Deny Thy Country, Young Man: An Interview with Alfian Sa'at
Poet, playwright, short-story writer and underground figure. Alfian
Sa'at is all these and more. But even nowadays Alfian (after growing up
in public the past year - having his picture appear in The Straits
Times whenever there is a story about poetry, reading at the BigO rock
concert and writing the intro to Chris Ho's book - is he gearing up to
be Singapore's Lizard King?) is realizing the danger of the hype. As
much as there is the danger of being co-opted by the mainstream, the
young medical student is also wary of the support given to him by the
other end of the spectrum, the so-called 'underground'. It has reached a
point whereby his endorsement by the alternative 'establishment' is
suspect. Do they dig the poetry or the 'stance' Alfian is taking? How
much of it is in what he is expressing rather than the assumed audacity
of that expression? Important questions if any writer wants, in the
final analysis, to be defined by his poetics rather than his politics.
Audrey Lim fields the questions and took notes.
Q: What was the first print run for One Fierce Hour?
350 copies. The publisher Landmark Books hadn't really done poetry
before and they just wanted to test the market. They launched me along
with two other writers and they settled on 350 copies. But even for that
deal I did not get a good contract, like below royalty rate. I got 8%
when I should be getting 10-12%. Really, at the point in time when I
came in with my manuscript, they made the whole thing sound like they
were doing us a favour. As if they are going to lose money with this
deal and it's not a profitable venture for them. They would rather do highly
lucrative deals that involved shiny glossy pages like coffee table
books. I don't think they were as enthusiastic about us than their other
writers, like say, Adrian Tan. But still, I'm thankful for their initial offer.
Q: But your book has become popular enough for a second print run.
Yes, that's another 350 copies. But I wouldn't say it's popular. If I
was that popular, they (the state) will ban the book. As it is right
now, I like this kind of non-mainstream status that I'm in right now
because it brings attention to the poetry rather than the personality.
Q: How do you define marginal?
Print run of seven hundred. That's why I think the government has not
done anything drastic to me despite certain anti-establishment
sentiments in my work. Because they know that I have a very low
circulation and there are not many people who read poetry at all. I only
reach a very selected audience and it's not like my poems are being
published in The Straits Times which has a mass circulation. A lot of
people were asking about how I deal with the paradox of, on the one
hand, I am raving against censorship and the on other my poems are being
so blatantly anti-establishment and yet they are not being censored. So
how do I negotiate that?
My answer: I'm small fry.
But when it comes to agitating the masses and doing things that are
potentially revolutionary, I think I'm only a very small player and I'm
actually comfortable being in that position. Of course, it's good to
have establishment support and especially when Assoc. Professor Lee Tzu
Peng wrote the review in Life!. I was very thankful for that because she
is someone from the establishment. She is a member of several important
committees and to have that kind of review is to have myself, so to
speak, under her wings. Sort of like I'm spared the guillotine for the
moment.
Q: But how about the example of Catherine Lim and the rebuttal she got
from the state when she commented on their style of governing? She is
very establishment too but look what she got.
For her, they came hard on her because her article appeared in The
Sunday Times. ("One Government, Two Styles", 20/11/94) That's the
problem because a lot of people are going to have access to that. If she
had written that piece in a book, people will have to go through the
process of buying the book before they can receive this kind of
information. The newspapers is a mass medium and the government, of
course, cannot have this kind of things circulating. They would see it
as a loss of control if they don't respond to her criticism.
Q: Is your poetry "hidden" in the sense you are not being overtly
subversive?
