Chapter 1:

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
Positioning the Gay Poet and/in the City

I am haunted by the sadness of men

hanging out at night
in all parks and alleys of the world.
-- Jaime An Lim, Short Time
This thesis reads and examines the poetry of four gay writers from Manila and
Singapore. The study positions the selected poets as writers operating within a
particular spatial context. The reading of their poetry thus takes into account both sexual
identity and the notion of place and is ultimately interested in locating the ways in
which patterns of urban production and sexual identity inflect the creative practice of
writing poetry.
In this thesis, I examine the works of Alfian bin Saat and Cyril Wong from
Singapore and J. Neil Garcia and Lawrence Ypil from Manila. Existing scholarship and
critical writings on most of these poets as well as creative commentaries done by these
writers themselves (through interviews and creative essays) often do not posit a vital
connection between poetic production and the urban environment. Scholarship makes
mention of their sexual orientation and alerts us to the various works and instances in
which such themes appear in their works. Alfian Saat for instance is notable for works
like the Asian Boys Trilogy as well as gay-themed poems in One Fierce Hour (1998) and
History of Amnesia (2001). Cyril Wong is widely regarded as Singapores first openly
gay poet (Ng et. al 12). J Neil Garcia is an academic, poet and literary editor whose
writings and academic work highlight the intersections between Filipino post-colonial

identity and gay identity. Ypils long poem Five Fragments: A Confession highlights
the varied experiences of coming out as is framed by the fragmented lyric form.
In this thesis then, I posit that the patterns which characterize the production of
urban space in Manila and Singapore enter the ways in which gay poets write about
what it means to be gay in a particular urban context. The position of the gay poet in
Manila and Singapore, I argue, is one where he utilizes the patterns of urbanism to write
about what it means to be gay in these spaces and to offer possibilities to reimagine
urban life. I argue and eventually demonstrate how both sexuality and geography enter
the process of poetic production.
While the works of these poets can certainly be appreciated (merely) for their
aesthetic merits, an examination of the poets various contexts can lead one to a greater
understanding of poetic production itself.

More nuanced appreciation for a poets

aesthetics takes into account the various threads that the writer eventually weaves into a
text. As far as this thesis is concerned, one finds in the poetry of these writers from
Manila and Singapore an aesthetics of fragmentation/self-splitting and confinement
respectively.

For Alfian and Garcia, there is an emphasis on the use of the everyday

Everyday space for these two poets is rendered as liminal space, creating dual
experiences of discomfort and transformation. For Wong and Ypil, there is what I
would demonstrate, a domestic perspective in the way they do their city writing.
Indeed, what is interesting in the way Wong and Ypil is how the kind of optic they use
to render urban experience. Much of city writing is done from outside space such as
streets. (Walter Benjamins notion of the flaneur is one example). My reading of Wongs

and Ypils poetry on the other hand focuses on how representations of domestic space
are projected into the way they view urban experience. . Singaporean poet Ng Yi-Sheng
and Filipino Ronald Baytan whose poetic projects offer an interesting and exciting
challenge to the framework I seek to establish in the next few pages will make an
appearance in the concluding comments of the thesis.

In this introductory chapter, I will unpack the theoretical concepts I will utilize in
my analysis. In the first subsection, I draw upon Georg Simmels seminal work The
Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) to show how urbanization is an orchestration a locus
of patterns. The discussion is complemented by a brief survey of how poets in the West
responded to these shift in patterns. The second subsection looks into the ways in which
one can compare Manila and Singapore. Here, I demonstrate how the patterns of
urbanism which characterize the production of space in Manila and Singapore are
horizontalized fragmentation and verticalized compression respectively. I extend the
analysis by looking at the different ways in which certain poets write about their cities.
The third and final subsection positions the relationship between the gay poet and urban
space and problematizes the role of the gay poet and what unique forms of engagement
he may offer to this creative engagement of urbanism. In all I demonstrate that the gay
text draws its power from the notion of liminality, a kind of liminality grounded on the
experience of eros and public practice.

Ebb and Flow

The City of Pattern and Rhythm

What links poetry and urbanism is the fact that they are in many ways connected
to the idea of rhythm and form. Like the poet who creates it, the poem is a play on form
and rhythm. As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write:
The human body itself is a locus of rhythms: the beat of the heart, the inhalation
and exhalation of breath, waking and sleeping, effort and rest, hunger and
satiety Rhythm is a principle of all life and all activity and is, of course, deeply
involved in the experience of, and the expression of, emotion the very origin of
language involves rhythm. (Brooks and Warren 2)
Poetry is translation and appropriation of such rhythms. The poem, as the Filipino poet
D.M. Reyes describes it is the most enduring on the line of the worlds oldest rituals
(Reyes 7). Across time and centuries, the poet can be seen as a laborer and a synthesizer:
poetry is the synthesizing act, no mere act but labor attention, dedication and
inevitably, love for translation of intangible energies to graceful shapes and tangible
accomplishments (7).
The human intellect is further gifted with the ability to understand these
rhythms of the human body and of nature itself and to ultimately find ways to
manipulate such patterns. Modernity as a massive technological, social, intellectual and
cultural transformation of human civilization is a testament to this idea. Modern
industrial cities, the spatial articulation of the logic of capitalist modernity transformed
human civilization in great ways: landscapes were flattened and reshaped; patterns of
production shifted; labor became organized and in many ways mechanical; man-made

