Me Migrant

On 1 May 2016, Mhd Mukul launched his debut english poetry collection, Me Migrant, at The Arts House. The book is published by Ethos Books, translated from Bangla with help from Fariha Imran and Farouk Ahammed and transcreated by Cyril Wong, with input on several poems from Marc Nair.

The High Commissioner of Bangladesh launched the book while many - over a hundred, by my reckoning - of Muhammed Mukul’s friends at Healthserve, in the migrant worker and literary communities were in attendance.

“Md Mukul Hossine was born in Patgram, Bangladesh, and has a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences. In 2008, he arrived in Singapore and has been working in its construction sector. Mukul writes poems, novels, and short stories. He enjoys composing poetry to remember his mother back home. His novel, Buker Simanaye Sukh (Happiness at Heart’s Edge) and his poetry collection Apurna Vasana (Unfulfilled Desire) have been published in Bangladesh. His other works have also appeared in anthologies. Mukul has spent many long nights writing poetry. His favourite poet is Rabindranath Tagore.” - Ethos Books

Md Mukul and his book are currently receiving a lot of attention in the Singapore media. This focus is a welcome change from the othering and simplistic political dialogue surrounding migrant workers. The media gaze and ‘celebrity’ opportunities should not sanitise, absolve and/or distract from the need to recognise: 

• Md Mukul is not just one thing. He is a writer, a worker, a friend with a warm smile, a son, a muslim, a degree holder etc. Let's celebrate the multiple, complex narratives and routes that make up each human being rather than identity politics that privilege a single tribe & punch down on others 
• the poetry is pretty good
• the heartfelt longing for his mother is something we all share - but most of us are privileged enough not to have to sacrifice so much to support our families
• there is a need to have a deeper, genuine conversation about the role of migrant workers in Singapore that goes beyond sentiment, recognises their significant, ‘white washed’ contribution to national myths and their status as an underclass. Such a conversation should consider whether it’s acceptable to preserve such an underclass or should there be a road map for reform so migrant workers have the right to change employers, choose their own medical care, have their days off respected, have proper accommodation and food etc 
• a society built solely on pragmatic utilitarianism, where everyone is seen as an economic input, will find it difficult, especially during worsening economic times, to build unity and community unless opportunities and a future are provided for the less powerful and privileged 

Don't just buy Md Mukul's book, please support those on the ground providing much needed help to, and recommendations benefitting, migrant workers such as Healthserve, TWC2 & HOME.

Images from other SGLit Migrant Worker Poetry events

Images from the HOME Showtime Pageant 

Wedding, Lombok

On distinguishing between 'the character', 'the man' and 'the author':

"It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes."

Death of the Author, Roland Barthes, Trans Richard Howard
 

Written Country

Written Country: The History of Singapore through Literature was launched at Kinokuniya last Saturday. The book is published by Landmark Books and edited by Gwee Li Sui. 

This anthology tells Singapore’s history through excerpts of prose and poetry. A brief informative commentary on key events from the fall of Singapore to the death of Lee Kuan Yew accompanies the literary texts. 

Gwee’s introduction sets out the editorial principles guiding his approach to the selection and arrangement of the texts. I like Gwee’s discussion of: 

• the ’factually sound and the emotionally consistent’, 
• the play between first hand and imagined experience, 
• how history and literature relate to each other

What is the quality that literature possesses that makes history come alive and something more  than a list of observed facts and descriptions?

In the very first text, Lim Thean Soo demonstrates this quality when he writes about the schoolboy who runs to the concrete roof of his family home to watch the shelling and counter shelling, and the bombs falling across Singapore on the 15th February 1942.

Gwee notes, inter alia, writers form characters that possess ’some quality of having lived through time’ and possessing deeper forms of knowledge by ‘allowing information to be thought back to us - accordingly rethought, made meaningful.’

Gwee writes ‘[a]s ... texts enter specific moments, they effectively give back to events their emotions and, in this way, generate reflections and commentaries from within.’

