in Wong May's "The Rule", "Only the Moon", and "The Shroud"
In her essay, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Poetics: The Poetry of Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng”, Joanne Leow writes, “Wong is not just concerned with the personal loss [in her poetry]—it is a larger existential ‘nothing[ness]’ or ‘lostness’ that preoccupies her, something that is both more biologically fundamental and universal than culture or ethnicity” (27). From this quotation, it is evident that Leow reads Wong’s poetry as concerning itself with the dichotomy between the universal and the personal: the personal being one’s “culture or ethnicity”; one’s “origin” (89), while the universal being a multiplicity of ethnicities and origins. While this analysis is indeed relevant to her argument of Wong’s poetry opening up “new readership… one that widens its concerns past the more insular aims of building cultural identity in a specific nation” (97)—essentially serving as an alternative to reading postcolonial literature, this essay will further such analysis and argue that there is, in fact, a blurring of the aforementioned dichotomy between the universal and the personal, resulting in a conflation of the two: the personal is the universal and vice versa. In other words, instead of poems “that go beyond boundaries and rules of national identity building or even nations” (7), this essay posits that Wong’s poetry dissolves the existing “boundaries” through the process of blurring.
To understand the conflation of the universal and the personal in Wong’s poetry, a close reading of Leow’s theory of “Wong May’s universality” (3, italics text) is necessary and helpful. In her thesis, Leow argues that most of Wong’s poems lack a “contextual specificity”, but “it is precisely through the absence of this specificity that [she] manages to write a poem that speaks to multiple audiences” (19). Thus, Wong’s poems adopt an ambiguous vantage point from which “multiple audiences” of different backgrounds can relate to, rather than one with specific geo-cultural overtones. Evidently, the notion of blurring is already present here in the form of an “absence” of cultural boundaries, an erasure, a non-existence of borders. Yet, Leow does not expound on this but rather hinges her argument on the existence of the dichotomized boundaries separating the personal from the universal—“she highlights the gulf that exists between personal experience and the historical past”, insofar as history is a universally shared knowledge and experience. This ambiguity and suggestion of “absence” thus invites readers to consider how the latter may be heightened in the implied notion of blurring, of conflation between dichotomies such as that of the personal and universal.
In fact, the notion of blurring is apparent in Wong’s “The Rule” as she writes, in the last stanza, “& repressed patriots / that turn to literature / to forget the world” (15). Here, the word “forget” connotes the blurring of specific memories, of specific people, of, essentially, specificities – specificities that divides and delineates “the world”; in Leow’s own words: “contextual specificity”. It is also important to note that Wong herself attributes this power of the blurring of specificities to “literature”, since “repressed patriots” under the most evil rule “turn to” and appropriate “literature” (in this case poetry) to alleviate their sufferings. Through the emphasis on forgetting, and blurring, Wong is essentially according poetry the power to heal. Notably, she asserts her theory of poetry as “The Rule” as well, an absolute and unassailable power as suggested by the definite article used in the title. This enables the “oppressed” and “repressed” (15)—the sufferers and suffering—to be surfaced and erased, therein ameliorating the pain. Wong’s poetry thus possesses an indubitable power which enables the blurring of specificities and therein a forgetting of suffering. And it is with her and Leow’s theory of poetry which “Only the moon” and “The Shroud” will be analysed, elucidating the conflation of the personal and the universal which results in the blurring of specificities.
