, she also

notes her inability to “hold on to [her] old”; she does not want to be “shadow[ed]” or

weighed down by the past or her ethnicity, even though she knows that these things

shield her from some of the challenges in life, as an “umbrella” of sorts. This short,

deceptively simple poem forces the reader to pause at Wong’s ambivalent conclusions

and pushes them home with the striking visual image of an umbrella, signifying a past

and a belonging that adds weight and encumbrance, something that both protects and

yet obscures. Because of the elliptical nature of this and other poems, multiple

readings are required to come to any interpretation of the work; a style that echoes the

actual complexities of pinning down the significance of one’s history, geography and

biology and refuses to settle for easy, comfortable conclusions about these issues.

Wong’s other poems on the subject of family suggest that she sees her poetic

persona as a starting point where meaning and history explode into something that is

far more complex and nuanced than a linear family tree. For example in the same

book, she writes in another poem “The Judge”:

Who goes on watch tonight? I’m here to judge My father the lonely man My mother the lonely woman – People who have never met and are harsh on each other. I tell you before daybreak I will fall apart I will become so many dogs dogs of all directions I will breed a whole race of lonely children,

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Each dog a judgment (6). Wong here focuses on the arbitrary tragedy of her parents’ union as she sets the

poem’s persona firmly above them, as a “judge”. The poem discusses the

consequences of this loveless relationship: a multiplicity of identities, “dogs of all

directions”, “a whole race of lonely children”. The subject confusion in these lines is

particularly poignant; “dogs” and “children” become interchangeable even as they

signify both the persona of the poem and her progeny. Ironically, the repetition of “I”

ultimately seems to suggest a fixed identity that is illusory.

The major relationship that is returned to continually in Wong’s poetry the

bittersweet and complex bond between mother and child and consequent meditations

on mortality:

Mother, this is not even it. If I say the day is Beautiful, it probably is. I don’t affect it. Nor Does it affect me. If I say I love you, love You, I probably do. I cannot live with Out you, yet I do. Failing that, it doesn’t Make me feel the grapes are less sweet Or cool. The insignificance, mine. After yours Or anybody’s funeral, the world is not made Ugly for me, it is (11).

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This particular poem, “A Letter”, infuses these musings on death and maternal

attachment with a pragmatic sense of a lack of control. Wong does not want to

pretend to be responsible for creating a narrative about her mother’s death, and thus

she eschews a controlling sense of the situation that might make sense of the tragedy

of “yours/Or anybody’s funeral”. Instead, Wong conveys her “insignificance”, her

inability to “make” a world ugly, since it already “is”, and “I don’t affect it”. This

surrender of authorial control over her narrative is important, because it shows

Wong’s understanding of the reality of her mother’s impending death on multiple

levels. Even her choice of using couplets in run on lines also reinforces this

impression as she breaks and opens up meanings in each pair of lines, “I cannot live

with/ Out you, yet I do.” This poetic technique punctuates the reading of the poem,

forcing the reader to stop and consider the multiple ways of understanding each line

and emphasizes the idea that a singular meaning would be suspect. Wong has an

unwavering understanding of her context in a world that cannot be altered by her or

her writing, it is a world that she keenly observes, where the non-specificity of her

context is also one that is universal.

Continuing to write about her mother in the poem “Dear Mama”, Wong sees

herself as “a grafted green”, using an image of biological descent that permeates the

entire work:

By the same token I leave you, I leave myself (with you). The going forth henceforth a grafted green fit to live or die. By the same token I leave you living, dying, or unfit for both, waiting

Joanne Leow 24

for my return: Your big eyes, short arms that I inherited, failed. (59) Wong uses a familiar trope of parental-child separation, but detaches the reader ever

so slightly by using the startling image of the “grafted green”. The image conveys the

feelings of liminality; between attachment and separation from the maternal (“… I

leave you, /I leave myself (with you)”) and between life and death: the “waiting” that

is in the middle. Wong returns to the idea of biological inheritance at the end of the

poem “Your/ big eyes, / short arms/ that I inherited, failed” and these disembodied

body parts seem to echo the image of the plant that pervades the poem. This piece,

like so many of Wong’s other poems, bears repeated reading in spite of its cryptic

restraint. Yet, it does not readily yield the culturally specific reading encouraged by a

conventional postcolonial analysis. Wong’s relationship with her mother is not

allegorized to a larger social context; it simply is what it is.

Wong’s portrayal of the familial is sharpened in her second, arguably best,

collection, Reports. In the poem “To My Mother”, the themes of mortality and

detachment remain and are more clearly articulated:

Does the hair feel pain Do the fingernails complain All right pain is what connects me to myself but your pain is yours It separates us as it goes on I realize perhaps it only means to prepare us each separately for death (108) Wong’s characteristic philosophical tone is again simple in its choice of words but

deceptively so. She plays with the repetition of key words like “pain” and “separate”,

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and brings them back in slightly different permutations that play out almost like

musical variations on a theme. Her line breaks are significant as she uses form to echo

meaning, “but your pain is yours / It separates us”. This poem starts out fairly

coherently as Wong writes about the inherent alienation of the human experience with

lines like “How much of you has failed / to reach me” and “But already I understand

less and less / I can separate nothing from nothing”. Her persona yearns for clarity of

vision and simplicity when it comes to her relationship with her mother, “May you at

last occur to me / as a glass of water by my bedside / Yes we have loved”. The poem

reaches a tipping point when Wong finally gives the reason for her mother’s pain:

“Beginning September / I should be expecting your cancer report / which I will never

get”(108), the implication being that her mother will be dead by then. At this point,

Wong begins to push the repetition in the poem further, consistently beginning each

sentence in the poem with “I”, emphasizing the inability to understand anything from

any perspective but her own, leading to an almost litany like effect:

I remember as a child I began to be aware of language only when I began to be aware painfully how I cannot write without a pen about you Yes, even about you I will perhaps never write about you to this day I consistently write about other things I wish so often love were otherwise I wish so often to completely enter the bark the stone to part-take

Joanne Leow 26

a scheme so vast, so minutely hopeless perhaps one does not even have to call it love I go on (109) The spareness in Wong’s poetic language and her use of monosyllabic words and

uncomplicated phrasings bring home the universality of losing a parent, of the

helplessness when we are confronted by the death of a loved one and the tragic

inability of language to convey the totality of human experience. The introduction of

the physicality of objects like “bark” and “stone” in a poem about abstract emotions

serves here to draw a reader to the material reality of Wong’s desire to comprehend

her relationships. Further, the poem is stripped of any references to culture or

ethnicity; it is not mediated by any of these contexts and this makes it a more

immediate, visceral experience.

In contrast, one poem that does insert some cultural context is “Letter to the

Dark”, a hallucinatory, nightmarish vision of pregnancy, progeny and mortality. Yet,

it is a cultural context that does not anthropologize the subject matter; the reader has

no sense that he or she is entering a “different” culture. In the poem, Wong makes

references to “the young of a fox”, “a phoenix” and the idea of “break[ing] out of my

form”(92). The lines about foxes call to mind the Chinese myths of female foxes who

disguise themselves as women to lure unsuspecting suitors and the image of the

“phoenix” has both Western and non-Western meanings. However, Wong’s poem

does not seek to alienate a more general audience; there are no overt cues to

traditional rituals or myths, or even italicized words to signal a translated sentiment or

idea. Someone without any prior knowledge of Chinese culture would still be able to

negotiate this poem without a cultural guidebook. The poem is a disturbing meditation

on cycles of life and the inevitability of loss, “as I weep over my parents / I weep over

Joanne Leow 27

my children now / the rows of teeth in the churchyard / and their slow decay” (93).

Wong also returns repeatedly to the idea of deracination or as she puts it “lostness”,

The space that I am I still cling to: my lostness where the chromosomes dance like small bent nails the music of the sad cosmos and its ruined stars I am stretched upon nothing. (93) These lines create a vision that is simultaneously on a microscopic and cosmic scale,

revealing how Wong sees her deracination as fundamental from the “bent nails” of

her biological makeup to the cosmos in general. The alliteration between

chromosomes and cosmos cannot be accidental, given her generally careful choice of

words. It is this leap that confirms, then, that Wong is not just concerned with the

personal loss here – it is a larger existential “nothing[ness]” or “lostness” that

preoccupies her, something that is both more biologically fundamental and universal

than culture or ethnicity.

Wong seeks to extend this sense of physical, cultural and familial

displacement that runs in an unbroken fashion throughout Reports to describing an

emotional and intellectual state as well. In the final poem “Blessings” she starts with

the lines “I run cold water/ to forget everything I have learned” (139). This clean slate

is one that is devoid of acquired culture, of history and literature. The poem instead

values the moment “a bird’s shrill voices/ say more than all the poets / through the

centuries / put together” (140) and it is one of the clearest instances where there is a

rejection of a literary canon, “the poets through the centuries” and instead a nod

towards life as it is experienced. Going on to paint a slightly ghostly tableau through a

bathroom window, where “[t]he houses take on a/ chalked look. The washing/ on the

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clothesline dances/ like apparitions”(140) and the poem ends Wong’s second book

Reports with this sinister vision:

I see my grandchildren. Nothing is stranger than Spring. I smell blood in the wind. I accept the offerings of one who died for me in the Tang Dynasty. I do not know him. I do not know him. (140) In an almost prophetic voice, Wong’s poetic persona envisions progeny and yet finds

that this “Spring” is strange. She also harkens back to her ancestors and yet, quite

honestly ends with the repetition of “I do not know him”, as who can truly claim to

“know” one’s familial ancestry and history? In doing so, Wong shows up the

arbitrariness of inheritance and cultural belonging; she highlights the gulf that exists

between personal experience and the historical past of the “one who died for me / in

the Tang Dynasty”.

In her third and last book Superstitions, Wong barely touches on the subject of

her family at all, instead the main theme in the collection is travel, which will be

addressed in the next chapter. However, one vivid portrait of her mother stands out in

the poem “Homage to Matisse”, where it is as if the poet has thrust us into a canvas

that becomes an impetus to her memory of her late mother. It is a still-life, a

retrospective glance at her childhood memory of her mother:

So much of Matisse looks like furnishing fabrics the sea-green & oleander- reds of the sofa & rattan chairs of my childhood & is connected with my mother’s youth her effusion & regal beauty

Joanne Leow 29

her astonishing forehead radiance of the brow candid eyes at ease with each object one arm resting on the chaise-longue while some large leaves, as on an espalier, look on -- of a hushed green) that I stood to-day in the museum gazing into that interior as if her happiness belongs there. (109) The poem’s unusual spacing and lineation forces the reader to pause to absorb the

tableau and the careful choice of words that create it. Words like “regal”,

“astonishing”, “radiance”, “espalier” allude to a classical setting and of Western

traditions in portraiture painting. Wong is paying homage to Matisse not necessarily

for his own skill, which “looks like / furnishing fabrics”, but because he connects her

to the memory of her mother’s happiness. The physical painting becomes mere

“furnishing fabrics”, whose “sea-green & oleander- / reds” bring to mind pieces of

furniture. The real painting here in this poem is the portrait of Wong’s mother. Wong

distances herself from this fairly emotional revelation by placing herself firmly

outside the frame and by sharply acknowledging, in the penultimate line, that it is an

illusion that her mother’s happiness could belong in a canvas by Matisse.

At this juncture, it is important to consider why then, in spite of her obvious

masterful command of the poetic medium, Wong May has not been the subject of

more critical studies by both Singaporean and international scholars. An attempt to

locate secondary sources of research on her only turns up two brief works. A negative

review of Superstitions by Valerie Barth seems to undervalue Wong’s love for

wordplay by paradoxically calling her writing “irritatingly circumloctionary” and

“prosaic” (100). Robert Yeo has also provided a rare close reading of one her earliest

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poems “The Shroud”, yet it is a work that is not illustrative of her later pieces, which

have a greater sense of complexity and nuance. The same source that gives these

citations lists thirty-three studies on Edwin Thumboo, most of them in-depth analyses

of large selections of his work2. While Thumboo is undoubtedly the more prolific

poet, I believe this is a valid comparison given the similar time frames that Wong and

Thumboo were writing in and given Wong’s astute command of the medium. Was her

choice to write in what Thumboo would call the “creeping internationalism of

idiom”(63) the reason? Wong writes about maternal attachment and descent in a

deeply personal voice, without any hint of the national or postcolonial, and when she

does write about ideas of belonging and rootedness, she tends to emphasize the

opposite. This undoubtedly poses problems for scholars who might seek to position

Wong within a postcolonial Singapore canon whose aim, as Thumboo notes is to

create myths that work towards a collective psyche. Yet, I believe Wong’s work is

crucial in showing how the family can be delinked from the contexts of nation and

culture.

Boey Kim Cheng’s deracination and cosmopolitanism While Wong May erases place in her poetry to focus on the timelessness of

relationships, Boey Kim Cheng inserts place into his work, but it is always secondary

to his familial relationships. Boey does connect certain narratives of his family

members with Singapore’s history and progress, especially in his earlier work, yet

these only serve to re-emphasize his feelings of detachment and ultimately

2 The source that I am citing is the National University of Singapore’s library website <http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/bib/singlit/poetry-indiv.html#Wong%20May>. 2 October 2009. While it is certainly not exhaustive, it does provide an interesting observation on the dearth of secondary sources on Wong May. Further research into the matter on my part only found three more fairly brief studies on Wong May, by Elizabeth Su, Shirley Lim and Anne Brewster.

Joanne Leow 31

deracination from Singapore. Boey very self-consciously sees himself as an outsider,

an interloper who has come not to belong where he was born and raised. This tactic

makes Boey’s work significantly different from Wong’s when it comes to their focus

on their relationships with their immediate kin.

In this section I will look at Boey’s poems about his family in a chronological

fashion – starting with poems from his collection Another Place, from which poems

have also been collected in Boey’s volume of selected and new works After the Fire.