goods were produced at an exponential rate. These changed not only the external
environment but the human condition as well.
In the opening paragraph of what would eventually be a foundational reading of
metropolitan life, Georg Simmel in The Metropolis and Mental Life posits that the
deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual of his existence
in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and
of the technique of life (Simmel 23). Urbanization marked not only a systematic and
calculated re-landscaping but spurred as well a radical change in the pattern and
rhythm of the human psyche. This change was oriented towards the idea of progress
promised by the post-Enlightenment notion of the modern and maintained by the
gradual mechanization of the body. The geography of the city affected the disposition of
the body and how the body related with other bodies and the spaces they occupy. The
human heart became a clock whose beats were synchronized with particular pulses of
the city: the traffic of cars, the pitter-patter of pedestrian feet, the tabulated demands of
the time card. As Simmel writes, if all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go
wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication
of the city would be disrupted (26).
Moreover, urban life is not simply about a shift in mental dispositions but also in
the way an individual would relate to others, to the environment and more importantly
to himself. The fissures created by new articulations of space altered and reconfigured
human cognition and relations. Simmel outlines these different strains that affect and
influence the production of the urban self as a relational being: social forces which

point to relations that may be personal, impersonal (as in hierarchal relations at work)
and even anonymous (as in relationships with the crowd); historical heritage which
refers to spatial and material evidence of the past; external culture which point to the
material and socio-economic conditions of the present; and the technique of life which
encompasses the cognitive and bodily practices these different relational strains entail.
People became each others employers, employees, tellers, bankers, market vendors,
customer, landlord identities and relations that the various spaces of the cities created.
The changes in physical, cognitive and social landscapes introduced a new
environment for the poet. This new relationship between the poet and the city however
was not exactly a happy one. The poet was gradually taken from the allure and
imaginative fertile fields of the pastoral and was thrust into the arid world of the
concrete streets. In this new environment, poets offered various ways which, according
to Ellman and OClair in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1993) called into
question the reality of the objective world (Ellman and OClair 1). In their renditions
of urban life, the modern poets creatively transformed urban experience through image
and language. In The Crisis of Language, (1978) Richard Sheppard presents the poets
socio-cultural context of the early modern age as one characterized by a sense of
linguistic aridity (Sheppard 324) wrought from the suppression of an aristocratic,
semi-feudal, humanistic and agrarian order by one middle-class, democratic,
mechanistic and urban (325). He thus argues that what characterizes modern poetry is
its sense of homelessness (327) and that the task of the modern poet:

 becomes the creation of a redeemed, visionary world of language in which

something fundamental is given back to form and in which the lost dimension
of language and the human psyche was rediscovered or preserved the
Modernist poet [ceased] to be the manipulator of fixed quanta and [attempted] to
liberate the repressed expressive energies of language; ceases to be the celebrant
of a human order and becomes the experimenter who searches for barely
possible redeemed and redeeming images. (328-329)
Language thus became a critical means to represent the poets vision of modern life. The
task of the modern poet thus was to explode language before he can create an
adequate verbal ikon (328). T.S. Eliots The Waste Land (1922) and The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) as examples explore the various notions of ruination and
decay in urban experience. Prufrocks city is a murky place where his sense of social
refinement is balanced by a sense of vulgar temperament (Versluys 176). The Waste
Land on the other hand somberly depicts London as a fractured and fragmented city
(Versluys 179). Eliots play on language which incorporates various dialogues, linguistic
play and use of obscure word play Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug (The Waste
Land 203-204) highlight this sense of fragmentation. Walter Benjamin in his reading
of Charles Baudelaires poetry on the other hand utilizes the idea of the flaneur and sees
urban experience as essentially a successive sequence of fleeting, fragmentary moments
that paradoxically are but repetitions within the same system. Such experience,
Benjamin argues forms the cause of ennui or boredom (Gilloch 211). Baudelaire
specifically looked at crowds and how such crowds elucidate an experience of loneliness
(Hyde 337).
The list of poets, their works and the unique ways in which they engage the
experience of modernity and urbanism is long and rich. In all of these, we find how the

