I picked up Christine Chia’s poetry collection, Separation: a history, a slim volume of just 96 pages, because I was intrigued by its overall concept after a brief first look. I was also, for a change, interested in reading a collection of poems written according to a specific, premeditated theme, which is quite unlike a collection retrospectively selected from a poet’s entire oeuvre according to a theme chosen by an editor.

Chia’s collection experiments with the relationship between the apparent facticity of journalistic material and the not-quite-fictional mode of poetry. Divided into four sections—“a short-lived union”, “tearful”, “independence against will”, and “Imagine families being torn apart, uprooted, and separated by borders”—the collection traces a journalistic, historical narrative alongside a personal one, ranging from the political narratives of Chia Thye Poh, J.B. Jeyaretnam, Tunku Abdul Rahman and Lee Kuan Yew, to the poignancy of a father’s death, the fraught relationships between mother and daughter, and husband and wife. It invites us to consider several questions: if poetry has as much integrity as history, if history is a poem writ large, or if family, conventionally assumed to be the primary social unit of society/nation, is then necessarily a microcosm of it. But as much as I found these questions conceptually appealing, I often felt that Chia’s collection fell short of its ambition—not for lack of talent (which was undeniable in some of the poems) but of effort. Footnotes and epigraphs are used too liberally; the poems/prose pieces struck me as quietly moving only when this technique was reined in, and seemed to me rather gimmicky when it was used to excess.

For instance, I found “threat” to be a particularly poignant piece on its own, which could’ve done without the too obvious connecting symbols of water and death/violence introduced in one of its epigraphs:

“The penchant for Malaysian leaders to periodically exploit the asymmetrically dependent relationship, by threating to terminate the water supply, to express unhappiness over policies pursued by Singapore, to influence governmental decisions in the city-state or for domestic political purposes has generated concerns that Singapore-Malaysia relations may quickly deteriorate, with potentially violent outcomes.”

– “The Water Issue Between Singapore and Malaysia: No Solution In Sight?”, ISEAS, Lee Ooh Ohn, 2003

 

What follows is a short prose piece whose narrator dreams about meeting her father a year before her birth. She warns him of the bad luck that talking to his unborn child might bring, and then tells him not to worry about her—she ‘will be born, somehow’. Soon after, her mother appears and threatens to leave her at a river. The child hides, and witnesses a mother forcing her child to drown with her. I thought this parallel too blatant; the unbalanced power dynamic of the mother-child relationship mimics the ‘asymmetrical’ nature of Singapore-Malaysia relations, and is brought to a violent end through a murder-cum-suicide by drowning in water—water of course being the source of tension and dispute in the two countries’ bilateral relations. This seemed to me too much of a rigid metaphorical adherence to the political context imposed by the epigraph. And I thought perhaps the concept that Chia envisioned for the entire collection proved too burdensome for the poems, which often read like they were written after the epigraphs were selected, much too consciously conforming to them.

At other times, however, I felt cultural references were used too haphazardly, which can cause some confusion with context. “marriage of symbols” puts its own witty twist on the sterile origins of the Merlion—according to the poem’s account it was not the manufactured product of the Singapore Tourism Board but the rape of a mermaid by a lion:

 

the lion mounts the mermaid (it’s her fault for swimming

too close to the shore), his claws hooking

into her slippery body for grip. She lost so much blood

she almost died, but she didn’t.

 

As it turns out, the ‘marriage’ of symbols is not an amicable conjugation but a violent union between myth (Sang Nila Utama’s lion) and trademark (the STB’s Merlion). On the whole, the poem is delightfully sardonic, but would have been better off without what I found to be an oddly placed reference. Its jibe at the controversial comment about rape made by the American Republican, Todd Akin—‘Inconceivably, because the body should shut down / when raped…’—doesn’t quite fit into the general direction of the poem. Together with the poem that comes right after, “why did the lion rape the mermaid?”, it reads as a confused and uneven mockery of two separate issues. Its clever attacks on the Singapore government’s disregard for biodiversity, the artificiality of the Singapore Tourism Board and the dubious origins of the Merlion, form a smooth parody of the hypocrisy and image-consciousness that often motivates governmental policies, until they are suddenly detracted by a foreign context and what seems to be a random satire of misogynistic attitudes. That these attitudes are strangely framed and unbalanced by a specific controversy in the US rather than the consistently localised context of the rest of the poem, is what I found most puzzling.

But the collection certainly isn’t without its good moments. The poems I found most moving and potent were also the sparsest and the most compact—free from the contextual baggage of epigraphs and footnotes, and the anxiety of adhering to the collection’s overall theme. “searching” is particularly evocative:

 

blood rises in waves

wrapped by bounds of body,

 

conch roars in vessels tuned

to stars speaking in radio static,

 

crackle of the first chaos – blind convoys searching

 

for land

 

The poem produces the sort of understated, visceral effect I get from reading a haiku, which I also found in “end”:
The half moon, numinous.

 

The breeze brushed

against her brow.

 

I relished the stillness of this short piece, which was a welcome respite from the rushed, desultory poems that I felt were bogged down by attempts at contextualisation that were too explicit.

On the whole, the concept of using national history as a frame for personal narratives was promising, but its execution showed too little subtlety and nuance. I really wanted to like this collection, but I was a little disappointed. I would, however, love to read more of Chia’s work—an interest fuelled purely on the strength of the few good poems I loved in this collection.