Good morning. My name is Daryl Qilin Yam, a writer, editor and arts organiser from Singapore.
I am the author of three books of fiction. The first is Kappa Quartet, published by Epigram Books in 2016; the second is Lovelier, Lonelier, also published by Epigram Books in 2021; the third is a novella, Shantih Shantih Shantih, published by the now-defunct Math Paper Press, also in the same year. Even though I do describe myself as an author of fairly weird and some might even say inaccessible, incoherent, challengingly structured, unnecessarily highbrow fiction, I’ve had some kinder words said about them too, mostly from other writers in my community. The Business Times listed Kappa Quartet as a Best of 2016 book; Jee Leong Koh, the publisher behind Gaudy Boy, described Lovelier, Lonelier as “one of the best novels written by a Singaporean that I’ve ever read”; and in the judges’ citation for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize, Balli Kaur Jaswal, Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Xu Xi collectively described Shantih Shantih Shantih as “a remarkable feat for a work of fiction from a promising writer who will continue to do great things”. I’d like that to be true, because a year from now, Epigram Books will be launching my fourth book, Be Your Own Bae. To me, the book is an ekphrastic self-portrait, a love letter to cringey millennials and godforsaken hipster culture, but also an attempt at queer world-making within homonationalist structures. It’s a short story collection that puts together a decade’s worth of interlinked short fiction published in places like the Berlin Quarterly, the Sewanee Review, the The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singapore Short Stories anthology series, and elsewhere.
Now, I do feel like I must clarify, at this point, that I do not mean to hold onto these anecdotes and accolades when describing my literary output. But there is admittedly little else that can comprise or add to a writer’s reputation in Singapore. We turn to our resumés because of how few readers exist in the little country that I come from. Those who are artistically inclined, even practicing artists, would much rather attend a play, watch a film, or obtain entry into an art museum, than read a book. And whoever does have the habit of reading would much rather read nonfiction, or fiction published and distributed internationally, rather than read a single sentence of what we’ve come to call “Sing Lit”, or Singaporean literature. And for those who do read Sing Lit, well — they’d much rather read local poetry than local fiction. You can debate me on that.
It’s important, nonetheless, to think about why things are the way they are, in order for me to answer how and why I write. And I do have to thank the Asia Literature Forum for choosing this session’s intriguing title as a way of framing my practice of fiction.
As a writer, I am inherently interested in human behaviour; in the effort it takes to access the very essence of our beings; and the ways in which one’s personhood might come into contact with another’s. I’ve taken it upon myself to unveil the soul of my Asian city, and the many denizens that inhabit it, mainly because I am and have always been a constant excavator of my own soul. In fact, when I decided to become a writer and attempt the making of my first novel, I was just twenty-three years old, a second-year undergraduate at the University of Warwick, wrestling with the terrible notion that I will never find love, because I’d grown up wanting it and never getting it in return, bullied for twelve years in an all-boys’ school —
— a child whose sole comforts throughout that passage of time soon revealed themselves to be female friendship, the reckoning of reality via the reading of books, and also the constant act of reminding his reflection that, surely, there was something worth loving and cherishing within what he was seeing in the mirror.
It should therefore be no surprise that, when I spent my third year as an exchange student at the University of Tokyo, the resulting manuscript became centred on this one strange premise: that it is somehow possible to live in Singapore without a soul. This unnatural fact comes to light when one apparently soulless Singaporean encounters a kappa in Japan, demons known to inhabit rivers and lakes, and also store water in the large hole in their heads.
What isn’t so widely known about the kappa, however, is their unique appetite for human souls, stored in our anuses in something resembling a hardened ball, a mythical organ named a shirikodama. And it is in the wake of one kappa’s desire that the soulless Singaporean’s reality finally and tragically unfolds.
For me, and for many other writers, I’m sure, the challenge that quickly came to me in the writing of Kappa Quartet had everything to do with language and its limits. How does one write about a thing that technically doesn’t exist? And even if it does, and I believe that it does — how to describe what we cannot see, and have only learnt to conceptualise? How to concretise what would exist purely in the abstract? To give form what is, by nature, formless?
I think these are important questions, because the existence of the Singaporean soul is presently endangered, if not virtually extinct. I received the first warning signs of this imminent wipeout in 2016, literally one month before the release of Kappa Quartet, when I’d scored an invite to speak at two events in Indonesia: the Jakarta International Book Fair, followed by an engagement with writers and literary arts organisers conducted by ASEAN, also known as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
I took in my stride the multiple questions I’d faced over the course of the week when, upon learning I was Singaporean, several Southeast Asians quickly and without any prompting asked me if my country had a soul — as though they had somehow known, in advance, the plot of my debut novel. Perhaps it is the idea that urban spaces are inherently artificial — more artificial, obviously, than Jakarta, or Kuala Lumpur, or Bangkok, or Manila. Or perhaps it is too clean? Too… organised? Perhaps, more chillingly — it’s the widely known but unspoken fact that the biggest supporter of the arts in Singapore isn’t its local populace, but its government. Perhaps it’s because our founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once famously remarked in 1968 that “poetry is a luxury we cannot afford”, with the qualifier that “technical education is more important” —
— a mindset that has since become mainstream, demonstrated in a Sunday Times survey released during the pandemic, that declared artists as the most “non-essential” workers in society.
Because of course we are. I’m utterly non-essential. Utterly unimportant. I am in low demand and oversupply. I sustain myself in ways that are inherently unsustainable. I am virtually unknown, an invisible entity; I say I write, but I’m not sure I can tell you who my readers are. I speak, am speaking right now, but remain uncertain about who might even be listening. I am what people are already saying I must be: a ghost in a machine, tethered to the systems that have shaped me, reliant on the systems that support me, conditioned since birth in the way I operate, articulate. It must be distressing to realise that the person whose voice you’re now hearing — fed into a microphone, broadcasted via the speakers in this space — doesn’t actually exist. But, nonetheless, the writer standing before you now speaks because, well — the situation demands it. In many ways, it’s the only way he can be certain he’s being heard at all.
And now, in the face of so much alleged artifice, allow me to end my time now with another question: Is not the book also a form of technology? Is not language and its rules of grammar and syntax and logic and sense-making an invention in service of further invention? Aren’t stories and the way they are sequenced — narratively, conceptually, line after line, paragraph after paragraph, scenario after scenario — another form of construction, of human creativity? These questions are important because, unlike my first novel, I’d say that the books I’ve written since are all in service to the idea that Singapore is anything but empty. Anything but artificial, or lacking in any way of cultural worth, of human warmth. They are written with the understanding that every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, and that the making of books are beautiful because, now more than ever, it is clear to me, this Singaporean, that they’ve become one of the most tangible tools that we have created, as a species, that are still able to contain, and preserve, and nurture, and even transport across space and time the very thing we’ve not yet learnt to see in one another: the human soul. Thank you.
16 Sep 2023
REFERENCES
Koh, Tai Ann. “The poet’s place in Singapore.” The Straits Times, 24 Aug 2021. <https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/the-poets-place-in-singapore>
Tai, Janice. “8 in 10 Singaporeans willing to pay more for essential services: Survey.” The Straits Times, 14 Jun 2020. <https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/manpower/8-in-10-singaporeans-willing-to-pay-more-for-essential-services>