By Rheverie Chen Ying

On hindsight, perhaps calling the event ‘AfterWords’ is a little misleading. As much as the event introduces the completed works of the authors — fresh out of the oven, you might say — to the readers, it’s as much about what happens before these carefully chosen words fill the blank and inviting computer screen, as well as what goes on just as the tiny black alphabets gather to reflect their creator’s thoughts, opinions and experiences. And that, I find, is the beauty of the event.

In a clean, spacious and simple room at Marine Parade Library, next to the Children’s Section, a few rows of plain sensible chairs gradually filled up. The children peered in sometimes, doing their best to appear aloof and disinterested. I wondered if they knew that the somewhat mismatched figures sitting at the front of the room belonged to that group of people who put words on a page and fuelled their innocent imagination. As I entertained myself with these thoughts, the event began.

Many things happened that night, but what struck me the most was the atmosphere. I have been to events like these before, but this one seemed more harmonious, more blithe and inviting. The conversations and voices lure you in, and time passed ever so quickly. For those of us studying English Literature, who are contemplating entering the literary scene ourselves as authors one day, the session offered a helpful glimpse into the world of writing.

Wong Shu Yun, a graduate student at NUS, shared details about her writing process for her short story, “The Short History of the Son”, which was recently published in the anthology, Passages. Her story consists of one “long” and “rambling” paragraph, she said with a laugh. When she read snippets of it aloud, the poetic language was adorned with a touch of melancholy. In her oration, the ending note of the story was particularly delicate. Curious, even, almost difficult to pin down. For me, it is hopeful; the son passes on the stories his father told him to the ambiguous figure (I will not spoil it for you), and so life goes on. But I will not be surprised if someone found it chilling, or poignant, or all three and more. When asked about how she came to compose it, Shu Yun shared the myriad influences that found their way into her mind — Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, Bob Dylan’s “Man in the Long Black Coat”, her conversations with a drug dealer turned ex-convict turned evangelist… “Life is stranger than fiction, sometimes,” she said, and she captured this perspective in her story.

Later, the poet Jerrold Yam talked about how he structured his latest poetry collection. “Organization”, “structure”, “plot”; these words he used now and then revealed the intricate processes that went behind the scenes in the publishing of a book.

In fact, Yam’s poems interested me the most. Perhaps it is due to our similar ages, or perhaps because migrant and travel literature (especially poetry) always fascinated me the most. But in any case, his book was the one I reached out for when my legs wandered to the sales counter later.

There must be a theme, he said, and his started with the home, then to London, and then back to our little island. But he assured us that something has changed between the first and last section of the collection, simply because after spending a year in a foreign land as an intruder, what was once familiar will cease to be so. Sometimes, a word begins to appear strange if you stare, transfixed, at it for too long, but other times, its the other way around. Homecoming is not always the triumphant return or a heartwarming reunion in the arms of the familiar. It could be a discordant, dissonant and fearful experience too.

For me, his poems engage with what always intrigued me about Singapore literature. How sometimes, our country is so small it is almost claustrophobic. Everything everywhere rushes at you like you have hit the fast-forward button and you cannot go back. Whether our culture, our progress, our education or our life, it is all so fast and so close that it becomes impossible to see things clearly anymore. So writing about Singapore from a place far away and above the noise brings to the table a whole new way of seeing. Just because our migrant writers have left the island and are now writing from a place different from Singapore does not discredit their writing. In fact, this distance empowers them and makes it possible for them to offer new insight about the Singapore landscape and culture that we are blind to. Distancing, or defamiliarization, as Shklovsky would call it, is important for us. It not only lets us see the artfulness of something, but to see a different perspective previously hidden and that gives us food for thought. Migrant literature makes us rethink whether we really know Singapore as we think we do.

Jerrold Yam’s titular poem, “Intruder”, is the last poem of the collection. It is the brainchild of someone who has left home, travelled, and now returned. The question it leaves me is this: Does our experience as an intruder makes us more at home with ourselves?

Intruder by Jerrold Yam

Back when I could stare without bitterness,

my brain easy enough

for toying a newfangled scene

or surprise, I would hop on a train to

watch meadows swim by,

mud slathered on fields

like toffee, my reflection in the glass

lighted by the novelty of the countryside.

For a minute there is no shame

in becoming my own best companion,

no remorse or loneliness

pushing me to disentangle words

from strangers. When I wake,

there would be no need for a future.

Give me unsettled coffee

by the window. Give me suitcases

muffling the snare of permanence

with leather rind, and I

can almost believe the life

hurrying before me

is not my own.