At the Kino launch: 

• Rick Buck Song Koh read Completion of Toa Payoh New Town
• Meira Chand read an excerpt from A Different Sky on the Hock Lee Bus Riots. 
• Marc Nair read his poem, Mas Selamat from Postal Code
• Mhd Sharif Udin read his poem, Little India Riot: Velu and a History in Bengali 

The book also contains prose excerpts and poems from Alfian Sa’at, Robert Yeo, Said Zahari, Goh Sin Tub, Dave Chua, Christine Chia, Gopal Baratham, Stella Kon, Boey Kim Cheng, Felix Cheong, Toh Hsien Minh, Tania De Rozario and others.

The book is a gateway drug encouraging the consumption of other works of leading Singapore writers.

Landmark’s founder, Goh Eck Kheng, did not expect Gwee to do so much work editing the book. Gwee probably did not expect to do so much work either. He ended up looking at a ‘couple of thousand Singaporean English titles’ and whittled that down to 54 pieces. Gwee’s expression after the suggestion of another volume of literature covering pre-war events can be seen above.

My only other question is where was the kachang puteh and potong ice cream?

Rashid at the Sail

"He remembered when he was a child, maybe about nine years old, massaging his mother’s feet. Pressing his little thumbs into her rough, calloused flesh as hard as he could. Feeling the warmth and softness beneath the dry, crackled skin and trying to smooth out all her tension and worry. When did the quiet comfort in each other’s company disappear? He loved his mother. Very much. It was just that she loved his brother more."

Excerpt from Rashid at The Sail, a story in my book, We Rose Up Slowly

In this story a young man, kicked out of home by his mother, retreats to his brother’s luxury condominium at The Sail to work out what to do with his life.

The story was written in 2014 and 2015 and was inspired by:

• my personal trainer, Rizam. The basic plot and characters were developed with Rizam while i worked out in the gym. Rizam was my first ‘non-work’ friend in Singapore back in 2002.
• a Tessa Hadley story in The New Yorker, Experience

Rashid at the Sail:

• is set at The Sail in the heart of the modern corporate core of SGP, Marina Bay, where you can literally walk 70 steps to work. When I worked at One Raffles Quay I used to eat pasta once a week from Da Paola at the foot of The Sail
• is about family, loneliness giving birth to exploration, breach and consequence, with an unethical act leading to a new place, and ultimately reconciliation
• Other themes include yearning for something more, taking responsibility, looking to escape ordinariness, trying to find purpose, how to live - not just go through the motions, being envious of a brother & wanting to break out to be your own person
• “He didn’t even glance at the Merlion.”

In some ways this is an anti-Merlion story. The Merlion (that consumer staple of Sing Lit) means nothing to our protagonist whose inspiration is gained from another SingLit icon: a kite, representing the independence and agency of individuals rather than a contrived, 'marketing driven solution'. See Dave Chua's, The Beating & Other Stories, for a story with a Kite in it.

• “He fell hard for this vision of himself, built on the shifting sands of selective nostalgia.”
  
  Rashid finds purpose in idealising a relationship from the past. This gives him a new role for the future: to mean something to his brother's son.

There are also references in this story to: 

• TV studios at Caldecott Hill. I went there several times during the first season of Singapore Idol in 2004 to watch Jeassea, Rizam’s ex wife sing
• The Biggest Loser - Asia. I’ve never seen it, never wanted to see it. Pass me another beer please.
• Hibiscus Royal Slings, are a cocktail at Lantern, the chill out bar on the top of the Fullerton Bay Hotel. This is where an FX Trader lost his life jumping from the roof after a few too many drinks.
• Expat Life is a typo - it should be Expat Living
• A plastic diorama of the Petronas Towers - representing a connection with Malaysia
• Those infamous on line sites: The Online Citizen, The Real Singapore & SammyBoy
• A magician in Bradford - famous for Cleo the girl in a goldfish bowl - and a wrestler from Atlanta, Georgia who share the same name as your favourite author
• Another lunch time eating place, Lau pa sat
• Bromsgrove. My mother taught there. We lived nearby until I was 11 when we emigrated to Australia. Bromsgrove houses the National Telephone Kiosk Collection and is close to the Lickey Hills.
• tapas at Duxton Hill Road, KopiO at Everton Park, Milo Godzillas beside the infinity pool at Ku De Ta, poetry readings at BooksActually, live music at Haji Lane. 
• the presents, designer underwear and a fountain pen, are a reference to gifts from a student to her law lecturer

Shanghai

"The past is what you remember,
imagine you remember,
convince yourself you remember,
or pretend you remember."