In “Only the moon”, the conflation of the universal and the personal is evident in the superimposition of images from Wong’s poetic persona’s memory onto the sole, universal image of “the moon”:
When I was a child I thought
The new moon was a cradle
The full moon was granny’s round face
The new moon was a banana
The full moon was a big cake (Wong 190)
Here, Wong appropriates the generally-accepted astronomical phenomenon of the lunar phase cycle to represent intimate memories of her childhood. The “new moon”, which takes the shape of a crescent, represents her “cradle”, the bed which supports and protects when she was in her most vulnerable and delicate years. Immediately, the blending of something singularly intimate and personal with something that is particularly universal is evident. By doing so, the line which delineates the personal from the universal is blurred, even dissolved, for the two polarizing notions coincides to become one. Similarly, “The Shroud” shows this conflation of the personal and the universal as the “little childish happiness / is taken off, together / with the old school uniform” (191). Here, the universal experience of “childish happiness”, of innocent joy, is “together”, is at one, with her personal “school uniform”, which is in turn a metonymy for the human experience of happiness. Like “the moon” which “wasgranny’s round face” or “was a cradle”, her “school uniform” is her childhood innocent and happiness (italics added). This is further accentuated with the technique of repetition that runs through both poems. The anaphora of “The new moon” and “The full moon” reinforces the superimposition, the blending of the polarizing notions of personal and universal in “Only the moon”, while the repetition of the “old school uniform” and the notion of innocent joy – “the little childish happiness” and “the little childish delights and giggles” (191)—accentuates the similar conflation in “The Shroud”.
Furthermore, the conflation presented in both poems leads to the surfacing of personal suffering—“Shall I cry?” (191), which is achieved through, as Leow suggests, the “sparseness in Wong’s poetic language” which “bring[s] home the universality of” personal suffering, making the personal experience an “immediate, visceral experience” (26). Indeed, the viscerality of suffering is the focus here. Having established the blurring of the dichotomy between the personal and the universal, it becomes logical to assert that the personal suffering of the persona is a universal, shared experience of suffering. This is especially since the personal is made universal for the reader through a process of defamiliarization as well, as the persona is distanced from her own visceral experience, enabling her suffering to be experienced as a universally visceral one, one that is also felt by the reader:
Yet, I hear someone weeping –
Crying louder and louder – howling
I feel her tears –
She is the girl locked up in the top drawer. (Wong 191)
Here, the word “yet” creates a break, a fragment, a gap between her and her “weeping”, “crying” and “howling”. Furthermore, she addresses herself crying as “someone weeping”, leaving a space of ambiguity which opens the identity of the sufferer for the reader. Therefore, the reader hears as much as “I hear” and feels as much as “I feel” the “howling” and “her tears”.
Similarly, a sense of distancing is present in “Only the moon” – a temporal distance instead of a spatial one.
And now I see the moon
It’s the moon,
Only the moon, and nothing but the moon. (Wong, 190)
The interjection of “And now” amidst the repetition of “When I was a child” highlights the temporal distance between then and “now”, past and present, evident from the use of the past tense in “was”. This distancing hence accentuates the current loss of childhood innocence and imagination evident from the repetition of “the moon” which are placed in quick succession, highlighting the banality of the universal object “now” which suffers, too, a loss of the previous personal imaginative associations—“cradle”, “granny’s round face”, “banana” and “big cake”. As such, this personal loss translates into a universal one, curating an “immediate, visceral experience” for the reader as well.
In conclusion, this paper has argued that Wong’s poetry, through the conflation of the personal and the universal, results in a dissolution of boundaries which separates and delineates. Moreover, building upon Leow’s brief points of “absence” and “sparseness”, this essay has shown that her poems are able to translate the personal into the universal with defamiliarization and distancing as well, thus enabling readers to share the persona’s experiences. Therefore, this essay elucidates that Wong’s poetry goes beyond just crossing boundaries; it breaks down the boundaries, enabling a congelation of peoples through human suffering.
Works Cited
Leow, Joanne. “Towards a Cosmopolitan Poetics: The Poetry of Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng.” Thesis.
National University of Singapore, 2010. NUS Scholarbank. National University of Singapore, 2010.
Web. 12 Apr. 2017.
Wong, May. “Only the moon.” In Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. Eds.
Angelia Poon, Philip Holden and Shirley Lim. Singapore: NUS Press, 2009. 190.
——. “The Shroud.” In Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. Eds. Angelia
Poon, Philip Holden and Shirley Lim. Singapore: NUS Press, 2009. 191.
——. “The Rule.” In Superstitions: Poems by Wong May. New York and London: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978. 15.
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