A Sense of Movement: Keynote, RI Creative Writing Festival

This is apparently what I look like while teaching (!)

I was thrilled to be the keynote speaker at Raffles Institution’s Creative Writing Festival on 28th May, one of many initiatives that now exists to develop younger writers (not unlike that closest to my heart, the MOE Creative Arts Programme!) Since I also turned 30 last week, I had to find a way to use Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, which is a poem I’ve come back to on my birthday every year… since I was a student at RI.

Everything comes full circle. Here’s my talk, with some light edits.

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When I was a child, my mother tells me, I hated being pushed around in a pram. This was very inconvenient for my parents, who had no choice but to carry me everywhere; or, after I discovered the ability to walk, then run around on my own, had to worry about losing me among the supermarket shelves. I simply hated going from point to point on my back with nothing to look at but the sky. Far better to ride on Dad’s shoulders, and watch a new world open up at every street corner.

Within a few years everything changed. Maybe it was the math tuition or piano lessons, hallmarks of so many Singaporean childhoods (including mine). It felt like there was always somewhere to be, something to be done. By the time I was your age, these destinations had become the main event of every day, while the journeys between them faded into the background. Once the school bell rang, I knew I had to head on to my volunteering shift or orchestra practice somewhere. And if I was excited to spend the next ten or twenty minutes on the bus, it was just so I could catch a nap before having to busy myself once again.

My dad: he raised me (literally)!

So what do our journeys mean to us, and how does our answer to this question change throughout our lives?

This year’s festival is all about place, and over the next few days, you’ll learn to use your words to transport others into the public and personal spaces that are special to you. My focus this morning is a little different. Sure – places are important. But how do we get to them? Even to arrive here this morning, some of you will have come early and wandered the corridors, looking for the right classroom. Others will have dashed across the parade square with minutes to spare. Unless you’ve learned to teleport, we are all constantly figuring out how to get from place to place. To move, in other words: which is one of the few things we all have in common.

“But wait!” I hear you say. “I write stories – I make stuff up all the time. My characters will teleport if I make them. Problem solved.”

Indeed. In a world entirely of your imagination, why bother about something as boring as moving around?

I think there are two good reasons for this. The first is: as writers, we are always trying to close the distance between our readers and our characters, and by extension, ourselves. We do this by giving them – our readers, but also our characters – as real a sense of what it means to be alive as possible. It’s no accident that the word ‘animal’ shares the same root as being ‘animated’, or lively. In the original Latin, ‘anima’ refers to breathing, that most basic of movements, as well as to a creature’s soul or life force. When you watch Japanese anime, that’s what you’re watching: a static drawing that comes to life on your screen.

To be alive is to move: to rise, to eat, to sing, and yes, to breathe. But it’s no good being ‘alive’ in general. The verbs we use to animate our characters can reveal so much more about them, because we move in ways that are so specific to our bodies and our place in the world. At the close of his poem ‘Ulysses’, the poet Alfred Tennyson imagines his hero, now aged, setting out on one last spectacular quest before he dies:

“Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
[…] It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Listen to the verbs he uses: “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”. We might just hear in them the troubled voice of an older man who must convince himself that this long journey will be worth it in the end.

The second reason is a more subtle one. No matter how hard we try to imagine a static universe, with the stars and continents fixed in their places, the truth is that our world is a moving one. The earth keeps spinning, setting in motion the tides and seasons; in our own lives, people come and go. Even for The Flash, the superhero who can travel at the speed of light, the ability to stop time is only an illusion – events must still take place, even if he manages to race ahead of them. The same must go for any world that you create in your stories and poems, in order for it to resemble the world your readers know best, which is the one we live in.

We learn from a young age that our world is one of distances: think of the separation anxiety every child feels on the first day of school, when their parents drop them off at the gates. The first poem that I ever learned by heart is ‘Walking Away’ by Cecil Day-Lewis, which remains one of my favourite poems today:

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be […]

It approaches distance from the opposite perspective: that of the father watching his son walk away, “like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem”. This moment from eighteen years ago is burned into his mind; though of course the whole point of the poem is that time’s onward march cannot be stopped, and those we love will leave us one day.   

So here’s the big idea I want to leave you with. Like this poem on the screen, any story or poem that moves your readers (in every sense of the word) must tackle the challenge of how to pin a moving world to the page, or perhaps, how to stop time just long enough for your readers to really feel the world moving around them. The most effective writers are the ones who are able to capture just what it means to move from place to place, in a world that’s moving around you.

There’s a poet from Singapore who does this really well. Born in wartime Chungking, Wong May arrived in Singapore after the Japanese Occupation and grew up here, attending St Nick’s Girls School. Later in life she moved again: to the US, Germany, and then Ireland. When I heard her life story, my first thought was – how did this lifetime of movement shape the way this poet saw the world?

