By Shelly Bryant

We Are Not Alone Here
O Thiam Chin
Penguin Random House SEA (2022) / 158 pages / SGD 24.70  

Detailing the events of a horrific tragedy is not an easy task. The difficulty is magnified when seeking to convey the inner experiences as endured by the victims of such acts, and then magnified again when examining the mental processes that propelled the perpetrators of any series of horrific acts. In We Are Not Alone Here, O Thiam Chin tackles the challenge head on, exposing the inner world of a protagonist who is simultaneously both victim and perpetrator of many horrible things.

O does not shy away from what I think is the toughest challenge of all – presenting the events in the direct speech of the victim/perpetrator as she moves increasingly towards the role of perpetrator throughout the course of her narrative. This is a bold choice, and it requires steely nerves to present such events with full buy-in to the various explanations, excuses and outright lies such an individual must tell herself if the character is to remain at least somewhat sympathetic for the reader. This risk is, to a certain degree, mitigated in We Are Not Alone Here by the presence of a primary audience for the narrative, someone to whom our narrator presents all the explanations, excuses and outright lies as the reader eavesdrops on that discussion. The primary audience in the text serves as an interlocutor even as she remains invisible to the reader. The challenges and questions are not presented as a dialogue but are instead embedded in the monologue of our narrator, which constitutes the entire body of the text. This presentation of a single speaker from beginning to end without break adds another challenge to be addressed in the narrative. Had I been an editor on the project, I probably would have suggested at least testing out whether some interruptions by some other voice speaking directly to the reader might help the flow a bit, though, even as I write that, I can see that it would present another set of challenges, which might ultimately have been insurmountable. Either way, the experience of the text as it stands is that the reader is taken on a bit of a bumpy ride, with a narrative interrupted by an interlocutor whose questions and challenges are only presented when repeated/refuted by the narrator. As a result, the view we have of these events is not exactly one-dimensional, but it is at least severely limited and overtly biased.

Added to the bumpiness of the unbroken monologic text is a certain unevenness in the language. There is throughout the novel a fair amount of non-standard grammar, word choice and punctuation, averaging no less than one instance a page. Examples from a series of three consecutive pages include an awkward run-on and irregular tenses in "Did he kiss his wife before he turned in every night, I often wondered, did he fuck her till they both come before sinking into sleep, nestled in each other's arms?" (p. 56); a slip of tenses in "I wanted to, but by then it's too late" (p. 57); and wrong word choice in, "Why made you think I'm lying to you?" (p. 58). There are enough instances of this sort of divergence from standard grammar/word choice/punctuation norms to suggest that it is done intentionally to mimic spoken rather than written language, or perhaps to mirror the divergences from other social norms which our narrator reveals as the story unfolds. If it was in fact intended for such purposes, it might have been more effective to lean more heavily into these linguistic transgressions, preferably increasing them as the story goes along to heighten the sense of disconnection from social norms, as in A Clockwork Orange. But as it stands, alongside these divergences, the rest of the narrative maintains a much more formal register and more rigid standards of grammar, punctuation and word choice, and this creates a feeling of unevenness, rather than an unhinged narrative voice, which leaves me uncertain whether the divergences were even done intentionally. Ultimately, that makes them, for me, more of a distraction rather than feature of the text.

Another bold step O has taken in We Are Not Alone Here is to present "a feminist take on the roles of womanhood", according to the back cover of the book. Seeing this claim in the blurb, I approached the book with great anticipation, because I am always interested in the work of male writers who seek to embrace and amplify the feminist perspective and its agendas. O is to be applauded for doing so, and where I think he was particularly effective in this endeavour is in the presentation of how women are so often complicit in the continuation of the privileging of men, and in the representation of the all-too-common male indifference to the impact their privilege has on the women around them. The mother-daughter relationship is the clearest example of the former, and the series of love-'em-and-leave-'em men is the clearest example of the latter in the novel. So far so good.

Where the "feminist take on the roles of womanhood" becomes problematic is, again, an issue rooted in the character of the narrator and her perspectives. While this story does lay out many challenges faced by women and "the roles of womanhood, especially motherhood, in contemporary times", surely it is not a generalised view of these issues; after all, the protagonist suffers from a mental disorder. It is perhaps meant to be clear that this disorder is a result of the "roles of womanhood" that have been thrust upon the narrator in the course of her life, but that's precisely the issue I take with the representations in this novel – surely in our times feminism has brought us past the trope of associating womanhood with hysteria and madness, but We Are Not Alone Here pulls us back in that direction. The cruelty of the narrator feels very unlike female cruelty, having a bit too much testosterone behind it, but that could perhaps be explained or overlooked were it not for the implication that the end of the performance of "the roles of womanhood", its climax and resolution, is madness. This is a deeply troubling conclusion, considering that the book positions itself as "a feminist take" on such issues. The efforts feminists have made to detach these long-held cultural biases are apparently overlooked in We Are Not Alone Here, which perhaps calls into question precisely what it is that is feminist about its take on the roles of women.

I believe there is much value in a male writer exploring the impact male privilege has on female lives, and I applaud O's efforts in doing just that. I hope that this daring attempt will be one step along that journey for us, and not the end. It is a valuable endeavour, and even with its problematic points, this is a valiant effort to engage and understand the experience of women who live in a society where they are less valued than their male counterparts, even by the other women around them. My hope is that O's work in We Are Not Alone Here reflects a truth for all of us to consider and absorb: that a monologic recital of enduring defects in our thought does not bring us to a desirable end. I hope this book opens up space for the opposite of this monologic approach, leading to more dialogue on these important topics, which will engender healthier mindsets in us through the repeated process of listening, (re)thinking and understanding.

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