Interviewing Gwee Li Sui

Interviewing Gwee Li Sui

Singapore, 4thSeptember 2018

Gwee Li Sui is a poet, a graphic artist, and a literary critic. His works of verse include Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? (1998), One Thousand and One Nights (2014), Who Wants to Buy an Expanded Edition of a Book of Poems? (2015), The Other Merlion and Friends (2015), Haikuku (2017), and Death Wish (2017). He wrote Singapore’s first long-form graphic novel in English Myth of the Stone back in 1993, which was re-released in an expanded twentieth-anniversary edition in 2013. A familiar name in Singapore’s cultural scene, Gwee has further edited acclaimed literary anthologies and written and lectured on a range of subjects. He also wrote FEAR NO POETRY!: An Essential Guide to Close Reading (2014) and Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate (2017).

JF: What is your relationship with Chinese as a language?

I read in English; my Chinese isn’t very good. I went to a middle school that wasn’t great at Chinese or at least didn’t have a reputation of. We kind of peer-pressured one other into being bad at it. [Laughs.] So, unfortunately, I am ashamed that my Chinese is bad. 

JF: Do your parents speak Mandarin?

I am not sure how much you know about Singapore...

JF: I have been reading your founding prime minister’s interviews. Singapore is a difficult country to grasp.

When I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, the state decided to do away with Chinese dialects. You couldn’t hear them on the radio or on TV anymore. They took them away from casual use in schools too. Mandarin became the official Chinese language while the other dialects were suppressed. My parents cannot speak Mandarin; they speak Teochew. So, I speak this with my family. When I step out of home, I speak English or Mandarin. This happens with a lot of Chinese families.

JF: But your poetry is still influenced by Chinese.

I get Chinese influences from my family, from stories my grandmothers and mother told me. Teochew has its own rhythms. Every language has its rhythms, and our poets here do play with that and assume people can hear them. Teochew is a rather gentle language. Even when speakers mock something, we do so gently, and I think my poetry shows this. It is not overly sarcastic. It’s tender, it’s humane.

JF: There seems to be an educational gap, a professional gap. They are raising children to be foreigners in their own country.

That is true. Much about Singapore is about erasure. The focus on the past disappears, and people have few historical and cultural identifiers. A kind of amnesia results, and it’s quite natural. The generational gap itself is acute here.

JF: Do you talk about the past?

There is a tendency to sound nostalgic because our past is lost. The way we preserve things is quite horrifying. We have something called the Singapore Memory Project, for example. Some years ago, they began collecting oral accounts and photographs and scanning everything. There’s now this large digital archive of the past, but it goes hand in hand with a physical destruction of the past. The contradiction shows the disconnect. There isn’t a strong enough respect for the past to keep it, only to keep a record of it.

JF: Like you describe in ‘Cognitive Gap’?

Yes, Singapore is a country of ironies. ‘Cognitive Gap’ was one of the first poems I read in public, and people laughed hard then. But the real irony is that we still haven’t stopped to think why it shouldn’t be this way.

JF: Singapore is still perceived as an example. In Portugal, we heard a lot about it during the recession. It was often given as an example.

In a way, we are fortunate to have a certain kind of leadership, but that makes the country vulnerable since too much depends on it. In other countries, you have the human rights aspect to anchor everything. Here, it all depends on the rationality of the leadership. At some future point, someone may become selfish and self-serving – who is going to stop this person? Right now, thankfully, we don’t have that, but it could quite easily slip into that.  

Singapore places a lot of emphasis on economics. I am not personally confident that the rich will help the poor enough. There has to be a stronger focus on, and concern for, our high cost of living. For example, for the longest time, no one talked about the issue of poverty. Ten years ago, people would say that there was no poverty in Singapore when it wasn’t the case. It was all hidden under covers. If the homeless are found on the streets, the authorities will pick them up and put them in temporary quarters. Some escape. But that’s how it’s done. We clean up the streets, which doesn’t mean the poor do not exist.

JF: Everybody keeps mentioning how you don’t see poverty in Singapore.

You can think about that in terms of MRT lines. These signal the trend of development in Singapore as they go to the pretty places. The poor places, the underdeveloped places, are outside the MRT lines; they are not accessible. So whether you travel by car or you walk will show you a different Singapore. Although I use public transportation, I try to explore the city on foot as well. There are a lot of hidden places, and trains don’t give you this sense of realness. A train station is where it is because that place will be developed soon or it needs one because it is already developed.

JF: Do the poor areas cross the ideal Singapore?

In Singapore, you have everything withinthe city. I discovered this when I was working on a project and had to talk to old people and find out how they were being cared for. A social worker referred me to a location just outside Chinatown. There are many things like this that get forgotten. People just hang around there during the day as they don’t work. They come from a certain demographic.