Boey’s early poems about his family often present conflicted relationships with his

immediate family members, set in the context of his position as an outsider in the

Singapore context of material gain and pragmatism. Unlike Wong’s poems, Boey’s

work seems at first to be grounded in the Singapore context through his family, yet

closer examination reveals that Boey uses this position to firmly reject his roots and

open up new geographical and cultural horizons that go beyond what he feels are the

narrow constraints of Singapore life. I will go on in my analysis to look at his work in

After the Fire, published in 2004 where Boey’s later poems show a definite evolution

in his view of the family; in contrast to the earlier more conflicted tone, the poet’s

later work speaks of his familial relationships in a tender fashion and opens up a

world of memory with his father as the central figure. While there is some reference

to place in these poems, Boey here is more concerned about giving an impressionistic

vision of what has been lost through the urban development in Singapore and using

this to create an imaginary, emotional landscape which serves to foreground his

central theme of familial loss. Boey, however, does adopt an optimistic tone when he

looks forward in his relationship with his daughter. Arguably, his most recent poems

about her anticipate the hybrid spaces and histories that she will inhabit and create.

Joanne Leow 32

Boey’s first references to his family are mostly about being in conflict with his

relations. In Boey’s poem “Letter to my Brother” for instance, he positions himself

firmly in flux, “halfway through now / in life and travel”, traveling almost aimlessly

and writing maniacally, “gush[ing] forth like mountain streams, / words tumbling

over one another, a lunatic / with cataracts of thoughts” (161)3. In contrast, Boey sees

his brother as having taken the ideal route to success in the eyes of the nation of

Singapore:

Yes, I can see you now. A race brilliantly run. A job, wife and home for trophies. You trained hard for all that. I have been running too. A difficult race though. While you clock the track they laid for you, I am doing it cross-country. I rest when I please. Enough of these odious comparisons. (161) Boey uses the metaphor of a race on a closed track to emphasize the competitiveness

and rule based nature of his brother’s life, which is full of expectations and rigid

measures of success. This is also borne out as well in the short sentences that this

verse is composed in, full of abrupt breaks that seem to draw on a quiet sarcasm. The

tone of the poem mocks his brother, and yet Boey frequently undercuts himself as

well. He shows up what he feels is the weakness of his own poetic metaphors,

“enough / of these odious comparisons”, and in doing so disorients the reader.

Further, he reveals his own follies, writes about the realistic nature of his travels and

notes his inability to automatically absorb cultures and countries: “This note rings

false. The truth is / such beauty leaves me cold. / Like churches with shut gates”

(161). The poetic persona here becomes an unreliable voice, highlighting its own

3 Unless otherwise noted, references to Boey’s poems will be taken from After the Fire: New and Selected Poems. Singapore: Firstfruits, 2006.

Joanne Leow 33

weakness and creating believably complex and ambivalent emotions within the

context of the fraternal relationship described in the poem. Another point of note is

how Boey does not use specific cultural markers in referring to his brother; for

example, his final line “Hope you keep the flag flying at home” (163) is universal

enough to be understood by readers without prior knowledge of the Singapore

context.

The companion piece to this poem, entitled “Letter to His Mother” is clearer

in its conclusions. Evoking travelers of every era, but especially Bruce Chatwin,

whose influence permeates his oeuvre, Boey tells his mother that he has no desire to

return:

No thoughts of home for me here. All roads homeward peter out in the desert, like footprints emptying into the sea; tides of sand erase the tracks of our past, give rootlessness its proper place, lead to beginnings where no paths exist, and short of turning us into mystics, transform emptiness from curse to gift. (164) This landscape of liberating emptiness and a-historicity where there are no signs to

follow or marks to leave is gravely contrasted with the constriction and

claustrophobia of what Boey’s mother seems to represent,

This landscape loves everything in it, yet does not cling to them, the way we hoard our feelings, freeze them in fixed deposits, expecting rich returns. That is to say. I am unrepentant, and celebrate my departure everyday. You held me so tightly I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t grow. I was a plant that resented being potted on your sill, reviled the constant shower of affection, the unfailing attention. I didn’t just want to lean into the light. I wanted to run with it, pace it across the globe, reach its very source. (164)

Joanne Leow 34

Boey uses the vocabulary of finance to illustrate family relationships in Singapore, a

nod to the country’s capitalist leanings. Words like “hoard”, “freeze”, “fixed

deposits” and “rich returns” add texture to his descriptions of these relationships,

crucially though, without adding a layer of cultural detail. Coincidentally, like Wong,

Boey uses the metaphor of plants to describe his relationship with his mother. Wong’s

images of “grafted green” hint at the inherent alienation at the heart of familial

relationships. Boey on the other hand uses the conceit of the potted plant, unable to

thrive within the confines of his familial life. Again, these images are removed from

culturally specific ideas. Unlike Wong, whose mother is completely unconnected

with ideas of nation and place, Boey’s mother appears for a moment to stand in for an

authoritarian Singapore that Boey ostensibly rejects,

I didn’t want to be useful, at least not for a term, until I knew what that meant. I wanted to go without the privileges of name, wanted to lose the country’s damaging interest in everybody’s welfare. (164-5) In lines that give new meaning to the term “motherland”, Boey also draws the

connections between the idea of a family “name” and citizenship. The rest of this

particular poem suddenly becomes fragmented and disjointed. Boey writes

increasingly shorter stanzas that appear to have little or no relation with one another.

In a way, the disorientation in the poem can be read as Boey’s ambivalent relationship

with his mother. While he certainly ties his mother to Singapore, he is also capable of

looking beyond its borders to draw more general conclusions about freedom,

capitalism and environmental degradation, and his place in the world, “swinging in a

hammock / hung in the sky / between singing stars”(165). Boey opens up the poem’s

and his own possibilities beyond the claustrophobic confines of his mother’s and

country’s expectations.

Joanne Leow 35

After these references to his family early on in his poetic career, Boey does

not return to the theme of familial relationships until his poems in the volume of new

and selected poems After the Fire. While his earlier poems about family eschew direct

cultural references for the most part, Boey’s later poems about his father and his

daughter do situate his subjects. However, these are spaces that are not burdened with

excessive or essential cultural detail. Instead, Boey’s poems about his father recreate a

past imaginatively, taking license with details in order to flesh out his father’s

personality and life, while the poems about his daughter open up imagined pasts and

futures that are cosmopolitan and hybrid.

At the time of the publication of After the Fire, Boey had been in Australia for

about twelve years and his new work centres on the family, with the majority of the

poems (thirteen out of twenty-one) having some connection to family members. The

book is dedicated to his family, and the titular poem refers to the cremation of his

father’s body. “After the Fire” is a Lazarus-like resurrection of his father’s cremated

remains, an eerie deconstruction and re-assemblage of a loved one’s parts. Boey

conflates the physical and spiritual, the scientific and the religious,

[…] He pieces you together, his post-mortem reconstructing your life. A broken man, he says, picking the slivers, the bits that sum up the whole man. He wants us to go through the pieces to make sure you are all there. He has a responsibility to the living and the dead, he says, to get it right. He starts from the base, an anatomy lesson in Hokkien, showing us what we didn’t see in life, where it went wrong, the rot attacking the tibia, the fatal flaw in the scaffolding. A smoker and drinker, and a fracture that never healed, he adds.

Joanne Leow 36

The cranium piece completes you and the ash is poured into the urn. He says we have to rig you up in sequence, from the feet, so that in afterlife, you will be upright, standing on even feet and ground. (16) Boey’s description of the Buddhist medium’s careful handling of his father’s ashes is

a strange yet appropriate mixing of Chinese cremation traditions and scientific

jargon. Words like “post-mortem”, “ anatomy”. “tibia”, “cranium”, and “fracture” are

contrasted with the almost mystical reconstruction of Boey’s dead father, “in

sequence, from the feet”. Biology and moral character become quite literally

inseparable, with idea of “a broken man” taking on actual physical manifestations.

Again as with Wong’s poem “Blessings”, Boey doesn’t italicize (literally and

figuratively) any of his references to Chinese culture. His poem might be imbued with

a sense of culture, but it is one that is readily accessible and does not seek to exoticize

its subject. What is even more interesting is the Christian references that are

interlaced with the Chinese ones. For example the lines “I take his word like

sacrament, / take the jade-green stone urn, / and cradle its surprising weight”(17)

have definite references to both Christian and Chinese traditions. Boey seems to

suggest an interchangeability between them and this hybridity suggests a more

complex rendering of cultural traditions in Boey’s family. In the last stanza of the

poem, when he poetically recreates what the Buddhist medium seeks to do with his

father’s remains, one cannot help again but notice the Christian references to the

resurrection and Jacob’s ladder, the idea of ascent heightened by the short run-on

lines,

I can see you in heaven materializing from the urn, the scraps and dust assembled into a ladder of bone and flesh, up

Joanne Leow 37

on your feet, the limp gone, dusting the ash off, and ready to walk back into our lives. (17) Boey embeds multiple ways of looking at death and an afterlife in this poem, in ways

that make the urn that contains his father’s ashes “heavier / than the sum of its sifted

contents” (17). Transitioning from the difficult physical reality of receiving his

father’s ashes to a transcendental meditation on a redemptive afterlife, Boey’s poem

reconciles the various strands of religious and cultural beliefs in his life in a way that

shows how they are intimately and irrevocably entwined. Boey does not privilege any

set of beliefs and traditions, choosing instead to combine them, embedding this

hybridity in the imagery and vocabulary of the poem.

This sense of flux and liminality is even more apparent in another poem about

Boey’s father entitled “Kelong”. Boey uses the idea of the fishing outpost to illustrate

the central theme of the liminal nature of this space in his memory:

My father carries me into the hut where I sit and find equilibrium on a floating world of water and air. The smell of salted fish everywhere and through the gaps of the worn timber floor you can see the threadwork of the tossing tides and imagine the kelong’s legs stretching miles to the ocean bed. You feel the pulse, the tug of the depths at the kelong frame and wonder if it will hold (18-9) Arguably, Boey is aware that at this point in his career, he no longer writes just for a

Singaporean audience and has developed strategies to prevent cultural translation

from being obtrusive in his work. One sees this impulse when he chooses to use fish

names like “trevally” and “whitebait” where the fishermen of his childhood would

probably have very different names for these fish in their own Chinese dialects. The

effect of this is a sensorial immersion into Boey’s memory, without the lens of

Joanne Leow 38

extraneous explanations. It seems natural then to draw parallels from Boey’s liminal

position as a poet writing from outside the culture he grew up in for an audience

wider than the Singapore context, and the idea of the kelong as “hovering in a realm /

neither water nor land” (19), in a space that is in a way outside the borders of a

country. It is this space where Boey truly finds his father, “buoyant, free / from debts,

going for the big catch”(18). It is also through the memory of this space that Boey

comes to an acceptance of the lack of fixity in his life, as he notes that it is here that

he learnt “to trust the aerial walkways, / fit my tread to the swaying sense of things, /

the planks bending but holding firm with each step” (19). The memory of a borderless

world is where Boey hopes to find his father again through his own poetry, “In my

dream I cast about for the word / that will reel in the sea hoard in one haul: / starfish,

seahorses, and my father” (20). This moment of revelation also brings to mind the

Christian references that continue to run deep through the preceding poem “After the

Fire” and now “Kelong”. Boey talks about “walking on water” and connects the

fishermen in the kelong and those in the New Testament when the “nets are reeled in,

like a retiarius / ceiling, and there is a heaven of fish / heaving, thrashing scales, and

mouths / agape in hosannas of death” (20). Life and death are seen as intrinsically

linked with the plenty of the fish coupled with their necessary death – the

undercurrent of mortality becoming all the more evident in this poem about Boey’s

late father. There is of course, also the redemptive idea of this fishing, echoing the

biblical salvation that is tied to the apostles and their role as “fishers of men”. Boey’s

father is somehow rehabilitated through this memory and seems to thrive in this

liminal space. Furthermore, the poet’s use of Christian imagery here and throughout

the rest of his work provides a layer of imagery and meaning that is not easily linked

with a particular ethnicity. Boey’s references to Christianity, along with his use of

Joanne Leow 39

Buddhist mythology, jazz vocabulary and a whole host of other cultural references

create a nexus of cosmopolitanism that does not lend itself to simplistic definitions of

ethnic belonging.

For Boey, it appears that the “word” itself or poetry is the most important in

negotiating the murky waters of history, identity and belonging. As such, the poem

immediately following “Kelong”, “Placenames” extends the theme of the ability of

words to breathe life to a forgotten past or deceased person. What is interesting here is

Boey’s usage of the italics when naming specific historical Singaporean locales like

“Buffalo Road, Robinsons / The Arcade and Satay Club” (21). Where before Boey

resisted the use of italics, perhaps seeing that they distance the reader from the text, he

uses them specifically for the place names. Yet the effect here is not one of

distancing, it is merely one of emphasis, to show the power of these words for Boey’s

father. A reader of the poem who is unfamiliar with these places, a category that also

includes younger Singaporeans, is still able to understand and appreciate this piece.

Even though, someone with a first hand knowledge of Singapore history might have a

more profound connection to this poem, what is evident here is that place becomes

secondary to Boey’s meditation on his father’s demise. Boey uses the idea of these

long vanished places, “now remote as the stars / in a galaxy already extinct”(21) to

illustrate his father’s failing memory and return to the past. The narrative of the

“ruined city” is direct parallel to the father’s “vanished self”, and Boey writes,

I don’t know if it is the dead places calling him to come home or my father summoning them for a last walk. He intones Johnson Pier, Malacca Street,

Old World, New World, as if piecing together the alleys, the streets and neighbourhood of his body, reassembling the ruined city

Joanne Leow 40

of his vanished self. (21)

It is a meditative litany of forgotten places that Boey says he will inherit, in a way re-

emphasizing his deracination since he is attached to something that no longer exists.

Yet Boey does not romanticize versions of his supposed origins, that he is completely

aware of the finality of the disappearance of these “dead places”, like his deceased

father they have been “erased”, with only the poem left to remember them.

Boey’s preoccupation with his late father continues in the poem “Prodigal”.

