Marginalised by the Marginalised

Home is tracing the familiar lines

Of the silhouetted horizon against the setting sun,

Like the assuring wrinkles of kind smiles.

 

Home is greeting the coffee shop Uncle in my Mother’s tongue

Jiat pa buay? Chek puay. Ta bao, Kam siah!

As he, in a sleight of hand, concocts my teh as only he knows how.

 

Home is using my native language that I have been proudly schooled in

Vehemently wrangled in, dreamt in, romanced and fell irrevocably in love in,

And understood by, without being patronised Oh! You speak such good English!

 

Home is sharing my commute with those who are making

their way home in a place they call Home.

 

But now I have to be constantly reacquainted with the morphing skyline

And question myself in shameful forgetfulness, What used to be here?

And hang up my ancestral dialect in an act of betrayal for the Stepmother’s Mandarin tongue,

While reeling from the slap by my own Country Of Origin

When being told that I am not acknowledged as a native English speaker,

But merely an illegitimate child born out of the wedlock of Commercialism and Materialism.

 

Therefore, I am not Home.

 

Therefore, I envy you for

You can go back to where you came from

But tell me,

Where am I to go?

Books are the Carriers of Civilization

Councils in the UK has planned to shut down more than 450 libraries due to budget cuts. This horrendous news has sent shock waves among the educators, writers and the general public throughout the UK.

Julia Donaldson on the importance of libraries. “If you close all these branches, get rid of these expert librarians, we’re going to end up with a population of more illiterate people.”

Helena Pielichaty on the budget cuts. “They seem to be going for libraries, and all the arts, as a soft target. Life isn’t worth living without those things, and those are the things I pay my taxes for.”

Kate Le Vann on the valuable role of librarians. “…A lot of my readers get recommended my books by librarians…Librarians are really interested in books and have an incredible knowledge of books.”

Lesley Garrett on vital role of literature. “The idea that everyone in this country can’t have ready access to free literature is completely abhorrent. Libraries are the cornerstone of our society.”

Philip Pullman on the impact of library closures. “It’s a kind of inward loss, a darkening of things, a narrowing of horizons that will gradually make us a less informed, less intelligent, less aware, less useful, less imaginative, less kindly people than we might have been.”

In response to the planned closures, 5 February in the UK has been set apart for Save Our Libraries Day in which planned protests are taking place across the UK. These protests take the form of petitions, read-ins, author appearances, story-telling events and the sheer congregation of visitors to show how valuable these libraries are to the communities that will be adversely affected.

It has been noted that social media such as Twitter and Facebook lends a big hand in the quick spreading of publicity and support for the co-ordinated protests. The twitter hashtag #savelibraries has been used by twitter uses worldwide and gained even faster momentum by the retweets of authors like Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman. The hashtag has also been picked by other countries such as US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands and climbed to the top few world treading hashtags within days.

In Singapore where we are are fortunate to have a well funded and well stocked National Library Board, consider the important role that you can play in the continual utilisation of the resources and services at your finger tips.

NLB Search Plus and the easy book reservation service are my most used features. I’ve also recently bookmarked Library In Your Pocket (http://m.nlb.gov.sg/) in my smart phone’s internet browser for quick access to library services on the go.

Consider the quote by Henry David Thoreau; “books are the carriers of civilization.”

If our library is ever threatened with closure, what would be your rally cry?

Books Reviews of Late – Dystopian Texts

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

This book is dystopian literature that depicts what becomes of a society that prizes progress and efficiency above all else. Nothing has sentimental value, private aspirations are not permitted and people are harvested and genetically modified at the Social Predestination Room to fulfill their cog-in-the-wheel destiny.

Why bother to hope if you can control the outcome by means of passing everything and everyone through an assembly line production and more essentially, when you can determine the maximum potential for each individual and make that known from the beginning?

I’ve read three dystopian literature this year: The Giver, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World.

One common thread between all the depicted societies in that literature and history are banned or not made available. The novels then show how people are conditioned to be ignorantly happy and contented with life as it is now as the be all and end all.

More tellingly, the people depicted are all drugged to varying extents. In The Giver, people take “the pill” everyday to suppress urges of any kind. In Brave New World, people take “Soma” to feel high all the time. In Fahrenheit 451, the drugged induced are further made drowsy with mind-numbing white noise of media. In all cases, the awareness of sadness and dissatisfaction are banished.

You are living a lie, but if you don’t know that its a fraud, what wrong with being blissfully happy albeit very shallow.

Interestingly, The Giver and Brave New World deal with sexual desires in diametrically opposite ways. While the people in The Giver have sexual urges suppressed, people in Brave New World learn to have sex from the time they are toddlers having “erotic play.” In both scenarios, sex or the lack of has no sentimental value and do not result in procreation.

The idea is that without emotional attachment, there is also no maudlinness or tearful departures upon death which also comes at an appointed time according to schedule.

Books like Brave New World discuss the values of organised society. What do we prize more? Individual ambition, romance, art and compassion, at the risk of failure, dissatisfaction, uncertainty, and possibly (oh-god-forbid) inefficiency?

 

The Chrysalids – John Wyndham

Written in the first person, The Chrysalids accounts for David Strorm’s realisation and implications of his telepathic abilities in a tightly knit agrarian society where the slightest differences are punished and banished in the quest to distill Purity. The overarching theme for me is the definition of Man. Man as defined by David’s puritanical and fundamentalist society begins with outlining outward appearances and continues to imply anything “deviant”. This definition is contested as the reader is made to be sympathetic to the “deviants” themselves.

The text warns against extremism and blind bigotry that in this case renders the staunch religious-right inhuman in their treatment of people who are different and therefore inferior or contaminated. Although the text is a response to post WW2 traumas (Holocaust, Third Reich, Nuclear explosion and its aftermath), parallels can also be drawn to the harrowing realities of the decimation of Aboriginal people in Australia and coercive sterilisation practices such as Mississippi Appendectomy in the United States.

The text ends on an optimistic note when David, Rosalind and Petra are rescued by a highly developed civilisation with telepathic abilities. However the happy ending is balanced by Michael’s earth-grounding decision to remain behind with Rachel. This underscores that the solution is not always to stay separate from those who are different or even cruel to you but to find a way to co-exist and embrace change, evolutionary or personal.

on publishing

why blog, or publish, or produce literary art? because it is in negotiating between what remains deeply private and what is vulnerably made public, in making sense of experience by giving articulated form to swirling nebulous thought, in struggling to define opinions from the bubbling murky pool of feelings, that i find myself, coherent and whole.

five ways to kill a man

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.