By Crispin Rodrigues

Burn After Dawn
Chim Sher Ting
Landmark Books (2024) / 88 pages / SGD 22.50

The challenge of poetry has always been the question of authorship. Since the Greeks and their muses, the inspiration for poetry has sometimes been seen as this outward force that descends upon the self. In our contemporary world, while we have largely dismissed the muse's role in the poet's genius, we have since substituted it with other means – research, interviews, news articles and other texts, which sometimes creates the question of whether we do have ownership of addressing issues when we look at them from that scholarly distance. What does it mean to speak about the experiences of these individuals when we did not experience them ourselves? History offers an excuse – there is simply no possible way to return when survivors have passed on, but the question still lingers. Chim Sher Ting's poetry collection, Burn After Dawn, interrogates this question to various degrees of success insofar that she challenges the notion of representing and knowing about World War II rather than an accurate representation.

The first half of Chim's collection explores the war from its political (in)evitability across a range of forms and perspectives, moving between the intimacy of a grandmother relating to the persona about how wartime atrocities have shaped her language in 'Songs of War' to the distancing muteness of a timeline in 'How to Cook Up a Malayan Offence' and 'The Anatomy of Grief'. In the latter two poems, there is an attempt to find the sentimentality within the de-humanisation of the overfactualisation of a timeline. However, this is done to varying degrees of success.

In 'How to Cook Up a Malayan Offence', for example, the harshness of surviving through the Japanese Occupation is articulated in the familiar metaphor of tapioca as the only available food source in this period of food scarcity. However, the subjecting of the tapioca as a metaphor for the trauma of the resistance against the Japanese ("The tender flesh / of the wounded" and "Cleave the tapioca into factions") is somehow juxtaposed against the seeming luxuriousness of the "dollop / of corn oil" and "Falling like chopped / scallions to a luminous / Flame", creating a sense of disjointment. There is a sense that the realness of the war struggles against the slantedness that poetry advocates for. Even in 'Songs of War', the persona confuses what her grandmother says  ("爱国主义", meaning "patriotism") with an imperative to understand one's patriotism ("爱国注意", literally meaning "love country, pay attention"), suggesting a disconnect between real lived experience and understanding about experience through the lens of another, especially for the purposes of didacticism. Throughout the first half of the collection, there is a tension between the experiences of the earlier generations that have authentically experienced the war when it becomes platitudes for those who have not gone through such a traumatic event.

The first half also led to some confusion about the need for experimentation in light of the direction that the poems were heading towards. The vertical columns in "A Canon of Constraints" left me confused in that other than the leftmost column creating a vertical column of C-words, which echoed with 'Canon', I struggled to see the value in needing the columnisation. Likewise, in 'The Truth of the New Order', the use of the crossword puzzle form as a way to link clues to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere seems quite disjointed. On one hand, it aims to point out the irony of the Japanese war campaign, yet the whimsiness of the form takes away the critical aspect of the poem. Hence, the experimentation tends to distract at times from the undergirding message within the content of the poems.

However, the latter half of the collection functions almost as a reaction to the questions put forth in the first half. There is an acknowledgement of that limitation of experience, which draws out larger questions on the role of memorialisation and the value of re-visiting these traumatic events. In the poem 'Our Conversations of War are Merely Syntax', there is an acknowledgement that all articulations of the unlived past are just "becoming / purely stolen verbs" rather than embodying the lived experience. The poem foregrounds the realisation in its simplicity – no verbose words, recognisable, even traditional poem structure, with monostiches clearing pointing out the gap – "There's a difference." The poem punctuates the previous section with a pause and a shift in tone to the realities of the inaccessibility to the horrors of World War II. It is an honest confession, and one that is much needed as an acknowledgement of authorship – "loose grief" is all we can experience within our contemporary conditions and conveniences. Likewise, in the closing poem of the collection, 'Inheritance', the complexity of authorship is raised as a final moot point:

Survival is a reckoning in itself.

I say I'm the grandchild of two grandparents,
born and bred on an island,

When what I really mean is
you don't know how much I'm coming from.

Here, the persona arrives at the "reckoning". On the one hand, there is a romanticised view that one is only here because their grandparents survived the horrors of the war and procreated to the point of the existence of their grandchildren. And yet, the concluding line in italics carries an admittance of the heaviness of such realities. What right do I have to speak just because I exist? How much do I know? How much can I know? The line holds the complexity of authorship in a manner that grapples with possibility of veracity.

Within Chim's collection lies the complexity of the question – what is actual history? As Singaporeans, we question the instrumentalism of the discipline when it is used as a facetious object of threat or political manipulation in our Social Studies lessons, or as a civics and moral education tool. I believe Chim's collection makes strides in pushing this questioning even further. She presents the impossibility of re-accessing the horrors of the past through over-intellectualisation and a little whimsy (I am reminded of all the times they fed us tapioca and sweet potato during Total Defence Day), and yet possesses the wherewithal to acknowledge the complex nature of authorship. She presents history, insofar that we can know it.

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