Beginning with its title, the poem continues with Boey’s use of Christian imagery;

Boey sees his father’s corpse as a “formaldehyde body / hard like the plaster St

Anthony / close to the coffin, removed / from life as the preserved saint / I once saw

in a Siennese Church” (31). Boey seems to be hinting at the deadness of Catholic

iconography through its macabre fascination with a saint’s corpse. Instead of religious

revelation, Boey simply sees

His face a blank map, arctic peace, no trace of the errant ways scarring the image in the funeral photograph under Anthony’s watchful eyes. He had left for the last time, eluding us again, for the country where all fathers wait. (31) These lines show how Boey’s ideas of space and country exist in the realm of the

imagination, memory and emotion. His grasp of geographical space and cultural

specificity in these poems is far more tenuous than many of his peers who write in

more realist ways about their country and living environment. This points us to

finding a different way of locating Boey’s poetry about his father, one that does not

tie itself to a specific locale or culture.

Joanne Leow 41

While Boey’s poems about his father necessarily look backwards, Boey’s

work about his daughter is an exploration of what kinds of cultural belonging and

identity can exist moving forwards. In “Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB”,

Boey writes about his daughter “discovering the sound of her name / the new old

country revealed under / her tiny preschool tentative hand”(32). Boey seems to tie the

idea of belonging to a language and further raises the question of who his audience is

by carefully breaking down the construction of the Chinese character for his family

name:

She prints the pictogram mu, a solid vertical stroke like a tree trunk, a horizontal across for the arms, and a sinuous downward branch on either side. That is the radical for wood or tree. And on its right she prints mei, meaning every, made from a roof over the pictogram from mother, mu, with its nourishing embrace. Grafted on the tree, it adds up to the talismanic plum, tree and blossom. It has been years since I have written my true name. (32) It is curious here how Boey steps back into a Chinese essentialism, using terms like

“true name” and “talismanic”. In spite of this culturally specific focus, there is also a

certain universalism that runs through Boey’s deconstruction of the character of his

name. By making the pictoral elements readily accessible to a reader who might not

have any knowledge of Chinese script, Boey both more deeply explores the layers of

meaning possible in one Chinese character and elucidates the process to a degree that

makes prior knowledge of Chinese a moot point. The importance that the poem places

on this character is also very much in line with Boey’s previously articulated ideas on

the centrality and significance of words and their power. Further on in this stanza

Boey fantasizes about being

No longer emigrant, foreign

Joanne Leow 42

but recalled home, and not to the country left behind, but further back beyond the South Sea. Vague lost connections somewhere south of the Yangtze. Karst country, paddies and mountains the color of jade (32) This seems like an almost clichéd view of South China, where Boey’s ancestors are

from and his claim to understanding this sense of attachment is tenuous at best. He

acknowledges as much, “In a few years my daughter will press / for her family history

and tree / and I will have nothing more to show / than the withered branch that is her

dead grandfather”(33). Yet this idea of having multiple attachments to “south of the

Yangtze” and “the country / left behind” (Singapore) and further on new “soil”

(Australia) (32) seems to suggest an inbuilt capacity that Boey has for

cosmopolitanism. He is able to imagine attachments that go from before his historical

existence, to a migrant nation and to his new country of residence.

By the end of the poem, Boey begins to confabulate a family history to replace

one that is “buried, irretrievable”(33), choosing to creating his own identity, his own

history with a free hand, coming to terms of acceptance that are wholly his own and

even of his own imagining. Boey feels free to recreate a possible history involving his

grandfather and a “Chinese / pioneer who made it good in White / Australia”(34).

Crucially it is an unknowable possibility that cannot be proved or disproved; “Perhaps

Great-grandfather sallied forth / with Quong Tart on the same junk […] Perhaps they

were brothers”(34). A sort of alternate history that speaks of paths not taken,

I see my other life my father could have had staring out from the sepia shots, if our forbear had traveled on down-under. I could not explain to my daughter the déjà vu (34)

Joanne Leow 43

Australia, in this poem, is a free space where it is possible to have “married a

Scotswoman, sang / Border ballads and wore tartan kilts”, “fed the Aborigines / and

played cricket with the whites” (33-4). It is a fantasy of alternate origins for Boey, one

that sees his father as “Mandarin of the Fifth Order, costumed in silk tunic and

plumbed hat”(34), a status far removed from the “pig-tailed coolie in the new

colony”(33). Yet while Boey appears to have situated this poem in an almost

ironically hyper-Sinicized context, it is important to read the work with the full

knowledge that it is a creation of Boey’s imagination. Boey is borrowing a history

here and claiming it as his own, almost in opposition to what he feels is the actual

subaltern gap in his paternal heritage.

This exploration of identities and histories continues in the poem “Stamp

Collecting” which depicts a scene between father and daughter as Boey shows her his

old stamp collections and she asks,

Is Australia our home? What is this country? Why doesn’t it exist anymore? Why is the Queen’s face on the stamps of so many nations? (38) If the question of where home is has to be asked, then it seems like the answer is

uncertain. A five-year old’s questions about political changes in the colonial and

decolonized world have a simultaneous effect of making them both simplistic and

complex. Making sense of the complicated and fraught histories behind these changes

seems too much for a single poem or a stamp collection, yet, these stamps were also

Boey’s first encounter with the wider world, “my first travels, / transported on these

serrated tokens”(38). Through the poem, he conflates the idea of nations and colonies,

making them interchangeable and showing how drawings and redrawings on the

global map are to a certain extent arbitrary. As with “Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at

the QVB” though, Boey makes up for the gaps with his imagination and ends again

Joanne Leow 44

with a hybrid image, “of a youthful Elizabeth / pendant over a Chinese junk, and slips

it home” (39).

In these two poems about his daughter, Boey seems to see her in much the

same way Wong May sees her poetic persona in poems such as “The Judge”: as a

locus for change in the way one looks at family history, family relationships and

cultural identity. There is in fact a certain kind of freedom for his daughter that her

family tree is “broken branches. So little history / to go on”(33), enabling her to create

“the other life” that Boey so wishes for his father. While it is ironic that Boey does

use culturally specific and overladen images of village life in South-east China, the

fact that this is an imagined history and that Quong Tart is such a vividly hybrid

character, speak to the myriad possibilities of this endeavour.

Arif Dirlik has noted that that literature in postcolonial nations has been

“placed at the service of exploring ethnic and transnational (or diasporic) identities”,

leading to a problem where “the construction of identities in literary work has been

confounded with the ethnography of culture, subjecting the writer to pressures that

subvert the autonomy of creative work” (210). What we see in Boey’s work, however,

is the opposite of this. Boey has used culture to service his work; choosing stories and

fabricating an autobiographical history that speak to the greater cultural freedoms that

are possible. Where Dirlik is concerned about ethnic writers finding that their work is

treated as “ethnography that erases individual and social complexity”(231), here Boey

rescues this individual agency and complexity through his confabulation, and in doing

so frees himself and his family from a cultural specificity that might seek to define

them.

Both Wong and Boey have worked outside the constraints and obligations of

constructing national and cultural identities through their poetry. In this chapter I have

Joanne Leow 45

shown how this has been achieved through the poets’ focus on familial relationships,

a subject that has been so often tied to ethnicity and cultural origins in postcolonial

literature. Wong’s poems about her parents are written for the most part without any

reference to the specificities of culture or race, while Boey uses cultural history as

only one of many ways to approach his relationships. In doing so, both poets open up

the possibilities of invented, imagined origins and personal histories that encompass

cosmopolitan landscapes and are not fixed in defining a particular culture or country’s

identity.

Joanne Leow 46

Chapter 2 Travel, Migration & Return

I long to be nowhere. I long to be merely going, but not Some-Where. Please No.

– “Going”, Wong May

Besides family, travel is another prominent theme that figures in the oeuvres

of both Boey Kim Cheng and Wong May. Both have set a significant portion of their

work outside Singapore: Boey’s second and third collections, Another Place (1992)

and Days of No Name (1995) move from India to Europe to North America, while

Wong’s Reports (1972) and Superstitions (1978) chronicle journeys from America,

back to Asia and then to Europe. A constant sense of restlessness is apparent in poems

from these collections, but more crucially, when compared with their peers, Wong

and Boey are unique in their portrayal of travel and the diverse settings that have

informed their work. In this chapter, I will take a chronological look at a selection of

poems from both Wong and Boey through the lenses of travel, migration and return in

order to understand the development of these ideas in their work. Through a close

reading of their form and content, it is possible to trace how their ideas on leaving,

traveling and returning have evolved through the years. Their journeys to each

country and city naturally culminate in longer voyages of revelation.

Comparing the poetry of Wong and Boey reveals striking similarities in the

way they perceive travel and ideas of movement, while also highlighting the vital

differences in their work. Both poets see travel as metaphor for life and write about

the impossibility of a return to a “home” or “origin”. While Boey starts out ostensibly

rooted in Singapore before moving into a more cosmopolitan stance, Wong starts out

Joanne Leow 47

from her first book with a sense of universality and statelessness that continues

throughout her work.

First, it is important to examine some generalizations about the impact and

aims of the misleadingly broad term “travel literature”. One commonly perceived

notion of “travel writing” is as a journey of cultural and emotional self-discovery

through interaction with different people and cultures. Thus, a seemingly paradoxical

move occurs where, in spite of writing abroad, a writer continues the production of

his specific locality and culture, whether by contrast or through obvious absence, and

in this way reiterates the simplistic binary of “us” and “them”. In a similar manner to

my earlier discussion of the theme of family in post-colonial Singapore literature, this

often leads to an over-emphasis on the ethnic, and a tendency to exoticize the foreign

or even re-exoticize the local. The travel writer is also seen to be writing for a “home”

audience; as Steve Clarke puts it, a decision has been made “to be there, rather than

here, and yet still to wish to be heard here” (17). This sense of a home audience that is

removed from the realities of being abroad illustrates the problems of representation

and value judgments that occur when travelers write about countries they visit. These

issues are further complicated when one considers the act of migration as a form of

travel that seeks to leave “home” behind. In short, the acts of leaving, traveling,

migrating and returning create complex problems when it comes to identity,

belonging and finding audiences.

There are many examples from the body of Singaporean literature that

illustrate these complexities of travel, migration and return. This is especially so in the

second half of the 20th century, a time that saw the Singaporean writer abroad and

finding inspiration there. For the purpose of showing how some of these writers have

remained firmly rooted to their home audience, I have chosen two poems--Leong

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Liew Geok’s “Exiles Return” and Yong Shu Hoong’s poem “Guilt Trip”-- from a

broader selection. Taking a closer look at these two poems is important here to

illustrate how the themes of travel, migration and return are treated with a Singapore

reader in mind.

In Leong’s “Exiles Return”, the treatment of “exiles” who have returned to

Singapore after migrating shows the construction of an idea of Singapore and its

supposed antithesis of “overseas”. Leong describes the tastes and behaviour of

returning Singaporeans who play a bizarre neo-colonialist role in which they indulge

in the exoticization of a tropical paradise:

No stranger from absence, They come to see New streets, pick hawker Food, soak the crooked Equatorial heat. Orchids, hibiscus, Greens of weeds and grass Throw up, bruising Eyes accustomed to less. Chewing satay Dripping kuah, they watch Gula Melaka leach Chendol’s peaks Ask for rojak: hot-salt-sweet-sour Aftertaste of past aches Assorted on a plastic plate. (284-5)

Here the descriptions of flora, climate and food overwhelm the reader with a hot, lush,

sultry sense of the tropics, which rather disingenuously refuses to acknowledge the

modernity of air-conditioning, western cuisine and concrete that was also present in

Singapore at the time in which the poem is set-- circa 1991. Leong chooses to focus

on what she sees to be the most important aspects of an “exile’s” interaction with

Singapore, its food and its shopping: “[e]xiles compare/ Notes, size things up, / Scour

bargains / Between torrid heat and temperate zone, /The yin and yang of home”(285).

Joanne Leow 49

The strange and superficial exoticization of Singapore ends with a simplistic

conclusion that reinforces the binary of home and abroad, here and “[e]lsewhere”:

“[t]o end is after all to start, / To come home, to know where you belong. / Secure,

they depart /And then return to air / Secrets of their zig-zag hearts”(285). Travel here

is depicted as a trajectory that begins and ends at a particular “home” which Leong

equates with a sense of certainty that is deceptive and illusory, since both the migrants

depicted in the poem and city itself have irrevocably changed since their departure.

Yong Shu Hoong’s poem “Guilt Trip”(628) is about traveling abroad and

chronicles a coach trip from Singapore to Thailand played out ironically to the

soundtrack of U2’s Where The Streets Have No Name and “trashy Euro-disco”(628).

The poem’s objectification of “Thai girls burning bright in bars” and “masseurs put

on display Amsterdam-style in store windows” degrades the foreign subjects and

reinforces the dichotomy of an ordered Singapore life and the zoo-like anarchy of “the

city of temples and massage parlours so unlike our own”(628). Perhaps it is most

telling how the poem equates a sexual encounter with a prostitute with “her front /

row of misaligned teeth” with a Thai dish of “tom yam goong”(628), as if the

transaction of sex could be equivalent to indulging in foreign cuisine while abroad.

Significantly, the poem notes that what happens in Hat Yai stays there - “no one

would admit / to anything at all, hoarding our secrets into adulthood, / like domestic

scandals better kept behind latched gates”(628) - further compartmentalizing the two

worlds of Singapore and outside Singapore. While there undoubtedly is irony in

Yong’s poem, it is telling that he is still unable to escape the cultural binaries and

stereotypes that perpetuate the myth that countries exploited for tourism by

Singaporeans are necessarily inferior, dependant and wholly separate.

Joanne Leow 50

The selection of Yong’s and Leong’s poems is by no means an exhaustive

final word on the idea of travel in Singaporean literature or of the positioning of all of

their work, yet they are useful in highlighting fixed definitions of home and abroad,

and the objectification and exoticization of both the local and the foreign. Both poems

are also written in a prose-like style, set in free verse with fixed narratives that have

straightforward beginnings and endings written with a specific Singaporean audience

in mind. Yong’s poem carefully creates an impression of anarchy and excitement in a

holiday away from the ordered, sterile city-state, while Leong depicts a return to

Singapore that is coupled with an artificially cloying sense of nostalgia for a sensuous

cornucopia of culinary delights and materialistic activities. This is significantly

different from the suspended, open-ended style that the two poets discussed in this

thesis work in. The audience that Wong and Boey have in mind for their work is also

less apparent: Wong’s poetry, published away from Singapore by an American press,

does not make any attempt to speak specifically to a reader from Singapore or from

any other country. Boey’s work, on the other hand, seems to move from addressing a

Singapore audience to a more diverse one through his four collections.

