‘Cosmopolitan Communion of Perspectives':
A Conversation with Cyril Wong
Nibir K. Ghosh
Cyril Wong is the Singapore
Literature Prize-winning author of poetry collections, Unmarked
Treasure and The Lover's Inventory. He has also
published Ten Things My
Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories, and a novel, The Last
Lesson of Mrs De Souza. A past recipient of the
National Arts Council's Young Artist Award for Literature, he completed his
doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore
in 2012. His poems have been anthologised in Language for a New
Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W.
W. Norton 2008) and Chinese Erotic Poems (Everyman's Library
2007). Wong served at various times as a creative-writing
instructor for the Singapore Association for Mental Health and the Ministry of
Education's Creative Arts Programme, as well as a books and performing arts
reviewer for The Straits Times. He
appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival; the Singapore Literature
Festival in New York; the Hong Kong International Literary Festival; the
Sydney, Melbourne and Byron Bay Writers Festivals; Vietnam's first Asia-Pacific
Poetry Festival; the Utan Kayu International Literary Biennale; and the Ubud Writers
and Readers Festival. His poems were interpreted through dance at the 2004
Queensland Poetry Festival and his verse monologue, Still Flight,
was presented at the 2005 Magdalena International Festival of Women in
Contemporary Theatre (USA). In this conversation Cyril Wong generously
shares his views on diverse issues and concerns that have contributed to his
poetry and other writings.
NKG:
Greetings from Re-Markings. You have expressed your delight in being a part of
Re-Markings’ special number entitled A World Assembly of Poets, an
anthology you found “both enriching and cathartic, as well as an overall
beautiful and life-affirming experience.” What role can such efforts to bring
together poets from various parts of the world play in contending with a
conflict and crisis-ridden world?
CW:
Idealistically, by making the world feel like a smaller place, at least to a
small community of people and only for a small moment in time; a cosmopolitan
communion of different perspectives meeting symboli-cally across the page,
comparing notes. In contrast, a cynical poet from Australia joked to me about
how there had recently been a writing anthology about basketball in New
Zealand. I wasn’t sure about the point he was making. I think cynicism is useful,
if intelligently applied. I believe that hope is better. Anthologies to bring
poets together can still offer humble and humbling examples or promises of
possible, utopian harmonies between citizens of the world that might not
necessarily agree with each other.
NKG:
At what age did you feel the initial stirrings of your creative genius? What
was your first composition?
CW:
I’m uncomfortable with the idea of “genius.” I believe the ability to free
ourselves of conditioned thought resides in everyone. We can all be “creative
geniuses” when inspiration claims us—we need merely to open the mind to meet
it. I first felt the need to compose poetry when I was at a low emotional
point during my National Service (compulsory military duty); I was eighteen and
wrote a poem about how much I wanted to go home.
NKG:
Who would you consider as major influence upon your work?
CW:
Horror fiction, fantasy novels, dysfunctional gay-sex poems by Dennis Cooper,
systemic homophobia, stupidly religious parents, texts on spiritual philosophy,
literary criticisms, Kafka—all have been crucial influences.
NKG:
On account of your iconoclastic views, you have had to fight many battles in
your eventful life. Could you please shed some light on the forces you had to
contend with?
CW: Queerphobia,
religious conservatism, political apathy, a general snobbery and aversion to
writing deemed too personal, feckless accusations of “Chinese-majority
privilege”—these are the major forces that I still tango with inside my
sometimes claustrophobic literary scene. I’ve been denied grants, disinvited
from literary events, snidely criticised directly or indirectly, formally
scrutinised at teaching gigs to ensure I’m not “controversial”—I have had to
“grit my teeth and bear it” in order to assert my position as a poet and writer
in my own right.
NKG:
The fact that you have won the Singapore Literature Prize twice definitely
shows you have your admirers too. Wouldn’t you like to talk about that?
CW: Readers sometimes relate to my work. It’s a sweet
and beautiful thing, persuading somebody else to feel less alone about intimate
truths and sufferings that too many of us share. With regard to prizes,
however, I’d suggest that these symbols of recognition are a result of my
defenders, not “admirers.” It’s always a political move, giving formal
recognition to my kind of writing in Singapore. I’m personally only interested
in the kind of reader that reads without caring whether a book has won a prize
or not, or whether the author is published by an international press.
NKG:
What, according to you, are the salient features of contemporary Singaporean
Literature?
CW:
Obsessions with national identity. Social critique. Race and politics.
Psychological dishonesty disguised as linguistic play.
