Chapter 1: INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER Positioning the Gay Poet and/in the City I am haunted by the sadness of men hanging out at night in all parks and alleys of the world. -- Jaime An Lim, “Short Time” This thesis reads and examines the poetry of four gay writers from Manila and Singapore. The study positions the selected poets as writers operating within a particular spatial context. The reading of their poetry thus takes into account both sexual identity and the notion of place and is ultimately interested in locating the ways in which patterns of urban production and sexual identity inflect the creative practice of writing poetry. In this thesis, I examine the works of Alfian bin Sa’at and Cyril Wong from Singapore and J. Neil Garcia and Lawrence Ypil from Manila. Existing scholarship and critical writings on most of these poets as well as creative commentaries done by these writers themselves (through interviews and creative essays) often do not posit a vital connection between poetic production and the urban environment. Scholarship makes mention of their sexual orientation and alerts us to the various works and instances in which such themes appear in their works. Alfian Sa’at for instance is notable for works like the Asian Boys Trilogy as well as gay-themed poems in One Fierce Hour (1998) and History of Amnesia (2001). Cyril Wong is widely regarded as Singapore’s “first openly gay poet” (Ng et. al 12). J Neil Garcia is an academic, poet and literary editor whose writings and academic work highlight the intersections between Filipino post-colonial identity and gay identity. Ypil’s long poem “Five Fragments: A Confession” highlights the varied experiences of coming out as is framed by the fragmented lyric form. In this thesis then, I posit that the patterns which characterize the production of urban space in Manila and Singapore enter the ways in which gay poets write about what it means to be gay in a particular urban context. The position of the gay poet in Manila and Singapore, I argue, is one where he utilizes the patterns of urbanism to write about what it means to be gay in these spaces and to offer possibilities to reimagine urban life. I argue and eventually demonstrate how both sexuality and geography enter the process of poetic production. While the works of these poets can certainly be appreciated (merely) for their aesthetic merits, an examination of the poets’ various contexts can lead one to a greater understanding of poetic production itself. More nuanced appreciation for a poet’s aesthetics takes into account the various threads that the writer eventually weaves into a text. As far as this thesis is concerned, one finds in the poetry of these writers from Manila and Singapore an aesthetics of fragmentation/self-splitting and confinement respectively. For Alfian and Garcia, there is an emphasis on the use of the everyday Everyday space for these two poets is rendered as liminal space, creating dual experiences of discomfort and transformation. For Wong and Ypil, there is what I would demonstrate, a “domestic perspective” in the way they do their city writing. Indeed, what is interesting in the way Wong and Ypil is how the kind of optic they use to render urban experience. Much of city writing is done from outside space such as streets. (Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur is one example). My reading of Wong’s 2 and Ypil’s poetry on the other hand focuses on how representations of domestic space are projected into the way they view urban experience. . Singaporean poet Ng Yi-Sheng and Filipino Ronald Baytan whose poetic projects offer an interesting and exciting challenge to the framework I seek to establish in the next few pages will make an appearance in the concluding comments of the thesis. In this introductory chapter, I will unpack the theoretical concepts I will utilize in my analysis. In the first subsection, I draw upon Georg Simmel’s seminal work “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) to show how urbanization is an orchestration a locus of patterns. The discussion is complemented by a brief survey of how poets in the West responded to these shift in patterns. The second subsection looks into the ways in which one can compare Manila and Singapore. Here, I demonstrate how the patterns of urbanism which characterize the production of space in Manila and Singapore are horizontalized fragmentation and verticalized compression respectively. I extend the analysis by looking at the different ways in which certain poets write about their cities. The third and final subsection positions the relationship between the gay poet and urban space and problematizes the role of the gay poet and what unique forms of engagement he may offer to this creative engagement of urbanism. In all I demonstrate that the gay text draws its power from the notion of liminality, a kind of liminality grounded on the experience of eros and public practice. 3 Ebb and Flow The City of Pattern and Rhythm What links poetry and urbanism is the fact that they are in many ways connected to the idea of rhythm and form. Like the poet who creates it, the poem is a play on form and rhythm. As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write: The human body itself is a locus of rhythms: the beat of the heart, the inhalation and exhalation of breath, waking and sleeping, effort and rest, hunger and satiety… Rhythm is a principle of all life and all activity and is, of course, deeply involved in the experience of, and the expression of, emotion… the very origin of language involves rhythm. (Brooks and Warren 2) Poetry is translation and appropriation of such rhythms. The poem, as the Filipino poet D.M. Reyes describes it “is the most enduring on the line of the world’s oldest rituals” (Reyes 7). Across time and centuries, the poet can be seen as a laborer and a synthesizer: “poetry is the synthesizing act, no mere act but labor – attention, dedication and inevitably, love for translation of intangible energies to graceful shapes and tangible accomplishments” (7). The human intellect is further gifted with the ability to understand these rhythms of the human body and of nature itself and to ultimately find ways to manipulate such patterns. Modernity as a massive technological, social, intellectual and cultural transformation of human civilization is a testament to this idea. Modern industrial cities, the spatial articulation of the logic of capitalist modernity transformed human civilization in great ways: landscapes were flattened and reshaped; patterns of production shifted; labor became organized and in many ways mechanical; man-made 4 goods were produced at an exponential rate. These changed not only the external environment but the human condition as well. In the opening paragraph of what would eventually be a foundational reading of metropolitan life, Georg Simmel in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” posits that “the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life” (Simmel 23). Urbanization marked not only a systematic and calculated re-landscaping but spurred as well a radical change in the pattern and rhythm of the human psyche. This change was oriented towards the idea of progress promised by the post-Enlightenment notion of the modern and maintained by the gradual mechanization of the body. The geography of the city affected the disposition of the body and how the body related with other bodies and the spaces they occupy. The human heart became a clock whose beats were synchronized with particular pulses of the city: the traffic of cars, the pitter-patter of pedestrian feet, the tabulated demands of the time card. As Simmel writes, “if all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted” (26). Moreover, urban life is not simply about a shift in mental dispositions but also in the way an individual would relate to others, to the environment and more importantly to himself. The fissures created by new articulations of space altered and reconfigured human cognition and relations. Simmel outlines these different strains that affect and influence the production of the urban self as a relational being: “social forces” which 5 point to relations that may be personal, impersonal (as in hierarchal relations at work) and even anonymous (as in relationships with the crowd); “historical heritage” which refers to spatial and material evidence of the past; external culture which point to the material and socio-economic conditions of the present; and the “technique of life” which encompasses the cognitive and bodily practices these different relational strains entail. People became each other’s employers, employees, tellers, bankers, market vendors, customer, landlord – identities and relations that the various spaces of the cities created. The changes in physical, cognitive and social landscapes introduced a new environment for the poet. This new relationship between the poet and the city however was not exactly a happy one. The poet was gradually taken from the allure and imaginative fertile fields of the pastoral and was thrust into the arid world of the concrete streets. In this new environment, poets offered various ways which, according to Ellman and O’Clair in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1993) “called into question” the “reality of the objective world” (Ellman and O’Clair 1). In their renditions of urban life, the modern poets creatively transformed urban experience through image and language. In “The Crisis of Language,” (1978) Richard Sheppard presents the poet’s socio-cultural context of the early modern age as one characterized by a sense of “linguistic aridity” (Sheppard 324) wrought from the “suppression of an aristocratic, semi-feudal, humanistic and agrarian order by one middle-class, democratic, mechanistic and urban” (325). He thus argues that what characterizes modern poetry is its “sense of homelessness” (327) and that the task of the modern poet: 6 … becomes the creation of a redeemed, visionary world of language in which ‘something fundamental’ is given back to form and in which the lost dimension of language and the human psyche was rediscovered or preserved… the Modernist poet [ceased] to be the manipulator of fixed quanta and [attempted] to liberate the repressed expressive energies of language; ceases to be the celebrant of a human order and becomes the experimenter who searches for barely possible ‘redeemed and redeeming images.’ (328-329) Language thus became a critical means to represent the poet’s vision of modern life. The task of the modern poet thus was to “explode language” before he can create an adequate “‘verbal ikon’” (328). T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) as examples explore the various notions of ruination and decay in urban experience. Prufrock’s city “is a murky place” where his sense of social refinement is balanced by a sense of vulgar temperament (Versluys 176). “The Waste Land” on the other hand somberly depicts London as a fractured and fragmented city (Versluys 179). Eliot’s play on language which incorporates various dialogues, linguistic play and use of obscure word play – “Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug” (“The Waste Land” 203-204) – highlight this sense of fragmentation. Walter Benjamin in his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry on the other hand utilizes the idea of the flaneur and sees urban experience as essentially a successive sequence of fleeting, fragmentary moments that paradoxically are but repetitions within the same system. Such experience, Benjamin argues forms the cause of ennui or “boredom” (Gilloch 211). Baudelaire specifically looked at crowds and how such crowds elucidate an experience of loneliness (Hyde 337). The list of poets, their works and the unique ways in which they engage the experience of modernity and urbanism is long and rich. In all of these, we find how the 7 poets utilize image and more importantly language to engage the complex materiality of urban experience. As Versluys points out “The poet, therefore, could no longer look at the city from a distance… The flaw became the fabric” (Versluys 18). Indeed, there is a vital connection between the poet and the city. The poet in the city is seen to have transformed this sense of aridity and lifelessness into viable poetic material. Poetry mirrors and refracts the language and patterns of the streets. As G.M. Hyde in “The Poetry of the City,” writes “the city is inherently unpoetic... and yet the city is inherently the most poetic of all material” (Hyde 338). The city can be poetic, or at the very least a valuable source for poetic material precisely because in many ways it is an amplified mode of patterns. In the next subsection, we zero in on Manila and Singapore and explore the ways in which one may read these as comparative cities. We will also look into the ways in which certain poets not included in the thesis respond to these spaces in their works. Push and Pull The Case of Manila and Singapore More than a century after its first publication the insights in Simmel’s seminal work still hold merit. In today’s increasingly fast-paced, wired and globalized world, Simmel’s metropolitan man is more and more adept at absorbing the audio-visual shock of the city landscapes as well as registering within his body the cognitive demands of late and globalized capitalism. In this subsection, I demonstrate how Simmel’s analysis 8 of modern industrial cities in the West can be applied specifically to cities in Southeast Asian cities. Though the thesis does not take a post-colonial approach, it still necessitates the drawing of works that are concerned with scholarship framed by post-colonial and globalized discourse if only to illustrate in detail the spatial and urban growth of these cities. Manila and Singapore make for viable samples for comparative study precisely because the patterns of their spatial production and the implications generated by such rhythms highlight the various complexities of post-colonial, globalized urbanism. Both cities were once colonial port cities and in varying degrees now share dispositions as postcolonial cities in an increasingly globalized world. More than that, the various characteristics which define the logic of capitalist modernity can be seen in the way these poets render urban experience. The urbanization of Manila and Singapore as two postcolonial Southeast Asian cities is grounded by a constant negotiation between two opposing forces – first in their colonial past and secondly by their orientation towards globalized narratives. In “Perpetuating Cities: Excepting Globalization and the Southeast Asia,” (2003) Ryan Bishop, John Phillips and Wei-wei Yeo contextualize this interplay by positioning the “identities” of Southeast Asian cities precisely through tensions and contestations of various narratives: [Cities] in the region have a unique relation … insofar as they went from being colonial cities serving the material bureaucratic, technological, ideological, and imaginative needs… to explicitly modern, international cities in a matter of years, with the concept of national playing an important but oddly peripheral role (Bishop et al 2). 9 This statement challenges Peter J. Rimmer and Howard Dick’s assertion in The City in Southeast Asia (2009) which argues that cities in Southeast Asia have already undergone a period of “decolonization” and must be read in the same way one reads other global cities of the world. All global cities, they argue, are oriented and guided by one particular pattern and as such “any attempt to explain the historical or contemporary urbanization of Southeast Asia as a unique phenomenon is therefore doomed to absurdity” (Rimmer and Dick 48-49). The problem with Rimmer and Dick is that they look at malls, superhighways and Starbucks branches and make the claim that Southeast Asian cities can be read and placed alongside global cities in the west. What is important to highlight and call attention to I conjecture, is how these malls are juxtaposed with other sites that in turn form the much bigger picture of a city’s urban production. Rimmer and Dick’s reading of Southeast Asian cities does not take into account the active participation of local dynamism in the production of city space. As William S W Lim in Asian Alterity (2008) writes: In Asia, chaos uncertainty, pluralistic richness and evolving complexity are now accepted as essential elements of its urban dynamism… In Asian cities, the introduction of modernist planning and spatial and usage separations are constantly contested and defied by the dynamic human interactions taking place on the streets everywhere. This fluidity and the rebellious attitude of Asian urban dwellers in interpreting spaces in response to evolving demand are precisely what fuel the vibrancy and dynamism of Asian cities. (Lim 114) To compare Manila and Singapore then is to locate the ways in which the cities spatially negotiate the reoccurring tension between various forces –local color and global orientation, informal and formal economies etc –and how these dialectical forms of 10 articulations shape the cities’ forms and patterns. What differentiates their modernities however is how these negotiations are done. In the case of Manila and Singapore, what orients their urbanization has to do with a horizontal, outward spinning force for the former and a verticalized kind of compression for the latter. These notions of fragmentation and compression define and orient the production of multiple spaces and the patterns of spatial practices. In what follows then, I will discuss how such notions can be used to describe the urbanization of Manila and Singapore respectively. I then extend this by discussing the potential implications of such generalizations. Manila’s Modernity as Horizontalized Fragmentation In arguing that the pattern of urban production of Manila is fundamentally horizontal, I do not simply point to horizontality in the mundane sense that Manila is essentially a sprawling metropolis. Horizontality points as well to the pattern of spatial experience in the city. Manila is a messy city. In her analysis of the city’s new metropolitan form, Neferti Tadiar regards Manila as essentially a “flat city” where one goes around like someone “swimming underwater in a shallow metropolitan sea” (Tadiar 77). Indeed, to the inexperienced untrained foreigner or probinsyano (non-Manila residents), the city can be a difficult place to swim around in. Wading through its polluted streets where the perennial sight of garbage and the glaring honks of frustrated drivers stuck in 2 11 kilometer per hour traffic are among the flotsam and jetsam of urban mismanagement, one encounters an urban experience that is severely disorienting and confusing. The disorientation and fragmentation of Manila’s metropolitan form reflect the city’s violent and tumultuous history. Sitting in the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, the city is battered by typhoons and is a potential ground zero for a devastating earthquake. The city was one of the most devastated cities after World War II (Zaragoza 13). Widespread poverty in the city mutates into a pandemic of crime. Australian academic Trevor Hogan writes that one vital way to understand Manila is thus is to see it in terms of “violence, suffering and loss” (Hogan 105). The idea that Manila is a fragmented city is a notion which also stems from its post-Second World War fate: that it is a city without a clear center. To understand this, we first have to briefly examine the history and fate of what was considered by Filipino writer Nick Joaquin as the “original Manila,” (Joaquin 354) the walled city of Intramuros. The genesis of Manila was essentially a narrative of compression. Like most colonial communities in the Philippines during the Spanish occupation, the population of the walled city of Intramuros grew largely because of the relocation project called the reduccion where “dispersed barangays were… reduced into compact and larger communities” (Caoili 28). Intramuros was deemed the seat of the economic and ecclesiastic power of colonial Philippines and from 1580 to 1625, Manila became “the foremost capital of Asia and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity” (34). In this respect, the tall walls of Intramuros did not just help repel invasions. They also compressed people as well the narratives of guns, gold and God. Colonial Manila’s urbanism thus 12 materialized the logic of colonialism and inserted the archipelago into the enterprise of colonial trade and geopolitics. American occupation in the Philippines saw massive change in economic policies on tariffs and as well as political and cultural structures. This sense of compression would later on “explode” (almost literally and figuratively) during the Allied liberation at the end of the Second World War. As Zaragosa writes in Old Manila (1990): Modern facilities in transportation, communication, electrification, and port works were established. Massive urban and rural development and town planning marked the beginning of the modernization of Old Manila… All these developments came to a halt during World War II with the Japanese Occupation of Manila from 1942 to 1945. At the end of the war, Manila was considered the most devastated city in the world… Manila lost its centre. [emphasis mine] (Zaragoza 13) This notion of Manila as a city having no center is mentioned in other critical and creative materials. In Malate: A Matter of Taste (2001) a coffee table book on a site known for its unique bohemian subculture, Rafael Ongpin echoes Zaragoza’s sentiment: “[In] the post-war era, Manila’s population exploded outwards from the rubble of the center. Instead of there being an increasing population pressure on the core city, there was a vacuum” (Ongpin 49). Thus, the liberation did not just obliterate a good number of Intramuros’ basic infrastructure. The explosions that ruptured the core city spurred as well a massive exodus towards the fringes and enabled what were once communities and spaces in the periphery to develop into more urbanized spaces. For instance, Makati and Ortigas once suburbs are now regarded as the business districts that integrate Manila (and the Philippines) into the economic global network of nations. 13 The “vacuum” that created an open space in Manila’s center would function as the bedrock for Manila’s modernity and spatial articulation. As Caoili writes, the postwar reconstruction and brief economic boom of Manila saw the rapid migration of families from the provinces (Caoili 161). Having no money to buy or to lease living spaces, these workers lived as informal settlers in what used to be the center of the city. Erhard Bernard in his study on urban poverty in Manila Defending a Place in the City: Localities and the Struggle for Urban Land in Metro Manila (1997) writes that “In Metro Manila… we find a high percentage of squatters and slum dwellers relatively close to the city center” (Berner 161) What is interesting however is that these informal settlers are not much of a nuisance as they are a necessity. They take on the hard jobs (cooks, waiters, carpenters etc). They are the ones that keep “the heart of the city throbbing” (Duldulao 46). Indeed, what was once the powerful center of Manila now has two paradoxical functions: on the one hand, it is no longer the center of formal economic power – Makati and Ortigas are. Yet on the other hand it still functions as a critical center in that this space now houses workers who provide necessary the cheap labor that maintain and support much of Manila’s infrastructure. In her analysis of Manila as essentially a “flat city”, Neferti Tadiar argues how flyovers were used as a way of separating the producers of informal economies (treated as “excess”) represented by the urban poor with the formal/transnational ones (Tadiar 81). Flyovers provide those travelling through flyovers easy access to spaces of transnational narratives while keeping those representing informal labor and practices (street peddlers, the urban poor) literally below. Flyovers physicalized Manila’s global 14 dream by means of easy access and unique perspective (Tadiar 84). Flyovers were a way of “discharging” but not necessarily eliminating the so-called urban excesses (Tadiar 96). Using this survey of various critical writings on the urbanization of Manila, I argue that the urban production Manila’s modernity is fundamentally horizontal in two ways. First I point to the dispersal wrought by the literal explosion of the center. This migration does not simply refer to the rapid urbanization of the geographical fringes but to the development as well of multiple internal narratives and systems that often compete with the narratives of other spaces in the metropolis. Tangential to this is the so-called ruralization of Manila. The occupation of informal settlers in the center has both physical and socio-cultural implications. This presence influences much of the policies and patterns of urbanism that spatially articulate the tension between the increasingly ruralization of urban space and the need to function as a city in a globalized world. Such influences include the construction of infrastructures that negotiate, partition and space out the conflicting and contesting narratives within the city. In a city with no clear, physical center, it can be argued that, as Tadiar would posit, the center is network more than any downtown center (Tadiar 84). To speak then of Manila’s modernity as one of horizontalized fragmentation is not simply a matter of seeing it as a sprawl or even a city without a center but to see it as a city in constant flux. It does not just refer to the earlier exodus towards the fringes but to a perspective characterized by distance, dislocation and fragmentation. Writers whose poems creatively engage urban experience draw their themes and poetic material precisely from this idea of fragmentation. For instance, Jaime Dasca 15 Doble in his poem “The Sky Over C-5 Corner Kalayaan Avenue” (2005) traces the chaotic flow of the city as he comments on the impoverished state of a small community in Manila. The disorientation is seen as the subject matter of the poem shifts from line to line, describing children playing hopscotch on a busy street (3) with “a pebble stolen from the construction site nearby” (5-6), illustrating the lack of a decent playground and the danger of having children playing near hazardous sites; an old “carpenter” who counterflows with traffic (7). Representations of luxurious brands mock the poverty as towering “advertisements boast of the good life” (26). The poem ends with the image of dogs commenting on the inhumanity of the chaos and impoverishment: Two mangy dogs leashed on a rise bark at all the confusion. Their agitation lifts up to the sky, to the clouds forming myriad masks, of colors shutting out the very sun (31-35) Doble’s rendition of urban space in Manila lies precisely in how the line cuts attempt to trace the contours of confusion and chaos in a highway that ironically cuts through the wealthier parts of the metropolis. The poem in itself is a highway and the images that are presented counterflow this attempt to create a coherent and central picture of the city. The incoherence is thus highlighted by the idea that Doble chooses two dogs that do not possess in any way the ability to interpret human activity, as the final focalizer for this chaos. In Conchitina Cruz’s “What is it about tenderness,” (2005) the woman-persona (presumably an undertaker) attempts to gain dominion over a dead body by means of 16 anatomical geography – by naming the different parts of the body the way an urban planner would assign street names. This familiarity with the body is contrasted with the unpredictable city portrayed as a dark and savage jungle where “streets sprouted overnight like weeds and snaked their way into each other’s aimlessness” (2-3). The personal control is lost when the urban jungle invades the body through the descent of maggots (12-13). There is no sense of control and cohesion and the body in time will absorb these narratives. The “bodies” of Cruz’s different poems which experiment on form reflect this. Particularly interesting to this experimentation are “Geography Lesson” and “News of the Train.” Here the reader does not find any body text but footnotes to a blank page. Her experimentation on the different forms of poems which shapeshift into different forms reflect this idea of a fragmented city whose form ironically rests is precisely in its formlessness. Singapore and the Modernity of Verticalized Compression In this subsection, I unpack the idea that Singapore’s mode of urban production is characterized by a notion of verticalized compression by drawing upon critical writings on Singapore urbanism, most notably from Robbie Goh’s Contours of Culture (2005). Critical analyses of Singapore’s urbanism focus on the notion of wholesale erasure of certain urban structures (Luck 2004; Yeo 2003; Powell 2002). My reading of Singapore’s urbanism does not seek to dispute this notion but focuses instead on the production of certain spaces. Verticalized compression I would demonstrate is the subtext that negotiates various contesting and conflicting narratives in Singapore. 