To delve deeper into these differences, it is useful to consider a study of travel

literature by Anke Gilleir that looks at the work of diasporic writers writing about

travel and migration in ways that suggest the dominance of their literary methods

rather than their biographies. Gilleir examines these writers through a lens provided

by Gayatri Spivak who “defends a sophisticated study – a reading – of postcolonial or

marginal literature that does not replace literary criticism with identity politics, the

routine use of literary texts as representations of collectivity” (256). Gilleir, through

Spivak, focuses her attention instead on the “undecidability of collectivities” that

occur in literary texts that exist on the borders of cultures and move the process of

Joanne Leow 51

literary analysis beyond the false certainties of ethnicity and nationality. She

examines the trope of travel in transnational writers who are unique because of their

use of complex and demanding prose, concluding that it is necessary to avoid “a

narrow identitarian perception” of their work and instead acknowledge “a sense of

strangeness that emerges from the literary nature of the narratives” (266). This

questioning of identity politics in postcolonial or marginal literature is central to my

reading of Boey and Wong’s take on their travels, as is a closer look at exactly how

the trope of travel itself is explored through literature. Although Gilleir’s work

focuses on prose, she is conscious of how the language functions “almost flaunting

poetical and rhetorical devices” and of “the unreliability of the narrator” (261). These

factors contribute to the literariness of these texts and for her, literature is important

because of its “aimlessness”, “its unwillingness to be complicit in identitarian

discourse” and “the text’s self-awareness of the stereotyping and thus the fallibility of

(literary) representation”(261).

In Boey’s poetry on travel, this idea of literariness and the self-awareness of

the limits of its representation are also similarly apparent in poems like “The Howrah

Station” and “Sudder Street, Calcutta”. With self-reflexive asides embedded within

poems, his poetic personae are fundamentally unreliable, questioning their own

existence. In his later poems, written after a stint at the Iowa International Writing

Program, Boey continues to emphasize the centrality of “poetry” and “words” in both

content and form. He also displays a cosmopolitanism influenced by both his reading

and travel. A poem from his debut collection, “For Chatwin”, puts him in the realm of

the British novelist and traveler Bruce Chatwin whose peripatetic musings were often

semi-fictionalized and placed the traveler within the context of the particular culture

being written about. Chatwin’s tendencies were towards impressionistic remembrance

Joanne Leow 52

and his central conceit of Aboriginal songlines suggests that life is to be lived through

travel and music. These ideas continue to resonate throughout Boey’s poetic career, as

a great proportion of his work is about traveling, has an awareness of the particular

context of his journeys and consistently contains references to music. Like Chatwin,

Boey sees himself through his journeys, noting “a man must place himself on a map /

to see how big he is” (195). Yet his is not a typical cultural self-discovery through

travel; Boey has a constant tone of self-awareness that set him apart from his peers,

and avoids making unsophisticated comparisons with Singapore in his poems about

being abroad.

In Wong’s work, there is a comparable awareness but instead of using self-

reflexive asides and questioning the value of poetry, Wong focuses on the liminal

spaces between physical states and written words and suggests their power to

transform perspectives. Poems like “On Leaving Berlin” and “Kampong Bahru” seek

to go beyond stereotypes of travel writing and ethnicization, and instead intently

converge on moments of liminality and flux that give rise to alternatives to simplistic

ways of defining culture and belonging. Like Boey, Wong also displays a certain level

of “literariness” with her poetry. Wong’s work is often challenging in both form and

content as she uses unusual lineation, inventive imagery and metaphor, and firmly

eschews a straightforward and predictable sense of narrative in her poems. These

techniques reinforce a sense of strangeness and dislocation that preclude catering to

any “home audience”.

Furthermore, Wong’s adaptation and appropriation of cultural references and

inflections recalls the strategies of cosmopolitanism that Ross Posnock describes: it is

a cosmopolitanism that is not “preoccupied with opposition and exclusion” but

“regards culture as public property and nurtures the capacity for appropriation as a

Joanne Leow 53

tool for the excluded to attain access to a social order of democratic equality” (804).

Posnock writes about the contemporary African author Manthia Diawara and his

“reverberant move […] to reanimate the dream of deracination as freedom”, through

deploying cosmopolitanism “as an escape from what he calls the ‘conundrum of

identity politics’ and the malaise of “identity fatigue” (804). Cosmopolitanism in this

sense refuses to define itself through differences or oppositions, and seeks instead to

“grasp the syncretic basis of culture”(809) and sees what cultural differences that may

arise as non-hierarchical. In many instances in Wong’s poetry, she looks not to define

herself culturally or locate herself ethnically through difference but instead to retell

and reinhabit the stories and lives of the people she encounters. This is obvious not

just through her subject matter but also by her choice of vocabulary, syntax, phrase

structure and imagery. Wong’s poems about the New England landscape are starkly

different from her litany-like elegy of East Bengal, and even more so from her bleak

portraits of Eastern Europe. In each poem, she does not, like Yong Shu Hoong in

“Guilt Trip”, contrast an idea of “home” with the location in which she has set the

poem. Instead, there is a sense that she has placed herself within the setting without

losing her distinctive voice, but yet not set apart as a dispassionate observer.

Ultimately, both Wong and Boey show us that there are more sophisticated

ways of looking at how travel, migration and return affect poetry, ways that are

beyond the narrow definitions of ethnic belonging and cultural relativism. In doing so,

they significantly alter the concepts of “home” and “abroad”. Boey emphasizes the

impossibility of a naïve and one-dimensional “return” that Leong Liew Geok

ultimately seems to suggest is possible in “Exiles Return”. Wong, on the other hand,

turns to the idea of being constantly “in-between”: by the end of her third and last

book, she declares unequivocally that “the world is beautiful” even with its

Joanne Leow 54

imperfections and debris, and that she seeks to be “traveling anywhere” (135), getting

her windows dirty. The two poets concur on the inability to truly return “home” once

one has left; Wong’s poems seem unwilling to entertain the illusion that a “home”

existed in the first place, while for Boey any return is only possible through memory

and not in the present-day reality.

Wong May’s “lostness” The little biographical detail that can be gleaned from the back flaps of her

three books tells us that Wong May was born in China, spent her formative years in

Singapore and by the writing of her third and final book had also spent time in the

United States, Germany and France. While Wong’s first book is opaque about its

locations and biographical detail, Wong’s second book Reports chronicles her time in

the United States from 1966 to 1971, her third book Superstitions continues

immediately from 1971 to 1976 and ventures further afield. There is less geographical

range in Reports, but Wong’s poems about the people, landscape and life in the

United States are significant because of their settings which are observed without

comparisons to a “home” or an “origin”. Poems like “America”, “New Hampshire”,

“New England” and “New York” make this readily apparent as they weave cultural

references to jazz, American poetry, rural and urban landscapes into the subject and

form. The poem “East Bengal” stands out in Reports as one where the social realities

of poverty and political injustice are brought to light, but without a condescending

descent into comparisons or stereotyping. The poem is a foretaste of work in Wong’s

third collection of poems Superstitions, which journeys beyond North America to

Europe and returns in parts to Singapore and Asia. In these poems, Wong is far more

culturally specific in her remembrances and critical about the social inequities and

Joanne Leow 55

political injustices that she encounters. While she still retains a neutrality and

cosmopolitanism when talking about each different culture, crucially for Wong this

does not mean disengagement with the realities at hand. Superstitions is a less inward

looking collection of poems compared to her earlier work and many poems in this

collection politicize themselves without resorting to cultural stereotypes. And when

Wong tackles her return to Asia later in the book it is managed with a detachment that

avoids any sentimental nostalgia or reconstruction of the past. This balance of

political engagement with cultural detachment becomes the hallmark of Wong’s later

work as she successfully negotiates between making informed social critiques and

what it means to be traveling without a firm sense of home.

In her poems about various countries and people, Wong moves from being

aesthetically embedded in a particular context to being socially and politically

engaged. And when she stages a return to an originary context, it is without a naïve

acceptance of the status quo or a stereotypical belief that a simple return to the places

of one’s youth is possible. What is also striking about Wong May’s work and its

critical reception, is the lack of a comprehensive biography which often accompanies

the work of a postcolonial writer, and is often used to supposedly illuminate the

themes and motives of his or her work. For Wong, the lack of a biography has worked

in a paradoxical way: while readers of her poetry are forced to deduce what they can

of her peripatetic life from her poetry, the elusive and elliptical nature of her work

prevents them from doing so with any great certainty. This gap in knowledge points to

the necessity of looking beyond the biographical and instead focusing on the literary.

In doing so, it becomes possible to concentrate on the text itself without the

distractions of having to fit Wong’s work into the larger narrative of her life.

Adopting this approach, I will do a close reading of a brief selection of Wong’s

Joanne Leow 56

poems looking at their lineation, imagery and cultural references. While elements of

biography might suggest themselves from time to time, they do not eclipse the fact

that Wong’s poetry about travel is fundamentally disorienting, untraditionally non-

narrative and formally innovative.

Beginning with an analysis of Wong’s second volume Reports, it is important

to consider her series of poems about North America separately from a poem like

“East Bengal” which is significantly different in terms of style and references. In the

range of these poems, we see Wong’s ability to absorb cultural references, stylistic

and syntactical traits in each poem in order to suggest a sense of place. The poems

“New Hampshire, September 1969” and “New England” share a sense of the space

and weather of the east coast of America. In both works, Wong uses a series of

truncated run-on lines spread across the page visually to create a sense of liminal

spaces and a greater awareness of the surroundings as she becomes “conscious of all

the minute dying things / and their phosphorescence” (53). Wong relies on a sharp

attention to the natural details of her surroundings and transforms spatiality into an

awareness of temporality and mortality. She does not use any ethnic markers to

describe this landscape; instead she notes the universality of her revelations, writing

“the earth always turns up / with something to say / the earth never fails” (79). This is

not to say that the landscape appears familiar to the poet or the reader; Wong’s

considered words and lines suggest careful observations and meditations on her

environment. However, what is achieved here is a sense of a place without resorting

to clichés, her own ethnicity or a direct comparison with a “home”.

When making specific references to a place’s culture, Wong does so in

unexpected and unsettling ways. The clearest example of this is her poem “America”.

Even while delivering a wry social critique on America, the poem refuses to resort to

Joanne Leow 57

the binary reasoning of cultural difference. Instead, Wong delivers a poem that is

simultaneously violent, syncopated and exultant:

What is N.Y.C. after dark but Miss Lulu Marican singing blues her breasts pushed to her throat across her body the traffic the live wires and dead wires the neon signs and used tires crossed and crisscrossed What is Miss Lulu Marican but a road to be stamped out entire the universe reduced to a scream […] Nothing will recover from her singing. From her silence None none but America! Business Management

Is that all you have to teach us America (7) Wong here uses short lines and the visually complex placement of the poem on the

page to evoke a sense of rhythm and movement that is central to her portrayal of the

desolate and disturbing landscape of “N.Y.C.”. Images of a woman’s body are

subjected to the violence of urban traffic and detritus, and yet there is also bittersweet

beauty to be found in Miss Lulu Marican’s singing and the irrepressible nature of the

American spirit that thrives despite the degradation. In the lineation and phrasing, we

find an improvisational quality in the poetry that invokes jazz and blues, as does the

use of the formal address “Miss Lulu Marican” which echoes the announcers at music

performances. Wong combines the worlds of music making and the bleakness of the

cityscape before ending with a crescendo of noise “a scream” and a non-sequitur that

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contemplates what can be “learned” from it all. The absurdity of the ending mocks the

reader who would find easy conclusions and lessons from an experience in New York

City. In this unflinching encounter with the terrible beauty and violence of the

country, there is, Wong seems to assert, nothing to learn here. At no point in the poem

does Wong pass judgment or attempt to define “America” in contrast to another

culture or memory. Yet, there is an understanding that she stands apart from the

America that she describes, in the distinct position of an involved observer.

Wong’s other poems about America are mostly focused on the east coast of

the country as she describes the cold, dark landscape of New Hampshire being full of

vertiginous possibilities or the urban alienation of New York uncannily figured

through its women. Reports is a collection that is centered mostly in North America,

but two poems, “East Bengal” and “November 1969” hint at the geographic and

thematic scope of her following book Superstitions which sees Wong traveling, as the

book jacket points out “from the Hebrides to Singapore”. “East Bengal” in particular

stands out from the collection because of its short run-on lines, which are not at all

characteristic of the lineation in the rest of Reports:

Children die Children go first everywhere Children are ancient like milk they don’t keep they are wise like dried fish they lie by the roadside After Cholera and War they expect to see God meanwhile they wait for cremation (14) Wong’s short lines create a rhythm that mimics child-like speech and epigrams that

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hold the promise of inherent truths. The use of anaphora and simple phrasing also add

to this effect. Horror is mixed with innocence, and age with youth, as Wong uses

paradox to invoke scenes of suffering that are so incomprehensible in their scale that

they become surreal:

Cholera was nice her sari a triple hoop of flame she was gorgeous Our Lady of the Rock attended by a psalm of flies War was nice like Shiva She has many arms one face & many legs when she dances She is a dancer with no feet Vultures are nice they can’t wait they are angels but people are stupid they ought to get wood enough wood to make a pyre for all their children meanwhile they fight Cholera & each other when we wait like bottles in Death’s factory & God is hand-woven pressing his face close to me a piece of cloth (14) Wong uses the form of a long sentence to evoke a tone of quiet desperation and

conjures up a nightmarish vision that ends with the desolate scene of “Death’s

factory” and a suffocating sense of divine inevitability. Wong’s references to both

“Our Lady of the Rock” and “Shiva” hint at her understanding that East Bengal has a

complex, heterogeneous, hybrid culture. Her use of these religious references brings

to life the tragedies of war and cholera with terrible beauty, melding images of intense

suffering with dance or female beauty. Yet it also undermines these religious

symbols, reflecting their powerlessness in the face of such great misery, only people

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“who are stupid” can make a difference, although it is clear they are not doing so.

