By Jasmine Goh

Acts of Self Consumption
Ally Chua
Recent Work Press (2023) / 104 pages / SGD 18.87

The Earth in Our Bones
Marc Nair
Landmark Books (2023) / 136 pages / SGD 26.00  

I had the recent pleasure to read Ally Chua's Acts of Self Consumption alongside Marc Nair's The Earth in Our Bones. Both collections confront the complexities of society while traversing geographies of the self, offering powerful poems that speak to each poet's dissatisfaction in wrestling with contradictions within and beyond themselves. Acts of Self Consumption confronts various paradoxes: holding love encrusted with inherited pain, harbouring desires for safety and risk and balancing genuine impulse with moral guilt, while The Earth in Our Bones is a photojournalistic endeavour to locate vignettes of minority sufferings within our cityscape, insisting that the reader look more deeply at our histories and geographies to imagine a more equal world.

Ally Chua's debut poetry collection reads like the remnants of a crime scene. Excavating the intentions of the self over the trajectory of a single night, Acts of Self Consumption pulses with the push and pull of desire, both carnal and complex, all while staying accountable for its accompanying consequences. While bearing these weighty themes, Chua's poems feature an array of vistas – from the kitchen of her home to an expressway drive towards Pasir Panjang to New York City in January winter.

The quiet and confessional nature of the first section 'Dusk' strikes me as the most honest and haunting – Chua reflects on the intergenerational scars that she has inherited, the ache that lingers despite cleaving from family. In 'Halley's Comet', Chua wields language in a manner that feels both raw and resolute:

… Understand: letting go is
an act of risk and sometimes, the beloved

does not return. Every lover knows desire
does not sever clean; it lingers long after

the last rays of love. Strange how
we make space for ghosts.

The collection grows in confidence in the section 'After Hours', the nocturnal setting echoing the poems' darkening glow. In 'The Boys in the Lineup', Chua confronts the complexity of her relationships with the men in her life. Chua adopts a loose poetic line as she imagines having to identify a boy from a lineup of familiar men – from close family to past lovers. Chua lays bare their jarring, even criminal, flaws, grapples with the grief of their absence, but also demonstrates a keen awareness of her complicity in the brokenness:

All of them have flayed you
            from heart to marrow.
                                                            & you figure out
                        who you're supposed to save.

            See,
            all the boys you loved
                        have left                                  so it must mean
            you like broken things.

…

See, you know this:
            a lineup is not meant to save.
                                                So, pick him out,
            the boy you could not fix.

            Because this lineup is you,
cut into parts
                                    on the other side of the glass.

I am particularly moved by Chua's tight grip over her agency. Chua's sense of self stands as the bulwark of the collection: "What I'm saying is, / I regret nothing. / What I'm saying is, I am the driver behind the wheel." ('Self Portrait as Reflection in Car Mirror'). In other pieces, including 'Martin Scorsese and I Get into a Taxi' and 'On Cannibalism', Chua wrestles with both the guilt and pleasure of internalised misogyny, divulging ravenous hunger while still exercising a strong economy of language. This excerpt is from the latter piece:

            The gluttony of
            gorging at a buffet and
            going back for seconds.

            The more I take
            the less
            pleasure I feel
 
            Yet stopping was
            beyond
            my control.

With a voice marked by its distinct assertiveness, it is difficult to believe that this is Chua's debut collection. Above else, it is the flesh of desire brimming with tactile memory that Chua writes best towards. There were various moments in the line breaks where I found myself needing to pause and exhale – to look away, then back again, as if a voyeur or trespasser on a scene of something unflinching, startling and deeply true.

Marc Nair has always possessed an uncanny ability to see the world. Long recognised as a poet, photographer and spoken word artist, Nair's past collections, such as Spomenik and Vital Possessions, have harnessed both word and image to cross chasms in speaking to a reader, viewer, listener.

The Earth in Our Bones is no different. In his 11th collection of poetry, Nair deftly straddles the personal and political, word and image, poetry and prose. Nair explains in the preface that the collection arose from "a deep sense of offence" after reading about several racial incidents against minorities in Singapore. Drawing from this, The Earth in Our Bones speaks to the tides of migration and the inability of foreign bodies to take root. Nair's collection raises various perspectives: that of a mixed-race child, a migrant worker, a sojourner in a foreign land, as well as that of objects abandoned then found on shoreline.

The collection begins with 'Mirrors to an aching', which is part essay, part prose and part poetry. Nair negotiates his personal experience of dislocation as a child of parents of mixed heritage, with several identities for his choosing, but yet he can "find no harbour in any of these coves". The piece then considers several incidents of racial microaggressions in local news – racially charged statements made in Parliament, a grassroots committee misappropriating a wedding photograph of a Malay couple for a Hari Raya celebration, a neighbour retaliating with hostility to a practice of faith. Nair's argument and emotion is essential to this piece – that the roots of these incidents are nothing short of intolerance, manifestations of "visible anger". Crossing different media allows the reader to experience it all – the logic of the essay, the story of the prose, the sensitivity of poetry.  

… like the man sitting

beside you, whose skin is soaked in hues
of ochre and cinnamon, whose scent
is tinged with sandalwood, who has spent

an hour at prayer, whose shoulders curve
with the weight of fighting to translate
himself in an office where they speak

another national language, one that sits
beyond the reach of his tongue.
He is not the body of battle you are

searching for.

The section 'My body is lorry' consists of ekphrastic poems, Nair's poetic response to vignettes of migrant workers that he captures on film. The poems are a call for justice, as Nair responds to inequalities that are alarmingly normalised in the everyday life of migrant workers. In 'Lorry', Nair expresses outrage towards a series of fatal accidents involving migrant workers being ferried in lorries by personifying human as vehicle, representing the cosmos in disaster:

            smaller bodies tumble blood and bone,
brittle without their yellow safety
because this is not a construction site
this is kin that offers passage

…

but softer bodies
            have no right to safety,
            they are flung the way a god hurls
            stars into galaxies

Nair's photography plays a crucial role in the collection. In 'Pulling up roots', Nair photographs a group of construction workers in a single file at work, all straining at a long and heavy rope, in the middle of an affluent neighbourhood in Singapore. The composition of Nair's images visually highlights the contradictions, reminding the reader that the inequalities play out in broad daylight for all to witness.

As the men haul, they unearth
histories of myth and magic,
kampongs protected by fire
and spells, rituals of change

under silvered moonlight, feastnights
by the river. They feel all this, briefly,
against a skyscraped city
that holds no place for their songs.

Indicative of Nair's ability to harness poetry to both observe and challenge, the closing poem 'Land Acknowledgement' heeds space to ancestral territories and stewards, naming the tribes and peoples who first inhabited the land we now know as Singapore. In the footnotes, Nair challenges the reader to reflect on Singapore's practice of land reclamation that results in the creation of local shorelines that take away from others, while also contending with the notion that the practice of land acknowledgements can be reduced to a gesture, an empty formality.

While I would have loved to see the sections speaking across the page and towards each other in a more direct, intertwined manner, the whole of Nair's collection is truly more than the sum of its parts. In a society where diversity has the disturbing prospect of also destroying us – The Earth in Our Bones is a critical read for all who inhabit this inherited land, who live amongst others unalike us.

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