Portraits of the Past: Seeing history’s many faces

With fellow panelists Meihan Boey, Prasanthi Ram and moderator Desmond Kon!

Last November, I was invited to speak at the Asia Creative Writing Programme’s inaugural Practitioners’ Conference on something I’d been mulling over for a while — the poet’s relationship with the past. I had the chance to revisit the talk this year, adapting it into a video lecture for the Ministry of Education’s Creative Arts Seminar, and this made me realise just how central that question is to my new book COMMONWEALTH (now in stores!).

Here’s the original version of the talk delivered at ACWP 2024, which also provides some insight to the book’s title poem. Enjoy!

The late Hilary Mantel once said that she only became a novelist because she thought she had missed her chance to become a historian. Though nowhere as successful in my own attempts to write about the past, I must confess to a similar regret. Throughout my years in school, history was my favourite subject and also the natural choice when it came to deciding what I would do at university. Some teachers were surprised that I hadn’t opted to do literature, since by this point I was spending more time on my writing than my schoolwork. But there was hardly any conflict in my mind. I knew what I enjoyed doing most – even more than writing – and that was putting history under a microscope.

As it turned out, I did not go on to make academic history my career. Still, it was at university in the UK that I had, for the first time, space and freedom to discover stories from the past that never made it into my school textbooks back home. Some of these, especially the ones from the weeks I spent reading about Southeast Asian history, found their way into poems I was writing at the time. The account in the Sejarah Melayu of the Portuguese arrival in Melaka – a first encounter defined by astonishment and wonder, rather than violence or fear – formed the basis of my poem ‘The Difference’, which I wrote in the fraught months leading up to the Brexit referendum.

But more so than stories from the past, my time at university exposed me to a multitude of stories about the past, which threw up questions about who was telling which tales, and why. For a while, I experimented with a sort of reverse cultural appropriation, claiming tropes from the Western canon for the tropical stories I came across. Dante’s journey into the underworld, for instance, lent me the setting for an imagined encounter between Huang Xueying, a veteran member of the Malayan Communist Party, and her late mother, whom she never saw again after disappearing into the jungle for fifty years.

I share these early forays not as positive examples, but to give you a sense of how I stumbled into writing ‘historical poetry’, a process that taught me – mostly through trial and error – that what I was trying to do was very different from writing historical fiction. In the same interview I quoted earlier with The Paris Review, Hilary Mantel describes what she does in her masterly novels as “finding a shape” in historical events, even though she would be the first to admit that “history is not shapely”. In some ways, this art of spotting the curves and corners of history lends itself more easily to fiction because, as Mantel puts it, “there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama”. But what I found myself more interested in doing, and what I think poetry provides a better vehicle for, was finding and filling the silences of history, that is, creating ways for myself and others to identify or imagine encounters with those at the very edge of the historical record.

This difference cuts to the heart of what sets poetry and prose apart. I come back often to how the poet Don Paterson distinguished the two: “Prose evokes; the well-chosen word describes the thing. But poetry invokes; the memorable word conjures its subject from the air”. To paraphrase, prose concerns itself with what is there, while poetry is that spell that summons what isn’t. Paterson also gives us a clue as to how poets exercise these dark arts. He calls the poem a “little machine for remembering itself”, which casts the poet as a sort of Thomas Edison figure – or, if we reach further back in history, an Archimedes or a Galileo. What these inventors, like all good poets know, is that any form of magic is within reach as long as you have the right tools and parts on hand.

This is perhaps the inverse of Arthur C. Clarke’s oft-repeated line that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Just like any machine that claims to conjure light from darkness, the poem operates on the reader not as prayer, but as process: through a combination of effects (shape, rhyme, meter…) that conspire to help the reader access, for a moment, that which defies explanation. Little wonder we refer to these elements from the poet’s toolkit as poetic ‘devices’.

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I don’t mean to suggest that invention is the sole province of the poet, while novelists are confined to mere description. But I do think that the poem’s resources allow for distinct methods of reckoning with what I have earlier called the silences of history, or what lies at the fringes and margins of the historical record. In the interest of time, I will confine myself to two such approaches, which we might think of as ‘zooming out’ and ‘zooming in’.

‘Zooming out’ refers to the act of compression: by which the poet gathers up the wide rippling layers of the past and combines them in uncanny or unsettling ways to illuminate what goes unspoken, even in the course of history’s watershed events. Consider with me Christine Chia’s deceptively brief poem ‘tunku’s dilemma’, from her collection Separation: A History. In its very form – that of the pantun, which thrived both as high art and in popular tradition – the poem alludes to the diaphonic quality of the Merger negotiations, with the debate on the streets taking place at a separate register from the horse-trading of government representatives:

“like bile that sticks to the liver,

such is a love you cannot dissever;

if you can’t marry for love, marry for silver,

she’s too chinese but at least she’s clever.”