While other poets might choose at some juncture to give themselves a superior

vantage point within the poem to absolve them from the suffering of “other” peoples

or countries, Wong here does not make a single reference to the more advantaged

background that she comes from. Instead she puts herself firmly in the context of the

poem, noting that everyone “wait[s] / like bottles / in Death’s factory”; it is a fate that

nobody escapes. Her use of the first person in the last five lines of the poem is part of

this strategy, and she waits till the end of the long sentence of the poem to make the

reader fully understand the suffering that he or she is complicit in. The poem manages

to do away with an anthropological view of the situation of the children in East

Bengal, while in no way diminishing the horror of it. It does this by obliquely

acknowledging that everyone is in some way complicit through inaction and cannot

accept death’s inevitability. If we recall Yong Shu Hoong’s poem “Guilt Trip” with

its precise and pragmatic stance apart from its subject matter “so unlike our own”, it

becomes clearer how Wong’s poem by embedding personal liability in a wholly

claustrophobic tone, collapses the binary between “us” and “them”, “here” and

“there”.

In Superstitions, Wong displays a social and political awareness particularly

with her poems about French Algerians, “Morning in Grenoble” and “Europe”. In the

latter, Wong astutely points out how in Europe, racism has become intimately

entwined with ideas of class. It is a short, cutting poem where simple, direct lines

bring out the ironies of European attitudes towards Algerians. Wong’s focus on the

postcolonial citizens of France reveals her preoccupation with their position of

disadvantage in the country. Yet, her work “Morning in Grenoble” reveals that there

is no simple relationship between ex-colonizer and ex-colonized. In this longer poem,

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Wong explores the dreams and ambitions of the “ouvriers” in a more in-depth

manner. In doing so, she manages to humanize them and render their lives with a

realistic yet aesthetic eye:

The Algerian Garbage-men who hang onto the rear-end of their truck whistle & hum lustily like sparrows with their backs turned to the world’s (if only the Frenchmen’s) garbage, their shoulders heave good-naturedly with a rare energy to the sound of a filth not theirs being spinned shredded & spinned in great detail – are they not seeing already the green field they’ll acquire in Tipasa, in Djemila in Oran with this perhaps not their last day’s toil in France? O to own an almond tree, an almond tree where you know it (61) Wong’s carefully spaced out lineation and her method of breaking up each of her

phrases create a sense of energy and rhythm in this passage and echo the whistling of

the garbage men and the start-stop motion of their truck. In a neat reversal, Wong ties

the “filth” not to the garbage men, but to their ex-colonial masters, the French. Further

distancing them from their oft-despised profession, she looks instead to “the green

field” and “almond tree” that they will acquire from their toil, naming each hometown

that they come from with ease. As Wong recreates the interior lives of subjects who

are typically subaltern, she elevates the immigrant narrative of the Algerian garbage

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men in a way that make them equal if not superior to the French. Writing about

France, she turns a cosmopolitan eye on the social landscape seeing how it is made up

of layers of belonging and identity that are complicated and interconnected. Wong is

especially wary not to be carelessly optimistic about the lives of these French

Algerians, she ends the poem with a necessary return from her reverie:

but I’ve seen the wives of some in the fish market of Place St. Bruno under the railway bridge, the worm-eaten look in the immigrant children’s black & utterly still eyes (61) Despite her ability to colour the Algerian garbage men’s dreams with a vivid hue,

Wong is only too aware of the effects of the racist and segregated society on the

immigrants. She is careful to not exclude the plight of their wives and children, who

have possibly even less of a voice in society. Their world is reduced to “the fish

market” which is “under the railway / bridge”, the only place that they appear in

public. Wong’s use of simple, short words and the absence of overtly ethnic

descriptors and references to the women make it clear that she refuses to objectify or

exoticize them. Instead, the poem “Morning in Grenoble” is remarkable precisely

because of Wong’s ability to simultaneously see the Edenic possibilities that are

created through the Algerians’ toil and understand the imminent social break-down

due to the plight of their children and wives who are unable to be assimilated into

mainstream French society. These revelations are achieved through direct

observation, and an ability to appropriate new cultural references. Wong does not

attempt to draw her own cultural baggage into the poem or over ethnicize and

exoticize her subjects. Disappointment and complexity are built into the structure of

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the poem, which opens exuberantly and ends with a more multifaceted understanding

of the situation. This structure is also evident in the poems “America” and “East

Bengal” as well, as Wong sets out to complicate the revelations that she gains from

each country. There is no simple narrative or conclusion in each of these three poems,

suggesting that in poetry, as in travel, there is no direct route to understanding.

In fact, it is neither the origin nor the destination in this journey that become

essential for Wong, but the act of moving itself. Poems like “Shopping in Steglitz”

and “On Leaving Berlin” explore the idea of motion that leads to a metaphysical

discovery. “On Leaving Berlin” in particular works with the liminal space and

physical cold that awaken the mind to a multiplicity of possibilities:

At 15ºF Flesh begins to wander: the Form verges on a blur as first frost on a field of winter vegetables

- the night passenger on the train wakes to. I’m leaving leaving what would be

too strange to go into & too familiar; occasionally the blur is like China, & could be Home. (26) This is one of the rare poems in Wong’s entire body of writing where she makes

reference to “Home”. Leading up to this single worded last line, the poem suggests

that the idea of “Home” can only be approximated when “Flesh” and “Form” are

sublimated into the landscape of “first frost / on a field”. So like Boey Kim Cheng,

Wong discounts the possibility of a physical or simplistic return to “Home”; only

traces of it can be grasped in the liminal spaces of travel - “the blur”, a word that she

repeats twice for emphasis. This idea of “the blur” is central as it is this indeterminate

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sense of space and time that becomes “occasionally” like home. While Wong was

born in China, her tentative reference to China in the poem and the suggestion that it

“could be / Home” is more striking for its hesitancy than its choice of country. What

is evident here is the fact that “the blur” gives rise to a multiplicity of prospects as do

her characteristic gaps within lines and run-on lineation that focuses the reader on the

spaces between the words and the multiple meanings possible through the breaking up

of the lines. Wong contemplates the liminal space of train travel, with scenery that

rushes by in a “blur”, and sees in it a corollary universal landscape of travel that could

approximate any location. This is a physical observation of an intellectual sense that

being in-between could be being anywhere. By showing how origin and destination

are uncertain and focusing on the multiple possibilities of the in-between of travel,

Wong disorients her poetic persona and the reader, rendering the separateness of

terms like “home” and “abroad” suspect.

Even though it is clear that Wong comes to believe (as Boey does in his poem

“Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB”) that China represents some kind of

origin for her, this is never treated as an uncomplicated truth. For example, the poem

“1966-76” contemplates “[t]he beauty of Chinese girls” but in doing so, stands apart

from them, never identifying Wong as Chinese herself. It is a surrealist, elliptical

work, which suggests that concepts like one’s “own people” and a return to them are

suspect at best. In the poem, Wong likens her experience of return to a dreamlike

sequence where what was once solid ground turns into water. Her use of quotation

marks in the poem makes the identity of the poem’s persona ambiguous, distancing

herself from lines like “To be / among your own people” and the repeated “the beauty

of Chinese girls never / as clear to me as now.” Indeed, Wong sets herself apart from

both what is being observed in the poem and the person doing the observing; she is

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fully prepared to “walk away” from it all. It is clear then that the idea of return to a

cultural source or geographical origin is one that is unattainable and perhaps even

undesirable for Wong.

This sentiment is elaborated on more distinctly in “Kampong Bahru, 1975”.

The poem describes a scene from the Malay quarter in Singapore as a muezzin

delivers the call to prayer. Yet it is not a call that seems to come from one particular

place for Wong, instead the voice for her is

Calling from all corners not a corner not his minaret. The voice looks in all nooks & crevices a scent really, released from the earth. (105) Wong here employs synesthesia to bring across her point that the muezzin’s call for

prayer does not come from a single, determinable place or culture, but instead recalls

its past and present incarnations and its existence throughout the world. Sound is

conflated with both vision and smell as the call to prayer permeates its surroundings

completely. Wong’s lineation creates a similar effect with her lines visually moving

away from an ordered pattern to one where words appear with unusual indents and

spacing, filling up spaces across the page that would otherwise be left empty, given

the short length of the lines. This is not to say that Wong sacrifices specific detail to

evoke the universal, she is very precise about how this experience moves her:

The expanse of sadness inherent in the Muezzin’s voice makes distances near: a motion really that moves the immediate the hair, the sleeves, the burnt grass near the gravel. […] If as a child I’ve said

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“one day I shall have no home” nearing that hour of the day, prompted by that voice, & partly in answer, now it is said over & again echoing everywhere, creeping like lizards the lostness that 20 years later has fetched me here. (105) For Wong, the call to prayer appears to bridge not just geographical but also temporal

distances, it becomes a way of traveling, “a motion really” in itself. Again here, there

is a sense that it is in a moment of flux that an approximation of truth arises.

Considering the cosmopolitan nature of Islam, this is an apt reference that highlights

Wong’s refusal to be tied to a single geographical or cultural origin. In a sense it has

been transplanted, as Wong herself has, into various contexts and has “no [one]

home”. Eschewing closure and certainty, Wong focuses on a sense of dislocation and

alienation that is heightened by her return to Kampong Bahru. In doing so, she turns a

simple idea of return on its head and connects it to “lostness” and bewilderment.

Instead of being able to return like the “exiles” in Leong Liew Geok’s poem and

enjoy the tropical delights that Singapore affords, Wong looks to a minority group in

the country and reveals how their call for prayer reverberates with possibilities of

cosmopolitan memory and history. Wong also connects this very public call to prayer

and larger sense of history to her personal story of growing up and her sense that an

idea of a single “home” is inherently false. Even though Wong credits this “lostness”,

a neologism, that seems to suggest an ultimate sense of disorientation, for bringing

her to Kampong Bahru, there is no indication that she sees the return as a panacea.

Encountering the muezzin’s call seems to intensify Wong’s childhood idea that “one

day I shall have no home”, for now it is “echoing everywhere”.

Not having a home means that questions of audience continue to plague

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Wong, a poet from Asia, published in the United States. Writing about travel usually

presumes a “home audience”, yet it is difficult to say for Wong, exactly where this

audience is situated. This is due in some part to her biography but in a greater part to

her writing itself. Wong’s poetry is cosmopolitan to the point of relinquishing any

claim to one particular culture or country of origin and it is because she does not

pander to commonly held notions of home, return, migration and travel writing that

her work continues to garner little critical and popular attention. However, as I have

shown, Wong’s poetry is not an anonymous internationalizing idiom that Edwin

Thumboo fears, but instead a careful consideration of the context of each of her

settings and deeply engaged ruminations on the interstitial moments of travel, the

illusory nature of “home” and the contradictions of human societies. Wong manages

to write about different countries without resorting to an essentialist view of her

subjects or by looking to an audience in a simplistically defined homeland.

Boey Kim Cheng’s “between home and home” Boey Kim Cheng starts out differently from Wong, with his audience initially

in Singapore. His first book, Somewhere-Bound (1989), is written as he is poised to

leave the country, while his second book, Another Place (1992), sees him writing

extensively about his travels, still looking homeward to Singapore but with a greater

sense of dislocation and alienation. Boey’s third collection, Days of No Name (1996),

mostly chronicles his time in North America and features a few poems about Europe.

It is in this collection that he more consistently began to write in a cosmopolitan style

that is similar to Wong May’s, appropriating styles, aesthetics and references

depending on the subject matter of his poem. Boey then left Singapore for Australia

and his latest set of new and selected poems, published after a decade’s hiatus in After

Joanne Leow 68

the Fire (2006), reflects this change in setting and audience, even though it is

published by the Singapore-based Firstfruits Publications. In looking at Boey’s entire

body of work thus far, it crucial to see his evolution through a sequential analysis of

his writing. Also interesting is which poems Boey chooses to include in After the Fire

and how some of these poems have been significantly revised, adding layers of

meaning through absent or changed lines. The selected and occasionally edited poems

give us an idea of the sentiments, journeys and memories that have remained relevant

to Boey and through how they have been edited, give us an archaeological view of

how Boey’s concerns and writing styles have changed through his career.

Boey’s trajectory is different from Wong’s in the sense that he begins

inextricably although unwillingly rooted to the Singapore context. Boey uses travel

first in the conventional sense to escape from an authoritarian, materialistic, rapidly

developing society that he writes about in his poems. Yet, there is a sense at first that

try as he might, Boey cannot escape his familial, literary and cultural upbringing. His

poems about India in particular, while more nuanced than Yong’s version of

Thailand, are still markedly conscious of Boey’s position as a privileged outsider

seeking escape and enlightenment. The major change that occurs in Boey’s work is

only apparent in Days of No Name, written when he spent a significant time in the

United States, when he was awarded the University of Iowa Writing Fellowship to

attend the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Nevertheless,

even though Boey’s biography is far more transparent than Wong May’s, it is also

important here to consider the poems themselves. Boey’s writing evolves as his

collections progress, from self-conscious reflexive asides and the use of dense, over-

wrought imagery to a cleaner and more direct style that is more coherent and focused.

While some of this can be attributed to the craft of an older poet, Boey’s later work is

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also more formally innovative and assured as he comes to accept and explore the

function of travel in his life.

While critics like Angelia Poon see Boey’s preoccupation with travel as “a

necessity of [his] life, with restless motion paradoxically offering peace and

equanimity” (375), there is a need to look beyond Boey’s apparent fixation with the

idea of travel as flux. Boey sees each of the places he visits as holding important keys

to “a whole library of meaning”; the specificities of each city and country are

essential to the poet as he re-examines his place in the world whether through social

awareness in India or a more figurative spatial and historical understanding in

America. Again, Bruce Robbins’ ideas on cosmopolitanism as not “detachment” but

“(re)attachment” is germane here. Certainly Boey does display the desire to leave

Singapore behind especially in his earlier collections, yet it is only to redefine the

place of Singapore in his world view as but one of many other cities and countries.

While Poon might see that Boey continues to “write back to Singapore” (375), he is

also simultaneously writing himself away, and conscious of the irrevocability of this

move.