NKG: Could you elaborate “Psychological dishonesty
disguised as linguistic play”?
CW: Let me first state that I don’t subscribe to an
“art for art’s sake” type of philosophy. If a poet is going to kill a tree to
print a book, surely the poems printed should count for more than just
acrobatic perfor-mances? There are poets who don’t care, of course—this speaks
volumes about their humanity. There is always a moment in many poems (if one
reads sensitively, empathetically) when the reader may tell when the poet has
declined—violently, strategically, even pathologically—to be vulnerable, for
fear of exposing or engaging with an internal crack in the soul, an inherently
unspeakable contradiction that breeds anxiety. One can always tell when details
are deliberately left out in a poem. This happens a lot in Singaporean
poetry—when the poem becomes a magician’s con, full of turgid language, aural
effects, semantic playfulness bordering on absurdity—as books, the poems either
amount to a hysterical cry for aesthetic appreciation or they are ingratiating
and anodyne.
NKG:
You consider Singapore “a constant pendulum between mindless conservatism and a
possible future of boundlessly intelligent liberalism.” Do you visualize that
the multicultural and cosmopolitan atmosphere of Singapore can help creative
writers overcome what you call “mindless conservatism”?
CW:
I have doubts. Very often, this mindless conservatism is growing within the
creative community itself, mostly propelled by self-centred modes of
professional survivalism. It is often easier to “play the game” in order to be
a “successful artist” than to fight for what is important or to carry on in a
state of permanent doubt about whether anything one does is ultimately
worthwhile. It is also easier to be apathetic about the ethical need to
celebrate different subjectivities—such apathy is fundamentally what
conservatism entails. In this way, my society, as a whole, remains conservative
while appearing to be superficially progressive, glossily efficient, hyper-modern,
even multicultural.
NKG: What is your view on the so-called politics of
literary prizes?
CW: Prizes are a crapshoot (Margaret Atwood, I think,
said this after receiving a book prize)—I tend to agree. Literature is
endlessly subjective. A lot of Shakespeare is overrated, for example; same with
Auden, Walcott, etc. Truth is an unending battlefield and public endorse-ments
are all about who has the power and the biggest voice at the right time to
grant a work with the aura of fame and importance. Also, just because something
has “stood the test of time” (a common justification for why any book, work of
art or idea should be deemed as “better” or “best”) doesn’t make it “good” or
“right”—patriarchy has stood the test of time, so have homophobia, slavery, the
KKK, dictatorships, religion, conceptual art, etc.
NKG:
Do you believe in the transformative potential of art?
CW:
Yes. For example, I’m not the same person as I was a few decades ago.
Poetry—writing and performance—has expanded and settled my spirit. Also, how we
look at art is as important as aesthetic effects. If the mind is sufficiently
liberated, even graffiti on toilet walls may be profoundly transformative; a
speck on the mirror could be poetry.
NKG:
If you were to create a list of authors and works you have adored from around
the world, what names or titles would you consider uppermost?
CW:
Louise Glück’s Averno, Arthur Yap’s Commonplace, Linda
Pastan’s An Early Afterlife, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Stephen
King’s The Shining, Mani Rao’s Echolocation, Jiddu
Krishnamurti’s Freedom from the Known, Rebecca Edwards’ Scar
Country.
NKG:
You have successfully written in various genres: poetry, fiction, prose and
non-fiction. In which format do you feel most comfortable?
CW:
Poetry, because it is the most efficient medium for layers of interpretation to
rapidly evolve and absorb surprising meanings across time.
NKG: What motivated you to drift towards the novel
form?
CW: I write prose only when I’m taking a break from
poetry. Writing a novel or a short story helps me to think better about the
poems I’m hoping to write in the future. Prose is a means to an end—and that
end is always poetry.
NKG: I think it is your love of poetry that seems to
predominate your prose. For instance, you begin the story “Applause” with the
lines, “A line of raindrops hitting the ground culminates in a concatenation of
explosions nobody can hear—except me. They deafen me, they are deathly, every
new thought blown to the back of my brain to die and dissolve with each rapid
succession. The raindrops are unceasing.” The lines sound so poetic. Would you
agree with Wordsworth when he opines that there is no essential difference
between the language of prose and poetry?
CW: I definitely agree with Wordsworth! But
conventional dualities existing and prevailing the way they do, our prose tends
to be longer than our poems (publishers demand this difference, and also readers
desperate to escape into fully and tediously described worlds when entering
prose). For certain, my love for lyrical images and precision, which to me are
the essential aspects of what poems should be, naturally inform my fiction. I’m
always a poet hiding in my prose. I can’t help myself.
