by Alison Koh Yuen Wan
On the 23rd of August, I attended the launch of Animal City, a collection of children’s poems written by Marc Nair and illustrated by Vanessa Chan. The event was hosted at Aliwal Arts Centre by Red Wheelbarrow books, alongside an impressive collection of food and free Sapporo. The poems were interestingly read alongside music by Marc’s band, Neon and Wonder, which had a largely alternative, electronic-funk sound.
Animal City depicted the “concrete jungle” – a displacement of actual animals from the wilderness and other more organic settings into an urban Singapore. It featured characters such as monkeys in a mafia (“Monkey Mafia”) and an elephant navigating the vagaries of a road crossing (“Elton Elephant Goes Shopping”). The collection’s eccentric and consistent rhyme scheme, a la Dr. Zeus, was rather fitting for its intended audience. However, Vanessa Chan’s street-art type illustrations – a luohan fish decked out in the bold chain and sunglasses of American rappers, a Persian cat adorned with a peacock feather headdress, etc. made it clear that this was far from your typical children’s book. If anything, it was a consistent attempt to re-invent the traditionally idealistic genre in a cosmopolitan setting where we are simultaneously amazed and appalled by the increasing worldliness of children.
I found the afternoon quite enjoyable and extremely refreshing for this reason as well as the masterful, multi-disciplinary blending of music with poetry. A careful manipulation of meter, rhythm and syntax allowed for the poem to be read in harmonious accordance with the beat of the music. One example was “The Howling Cats”, which depicts the shenanigans of a pack of alley cats in the evening. Marc varied his speed and rhythm to suit the accompanying jazz bass standard, so it effectively transformed into a song. The added auditory dimension made the poem more real, for lack of a better word, providing the audience with an amplified experience that transcends the two-dimensional page. His easy manner and open-handed humour also went over very well as nearly all of the audience participated enthusiastically. This eventually culminated in a room full of expats, thirty-somethings and a small collection of people my age forming a rousing chorus of “Pigeon Pooping Contest!”
The experience was also particularly relevant to Shklovsky’s idea of “defamiliarization” discussed in week 2. One of the lines in the reading that particularly struck me was when Shklovsky declared that defamiliarization aimed to “recover the sensation of life… to make one feel”. Animal City accomplishes this in two ways – first through the use of music. We have been conditioned to accept the verbal reading of poems as normal; if anything, the lyrical poetic forms were made for reading and performing. The addition of music complicates this understanding. Not only do we have to decipher the meaning of the words themselves in their configurations, we have to pry apart the implications of melody and rhythm. The extended period of time we spend musing on the poem, this lingering slowness, allows us to reach new depths and dimensions of feeling. There is not just more to feel, we feel for longer.
Secondly, Animal City accomplishes this through its illustrations. What does one expect in a children’s book? It is likely they would be animals of the colour-penciled, soft pastel toned variety. This is the “habit” or expectation that we have grown used to in our reading and social conditioning, per se. Vanessa Chan’s illustrations, instead, are done boldly (almost casually) in marker. Her animals are vivid with well-defined hard lines and laden with references to popular culture. The images jolt the words from the page, violently displacing the reader’s preconceived notions. The use of such images allow Animal City to continue defamiliarizing its audience, retaining the ability to make them feel and think, even without that auditory dimension.
The multi-disciplinary nature of this collection is a reminder of how the local literary scene continues to push boundaries. Literature is not a static or stoic concept that rests firmly within the page or in existing “giants” like Edwin Thumboo, Alvin Tan, etc., there is a wide variety of emerging poets that aren’t afraid to collaborate and breathe the unconventional. I see this most prominently in the slam poetry scene, where new forms of competition continue to keep the opportunities vast and the atmosphere dynamic – the Story Slam (where one presents stories instead of poetry), the Symphonic Slam (where a poet-musician pair participates together), etc. This willingness and tendency to experiment is important in a city that runs like clockwork within fixed, definite boundaries (recall the image of Ricard’s literary mausoleum). People need to feel poetry in all its vibrancy and colour against the humdrum of daily life, which can sometimes be all-encompassing. Jolting someone out of their familiar patterns and comfort zones via defamiliarization is an excellent way to do this.
Here is a link to the audible version of some of Marc’s poems on Neon and Wonder’s bandcamp: http://neonandwonder.bandcamp.com/
(The very gangster looking luohan fish is available on the cover of Animal City which can be found on the page as well)