Where Boey begins this journey is in an early poem that contemplates travel

and pinpoints his affinity to the traveler-writer Bruce Chatwin. In doing so, he

demonstrates a cosmopolitan sensibility that is hitherto not displayed in the preceding

poems in his book Somewhere Bound (1989). In the original 1989 version, the

eulogistic poem is entitled “For Bruce Chatwin, A Great Teacher”, while the version

published in 2006 in After the Fire is simply titled “For Chatwin”. Boey’s revised

version appears to have been edited for clarity and style, where the original takes a

more intimate tone in its mourning of Chatwin’s death. In both versions, Boey sees

himself as a fellow traveler with Chatwin, through the medium of poetry,

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A man must place himself on a map to see how big he is. I have come into your song, an ant dreaming himself into your line. (195-6) Boey sees both a spiritual and intellectual connection with Chatwin, specifically in the

notion of songlines where lives and journeys are seen figuratively to be songs. Many

of Boey’s poems throughout his career return to the idea of songlines and also feature

musical motifs. Boey also identifies with Chatwin’s notion that a man is defined

through travel because the ability to be in motion, to explore and discover, serves as a

measure of his worth. He looks to Chatwin as a role model of sorts:

On the BBC they tell how you left behind the little things you had grown to love, like a child letting the petals drift from the one flower in his hand. I am desperate for these signs marking your trail the pieces of the map, the colours of the countries, the scattered beads of your thoughts. I try to read what enchanted you into such song. The man who is left behind has not moved. Tonight he is a million miles away. (197) Boey here places his life and writing in context, and positions himself finding solace

in the work of a cosmopolitan traveler schooled in European literature (he quotes

Chatwin quoting Proust) who has been drawn to the primeval ideas of Aboriginal

tribes in Australia and taken to wandering the far-reaches of inhabitable regions. For

Boey, taking Chatwin as a role model is a form of rebellion from life in Singapore

which he sees as static and superficial. The last two lines of this selection which are

italicized are a recurring motif, providing a self-conscious narrative about Boey

himself that is embedded throughout the rest of the poem; and even though at this

point he hasn’t yet “moved”, it is apparent that he will soon.

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Boey sees himself as sharply separate from the Singapore context, wanting

instead to pick up on Chatwin’s abruptly halted trail. Yet, this idea changes from 1989

to 2006; where in the first version Boey writes,

I am praying before an open window leaning over the rail of the ship given me, that at the end of every journey, the father welcomes the errant son, and that walking is the way to what the Greeks called catharsis, and Christ, purgation. (Somewhere Bound 68-9) in the second we find the same verse changed and in some ways expanded upon: I am sitting before an open window, facing a quadrangle of flats, so many lives and stories, broken songlines, dots of a canvas I can’t quite see. I want each dot to become a walking dream, to take the first step on the waiting map. I see the son leaving again and again till is no more leaving to be done and the father welcomes the errant son. I see us all walking as you did, Bruce, walking into our waiting lives. (After the Fire 197-8) In the first version of this verse, we find references to the Bible and Aristotle and a

paternal theme which will figure extensively in Boey’s later work. Boey’s spirituality

is also clearly referenced here, as he “prays” in front of an open window. It is telling

that the poet has chosen to alter the verse so much after twenty years, removing most

of the references to mythology, the bible and spirituality, as if he sees that they are

insufficient placeholders for his sentiments. Instead, Boey embeds himself in an urban

landscape, ostensibly Singapore’s. He sees clearly that “lives / and stories” here are

“broken songlines”, seemingly trapped in the city, unable to fulfill their dreams. The

poem’s line breaks interrupt each phrase and echo the idea that journeys are curtailed.

More significantly, there is a new pronounced visual element to the imagery: Boey’s

Joanne Leow 72

reference to dots creates a vision of an Aboriginal style artwork that more deeply

recalls Chatwin’s work in Australia. In choosing to re-work his poem, Boey acquires

a double perspective of the past and present (or rather his past’s future). He

simultaneously sees what happens at the point of the writing of the poem and after,

where he is more conscious of his mortality and his diffused sense of belonging.

In a sense, this early poem sees Boey playing the role of a would-be

cosmopolitan and world traveler even though he has not yet ventured extensively

abroad. Accordingly the poem is rife with dream-like, fantastical images with

“ancient figures covered / in an ancient dusk” and “lost fairy-tale[s]” involving a

“drowsy dragon in Patagonia” (195). In his revised copy, Boey acknowledges that the

reality that is tangible for him is “a quadrangle of flats” before him, which he wants to

walk away from. Travel here becomes an abstract ambition and a pseudo-spiritual

quest for enlightenment and freedom. To a greater extent than Yong however, Boey

undercuts these mawkish sentiments with a sense of disenchantment and irony –

clearly seeing himself as “desperate” and immobile. What is crucial here is the

significance that Boey places on the idea of travel, seeing it as “the movement of man

/ across the empty landscape, / sowing his trail of poems” (196). Boey sees poetry as a

way to mark his way during his travels and this theme will continue throughout his

career.

As the titles suggest, Boey’s next book Another Place (1992), acts as a natural

progression from Somewhere Bound. The majority of poems in this collection are set

away from Singapore, mostly in either Asia or Europe. As with Wong, Boey does not

set up the countries he writes about in comparison with Singapore. However unlike

Wong, Boey initially positions his poetic persona firmly outside the cultures he writes

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about. Consider the tableau that “The Howrah Station” paints where the traveler is

strictly separate from the context of the train station:

To purchase a ticket out I pick my way through the homeless souls, sprawled between refuse heaps and bags on the sooty station floor. The leveler is working overtime here, tireless, laying out a field of maimed mortals, half-killed, untended, unfinished, his indiscriminate scythe littering with travail the pilgrim’s path. (136) As Boey continues he sees the traveler bizarrely as “an adroit footballer”, a

“laundered self” trying to escape “the lunging pleas / for mercy, warding off eyes /

that draw the heart into their dark pits” (136). It is a scene of horror, straight out of a

Hieronymus Bosch painting, in particular the lines “maimed mortals, / half-killed,

untended, unfinished” where negations are broken up by caesuras emphasizing the

irrevocability of the scene. These are lines dense with imagery that piles upon itself

conflating football metaphors with images of a medieval Death and references to

Elizabethan poetry. It is as if the experience in the station has been so intense for

Boey that in order to fully express his sentiments he feels he must overexert himself

in his craft. Crucially though, the poem does not deliver a simplistic anthropological

verdict; the beggars are not portrayed as inferior beings at all, instead the scene sets

itself up as a challenge to faith and art. The multiple questions in the following verse

serve to stress the interrogative tone,

It is a terminal ward. Enough revelation to stop all seekers carrying urgent requests for truth in beauty and beauty in truth in their tracks. What are we doing here? Is this the right address? The capital of God? Art’s proper haunt? (136)

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Here the fact of travel alters the traveler instead of reaffirming his cultural roots or

identity. It is not a validation of the his preconceived truths or certainties, instead

Boey comes to question the value of his choice of career, his search for meaning and

his place in the world,

If poetry could drum up courage, correct the economists, reform the politicians, and bake a million loaves, my presence would need no apology. But who eats poetry? (136) Of course, this verse is not without irony, since Boey does not stop traveling or

writing poetry. His “unplugged conscience” however, has been awakened and while

there is no easy resolution to his unease at the great suffering that he witnesses, it is

an experience of travel that is more realistic since it resists painless conclusions and

pithy generalizations.

Boey makes a parallel move in “Sudder Street, Calcutta”, documenting the

terrible scene of poverty, “in inexhaustible variations of deformity and need” (138)

and his consequent helplessness and insignificance:

The hands of this poem are useless stumps. They cannot even begin to turn the page. I come from a race that has no word for despair, its culture purged of poverty’s germs, its language a propaganda of faith in absolute health. I even doubt my ABC. (138) In contrast to the limbless artist in “The Howrah Station”, Boey declares that his

poetry is unable to even move beyond the narratives of inequality and suffering that

he has so vividly portrayed, where “deserted angels lie sprawled on Sudder Street, /

beauty broken in God’s terrible neglect” (138). His end-stopped lines here emphasize

the finality of his pronouncements. In an indirect way, he blames this on his insular,

cloistered upbringing in Singapore, described using a vocabulary of medicine,

education and political discourse. This sense of dichotomy between Singapore and

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Calcutta might seem similar to Leong and Yong’s separation of home and abroad, yet

Boey’s intent here is not to contrast the two cities unfavorably. Instead, Boey seeks to

explicate his biased position that arises from his upbringing and in doing so reveals

the limitations of each culture. The lines are a sharp deviation from the first two

stanzas of the poem, and Boey continues by again showing how his encounters have

destabilized his sense of self,

Perhaps I am looking in the wrong archives for my history, checking the wrong catalogues, tracing irrelevant titles. Perhaps I should stop subscribing to foreign publications which inform me of happenings on the other planets. On Sudder Street my mind is numb. (138) The alienation and dislocation that Boey encounters in his journey through Calcutta

extend into his quest for a better understanding of his familial history and his idea of

what “home” is. Boey comes to question his predilections for all things “foreign”, as

if they distract him from the task at hand. Filled with doubt and uneasiness because of

this encounter with despair, Boey chooses to end the poem by placing himself firmly

within the context of the poem’s setting, “But tonight let me take my place / among

the forlorn angels of Sudder Street” (139). Whether this is a successful move is

debatable; in fact, I would argue that the final couplet of the poem rings false, since

Boey has spent the entire poem setting himself apart from the scene on Sudder Street

before suddenly arbitrarily fitting himself back into the context. What is important

here however, is not necessarily Boey’s conclusion, instead it is the process of his

self-conscious departure from what Philip Holden sees as an “Orientalist turn”(357) in

his portrayal of Calcutta to a cultural and personal disorientation that seems be a more

genuine response. With these poems about India, Boey reflect his uneasiness with the

idea of travel as a quest for spiritual enlightenment. There is a disparity between his

expectations of travel as seen in his poem “For Chatwin” and his actual experiences

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abroad. This leads him and his readers to reconsider his motives for travel, to rethink

what if any cultural knowledge and experience can be gained if Boey continues to see

himself as embarking on a journey of spiritual discovery.

As these issues work their way through his poetry through the years, it seems

logical then that Boey would choose to see these notions of flux, motion their

attendant possibilities in the vast cosmopolitan American landscape where his next

major collection Days of No Name (1996). The collection is separated into two major

sections with the former set in America while the latter is a section entitled “Home,

Elsewhere” encompassing Singapore and other locations outside the United States in

Europe and Asia. Through the poems in “An American Journey”, Boey sketches a

journey that takes him from the centre of the country to the East Coast and finally

coming to a revelatory conclusion in San Francisco, a city that comes to signify both a

destination and starting point. America dominates Days of No Name for it is there that

Boey finds others like him, who write in the borders between cultures and countries,

and question the reifications of ethnicity and nationality.

In the poem “Day of No Name”, each of Boey’s companions in Iowa is

described as being on the fringe or in a space that is difficult to pinpoint. In particular

though, there is the poet Helena Sinervo4 who becomes a recurring trope through

Days of No Name. In his interaction with Helena, Boey seeks to “unwrap the images

like boxes within boxes”(66) to discover a culture, aesthetic and history wholly

different from his own. In taking on and appropriating this different aesthetic, Boey’s

poetry performs in a similar way to Wong May’s poetry about North America, taking

4 While Boey never explicitly gives Helena Sinervo’s full name, we can infer that he is referring to the Finnish poet because of her concurrent participation in the International Writing Program in the University of Iowa in 1994. Also, the themes that Boey explores in this period of his poetry are very similar to Sinervo’s, see an interview with Sinervo on The Virtual Writing University Archive: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/archive/record/helena_sinervo_interview/. Accessed 28 February 2010.

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on the cultural references, form and imagery of its setting. Poems about Helena and

her native Finland dominate Boey’s first section “An American Journey” in Days of

No Name. Seven poems out of the twenty either address her directly or are written

with specific references to Finland and its landscape. This is the first time that Boey

so intimately adopts a different poetic style and imagery, and it invigorates his poetry,

enabling him to look beyond the disorientation that was so evident in Somewhere

Bound.

For example, in the poem “Springtime Sonata”, which is dedicated to Helena,

Boey describes the poet and her poetry as a place that escapes the boundaries of space

and time. The metaphor of Helena and her poetry as a primeval temperate forest

permeates the poem. The slum-like or overdeveloped urban landscapes of Boey’s

earlier poems are sharply contrasted with images of nature and a deep-rooted sense of

the earth’s possibilities. Boey departs from his usual vocabulary and even lineation

style to create metaphors that conflate the body and the forest. Words are “rough-

hewn” and can be held in hands and Helena has “dark firs” in her throat and her eyes

are a “lake” (70). Boey has been able, for the first time in his work, to completely

enter into another’s universe and forms lasting attachments. The very quality of light,

“the long slant of sun” appears altered in these poems as a different aesthetic pervades

Boey’s writing. At this juncture, it seems pertinent to recall Bruce Robbins’ concept

of cosmopolitanism - “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment

at a distance”(3). Boey’s ability to draw metaphors and imagery from a temperate

landscape without any touristic overtones and his references to religion and childhood

reinforce the elemental nature of his revelation. Another characteristic of poems about

Helena is Boey’s return to faith in words and their power to “redeem” – this is an

about face from his poems set in India where he doubts the utility and value of his

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craft. Here his words become a talisman against forgetting the power of literature and

its attempt at a form of immortality. The style of these poems about Helena is more

direct and less fraught with a diversity of seemingly unrelated references. Boey is able

to master a single aesthetic and focus on a single emotion or thought.

Boey’s encounters with Helena are also an encounter with a foreign language

that enlarges his poetic vocabulary. In the poems “Last Birds” and “For Helena”,

Boey incorporates Finnish words into his poems, reveling in their unfamiliarity and

aurality. He italicizes these words where he has not italicized foreign words before, as

a way of emphasizing their power for him. In “Last Birds”, Boey never explicitly

refers to Helena and yet reveals her presence through Finnish bird names as he writes

about their parting. This poem echoes Wong May’s “New Hampshire”, where Wong

walks into the unknown of the New Hampshire countryside and this leads to a greater

awareness of her surroundings and of her mortality. For Boey, it is the Finnish words

that bring him “into the dark” of their possibilities, they are “poems / translated whole

out of our dreams here” and they transport him to Helena’s land, becoming birds that

migrate between north and south. The shortness of his lines seem to mimic the quick

flight of birds and also suggest a newness in the emotions that Boey depicts.