I went then to help with food distribution and to get a sense of things. I saw all these people come to collect food. Think of the irony: just across the road, you have the whole Robertson Quay area, which looks so rich, so well-developed. But here there’s a different reality that not even I knew about. It hides between a highway and a river, an in-between space which is the perfect invisible space. All you need to get here is to cross a couple of roads, but you don’t do it. There are such spaces; even though people don’t see them, they exist.

JF: Is the economic disparity an ethnic one?

This is a sensitive topic in Singapore because we try not to make race the issue. But it is the case that certain ethnic groups are, in general, poorer than others. The good thing about our system is that we aim nonetheless not to essentialize disparity. Resentment exists all the same.

JF: What about education?

Education is thebig divide. You have probably also read of the problem by now, of how the well-off are getting better access to education than the poor. They not only send their kids to school but engage after-school private tuition for them as well.

JF: It’s the same everywhere, it seems.

This is an unfortunate reality we’re trying to acknowledge and address. I am not sure if, in Portugal, you have the concept of being kiasu. Maybe you saw this in my poetry, which has Singlish.

JF: Yes, I wanted to ask you about it.

I wrote a recent book on Singlish which is now a bestseller. I am quite proud of it because it is the first book on Singlish written in Singlish. [Laughs.] I thought that would be logical, right?

JF: I’m not a native English speaker, and, when I started reading your poems, I thought to myself it was weird because they did not appear to rhyme where they were supposed to. Then I tried reading them with different pronunciations, and it suddenly made sense. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Yes, in my humor books I do that a bit. I also make fun of spelling. Kiasuis Hokkien, a Chinese dialect, for “afraid to lose”. In Singapore, we have this entrenched sense of competitiveness, which we describe as kiasu. In fact, this is our contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s very Singaporean.

We are always afraid that, if we don’t eat a cake, someone else will eat it. If we don’t take something, someone else will take it. We have to get ahead of others all the time. I am not sure where this mentality comes from. It is in part a postwar mentality, in part a capitalist mentality. Or it’s just human selfishness. You feel that no one is looking after you, and so you have to look out for yourself.

JF: Going back to your poems. I also feel that the last line is at odds with the rest of the poem. For example, in humorous poems, the last line or couplet is often used as a punchline. In your poems, the last line seems to do the opposite; it is quiet, it deflects the poem. I might be wrong about this…

It depends on which book you’re talking about. The very first one, Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems?,came out in 1998, at a time when my publisher wasn’t confident about releasing poetry books. He had published mostly fiction. You somehow doubt this, looking at bookstore shelves nowadays, but, back in the ’90s, poetry was dying here. People speculated about the death of poetry. It seemed too self-indulgent, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

My publisher took a risk with my manuscript and two other poets’. He selected from each of us poems that he thought held together best. I wasn’t too happy about that, but he was willing to publish my work, and I was young. The book was written when I was an undergrad. The three of us were very different: Alfian Sa’at wrote very political angry poems while Felix Cheong, at the time, wrote emotional existential ones. I was just a clown, you know? [Laughs.] In a sense, I managed to exist at a hidden level because people don’t pay attention to humor verse. I was able to observe things without being judged.

JF: This book has two versions. What’s the difference between them?

At the time, both politically and socially, the mood was very different. My editor then was unsure if some poems should be published as they were. We talked a lot about it and about what would happen if they appeared in their original forms. The new version actually returns to what I had before. For example, in one of my poems, I have a racist term, but the poem itself is criticizing, among other things, racism. My editor wasn’t sure that people would get it; they might think I was the racist, she said. Seventeen years later, I thought that I could bring back the original form and get that out at last. By the way, I do think you’re right when you said those poems had a mild ending. 

JF: I wasn’t criticizing, I was just…

Yes, it was an observation.

JF: I thought the poem criticized itself by not offering the reader what the reader was longing for. So, instead of a grandiose conclusion, you present a line that deflects the meaning of the poem. You keep it humble, but I might be wrong. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] No, you are entirely right about that. Hence the title Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? I was surprised to find the book even had an audience! In fact, a whole generation of kids grew up on those poems.

JF: That’s another thing. I was thinking people could offer the book to their kids without realizing what it actually is. It’s very subversive. [Laughs.]

Yes, thank you for saying that. [Laughs.] I am always saying to people: I’m not sure you want to offer my book to your kids. [Laughs.] It goes along with what my editor said to me before. Although Alfian’s book was more openly political, she felt that mine was truly the naughty one. So naughty that people don’t realize how subversive it is! But you can be light and subversive. When I look at this book, I think of the ’90s, what we could and could not say then… 

JF: What about The Other Merlion and Friends?

I returned to humor verse after seventeen years with this one. Soon after Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems?, I became an academic. I did my PhD in London before working for many years at the National University of Singapore. During that time, I seriously wanted to write funny poems, but I couldn’t. 