poets utilize image and more importantly language to engage the complex materiality of
urban experience. As Versluys points out The poet, therefore, could no longer look at
the city from a distance The flaw became the fabric (Versluys 18). Indeed, there is a
vital connection between the poet and the city. The poet in the city is seen to have
transformed this sense of aridity and lifelessness into viable poetic material. Poetry
mirrors and refracts the language and patterns of the streets. As G.M. Hyde in The
Poetry of the City, writes the city is inherently unpoetic... and yet the city is inherently
the most poetic of all material (Hyde 338). The city can be poetic, or at the very least a
valuable source for poetic material precisely because in many ways it is an amplified
mode of patterns.
In the next subsection, we zero in on Manila and Singapore and explore the
ways in which one may read these as comparative cities. We will also look into the ways
in which certain poets not included in the thesis respond to these spaces in their works.

Push and Pull

The Case of Manila and Singapore

More than a century after its first publication the insights in Simmels seminal
work still hold merit. In todays increasingly fast-paced, wired and globalized world,
Simmels metropolitan man is more and more adept at absorbing the audio-visual shock
of the city landscapes as well as registering within his body the cognitive demands of
late and globalized capitalism. In this subsection, I demonstrate how Simmels analysis

of modern industrial cities in the West can be applied specifically to cities in Southeast
Asian cities.
Though the thesis does not take a post-colonial approach, it still necessitates the
drawing of works that are concerned with scholarship framed by post-colonial and
globalized discourse if only to illustrate in detail the spatial and urban growth of these
cities. Manila and Singapore make for viable samples for comparative study precisely
because the patterns of their spatial production and the implications generated by such
rhythms highlight the various complexities of post-colonial, globalized urbanism. Both
cities were once colonial port cities and in varying degrees now share dispositions as
postcolonial cities in an increasingly globalized world. More than that, the various
characteristics which define the logic of capitalist modernity can be seen in the way
these poets render urban experience.
The urbanization of Manila and Singapore as two postcolonial Southeast Asian
cities is grounded by a constant negotiation between two opposing forces first in their
colonial past and secondly by their orientation towards globalized narratives. In
Perpetuating Cities: Excepting Globalization and the Southeast Asia, (2003) Ryan
Bishop, John Phillips and Wei-wei Yeo contextualize this interplay by positioning the
identities of Southeast Asian cities precisely through tensions and contestations of
various narratives:
[Cities] in the region have a unique relation insofar as they went from being
colonial cities serving the material bureaucratic, technological, ideological, and
imaginative needs to explicitly modern, international cities in a matter of
years, with the concept of national playing an important but oddly peripheral
role (Bishop et al 2).

This statement challenges Peter J. Rimmer and Howard Dicks assertion in The
City in Southeast Asia (2009) which argues that cities in Southeast Asia have already
undergone a period of decolonization and must be read in the same way one reads
other global cities of the world. All global cities, they argue, are oriented and guided by
one particular pattern and as such any attempt to explain the historical or
contemporary urbanization of Southeast Asia as a unique phenomenon is therefore
doomed to absurdity (Rimmer and Dick 48-49). The problem with Rimmer and Dick is
that they look at malls, superhighways and Starbucks branches and make the claim that
Southeast Asian cities can be read and placed alongside global cities in the west. What is
important to highlight and call attention to I conjecture, is how these malls are
juxtaposed with other sites that in turn form the much bigger picture of a citys urban
production. Rimmer and Dicks reading of Southeast Asian cities does not take into
account the active participation of local dynamism in the production of city space. As
William S W Lim in Asian Alterity (2008) writes:
In Asia, chaos uncertainty, pluralistic richness and evolving complexity are now
accepted as essential elements of its urban dynamism In Asian cities, the
introduction of modernist planning and spatial and usage separations are
constantly contested and defied by the dynamic human interactions taking place
on the streets everywhere. This fluidity and the rebellious attitude of Asian
urban dwellers in interpreting spaces in response to evolving demand are
precisely what fuel the vibrancy and dynamism of Asian cities. (Lim 114)

To compare Manila and Singapore then is to locate the ways in which the cities spatially
negotiate the reoccurring tension between various forces local color and global
orientation, informal and formal economies etc and how these dialectical forms of

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articulations shape the cities forms and patterns. What differentiates their modernities
however is how these negotiations are done. In the case of Manila and Singapore, what
orients their urbanization has to do with a horizontal, outward spinning force for the
former and a verticalized kind of compression for the latter. These notions of
fragmentation and compression define and orient the production of multiple spaces and
the patterns of spatial practices.
In what follows then, I will discuss how such notions can be used to describe the
urbanization of Manila and Singapore respectively. I then extend this by discussing the
potential implications of such generalizations.