NKG:
How would you respond to the charge of “brutally candid sexuality” in your
writings?
CW:
I would just say, “I can’t help it.” The body and its desires are essential
aspects of how I see myself and my writing is just another body part that
defines me.
NKG:
In your poem “Blueprint” you mention, “In school, / a teacher commented that
you had a talent for stories, / a startling gift for description.” Is the
statement autobiographical? If yes, could you please elaborate?
CW: Actually, I was reimagining my father as a man
with a creative past. The poem is centrally about my father (not me, although
I’m sure there’s some level of self-projection involved) as a man who has lost
his soul, in a sense—a sense of being in touch with one’s capacity for wonder
or wondrous doubt. Having known my father for long enough, I didn’t think that
this was terribly improbable—for my father to devolve from a childhood in which
he had been full of wonder.
NKG: In what way did your university education contribute
to your talent and sensibility as a poet?
CW: University life was a delight! I loved being a
student memorising, studying and debating philosophies without any singular
agenda. I think being in school gave me a broader or more metaphysical
advantage in the way I wrote about everyday things like love or the lessons of
queer relationships. Reading everything from Rousseau to Lacan and Derrida made
me rethink my language choices, or when I later chose to write more directly,
even innocently, I felt I was coming to language with a more
critically-challenged, hyper-conscious perspective—university helped me to make
more informed choices as a poet.
NKG: Your Ph.D. topic, “Globalisation and the
Cosmopolitan Novel: An analysis of the later novels by J. M. Coetzee and Kazuo
Ishiguro,” sounds interesting. How exactly would you characterise a
“cosmopolitan novel”? What motivated you to take up the two Literature Nobel
Prize winners for comparison?
CW: Pure serendipity. Their later novels mirrored
each other in terms of certain thematic developments that captured my
imagination briefly. I stumbled upon their similarities by accident. The
cosmopolitan novel, as I defined it, was one that is extraordinarily conscious
of the contem-porary world, and engaged with global concerns—transnational
inequalities and geopolitical tensions—at the levels of style and narrative
content. Cosmopolitanism, in my definition, was an ethical mode of
being-in-the-world that reflexively acknowledged a global interdepend-dence
(how one’s actions have an impact on everyone else, regardless of whether you
are a mere artist or an influential politician). Once I was done with the
thesis, however, I realised that it was too generalised and superficial in
my comparison of the authors. (In any case, I somehow wangled my way through to
receive my doctoral degree in the end.)
NKG: How do you see “Cosmopolitan perspectives” in
relation to Samuel Huntington’s idea of the imminent “Clash of Civilizations”?
CW: I just think Samuel Huntington has a rather
xenophobic, even racist way of looking at the world, which has nothing to do
with the cosmopolitanism that I’m talking about. My version of cosmopolitanism
should promote a greater mixing of cultures behind and across broader
ideological boundaries. Huntington has stated that he’d like to see a greater
limit imposed on legal immigration in America because he believes the world
will experience greater conflict along cultural lines (all Hindus standing
against other transnational “civilizations” like the Chinese, Islam against the
West, etc.). Maybe I’m anachronistic, a “free-love hippie”; but being a
“hippie” is indeed related to how I think a truly engaged cosmopolitanism
should feel like—I think countries need to be more inclusive of different
cultures, even to the point of “blurring” positively into cosmopolitan entities
that mirror each other in ever-evolving ways. Of course, all this is
“foolishly” idealistic and “imprac-tical”—but the alternative seems worse. If
we force countries to become more monolithic, ideological blocs (like before
the Cold War, as described by Huntington) that stand against each other along
rigidly ideological lines, won’t we roll inexorably backwards in time towards
that threat of another World War? I would love for the world to be “messier”—in
the best way—such that all countries are homes to all cultures, and
“ideological divides” between nations become merely porous over time. Maybe
it’ll never happen, but I’d rather die hoping for something “foolish” than pass
away as a cynical, political pragmatist.
NKG: Have your writings been influenced by Chinese
literature and culture?
CW: Chinese movies and folk tales have naturally
shaped my childhood growing up. But I was also shaped by Bollywood, Hollywood,
European cinema, Greek to Hindu mythology, Malay soap operas, Japanese cartoons
etc. They have all influenced me equally. I never saw myself as “Chinese”
growing up, as my family was extremely “anglo-Catholic” and my schools were
very racially mixed (in my time). I was shaped semi-consciously by every kind
of belief system and a bewildering range of disparate cultural stimuli.