17 Verticality is not just about the significant presence of high rise buildings and the need to accommodate a growing population of locals and migrants within more limited space. It points as well to its upward-mobile movement that is hierarchized, controlled top-to-bottom management of urban production. Verticality is a critical subtext that grounds the patterns of Singapore’s urbanism, one characterized by a sense of compression. In the case of Singapore, the idea of the vertical cannot be separated from the notion of compression. The compression I speak of, however, does not just refer to meticulous economics of space but to the compression of narratives as well. To illustrate, I focus on two prominent and critical spaces: the typical Housing Development Board (HDB) community and the Civic District. HDB communities exemplify this notion of verticalized compression. HDB communities are clusters of buildings within a relatively small number of hectares. Walking around a cluster of HDB community buildings, one encounters a sense of tightness in the way high-rise buildings appear as walls. The height of a typical HDB building can range from 10 to 30 stories. The typical HDB community then can accommodate (and compress) as many as thousands of residents within such a small space. Moreover, the HDB community compresses not just people within its space but more importantly the dual narratives of cosmopolitan and heartland culture. As Goh writes: The spatial semiotics of ideology of the HDB is a crucial part of this modernist collectivity, and its changing directives towards the millennium reflect the new ideological battleground, and the new project of reconciling cosmopolitan individualism with heartland collectivity. (Goh 77) 18 Goh extends this analysis further by zeroing in on void decks. Open-spaced void decks ironically compress the different state policies and other privileged narratives. As he argues: … void decks played a more complex role in social construction… Beyond this physical openness and its facilitation of gazing, mingling and informal (though necessarily legitimate and approved) socializing, “community bonding” in the Singapore context is ever mindful of racial/cultural, neutralization, the creation of “empty spaces” (voided of vernacular, ethnic historical and local cultural particularities) in order to remove grounds for racialized politics and social tensions. (Goh 78) Open spaces in void deck therefore materialize the logic of the HDB narrative in that they compress and articulate notions of surveillance as well as state policies on racial harmony. The busier parts in Singapore, the Civic District as well as Shenton Way, articulate and physicalize as well this notion of verticalized compression. Like the HDB community, the notion of verticality becomes immediately evident to the casual pedestrian who are encounters the walled, overt presence of high-rise buildings which compress and articulate Singapore’s posture as a global city. Peggy Teo et. al in Changing Landscapes of Singapore (2004) list the different areas in which Singapore chose to excel in: In particular, Singapore promoted itself in the following areas: • cruise and air hub of Southeast Asia; • convention centre; • education hub; • medical centre; and • arts and entertainment (Teo 155) Walking along the busier districts in Singapore, one eventually encounters particular buildings and sites within proximate distance which physicalizes this vision: Suntec for 19 conventions, the Esplanade for entertainment and the Singapore Management University along Orchard Road. The city center compresses not only the different promises that Singapore offers but as in the HDB community, the growing tension between local color and global identity as well. To illustrate, I use as an example Goh’s discussion on landmarks. Goh outlines how historical architecture, cultural symbols are located within proximate possible space: Key landmarks in this Civic District – a roughly ‘L’ shaped area on the north side of the Singapore river, up to Bras Basah Road and stretching to the foot of Fort Canning – include the Singapore Art Museum, Raffles Hotel, the Armenian Church, St. Andrew’s Cathedral, the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, and other buildings from the colonial period. (Goh 30) More than just preserving and maintaining these sites within the small geographic, cultural and political center of Singapore, these sites simultaneously articulate Singapore’s identity as a Southeast Asian nation and a global city. What the Civic District thus conflates within the small space are imposed meanings as well. Landmarks: … are thus characteristically sites of narrative overlays by virtue of a combination of their long history and wealth of associations, their co-option by different institutions, discourses and media and their foregrounded experience in everyday urban experiences… In the context of Singapore, landmark designation is a project of tourist promotion, the attempt to create a national discourse and identity of global progressivism and the management of multicultural and multi racial relations all at once. (29) Now, a good counter-example to further illustrate the comparison between Manila and Singapore would be present-day Intramuros. Like the Civic District in 20 Singapore, Intramuros is still preserved as a colonial city where one still see bungalows, crafts and weapons from the colonial period. Unlike the Civil District however (and this perhaps emphasizes the notion of distance and fragmentation), Intramuros is very much distant from the spaces that articulate Manila’s global economic stature. Intramuros in fact is surrounded by spaces of poverty and impoverishment whereas in the Civic District one encounters a sense of compactness where compressed spaces articulate narratives of privileged cultural memory and nationhood. In contrast then to how Manila replicates the notion of dispersal in the spatial articulation of urban space, Singapore addresses the perennial problem of lacking space in how it negotiates the reoccurring tensions by compressing space and condensing meanings. In the case of the HDB community, the tall buildings that can accommodate a considerable number of people conflate and compress narratives of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity. As Goh points out, the open spaces of void decks ironically and almost invisibly compress these policies on racial neutralization as well as notions of surveillance. The central district on the other hand functions not only as narratives of national identity but viable objects for tourist consumption. Verticalized compression is not only evident in Singapore’s physical landscape in that the towering buildings of the city not only stand as a testament to the city’s economic prowess but as a series of walls that seem to encase the crowd that walk between them. It is also more importantly seen as an overarching narrative that orients and directs urban and cultural policies to accommodate the tension between global and local forces. 21 The poets of Singapore who write about their city respond to this kind of pattern. The idea of the vertical and the image of towering things seem to be a reoccurring image in several works of Singaporean writers. We can go back to Edwin Thumboo’s much quoted “Ulysses by the Merlion” where he describes the urban landscape of the growing Singapore as one filled with “towers topless as Illium’s” (“Ulysses by the Merlion” 25). Alfian Sa’at, one of the poets included in the main body of this study, utilizes the image of the elevator in “The City Remembers” (2001) as a metaphor for mechanization of urban life in the city. In his foreword to No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Poetry (2000), Dennis Haskell quotes Philip Jeyaretnam who says that “the Singpore writer’s situation is claustrophobic; in a city-state there is no escape from the city, there is no country to go to” (Haskell 18). This sense of claustrophobia is not only seen as a response to enclosed physical space but also to the suffocating aridity wrought from the experience of an overtly controlled modernity. The poets in this collection lament the loss of identity as a cost for this upward mobile direction of progress. This yearning for escape is exemplified by Paul Tan (1994) in “Train Rides” where writing about a ride “out of a country drugged with / its modernity and its self-image” (1-2) he explicitly states how Singaporeans have spent too much time in “claustrophobic comforts” (16). In both cases, I sought to demonstrate how the patterns of Manila and Sinapore negotiate various often contesting narratives that move around in their particular spaces. I also surveyed the ways in which certain poets write about their cities with 22 particular emphasis on these patterns. What of the gay poet then? In the third and final subsection of this introductory chapter, I look into creative possibilities opened and offered by gay poets. Sex as Text Positioning the Gay Poet in the City Utilizing sexuality as a way to examine urban life is especially useful because sexuality is relational itself. Sexuality practices are not merely private acts in that they ultimately play vital roles in the production of urban space. Heterosexual intercourse leads to birth and population growth within urban space. Economic activities generated from consumption of various cultural texts (fashion, film, tourism) rely heavily on advertisements that are in many senses inflected by representations of sexuality. Homosexual identities and practices make for an interesting case because of the kind of fluidity and interrogation they offer to these patterns and to urban space. As Alan Collins in Cities of Pleasure: Sex and the Urban Landscape (2006) writes, “[The] milieu by which the clustering of homosexuals has long been a discernible feature (as least since the classical era of ancient Greece) is the city environment” (Collins 8). What makes homosexuality and its relation to city space interesting is essentially an experience of liminality. Examination of this relationship between homosexual identity and space exemplify this kind of ambiguity and fluidity. In “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983) John D’Emilio discusses how structural changes wrought by capitalist social relations and urban migration enabled individuals to move out of the structure of 23 the family, establish their own identities and create spaces that develop, sustain and nurture such identities. His essay cites bars, YMCA gyms and living communities (103) as places where gays and lesbians may commune and interact. For D’Emilio, space functions paradoxically in both enabling and at the same time minoritizing identities. Lawrence Knopp (1995) echoes the idea as he argues that “heterosexuality is still often promoted as nothing less than the glue holding these divisions of labor (and indeed, Western society) together. But on the other hand, “these divisions of labour create single-sex environments in which homosexuality has the space, potentially to flourish” (Knopp 149). Both Knopp and D’Emilio position space as ambiguous one which simultaneously opens possibilities for forging new identities but also oppression and violence. Other critical works focus their attention not on homosexual men and women in space but the notion of what is called “queer space.” Unlike D’Emilio’s YMCA gyms and neighborhoods, queer spaces are not defined but are in a way created or “activated.” Sites, often public and open ones such as malls, bathrooms, streets and parks may be used for gay sexual practices. Cruising was one of the ‘earliest’ ways in which “the city was rewritten by men… refusing to accept its strictures” (Betsky 12) Queer space then is “something that is not built, only implied” (17). Sally Munt in “The Lesbian Flaneur” (1995) connects her own experience of wandering with flaneur figures in literary history. The experience of homelessness for the lesbian flaneur is not a lack as it is as an opportunity to create and recreate special experience. As she writes at the end of the 24 essay: “Space… is never still… I zip up my jacket, put my best boot forward, and tell myself that ‘home’ is just around the corner” (Munt 125). The relationship between space and homosexuality highlights the idea that the relationship is indeed an ambiguous and fluid one. The relationship between space and homosexuality discussed by Knopp and D’Emilio points to the opening and widening of thresholds for possible new identities as well as narratives of repression and even violence. The notion of “queer spaces” on the other hand points to those spaces that require “activation” and reveals how narratives of spaces are impermanent and destructible. In the case of Singapore, the gay and lesbian movement has been increasingly tied to the creation and appropriation of space. In “Tipping Out of the Closet: The Before and After of the Increasingly Visible Gay Community in Singapore” (2001) Russell Heng Hiang Khng traces the formation of gay and lesbian community in Singapore from the 1960’s to the present. While his focus lies primarily on the formation of the gay and lesbian movement, Heng’s comparison between the liberation movement in the west to the socio-political situation in Singapore reveals albeit tangentially the necessity of space. Space and more importantly the creation of space become a necessary determinant in the creation and production of identity. Indeed, the gay and lesbian movement in Singapore has become a constant struggle to the creation and legitimization of space. Heng cites that the earliest indications of such articulations were the opening of a bar called Niche and the beginning of cruising culture in the 1980’s (Heng 83). 25 The social movement of the gays and lesbians however has also moved from the creation of space to a movement of integration to the imagined space of the nation. Kean Fan Lim in “Where Love Dares (Not) Speak Its Name: The Expression of Homosexuality in Singapore” (2006) cites that one of the more prominent activities for the gay and lesbian scene were the Nation coming out parties in 2001 and 2002 organized by the administrators of Fridae.com (Lim 145). The naming of the events are not incidental for what the events truly wanted to show was that Singaporean gay and lesbians do have a place in the city-state. This interplay between gay and lesbian identity and a place in the nation is carried out further in the way the month-long pride season of Singapore is named: IndigNation. Presently, a major event in the LGBT movement in Singapore is Pink Dot. In one afternoon, members and supporters of the LGBT movement wear pink shirts and gather in Hong Lim park. When seen from above, the human pink dot creates an interesting contrast to the green and gray of Singapore’s cityscape. Appropriation of space thus functions as a critical, discursive act for identity. This liminal relationship of LGBT practices and identities to space in Singapore is not only seen in the periodic appropriation of space but more importantly in the notion of citizenship. As Lim writes, “homosexuals are apparently tolerated only to the extent that they remain interstitial spaces, invisible to public eyes,” (Lim 137). There is also that possibility that increasing tolerance to gay practices may have to do with discovering the economic possibilities of the so-called pink dollar (Lim 130) -- highlighting then the rather shaky ambiguous nature of gay identity: invisible yet relevant to the structured narrative of the Singapore state. 26 This notion of fluidity in relation to space is also seen in Manila’s LGBT scene. The annual pride march in Manila cuts through the different busier parts of the metropolis. The most recent march held on 4 December 2010 saw gay and lesbian women marching through the streets of Tomas Morato in the middle of local and multinationally managed shops and restaurants (Ang Ladlad Pride March 2010). Malate is a site not only known for its unique bohemian culture but also in how it houses gay practices. The temperature of homosexual pleasure reaches an all-time high in the annual White Party. On this night where gays and lesbians may “come in [their] fiercest and most luminous white costumes,”(Task Force Pride 2010) the spaces of already bohemian Malate are transformed into a topsy-turvy carnivalesque articulation of LGBT identities. There are certainly many other ways in which homosexual men and women in Manila and Singapore find ways to appropriate and “activate” space. In the examples mentioned, we find how such homosexual identity in many ways reveals the instability of space. Space when appropriated can be a means to articulate varied kinds of identities. Possibilities of resistance are activated from below, from the spatial practices that articulate desire and eros. Homosexual experience of space highlights the contradictory nature of space itself. In highlighting the ambiguous and fluid nature of homosexuality, I argue that sexuality provides us with possibilities of engagement precisely because it reflects the instability of space. Homosexual identity thus enables a peculiar type of positioning: of being both simultaneously inside and outside the 27 discourses that operate, of being within and outside these patterns, offering various perspectives in the way urban practices are rendered. The focus of this thesis as I have said in the earlier part of this introductory chapter however will be solely on how four gay poets exemplify this sense of liminality in experiencing urban space. The choice is more of a practical one and not an attempt to say that what these poets in question articulate can stand for all homosexual or queer folk in Manila and Singapore for indeed the ways in which homosexual artists (through other artistic genres) have articulated this notion of liminality are varied and plentiful. By practicality, I mean that for one, works by gay writers are more prominent in terms of the actual number of poetry collections produced. Singaporean poets like Cyril Wong and Alfian Sa’at already have several books. The same can be said for Lawrence Ypil and J. Neil Garcia. Collections do more than just anthologize a writer’s works and allow one easier access to an extensive number of their poems. Collections also allow one to create a more generalized picture of their concerns as poets. Collections are often thematically arranged and so as far as this study is concerned, the convenience of having collections in hand allowed me to construct and develop a stronger comparative dimension to the poets’ works. In reading texts produced by these gay poets, emphasis will be placed on how this notion of liminality is activated and rendered in the way they respond to metropolitan space. My reading of these four poets will look into the ways in which such liminality is engaged and utilized through poetic technique such as imagery, tone and enjambments. 28 The thesis will be divided into two chapters that address two themes: the everyday and the domestic. The first chapter analyzes the works of J. Neil Garcia and Alfian Sa’at by looking into the ways in which they utilize everyday narratives as poetic material and as a form of engagement. In this chapter, I look into the ways in which the notions of verticalized compression and horizontalized fragmentation are seen in the poems of Alfian and Garcia respectively. Notions of fragmentation and compression are seen in the way Garcia and Alfian write about particular experiences and unsettling conditions of difference in their poetry. I then extend the analysis and look at the gaythemed poems. In the same way that gay sexuality offers creative possibilities to reexperience and redraw space, the gay-themed poems of Alfian and Garcia utilize the same notions of the everyday to render gay experience. In both the everyday is seen as spaces and that become the cause of unsettlement but also of liberation and freedom. In the case of Alfian, there is a movement in the way the everyday is positioned from an experience of compression to one of safe enveloping. In Garcia’s case, gay experience moves from an experience of homelessness and fragmentation to one of fluidity. In the gay-themed poems of Alfian and Garcia, everyday space is seen as liminal and can be inflected to articulate gay desires. In my analysis of the poetry of CYyril Wong and Lawrence Ypil in the second chapter, we move from the streets to the home. By making vital connections between autobiographical sketches and a close reading of their poems, I demonstrate how the interplay between space and sexuality is interiorized and how such a disposition is materialized within the frame of domestic space through the lyric mode. Domestic space 29 functions as a critical mediator for personal and public narratives. The private poem especially through the lyric mode functions as a kind of domestic space in itself, a space different from the houses that have in many ways expelled them, where Ypil and Wong negotiate and creatively render notions of home and city life. The poem and the city as I have said in the introduction are essentially manmade works of rhythm and form. In this thesis, we will now look into how such the patterns of the city are translated into an art form and how such a translation is inflected by gay identity. In all these readings, I demonstrate how poetry is rendered as a critical space where these patterns of spatial production are utilized and repositioned. 