JF: Academia does that to you. [Laughs.]

It does! The poems I wrote in despair instead are all in my latest volume, Death Wish. [Laughs.] I kept struggling because I couldn’t find my funny voice. When I left academia, I had fragments that evolved into TheOther Merlion and Friends. This is a darker book in a way. The endings are different in terms of roundedness. They are stronger here; the earlier me was gentler.

JF: I do love these poems. The way language is playful while you’re being very mean. I think I have detected certain influences… 

Stevie Smith. [Laughs.]

JF: I thought so. [Laughs.]

Between these two books, I discovered Stevie Smith. In the earlier one, I think I had Blake.

JF: I also wanted to ask you about Death Wishbecause the influence here – and I’m afraid I’m overinterpreting – seems to be…

Pessoa. [Laughs.] He is there. I discovered him in the ’90s, and I was spellbound. He had this philosophical side which appealed to me. Singapore is a practical nation, and we are not very philosophical. When I found Pessoa, I found both poetry and philosophy. You can see my tribute in “The Philosopher” section in Death Wish.

JF: Yes, I see it also in the poems about thinking, seeing something for the first time, the disconnection between one’s self and the writing hand...

A decade ago, I had all these voices I couldn’t bring into a single manuscript. I couldn’t use humor, but I had all these voices that could make a book and yet didn’t seem to fit together. A poem would be very angry, another philosophical, another confused. You remember how it was at that time, when George Bush’s Iraq War was happening. Everybody was so angry.

JF: And you were in London at the time.

I was in London when 9/11 happened. When they invaded Iraq, I was already in Singapore starting work; it was my first year at the university. Around the world, people were angry and demonstrating. But, in Singapore, we had nothing. We lived as though nothing was happening. Only a small vigil was held at an arts venue. It gave me a lot to think about. It’s one thing for the state to be like that, but for citizens… 

JF: Could you protest against the war if you wanted to?

There’s a Speaker’s Corner; you can register with the police and protest. My angry voice, as Death Wishshows, went into the figure of the soldier. In Singapore, we seemed then to live in the shadow of the world. Everything was happening, and we did nothing. I was very disillusioned, and academia was the worst place to be. I felt that I was living in an ivory tower inside an ivory country.

The academic here is powerless. You write an article, you publish it, and you keep publishing. Never mind the impact, or non-impact, of what you’re doing. Never mind the time you are needed precisely to be useful. All that is expected of you is numbers – which was the opposite reason for why I went into academia! All day long, I was surrounded by too many insecure people and their games. It was a death wish.

JF: I know what you mean.

I wasn’t supposed to focus on Singaporean literature because it wouldn’t get me into top-tiered journals. I am trained in eighteenth-century European literature, but there will always be someone working on Jonathan Swift or Jane Austen. Those writers don’t need me. [Laughs.] The artistic side of me rebelled. I planned an exit for years. They had to let you go if I chose not to do what they wished. I read and wrote about Singaporean literature. The eighteenth century is always there, of course. Pope, Voltaire…

JF: Oh yes, Pope is in your poems as well.

[Laughs] Yes, he is! In Singapore, we are now living in our eighteenth century. We are discovering civil space, an open space, which was what the European eighteenth century was about. I feel I need to document this.

JF: We didn’t speak about your love poems.

One Thousand and One Nightsis sadly my most famous poetry book. It involves a relationship that lasted almost three years and follows it from beginning to end. The whole book was drafted during the relationship itself. I had that voice for that volume only. People keep asking me to do more, but I can’t write another one like it. It’s all about voices, and the voices vary. I give prominence to a voice at a certain time or I imagine a persona. Readers don’t know this; they think a voice and a person are the same thing.

JF: Which authors do you like in Singapore?

My love lies with the older writers. Because Singaporeans are forgetful, we tend to forget our older writers. We celebrate new voices. If you read reviews online, you will see this to be true. We talk a lot about our younger voices, and we rightly celebrate them. But we forget the people who paved the way for them. These are the ones I hold dear, up to the turn of the millennium. Some time ago, I have completed a five-year series of public lectures on Singaporean poets. I want to be this memory and hold up the forgotten voices.

JF: New books should be easier to find as well. It has been difficult for me to find old books, like Edwin Thumboo’s love poems. Cyril Wong mentioned those, but I’ve been everywhere, and they are not to be found.

Yes, people ideologize Thumboo and forget about his personal side. Everything now thinks from the angle of postcolonialism or feminism or a critique of power – but what about what poetryis? I feel that this is unfortunate. I feel that we’re creating a whole generation who doesn’t go deeper with poetry.

JF: It’s a bit what we tried to counter with Jogos Florais. People seldom want to read poems carefully and think about them.

Yes, at the end of the day, that’s lazy thinking and lazy writing.