By Jess Song

On 29 October (Wednesday), I had the pleasure of attending Speakeasy #15, a spoken word event had at Artistry Café. It was my first spoken word experience, and I found it a light-hearted and enjoyable event. The first segment saw prolific Singaporean poet Joshua Ip reciting poems from his collections, and the second segment featured playwright Joel Tan performing a dramatic monologue and an essay. (Interestingly, this was the first time Speakeasy hosted a prose performance!) Joshua’s poems encompassed a variety of themes and Joel’s dramatic monologue and essay explored the topic of homosexuality in Singapore.

Joshua read poems from his two collections: sonnets from the singlish (2012) and making love with scrabble tiles (2013), as well as some unpublished works. His first poem was “Sarah”, a poem about his girlfriend, which was heavy with irony and highly humorous, as he regaled her with what his love “is not about”, including a “deviation from contracts”. I found this highly ironic as it conveys the idea that love cannot be about fulfilling a series of contractual promises.

His poem “Evacuation Instructions” was a poem about boiled Coke (yes, Coca-cola) and lemon. He described boiled Coke as a remedy for “sundry illnesses”. This poem was again humorous since it consisted of a series of nonsensical instructions on what to do in an emergency. His next poem was “Apart”, which primarily involved wordplay on the words “apart” and “a part”, and had an amazing number of alliterations on letter ‘p’ (like partitions all in place).

Joshua shared that “People in Singapore tend to read lyric poetry [at events] because it is dramatic”, but he broke this convention by reading “darkly duckling scanner thrush”, an experimental poem that was “about nothing”. It consisted of a series of words strung together without any ostensible meaning (try “freedom phlegm potential warfare” or “yogurt culture museum dinner”), yet it sounded great when read out, due to the diction. He uses defamiliarisation as he exploits the tenuous relationship between seemingly unrelated words to create a “meaningless” poem, but it does depict modern society in a disjointed, circuitous manner.

Joshua’s poem “Elitist Writers” was another highly memorable poem, written in response to the National Library Board saga, as it asserted that “[Singapore] has been hijacked by literati” and its closing lines “We’ve only got one chance in 2016, to vote in men who neither read nor write” drew much laughter from the audience. Joshua also showed his brazenness in “I Will Get Up”, a poem written in the persona of Lee Kuan Yew which features Lee’s resolve to “[get up and] lead by example”.

Next came Joel, who performed a dramatic monologue about someone who had contracted gout, which he attributed to his success at weight loss, since his gay partner had asked him to lose weight earlier. I enjoyed the monologue as it was performed with much expression and drama, lending a high degree of realism to the persona’s pain.

Joel’s final item was an essay reading “We Could Have Danced All Night” (http://poskod.sg/Posts/2014/3/18/We-Could-Have-Danced-All-Night) which was written as a response to the closure of the gay club “Play”, and featured an exploration of gay identity constructed around his experience at “Play” and his journey in coming clean with his identity. I found his segment thought-provoking as it raises the concerns of a marginalised community in Singapore, since our heteronormative state actively suppresses the expression of homosexuality, which Joel aptly terms “transgressive intimacy”.

What I find refreshing about this experience is how relevant Singapore literature can be in our lives. Joshua’s poems bear direct relevance to daily life, for example, his poem “On Loss” describes the humdrum of office work and the bureaucratic management of Singapore offices, most pointedly the demand that work be represented by “Powerpoint slides”. His poems “Elitist Writes” and “I Will Get Up” also demonstrate how poems can comment on politics in an innocuous way and hence avoid censorship by the authorities. Joshua’s poems infuse considerable humour; hence he makes Singapore literature relevant and fun. Joel’s dramatic monologue and essay also detailed the anxieties of homosexual males, which provide a rare glimpse into this area which is largely excluded from mainstream texts.

Speakeasy also foregrounded the performative aspect of literature, since the experience I had differed greatly from the conventional way of literary study in which poetry, dramatic monologues and literary essays appear in print. The performative element greatly decreased the metaphorical distance between the literary work and the audience.

In short, what draws Joshua and Joel together is their willingness to explore ways of representing themselves in their writing. Joshua breaks from conventional love poetry in his richly ironic poem “Sarah” and experiments with the technique of defamiliarisation in “darkly duckling scanner thrush”. Joel explores the concept of homosexual identity and belonging in his works and hence provides an alternative perspective in conservative Singapore.