By Lycia Ho

As a lover of travel and poetry, I knew I had to attend the event ‘A Travel Special’ at Artistry Café on the 19th of September. Hosted by Ethos Books, the event featured music by Olivia Cham and Maximilian Tay, poems by Jerrold Yam and an essay titled ‘Home’ by Zhang Ruihe.

Jerrold Yam’s latest poetry publication is aptly titled ‘Intruder’, and focuses on his identity as a Singaporean studying overseas. Yam said that he ‘felt like a stranger in his first year in London’. For him, poetry is a way of navigating lone and loneliness; his collection deals with that strange sense of alienation that comes with being a foreigner living in a country that is not his own. It is this sense of alienation, of being an intruder, that Jerrold wishes to communicate to his readers. For him, poetry is universal in that it compels its readers to share in the emotions it tries to convey – he hopes that by reading his poetry, his readers will identify with the emotions that come with alienation, and that if they feel the same way, that they would be comforted.

The cover of Yam’s latest publication features a knife slicing through a loaf of bread. When you’re a stranger, ‘even familiar objects are disconcerting,’ Yam explained. At his mention of the word ‘familiar’, I immediately thought of Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization – the artistic process of making the familiar everyday object unfamiliar. For Shklovsky, defamiliarization is the purpose of art: by rendering the everyday object unfamiliar – or strange, even – the artist is able to shift our perspective, allowing us to see the same thing in a new way. The title of Cyril Wong’s poetry collection ‘Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light’ comes to mind – the artist tilts his plate by manipulating his words so we as readers catch the light and gain a new perspective.

I wonder if the artist himself – or in Yam’s case, the poet – has to undergo some sort of defamiliarization, or alienation, in order to translate that into his art. In other words, the shift in perspective must first occur for the poet before he is able to use words to do the same for his readers. After all, honest poetry has to come from honest experience. I recently hosted a tea with Miss Pooja Nansi, who said that her poems are honest partly because she’s ‘not very good at writing about what she doesn’t know.’ For Yam, it is his own experience of alienation in London that allows him to translate that into his poetry and shape the readers’ own experience of his poems.

‘For a moment there is no shame
in becoming my own best companion,
no remorse or loneliness
pushing me to disentangle words
from strangers.’
– from Intruder, by Jerrold Yam

After Yam’s poetry reading, Zhang Ruihe took the stage with excerpts from her essay, ‘Home’, which was initially published on Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. You can read it here: http://www.qlrs.com/essay.asp?id=1114

Zhang’s essay reads like poetry, a difficult task to accomplish. In her work, she tries to uncover why Singaporeans love to travel. ‘Maybe our origins explain our restlessness,’ she writes. After all, ‘we are a nation of immigrants – the blood that flow in our veins has its sources elsewhere, in China, India, Saudi Arabia, England, Portugal, Amenia… Our very existence as a city is predicated on movement, transit and exchange.’

For Zhang, it is only ‘when you have to explain your country that you find it strange.’ She referenced the fish story told by David Foster Wallace:

‘There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”’

According to Wallace, ‘the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.’ Travel takes us out of the familiar, it removes us from the most obvious realities. For Yam and Zhang who have traveled extensively, Literature then provides a space where they are able to articulate not only the re-imagination of themselves but also their re-imagination and re-examination of the notion of home.