NKG: In the 1920s, T.S. Eliot talked about men and
women engaged in “preparing a face to meet the faces you meet.” A century since
then, don’t you think nothing much has changed in contemporary parlance as it
appears from your poignant poem, “Miss Universe”?
CW: Indeed, nothing has changed. The engagement has
even broadened exponentially and extended into the virtual, social-media world.
We interact with each other through screens of our public selves, constructed
from text and images. We mutually enable each other to believe that these
filtered images—our curated “faces”—are more than enough. Sadly or not, our
“Miss Universe” versions of our selves will outlive us across social media
platforms, long after our physical bodies—along with the messiness of their
private hopes and untameable uncertainties—have been extinguished.
NKG: “You wonder about the years you have/ emptied
into your present job, the sameness of expression/ with which your wife greets
you in the evenings, sullen/ face of your son at the dinner table, the taste of
food/ reduced to blandness on your tongue, while the television/ in the hall
blares forth winners of another game show.” Can these lines from your poem
“Blueprint” said to be reflecting your concern with alienation in a globalized
world?
CW: Yes. I’m using my father (the central figure in
the poem, a man reflecting on his shattered life while stranded in a
Singaporean supermarket) as a symbol for a more general, unreflective existence
within an increasingly technological and globalised world.
NKG: In your poem, “Practical Aim” when you say,
“After the mall is completed, must we/ remember the field it now inhabits/
where we raced each other as children?” are you lamenting the idea of “what man
has made of man” in pursuing his materialistic interests?
CW: Yes, but also in a more specific way, I’m talking
about what we lose of ourselves in a hyper-modern place like Singapore, where
places are constantly being torn down or erased in the name of greater urban
development.
NKG: Do you agree with the generally accepted view
that good poetry is often lost in translation?
CW: No, I don’t. “Good” is endlessly subjective.
There are so many translations that are probably far more memorable than their
originals. Also, all poetry is already “imperfect” translation of events that
might be more intractable, more ineffable than the words used to describe them.
NKG: How would you react to Auden’s statement, “Poetry
makes nothing happen”?
CW: It depends on how we define “nothing.” Nothing is
still something, whether we like it or not. It’s a concept—a word used to
denote a thing, much like any other word. And like any word, it can mean any
number of things. One is only limited by the imagination or a lack of sensitivity.
If the mind is open, “nothing” is already more than itself, even more than
everything. Nothingness can be a spaciousness that is pure, living, vibrant
energy—the heart of potentiality at the heart of creation. Or it can be the
“nothing” that fills an empty bucket, the vacant heart of a politician.
NKG: You consider the film Vive L’Amour your personal favorite? Could you cite the
reasons for your choice?
CW: Because the movie dramatises—fully and
intimately—the cyclical nature of desire and how it entraps us. Towards the
film’s end, the leading lady walks and walks until we realise she is only
circumambulating her own misery, culminating in a moment in which she weeps for
an extended period of time. It’s a moment of profound banality because this
viewer understands she will only long for the pleasures that romantic love
promises all over again—the pain is part of her pleasure, after all. Love is
made possible by time—the time she takes to walk in circles—and time comprises
the opposite of love, too. There is no running away from these opposites. There
is only a sleepwalk between dual states, between the highs and the lows—heaven
and hell in equal measure.
NKG: Have you visited India? What is your perception
of contemporary Indian Writing in English, especially Booker Prize winners like
Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Aravind Adiga?
CW: I have not visited India. For some reason, I had
turned down a few invitations to festivals, probably due to scheduling issues.
I’d love to visit one day. To me, India is the most spiritual place on earth
(my Indian husband tells me this all the time). The fiction writers you
mentioned are too long-winded for me—so much time spent on description, so full
of stylistic fireworks and narratorial cleverness! Maybe it’s my growing,
mystical temperament, but I’d much rather swim in the poems of a Mirabai or
Hoshang Merchant on any given day!
·
Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh,
former Head, Department of English Studies & Research, Agra College, Agra,
is UGC Professor Emeritus. He has been a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the
University of Washington, Seattle, USA during 2003-04. An eminent scholar and critic of American, British and Postcolonial
literatures, he is Author/Editor of 14 widely acclaimed books and has published over 170 articles and scholarly essays
on various political, socio-cultural and feminist issues in prestigious
national and international journals.
v
Copyright Nibir K. Ghosh 2019.
For hard copy of the issue write to ghoshnk@hotmail.com
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