Let’s take a look at her poem ‘Kampong Bahru 1975’ – named after a village near Outram Park, close to the old KTM train tracks. The name literally means ‘new village’, distinguishing Kampong Bahru from an older village that existed nearby. Now, the first thing you’ll notice is the way the words are arrayed across the page; the poem sways into being like smoke rising from a fire. That’s the kind of motion you imagine when she identifies a sound, that of the “Muezzin’s voice”, as the main animating force of the poem, the thing that moves “the hair, the sleeves, the burnt grass / near the gravel”. She also tells us what doesn’t move, or doesn’t change, which is the meaning of the word “immutable”: it’s the light that falls at dawn or dusk, the “same ray”, she tells us, that falls on this scene “as over an ancient battle-field”.

Read the full poem at the link in the paragraph above!

So why does she distinguish so clearly here between the sound that moves – that calls “from all corners”, that “looks in all nooks & crevices” – and the light, that doesn’t? We find our answer in the final lines of the poem, where she reveals that this voice is one she remembers from her childhood; a voice so distinctive and so sad that it once prompted her to say, “one day I shall have no home”. And now, twenty years later, with the sound that defined her childhood being so far away, it is no longer the Muezzin’s voice but this phrase, this idea of “having no home”, that “echoes everywhere”, “over & again”. The village of her childhood has disappeared, and she too has moved to a new country, her own ‘Kampong Bahru’: what follows her from place to place is this deep sense of “lostness” that she is simply unable to shake.

For other poets who leave one country behind and embark on long journeys elsewhere, the cost is much more personal. Those of you coming to my workshop this afternoon will have a sense of this as we look at some poems by migrant writers in Singapore – many of whom work here in the construction industry, or as domestic helpers. But for now, I want us to look at another poem by a Singaporean who has moved overseas, ‘Singapore Buses Are Very Reliable’ by Koh Jee Leong. The title itself points to the act of travel: though not over great distances, but just the short, familiar bus rides within Singapore that we’re all familiar with.

From its very first line, the poem points us to a central figure – “she” – who is never named, but we know immediately who it is. Someone who rings her son from miles away with news about everyone in the family. Someone who is always the first to call when anything happens, who “won’t let anyone else” do it. Someone whose habits are so distinct, so reliable, that the poet can’t imagine them not happening, even when she’s gone. “She will tell me herself that she has died”, he writes, a sentence so absurd and yet so ordinary. It is the force of predictability that throws everything off balance. Which is exactly what will happen – or at least what the poet imagines will happen – on the day of her fall. The handrail of the bus is always there, until it isn’t.  

The poet compares this to another incident, when as a child, he snatches his hand from his mother while crossing Orchard Road. The action is the same – he says his mother “grabs air” – but if she is the one to feel the loss before, he is the one who will feel the loss now. In some ways, the poet’s action of snatching his hand away reads as a precursor to him leaving home (in Jee Leong’s case, moving to New York), and being far away on the morning when the worst happens. There’s a sense of regret too: what if she had been able to steady herself by holding on to her son’s hand that morning, rather than reaching for the bus railing, and finding only the air?

When the world moves in abrupt and unexpected ways, we are left reeling, having been tricked into thinking that things will always stay the same. Disaster shakes us out of complacency; suddenly, things are no longer like they are on every other day. “She will compare one day to another”, the poet says, and you can almost hear him coming back again and again in his mind, to this one terrible day. What is “reliable” has broken down: this day, this road, this bus journey, is not like all the others.

Now let’s zoom back out. What have we learned?

Envisioning different scales of movement in poetry.

I hope you’ve gotten a sense of the different scales of movement that both poets have tried to illuminate. On the most immediate level, in Wong May’s poem, the waving of grass, or lizards creeping in the dark. Then day-to-day movements, like the Muezzin’s call to prayer, a mother calling her child, or a journey on the bus. Or movements that shape a lifetime, as we see in both poets’ decision to uproot themselves, which makes Wong May say, “one day I shall have no home”. And finally, the emotional upheavals that change the poets themselves in immeasurable ways, like the loss of a home or parent. From minor tremors to earth-shaking events, these different scales of movement intersect to bring their poems home to us in very moving ways.

You might point out that I still haven’t answered the most fundamental question – why? Of all the ways of describing joy or heartbreak to the reader, why should writers focus on movement, instead of landscape, characterisation, dialogue?

I can only provide my own answer to this, which is – why not?

For most of us growing up in Singapore, it’s easy to take movement for granted. By and large, we spend our lives in the same environment. Sure, we might move from Tampines to Tanah Merah, or Bedok to Bishan, as I did when I was growing up. But our sense of the world is a generally rooted and reliable one.

The truth is, for many others, this isn’t necessarily the case. At some point, you may meet friends who have travelled great distances to get to where you are – either crossing seas and borders, or crossing hurdles in life which are invisible to you. In your conversations with them, in the words you use, how will you find ways to make space for their journeys?

And at some point, you too might embark on journeys of your own. Whether they are the adventures you choose, or upheavals that life forces on you, it’s likely that you’ll have to find ways to measure how far you’ve come. And here’s where the writer’s toolkit comes in handy. Not all your journeys will be easy. But I hope you’ll always be able to find the words to make sense of the paths you’re on.

With that, I’ll end my talk. Thank you for spending the morning with me, and wherever you’re headed, I wish you safe travels.