30 Chapter Two: The Gay Poet and the Urban Everyday Alfian bin Sa’at and J. Neil Garcia “To not serious consider sexuality in one’s writing is to unwittingly inscribe heterosexuality in one’s work and assume it’s ‘natural’ superiority over all forms of desire” -- J. Neil Garcia, “Should Writing be Gendered?” This chapter examines how Alfian bin Sa’at and J. Neil Garcia utilize the notion of the everyday in their poetry. The everyday consists not only of streets or flyovers that cut through the metropolis and Housing Development Board (HDB) communities that articulate a city-state’s multicultural vision, but also people and events that embody everyday narratives of space. The everyday makes a viable point of analysis because it is “a problematic, contested terrain, where meanings are not to be found ready-made” (Highmore 1). The everyday is the site where differences and commonalities are performed (2) and where narratives are materialized and transformed into habits. The everyday is also invisible. As Ben Highmore reminds us, “it is to the everyday that we consign that which no longer holds our attention. Things become ‘everyday’ by becoming invisible. And if familiarity does not always breed contempt, it does encourage neglect” (21). To go back to the everyday is not merely to reexamine material culture but to return to seemingly insignificant cultural objects that nevertheless orient particular articulations of urban life. The chapter thus extends the theorizing ofthe introductory chapter which compared and contrasted the urban production of Manila and Singapore as horizontalized fragmentation and verticalized compression respectively. Here, I look 31 into the ways in which Alfian and Garcia respond to such patterns of production. The ensuing discussion is grounded on Michel de Certeau’s notion of spatial practices in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). De Certeau in “Walking in the City,” privileges the act of walking because it allows the walker (likened to writers of figurative language) to open creative possibilities of spatial practices: … the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements. (De Certeau 100) De Certeau likens urban planners and architects to grammarians and linguists who develop the language of everyday space. In contrast, “[the] long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations” (101). For de Certeau, individual practices function as a form of creative resistance. De Certeau’s notion of creative resistance positions the walker in a liminal position in that he is in the street planned by the urban walkers yet devices unique ways to personalize his individual traffic. While most of the poems to be discussed later on are not necessarily “walking poems,” the greater importance of de Certeau’s analysis lies in his emphasis on the role of individual practices in the production of meaning within and through spatial practice. He makes this clearer in “Spatial Stories,” where he distinguishes place from space by positing that the latter is essentially “practiced place” (130) in that what transforms these places into spaces are narratives. Personal narratives develop individual spatial experience and allow one to generate new experiences of place: In a pre-established geography, which extends (if we limit ourselves to the home) from bedrooms so small that “one can’t do anything in them” to the legendary, 32 long-lost attic that “could be used for everything,” everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it. They are treatments of space. (122) This chapter then looks into the different ways in which Alfian and Garcia utilize everyday spaces and events in the way they render their own experiences and transform these into unique spatial experiences. Alfian and Garcia make for viable comparison precisely because of the way they put an emphasis on the importance of the everyday in their writing. Alfian is a Malay Singaporean playwright and poet. After being the top Malay student of his Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) cohort, Alfian was admitted to the Raffles Institute and Raffles Junior College (Interview with Klein 16-17). He then moved on to study medicine at the National University of Singapore but did not finish his studies. He is currently a student of Communication at Nanyang Technological University. His plays include Asian Boys Volume 1 (2000), Landmarks: Asian Boys Volume 2 (2003), Happy Endings: Asian Boys Volume 3 (2007) while his collection of poems are One Fierce Hour (1998), History of Amnesia (2001) and the unpublished The Invisible Manuscript. Critical scholarship on Alfian’s works highlights the presence of everyday imagery in his poetry. In Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature (2009), Poon et. al write that “[poets] like… Alfian Sa’at… train an eye on everyday images so naturalized they escape notice, mining them for poetic potential” (Poon et al 373). Alfian affirms this idea in his interview with Ronald Klein in Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature Volume 8: Interview II, (2009) where the enfant terrible of Singapore (Interview with Klein 33) mentions the vital connection between the everyday 33 and the construction of political rhetoric: “I tend to see a lot of political action being done every day by people who are not even aware of it” (Interview with Klein, 35). Alfian’s poems demonstrate this kind of critical engagement. His position is one which provides an alternative vision of Singaporean society. As David Birch (2009) writes, “Alfian is intent in much of his writing to expose the artificiality, pretence and dishonesty of those people, policies and practices which deliberately deceive and obfuscate in the name of the state.” (Birch 148). In his poem, “Trawler” for instance Alfian likens election propaganda to trawlers that throw rhetoric “in four directions / and four official languages” (“Trawler” 7-8). The poem is a critique not only of election propaganda but of Singaporean society who according to him are “mouthless [fishes]” (19-20) that are hooked by such rhetoric. The connection to the everyday is seen in how Alfian utilizes the street and images on the street to render this form of political criticism. Critical scholarship on Alfian’s works seems to establish a connection between his ethnicity and its impact on the notions of identity in his works. While we can thus argue that Alfian speaks more as a marginalized Malay man than as a gay individual we also find that two of his longer and more emotionally charged works ( such as “Singapore You Are Not My Country” and “We Are Not Yet Free”) are informed precisely by the experience of homosexual repression. In his play, Asian Boys Volume 1 Alfian “stages both Singapore’s handling of queer capital and its posture as a traditional Asian state” (Lim 390). The play follows the journey of gay characters as they time travel through pivotal events in Singapore’s history which include the “Chinese migration to 34 Nanyang (Singapore) in the nineteenth century, [the] Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the detention of several local presumed Marxists under the Internal Security Act in 1987” (391). Alfian’s play “[pits] these Asian boys in their varied manifestations against the city-state’s national history, ambiguous cultural policies and postcolonial sexual mores” (391). In this play, Alfian uses gay characters and everyday objects (such as a carpet from IKEA) and historical anecdotes to articulate a rather humorous yet nevertheless alternative vision of Singapore society. J. Neil Garcia on the other hand is an academic and a poet. His book Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics (2003) is a collection of these essays on issues related to Philippine literary criticism and culture. He has also written and published works concerning gay culture in the Philippines. His Philippine Gay Culture: From Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM (2000) is a foundational work on gay studies in the Philippines as it is one of the first to critically explore the formation of gay identity within metropolitan space. Together with another poet Danton Remoto, Garcia edited the three volumes of Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing (1992, 1998, 2009). As a poet, Garcia sees gender and sexuality as a consequential aspect of his individuality. In “Should Writing be Gendered?” he writes: My homosexuality has never, for one second, struck me as been immaterial and inconsequential to my very being inasmuch as everywhere I look, whatever I do, whomever I speak with, everywhere I go, I am reminded of the unlawfulness of my desire, of the demonic difference ascribed to me by my sexuality. (Garcia 163) Garcia insists on the need to thematize homosexuality in his works for he believes that “to not seriously consider sexuality in one's writing is to unwittingly inscribe 35 heterosexuality in one's work and assume its ‘natural’ superiority over all forms of desire” (164). Most of his poems demonstrate this sense of awareness in that they map out the life and melancholy wrought from gay life along the contours of the metropolis. Gay love and desire can be found in the jeepney (“Cypher, 2”), the cinema (“Subtheatre” and “Subtheatre 2”). The temptation and the desire for warm bodies can be found as well in the streets (“Bakal Boys”) and in the beauty parlor (“Real Men: A Cycle”). The discussion for each poet will first begin with an analysis of poems which highlight the ways in which Alfian and Garcia experience these notions of compression and fragmentation through everyday images. In this chapter, I demonstrate that there is a difference in the way Garcia and Alfian utilize the everyday in their gay-themed poems. In the case of Alfian, there is a movement from the way the everyday is positioned from confinement to enclosure. In the case of Garcia, the movement is from fragmentation and placeless to a sense of fluidity where identity in flux is seen not as a circumstance for lament but of opportunities for creating new forms of identities. I demonstrate how everyday space is rendered as liminal space by Alfian and Garcia. As in de Certeau’s notion of spatial practices, everyday space is utilized as material to articulate difference, unfamiliarity and pain but also as possibilities for creative individual practices. Forever Each Other’s Ghosts Compression and Fragmentation in the Poems of Alfian and Garcia 36 De Certeau argues that spatial practice rests on a creative negotiation between the concrete space and individual practices. The ensuing discussion looks into the ways in which the notions of compression and fragmentation are seen in the poems of Alfian and Garcia. Spatial experience for Garcia and Alfian are fraught with experiences of discomfort and aridity. These are seen on the level of theme and language use. Alfian’s poetic technique can be likened that of Allen Ginsburg’s whose political critiques and eroticization of desire are crafted and creatively sustained by the utilization of everyday objects and ordinary language. In the case of Alfian, the notion of compression is seen in the way everyday images and often place-specific scenes (such as an HDB flat in Simei and a specific secondary school) are utilized to create a sense of confinement. Everyday images are seen as objects that materialize the confining experience of routine. Alfian’s use of deceptively simple language helps create this irony. For Garcia on the other hand, the notion of fragmentation is seen in the reoccurring trope of self-splitting in his poetry. Garcia’s poems, unlike those of Alfian, are set in non-specific places. There is in Garcia’s poems a sense of disorientation and placelessness. This is seen not only in the recurring trope but in the thick and rich poetic language that Garcia utilizes. In what follows, I read several poems which demonstrate such notions. I begin with poems that explore the concept of family and domestic space. While it can be said that domestic space is private space, the emphasis of the ensuing discussion is on how Alfian and Garcia utilize the everyday in constructing the domestic. I finish this 37 subsection with a discussion of several poems on outside space in which the notions of fragmentation and compression are evident in their creative vision of spatial experience in Manila and Singapore. The City as Portrait: Confinement and the Notion of Framing in Alfian Sa’at’s Poems Most of Alfian’s poems in One Fierce Hour and A History of Amnesia do not reflect the kind of glitter and glamour found in Singapore tourist brochures. Alfian’s Singapore is not a city where neon lights drape the shopper’s street of Orchard Road. His “alternative vision” of Singapore society is fraught and littered with dark images and posits that whenever there is light, there are shadows. Alfian’s use of dark and often grotesque portrayal of the everyday is hinged upon the idea of confinement as this is through everyday objects. Alfian develops this through listing and framing. Everyday objects are introduced one by one, line by line and at the end of the poem, confine the poem’s subjects. Framing is an appropriate term for this idea of confinement because the scenes painted here are, in many ways portraits themselves: images of people frozen in time and in the everyday narrative that has confined them. The challenge in these critical illustrations is to locate the ways in which gay sexuality inflects poems which at first sight have nothing to do with issues in sexuality. In my close reading, I demonstrate that these illustrations of confinement reproduce dominant narratives. We find in Alfian’s poems an overt disgust and ultimately resistance to the depiction of the typical. As an enfante terrible, Alfian is the resistant and rebellious son who refuses to reproduce the narratives of the ideal constructed through 38 images of the typical. Alfian utilizes the materiality of the everyday as poetic material to craft this lucid aesthetics of confinement. Poems on domestic space illustrate this notion of confinement within the notions of everyday domestic routine. In “View From A Window (Simei St 1, 11:22 PM), Alfian does not only show that one is trapped by routine but also utilizes dark and rather imagery to develop this rendition. We find two frames in the scene: looking out at the next block at the curtains on the next block at shadows opening cupboards and closing them, noiselessly at housewives washing dishes framed by socks on window grilles at wooden slots for air-cons at rusty holders for washing poles (“View From A Window, 1-9) The first frame is the speaker’s window where he observes an HDB flat across and the second one is a portrait of the housewives as they go about their routine. Here, materializations of everyday domestic routine are the ones that do the framing and confinement. The speaker calls our attention to objects that drape the scene as the routine of “housewives washing dishes” (6) is framed by “socks on window grilles / at wooden slots /… at rusty holders for washing poles” (7-9). The commonplace objects do more than just provide us with a literal frame for the scene but prepare us as well for the way in which the speaker perceives the housewives as lifeless individuals trapped 39 within the frame of domestic routine. Their movements are limited precisely and only by the cyclical and repetitive act of cleaning. The speaker’s own frame thus covers the entire scene as the speaker regards the housewives as faceless shadows (4), then as soulless individuals “… viewing a wall / at a columbarium / at ghosts behind their plaques” (11-13). The poem thus ends with the speaker commenting on the lifelessness of the scene as he likens the scene to looking at “gravestones” (19). “Family Portraits” likewise illustrates Alfian’s vision of lifelessness in routine. Here, Alfian’s position as a rebellious (and gay) son is more evident and his notion of resistance, clearer. In the poem, we find snapshots of daily lived experiences of three family members that represent and play stereotypical roles: the son in school; the housewife mother who takes care of the house and the father who works. That this poem in itself is divided into three “sub-poems” which focus on one member of the family develops this idea that they are somehow framed by routine. While the son, the mother and the father are all given voices (i.e. each section poem is told from a different first-personperspective), the choice of identities given to each character (mother, not wife ;father, not husband) reveals that this very much about the son (who perhaps represents Alfian himself) and his attitude towards the stereotypical representations of familial roles. The son is stuck in school with a marked “badge [with] a Latin motto / Hope for the future / The future is hope / Or something” (“Family Portraits” 1-4). The specificity of the place and the autobiographical reference is evident in that the motto seems to 40 point specifically to Raffles Institution (“Hope for a better age”)and Alfian’s own dismissal of the promises of a bright future and mobility. Moreover, the opening lines prepare us for what the son tries to do in the poem. Alfian’s technique of listing creates a tension in which we find the son trying to break free from this routine. The first line four lines give us a clue as to how this is rendered. At first, the son seems to be following the set narrative of the ideal by articulating what his badge means but then takes the idea back by showing indifference to it. Everyday images are used to show how the son attempts to create a back and forth struggle to be dissident and even rebellious: At times black crows try to interrupt When we sing the National Anthem It is difficult to maintain The whiteness of my shoes Especially on Wednesdays I must admit there is something quite special About the bare thighs of hardworking Scouts Seven to the power of five is unreasonable On Chinese New Year Mrs Lee dressed up In a sarong kebaya And sang Bengwagan Solo The capital of Singapore is Singapore My best friend Did a hero thing once Shaded all A’s For his Chinese Language Multiple-choice paper (5-26) 41 The son’s portrait is a disparate listing of scenery, general knowledge and personal experiences in school. The list features the son’s back-and-forth effort to be rebellious about what is imposed on him. In the first two stanzas of the excerpt, there is a tension between the notion of soiling and cleanliness: the presence of black crows interrupting the oral affirmation of nationhood is contrasted with the son’s still trying to follow rules. A news clip and a geography lesson item follow a subtle hint of homosexuality and a complaint concerning a mathematical problem. In all this, the son’s attempt to be disobedient is continuously cut off by everyday knowledge and events. Towards the end, the frame locks the son in: “in our annual yearbook / There is a photograph of me / Pushing a wheelchair and smiling / They caught me / At the exact moment / When my eyes were casually closed” (27-32). The housewife mother on the other hand is trapped within the frame of domestic routine: watching sitcoms (33-35), laundry (47-50) and cooking (52-53). She echoes this peculiar sense of boredom and repetition by almost repeating the same question twice: “What to do/ What else to do?” (70-71) The repetition functions as echo as she faces the wall, the poetic borders of a frame that traps her within the routine of domestic space. We are introduced to the working father in the last part of ”Family Portraits”. The father’s portrait is a frame within several frames as he finds himself facing the wall ironically of “motivation posters / one with a sunset / one with a parachutist” (89-92). The posters depict two paradoxical scenarios: on the one hand, they show scenes of escape (of vacation and of a man in free fall). On the other hand they also mirror the 42 confining situation of the father. In our eyes, the father too is a poster boy of a framed typical scene, of being trapped in the office. The title of the poem is ironic: there is no family portrait. The son, the mother and the father are separate from each other, with each one tasked to fulfill his or her assigned productive role; the mother who accedes to her role in the domestic realm; the father as the breadwinner confined in the enclosed space of the office; and ultimately the son, resitant, who tries to the continuation of such narratives. Moreover, in isolating each family member into different “portraits” and depicting them in discomforting illustrations, Alfian makes his critique known. The subtle hint at homosexuality, found at the center of the son’s portrait thus proves to be central to the poet’s vision of resisting a future he does not wish to be a part of. In the two poems discussed so far, we find how this experience of confinement is hinged on the notions of routine as these are materialized by everyday objects. Alfian’s gaze is directed at how everyday narratives are not far from neutral. The materiality of the everyday is hinged on the constant reproduction of such ideals. As we have seen so far, gay subjectivity in Alfian’s poems is seen in how he seems to reject this notion of reproducing these narratives that are especially bred and cultivated by familial roles, the basic unit of the state itself. The emphasis on family is equally important. Natalie Oswin in “The Modern Model Family at Home in Singapore: A Queer Geography” (2009) quotes Lee Hsien Loong’s definition of the ideal Singapore family (as one made up of a man, woman and with children) and argues that the family and the affairs that have to do with the construction of domestic space is “underpinned by a heteronormative logic” 43 (Oswin 257). Alfian’s dark and grotesque portrayals reveal both his disgust in and rejection of such narratives. This interplay between the notion of confinement, routine and lifelessness as these are framed by the poet’s vision of disgust is seen in his urban writing. The reproduction of a fixed narrative as this is articulated in the everyday is a confining and entrapping experience that renders its citizens into objects similar to Ezra Pound’s “apparitions of faces in a crowd” in “A Station in a Metro.” What sets Alfian aside, however, from all of these poets who seem to render urban experience in almost similar ways is his overt sense of disgust at the scenes. From the realm of the domestic all the way to the streets, the vision covered by Alfian’s spatial stories features a rejection of the reproduction of such narratives. Unlike the two poems discussed earlier, “Good Morning (Images from an HDB Estate),” highlights the overt presence of decay and lifeless in the interface between the inside and the outside. Far from being a space of sanitation and peace, the HDB space is littered with images of unwanted noise and waste. The poem begins with a sense of shock and unwelcome noise: “Someone’s alarm screams unanswered” (“Good Morning“ 1). The color of the typical routine of everyday is blackened by the speaker as he brings the image of an amorphous crowd of residents dragging themselves from the bed: “Faceless people rise from the / dark asphyxia of unfamiliar beds / lined by the harsh glare of the sudden toilet bulb” (3-5). 44 The scene shifts from the bedroom to the bathroom where the act of bathing is presented as an act of cleaning not only the body but the spirit as well. The technique of listing is darkened by the tone the speaker adopts: The gecko stares with lidless eyes, a witness To private rituals, the fleshy shames confronted Behind the security of a latch. The flabby breasts, the rashes, The scabs, that would not heal the retching, and blood, thighs, sighs, incontinence – in horror of their nakedness they cleanse away yesterday’s sweaty guilt. (5 – 12) The act of cleansing is portrayed paradoxically as a scene of disgust as an animal stands witness to a long list of bodily rituals. The gecko’s “lidless eyes,” a possible reference to Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” are witnesses as well to the image of a ruined body. The listing he makes does not seem to connote cleanliness at all but instead highlights the scarring imperfections of the body. The lone and singular indentation highlights the notion that these imperfections are given bodily substance hinged upon the body (“fleshy shames,” “sweaty guilt”). This notion of permanent scabbing is carried over figuratively as the scene shifts from the bathroom to the outside where “the dirty water gurgles through the drains” (16) implying that filth can only be displaced. Filth, dirt and the concept of dirtiness although washed away are simply carried outside where we find filth literally everywhere. The speaker points us to birds and their “songs of shit” (15) “urine on the stairs newspapers curled / around glassy-eyed fish / the girl with cigarette burns on her face;” (22-24). Like the body that is permanently scarred, the world the speaker occupies 45 in is permanently scabbed with filth. As in the two poems discussed earlier, the speaker seeks to distances himself from the scene. He chooses to retreat but only a “step back from a narrowing world” (26). That the speaker chooses to take a step back implies that there is no where else to go, that he can go only as far to escape this “narrowing world” where filth is precisely like water that washes it away – it only circulates. This notion of circulation in turn enriches the all too apparent irony of the title. Mornings universally represent new beginnings, the washing away of the old. The irony lies in how the cyclical notion of purification in the morning is mocked by the circulation of filth in an increasingly compressing world. Alfian’s frequently quoted urban poem “The City Remembers” echoes these notions of entrapment. Here, the streetlamp, the morning train, the traffic light and the elevator (objects that ironically regulate motion and mobility) collectively comment on the faceless, isolating and exhaustive conditions of urbanism. People in this city (treated and addressed once more as an amorphous faceless crowd) have become mechanized and locked within a confining narrative of progress. The blinking street lamp that punctuates the street comments on the citizen’s incomplete interiority: “your soul finding its form” (14); the train, an object for mass transportation that ushers in and in many ways compresses the crowd comments on the “vulgar loneliness of the crowd” that looks elsewhere (34); the traffic light points at the directionlessness of the people ironically as they simply follow the ebb and flow of the red and green lights (47). In personifying these objects, Alfian shows the irony that in the end, it is the citizens who are the machines; they are the mechanized ones that power a faceless city. 46 The image which concludes the poem, the elevator, in itself is a commentary on the confining and verticalized narrative of Singapore’s modernity: When you are in me, limbo is not An option, not when my gift to you Is a vertical metaphor: hell below, Heaven above, and in between, Your life on earth, rising and falling. ( 58 – 62) The tone these everyday objects utilize develops this irony. The morning train appears flustered and frustrated: “Why do you not look at each other’s / Faces? Is the scenery that arresting, / one housing estate giving birth to another copy?”(19-21) The traffic light and the elevator on the other hand speak of a kind of helplessness in the directionless state of the crowd. Taken together, the tones develop a lament for the crowd that has become mechanized, automatic and trapped within a particular system. What we therefore find in the poems that we have discussed so far is a clear connection between Alfian’s domestic and urban writing: there is a sense of lifelessness in repetition, in the process of reproducing more of the same. This positioning is made more pronounced in his final poem in A History of Amnesia. “We Are Not Yet Free” combines these experiences of confinement with his political criticism as these are inflected by his subject-position as a gay man. Reminiscent of Ginsburg’s poetry “We Are Not Yet Free” features various techniques and writing styles (lyrical, narrative, journalistic) as the poem presents Alfian’s commentary on the Josef Ng incident.1 Like most of the poems that have been discussed so far, Alfian turns his gaze to everyday 1 In a footnote to the poem, Alfian alerts us to two articles “Chronology of a Controversy” and “A Review of Josef Ng’s Performance” by Lee Weng Choy. One can access these documents at www.happening.com.sg/commentary/index.html 47 spaces and objects and utilizes these to poetically perform his rendition of the incident. The incident in itself functions as a critical point of departure that Alfian utilizes to make his larger claims about the confining experiences of Singapore and ultimately as his position as a poet. One finds once more the reoccurring trope of framing in the poem. Here now, the focus is on how media seems to force an issue by framing a particular subject. The double meaning of “framing” (that of taking pictures and of being set up) cannot be more obvious: I was one of those Deceived into believing That the obscenity was in what You did, and not In the hands of that one in the audience Who decided to frame you in a photo – Graph, thinking of a headline, Settling on ‘Pub(l)ic Protest.’ You, Facing the wall, with your hands on your Crotch, it was as if you knew, As if you had posed for them, the image Of a man clutching his privates As a camera zeroed in like a scalpel on his back[.] (“We Are Not Yet Free,” 31 – 43) In Alfian’s use of the double meaning of framing, the wall that “Josef Ng” faces becomes increasingly ambiguous: on the one hand, it may point to the walls of the performance stage but on the other hand, it can also refer to the public image which has been constructed by the media. 48 “We Are Not Yet Free” also positions the poetic critique that Alfian offers. The more awkward enjambments Alfian makes in this narration of Josef Ng’s framing is key to this positioning in that these highlight Alfian’s sense of breaking away from the framed images. This is ultimately contrasted to the more disciplined and calculated precision line breaks in the succeeding subsections of the poem. This is especially seen in his repetition of “I doubt” in the following lines where the speaker seeks to break away from the created images: I doubt A crystal sigh Rippled through Midnight estates Bandaged in peace I doubt There were boys In the heat of self-abuse Who substituted fantasies Of swimming pool buddies With nightmares Of the lallang’s serrations And the handcuff’s click. I doubt Records were shattered In the department tabulating Indices for Moral Health I doubt Men walked the streets Assured that their genitals Were safe in the hands Of the police. (109-132) 49 That these more lyrical lines follow an excerpt from a newspaper sets the contrast and the positioning Alfian makes. This becomes more apparent as towards the end of this longer work, Alfian likens his poem to a “counterfeit poem” which functions as a foil to the images created by mainstream narrative. In this section’s discussion, I have alerted us to the various ways in which the everyday is utilized by Alfian to create an experience of confinement. Everyday objects create a frame which entraps the poet’s subjects by means of routine and a narrative that demands the replication and reproduction of the ideal. It is here that we are able to see how Alfian’s sexual identity functions as a form of present absence. As reproduction is the product of heterosexual relations, Alfian as a gay man reveals a subject-position that seeks to resist the narrative of the typical and the ideal. Alfian positions himself in the outside and the grotesque visions his poetry depicts are shadows to Orchard Road’s lights. Forever Each Other’s Ghosts: Self-splitting in J. Neil Garcia’s Poems This section invites us back to Manila. We recall what I have posited in the introductory section of the thesis where I argued that the metropolitan body of Manila is characterized as horizontally fragmented. In this section we look at how the grammar of such fragmented metropolitan form, to use de Certeau’s vocabulary, is projected in Garcia’s works and transformed by his various spatial practices. 50 I would like to begin with a brief anecdote. I watched my first drag queen show in 2007. Before the fierce neon lights and the rave music amplified by sound equipment from France (something the club actually boasted of) invited guests and cruisers to the dance floor, the denizens of the club were invited to listen first to “Mariah Carey” and “Whitney Houston” as they lip-synced to the song “When You Believe.” Eventually the stage lights dimmed and the partying began. I would later on find “Mariah” and “Whitney” outside the club with make-up still fresh yet wearing plain shirt and jeans, cursing about some jerk while hailing a jeepney (transportation mostly for the masses) for a long ride home. A series of putang ina niya’s (he/she is a motherfucker) trailed the smoke-belching jeepney as the vehicle carried them away from the safe and wealthy haven of Manila’s wealthy and globalized space. The glamorous hope for miracles which they once sang in a dress of equally glittering sequins seemed only confined within the doors of a club whose pleasure-seeking denizens have long since forgotten their heavily made up faces. I remember this scene as I begin to write about Garcia’s poems. Like the life and fate of the drag queens in that club, speakers in many number of Garcia’s poems depict a kind of splitting. Like Alfian, Garcia’s response to the everyday is not a happy, optimistic one. While Alfian’s perception of confinement is seen in the dark and decaying everyday, Garcia’s notion of the fragmented everyday is seen through the act of (self) splitting. Garcia’s poems exemplify particular experiences of fragmentation in the way the self and the characters live dual often incoherent identities. One finds as well a particular kind of violence and pain in this notion of self-splitting. 51 Garcia’s reading of metropolitan gay culture in Philippine Gay Culture reflects this notion of splitting selves in different ways. In his historicizing of gay male identities, Garcia argues that the “dominant view” of homosexual identity is that of the “inverted male,” that is a woman trapped in a man’s body (Garcia 223). An incongruity then occurs between an individual’s interior self and public front. It is precisely because of this dominant perspective that present-day men who indulge in homosexual practices (labeled as MSM or men having sex with men) find it extremely difficult to see themselves as gay men (232). The rejection comes from the idea that, informed largely by dominant macho culture, they do not see themselves as women trapped in men’s bodies. There is then that attempt on their part to split action and identity. Garcia, however, rejects this perceived separation between act and identity for he narrates that “in a lot of their workshops, the participants are allowed a certain night to be campy… and a drag party is held for which everybody gets to cross dress” (232). We find that Garcia’s notion of homosexual identity in metropolitan space is essentially grounded on various experiences of splitting. At this juncture, it would first prove useful to briefly mention Ronald Baytan, another gay poet who was Garcia’s student in the University of the Philippines. Like Garcia’s, Baytan’s gay poetry is informed by the notion of fragmentation. Baytan’s poems like “Transience” and “White Angel” portray the bodies of lovers as split parts in order to depict how gay desire is temporal and fleeting. Baytan’s use of the lyric, however, challenges his themes as the precise and disciplined construction of the lyrical text seems to nevertheless create a sense of wholeness to what seems to be depiction of 52 the fragmentary and fleeting notions of desire. In Garcia’s poems, on the other hand, the form lends to the reinforcement to themes of fragmentation. By form, I mean not only the syntax and diction of the body text but also the focus and the language that in itself proves to be a tool for disorientation. I will begin my reading of Garcia’s poems first by looking at his representations of the gay man’s body, and then move to his more urban poems. In all, we find how this conflict is eventually resolved by a sense of resolution. The tension between these multiple identities proves to be the center of Garcia’s speakers. In the long poem “Kaluluwa” the speaker finds himself humbled and angered by the soul’s presence and existence: “”you are certainly better / who kills me over and over / just by a single pitying glance” (“Kaluluwa” 10 – 12). The soul is the foil to the speaker’s own body in that it is able to endure, outlive and exist beyond the body’s shape. Another poem which highlights this sense of fragmentation and difference between the body and its perceived interior is “Invert.” Here, Garcia uses the house as a metaphor for the body. The speaker sees himself as a haunted house: “Possessed of womansoul / I am house / to her hauntings” (“Invert” 1-3). This notion of womansoul goes back to Garcia’s initial critical analysis of the Filipino gay male in Philippine Gay Culture as essentially “males turning into inward females became of their homosexuality” (Garcia 3). Of particular interest to this sense of self-splitting is the presence of violence and pain: my belly’s kitchen boils with her thickening 53 brew of salt Plates smash with plates in the air of my hunger, while a pet mouse eats a home into my mouth. (4-12) Hunger as a primal bodily urge becomes the site for this violent interaction between the body and the desires of the womansoul. The short brief line breaks emphasize this kind of pain. As readers, we get to experience as well the pain this tension creates as the slow and sluggish pacing of the rendition isolate the specific words that highlight this experience of pain: boils, smash, eating through one’s body. Towards the end of the poem, this sense of disconnection between the body and the soul is given a sense of compromise as the speaker eventually learns to live with this womansoul – “womansoul in manbody” (49) but acknowledges that there will always be differences between them, that they “forever of each other shall be ghosts” (51-52). Garcia utilizes this notion of self-splitting in the way he writes about everyday matters. His vision of fragmented identities is carried over as a reoccurring optic in the way he perceives urban experience. Garcia’s poems often creatively interrogate issues that have to do with the impoverished state of poorer communities in the city. There is, I would argue, a connection between Garcia’s subject-position as a gay man and his critical and creative affinity with poverty as a reoccurring theme. He writes in his closing remarks in the theoretical portion of Philippine Gay Culture2: 2 After this, Garcia moves on to analyze gay-themed literary texts in the other half of the anthology. 54 What feminism teaches us, and what we have learned from this short engagement with Philippine gay history, is that the disparities of gender ineffaceably mark the inequalities of our current day lives. Poverty feminizes; ethnicity too. Women certainly are feminized. And homosexuals, and all the other “underdeveloped, deviant, immature” groups constantly marginalized, violently othered people in our corner of this sad and perilous world. ( Garcia 245) We thus go back to the anecdote I shared earlier on. The drag queens, “Mariah” and “Whitney,” once they have returned to the dressing rooms, not only discard the dresses and scarves of glitter and glamour but strip away as well the wealthier dreams signified by the apparel on the floor. What we therefore find in Garcia’s creative urban texts is a weaving of various narratives of marginality and suffering. We find encounter the same experience of violence and self-splitting that we have seen in his more personal poems. Garcia’s image of the self-splitting gay man becomes his creative point of departure. In “Poem,” the violence of the city becomes apparent as the faceless city is seen as an entity which allows one to simply die: The train that stops the traffic did not stop for the boy at play outside his home. Today his home is torn for limb for limb by the government that let him die in the meanness of his childhood: accidents happen. No ball however flew streetwise. No small hands swiftly flung caught death midair by the jaw. He was skipping but a foot away from their lean-to. The train barely licked the door as it blew body and soul away so gently, he did not even think it was any more painful than his hunger 55 or the sharply pointed dreams that came from it. It even looked beautiful (“Poem,” 1-15) Splitting and disorientation are evident throughout the poem. On the level of the poem’s dramatic situation, the sense of splitting is of course seen in the violent manner in which the boy dies. The form and structure of the poem highlight as well this sense of fragmentation. While the poem has a clear form in terms of the way stanzas are organized, the awkward line cutting and more importantly the imprecise metering of syllables suggest a kind of disorder and disorientation. Ultimately, the sense of disorientation in the body of the poem is seen in the way images and concepts, all centered on the idea of the body, are convoluted: the boy’s body becomes a house; the neglectful government (although represented possibly by the train) is given hands that tear the boy’s body; later on the train itself is given bodily characteristics (“The train barely licked”). In all, the ambiguous title reflects the ambiguous and often disorienting feel of the poem as this is seen in the body of the poem and in how the concept of the body is treated. In this sense, the disorienting feel that Garcia paints, however hidden under the poem’s form then mirrors in various ways the disorienting feel of Manila’s urban landscape. Another poem which highlights this sense of splitting is “Passion and Unselfish Love in a Carnival.” Here Garcia assumes the identity of a self-proclaimed “carnival queen” (“Passion and Unselfish Love in a Carnival” 1) who as it turns out, is a woman in a shooting gallery game. The notion of splitting is seen in various ways: the woman sees 56 herself as a queen of the carnival and as somebody’s lover; the poem’s dramatic situation is split between the carnival and the house. Up in her self-proclaimed throne she considers herself different from the other “freaks” such as the “human spider. The turtle boy. / Twins linked to each other by their pensises.” (39-40) not only because of the latter’s deformed and strange nature but more importantly because “freaks… are those / for whom there is no more hope. Or love” (2930). The so-called carnival queen is thus happy with her double life, a life that she sees is denied to the other “freaks” whose “freakiness” lies precisely in their jointed abnormalities. We eventually discover that the woman lives a different life and subjects herself to shame in order to support somebody. She reveals that there is someone waiting for her and she remarks that “he’s happy / I come home to him at just the right time / where money is tight for my sweet” (44-46) and that “I love him so much I can see myself a fish / swimming feverishly in soup forever” (56-57). There is therefore no difference between the carnival and this lived space she shares with her partner. In both, she remains oblivious to the idea she is by her own definition a freak too, stripped away of dignity and entrapped in a domestic partnership devoid of love: “I think it’s true he loves me, too. / After all he says it right after I’ve said it / and given him what he so pityingly takes” (58-60). The title of the poem “passion and unselfish love” then speaks of how she has unwittingly split herself from the truth of her situation. Like “Poem,” “Passion and Love” is a lamentation on material and spiritual impoverishment. Garcia utilizes images such as “week-old water” (6) and “dust and rust 57 seeping in like a cold” (14) to subtly present a space fraught with dilapidation and neglect. Upon the ridiculed carnival queen’s body are woven narratives of poverty and violence brought about by the consistent act of self-splitting. That Garcia chose the first person perspective for this creative rendition highlights his affinity with this own fictive subject that represents the impoverishment and violence wrought by the gay experience of self-splitting in metropolitan space. Such a notion is made even more apparent in “The Conversion” where Garcia goes back to a particular and peculiar way of teaching an effeminate boy to man up. The speaker in the poem is a retrospective man who recalls how he was subjected to familial and communal humiliation as he is physically punished and coerced to man up. The title of the poem in itself has religious connotations in that the person’s conversion makes consistent referring to the Christian notion of conversion through baptism of water: It happened in a metal drum They put me there, my family that loved me. The water had just been saved just for it, that day. The laundry lay caked and smelly in the flower-shaped basins. Dishes soiled with fat and swill piled high in the sink, and grew flies. My cousins did not get washed that morning. Lost in masks of snot and dust, their faces looked tired and resigned to the dirty lot of children. All the neighbors gathered around our open-air bathroom […] (1-15) 58 We observe two things here. As in the previous two poems discussed, images of poverty and impoverishment prevail in the scene: water is insufficient and therefore must be saved up; proper sanitation and domestic care are absent; the lack of space is highlighted by communal spectatorship. The necessity of the boy to affirm his masculinity becomes the central concern of the community that day. Secondly, the alternating indentations highlight this sense of splitting as they develop a tension between strong and soft imagery. The poem begins with something concrete and hard – how the so-called “conversion” happened through a strong and metallic household object. The second line shocks us in a way that we find out that the kind of violence subjected to the speaker was done by the people who were supposed to love him. The next few lines develop this tension between strong and violent and soft imagery as they highlight the intention of the conversion: the laundry is seen as both “caked” and “smelly” in “flower-shaped basins.” The narrative then jumps from this public humiliation in his youth to adulthood, when he grows up feeling “happy now that [he is] / redeemed” (45-46). In reiterating the religious notion of redemption, the speaker emphasizes as well the idea that to be true to one’s biological body is a way to be morally good. Yet there is nothing quite redemptive or morally sound in his conversion for while sees himself rewarded for seeing the light and acknowledging his masculinity – “I got my wife pregnant with the next. / Our four children, all boys, are the joy of my manhood, my proof.” (47–49). The “water is still a problem / and the drum is still there” (54-55). The drum is symbolic of his material and spiritual impoverished state. It lingers on to remind him that nothing has changed: he is 59 still poor and by constantly hitting his wife and drinking with the uncles, he finds himself needing to assert his masculinity again and again – “Better off dead, I say to myself / and my family that loves me for my bitter breath” (76-77). The violence of selfsplitting is evident not only in this corrupted version of baptism but in the way he transfers his angst and anger through domestic violence. Thus in this poem, the sense of self-splitting is highlighted not only in how one’s personal identity is forced upon the person but on the kind of violence that was used to create and maintain such an identity. The experience of poverty proves to be an important backdrop for such rendition in that the material impoverishment mirrors the kind of violence and dilapidation of selfhood. In all readings, we find how Garcia’s vision of urban realities (particularly poverty) is fraught with the notions of fragmentation. Such a notion is hinged precisely on his critical perception of gay identity in metropolitan space as essentially a consistent experience of self-splitting. His more personal poems reflect this. For Garcia, poverty and homosexual identity share experiences of impoverishment in varying degrees. Fragmentation is all in Garcia’s poems. The fragmented metropolitan body becomes the reoccurring trope that highlights experiences of human impoverishment. Going back then to de Certeau’s notion of spatial practice, we find how much of the writings of Alfian and Garcia are informed by the grammar of the everyday. The notion of compression is evident in the way Alfian perceives the everyday as a sense of confinement. The family seems to be a critical and important space for Alfian because the family becomes a site where narratives of the heteronormative are compressed along 60 with the other values that are made manifest through the everyday. The notion of fragmentation for Garcia, on the other hand, is seen in the notion of self-splitting and this is made especially apparent in his perception of gay identity in metropolitan space. In Garcia’s works, such a perspective is transformed into a poetic vision that utilizes the experience of fragmentation in varied experiences of marginality and impoverishment. In the next subsection, we look into the ways in which these notions of compression and fragmentation are used to articulate gay desires. As in de Certeau’s privileging of individual practices, the grammar of the everyday is utilized to articulate the pain and pleasure of gay desire. A Simile Running the Wrong Way The Everyday in the Gay-Themed Poems of Alfian Sa’at and J. Neil Garcia This subsection discusses the more explicitly gay-themed poems of Alfian and Garcia and how these are inflected by both spatial experience and sexual identity. In the case of Alfian, there is a movement from confinement to enveloping. For Garcia, there is a change from splitting to one of fluidity in spatial experience. In all this, I demonstrate how, as in de Certeau’s notion of spatial practice, the eros and pleasure of gay experience are used to activate the liminal experience of space. A Switch is Flicked: From Confinement to Enveloping in the Poems of Alfian The ensuing discussion covers poems from his two published collections and The Invisible Manuscript, a collection of unpublished poems that deal with the gay desire. I 61 demonstrate how in these poems the notion of compression is still evident but there is a gradual movement from confinement to enveloping where everyday sites and imagery are used as a cocoon that shelters gay love and desires. Alfian situates these articulations of gay desire and love-making in closed, often packed, spaces. Enclosed space functions merely as a kind of setting for such practices of intimacy to take place because what we ultimately find is that what encloses and “shelters” these desires are everyday objects. This then is what differentiates Alfian’s gay-themed poems from the ones previously discussed. In the previous discussion, we found how the sense of confinement is created and manifested through everyday objects. In these poems, Alfian still utilizes the act of listing but this time he rips the notion of routine from the everyday objects and rewires them to articulate desires beyond the narrative of the typical and even the ideal. Gay desires articulated in these closed spaces do not mirror the kind of confinement that we find in his poems on ordinary everyday routine. Alfian’s gaythemed poems contrast the lifelessness and experience of aridity found in the poems that connote confinement. There is light. There is pleasure. There is life. In these poems, we are introduced to a different Alfian Sa’at, one who has not been choked and rendered pessimistic but one who has utilized and activated space to articulate desire and identity that is truly his, as they are given life by the speakers. In what follows, I discuss how this notion of enveloping is created first in and through public spaces and through certain everyday narratives. 