Its language, pungent and unfiltered, also nods to the unsentimental realpolitik of the marriage market in the 1960s (which maybe isn’t so different today as we’d like to think). But what I think this poem does most successfully is call into being the unseen matchmakers and midwives of Merger, the millions of ordinary citizens for whom the fate of two nations boiled down to one simple equation. “If you can’t marry for love, marry for silver”: a line so easily dismissed as a bit of coffeeshop talk, or the nagging of a meddling aunt. Yet within the construct of the poem the aunts are the ones giving the advice; while the tunku, so used to being the centre of attention, is reduced to little more than an indecisive groom.

What Christine achieves in a few strokes of the pen is to compress several layers of historical context, and, relying on the poetic devices of form, language and ventriloquy, turn the spotlight away from the facts and official statements – which are relegated to footnotes – and onto what elite decision-makers would politely refer to as ‘conventional wisdom’. The concision of the form plays a part here. Not only does it amplify the contrast between the voice of the efficient everyman and that of the prevaricating politician; it also catches us off guard by so rapidly collapsing the different registers of history, and reorienting us in the process towards what, or who, the poet would like us to pay attention to.

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The second approach is ‘zooming in’, where the poet brings into focus faces which have disappeared into the crowd among history’s ringside seats. Like a craftsman whose job it is to restore old manuscripts and artefacts – or even the thrifters and repairers among us – the poet must examine the cracked and unwieldy thing that history is, and make it new again. Not by presenting it exactly as it is found, but by scrubbing off the dirt, colouring in a faded fresco, or even adding a new layer of gold leaf. What this requires is imagination and empathy, which are essential to seeing the past in the ‘present tense’, as those of the past saw it. And what this achieves is not compression but clarification, allowing those whose features have been smudged or blurred by time to reappear in high resolution.

An excellent example is Ruth Tang’s poem ‘Radium Girls’, published in QLRS. I first heard Ruth read this at the old Booktique bookshop in Citylink Mall, the vividness of her imagery amplified by the long procession of clothes and jewellery stores on either side. Like Christine, she deploys the poet’s toolkit to tremendous effect. From the irrepressible, galloping rhythm of its very first line, the poem struggles against the silence of the page, struggles to keep these girls alive in the richness of description.

But we, the audience, know it is precisely their radiance and camaraderie that has damned them. This is a war poem, but not your conventional kind. It is a poem about war that is continuously waged on your own side, especially on women and girls, a war that doesn’t stop when peace is declared. What the poet has done here is wade onto the battlefield and bring us a report from the front, returning dignity and yes, life, to its unsuspecting victims.

Both approaches have their merits. Living amid the context collapse of the 21st Century, those who ‘zoom out’ to bottle history’s contradictions remind us that poetry exists to resist reductiveness, and that the past – like the present – can be full of complexity and surprise. In my own work, though, I tend towards the second approach of ‘zooming in’ to recover, or at least to approximate, lives and details that have slipped out of our grasp. I confess that I’m still trying to figure out why.

All I know is this. I remain constantly astounded by the realisation that no two people see an event the same way, and being able to imagine or colour in the shades of even one person’s lost world makes me feel like I’ve gained access to a whole parallel universe, perhaps just a few paces to the left or right of my own. There isn’t the question of getting it absolutely right: I know I won’t. But if I can create a close enough simulacrum that a reader can open a window into that universe, too, the poem has done its job.

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Let me show you what I mean. Here’s a picture you don’t see very often anymore: a road being opened, and by a Minister no less. The year is 1964 and Commonwealth Avenue has just been widened, with a second carriageway added to accommodate the anticipated flood of people and equipment in the direction of the new industrial estate at Tanglin Halt. There are lots of men standing around, shirts translucent with sweat (you can see their singlets clearly, even in this black-and-white photograph) and some scaffolding, maybe a crane in the distance. Now if you look among the onlookers there’s someone who stands out, a girl in a white dress and high socks, only a head taller than the ribbon that will soon be cut. To me, she is by far and away the most compelling figure in this picture. Why is she here? What is she thinking as she sees this new road being carved through her estate, the world she has grown up in changing forever?

Short of tapping her on the shoulder, I hope you won’t mind me sharing this poem as a distant, second-best attempt to ask her those questions face to face.

Before I close, I mentioned at the start that history was always my favourite subject. Truth be told, I can no longer remember how this obsession started. But my parents will recall how, when we were living in Manchester during Dad’s postgraduate year, they came to Oswald Road Primary School one afternoon to see their son – one of only two Chinese kids in the entire class – proudly holding up his portrait of the Celtic queen Boudicca as part of his year group showcase.

My own memory of that incident is a little different. Moments before whipping out our masterpieces from under our seats, my classmate Naomi had accidentally stepped on the edge of my picture, ripping Boudicca’s face diagonally across the page. Needless to say, I was distraught. But even then, I still remember my tears turning to amazement when I looked around and saw all my classmates holding up their drawings: there were blue-haired Boudiccas, green-eyed Boudiccas, tall and tiny Boudiccas, Boudiccas with mullets and muscles and moustaches.

No two queens were anything like each other. We had all let ourselves scribble in this margin of history as we saw it, and that was the beauty of it.