By Yong Shu Hoong

For some time, a buzz had gone around Singapore's literary scene that there was this excellent manuscript by a young poet about to be published – one that was worth looking out for. Then in July, that book was out. The author is Hamid Roslan, whose works have appeared in The Volta, Asymptote and QLRS. His debut collection is titled parsetreeforestfire (2019), a term made up of four words that incidentally are also the name of each of the book's four sections.

As the description on the yellow flap under the purple cover declares, this is "a bilingual book of poetry in which poems in Singlish occupy one side of the book, and poems in English on the other." Hamid uses the term "translation", but some critics may disagree as reading the English and Singlish versions side-by-side reveals nonliteral, highly creative, or even "transformative" (as one Singaporean writer puts it), relationships between the languages he navigates. (Readers, of course, are free to draw their own conclusions.)

At a literary event in August, Hamid revealed that the book started as a Yale-NUS College project under his advisor, Filipino poet and lecturer Lawrence Lacambra Ypil. In his blurb for parsetreeforestfire, Ypil says it constructs "itself out of the edges language makes when it chooses to wager against its own best interests." According to another blurb by Yeow Kai Chai, poet and one of QLRS's editors: "What a sonic thrill this stew of tongues is."

In an article published on the website of his publisher, Ethos Books, Hamid is said to have responded to an audience question in yet another event: "I don't think I can write the same book like this again because I don't want to do the same thing twice but also because writing this book was hard. There were periods when it was… so all consuming, like I remember spending like an entire weekend doing it and just neglecting everything else, and then there were times when it was utterly silent and I could not actually find my way back into the book."

Now that parsetreeforestfire is out, the silence is broken. The book speaks. And now the poet continues to speak…

  1. What are you reading right now?
  I'm reading Melayu: The Politics, Poetics and Paradoxes of Malayness, a collection of essays edited by Maznah Mohamed and Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied; and Dura by Myung Mi Kim. The former out of sense of deep frustration as to the popular, common-sense understanding of what "Malayness" is or means; the latter to remind myself that narration is not the ground of meaning, to borrow a phrase from Kathy Lou Schultz's essay on the poet.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
  The em dash. That's quite literary, no? I'd like to be one to hedge the sentence.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
  That I am proficient in all the languages I use in my poetry. My proficiency has shifted and will continue to shift over time depending on my circumstances, and my relationships to the languages I know. These days I use English the most, simply because it's the language of administration, commerce and theory. Other languages, it seems, are destined to remain in the home. It's sad.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
  I find it difficult to identify with living or dead authors these days, mainly because I don't see myself reflected in any of the literature I read. That might signal some deficiency in the literature or in me.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
  Yes. I'm not prolific. It takes me a long time to even begin writing because I'm always suspicious about the ways in which we choose to speak of or write about the questions we don't have the answers for. Until then, I'll go do something else.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
  Tenacity, single-mindedness, discipline and tempered courage.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
  Being precious or sentimental about one's lived experience. 

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
  "Shut out everyone. This is between you and the page." This was what Lawrence Lacambra Ypil said to me over Facebook Messenger when I felt confused after receiving readers' comments about parsetreeforestfire, and their suggestions to make the text more conventionally legible. It's good advice. 

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but…
  I own a pitcher plant. It's been steadily putting out new pitchers recently, which makes me very happy. Apparently these things need the right amount of neglect in order to thrive.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
  No, no and no. Horror, and only horror.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
  I like "abeh". It doesn't seem like much written down and it roughly translates to "And then?"

I hate "else", especially when it's used at the beginning of a sentence.

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three words: farewell, joke, dissent.
  I'm not a circus monkey, sorry. I won't do this.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
  A room, and an obscene amount of time alone. It's so easy to become distracted in Singapore.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
  Late in the evening, or on weekends.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
  Arthur Yap, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Masuri S.N., because I like their poems.

16. Singlish is featured prominently in parsetreeforestfire. How did you decide on this concept, and what are the challenges in the execution?
  Simply put: I thought Singlish would be the escape hatch out of writing in English, and I was terribly, terribly wrong.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
  Nothing. And no tombstone either, please. I prefer to leave the same way I arrived: sans fanfare.

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