62 In “MRT Platform 6:43 AM” we find the speaker fantasizing about someone in a train. The scene is reminiscent of the train in “The City Remembers” as the poem is packed with images of lifelessness. In this station, the speaker finds himself surrounded by inattentive army boys (“MRT Platform 6:43 AM” 7-8), immobile office workers (9-10), housewives sewing clothes (11-12). Amidst all this, the desire which the speaker has gives him “crystals around [his] eyes” (25) rendering him alive as the rest in this packed train where people are made immobile by notions of routine. Alfian also utilizes mobile closed spaces to talk about gay desire in other poems. “The Kiss” and “The Great Escape” set intimate scenes inside cars. Both poems highlight the idea that love can be found and lost, that desire can be as fleeting as the speed of the car that encases them. In “6 Notions of Intimacy,” the speaker portrays a brief intimate scene of a couple “holding hands at the back of the bus.” (“6 Notions of Intimacy” 1). Elements from the everyday are initially seen to condemn this act of social impropriety: you provoke the engine's choked outrage, the hellish heat under your seats. The scandalized sunlight is heaping veils of modesty on your rousing laps. Forbidding signs are glaring at you. (2-6) The elements from the everyday are initially seen to be moving against this act of intimacy with words and images like “choked” and sunlight permeating and “veiling” the couple signaling how these elements might be closing in on them. The foreboding activated by this sense of condemnation seems to come from everywhere, from the engine that bellows beneath them, the seats directly under them, the sunlight, the signs 63 of prohibition. The tone the speaker adopts also helps create this growing sense of foreboding. The actual position of the speaker in all this is ambiguous. On the one hand, he can be the one holding hands, yet on the other he can simply be an observer. In either case, we find how the speaker seems to be either part of the everyday elements that pierce through this violating intimacy (if he is an observer) or is very much aware of this intimacy (if he is actually the one involved). The scene shifts from one which forebodes confinement to one of enclosure as images of dissidence deflect the glare and stare of the disapproving elements. The sense of mockery and the arrest of space are emphasized in the next lines: One slashes a cigarette but the one that makes you laugh is that which bars a limp-wristed hand waving a hanky. (That stands for No Littering?) Two men holding hands, even the graffiti on the seat that says: "Jenny is a damn good fuck" pales to schoolboy whimsy. Well, squeeze his hand a little harder. Not because you don't care but care too much to let him ride beside you with his fingers un(g)loved. (8-13) The use of “slashes” here does not only point to the “No Smoking” sign in the bus also signals us to a break and a shift in the way the alternative everyday scenes will be used. The scenes of vandalized dissidence now help create an imagined space where the couple finds the silent conviction to continue with this act of intimacy. The speaker too joins in the shift and makes his actual attitude towards the act known as he moves from a warning of condemnation to one of approval. This notion of enclosure is ultimately realized with an act of enclosure itself – with the hand of lover tightening its grip. 64 Alfian’s gay-themed poems on public spaces also demonstrate this sense of enclosure. “Plaza Singapura,” a poem on gay cruising in one of the busy shopping malls along Orchard Road utilizes the different bodily senses and fuses these bodily senses with images from everyday space. The opening lines emphasize a tension between sight and sound.: “Two men talk. / Eyes hope for the sign of a gleam / In the other’s, like a first star.” (1-3). Visual imagery at first is seen as something starry, extravagant and hopeful. Speech on the other hand “[hisses] like steam” (4). Speech here is regarded as an object of propriety, “a civil noise among tongues / Burnt by strange tribal welts of longing” (5-6) ascribed to an ideal (perhaps heteronormative) social code. The men stop speaking and instead choose to “nod” and “smile” and by so doing “a switch is flicked” (7). The switch in this respect does not just privilege the experience of sight through the use of light imagery but also highlights a shift (a different kind of switching) as well the focal sense from the sight to touch. The image of the men as “naked light bulbs,” (8) contrasts how they were previously perceived as just gleaming singular stars. The description is one of which combines both sight and touch: “the heart white-hot, filament thin” (10). The experience thus moves from sight and sound to touch as “caresses in the stairwell” (11) take over. The sense of hearing likewise is activated but is only used to contrast and position the outside. From the sound of a “child tumbling down the steps” (11) to “footsteps of families ebbing outside,” the sound imagery like an echo emphasizes paradoxically both the outside’s absence and its overt presence. The dichotomy thus is 65 outlined by the senses themselves: close-contact bodily intimacy of the inside in Singapore is contrasted with the civil noise of the outside. Towards the end of the poem, “they hold each other, still in fear / but this time of losing themselves in / or simply losing, their shipwrecked embrace” (21-23) The speaker however is quick to emphasize that what separates them is not “shame” or “futility” (25) but the idea “[that] they had avoided the territories / on each other’s skin / [could] have singed them with love” (26-28). The temporal nature of Plaza Singapura rests on the idea that men must remove themselves not because of the civil noise outside but merely because of choosing to retain the brevity of the encounter. This sense of cocooning is made more realized by how the noise which demands “civility” is eventually silenced at the end of the poem. Particularly interesting as well in Alfian’s poems on gay desire is the reoccurring use of images from National Service (NS). While images and practices from NS may not necessarily be construed as part of the everyday (as compared to other spaces and practices), the logic which sustains the NS program, I would argue, is still hinged on the heteronormative and masculine narrative of Singapore society: the sons of Singapore must be able to defend their country when called to arms. The army, made up of readily-enlisted young men, contributes extensively to Singapore’s overt show of strength. This is particularly evident during National Day where vehicles roll their way in Singapore’s center and jet fighters knife through the sky. Alfian’s NS poems in contrast, play with these notions of strength and masculinity to creatively render gay 66 desire. Alfian rips images from their “original” disciplined, machismo context and uses them to articulate dissident gay pleasure within enclosed spaces. “Half a Soldier” utilizes images from NS exercises to trace the contours of lovemaking: “Again, my fingers reach / To decipher the Braille of your moss” (1-3). He moves on to conflate these images of love-making with NS exercises and jungle: “… stumbling / through thorns, fungi blistered bark” (touch), wounds that long for “smothered darkness” (16) in a “fur of night / [that] sniffed in the intimate musk of stars” (18-19). As in “Plaza Singapura” the sensuality of the encounter is seen in the way various bodily images are used to highlight the pleasure of love-making. Sensuality this time around is highlighted by the experience of the wilderness in NS exercises: the lover’s soft and furry touch, connoting the lover’s pubic hair, the lover’s musk, the natural scent of the lover and so on. The speaker’s rendering in many ways, functions as “a simile / Running the wrong way” signifying then a not only a desire but images that have been recontextualized to articulate such desires. In “Making Love in Army Bunk Beds is Wrong,” Alfian uses conventional masculine images to develop this kind of cocooning and enveloping. The poem begins with an image of enclosed space itself: “Under the mosquito nets we did it” (“Making Love in Army Bunk Beds is Wrong,”1). What envelops the act however is not the mosquito net but army rhetoric that while maintaining its sense of masculinity, has been rewired to articulate the pleasure of gay desire. The pleasurable power play between the speaker and the lover is created as the speaker deploys army rhetoric in the way the lover “inspects” and plays with the speaker’s body: 67 We did it. The friction of kneecaps. My elbows were up for your inspection. I would have punished you if I could not see my reflection in your polished eyes. You would have made sure that my heart was marching to some timing and a tune. Here a joint cracked, so there was pity. Here a muscle showed its small hump like a souvenir of a night exercise, so there was pride. Here a sprain begged for extra rations of kisses. Here the skin marked a border, so your alert guard eyes could discern which territories belonged to the sun and which are reserved only for these barefoot intruders that are deployed from the encampments of your breath. (7-22) The repetition of “we did it” signals this bridge from merely physical enclosure to one where these items from army rhetoric are utilized by the speaker to describe lovemaking. The language of army discipline is used to enclose the act of love making in that each army exercise corresponds to a particular part of love-making: the cadence of the march becomes the beat of the heart as the excitement rushes in; the cracking of the joints and the lump of the muscle, a sign of pain and pleasure and finally of temporal possession of the territories of the body itself. Alfian’s liminal response to the notion of spatial compression is thus seen in his consistent utilization of the trope of enclosed spaces. In his gay-themed poems, this notion of compression is given a more positive signification. In all these poems, Alfian demonstrates how everyday spaces and notions of masculinity articulated within the context of NS can be utilized to articulate gay desire. His poems which utilize everyday images and narratives highlight ironically the possibility of opening space. 68 Barring All Readings: From Splitting to Fluidity In this subsection, I demonstrate how Garcia utilizes the notion of fragmentation and dislocation as a way of articulating gay desires. In the gay-themed poems of Garcia, there is a movement from an experience of lack of centeredness to one characterized by a sense of fluidity. The lack of fixity is not something to be feared or lamented but as something to be embraced and utilized for pleasure and more importantly for creation of new identities. The next discussion covers Garcia’s poems on open space as well as how he utilizes Christian images as a trope for the articulation of gay desire. We also find in all these renditions a keen emphasis on the temporal notion of such experiences. Such fleeting experiences are not discomforting but opportunities for pleasure. The unstable signification of identity that we have seen in texts like “Poem” is given a more positive signification in Garcia’s more gay-themed poems. Here, we find once more his sense of affinity for poor people. Of particular interest in these plays on fluidity is the trope of linguistic play. In “Bakal Boys” (bakal is Filipino for “steel” or “metal”) space becomes the identity of a group of boys hanging around a particular site: “They got the name from the context / in which they are solicited: / in a shopping mall, upon flagstone” (1-3). Naming is one of the most privileged kinds of linguistic practice in that the act imposes not only markers but ultimately identities. What the speaker does in this poem however is to systematically recreate the seemingly genderless description of the boys. To the speaker, the bakal boys become objects for voyeurism as the lines with 69 subtle sexual connotations mention: “standing in wait like that / on boyish legs and feet could take its toll, / and fagged out… Thus the crutches / on which to bring to bear the vigil’s brunt” [emphases mine] (“Bakal Boys” 16-18, 20-21). The identity of the bakal boys then is sexualized by the voyeuristic speaker as he creates a new identity for them, one that is within and beyond the context established in the beginning of the poem: But barring all other readings I think of one poetic in their name: bakal boys, boys of steel The image captures much, much more. Hewed to steel, it hews them in turn: its tensile strength, its durability of which their crotches may partake (21-27) The boys lounging around in the supermall are thus given two names: “bakal boys / boys of steel” with the latter coming from the voyeuristic speaker himself. Boys of steel marks not only a kind of identity the speaker imposed upon the men. It is also one that is grounded by an eroticism of the boys on the street, with “boys of steel” being a reference to Superman, man of steel and in the change from the “crutches” to “crotches.” For the typical shopper, the boys may be the casual and usual bystanders but to the speaker, the boys are potential sites for pleasure. The bodies of the boys become open spaces themselves, a site where names and all their implications can be written. Another poem which deals with this play on signification through gay desire is “Cypher 2” which finds the poem’s speaker fantasizing about an individual inside a jeepney. The fluidity of identity is seen in how the notion of the cipher changes from 70 one person to the next as the desire is gradually articulated. As in “Bakal Boys,” the sense of fluidity is rendered through the trope of linguistic play: You are it: blind as love on a last jeepeney to nowhere, it gazes past all that should be our sorrow: I am not she, nor blind, but that’s no trouble because she can’t be blind like us, like you can be to my sorrow, like I already am to yours. I am it. (Cypher 2, 1-14) The notion of anonymity is central to the poem’s trope. “It” (a pronoun which opaques identities) is consistently used and passed around like a tag game in the poem and points to various images such as “the jeepney ride to nowhere” and the idea of the lover as blind echo as well the sense of placelessness and incoherence we find in the poems we have discussed in the previous subsection. In this linguistic play, the notion of anonymity is what brings the gay discourse to the fore as desire is rendered as an act of reading: I know how to see as you see: with the skin which reads another skin, like a book warm with people, with the beauty and sorrow of people […] (15-20) 71 The sense of namelessness is what grounds the experience of desire as well as the ability to reconstruct meanings and narratives. That subjectivity however is lost when the first name of the speaker is revealed and the play comes to an end: You light a cigaret and are happy, sorrow turning ash in your mouth John, John, you are not he because you know and see me. (32-37) Garcia’s poems on open space thus place emphasis on the temporal pleasure of resignification as this is wrought by gay desire. Anonymity and fluidity brought about by the gay subject’s horizontal gaze are the beginning and the end of pleasure. This play on the temporal and re-signification is also evident in Garcia’s poems that utilize images and concepts of Christian imagery as tropes to articulate gay desire. As in the use of NS poems in Alfian’s poems, Christian imagery may at first not necessarily constitute a part of Manila’s urban everyday but, being a Catholic country, much of Filipino mores and social dynamics are grounded on the narratives and valuesystems of Christian faith. One encounters along Epifanio Delos Santos Avenue (EDSA), the highway that cuts across the metropolis, several billboards that invite one to listen to the word of God. At the heart of EDSA is Our Lady of EDSA, a gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary erected in memory of the 1986 People Power Revolution, overlooking the traffic and smog of the major highway. Such a presence is not only material but is in many ways engrained in the collective Filipino psyche. Reynaldo Ileto’s prominent and alternative study of the Philippine revolution Pasyon and the Revolution establishes a 72 connection between the narrative of the passion and death of Jesus Christ, known as the pasyon, to the ideologies propagated by the Katipunan revolutionaries. National elections are often decided by swing votes of religious groups that vote as one block. The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) was and is still a force to reckon with when the bishops disagree with the stance of the government. Months in calendars are often reddened with Christian holidays. Aspects of the Christian mythos thus permeate the everyday of Filipino life. In his works, Garcia takes these practices and popular beliefs and reassigns them to signify experiences of gay desire. In “to the handsome boy no more than 20 but already unmistakably man, definitely, who goes to sunday mass 7 on the dot not a fail, no, not for once late,” we find the speaker fantasizing about the boy he regularly bumps into in Church. Here, the speaker not only uses the everyday space and ritual of Sunday worship to articulate this desire but also concepts from Christian faith as these are performed within the Eucharist: but before we go in peace, are shooed out for the world’s taking the one in smock iterates, we are family and we sing god is our father, brothers all are we lyrics i trust will see me thru another week of boys no more than 20 but already wonderfully men and never bless their boy hearts late for mass (and other no-nonsense, dead-serious stuff) only i think it odd how in between songs i get the strangest urge to grab this lovely brother for the sack (incest must run in the family) (“to the handsome boy” 13-24) 73 Here, the speaker takes various aspects of the Eucharistic ritual to express his secret desire for the young boy. There is in all of this an emphasis on the experience of peace. The end of the Eucharistic celebration marked by the phrase “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord” is not seen as a peaceful departure but as a nuisance which would separate the speaker from his object of desire (“shooed”); the notion of brotherhood which is emphasized by a recontextualizating of the song “Let there Be Peace on Earth” (“with god as our father, brothers all are we”) and how the speaker sees his desire as form of incest. The kind of inner albeit temporary experience of peace is found in this space. That the poem is actually simply one long sentence with its long title spilling over to the poem with no hint of punctuation highlights this sense of the temporal. The emphasis here is not on the temporary nature of the experience but the brief experience of centeredness, of peace elucidated by the experience. Garcia’s darker poems about gay life utilize as well the notion of Christian imagery. In these poems, Garcia defamiliarizes Biblical imagery to describe experiences of gay pleasure. In “A-12” he imagines the mythical garden of Eden and paradoxically reassigns new meanings to it to signify pleasures of gay space. The A-12 the poem speaks of is a pseudonym of a male prostitute, “Adams, twelve, bikinied, in a row” (“A-12” 1) in a gay bar. The reference to Adams in itself is a sexualized play on the biblical Adam. Adam in the biblical narrative was for most part naked but was only made aware of his nakedness after committing the original sin by eating the forbidden fruit. Here, the Adam is already naked and is the epitome of carnal pleasure and concupiscence. The 74 naming presents a rather paradoxical kind of positioning. Adams-twelve gives him a mark and thus in a way an identity in this bar. On the other hand, this identity renders him unidentifiable – a numbered pseudonym marking him as merely one of commodified bodies involved in sexy dancing and sultry service. This “Eden’s garden revisited / this late into salvation’s heyday” (9-10) becomes a site where signifiers are confused and taken from their religious context and rewired to articulate paradoxically into practices of the “sinful” and the carnal. The speaker is aware of this as he calls the site a place for a “revisionist show” (2). The bar is a site where these narratives are revised. In this bar, No tree offers knowledge of good for evil is but a matter of opinion Here, nobody complains of anything except when G-strings snap out of key, beer less yeasty, strobes, peek-a-booing none could see God blowing bubbles in the shower. And Eve is a transvestite lip-synching floozy with heavy-ball earrings and torch-singing mouth, Adam’s apple lodged telling in her throat. (5 – 13) The paradise alluded to here is the garden of temptation and perversion. There is a scene of fun and pleasure for everyone: men in G-string, men wet and wild, a drag show, a show featuring “angels in tie” (14), the mistress of this garden being a “Satan… a shedevil eating fire from a spit / on which roasts the babyfat of lost boys” (16 – 17). Notions of morality here are arrested and everyone is invited to take part in dark sexual fun because “sinning is deemed a necessity / after all. The greater the fall, / the more glorious the resurrection” (19 – 21). These lines indicate not only perversion of Christian 75 narrative but ultimately the temporal nature of the experience in the bar. The kind of pleasure (and pain) that happens in the bar, stays in the bar. Resurrection here may not refer to the physical rejuventation of the body, but merely a resurfacing back to the actual world. The more he loses himself, the greater part of his self is regained – a revised, often perverted version in itself of the Christian notion of “the fortunate fall.” We find Adams- twelve standing once more at the end of the poem, this time “naked, in a row – / like serpents charming the first Paradise” (30-31). Adams-twelve is more than just an individual macho dancer. He represents the perversion of the bar which in turn represents the denizens the bar accommodates. They too are naked, stripped away of all clothing and guardedness, anonymous to each other, tempting and tempted in this temporary paradise both lost and found where signifiers are in pleasurable disarray. Another poem which utilizes this Biblical imagery is “From Gethsemane.” The poem is set on a Maundy Thursday during the Christian Holy Week. The poem is a carnal retelling of the Christ’s agony in the garden. At the very beginning of the poem, a gay man is likened to the solitary position of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane: “Maundy Thursday, and you sit in a gay bar alone” (“From Gethsemane” 1) Here, Gethsemane is once more seen as a site for temptation (just as how Jesus was being in a way agonizingly hesitant to go on with his suffering) and as a threshold (as a temporary space between the Last Supper and the coming violence) where we find the guest at the end of the poem leading a serviceman out. The temptation is carried out in a conversation between the manager and the customer: 76 Fernan, the floor manager, comes, makes talk. Softsell, hardshell, in that order. He removes his earring and starts playing it in his mouth rolling it along his lips like the stud whose future he sells down a river of spit You’re new here, what’s your trip? That tall one with acne is eight inches. Just slightly used, so you’ll have to teach him a few tricks. Don’t worry, he learns faster than you can come to conclude he’s not worth it. That dark boy is a master. No complaints from customers so far… (“From Gethsemane” 2-13) The structure of the poem highlights this experience of anonymity in that there are actually three voices that are speaking here (the narrator, the addressee and Fernan) but the lack of punctuation or any form of typographical signaling to indicate who is talking creates a kind of blurring. In this apparent lack of clear delineation in the dialogue, we find ourselves as readers in the same kind of darkness that the people in the poem find themselves in. This sense of disorientation amidst the experience of darkness and anonymity is further highlighted in the next lines where we find it more and more difficult as readers to identify who is speaking and who is being described as conversational language, pricing as well as faces are convoluted: Bar fine is a hundred. Upstairs room ditto. Service is two-fifty fixed, fixed. Ante ups with one’s kicks. Straight sucking is cheapest. His face in the blinking lights is a mask constantly shifting textures. He frets, threatening to give you the best ever, mildly exciting, but beautiful like the movie star who plays Christ in the season’s passion films. Even before you can think He is there, the same smile, the same eyes you keep wanting not to fall into 77 (20-27) Here, the sense of anonymity and fluidity is seen not only in the way we lose ourselves, not only in this convolution of images and voices but also in the way we cannot seem to identify who is playing which role in this corrupted and carnal biblical retelling. The temptation is offered by Fernan who is also seen as a Judas whose earring “glints still more brightly / than any thirty pieces of silver can” (35-36). The speaker is seen as the waiting Christ figure but as he “receives” the man who looks like Christ, he becomes the Judas figure who kisses this figure (30). The darkness offers not only an experience of anonymity but a play on the fluidity of narratives and identities. In these poems which combine the dark experience of being in a gay bar and biblical imagery, Garcia takes the narrative of a Christian mythos and contextualizes them ironically to highlight the pleasures of concupiscence. The narratives of suffering and salvation are rewired into a space in which these articulate bodily pain and pleasure. Christian narratives which in many ways function as a critical bedrock of Filipino mores are utilized to articulate desires made and cultivated in the dark. Darkness thus promises not only the experience of anonymity but the opportunity to remake and reposition particular narratives and everyday knowledge. In the poems of Garcia, we find that experiences of everyday fragmentation and dislocation are used to render the experience of incoherence on the one hand and fluidity on the other. His poems on urban life demonstrate how incoherent identities in the city leads to experiences of impoverishment and suffering. When the night sets in, this sense of incoherence functions as bedrock for new experiences, created under the 78 shroud of darkness which promises anonymity, pleasure and the queer interplay of both. In this subsection, we looked into the ways in which Alfian and Garcia arrest, utilize and deploy the experience of compression and fragmentation in the everyday to articulate gay desire. As in de Certeau’s notion of individual practice, narratives and space, narratives in space function as open sites for creative possibilities. The Poem as Spatial Practice Chapter Conclusion Places for de Certeau are transformed into spatial stories by personal narrative. In this chapter, I sought to demonstrate how the patterns that characterize the urban production of Manila and Singapore enter the ways in which two gay poets write about what it means to occupy and to be gay in these particular spaces. Garcia’s and Alfian’s transformations are infected precisely by their various experiences gay identity. The responses are ambiguous ones: on the hand, discomforting and arid and on the other hand productive and full of life. For Alfian, this articulation is still rendered within the frame of the experience of enveloping. For Garcia, chaos and disorientation are transformed into experiences of pleasure. It comes to no surprise then that de Certeau likens individual practices to a “long poem of walking.” Poetry as I have said in the introductory chapter is an individual rhythmic response to stimuli. The poem for Alfian and Garcia functions as a space in 79 which the structure, the rhythm, the grammar of space is arrested and transformed in various ways to not only articulate experiences of difference, impoverishment and violence but also as opportunities for individual rejuvenation. 