I don't believe in deliberate veiling or being elusive or masking
meanings. If you have something to say, say it. At the same time you
have to consider why is it you are saying it in the form of poem and not
prose. Why can't it be expressed while talking across a table to a
friend, why formulate and configure it into a poem? When that question
comes in, your self-expression will have to be tempered with craft. So
for me it is not so much about veiling the meaning but more about
crafting it. It's not so much to obscure what you're saying or
attempting to say but in fact to make it clearer. Generally if there is
ambiguity in my work it's only to reflect the conditions that we live
in, and not something I opt for to save my ass if my convictions come
under interrogation. That's why the metaphors come in, to open doors to
certain emotional states. And sometimes in my poetry I don't adopt a
mimetic style, because I always bear in mind what Joseph Conrad said:
"Realism in art can never approach reality." It's to basically bring
something mundane to a higher plane, to sensitize. Basically a poem
works better on this front than a prose piece.
Q: By using metaphor you want to sensitize. But doesn't using metaphors
cut you off from certain segments of the public, in that way limit the
audience for poetry?
I don't see it as limiting my audience so much but as focusing. For me,
poetry is the most difficult form to write. It is by nature subversive.
If you talk about focus you are talking about bias-ness which means you
are privileging certain information over others. Poetry can never be as
balanced as prose. You just push forward with poetry. It is very tied in
to personality. You can get away with, 'oh this is my personal opinion,
and I don't need to reflect other people's opinions and those of the
newspapers'. And talking about limitations, I think the existence of a
poem does not rely only on the text in front of you. Sometimes the more
aware you are of what is happening in the world, the less inaccessible
some metaphors might turn out to be. It's like that old myth, that you
cannot kill a giant because his soul is locked in the shell of an egg
hidden in some faraway cave. So you realise you have to hunt for that
egg. And this is the kind of journey I sometimes want my readers to
take. Who is Radin Mas? What is Damyata?
Q: So you think you have been able to get away with it because the
authorities are closing one eye to poetry reading sessions?
Yah, I'm wondering also. I have been to sessions where people tell me
that "I have visions of the police coming down to take you away,"
whenever I read 'Singapore You Are Not My Country'. For me, if people
in other countries have these sort of poetry, then why not in Singapore?
The interesting thing is that Chee Soon Juan recently got into trouble
with the law for speaking in public without a licence at Raffles Place.
But poetry reading has been going on for so long and somehow they have
been closing one eye. There was even once during a Velvet Underground
poetry session that someone read out portions from the Communist Manifesto!
What is more interesting to me as a sociological phenomenon is that
there have been three separate readings at Chijmes, Substation and
Borders whereby there were these people who came up and read their own
gay poetry. For me, it amounts to as much as a public coming out to
complete strangers. It is interesting as it seems that homosexual
expression has been so repressed to a point that if they can get
outlets of self-expression such as these poetry reading sessions, they
will do it. You have this absolutely silent minority, supposedly silent
invisible minority that is using platforms like these. Interestingly,
these people are actually quite young and they are not out to project
themselves as flamboyant. These people are introverted writers and they
find their right to self-expression through declaring, in a rather
oblique way, their homosexuality to these kinds of audience.
Really the thing about poetry reading is that they are very
self-contained and very isolated. At the most, a very good audience is
about 40 people. Not a mass thing.
Q: I believe there's going to be a second collection of poems soon.
Yes, that should be my more mature collection because One Fierce Hour
has sort of jumped on the bandwagon and exploited the whole issue of me
being a Malay minority and that I am a Malay poet writing in English.
Q: An exploitation of your ethnicity?
Yah, I believe so. It puts me in a strange position. You are immediately
being categorized and it's like tokenism at work. People start to pay
attention to you because of your race and skin colour. They find my
poems interesting but is it because I am a Malay and that I am writing
about Malay myths or is it because of some other poetic value in my
work? So it's strange, you can get co-opted into this kind of discourse
just as in America, the Native American writers are being exoticized
too.
I don't know about this book. I get a lot of recognition but I don't
know where it is coming from. It might very well be tokenism - "we
recognise him" because of Singapore's pluralistic multi-cultural polity.
It's hard to embrace this kind of recognition wholesale. That's why I
look forward to the release of my second book. It won't be exploiting so
much of my Malayness. The worst thing about that Life! article is that
it called me a Bilingual Triumph. Would I be tagged similarly if I was a
Chinese writer writing in English? I should be holding my readings at
Popular (the bilingual bookstore) then and not at Borders.