Boey’s poems about Helena are usually written about liminal situations and

spaces. Boey hints at a relationship with Helena that borders on the romantic and yet

pulls back at crucial moments to suggest that his feelings are not fully articulated. One

poem about travel sees the two in mid-journey “North to Boston”. In the poem Boey

continues with the idea of travel as song, this time with Helena as a companion. He

writes the poem in the trip between New York and Boston, treating it as a

homecoming of sorts for Helena, whom he writes is drawn to “northing”:

New York’s polyphony behind us now, the piano bars, the Village voices fade out

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like a croon tune for the lonely by Sinatra, the Greyhound progressing into Massachusetts, the Transcendentalist country rolling past like a score of silent music. We are edging towards the unspoken, to the border between two chords, the duration between two partings, to the place words turn back from. (75) Boey uses this musical metaphor both to suggest the landscape unfolding before him

that is rich in musical and literary traditions, akin again to Chatwin’s idea of

songlines. These references seem varied from popular singers like Sinatra to the

highbrow literary nod to the Transcendentalists – yet they are all part of a coherent if

diverse American landscape where music and poetry are central. Boey uses his

journey through this landscape to embody the in-between space that he finds himself

in, “between two chords”, a place where “words turn back from” (75). In the rest of

the poem, Boey sees Helena as the bearer of light, “a candle […] / like the body of

white birch, the grain of your hands / filling with its glow” casting an “oblique light”

and leading into the darkness at “the heart of the snow-buried woods” (75). With a

great deal of sensitivity, Boey manages to absorb and render a temperate snow laden

landscape that resonates with its rich, particular and coherent imagery, recalling the

quality of light on a winter’s night. The poem is especially intimate since it uses the

form of a direct address to Helena and assumes an almost omniscient persona that is

able to enter Helena’s memory while simultaneously observing the scene at hand. The

persona of the poem is firmly embedded in this scene with no sense of being an

outsider, in spite of the fact that the memory of winter being described is someone

else’s. The poem is able to convey, through focusing on the liminal space of the bus

journey, the feeling and aesthetic behind the homecoming, forming an attachment to

Helena and her country that does not even require a physical journey there. This is a

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clear parallel with Wong May’s revelations in “Leaving Berlin” where a train journey

creates a sense of the universality of the in-between-ness of travel.

Boey continues to explore the geography of the borders of feeling and travel in

other poems about Helena like “Strangely Coupled” and “For Helena”, and his poetry

comes away distinctly enriched by the encounter. What Boey calls “the short strange

life of our being together” engages him in a way that his travel has not engaged him

before. This is not to say that there are not other characters in Boey’s Days of No

Name; the Burmese poet Win Pe also figures in a selection of Boey’s poems, yet

Boey does not seem to have been drawn to him with the same intensity. Other voices

in Boey’s poems here also include James, who journeys to California with Boey and

seems to infect him with restlessness and risk-taking in “San Francisco with James”,

“Wanton with James”.

More generally though, the landscape and geography of America affect

Boey’s poetry in profound ways. In poems like “Falling”, “The Art of Seeing”, “San

Francisco Again” and “Flowers Flagging on Haight-Ashbury”, Boey’s meditations on

landscapes, cityscapes and his observations of the people around him shape his

perceptions of his place in the world. From the change of seasons to urban

topographies, Boey finds his sense of space and direction changed both literally and

figuratively. While his poems about the American east coast are imbued with

melancholy, his poems about the west coast seem to speak of the multiple possibilities

of ways to live one’s life. For instance, in “The Art of Seeing” he writes,

The different districts, the different lives drew us on; straight, queer, left or right, hip or down, all directions taken, we were on the way. Crossing the streets at a bias, or going with the flow, we saw seeing whole is seeing differently, swinging from part to part to whole, at peace with the pieces. (96-7)

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This selection recalls Ross Posnock’s ideas that cosmopolitanism looks

beyond differences and oppositions, to consider how “culture is syncretic”(809). Boey

is aware of “the different districts, the different lives” that pull on “all directions”, yet

he points out that there are many way of “crossing the streets” and that to see America

in totality means accepting all its “parts” and “pieces”. Boey superimposes this

intellectual understanding of cosmopolitanism onto the physical map of San

Francisco, creating a visual representation that ties the urban landscape to a cultural

one. There is a rhythmic quality to Boey’s verse here, with the line breaks and

caesuras working together to suggest the experience of walking that connects the

disparate neighborhoods of San Francisco. The pace of the verse also echoes the

process of bringing together “straight, queer, left / or right, hip or down,” with the

single-syllable, staccato-like descriptors giving way to longer phrases and continuous

present tense of “crossing”, “going”, “seeing” and “swinging”. And ending with the

apt pun of “peace” and “pieces” equating a wholeness and completion with the

disparate parts of the city.

When Boey returns to San Francisco as a subject in a second poem in the

collection Days of No Name, he continues to animate its neighbourhoods, creating a

universe of meaning that brings together the fringes of the city into a coherent whole

through his writing,

[…] the climb and plunge of the streets, the decentred districts, Castro, Mission, Haight and Tenderloin, afloat on their own meanings, these scattered lives settle now and cohere in the language we found to speak to the darkness in each other. (102) The poem’s finding meaning in these seemingly disparate parts recalls how Sheldon

Pollock and Homi Bhabha see cosmopolitanism as “ways of living at home abroad or

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abroad at home – ways of inhabiting multiple places at once, of being different beings

simultaneously, of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller” (587).

Boey’s recognition of the inherent blurring of boundaries between home and abroad,

larger histories and more personal ones is characteristic of this view of

cosmopolitanism. So, it seems fitting that in the section “An American Journey” in

Days of No Name, Boey traverses the breadth of America and arrives in “San

Francisco Again”, making connections between where he has come from and where

he is going. Standing at a characteristically liminal space, a “long wooden pier /

striding into the bay, drenched in morning light” (101), Boey makes one of his final

revelations about his time in America,

All seems comprehensible, in place now, why we came, why this end of America ended a story and started others writing. First the rending, as you hurt me into tearing up the claim I made for poetry as the only religion to keep our lives whole, its lines ascetic, lean with fasting and keen as need. Your words nudged me into the uncertain waters of a blank page. Here I learnt to let the centre go, riding the heaving streets till I came before the dark room where you wrote, the room holdings it secrets quietly, untroubled by the desire to transcend. I found the house you made of pain, and made my way to my own dark room. (101) Here life, poetry and travel merge into one as Boey connects the stories of the

immigrants, explorers and artists who sought out the American West before him as a

goal and those who have settled there to start new paths. He makes a crucial choice to

situate the poem here on the border of America, looking “Pacificwards” as he puts it.

This destabilizes the idea of a one-way journey westwards and instead points to the

destination of the American West as an illusory one. The American West coast in fact

a Janus-faced location that looks one way towards America and the other towards the

Pacific and beyond, full of possibilities as “the uncertain waters of a blank page”.

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Reading the poem as a meditation on this liminal point, we understand how Boey

learns to “let the centre go” and make a journey that is both exterior and interior to his

“own dark room”. It is clearly not an a-cultural understanding that Boey achieves: he

chooses to end the poem with this portrait, more than aware of the cosmopolitans

before him, who have marked their way in a world where borders seem arbitrary:

An old Chinese man shuffles to the pier’s end, pauses and begins the slow breaths of tai chi. His hands begin to weave the wind and light into tracks moving beyond time. Our long walks through the city, the stumbling into reconciliation on this pier, seem now part of the story, the story of the distance I have travelled between here and here. (102) Much of Boey’s later poetry returns to the theme of his absent father and here it is

apparent that his presence haunts this poem too, as does the reference to “long walks”

which Boey associates with time spent with his father. Yet it is apparent that Boey’s

associations with a sense of his origins “an old Chinese man” are both complicated, as

envisaged by the man’s unknowable but necessarily transnational past, and universal,

as this same man is still used as a symbol of greater meaning and purpose, able to

“weave the wind and light”. It would be easy to dismiss this image of the “old

Chinese man” as risking stereotype and cliché but it is the context of Boey’s

observation that makes the difference. Boey is conscious of the histories and

pathways that San Francisco hides and is finally able to place himself with greater

certainty in one of these tales, “between here and here”, eliminating the idea of

“there” as something separate and foreign. Ultimately, this ability to transcend time

and distance to grasp at universal truths while acknowledging the specificities of a

place is a crucial development from Boey’s American journey. So it is not without

significance that Boey performs the same move twice in this passage, by moving from

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the specific (the man and walking in a particular city) to the abstract and transcendent

(an ability to move beyond time and a more figurative idea of the journey).

The poems in the section “An American Journey” are followed by a section

entitled “Home, Elsewhere” where, armed with new realizations, Boey writes poems

about traveling that are significantly different from those in his previous book,

Another Place. These poems like “Painting into Life”, “Madness in Tübingen” and

“Bach in Leipzig” see him better able to absorb contexts and other lives, and less

unsure of his craft and his place in each setting. However, one particular poem stands

out as a harbinger of Boey’s later work in After the Fire: “Change Alley” is unlike

the poems “Rites” and “Arming Rituals” which are firmly emplaced in Singapore.

Boey’s poem about going back in a time through a reverie inspired by a trip to

downtown Singapore is essentially about traveling, although Boey ostensibly puts it

in the “Home” category”, it is clear that it could also belong to “Elsewhere”. In the

poem, Boey journeys through his memory to a place in Singapore that is vibrantly

cosmopolitan and in a sense both at the heart and the fringe of the country. It is a

strangely familiar yet disorienting memory:

[…] the trade of tongues, the bazaar of puzzling scents and smells, an underwater world of sailors stale from the sea and travellers drowned in dreams of home […] in each recess he heard the conspiracies of currencies, the marriage of foreign tongues holding a key to worlds opening on worlds for the wakening sense of the child. (108) The poem is Boey’s catalogue of the possibilities that once were in Singapore, as a

port and crossroads, before these routes became “buried or closed” and the streets

“[have emptied] into loss” (108) with a forgotten past and a sterile, singular future. It

is a dream-like sequence with an almost exotic take on the Singapore of the past,

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emphasizing the importance of the foreign and the travellers who flooded the country.

Boey undercuts the sense of exoticism by making it clear that this vision is through

the unreliable memory of a child and has it end in a grotesque illusion of “the

laughing clowns / in the toy shop at the end of the Alley, / secreting peals of ghostly

glee, derisive / and disembodied” (108) before returning to the present-day Change

Alley. In following this narrative to the end, unlike Leong Liew Geok’s more

superficial “Exiles Return”, Boey shows how the reality of a “home” cannot remain

static and instead is with the passage of time “utterly changed” (109). By plunging

into the heart of this change, Boey comes away with the revelation that “the map [is]

useless / for navigation in the lost city” (109). Yet his nostalgia for this changed space

is tempered with a clear-eyed resignation of the irrevocability of the change effected

by development. The poet sees himself journeying to “the country of the mind”(109)

to compensate for the fact that he is utterly lost in this new city; in effect he is

traveling to two places: back in time to a lost Singapore and also to a new city that he

is completely unfamiliar with. It is a double loss for Boey and yet at the end of the

poem he sees himself as “changed beyond all changes” (109), moving beyond his

earlier bitterness at the rapid development in Singapore to a calmer acquiescence of

what has been lost.

“Change Alley” heralds a new stage in Boey’s poetic themes, building on his

earlier realizations that leavings and goings have begun to merge and that he has

learnt to let go of “the centre”. Again, Pollock and Bhabha come to mind with their

assertion that “cosmopolitanism is not a circle created by culture diffused from a

center, but instead, that centers are everywhere and circumferences nowhere” (587-8).

For Boey, these multiple centers have been created and cultivated by travel. Pollock

and Bhabha, as Boey’s poem hints, go on to note that this points to cosmopolitanism’s

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previous and continuing existence. Boey comes to a realization that there is no fixed

idea of culture or belonging, but that the “foreign” and the “abroad” co-exist

simultaneously in the “local” and at “home”. I do not mean, however, to suggest that

Boey has arrived at a faultless way of depicting a utopian idea of free cultural

exchange and movement, democratically decentred. New poems in After the Fire like

“Bodhgaya, “Benares” and “Slieve League” disappoint for the most part with their

more superficial grasp of the countries they encounter. While there is certainly less

angst and more self-assurance, this is often at the expense of genuine engagement

with his subject matter.

“Bodhgaya”, nevertheless, does bear closer analysis as Boey draws out a

religious and spiritual significance to his travels, which here are infused with

Buddhist beliefs:

We too retrace the routes from that life to this, erase the false forays, arranging the frenzied

sketches and torn pages into a scroll of arrivals and departures that will lead us to the empty quarter, beyond the poem’s end. (51)

At this stage in his life, Boey has the advantage of hindsight and uses it to try and

impose a sense of order in his “arrivals and departures”, turning them into a narrative

that is drawing to its inexorable close. The idea of pilgrimhood, referenced in so many

of Boey’s poems, also comes with a greater intensity in the poem as he retraces the

paths of those before him

[…]our soles memorizing the worn surface, gleaning the songlines in its deep texture, the grace that comes of exhaustion, meeting and parting compassed in one place. (54)

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Again here, Boey destabilizes ideas of origin and destination in a place where

“meeting and parting” appear to conflate. In this poem, as in so many others, Boey

returns ultimately to Chatwin’s songlines that crisscross a map that disregards borders

and how they are drawn. It is a journey that has taken him from a superficial and

romanticized view of travel to one that is conscious of the complexities of movement

and voyage insofar that they have no fixed points of departure and arrival whether

geographic or temporal. In Boey’s worldview, journeys have always been made and

will continue to be made, blurring national borders and cultural traditions to the point

of casting that original validity in doubt.