80 Chapter Three: Domestic as Site and Sight Cyril Wong and Lawrence Ypil What does a house speak? It speaks of certain enduring affections, it speaks as well of absence, neglect, common infidelities… of distance, distraction, forgetting. – Resil Mojares, “Coming Home” The domestic has constantly been utilized as a viable point for engagement in various literary and cultural traditions. We can think of how Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958) establishes an intricate connection between memory and domestic architecture. Mari Hughes-Edwards (2006) in her analysis of Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry argues, “the central paradox of the interpretation of domestic space is that the home is intensely private and yet concurrently a public arena” (Hughes-Edwards 122). In House of Memory (1997), Filipino historian and writer Resil Mojares orders his autobiographical sketches, writings on history and colonial criticism by assigning his various essays to different particular parts of the house. Suchen Christine Lim’s short stories in The Lies That Build a Marriage (2007) utilize the scene and space of the domestic to talk about the “unsung, the unsaid and uncelebrated in Singapore.” In the story “The Morning After” for instance, a mother grapples and comes to terms with the idea of having a gay son. While the entire story is set inside the house, the mother casts her worried gaze on what she perceives is judging outside world: “What if the army finds out? He hasn’t completed his national service yet. What if the Singapore Public Service Commission finds out and takes away his scholarship?” (“The Morning After” 13). The living room then becomes a critical space where the mother-narrator negotiates the tension between coming to terms with her son’s identity and the perceived prejudices of the world. In all 81 these, we find how the domestic perspective grants a sense of intimacy to human experience and social mores. This chapter thus explores the ways in which Cyril Wong and Lawrence L. Ypil utilize the frame of the domestic as a way to view human experiences. Utilizing the same critical approach I deployed in the previous chapter, the discussion aims to explore how narratives on urbanism and sexuality enter even the most private and locked spaces and how these in turn produce particular discourses that have to do with theme of dislocation and incongruity. The reading of these poems will be supplemented by a discussion of the lyric mode. The chapter will not be an exhaustive critical commentary on lyric poetry per se, but on how the lyric mode as a form is used by both Ypil and Wong to articulate these themes of dislocation. Towards the end of the chapter, I demonstrate how poetic space functions as a domestic space itself, one which the flow of these urban narratives alongside personal experiences and how such a construction is rendered through the precise and unique transformation offered by the lyric mode. The Body In Third Person Dislocation as Theme in Wong’s and Ypil’s Poetry Cyril Wong has written several collections of poetry and is often regarded by critics and peers in the Singapore literary scene as a confessional poet. Specifically, Wong is regarded as Singapore’s “first openly gay poet” (Ng et. al 12). “[Wong] always [makes his] own voice, [his] own personality, very clear in the poems” (Interview with Klein, 217). His own Master’s thesis in the National University of Singapore, From Ararat 82 to Averno: An Analysis of Plot in Louise Gluck’s Poetry (2008) in which he analyzed how Gluck’s last six poetry collection are “held by plot in which the poet negotiates with a world without certainty” (iii) and how these negotiations are laden with autobiographical sketches, highlight Wong’s own emphasis on the biographical interplay between the poem and the poet. Seemingly personal experiences color the tranquil depiction of anguish, melancholy and spiritual hunger for tangible human relations. Unmarked Treasure (2006), the collection to be used for this chapter, exemplifies this technique. Wong’s persona is a ghost haunting particular spaces after a successful suicide attempt. Lawrence L. Ypil is a Cebuano from the southern Philippines who moved to Manila for studies and work. After graduating from the Ateneo de Manila University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology, Ypil studied medicine at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine. In his fourth year, he left medical school and pursued a Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies degree at the Ateneo de Manila University. His collection, The Highest Hiding Place (2009) contains poems he has written from his undergraduate days. Both Wong and Ypil highlight explicitly the role of sexuality in their relation to the world. In both their creative work and critical commentaries such experiences hinge upon particular experiences of dislocation and incongruity. This sense of estrangement and dislocation is not only evident in Wong’s and Ypil’s rendition of familial relationships but also in the way they perceive their corporeality. There is a dislocation between the self and the body. In Wong’s case, he realized that he was gay earlier on in 83 Primary school and such an experience made him feel different from his peers (Interview with Klein 207-208). There were instances, Wong narrates, when he even contemplated suicide because he found it impossible to reconcile his homosexuality with the beliefs his Catholic family adhered to (Interview with Klein 208). This sense of dislocation is especially evident in Unmarked Treasure, where we find this estrangement played out by the trope of ghostliness. Wong’s persona in the collection, as we will see in the succeeding discussion later on signifies not only a severed connection from the body but creates as well a kind of perspective in which the limitations of corporeality and the urban mores of repetition are interpreted and reimagined. In an essay, “Impermanent Residencies” (2007), Ypil likens gay life to the experience of living in a guest room. A real life experience grounds this metaphor. Being the youngest and “unexpected,” he was given the guest room in a house meant for a family of three (Ypil 32). In the essay, he narrates how his life in his small village, his school and his family was similar to the experience of living in a guest room, of being both an insider and an outsider, of being a “[having] a seat at the feast but only at its edge” (34). Akin to living in a guest room, gay life is seen as an experience of transience. As he writes towards the end of the essay: “to be a guest in one’s house is to live in a room knowing you will lose it. To face a mirror that has memorized your shape enough to break it. To know the right time, the perfect time to leave it” (34). At the end of “Impermanent Residencies,” Ypil brings this experience of estrangement to the body. To be gay thus is to speak of “the body in third person” (33). This is best illustrated in his own works where his speakers often talk in the third person perspective. Moreover, 84 Ypil’s experience of dislocation is a multi-layered one – often more pronounced than Wong’s. Unlike Wong, whose urban experience is primarily limited to Singapore’s cityscapes, Ypil’s experience of Manila is a probinsyano’s tale of voyaging into a much bigger city. We can thus go back to John D’Emilio’s assertion of how the experience of travel and migration enables the possibility for the creation of new identities. Probinsyanos who move to Manila for studies (and eventually work) often live without parental or adult supervision and they often lease apartments and other kinds of living spaces. These point not only to experiences of homelessness and distance but also of transience: one does not own any space. Towards this, dislocation then becomes an important recurring trope in Ypil’s poetry precisely because it points to his dual experience as a gay individual perpetually loitering and claiming spaces that he might (or will) eventually lose. Urban migration affords the dual experience of coming out and ultimately the sense of estrangement that comes with such an identity. While these experiences of dislocation and estrangement may not necessarily be unique to either Ypil or Wong – in fact, it may to an extent, speak of the experiences of gay men in general – what is interesting about Ypil and Wong is precisely how these are creatively articulated through the frame of the domestic. Both poets portray domestic space from an imagined distance. Because the house appears distant, sight becomes the most activated sense and the writing from a particular distance becomes a heightened experience of observation. While Wong sees the house in the same way as Alfian – as a space for confinement – his gaze is focused on the interior, on familial relationships and not on the 85 outside. Wong’s speakers are often physically inside the house. Moreover, the house for Wong is seen as a kind of body. In his poems, the house-as-a-body is a place that breeds boredom through repetition and the imposition of dreams that are not his. To dream about death means to be severed from this body, to imagine a discontinuity between the self and the impositions of the house-body. To linger as a ghost means to go beyond the entrapment of physicality. Moreover, as the ghost is a residue of the body, it is both of the body and beyond the body and can thus position itself beyond the limitations of the body. Ghostliness in this respect is not so much about haunting as it is about the kind of perspective he adopts as he imagines himself liberated from the constraints of the parental home. While Wong imagines himself as a ghost, Ypil positions himself in particular locations in the house. The highest hiding place can be likened to a spot in the house where one observes things and events like childhood and familial relationships pass. As related to us in his critical commentary, the distant positioning the speaker adopts is characteristic of his poetry’s dramatic situations as much as it is a real experience for the poet. Although the house he writes about seems to be the one in Cebu, Ypil recreates this in Manila. Thus the kind of distance which undercuts Ypil’s poems is presented to us first as a gay son who has since experienced a particular sense of estrangement at home and as someone writing about this home from an actual physical distance and within a spatial milieu characterized by experiences of dislocation. Wong’s and Ypil’s renditions of strangeness are not only personal but also lyrical. For Wong, the poem has to have “oral beauty [to] it, some music. You cannot just 86 live in the realm of ideas and explain them and call it a poem. It has to have a hypnotic quality about it when you hear it” (Interview with Klein, 228). On the other hand, fragmentation is evident in Ypil’s lyricism. We find that his speaker often talks in broken sentences and even trails of to unfinished thoughts. Unlike Wong’s poems where line cuts often lead one to a complete sentence or thought, enjambments in Ypil’s poems emphasize fragmentation and brokenness. In his Masters thesis, Speaking in a Stranger’s House: Lyric, Speech, Locale and the Writing of The Highest Hiding Place (2010) Ypil provides us with a window to his technique. He writes that while some of the poems talk about childhood and family life in Cebu, a city in the south of the Philippines, these poems were in fact written in Manila (Ypil 4). As such, “the poem on home, like the letter of return, ironically then exposes the poet’s inevitable state of dislocation, as if to lyricize home was to speak of it as if from afar, knowing full well that this state of alienation, this state of ‘afar’ may ironically be the closest one can ever get to more fully understanding it, and returning to it” (26). Critics who have engaged with the lyric mode have often positioned the form that rhythmically disrupts the cadence of the everyday. Northrop Frye (1985) in “Approaching the Lyric” positions the lyric mode as something that may be prove to be disruptive precisely because of how it differs from the routine: “In the lyric, then, we turn away from our ordinary continuous experience in space or time, or rather from a verbal mimesis of it… The private poem often takes off from something that blocks normal activity, something a poet has to write poetry about instead of carrying on with ordinary experience” (31). Such a disruptive potential elucidated by Frye can be found 87 nowhere else but in language itself as Marjorie Perloff (1990) argues: “But how do we talk about such lyric “writings?” The answer… is that language not structure becomes central (28). Mutlu Konuk Blasing in Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (2007) echoes the sentiment: “[The lyric poem] offers an experience of another kind of order, a system that independently of the production of the meaningful discourse that it enables. This is a mechanical system with its own rules, procedures and history” (Blasing 2). In the lyric mode, words are chosen not simply because of their appropriateness but because they fit into a poet’s rhythmic calculation. The lyric mode is both personal and rhythmic. To locate then the uniqueness and, going back to Frye, the intervening and disruptive potential of the lyric mode, one must examine then how the rhythms offer a sense of thematic resonation to the thematic concerns of the personalized “I.” What is unique to Ypil and Wong however is how such urban forms – one characterized as “compression” and the other as “fragmented” – are treated in a liminal way. Compression and fragmentation which, as I have argued earlier on, can be seen as features of the urban fabric which characterizes the landscape and spatial experience of Singapore and Manila, are lyricized and utilized by Wong and Ypil as techniques for poetic engagement. In the case of Wong, there is that intricate containment of melancholy and anguish that is seen in most of the poems’ brevity. In the case of Ypil, there is the weaving of various threads that have to do with the whole notion of fragmentation and dislocation. Thus, through lyricism, Wong and Ypil do not just write about urban experience but engage as well the rhythmic nature of the city. In this chapter, the analysis will also look into the ways in which the rhythmic forms Wong’s 88 and Ypil’s lyricisms contribute to the domestic transformation of private and urban experience. In the next subsection, we will look into the ways in which Ypil and Wong creatively render these experiences of dislocation through the frame of the domestic. A Kitchen Table Emerges Domestic as Site My goal for this subsection is to demonstrate how Ypil’s and Wong’s representations of domestic space are developed through the notion of dislocation wrought primarily from the dual experience of homosexuality and (quite paradoxically) spatial experience of the urban. I will pay particular emphasis as well on how such representations are effectively articulated by the lyric mode. I Sang A Song: The Ghost in the House Unmarked Treasure follows a particular narrative. As readers, we follow the ghost as he navigates through and accesses different parts of the house. One can even see the book as a house in itself. These parts of the house, associated with and clustered into particular kinds of memories are divided into sections partitioned by an untitled poem. The first part, sectioned by a poem on the speaker’s imagined death scene in the bedroom leads us to the speaker’s notion of a weary and exhausting life. The untitled poem on the mirror and cabinet invites us to a section where the speaker-ghost talks about his fronts, his public self. The selections partitioned by an untitled poem on a long corridor introduce us to poems which like the winding and seemingly endless path 89 explore the whole idea of repetition. While the use of the house as central metaphor seems to imply that there is a kind of intimacy to these memories, the use of the ghost as the collection’s primary persona implies a kind of distance. In Unmarked Treasure, the experience of dislocation as this is played out in domestic space is seen as a movement from desire for freedom to an experience of banishment and homelessness. The introductory poem “End Song” prepares us for the entire collection by establishing the motif and the tone for the narrative. “So I’m finally dead,” (“End Song” 1) the speaker says. Death here is seen as a kind of relief, a relief from a life of melancholy. The poem introduces us not only to the thematic narrative of the collection but to a particular emphasis on the lyrical mode the retrospection takes: … I sang a song once as a child, then awoke an adult to sing the same song, although with an irony this time that was beautiful but sad. Beautiful and sad (1-6) A lifespan is seen as a gradual ruination of the musicality of childhood. The repetition of the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘sad’ emphasizes that while the song seems to be the same, there is a sense of melancholy towards it. “Beautiful but sad” tells us of this change while “Beautiful and sad” implies a kind of resignation in that the speaker acknowledges how the theme of the song is both an experience of beauty and melancholy. The motif of ghostliness which the poem brings, establishes as well the kind of perspective that Wong would eventually bring into his creative commentary. This 90 ghostly intervention of the present can be seen in the way the speaker contemplates on his concept of the afterlife: “I hope to sing again after my coffin / closes like a mouth… then [entering] the present like an echo -- / the ghost of an aria in the living air” (7-8, 1112). These last lines suggest two things: first, they point to the idea of ghostliness as an experience of liminality. In this case however, being in limbo does not mean shuttling between the world of the living and the dead but between past and present. It means to visit the past and past lives with the knowledge of the present. Secondly, the use of sound imagery does not only prepare us for the ghost imagery but directs us to the use of the lyric mode itself. The reexamination of his familial and urban life are rendered through a mode which best approximates the act of singing. The rhythm and practices of one’s past life are arrested and rendered in an aria that is the speaker’s own. To reexamine one’s life means to sing about it as an echo. Like a ghost which is the residual element of the body, an echo is but an amplified remnant of the original sound. The bedroom poems build on the theme and tone established in “End Song.” In the untitled poem, the speaker sees himself dying, and thus falling asleep for the last time, and finally staring at his own dead body “half-open mouth on the brink / of a word or yawn; hands lying / on either side of the body” (5-8). A mirroring takes place. The speaker identifies with the body but finds himself removed and different from it. Those were his hands. Those were his eyes. The poems in this section are in a way similar to this: the speaker-ghost finds himself looking at his house portrayed as a kind of body that has since expelled him. 91 “First Home” begins with the speaker “[waking] up in the place where [he] used to live” (“First Home” 1). Stillness is all in this poem and the lines divided into couplets that isolate and focus on one object at a time suggest this. The notion of haunting is emphasized by the seemingly mystical mood of the spatial recreation. Objects appear one by one, “quietly, blatantly/ dreamlike” (2-3). The idea of the house as a kind of body is then established through the images that connote confinement and fixity: “closemouthed cupboards” (3) and “chairs with arms tied behind their backs” (4). As in “End Song,” the images that connote monotony is contrasted by wind imagery. The speaker sees his young self staring at the outside where “clouds are the vast sails of ships / billowing with the future’s unstoppable gale” (17-19). In these last lines, we find the childlike and adult interpretations of clouds converging. The speakerghost brings back memories of how he imagined the clouds once upon a time but shadows this gentle innocent imagery with hints of violence. The precise line breaking makes this contrast more apparent. In this revisitation, the childlike dream of setting sail becomes a foreshadowing of a violent kind of escape. This desire to escape the house is developed in the next two poems. In “Turning Back,” the speaker recalls how his mother “commanded that [his] hair / be gelled into a helmet” (“Turning Back” 1-2). The helmet which signifies both encasement and protection goes back to the secure yet entrapping notion of home. What is also important to identify and highlight here is how the mother seen here as an imposing figure, demands a particular image for her son. 92 We ultimately find in the next poem “Flight Dreams,” a subtle breaking away from the gender-neutrality of the collection. As in “Turning Back” the notion of confinement is woven onto the narrative of parental imposition of (heterosexual) visions: “I would attain / a degree, a job, remain a Catholic, marry a nice girl” (“Flight Dreams” 6-7). The enumeration and conflation of all these different “requirements” (curriculum vitae information, religion, marriage) within a singular sentence strengthens not only the notion of compression but highlights as well (as in the case in Alfian’s poems) heterosexual expectations of productivity. The speaker is expected to replicate particular dreams and visions. The dream of flying exemplifies once more an escape from the house. The result however is not completely a liberating one. In fact, the child’s desire to be “catapulted from that claustrophobic / room of [his] parents’ dream of [his] future” (19-20) is transformed into a narrative of banishment and placelessness. The experience of flight this becomes two-fold: for the younger speaker, it points to a particular desire of escape from the monotony of confinement. For the speaker-ghost now contemplating on what has transpired in his life, it speaks of banishment. The change in scenery – from homeliness to a haunting experience of unfamiliarity – marks this gradual shift from the desire to escape to one of banishment, transience and homelessness: Then I discovered a part of me that rose up in a hundred bedrooms that eventually looked like each other, when a stranger’s hand or mouth would push me back into myself (11-14) 93 Wong’s poems on the house thus highlight a vital connection between the body and the house. Houses are bodies and bodies are houses and both create an experience of confinement. The trope of ghostliness thus establishes two things: on the one hand, they articulate the notion and experience of confinement. The subject’s vision of the past is one that is fraught with images of stillness and of dreams and expectations that are not his. On the other hand, the ghost motif through the wind imagery also articulates a desire to escape, to be severed from this corporeal, physical image. This desire for expulsion ultimately sets off a narrative of transience and homelessness. Such an experience can be a cause for loneliness but this position as an outsider helps carve a critical vantage point for engagement. What Else? Distance in Ypil’s Poems on the House Like Wong’s representations on domestic space, Ypil’s poetic revisioning of homely life is one fraught with experiences unfamiliarity, difference and dislocation. Sight once more becomes the most activated and utilized sense in Ypil’s house poems. Whereas Wong’s speaker is a ghost, Ypil’s recurring persona is a child. Whereas Wong’s notion of dislocation wrought from gay experience hinges on the experience of spatial and corporeal confinement and is played out through a movement from desire to banishment, Ypil’s sense of estrangement is rendered through an interplay between nearness and distance. The house becomes a distant space, even if the speaker is often inside it. We find a sense of disconnection and dislocation not only in the dramatic situation but also in how the language is used, through broken sentences and 94 incomplete thoughts, Ypil’s speakers often talk in the third person, emphasizing once more the dual experience of the “I” as both present and absent, identified yet distant. In the ensuing discussion, I discuss how this notion of distance is fraught in the way Ypil (re)constructs domestic space through the persona of a child and the use of various images and language. Loneliness and isolation are highlighted in “Childhood” where the title of the collection comes from. Here, the speaker’s childhood self sees the house from a solitary vantage point. The images themselves already provide this sense of disconnection. In this solitary positioning where the experience of sight is all, the speaker goes back to his childhood self and enumerates the different things he sees by playfully coloring them. Intimacies are “blue,” (“Childhood” 5) and a singular leap alone down the stairs is seen as a “red-carpeted” (3) extraordinary leap. The otherwise active imagination of the child is contrasted with the sleepiness and silence of the world around him where “the soul [is] asleep beside body” (4). This image of slumber highlights this sense of disconnection (a soul split from the body) and amplifies the speaker-child’s loneliness. This juxtaposition between play and rest culminates in the poem’s last lines: The day asleep beside the reckless rush home. Jump from the highest hiding place. Knife through the lonely run. As when the promise of a waiting small’s long kept. (17-20) This sense of dislocation is not only evident in language use –the use of incomplete sentences is quite evident – but more importantly in how these fragmented articulations give us a hint to the poet’s fragmented vision. The first two stanzas alone highlight this 95 technique. Here we find how the sense of fragmentation in the persona’s gaze is seen not only in his inability to focus on one particular object but more importantly in how his revisions of space are fraught with deliberate mix of the abstract and the concrete: As when there was always something to be done: Run the long yard. Hide the white sigh. A red carpeted jump over the steps of stairs. The soul asleep beside the body. To be young was to love the blue intimacies, Something tied like a knot Tumbling through the thorned bush, Gathering quick the small keeps. (1-8) The sense of dislocation in “Childhood” is thus multi-layered and in many ways grounds the thematic implications of being in this highest hiding place. As in his insights in “Impermanent Residencies,” the spatial experience is characterized as distance within (paradoxically) proximate space. Tangential to this is the overt experience of tranquil loneliness. The child is seen in a nook in the house as the quietness of the world passes him by. The speakers separated from his childhood self by time, eggs his past self on to move. Still, the world slumbers on and the child watches time pass, alone, quietly. This sense of distance provides a perceptive perspective that is simultaneously (and quite paradoxically) impaired. Fragmented poetic language frames the poet’s vision of a broken world. “Room” echoes these themes. Here we find the speaker remembering how his bedroom was severed from the natural flow of things. This sense of disconnection is further transformed into a commentary on the way isolated lives are lived: 96 What else was there to want? Other people, Yes. But sometimes only. Decent lives were lived Without them Without sons and murders And lost coins And tenderness given And even if only. (“Room” 13-21) The isolated and dissonant room is symbolic of the speaker’s disconnected state. Here the speaker recalls several Gospel parables (the prodigal son, the lost coin) that have to do with the notion of losing and eventually finding. The parables point to an experience of homecoming. In this instance however, the speaker seeks to disengage himself from these experiences and renders them unnecessary. As in “Childhood,” the form of the poem and the way in which language is used help develop this theme of brokenness. The line breaks emphasize a particular sense of hesitation and eventual retreat. The speaker gives a reply to his own question, “Other people” but eventually takes it back “Yes. But sometimes only.” The hesitation shows a kind of stepping forward outside into the world and then back again. As in Wong’s poetry, distance is not only seen in the way Ypil relates to domestic space but to family as well. Ypil’s poems present an inability to fit into the picture of the family. In “Lemon Tree,” the speaker-child silently witnesses his father’s show of strength as he cuts down trees that seem to deprive a fruitless lemon tree of light 97 (“Lemon Tree” 1-8). Here, the silent son seems to liken himself to the lemon tree: passive, stationary, the beneficiary of a father’s strong actions. Such a connection between the lemon tree and the speaker becomes apparent towards the end as the father “lifts a dull dead trunk / to the light / for his son to see” (21-23). The identity of the son here is ambiguous. It may refer to the lemon tree who has become subject to the father’s concern or to the son which the lemon tree represents. The father’s show of strength is for the lemon tree as much as it is for the son. Ypil as a son sees himself in many ways like the lemon tree which “grows tall but bears no fruit” (1-2) not only because he is gay but more importantly because of how he appears distant and different from his father’s expectations. In “Being A Son,” the speaker-child walks around the house and “[enters] the afternoon room / and everyone else sleeping with their mouths open, their legs” (“Being A Son” 2-4). As in “Childhood,” silence is all and the act of slumber when juxtaposed with the speaker’s own silence emphasizes this kind of loneliness. He eventually wanders into his doctorfather’s office where he finds him attending to patients. Here, the distance is not merely between the speaker and the unnoticing father. It refers as well to a dissonance between the father’s expectations and as what the now adult speaker realizes, what the speaker would grow up into. The speaker sees himself as “part of a wish” (27) yet also “part of the bad dream” (28) as well. Such a theme of dissonance recurs in another poem “Photograph of My Father” where the speaker over a dinnertime conversation refuses to acknowledge the physical features he shares with his father. 