By Christine Chia

dragon.paper.wind. (龙卷风)
Crispin Rodrigues
Ethos Books / 88 pages / SGD 18

Hybrid vigour as a concept is illustrated on the cover of dragon.paper.wind. as well as a central conceit in this ambitiously confessional collection of poems that is as much a bildungsroman as a potted history of the diverse races that comprise one specific Eurasian identity. On a stark white cover, the English words in red for "dragon", "paper" and "wind" are grafted onto the black Chinese calligraphy for each word.

The collection is divided into three sections. The first, 'dragon. 龙' is the most obviously autobiographical, opening with 'origin story (i)' and the well-worn parental lie:

we picked you up          from the rubbish
            bin       all sour pith       all peel-
soaked skin

As a first poem that kicks off the whole collection, 'origin story (i)' is a slow burn, in contrast to the next poem, 'origin story (ii)', which I would have preferred to be the first poem:  

…sometimes when races mix, a monster
emerges from confused genetic material –

That said, I understand that the music of the first poem intentionally mimics the simple and repetitive rhythm of a lullaby. From the second poem onwards, we are off to the races, as the monster motif is extended in subsequent poems, starting with 'orang minyak', where the persona's grandfather was rumoured to be the folkloric orang minyak or "night" himself. In contemporary times, Crispin the baby born right at the beginning of the Dragon year is also monstrous, accused of being too European and having "too deformed" a jaw to speak Chinese properly, which is simply ridiculous, as racist claims tend to be. Side by side with the trope of the Eurasian as monster/mutant, there is also the flip side of same figure as a superhero, seen in poems like 'my race wants me to have a body like joseph schooling':

joseph, you've set
all the little eurasian boys on a new course

For Singaporean readers, Joseph Schooling needs no introduction, being Singapore's first and only Olympic gold medallist thus far.

Fair warning should be given to the reader that racist not-so-microaggressions punctuate the book from start to finish, dished out by nurses, teachers, taxi drivers (of course), the comic book store lady (!) in the first section, all the way to the very last poem of the entire book, 'other names', which is a list of mostly derogatory names he has been called, with some witty Chinese clap-backs by Crispin, showing that bullies do not always have the last word, and that learning Chinese, while painful and difficult, can also be a source of power.

The second section, 'paper. 卷', shows the poet's many artistic and historical influences, signposted by the numerous 'self-portraits as x', with 'x' including 'diogo rodrigues', 'grandma's house in morecambe', 'the cretan minotaur', 'ferdinand pessoa' and 'caliban' (with the minotaur and caliban poems continuing the monster motif established in the first section). The most startling poem in this series would be 'self-portrait as alfonso de albequerque's penis', where the title points clearly towards the rapes of colonised women as well as lines like:

the only thing / I inherited / from my white ancestors / was my surname/ meaning / the phallus / was part of / my name / the rest of me / all silent // the women / who made me asian / who kept me grounded / kept silent /

This brilliant poem shows, without a doubt, that the personal is political, and that art is political, because who gets to speak, and who gets silenced, who gets depicted, and who gets erased, these are all cumulative acts of power.

The last section, 'wind. 风', returns the collection to a more intimate scale, focusing on the speaker's family, with affectionate yet conflicted portraits of grandparents, parents, cousins and even "colin schooling", father of the famous Joseph Schooling invoked in the first section. In terms of verbal pyrotechnics, this section is more sedate compared to the bravura second section, with an intentional revisiting of the father figure only briefly mentioned in the first section because the mother figure dominates the first section completely like the dragon lady she is. Even so, "dad" is still a largely silent figure, a melancholic, Singaporean Chow Yun Fat in '代表'：

dad lifts the cig to his lips and draws in hard.
his battered seiko a shadow in the sunlight

And also in '曲/取':

a line from chow yun fat / as he lights a cigarette […]

/ solitary/ on a sofa / my father sits / the only one watching / intently / he taught me / no kristang words / only the sayings of john / paul / george

It is fitting that the second last poem, 'origin story (vi)', mentions that "when dad stopped going to / church, mom started attending / chinese mass" as she takes on the religion he had seemingly given up, while also keeping up her worship of Guanyin in the same Catholic mass, which is syncretic or hybrid religion in practice if not in faith.

There is so much more in dragon.paper.wind. than this review covers. If it is not apparent by this point, I highly recommend it. It is unflinchingly faithful to the poet's enmeshment in a complicated, compromised history as embodied in one's ancestors, seen in these lines from 'comprador':  

compromise [verb]: to make a dishonourable or shameful concession,
e.g. he compromised his homeland for a few dollars more.

While not looking away from the sins of the fathers, it is also alert to the silences of the father(s), signifying the heroic stoicism that men like Crispin's father or Colin Schooling had to display against racism:

he [Colin] had to prove he was sufficiently Singaporean when there were accusations his son Joseph was a foreigner representing Singapore

(from 'Notes', p.78)

the hardest part about proof is the sentence
levied upon you even before saying anything.

(from 'pure asian punya', p. 63).

_____