Boldly steering towards a new critical praxis of platforming more creative works, Issue 9 intentionally intersperses critical and creative works to map out uncharted juxtapositions, intersections and resonances within and across texts. What started out as a budding friendship in a creative writing circle, whose goal was to cultivate new interests in other modes of writing beyond an academic one, has expanded into a more serious collaboration in mar/gins, through which we hope to highlight more creative works within the NUS community. Our theme for this year, “Waves”, outlines this issue as a (dis)continuation of the journal’s publishing choices, for it maintains its previous rigorous emphasis on outstanding academic writings, but also seeks to break new shores and open new vistas where other kinds of writing are emphasised, accommodated and celebrated.

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Opening the issue, Brandon David Servos’ “the drift” begins with a whisper-like reflection on the waves. Their swelling highs and sinking lows form the persona’s subject of contemplation. Gentle nudges and swirls seem to indicate movement and life; yet the persona confesses to the inexorable loss that actually characterizes the waves. Brimming yet constrained, the poem is formed by transient encounters, by the nautical temporality expressed through regular lines and stanzas, which give rise to a tacit revelation of our human need for visibility and connection. Yearning, both transitory and permanent, regressive and transformative, persists—even when loss haunts us, in all its certitude. Borrowing the undulatory movement of the waves, “the drift” ultimately transforms itself into a site of healing, where vulnerable selves yearn for another presence amidst the oceanic promises of love and loss.​

 

​Departing from the intimate shoreline, Xiong Ran’s “The Odyssey: A Quiet Battle of Narratives” positions itself starkly in the terrain of the epic. It asks: is the epic truly a self-contained, singular and homogenous narrative, cast into Hellenistic perfection? These questions for the genre are posed to and explored within Homer’s canonical epic poem, The Odyssey, that complicates the epic paradigm with its multiperspectivity. Theories of Auerbach, Bakhtin and Lukács are interrogated, in turn illuminating how the question of narrative is really one of narratorial authority, and how The Odyssey complicates, even threatens and undermines, ideas of divine authority. At its close, the essay organises a final push to an almost provocative conclusion: the epic and the novel are less dichotomous than expected, and The Odyssey may very well be closer to a novel than it would seem, its skeptical gaze directed at the rigidity of genre itself.​

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Aptly, the next poem revolves around one of the most iconic gazes in literary culture—that of Narcissus. Lance Teo’s “Narcissus at the Writing Contest” investigates the hyper-vanity born from one’s encounters with surfaces, focusing on a less discussed vanity that concerns artistic-intellectual production. Grappling with John Barth’s theory of literary exhaustion, the poem demonstrates how the writer whose literary resources have been exhausted turns inwards, and turns this “inwardness” into the subject he writes on. Throughout, the poem transmutes itself into the opposites it holds—both subject and object, origin and destination, completion and blankness—intelligently exploiting this dialectic tension to produce new, ever-growing, spectacular spaces for readerly argumentation and imagination. A threefold approach to the specular, the spectacular and the spectatorial, “Narcissus at the Writing Contest” interrogates the possibility (or futility) of writing from a position fully enisled from the reflections we see.

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In Brandon David Servos’s “I Love You Too Late: Vertigo’s Impossible Language of Love”, the act of seeing itself becomes troubled. Understood through a Lacanian theoretical framework, the essay outlines Lacan’s pivotal insight that the symbolic order of language and thus narrative is a fragile, easily destructible thing, built on fundamental misrecognitions. Building upon this, it then examines scenes from Hitchhock’s Vertigo, wherein every image of the lover is an illusory, hollow promise, making each attempt to love a predestined, belated tragedy. Love is understood “too late”, because the image of whom we love differs from reality, but more specifically, because the beloved’s image is haunted by an infinite series of other self-images preceding it. In a deeper sense, the essay questions whether an inherently stable core of meaning exists, exalting both life and art in a way that entails spiraling expectations—and at its unreachable centre of darkness, an imperfect love abloom.​

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Wayne Low’s “iâm (盐)” continues the effortful search for a language sufficient to express reality, focusing on the tension and terms of ecological discourse. The titular “iâm” offers us not one but three distinct meanings, in the breath of a single word. “iâm”, meaning ‘salt’ in Hokkien, but also “iambic”, and “i-am”, conjoins two languages, while referencing the poetic iambic pentameter. In this sparse poem, our complicity and enmeshment in the natural world and its destruction is foregrounded; simultaneously, its opacity keeps us at arms’ length from its subject—a gap is felt between human and other, language and nature, progress and extinction. Its minimalistic brevity is sustained through meter and pacing: brief lines, mostly condensed into a single poetic foot, and a short, sharp pace. In this manner, the poem reads as a series of waves, flowing over the speaker, affecting their cognizance of their ecological guilt and responsibility. The poem’s hybridity thus invites possibilities for new, more generative futures.

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Yet hybridity—as Benjamin Chew’s “2084” demonstrates—is also monstrous. Panoramic in its creative aperture, this post-Orwellian experiment collects and combines a sprawling assortment of renowned pop cultural and esoteric literary references to extrapolate and defamiliarize our existing reality into a dystopian surveillance state. Man and machine, when melded into one, bear unthinkable potential for swift yet cataclysmic destruction. Yet, as a counterpoint to the devastating violence located in this cyborg condition, the work’s hybrid form, be it through its medium or genre, discloses new possibilities for coherence amidst chaos, beauty amidst death. Echoing Chew’s artist statement, “2084” hints at “a near-future that has already happened, a trajectory in flight as we read; we are already living in a world of dystopian cyberpunk science fiction.”

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In a similar vein, Manus Wong’s “T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: The Re-Writing Shoreline” also centres on how we produce and understand knowledge, delving into the relationship between natural geography and human knowledge. Oscillating between dry and wet epistemologies, employed through the shorthand metaphors of ocean and land, the essay performs a (meta-)argument that insists on the need for ambiguity as a productive means of

hermeneutic rejuvenation. It is precisely within this ambiguity that the tension of truth is attained. Within this framework, places are no longer mere destinations, but instead, a saxtent employed for textual navigation and exploration. In the search for new horizons, the shoreline, an ever-shifting terrain that balances various (non-)forces, is where the essay ultimately finds its grounding.​​​

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Almost as a deft response, Zhao Yushan’s “in the fullness of the world, every word / i write only to you” closes this issue on the shoreline again. The poem is a confessional on the echoes of lost love, and a metamorphosis of poetic form, over four interlinked sections. Beginning from a place of both interiority and remove, from the mere echo of a lover’s voice reverberating in a seashell, the poem evolves into a fantastical narrative of a sunfish writing a letter to God. From shells and waves, to sashimi and sunfish, an expanse of nautical images act as conduits where pain and yearning meet and dissolve into one another, texturing these first two sections with their affective viscosity. Yet this process of submerging—into language, love, and loss—is capsized through the relative brevity of the ending. In its barebones construction, the final three couplets reiterate memento mori, as a haunting reminder of our own mortality in the face of suffering, seemingly ceaseless as the waves.

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In diversifying the writings foregrounded this issue, we hope Issue 9 will be one of many future waves in student literary publications that pushes forth all that is inimitable. All that continues to resist the quotidian pressures to comply and nullify themselves. And all that finds themselves on the margins. But now whose voices can find a home at last.