Quarterly Literary Review Singapore
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Vol. 1 No. 1 Oct 2001

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The Singaporean Poem
Alfian Sa'at's 'Autobiography'

Selected By Alvin Pang

'The Singaporean Poem' is a space for practical criticism of individual Singaporean poems.

Please post your responses in the Forum. After six weeks, the best posts will be compiled into this article.

Question of the Month:

Does the poem successfully make its case that identity is defined by loss? Or does its very existence as a catalogue of absences, an artifact of memory, defy that loss?

What absences define your sense of self and personal history?

Autobiography

Like most of us, I can't remember how
I was separated from my first love.
(Did it die, did I break it, was it stolen
Or did it fly out through the open window?)
I didn't have radio-tuning parents
Who filled the house with music
Or instilled in me "a love of the cinema".
I never recalled my mother coming home
From the hairdressers' with a new hairdo
Or father teaching me fishing, or
Staying up to watch football on TV.
He did once bring a kite home but hung it
On my bedroom wall (he turned it into
A portrait, it wasn't his fault the wall
Never became more of a sky). Meanwhile
Cousins came for visits wearing braces

And chattering about comics, bicycle scars,
And camping out, ghost stories (don't tell
That one, tell the one where Daddy used
The torchlight and Mummy screamed and dropped
Her things and laughed like a hyena). We drank
Boiled water in the house, and sometimes
Waking from a nap I would wander the rooms
To find mother copying cross-stitch designs
From a book or father watching a subtitled
Chinese re-run. So I slept again, dreaming
Of playing toys away from the sunlight
That leaked in between hawk-eyed curtains
Gold-plating afternoon dust to shining pollen.
When I awoke I was twenty, being asked
If I had a happy childhood. Yes, the one
We all have: filled to the brim
With the love of absent things.

- Alfian Sa'at

From A History of Amnesia (Ethos Books, 2001). Reproduced with permission from Ethos Books.


Question of the Month:

Does the poem successfully make its case that identity is defined by loss? Or does its very existence as a catalogue of absences, an artifact of memory, defy that loss?

What absences define your sense of self and personal history?

Please post your responses in the Forum. After six weeks, the best posts will be compiled into this article.

'The Singaporean Poem' is a space for practical criticism of individual Singaporean poems.


QLRS Vol. 1 No. 1 Oct 2001

_____


About Alvin Pang
Mail the editors

Return to Vol. 1 No. 1 Oct 2001


 
   
  Related Links

Alfian Sa'at interviewed
External link to NUS.

Recordings of Alfian Sa'at
External link to PlanetMG.

A History of Amnesia
External link to Ethos Books.

 

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