Someone thought that I was Malaysian. Because of the apparently
pro-Malaysian sentiments.
One Fierce Hour is an immature collection. A lot of it is about redress.
You open the papers and see so much bad press about Malaysia. I wanted
to turn the tables and say Singaporeans can be arrogant. A lot of the
poems inside were responding to a master narrative. It was as if they
could not exist if they were not born out of opposition to something
else.
However, poetry is powerful precisely because it's a sort of
micro-politics. But it doesn't try to change the whole world. It is this
tiny little base, bottom-up kind of revolution to oppose a lot of top
imposed stories, policies and even propaganda. But I've always believed
that real history is written from below. You not only have to write
history, you have to interpret and deconstruct it. That is what I am trying to do
with the Sang Nila story ('Sang Nila By Moonlight'), to excavate it; let
it come to the surface. So for my next collection I'm hoping to write
about things that are more autonomous, that I write because I am
inspired and not just agitated, and that if I write from conscience it
is not one that is evangelical.
Q: Are you doing any more theatre with The Necessary Stage?
But I hate the stage. (laugh) I'm not doing theatre anymore. I'm not
doing playwriting anymore! (laughs)
I don't like to have so many characters going round in my head. With
poetry, I like to get intimate with my audience. I want to have just
this sheet of paper between us and what is read. If you do theatre, the
script goes to the directors, actors and the ideas get re-imagined,
negotiated, and reconfigured. What gets on stage might not be exactly
your original vision.
Q: Wouldn't your poetry get distorted too, if read by others?
That is only one degree of separation. It is just reading. You don't
have to act it. There is only so much you can screw up.
Q: Who was your mentor in the creative arts?
Haresh Sharma, I was under him twice. The first time was in Sec 3, he
left me very much alone but he never gave up on me which is why in JC 1
at Raffles Junior College, I chose him again as mentor instead of
Assoc. Professor Lee Tzu Peng. A bit silly, since I already had Haresh's
contact.
Q: So you were selected for what you did best? Is playwriting your
forte then?
I would say my playwriting was more developed than my poetry. I
discovered poetry late in JC. I don't understand how a lot of people can
write without reading. I got influenced and inspired when I started to
read a lot more in JC.
Q: Getting back to One Fierce Hour, aren't more poems written than what
was printed in the collection?
Yes, a labour of two years and I gave the publisher 40 but she cut in
down to 21. There were a lot more personal poems but the publisher
refused to put them in. It was a constant battle between consistency and range.
I wanted range - the public aspect of me and the personal. But they wanted, "Oh, lets go all public."
Landmark never published poetry before. I prefer to have both social
commentary and personal poems in the collection, but they wanted one
colour, a mono theme.
I'm not really that pleased with the packaging. The book has got no
spine and it is so hard to find it on the shelf without the spine.
People go to Borders and I tell them "go look for the book with the
staples". (laughs)
Q: Which local poets are you more impressed with?
Boey Kim Cheng and Arthur Yap.
Q: What do you think is the impetus for the hype about poetry?
Over the past few years there has been a rash of poetry publications.
Landmark, probably as a reaction to another publisher, decided to put
out 3 poetry collections. It became a matter of one-upmanship. They got
me, Felix Cheong and Gwee Li Sui and all of a sudden, you have 8 poetry
books out in the market after a silence of 2 years. Also the media, Ong
Sor Fern, the book critic, has been a great help. They are really
pushing it and they have the power to make hype out of nothing. But the
thing about hype is that, well, you have people like Eric Khoo who is
the media darling, but I'm not too impressed by the work he does. On the
other hand, there are many artists out there who are not getting the
recognition they deserve. But this might actually be a good thing
because one of the most pernicious elements in a person's art is fame.
© Aporia Society MCMXCIX