By Tanvi Rajvanshi

Cyril Wong’s The Dictator’s Eyebrow may at first seem like a ridiculous attempt at glorifying a rather unimportant, almost useless, feature of the human face. However, as one reads and unpacks this “poetic account of an unnamed dictator’s eyebrow”, one would be quick to realize that there is more to it than meets the eye(brow). Put simply, this text is written from the perspective of a dictator’s eyebrow, as he narrates all that the dictator has been able to achieve because of his fantastic eyebrows. What follows is a disturbingly funny account of a power-hungry eyebrow and his always-consenting wife. By personifying the eyebrow and making it the emblem for power, rather than the Dictator’s face as a whole, Wong makes pertinent political critiques of a particular country and its leader that the reader can understand by inference.

I was immediately attracted to this piece because the title itself promised me an interesting and different literary experience. And this text, for me, became interesting because it lies at the intersection of poetry and prose. Although written in verse, it has a prosaic quality about it, which is perhaps in its narrative structure. The piece has a very clear beginning, middle and end. This is not to say that poems do not have narrative structures, however, it becomes immediately clear that this text is the story of the eyebrow told as poetry rather than a poem about an eyebrow when the eyebrow claims, “I’m the real hero of this story”.

The choice to write this in poetic form gives the writer freedom to explore more ways of telling a story. For me as a reader, this piece brought up questions about how we define the texts we read on a purely structural basis. Yes, in some ways this is a poem, however, it is published and presented like a novella. There was even a ‘book launch’ for the piece. It made me question whether there are certain things about poetry we analyze simply because the text is written in poetic form, and whether these aspects can or should be analyzed when reading prosaic texts. For instance, when I analyze poetry, some of the things I look at are line lengths and rhythm. However, when I’m analyzing prose, the rhythm of sentences is admittedly not the first thing that comes to mind. It made me wonder then, if I’m missing out on not looking at rhythmic structures of sentences in prosaic texts. This points to the way in which we, especially as literature students who have to read and analyze texts on an almost daily basis, are automatically attuned towards reading a particular text in a particular manner simply because of the form that text takes. When I’m presented, then, with this text that looks like a novella but reads like a poem, every part of me is confused about what to call it.

But the confusion is good because it alters my perception. It makes me wonder whether I should change the way I approach prose, and whether prose can carry a poetic value. However, this isn’t the only way in which defamiliarization works for Wong’s piece. It’s interesting that he chooses the eyebrow as his chisel to carve this elaborate tale of a dictator’s success in building a country. When we think of famous dictators in history, it is always the face that immediately comes to mind. But really, isn’t it actually that one particular something about the dictator’s face rather than the dictator himself? Case in point, Hitler and his infamous moustache. Similarly, when I think of dictatorships, it is something about that particular dictatorship that lends it its infamy. Taking Hitler as an example again, it’s the holocaust and his anti-Semitism that is perhaps iconic to his reign, even though his political philosophy branched far beyond this. But getting back to Wong’s text, by making the eyebrow a separate entity from the face, Wong raises interesting questions regarding the shaky relationship between a powerful person and the way they use that power, and also the way in which we remember that person. As Gwee Li Sui mentions in his introduction to the text, “power itself is not a constant quality and is only as unique and competent as the individual who wields it”, just as eyebrows tend to be unique to a face. Telling this story from the unusual perspective of an eyebrow allows the reader to detach themselves, in some ways, from the dictator himself and see the politics in a different light.

This text works for me because, like a bushy set of eyebrows, it challenges the way I see things. Not only does it challenge the way I approach texts purely on a formal level, but thematically, it also makes me think about how I approach politics and form an understanding about political people. What makes a political figure memorable? Is it their command over power? Their use of their power? Or is it, at the end of the day, something as unremarkable as their eyebrows?