Old Times, Harold Pinter

Waiting for a taxi, Singapore

Thinking about WG Sebald's Manchester in the Max Ferber section of The Emigrants.

This is the closest I get in literature to the time and place of my birth in Manchester at the end of the 60s. On arrival Sebald travels through Didsbury on his way to his lodgings. Did he pass the place of my birth? He writes of dour, grey days in a decaying city long since past its best, his only solace a teas-made with its reassuring lime green fluorescent clock face.

Max Ferber is based on Frank Auerbach, who was put on a plane to England at the start of the war by his parents who were deported a few years later and died in the camps. 

Buddhist Lodge, Kim Yam Road

"He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter let when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness."

W G Sebald, The Emigrants

Here are some of W G Sebald's writing tips from a student at the University of East Anglia where he taught up until the time of his death in 2001. These provide a wonderful insight into his work.

Also here is the Michael Silverblatt KRCW Bookworm W G Sebald interview dated 6 Dec 2001. He died just over a week later on 14 December 2001of a heart aneurysm near Norwich.

NTU Creative Writing Faculty: A Reading

NTU’s Creative Writing Faculty held a reading on 7 April at Artistry featuring several writers in residence: Tash Aw (Taiwan/Malaysia/UK), Divya Victor (Singapore/India/US) and Boey Kim Cheng (Australia/Singapore).

Tash read from his new nonfiction book, Strangers on a Pier, and entertained with tales of bourgeois gangsters and ‘bodice ripper’ reading teachers. 

I like the emphasis in his essay on ‘routes’, rather than some fundamental ’root’ at the core of identity. See Stuart Hall.

I will write more about Strangers on a Pier and it’s themes of nostalgia, the frame of narrative and story technique in migrant tales, mixed identities and imposter syndrome in a later post. These thoughts will be written from the perspective of a reluctant ex Yuppie, Eurasian with an adopted and adopting, hybrid identity.

Divya read a selection of her poetry, prose poems and essays including pieces from her forthcoming book, KITH and a prose poem about the Tamil child suicide bomber who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi.

Boey Kim Cheng read The Golden Temple and a stamp poem (after forgetting where he’d put it).

The common theme reflected in the readings and their readers seemed to be the entanglement of national and cultural identities - or perhaps I was reading this into things.

Meanwhile, despite it being obvious to the point of banality that any one individual can have many identities, influences and stories, lately, political and privileged classes have ramped up discourses of bigotry and racism so anything reflecting the complexity of lived experience (we are many not one) should be celebrated.

Examples of discourses of ‘othering’ include:

• in Singapore, Denise Phua MP's comments on migrant workers in Little India,
• in Australia, the treatment of Gold Logie nominees Waleed Aly and Lee Lin Chin, and
• in the US. Trump and the other Republican candidates.

Where is this racism, xenophobia and prejudice coming from? Punching down and a distraction from anxieties felt by the mainstream over the decline in opportunity and privilege? Another topic to be discussed in a later post.

Anyway back to the wonderful evening which may be summarised as follows: 

the sandwiches were decent, and the satays and readings were better.

The Model, Esquire, April 2016

Really quite chuffed to have a short story published in Esquire Singapore.

Everyone please buy the April 2016 edition as I have purposefully rendered the text in the photo above illegible.

I note I am not inside the robot in the pic although it does bear a striking resemblance to my body shape.

Thanks Amanda, Wayne & Zul for this splendid opportunity.

And thanks again to Amanda for editing me - the second time she has done so after my story, A Girl and a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang in the Eastern Heathens anthology (2013, Ethos Books).