98 The kind of distance Ypil creates in his poetry speaks not only of the way he relates to domestic space but to human experience itself. Intangible human experiences are transformed into spaces as he writes in “Drought:” “Now all the wounds become a place (“Drought” 17). The kind of distance which Ypil creates through the kind of poetic space he carves out of words is one which does not speak of physical distance or an imagined distance from family. It speaks as well of a particular vantage point from which one can see transformed space and one can amplify human experience. Here, he stands the threshold of familiarity and difference. Like the child in “Childhood,” Ypil takes intimacies and the silence of the world and colors them in unique, personal strokes. As reflected in their own commentaries, being gay for Wong and Ypil evokes this particular sense of unfamiliarity and estrangement. These experiences of dislocation are reconstructed as recurring tropes in their poetic rendition of domestic space. The house is seen as something distant and different. This sense of distance is highlighted not only in their rendition of physical domestic space but also in the various notions connected to the idea of the domestic: the inability to imbibe a particular image and to fit into a particular frame. The patterns of spatial production that characterize their milieu quite paradoxically are utilized as vital poetic fabric. For Wong, this sense of compression is seen in the way the house is seen as a confining experience of repetition and boredom. 99 For Ypil, the sense of dislocation is seen in the way his child speakers see themselves severed from otherwise connected spaces. The distances created become a source of loneliness but also offer a heightened sense of awareness. For Wong, this is carried out through a ghost imagery which allows him to navigate between the desire and exile. On the one hand, there is freedom and on the other there is a particular kind of placelessness. While for Wong placelessness becomes the effect of this kind of desire, Ypil transforms any kind of human experience into a place, the highest hiding place that Ypil speaks of a vantage point of solitude where one can engage human experiences as essentially an experience sight. The fragmented and broken lyric amplifies this brokenness and distance. In the next subsection, we will identify how such disconnection from the house is projected into the way both poets view urban experience. When We Saw the City Domestic as Sight We will now into the different ways in which these notions of dislocation and estrangement wrought from gay identity as these are framed through and by domestic space are projected into the way Wong and Ypil render urban experience. The sense of dislocation that one would find in the house poems of Wong and Ypil is the same one which they utilize as a creative frame to view spatial experience. The discussion would thus be centered on how this sense of difference becomes a creative way to re-vise and 100 re-activate urban experience. Estrangement not only elicits experiences of difference but also develops an optic that is simultaneously personal and engaging. I’ve Seen Better Pictures of Men: The Child Voyeur in Ypil’s Urban Writing Ypil brings his child persona in his city writing. Whereas the solitude of the child in his house poems seems to mirror Ypil’s own experience of estrangement and difference, the curiosity of the child-persona in the city mirrors in many ways Ypil’s own discovery and playful reception of Manila’s urban landscape. There too is a vital connection between Ypil’s child persona and gay identity. Ypil’s own journey into Manila is representative of the experience of many individuals from the provinces who have “discovered” their sexual identity as they have voyaged into the city. As D’Emilio argues in “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” urban migration affords an enabling experience: movement from the familial cocoon of the rural to the space of the city widens the threshold for the production of new identities – gay identity, as I have said, is one such identity. In Manila, provincial students, most especially those who attend the universities along major university belts, lease condominium units or bunk with other resident students in dormitories. Miles from family, they draft their own schedules as well as locate places they wish to haunt and loiter around in. There is a sense of adventure and pleasure in the exploration. Night time opens possibilities for the young gay man who has his own watch and who has bed and room beyond the boundaries of parental gaze. Ypil’s own critical commentary in his creative writing thesis reflects this interface between urban discovery and the birth of his gay subjectivity: 101 This dislocation was also informed by a deep-seated sense of difference: a difference which would find its ideological locus in my then growing recognition of my homosexuality, While the physical dislocation proved the more obvious context and concern of the poems, what also seemed evident reading the poems was the extent to which this physical dislocation seemed the mere explicit counterpart of the figurative exile I always felt in my experience of being gay [.] (Ypil 4-5) The gaze is an important aspect of gay subjectivity. Gazing forms the genesis of gay subjectivity. It leads to other acts that have to do with gay practices. Cruising is one such example. The gay cruiser is a wanderer – perpetually searching, discovering and momentarily finding sources for pleasure. Gazing in many ways empowers and brings to life the gay subject. The gaze of Ypil’s child persona is tempered precisely by this sensibility of wonder and eventual eroticized discovery. My discussion of Ypil’s poems in this section will focus first on how most of his city-writing is characterized by a sense of distance and voyeuristic play as these are carried out through the articulation of Ypil’s child persona. In “The Discovery of Landscape,” sight still retains its role as the privileged and most activated sense as the city is observed from a clear distance and is seen as a clustered symbol of magnificence: When we saw the city, we believed again in time. Line of the tall spires and the bend of a bright sky. (1 – 4) The speaker’s vocabulary reflects a child’s wonder: the tall structures are not referred to as buildings or skyscrapers but spires. Moreover, in using “we,” the speaker invites both his addressees as well as the readers to this retrospection and to gaze once more at the 102 city as an awesome man-made creation that exemplifies some of the defining characteristics of modernity: We believed again in perfectibility (if not perfection), in the fresh (if not the new). We named it progress. The past was not warm, so we named it dead. We named everything we could not touch passed. We believed again in what was large. (8-15) We find in lines 11-14 a particular emphasis on the notion of naming. The act of naming (most especially in its biblical sense) functions as a discursive practice of ownership. In this case, this landscape that highlights this sense of greatness is labeled and claimed by the speaker as signifiers of progress. The pronouncement by the speaker affirms the modern vision not only of progress but of the privileging of the individual as well. What we also find here is precisely how the sense of wonder developed and sustained by Ypil’s childlike persona seems to be inseparable from the experience of voyeurism. The curiosity of Ypil’s childlike persona is essentially voyeuristic. In this poem, the lyricism, (in particular, the repetition of “we believed again”) emphasize and reiterate a particular hypnotic quality of this gaze. Towards the end of the poem however, we find this repetitive and hypnotic pull temporarily broken and then returned: When we made the step back— 103 Look. There. Clear measure of the flock on the far tip, of all the missed trips. When we saw the city— (18-22) The dashes here emphasize a break in several ways. On the level of the sentence, the dash signifies a different, differentiated thought. On the level of the poem’s dramatic situation, it signifies a break from the speaker’s attention as well as the reader’s. In using “we,” the speaker and the readers are at once drawn towards this hypnotic allure and are made to be part of the interruption. Finally, we find as well a kind of excitement the speaker feels as he “[makes] the step back” (18) and sees something different, something missed (“Look. There.”). Although we find the speaker looking once more at the city, the dash, the final item at the end of the poem, reveals a kind of differentiated position the speaker makes. The dash establishes the contrast the last line makes with the first one which ends with a comma in that given the way it was utilized in the poem the dash seems to hint once more of another interruption. That the collection actually begins with this poem in a sense also signals to us as well the positioning that Ypil makes. In “The Discovery of Landscape,” we encounter several poetic techniques that Ypil devises in his city writing, all of which are tropes which we found in the way he frames domestic experience. Once more, there is an experience of distance, illustrated in the poems’ dramatic situation and the utilization of fragmented language. This time, the child persona’s dislocated gaze does not highlight a sense of loneliness and dislocation. The broken gaze provokes voyeuristic play. We find that, as far as Ypil’s city writing is concerned, brokenness speaks not only of estrangement wrought from gay identity but, 104 as in Garcia’s case, a viable opportunity for engagement. In Ypil’s case, h sees the objects and places in the city as parts dislocated from their wholes and these provide a reclamation of space that is both unique and personal. In some poems, we find these parts which were originally severed cohering towards the end. In “At the Ballet Rehearsal,” for instance, the speaker chooses to focus on each body part bit by bit: the knees and the arm (4) as they are hoisted into the air and the “torso and thigh” (10) gracefully moving and arcing in the air. He likens the movement of the ballet dancers to the writing of a story and the finale, a “denouement” where everything, all parts of the body “[falls] into place” (13). This sense of voyeuristic play is also brought to the readers themselves. In the poem “Yellow,” he presents a casual scene in the city, of people moving around, and attending to typical affairs on the streets. The speaker however chooses to focus on the color yellow, the only thing that all these individuals share: a “girl’s shirt on the train” (“Yellow,” 2), a young man’s band (3-4), a note (6), a woman’s set of teeth (8), the tarmac (9), the light of a handphone (12). As the speaker moves on, we see that for the speaker, yellow is not only descriptive but also prescriptive. Yellow is a marker of sorts, as he says: Yellow line we don’t cross. We don’t look back at the yellow eye of the sick stranger. (17-22) 105 The technique employed by Ypil – the use of line cuts to cleverly direct our attention towards a particular image – may remind us of that famous imagist poem by William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow” where the precise cutting forces the reader to focus on the seemingly mundane and typical images of a typical sight at the farm. Like the readers of Williams’ wheelbarrow poem who in a sense get to “see” the different images because of Williams’ line cutting, we now get to “see” the yellow in Ypil’s poem. But the picture that Ypil creates for us disorients. Because our attention as readers is focused on the yellowness of things, the flow of the everyday humdrum is arrested. In what seems to be scene of moving people (a girl on a train, a man passing a note, two people on an escalator), the redirection of our attention towards the color causes the scene to freeze, or at the very least disrupts the smooth spatial flow one may get when reading the scene: Yellow which I follow on a girl’s shirt on the train and a boy’s yellow band on his arm and in bright yellow ink on the note a man slips into the hands of the woman with yellow teeth. On the old tarmac: yellow. In the small heads of flashing bulbs in a phone: yellow. (1 -12) 106 Through the precise breaking of lines and the lyrical recreation of urban pace, Ypil thus brings the experience of fragmentation to us through a distortion of the experience of the reading of spatial writing. Like the speaker-child who colors his world in “Childhood,” the act of reading about the seemingly mundane is given literally new color not only through imagery but through lyrical rendition. Ypil’s more gay-themed poems illustrate this creative engagement through a voyeuristic play of parts. He encounters in the poem “The Love of Books” a picture of two men reading two books under a single lamp (“The Love of Books,” 12). The scene is not without a sense of loneliness as the image evokes certain memories for the speaker. These scenes appear distant: I’ve seen far better pictures of this love between two men: two legs entwined, two hands held tight, a whisper in the ear that’s meant to mean we close our eyes when no one’s looking close. (1-6) We find, as in the previous poems that we have discussed, a particular emphasis on parts. Especially notable in this poem is the repetition of certain words - “two,” “close” and later on, “same” – all of which point to a particular bond between the two lovers. Two thus signifies a particular bond between the two lovers. There is then a sense of completeness in this voyeurism. Nothing else can be said or done. Another thing worth noting here is the fact that in a rare instance, Ypil utilizes the first person perspective in 107 his writing. The gaze of the persona in this poem is thus given more individuality and agency. This sense of individuality and agency becomes especially pronounced in the next lines: Yet still, I find myself returning always to this picture of two boys who don’t know well each other yet, but choose to read two books together under the same lamp. (7-12) The playfulness of Ypil’s child persona begins with a kind of identification: the subjects of the speaker’s voyeuristic gaze are “boys” and not “men.” There is also a contrast in the way “two” is utilized, in that the word does not imply a sense of intimate connection. The speaker believes the picture is incomplete and so he playfully recreates the scenario by adding a more intimate narrative to the encounter: Who’ll turn the page at just exactly the same moment when the page of one, says Bless and then the other ends: me Father for I’ve sinned. The sin that says it’s wrong to end another brother’s sentences. Or to decide it’s time to turn it off: the light, the lamp. The book that’s still not done, that’s left half-opened face to face that’s meant to mean we read what can’t be said by hand when we’re not reading. (13-23) 108 The emphasis on parts is especially pronounced in the way the speaker recreates his scene detail by detail (light, then lamp). The imagined act of sexual intimacy is subtly hinted at by parts, as this notion of intimacy is ultimately repositioned as an act of reading by the hand. There is more to this than simply Ypil adding a scene of greater physical intimacy. The speaker not only often sees things as fragmented but he ultimately he fills in the gaps he himself creates. Like the book that is left half-open and undone in the poem, he recreates new perceptions and stories. “Bad Driver, Good Lover,” a “sub-poem” in “Paradise Village: Sketches” offers a challenge to this critical commentary on Ypil’s aesthetics. “Paradise Village: Sketches” is a poem on a village in Ypil’s hometown of Cebu. In “Bad Driver, Good Lover” Ypil brings his pleasure-seeking city voyeur into the way he fantasizes about the driver’s body. The utilization of parts to create this experience of pleasure is once more pronounced: Because he’s just too hot for us to touch we’ll only watch him get down shirtless to it: the sputtering wire, the flat tire, moored at the edge of the road, the old car with its hood open. (“Bad Driver, Good Lover,” 1 – 6) The use of “we” here is not incidental. As in “Discovery of Landscape,” the speaker’s gaze not only provides him with a sense of pleasure but, through the emphasis on each 109 detail, we too as readers are invited to this pleasurable act of voyeurism. As in “Yellow,” the spatial experience brought about by his gaze is brought to the readers. The speaker’s gaze is the reader’s. This becomes especially pronounced in the sub-poem’s last lines when this unified gaze between the reader and the speaker subtly collides with the close-knitted social dynamics of the speaker’s less urbanized milieu and thus ends this act of voyeurism: … We want to pull him over now. Be perfect if he’d bend us over, too. We hope he does not know our mothers well. (16-20) In the poems that I have discussed, I have pointed out the various ways in which the dual experiences of distance and dislocation that characterize Ypil’s notion of gay identity and are ultimately pronounced in his writings on domestic space become a viable form of urban reclamation. Distance and dislocation are not only themes in Ypil’s poetry but are tropes which he utilizes to creatively render the voyage of a gay man into the city. The child persona which we find in his house writings is sustained and utilized to highlight the exciting discoveries of urban space and the eventual experience of an imagined yet personal form of reclamation. We can thus go back to the “Discovery of Landscape” and begin to see how the discovery is not so much about the discovery of a new urban space as it is a pleasurable revelation of how landscapes can be toyed with precisely through a playful, queer gaze. 110 Then It No Longer Mattered: Repetition in Wong’s Urban Writing Cyril Wong’s representations of the urban are likewise extended projections of his creative rendition of domestic space. In Unmarked Treasure, Wong’s speaker-ghost leads us to a narrow doorless and windowless corridor (as the untitled poem describes to us) and into the section where we find poems that touch on notions of repetition in the city. In developing the narrative of a ghost haunting particular spaces in the house and showing that the city and its social dynamics are just as accessible as any part of the house, Wong makes the vital connection between the house and the city. The city as metaphorized by this seemingly never ending corridor is thus no different from the way the house is portrayed, as a body which houses recycled and entrapping dreams and visions. Repetition in the city is not just seen in the experience of space, but more importantly in relations as well. The notion that Singapore’s modernity is characterized as essentially a spatial experience of compression is seen in these varied experiences of entrapment. As in Wong’s poems on the house, this sense of confinement is transformed into an aesthetics of confinement mainly through his speaker. As in Ypil’s case, there is a vital connection between Wong’s consistent persona and the kind of gay subjectivity that is presented in his works. Whereas Ypil’s child persona performs the pleasurable experience of gazing and discovery, Wong’s ghost exemplifies the notion of the wanderer – a trope which we saw in his writing on domestic space. Wong’s ghost persona is a haunting flaneur – both similar and different from Walter Benjamin’s. Like 111 the Benjaminian flaneur, Wong’s ghost is a liminal figure – both inside and outside of the sensibilities of the city. On the other hand, because the city (and all its entrapping notions of repetition) is represented as a kind of body, the ghost’s alientation (and therefore the gay man’s subjectivity) is a bodily, corporeal one. This then is the milieu that Wong’s ghost persona works around with. The kind of wandering we find here is not a physical as it is one that places emphasis on the notion of perpetually searching. Searching, wandering is part of urban experience. The dislocation which is especially pronounced in his writing on family life is projected and utilized as a creative sensibility that repositions and reclaims urban experience. In the discussion that follows, we will first look at the various ways in which this connection between the confining experience of urban life and the corporeality of the body is established by the speaker. Next, we will look at how such interface is utilized to render gay life in the city. “Train” establishes this connection between bodies, the city and the notion of mechanized routine. The urban critique of the poem lies primarily in its brevity and precise use of line-cutting: At every moment we are changed, yet we clutch at bars engraved with our fingerprints from Boon Lay to Pasir Ris, keeping our stiffened bodies adamantly still, along the train’s singular direction (“Train,” 1-9) 112 The precision in the way the lines are written contributes to the way this idea of repetition and singularity of direction is developed in that almost each line in this nineline poem ends with a reference to the passengers: “we are,” (1) “we” (2), “our fingerprints,” (4) and “stiffened bodies.” (7) In isolating these words at the end of each line, we find the passengers changing from humanized “we’s” to cold “stiffened bodies” as they journey from one end of the East-West line to the other (5). “Stiffened bodies” which may refer to corpses connote how the experience of routine renders the living body paradoxically lifeless. The brevity of the poem provides a sense of irony. A ride from one end of the East-West line to the other normally takes an hour yet here we find the transformation through the brevity of the poem to be quite fast. The brevity hints us to how fast bodies decay through mechanical repetition. This sense of repetition in the city is pronounced as well in poems that deal with desire. Although “Part of a Discussion” does not seem to make any references to urban spaces and objects, we find that Wong’ adaptation of the Adam and Eve story is still hinged upon the connection between bodies, desire and the cyclical notion of repetition. In this retelling, the “fruit” of Adam and Eve’s disobedience is not entirely banishment from paradise but boredom: “Eve: Except nothing happens. That was what the fruit was / about: one bite and boredom exploded like juice to fill our / mouths” (“Part of a Discussion” 1-3). The juice which points to boredom would refer to bodily sweat (9) and thus alerting to the idea that boredom and repetition is essentially a bodily experience. Boredom becomes a vacuum which the body must fill. Adam assigns a word for it: desire (12). That it was Adam who realized this insight makes this reference to the act 113 of penetration even more interesting as it is of course the male figure (or the masculine figure) who makes the act of penetration possible. The notion of repetition is introduced by Eve who says that “[frustration] follows. Then