Introduction to Issue 10: un/rest
—disrupts and disturbs. The blade which streaks between “un/rest” is also the brief breath, whereby words, merely through their closeness with one another, are gathered into a grey cloud of meaning. This distance destabilises old definitions; they coalesce into something more ponderous. Something else. How one reads the line—with obedience or defiance, or neither—determines the words and worlds exhaled from the page itself, and into our very reality.
Issue 10 marks an important inflection point for mar/gins. What has first started as a literary journal, whose primary objective is to showcase exemplary student academic writing, has now broadened its platform, such that creative works too are brought into clearer visibility and celebrated. This un/rest is manifested not only in the writing genres more students are interested in, but also in the topics that they find themselves navigating around. Complex interrogations of identity—personal and societal—permeate across the works, in the same way this issue seeks to re-conceptualise its own position in the undergraduate literary landscape as a more accommodating space for all writers.
So, to rest or not to rest? Issue 10 chooses the latter; it will contemplate the tireless fissures of our writing.
Absences can withhold intimate words; yet while such self-censure deepens our yearning to learn the total truth, it also stirs within us new ruminations about the ethics of our yearning. At many crucial moments where little revelations are about to rise to the surface, bubbling into full exposure, Sarah Zafirah’s for Bethany (house of figs) softens itself, and catches itself in its stilled reflection of silence, before once more submerging into its blackened backdrop. Zafirah’s poem experiments with a range of poetic forms, each finding a new voice to punctuate this deliberate silence, this shapeless space in which partial truths speak about themselves, however difficult, in a necessary light.
Quite significantly, Hong Jun’s One insignificant day begins with a woman awakening to an absurd series of events that to the ordinary reader might appear ironic and humorous. To the dreary-eyed woman, however, these relentless events threaten to upend her womanhood, producing more questions than answers about who and where she is. The forcefulness of these events parallels that of existing societal pressures foisted upon women and which radically limits their autonomy over their own bodies. Dictated in one breathless sentence, as it ceaselessly breaches conventional boundaries of the sentence as a searing critique of society’s, this story defamiliarises what it perceives as insignificant events, until they warp into an all-too-familiar yet significant portraiture of alienation for many.
To articulate the post-colonial identity, one must inevitably confront the gaping void that is left behind when power is exerted forcefully over a nation. Zou Zihan’s Time and Rupture bravely traces around that void, mapping its physicality onto Salcedo’s Shibboleth while pondering on what meaning can be produced ex-nihilo.
Brimming with loss and longing, Benjamin Chew’s Sweet thing I watch you burn away commentates on a recently excavated fragment of Ovidian poetry from an Orang Laut settlement, far displaced from its poet’s original homeland. Encounters with historical and literary (dis)possession are made possible through the poet’s personal micro-histories and unreliable narration. Drawing from the cores and peripheries of the world and literature, Sweet thing uses a bricolage of music, photography, poetry, real-life scholarship, theories of world literature, mythical allusions, metafiction, and a story told in footnotes to sketch out an islandic condition as a reality and aesthetic, a condition that is at simultaneous remove and connection with currents in the world. This work has also been shared with Orang Laut SG.
It Takes a Man… to do what? To be masculine? To self-identify? To stab and assault? Riv Pek’s It Takes a Man to Do Something Like That explores the fluidity of masculinity, and how the classic Horror clash between the Final Girl and Killer blurs the lines between victim and perpetrator, male and female. Paired with their poem, self, construct, identity is still explored, but now the conundrum lies in the creation of identity. Something that is wholly organic, wholly you, yet artificial and unfamiliar. self, construct reveals a glimpse of the chimera that is identity, cobbled together with words, flesh and intentionality.
Olivia’s Late Night Prawning reimagines the poet’s memories of night-fishing with her father. Throughout the night, the boundary between reality and mythology ebbs and wanes, creating a mystifying, yet familiar, poetic world. Join her persona on a late-night drive to the pond, as themes of family, myth, and memory are explored over the tantalizing oblivion of Meng Po soup.
Benjamin Chew’s Death of a Theatre Director: Synecdoche, New York considers how artistic adaptation, both as product and process, complicates the already blurred lines between life and simulation, art and artifice. Caden Cotard, the protagonist of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008) attempts in agonising futility to render a realistic representation of his own life in absolute verisimilitude. To fashion such a faithful representation of life, however, is to create postmodern artifice. And yet, the loss of the real in artifice is, paradoxically, itself an apt apprehension of the reality that Caden loses control over his existence. It is precisely this articulation of loss that marks a return to sincere expression in postmodernity.
Equal parts intimate and disturbing, Tay Kai Li’s And there was eve… forces us to consider the blessings and curses that are ensnared within the feminine. In this series of loosely interconnected poems lies an attempt to illustrate the primeval condition of womanhood. The editors have collectively agreed to award the Mar/gins Recognition Award to this poem for its bold polyphonic representations of womanhood, sometimes which feel close and confiding, and others made pointed and painful, that they rip almost like a page itself.
The editorial team is extremely thankful to several important figures who have helped bring Issue 10 into fruition. We would like to thank Dr Susan Ang for kindly sponsoring the prize of Mar/gins Recognition Award ($100 Kinokuniya vouchers), as well as offering us the opportunity to broadcast this issue to her HS2917 class (“The Meaning of Colour”), such that students from other disciplines outside of English Literature could learn more about mar/gins and, if they wish to, contribute to this issue. Dr Gilbert Yeoh and Dr John Whalen-Bridge also generously gave us time to publicise our issue’s open call to students from their classes. Ms Angeline Ang from the General Office helped the editorial team to broadcast its open call multiple times to the EN cohort despite her busy schedule. We are grateful to everyone who has helped the editorial team in making this issue possible.