In this chapter, I have shown how through the trope of travel, Wong and Boey

challenge commonly held stereotypes of home and abroad. In their cosmopolitan

readings of landscapes, people and situations, differences and comparisons are

conspicuously absent. Jahan Ramazani makes a similar point when discussing modern

and contemporary American and postcolonial poets. He notes that, “although national

labels impute singularity and coherence, poets make and remake their often-interstitial

citizenship” (Ramazani 2006 354). Ramazani is particularly fascinated by the

techniques that are used to achieve this, like “formal and ideological rewritings” and

“sonic mutations and tropological reinscriptions that can span multiple nationalities

and ethnicities” (Ramazani 2006 354). It is evident that there is much in common with

the projects of Boey and Wong who “make and remake” their lives in between

borders refusing to adhere to strict ideas of nation and crossing territorial boundaries

to find homes in motion. What is also noteworthy is how their poetry itself changes

with each setting, whether absorbing a musical inflection or adjusting the lineation to

suggest different rhythms and speech cadences - both Boey and Wong’s work use

these techniques and many others to absorb context in their vocabulary, references

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and form. This significantly disturbs the idea of a travel literature that speaks in a

specific way to a home audience and instead opens up the possibilities in themes and

audiences for their work.

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Conclusion

“Somewhere between stations you forget the name of the place you have left behind, and the name of the place coming towards you in still indistinct. For that moment, you dwell in an autonomous state, a resting place between memory and imagination, between forgetting and remembering, between home and home.”

--- Boey Kim Cheng, Between Stations

In the eponymous essay that ends his most recent book Between Stations,

Boey Kim Cheng writes from that typically modern liminal space: the plane journey.

Flying from Australia to Singapore, Boey muses on the slippery quality of belonging

and identity, noting how he shifts between being Australian and Singaporean almost

unthinkingly. Very much like Wong May, Boey identifies the in-between quality of

traveling between places as one that makes both origin and destination

“interchangeable”. This blurring of national and cultural identities is central to the

work of both poets and demands a new way of examining their poetry without a focus

on their geographical origins.

In order to find new ways of reading Wong and Boey’s work, I examined their

poetry through two main themes: family and travel. Both poets explore the most

fundamental set of human relationships with various techniques that defamiliarize the

cultural connections that are often made with the family. For Boey, cultural history

becomes a means to invent and imagine new personal and familial histories. For

Wong, familial relationships are detached from ethnicity and nation, and instead

portrayed with a sense of universalism. Furthermore, the poets emphasize the

importance of the in-between space of travel, portray encounters with different

cultures without a view to comparison with a “home” culture and form lasting and

profound connections to diverse locations and people. Wong and Boey have created

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bodies of work that embody a cosmopolitanism that looks to multiple attachments and

centers. They have gone beyond the constraints of a fixed idea of “home” or “origin”

and from the obligations of constructing fixed national and ethnic identities through

their work.

Boey makes this particularly clear in his most recent work, where he

acknowledges the problematic of believing in a fixed sense of identity and belonging.

Having migrated to Australia and spent a large amounts of time traveling, Boey sees

himself as both “emigrant” and “immigrant” to those around him, but more crucially

as “uncertain” as “the tags fall off” (305). Boey’s realization is that it is impossible to

label or categorize one’s identity by nationality or citizenship. Yet, his idea of being

“in-between” is not to exist in an indeterminate third space that is devoid of

specificities and written about in a “neutral international style”. Instead, Boey

grapples with the realities and illusions of finding his way in a world where he sees

everything through multiple perspectives and biases. In his essay “Between Stations”,

he chronicles his vacillations between Australian and Singaporean cultures, between

being Kim Cheng Boey and Boey Kim Cheng5. These changes in the placement of his

family name signal a more profound tension between being an emigrant who is

haunted by the destruction of Singapore’s past and an immigrant who is open to the

possibilities (and disappointments) of a new Australian life.

As for Wong, her “resting place” approaches a similarly liminal state in the

final poem of her last published collection Superstitions. Entitled “Michael’s

Windscreen” (135 Superstitions), it moves from a grotesque description of insect

5 Names in the Chinese language usually start with the family name of the person, in this case “Boey”, whereas Western names put the family name last; thus the order of Boey’s name depends on which context he is in.

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debris on a windscreen to an understanding that:

O Travellers, traveling anywhere the world is beautiful Our windows get dirty. Wong pragmatically contemplates the dirt, grime and excrement that accumulates

with travel and accepts it as a thing of unconventional beauty that forms a

“palimpsest” of experiences and landscapes. It is a difficult poem to enjoy, with its

use of alliteration, repetition and highly specific vocabulary all working to create a

visual and tactile idea of travel’s detritus. But it is precisely this discomfort that

pushes the reader to confront it. In refusing to glorify travel, mythologize return and

simplify the idea of belonging, Wong comes to a truer meaning of the complicated,

messy and real meanings of these rites of passage. Her poetry opens itself up to the

difficulties and ambiguities of understanding one’s place in the world in ways that

challenge ideas of home, abroad and travel. Her ability to write about family, other

cultures and politics without resorting to stereotype and cultural and moral relativism

means that her poetry has a distinctly non-ethnicized approach, something that sets it

apart from many of her Singaporean contemporaries.

Wong and Boey’s poetry enable them to escape the mould of the national

writer that Edwin Thumboo privileges; their work does not seek to attain “a collective

psyche” or “add to the sense of [Singapore’s] destiny as a people” (66). Yet, it seems

difficult for critics of their work not to try to emphasize the “Singaporean-ness” of

their endeavours or failing which, exclude them from critical discourse all together.

Wong May, as documented earlier in this thesis, has suffered from the lack of critical

work on her three collections of poetry. Wong’s physical absence from the country,

the paucity of references to Singapore in her poetry, the opacity of her writing and her

publication by an American press appear to have all played a role in her absence in

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Singapore literary studies. However, I would argue that Wong’s poetry is important in

the context of studies on Singapore because of her redefinition of the country not as

an origin or a point for nostalgia, but instead as a nexus of what she calls “lostness”

and bewilderment. In doing so, Wong’s work sweeps away the notion that poets must

be tied to a particular origin and points instead to the complexities of establishing a

poetic identity and persona in a complicated postcolonial world. It becomes important

as well to consider Wong as a pioneer who heralds Singapore poets working in the

later part of the twentieth century who create, as Angelia Poon notes, “worldly,

cosmopolitan persona[e], observant and alert to points of connection, cultural

differences, and the impermanence of encounter” (375). It would appear that in this

sense, Wong was simply ahead of her time.

For Boey, who does explicitly write about Singapore – whether with an

aversion to its rapid development or a sense of nostalgia for its irrecoverable past –

the situation is slightly more complex. While he has not been subject to a similar lack

of attention, critical work on Boey has invariably focused on how he “write[s] back to

Singapore”(Poon 375). Philip Holden acknowledges this phenomenon and sees

himself having been complicit in this instinct to demand that “these poems speak

overtly of nationhood, or proclaim their postcoloniality” (356), as he admits to his

initial disappointment that Boey’s later poems were set outside Singapore. Holden

comes to an acceptance of the significance of Boey’s later work in terms of “the

importance of memory and a reconstruction of the past that is urgently important in

the present at both a political and a personal level”(356). But what is more crucial in

his analysis is his emphasis on the fact that Boey refuses to fall into the “the

temptations of a nostalgic reconstruction of the past” (356). The issue of temptation is

there as well for scholars involved in Singapore studies to burden Boey with nostalgia

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for his past so that it constitutes the entirety of his present-day identity. Shirley Lim

provides one such example in her review Boey’s collection of essays Between

Stations, as she sees Singapore as the linchpin to all of Boey’s musings and Boey’s

main purpose in the book “to find a permanent solution to the restlessness in

[himself], to [his] quarrel with Singapore and with [him]self" (Boey 4). For scholars

with ties to Singapore like Lim, there is often an oversight that leads them to avoid

addressing how important Australia and the rest of Boey’s travels are as well to his

work. Yet it is clear that Boey sees both his past in Singapore and his present

elsewhere as equally important: his struggles occur “between home and home” (313).

It is also essential, when reading his work, to take into account Boey’s travels away

from Singapore and his reception in and relationship to Australia (particularly through

his interactions with his children). These are things that scholars of Singapore

literature often gloss over as they exert themselves to place Boey within a canon of

transnational Singaporeans like Simon Tay and Arthur Yap, who still put Singapore at

the centre of their work by choosing to reside primarily in the country and write from

an internal perspective. However, unlike Tay and Yap, Boey has chosen to

permanently leave Singapore and is, I would argue, more concerned with seeing his

old life through the lens of his new one rather than vice versa.

In the context of Singapore’s political culture, Wong and Boey’s work reveal

the problems that are inherent in codifying what it means to be Singaporean. A case in

point is the 1999 government document, the S21 report, which consists of various

recommendations on how to improve Singaporean life and boost patriotism. One of

the key recommendations centres on how to engage Singaporeans working abroad to

ensure that they retain a “strong emotional attachment to home” through emphasizing

their “fond memories of growing up in Singapore” and material benefits which might

Joanne Leow 94

attract him to their “‘best home’”. The report continues to add that if this is

successful, “[i]nternationalisation will then no longer be a dilemma, for the Singapore

heartbeat will resound here and beyond our shores, wherever Singaporeans live or

work in the world”. In effect, the government’s strategy here is twofold: to try to

enlarge the definition of being Singaporean to encompass the international and the

cosmopolitan, and at the same time insist on a certain essential, biological sense of

being Singaporean, of the identity having a “heartbeat” as it were. To say this attempt

is inadequate would be an understatement, yet it is crucial to consider this document

as an insight into how the political authorities view cosmopolitan Singaporeans and in

turn to examine how this official mindset has influenced scholarly work on Singapore

writers who have left the country permanently. The major problem with this

worldview, which is echoed by many Singapore literary critics like Edwin Thumboo

and Koh Tai Ann, is that is places Singapore squarely at the centre, over-emphasizing

the importance of the country in a writer’s work. In doing so, it fails to consider the

equal if not greater significance of the émigré’s ultimate choice and the travels in

between. Another failing is the inability to reconcile the “fond memories” that a

writer like Boey might have of Singapore’s past and the inevitable disorientation that

rapid development brings. The overwhelming transformations of Singapore’s rural

and urban landscape in the past decades often render this nostalgia as a source of pain

and difficulty for poets like Boey.

Wong and Boey’s poems, which inhabit multiple locations and develop

attachments to multiple cultures, complicate attempts to draw them back into the fold.

While the S21 report blithely states that “[i]nternationalisation will then no longer be

a dilemma”, the reality is the poets expose not just a dilemma between Singapore and

abroad, but a struggle and negotiation that sees a multiplicity of belongings and

Joanne Leow 95

attachments pulling them in many directions. Wong and Boey’s awareness of the

multiple threads that pull at them lead them to more nuanced meditations on their

place in the world. Singapore is no longer the centre of this discourse – in many ways

it never was. There are, as Bhabha and Pollock suggest, many centres and in fact, no

circumferences (587-8). So instead of seeing Singapore as a homogenous, self-

generating state whose history follows an uncomplicated line directed by Sir Stamford

Raffles and the People’s Action Party, Wong and Boey’s poems encourage a view of

history that is directed by the many immigrants that passed through the ports and

markets of Singapore, “the marriage of foreign tongues / holding a key to worlds

opening on worlds” (Boey 108). It is a rich legacy that certainly did not just begin in

1819 or come to a neat and tidy end in 19656.

It appears then that Wong and Boey have much more in common besides the

fact that they spent their formative years in Singapore, a point that I made at the

beginning of this thesis to justify a comparison of the two writers. For in spite of

attempts to draw them into a Singapore literary canon, it appears that the work of the

two poets makes them firmly cosmopolitan, willing to define themselves beyond the

narrow confines of Singaporean nationalism and even the more expansive ideas of

postcolonial hybridity. This is no easy feat, for much of their poetry explores the

tensions, disorientation and as Wong puts it a “lostness” that comes with refusing

accept the burden of national authenticity. Angelia Poon notes that writers like Boey

and Wong allow us “to picture globalization as a net with holes permitting connection

and disjuncture rather than a suffocating blanket of homogeneity” (377).

6 1819 is the date Sir Stamford Raffles, a British statesman who is seen as the founder of “modern Singapore”, landed in Singapore. 1965 is the year that Singapore separated from Malaysia and saw an independent government dominated by the People’s Action Party, who had been first elected in 1959.

Joanne Leow 96

Ultimately, what should evolve as well is the critical approach to these writers:

they must not be held to ransom to their origins. As we saw in the introduction to this

thesis, this is especially important if postcolonial writers are to be treated as equals in

the realm of literary studies and freed from what Sarah Brouillette calls the “burden”

of “the association between an author and national authenticity” (177). Scholarship in

the field has to evolve beyond national-centric criticism and instead find new and

unconstrained ways of approaching cosmopolitan writing. Not in the least because

this conflation of postcolonial writing and national authenticity is a problematic that

has far-reaching implications. Graham Huggan makes it clear that this is a “burden”

that gives rise to what he calls "the postcolonial exotic” which is “a pathology of

cultural representation under late capitalism - a result of the spiralling

commodification of cultural difference” (33). Whether for profit or simplification,

much of the work done in the postcolonial studies has focused on “cultural

difference”, using writers and their work as bearers of essentialist definitions of

culture and nation. This is an insufficient response to writers like Wong and Boey,

who bring to the table multiple cultural attachments, affinities and occasionally

simply do without these markers, choosing to write in a universal, abstracted style that

refuses to be tied to any culture of origin.

I would share Rajeev S. Patke’s hope that the idea of “postcolonial cultures” is

one that is “contingent or provisional, like a name that is meant to become a

misnomer, or a ladder that will be drawn up when the climbing is done” (239).

Writing like Wong’s and Boey’s looks forward to a time when colonial histories and

indeed postcolonial pressures no longer burden literature that is written in former

colonies. Perhaps this movement will be similar to the one Salman Rushdie writes

about in his essay “Imaginary Homelands”, as he describes how America “has created

Joanne Leow 97

great literature out of the phenomenon of cultural transplantation, out of examining

ways in which people cope with a new world”(231). Indeed Wong and Boey, through

their work, show us the possibilities of a “new world” which does not have to be

circumscribed by the rules of national or postcolonial. Their work has not just opened

up new vistas, but more significantly, new readership as well – one that widens its

concerns past the more insular aims of building cultural identity in a specific nation or

situating hybridity between cultures and instead sees literature as Rushdie sees it, as a

“polygot family tree”(231) that has the freedom to be individual, eclectic and mobile.

Joanne Leow 98

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