weariness. Cyclical. With an / unstoppable rhythm: our hearts keep the time, drum out its / indifferent tempo” (13-15). Eve anticipates that desire can get weary and tired and so Adam replies: “We will have each other / Or more of us if we have to” (16-17). The poem suggests that boredom and the cyclical hunger for desire are part of human experience. This makes more sense if we explore the biblical reference further. The fall of a man is theologically seen as the beginning of the narrative of mortality, the concept of the body as a gradually decaying entity and of human concupiscence. The poem claims that to be human is to desire and to remain hungry for carnal satisfaction. Wong’s more explicitly gay-themed poems illustrate this idea of repetition as well and, like “Train” and “Parts of a Discussion,” emphasize how such an experience cause a kind of bodily exhaustion. Both poems are patterned in similar ways. Both begin with a lament and end with resignation and acceptance of these experiences of repetition. This sense of bodily weariness is evident in “Promiscuity” as the speaker one day realizes that: Then it no longer mattered whose body it was that pinned me to the bed, as long as I was pinned. Do you love me? was the hardest question I had to answer…. (“Promiscuity,” 1-6) 114 The utterance which marks the beginning of the poem articulates this sense of weariness. “Then” marks a turn (and a realization of that turn) in the speaker’s life. The seeming lifelessness of the repetition, moreover, is further seen in how the focus of the love-making falls merely on the faceless body and what the body does. Moreover, in juxtaposing “pinned” and the question “Do you love me?” in the same line, Wong alerts us to how this notion of repetitive experience is pinned to the body. What we find in “Aubade” is not only an interplay between the trope of having faceless lovers and the notion of repetition but ultimately how the body itself becomes configured to the cyclical rhythm of urban life Wong confronts the hard and harsh realities of being left by many different lovers, waking up to a bed half-empty and in the end having to keep up with the routine of the everyday: Getting up. Harder with each indifferent hour I remain in bed. Soon, sunlight enters the room like a lover and everything is touched. The self sliding shut over something not quite meant to be imprisoned. (“Aubade,” 1-9) The periods in the opening stanza punctuate the constant agony and the difficulty of the experience. Here, the punctuations and the line cuts give us access to the speaker’s stream of thoughts as each image and idea is conjured one by one. The speaker realizes that there is no time to mope or think about the loss as the day calls him on: 115 Some days the process is delayed – brief comfort of nothing in the head. But the day demands I heave off the bed – anchors into sea. (10-15) Abandonment becomes part of the routine and “words like loneliness / creep back into spaces / between each heartbeat” (16-18). Wong uses the italics to emphasize difference between his own thoughts. Here the loneliness of the city becomes part of the speaker’s body. He is in fact inserting it into the very rhythm of the body as he in turn clocks in to the rhythm of the city. The poem thus deals with several intertwined kinds of rhythm: the rhythm of the day as this highlights the cyclical experience of urban life and as these become pulses of the speaker’s the body. Wong’s urban poems thus extend the ghostly motif vis-à-vis his representation of domestic space in several ways. Wong writes the totalizing experience of urbanism unto the body. The poems on the house help prepare us for this commentary because the house and urban space are essentially spaces of confinement and exhaustion wrought from the experience of repetition. Like the house, the exhausted urbanized body becomes the corporeal space for such narratives to be written unto. The poems that talk about human relations suggest that this notion of repetition is very much ingrained in the personal as much as it is a narrative of public. The poems on desire in human relations make this articulation more apparent as this sense of homelessness and strangeness becomes a kind of insatiable desire. Desire becomes a kind of melancholic 116 rhythm which resonates with the repetitive of the city itself, the very sad song which the speaker-ghost remembers as he brings his eyes to a close. The lyric form amplifies this kind of lament and critique of urbanism. As the kind of aria sung after death, melancholy is given form and to be a ghost means to sever one first from the house-body and from the body which has exhausted itself with the repetition of things. In this discussion I have outlined the ways in which Ypil and Wong apply the domestic perspective in the way they creatively render urban experience. Dislocation, as we have established earlier on, is a recurring theme in Wong’s and Ypil’s poetic and even autobiographical writings. This experience of dislocation is pronounced in their city writing. Distance and dislocation here provide Ypil’s child persona an optic which he utilizes to playfully recreate urban experience. As he likens the house to a body, Wong likewise writes notions of urbanism to the body. By positioning himself as a ghost, Wong imagines himself distanced from the typified and repetitive rhythm of the city. Wong’s trope of a wandering ghost is simultaneously here and there, possessing knowledge of the space and the social relations and existing beyond it. The Poem as Domestic Space Save for a handful of poems, the gay presence in Unmarked Treasure and The Highest Hiding Place is not that overtly evident. In this chapter, by connecting several anecdotes from biographical sketches, I sought to demonstrate how these experiences wrought from gay identity are deeply embedded in the ways in which the house, 117 arguably the most familiar and intimate of spaces, is represented and how such representations enter the way they examine urban life. In their autobiographical sketches, both poets perceive gay life as essentially an experience of dislocation. This becomes especially pronounced in their writings on domestic space. Moreover, the spatial experiences of compression and fragmentation that characterize their milieu are utilized as poetic material in these renditions of domestic space. In both, the lyric mode is utilized to amplify this experience. The fragmented cadence for Ypil mirrors this sense of disconnection. Wong’s lyricism mirrors the kind of aria he sings of – a life characterized by a melancholy. As mentioned earlier in the introductory section of this chapter, the lyric poem draws its power from its disruptive potential. In this chapter, I have demonstrated how Cyril Wong and Lawrence Ypil utilize the lyric form in the way they rewrite urban experiences. Experiences of dislocation do not only highlight a particular sense of loneliness and alienation. These also have creative potential which may be used to activate new experiences of perceiving the city. Both Ypil and Wong transform this experience into a kind of perspective in the way they write about their cities. The lyric mode amplifies this sense of arrest because he urban experience is given a personal cadence and form. Both Ypil and Wong realize this potential as they take the arrest and disrupt the rhythms of the city through their poetry and make their voice more pronounced. For Ypil, the broken poem highlights not only his fragmented self but, more importantly, the kind of engagement he makes with the urban. For Wong, the lyricism he offers is a unique aria that laments but ultimately gives voice to one who chooses to detach himself from the 118 ebb and flow of repetitive urban experience. The emphasis on the body then as a site for such repetitions and the use of the ghost to epitomize this sense of imagined liberation becomes more realized. The poem thus in a way becomes the poet’s very own domestic space itself. This space, I argue, is different from the house which has since expelled them. The space of the poem, created and governed by its own lyrical rhythms is the highest hiding place, the unmarked treasure, which mediates narratives of distance, anguish and strangeness. 119 CONCLUDING CHAPTER To Write the “Wrong” Writing as Presence, Presence as Writing In 1994, gay writers and academics in the Philippines came out with the first volume of Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. The book whose title in Filipino means “to unfurl,” a verb often associated with the act of coming out, was a first in a country predominantly populated by Catholics and governed by faithful dogmatic interpretations of Catholic doctrine. It showed not only “the sundry creative and wonderful ways in which homosexuality can be lived and enjoyed” (Garcia xviii) but also the physical pain and spiritual anguish experienced by gay men especially in private and privatized urban spaces. In his preface editor and poet Danton Remoto makes a bold declaration “Hindi niyo na kami mabubura” (You can no longer erase us) (Remoto ix). Remoto’s statement is provocative on two levels. While he speaks of the pieces collected, selected and published in the anthology, the declaration is also an existential and even political one: we are gay, we exist and we are here to stay. The statement provokes and even taunts. In using na, a word used to emphasize immediacy or evoke a sense of finality, Remoto articulates what he hopes would be the end of a particular form of silence and to the immediacy of making a permanent mark in physical and imagined space. He speaks also to the niyo (the other) and tells them that any effort made to “erase” them now is almost impossible. Remoto’s use of the denotative and connotative meanings of 120 “erasure” is interestingly provocative for what he evokes in the end is precisely the power of writing as an act of identity-making: that writing is a form of presence and presence, a form of writing. Hindi niyo na kami mabubura then speaks not only of the published poetry and prose in Ladlad and their possible entry into mainstream literature but refers as well to the possible writing and weaving of new narratives into the fictions and history. For both the contributors and editors of Ladlad writing then becomes a discursive act for the personal and political and what is at stake is one’s spot in material and imagined space. In 2010, Singaporean gay and lesbian writers reached the end of a two-year project and released GASSP: A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose (2010). Although lagging behind when compared to their Filipino counterparts by two books, the anthology in itself is rich. The section divisions give one an idea as to how the gay and lesbian writing came about in Singapore. Similar to Remoto’s position on the act of writing, the anthology editors and foreword writer place emphasis on the role of writing in the articulation of identities. In her foreword to the book, Audrey Yue placed emphasis on the role of place and space as a site for gay and lesbian discourse. Spaces for Yue are sites where multiple identities are negotiated, mediated and performed (Yue 6). Yue argues that the writings in the anthology “hold together the postcolonial sexual futures that characterize the local diversity of the socially stratified and multilingual community and the radicality of the nascent gay and lesbian movement” (6). Writing thus provides a space for such an engagement to take place. In many ways, the works 121 published in the anthology function as space for such negotiations and articulations. The text in many ways functions as an indelible mark in space and as space itself. The thesis thus affirms this triangular interplay between place, sexuality and poetry. In the thesis I have tried to demonstrate how the poetry of four gay poets are informed not only by their sexuality but their sexuality in relation to a particular place. For this thesis I chose to compare two cities which share particular similarities as well as differences. Both cities negotiate various competing narratives (local/global, ruralized/transational, heartland/cosmopolitan) that increasingly become more tensed as both are propelled by globalized orientation. While the thesis does not aim to be a commentary on the global processes, one cannot speak of urban production in contemporary times without placing it alongside the discourse of globalization. As Lin and Mele write in their introduction to a subsection in The Urban Sociology Reader (2005), “[modern] cities are creations of the capitalist system” (Lin and Mele 13). We therefore could not begin our analyses of their poetry without looking at the many ways in which narratives of capitalist modernity enter the process of urban production. Thus, in the introduction I argued that the ways Manila and Singapore negotiate and mediate such flows and differences are horizontalized fragmentation and vertical respectively. For Manila, this negotiation is carried out by horizontalized pull in which excesses and mess as Tadiar would put it are constantly spaced out. To experience the city of Manila therefore is to experience a sense of dislocation, distance and fragmentation. For Singapore, the negotiation is rendered through a sense of verticalized compression. With limited space to work with, the compression that characterizes the 122 modernity of Singapore is not only done spatially but socio-culturally as well. Such urban productions inform the way various identities and in the city and inflect the way in which gay identities are created and performed. In the two body chapters of the thesis, I sought to locate the ways in which such renditions are made. In all, we have seen how the different conditions that have to do with the urban experience in capitalist modernity inflect the sensibility of the gay subject. The first chapter focused on how Alfian Sa’at and J. Neil Garcia copy and represent these notions of compression and fragmentation in the way they write about everyday space and practices. I argued that being gay gives Alfian and Garcia the opportunity respond to these spaces and concepts and differently. The everyday is seen as a space of liminiality and it is through this liminality that Garcia and Alfian are able to offer alternative renditions of the everyday. The poetry of Alfian and Garcia thus mirrors this kind of liminality – copying the notions of compression and fragmentation and then using these to reactivate spatial experience inflected by gay experience. For Alfian, this notion of confinement is especially pronounced in the way he utilizes the everyday to critique the demand to reproduce a particular image. Garcia’s aesthetics of self-splitting on the other hand is very much informed by his notion of gay subjectivity – of an overt tension between the inner self and the outer selves. Moreover, his writings on the city – his gaze directed at issues that deal mostly with poverty and spiritual impoverishment – establish the vital connection between the marginal experience of poverty and gay subjectivity in urban space. We then see how his affinity with the materially impoverished individuals in the city is very much informed by his notion of 123 gay subjectivity. The trope of self-splitting thus highlights the violent and impoverished state of gay subjectivity. In the second part of this chapter, I located the many ways in which Alfian and Garcia utilized these same patterns of production to articulate gay desires. Gay subjectivity thus is located precisely in their liminal response to space. From the outside going in, the second chapter, “Domestic as Site/Sight” explored the ways in which Cyril Wong’s and Lawrence Ypil’s creative and poetic reconstruction of private space is projected into the way they view urban space. Ypil’s poems however personal illustrate the possibilities created and afforded by urban migration. Wong’s melancholic renditions of urban space highlight the lifelessness wrought from repetition. Different from Alfian’s own renditions, Wong’s gaze is directed not on the political but the personal. Dislocation and distance as trope could be seen in the way they reconstruct domestic and urban space. Of particular interest in this chapter was well is how these poets used the calculated precision of the lyric form in arresting and rewriting these patterns of urbanism. Through these chapters, I have tried to show how this interplay between sexuality and urbanism enters the ways the various facets of spatial experience: the public and the private. In all, I hoped to show that being a gay poet is not just about being gay but performing such desires and practices within a specific space, responding to those space’s rhythms and arresting and rewriting them. To the Stars, To the Stars Invitation For Further Research 124 The thesis may be extended in various ways. One obvious possibility is to apply the kind of reading I did to other gay poets in Manila and Singapore. Given time and space constraints, I was forced to omit other gay poets such as Singaporean poet Ng Yisheng and Filipino poets Jaime An Lim and Ronald Baytan. Ng’s Last Boy for instance offers a particular interesting challenge in that most of his works extensively borrow images from myths, legends and other literary contexts. Can one therefore still situate Ng in a particular spatial context? What possibilities of reading does his more cosmopolitan poetics offer? A Filipino gay poet which may seem to be of interest would be Ronald Baytan. Like Ng, retellings figure in much of Baytan’s works. In his dissertation, Baytan clarifies that these retellings inform his project as a gay poet: “By rewriting these stories and legends, I would like to resurrect the voices of the marginalized subjectivities that have been excluded from the grand narratives of the Chinese Filipino culture” (28). Baytan is thus clear in the way he positions these Chinese retellings, as a set of narratives against the homophobic and conservative culture of the Chinese Filipino community that “has chosen to forget its same sex past” (27). Particularly interesting in Baytan’s retellings is his emphasis on the body as a marker of transience. Such a notion is carried out as well in his poems on lovers where there is keen emphasis on bodily pain and pleasure. The city for both Ng and Baytan seems to be absent yet the various notions of compression and fragmentation/dislocation are still present. An interesting challenge would then be to locate the ways in which Ng and Baytan erase the urban landscape yet apply the patterns that govern their production to a certain degree. 125 Another way to apply the findings of the thesis would be to look at other forms of writing (prose, plays) and other cultural texts (such as film) in analyzing the interplay between cities and sexuality. The analysis need not be limited to gay men alone. Dianne Crisholm (2005) in Queer Constellations utilizes a Benjaminian perspective in reading the prose narratives of writers like Samuel Delany, Robert Gluck and Gary Indiana to “expose the catastrophe of late urban modernity that redevelopment conceals” (Crisholm 8). Crisholm’s emphasis on prose narratives locates the various ways in which queer writings intervene in the production of history and what she calls “collective memory.” Crisholm connects the destruction and reconstruction of queer space to the ruination of urban experience and locates the ways in which queer prose writing carves out these spaces for forms of critical and creative engagement. A viable text for this as study and as a viable point for departure would be the recent GASSP book which seems to represent different writings from the LGBT community of Singapore. One may also utilize the theoretical apparatus I used in analyzing Manila and Singapore in the introductory chapter. In my comparative reading of Manila and Singapore, I called our attention to the ways in which other poets responded to the spaces of Manila and Singapore. I alerted us to the ways in which these notions of compression and fragmentation are present as well in the poems of other writers. Of particular interest for instance is Filipino poet Conchitina Cruz’s urban poetry. The female voice in the poetry of Cruz is quite apparent in her works. Moreover, there seems to be a tension between fragmentation and coherence in her work. Poems like “Geography Lesson” and “What is it about tenderness” echo these notions of 126 fragmentation. On the other hand, poems like “Elegy” where she represents the city as a familiar room where memories are near and often accessible, counter this notion of fragmentation and chaos. It would then be interesting to locate the ways in which these urban patterns and experiences are negotiated by a female voice. Having lived in both Singapore and Manila, I can say they are both cities of possibilities and adventure. Singapore as an open, global city attracts tourists, investors as well as skilled and educated potential employees. The messy uncertainty in Manila on the other hand continuously offers unpredictable adventures. The literary and creative scenes of both cities echo this kind of attraction. The lights and sounds of the cities are a mine of creative and critical possibilities. 127 Bibliography Alfian Sa’at. A History of Amnesia. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2001. __________. Interview with Ronald Klein. Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature Volume 8: Interview II. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2009. 15-37. __________. One Fierce Hour. Singapore: Landmark Books, 1998. __________. The Invisible Manuscript. Unpublished. 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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 135 [...]... violence The notion of “queer spaces” on the other hand points to those spaces that require “activation” and reveals how narratives of spaces are impermanent and destructible In the case of Singapore, the gay and lesbian movement has been increasingly tied to the creation and appropriation of space In “Tipping Out of the Closet: The Before and After of the Increasingly Visible Gay Community in Singapore ... seen in the poems of Alfian and Garcia respectively Notions of fragmentation and compression are seen in the way Garcia and Alfian write about particular experiences and unsettling conditions of difference in their poetry I then extend the analysis and look at the gaythemed poems In the same way that gay sexuality offers creative possibilities to reexperience and redraw space, the gay- themed poems of Alfian... necessary determinant in the creation and production of identity Indeed, the gay and lesbian movement in Singapore has become a constant struggle to the creation and legitimization of space Heng cites that the earliest indications of such articulations were the opening of a bar called Niche and the beginning of cruising culture in the 1980’s (Heng 83) 25 The social movement of the gays and lesbians however... well of multiple internal narratives and systems that often compete with the narratives of other spaces in the metropolis Tangential to this is the so-called ruralization of Manila The occupation of informal settlers in the center has both physical and socio-cultural implications This presence influences much of the policies and patterns of urbanism that spatially articulate the tension between the. .. from the creation of space to a movement of integration to the imagined space of the nation Kean Fan Lim in “Where Love Dares (Not) Speak Its Name: The Expression of Homosexuality in Singapore (2006) cites that one of the more prominent activities for the gay and lesbian scene were the Nation coming out parties in 2001 and 2002 organized by the administrators of Fridae.com (Lim 145) The naming of the. .. Hiang Khng traces the formation of gay and lesbian community in Singapore from the 1960’s to the present While his focus lies primarily on the formation of the gay and lesbian movement, Heng’s comparison between the liberation movement in the west to the socio-political situation in Singapore reveals albeit tangentially the necessity of space Space and more importantly the creation of space become a... heterosexuality in one's work and assume its ‘natural’ superiority over all forms of desire” (164) Most of his poems demonstrate this sense of awareness in that they map out the life and melancholy wrought from gay life along the contours of the metropolis Gay love and desire can be found in the jeepney (“Cypher, 2”), the cinema (“Subtheatre” and “Subtheatre 2”) The temptation and the desire for warm bodies... to the structured narrative of the Singapore state 26 This notion of fluidity in relation to space is also seen in Manila s LGBT scene The annual pride march in Manila cuts through the different busier parts of the metropolis The most recent march held on 4 December 2010 saw gay and lesbian women marching through the streets of Tomas Morato in the middle of local and multinationally managed shops and. .. deemed the seat of the economic and ecclesiastic power of colonial Philippines and from 1580 to 1625, Manila became the foremost capital of Asia and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity” (34) In this respect, the tall walls of Intramuros did not just help repel invasions They also compressed people as well the narratives of guns, gold and God Colonial Manila s urbanism thus 12 materialized the logic of colonialism... Alfian and Garcia utilize the same notions of the everyday to render gay experience In both the everyday is seen as spaces and that become the cause of unsettlement but also of liberation and freedom In the case of Alfian, there is a movement in the way the everyday is positioned from an experience of compression to one of safe enveloping In Garcia’s case, gay experience moves from an experience of homelessness ... towards the idea of progress promised by the post-Enlightenment notion of the modern and maintained by the gradual mechanization of the body The geography of the city affected the disposition of the. .. at the gaythemed poems In the same way that gay sexuality offers creative possibilities to reexperience and redraw space, the gay- themed poems of Alfian and Garcia utilize the same notions of the. .. write about their cities The third and final subsection positions the relationship between the gay poet and urban space and problematizes the role of the gay poet and what unique forms of engagement