Manilas Modernity as Horizontalized Fragmentation

In arguing that the pattern of urban production of Manila is fundamentally
horizontal, I do not simply point to horizontality in the mundane sense that Manila is
essentially a sprawling metropolis. Horizontality points as well to the pattern of spatial
experience in the city.
Manila is a messy city. In her analysis of the citys new metropolitan form,
Neferti Tadiar regards Manila as essentially a flat city where one goes around like
someone swimming underwater in a shallow metropolitan sea (Tadiar 77). Indeed, to
the inexperienced untrained foreigner or probinsyano (non-Manila residents), the city can
be a difficult place to swim around in. Wading through its polluted streets where the
perennial sight of garbage and the glaring honks of frustrated drivers stuck in 2

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kilometer per hour traffic are among the flotsam and jetsam of urban mismanagement,
one encounters an urban experience that is severely disorienting and confusing.
The disorientation and fragmentation of Manilas metropolitan form reflect the
citys violent and tumultuous history. Sitting in the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, the city
is battered by typhoons and is a potential ground zero for a devastating earthquake. The
city was one of the most devastated cities after World War II (Zaragoza 13). Widespread
poverty in the city mutates into a pandemic of crime. Australian academic Trevor Hogan
writes that one vital way to understand Manila is thus is to see it in terms of violence,
suffering and loss (Hogan 105).
The idea that Manila is a fragmented city is a notion which also stems from its
post-Second World War fate: that it is a city without a clear center. To understand this,
we first have to briefly examine the history and fate of what was considered by Filipino
writer Nick Joaquin as the original Manila, (Joaquin 354) the walled city of
Intramuros. The genesis of Manila was essentially a narrative of compression. Like most
colonial communities in the Philippines during the Spanish occupation, the population
of the walled city of Intramuros grew largely because of the relocation project called the
reduccion where dispersed barangays were reduced into compact and larger
communities (Caoili 28). Intramuros was deemed the seat of the economic and
ecclesiastic power of colonial Philippines and from 1580 to 1625, Manila became the
foremost capital of Asia and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity (34). In this respect, the
tall walls of Intramuros did not just help repel invasions. They also compressed people
as well the narratives of guns, gold and God. Colonial Manilas urbanism thus

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materialized the logic of colonialism and inserted the archipelago into the enterprise of
colonial trade and geopolitics. American occupation in the Philippines saw massive
change in economic policies on tariffs and as well as political and cultural structures.
This sense of compression would later on explode (almost literally and
figuratively) during the Allied liberation at the end of the Second World War. As
Zaragosa writes in Old Manila (1990):
Modern facilities in transportation, communication, electrification, and port
works were established. Massive urban and rural development and town
planning marked the beginning of the modernization of Old Manila All these
developments came to a halt during World War II with the Japanese Occupation
of Manila from 1942 to 1945. At the end of the war, Manila was considered the
most devastated city in the world Manila lost its centre. [emphasis mine]
(Zaragoza 13)

This notion of Manila as a city having no center is mentioned in other critical and
creative materials. In Malate: A Matter of Taste (2001) a coffee table book on a site known
for its unique bohemian subculture, Rafael Ongpin echoes Zaragozas sentiment: [In]
the post-war era, Manilas population exploded outwards from the rubble of the center.
Instead of there being an increasing population pressure on the core city, there was a
vacuum (Ongpin 49). Thus, the liberation did not just obliterate a good number of
Intramuros basic infrastructure. The explosions that ruptured the core city spurred as
well a massive exodus towards the fringes and enabled what were once communities
and spaces in the periphery to develop into more urbanized spaces. For instance,
Makati and Ortigas once suburbs are now regarded as the business districts that
integrate Manila (and the Philippines) into the economic global network of nations.

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The vacuum that created an open space in Manilas center would function as
the bedrock for Manilas modernity and spatial articulation. As Caoili writes, the postwar reconstruction and brief economic boom of Manila saw the rapid migration of
families from the provinces (Caoili 161). Having no money to buy or to lease living
spaces, these workers lived as informal settlers in what used to be the center of the city.
Erhard Bernard in his study on urban poverty in Manila Defending a Place in the City:
Localities and the Struggle for Urban Land in Metro Manila (1997) writes that In Metro
Manila we find a high percentage of squatters and slum dwellers relatively close to
the city center (Berner 161) What is interesting however is that these informal settlers
are not much of a nuisance as they are a necessity. They take on the hard jobs (cooks,
waiters, carpenters etc). They are the ones that keep the heart of the city throbbing
(Duldulao 46). Indeed, what was once the powerful center of Manila now has two
paradoxical functions: on the one hand, it is no longer the center of formal economic
power Makati and Ortigas are. Yet on the other hand it still functions as a critical
center in that this space now houses workers who provide necessary the cheap labor
that maintain and support much of Manilas infrastructure.
In her analysis of Manila as essentially a flat city, Neferti Tadiar argues how
flyovers were used as a way of separating the producers of informal economies (treated
as excess) represented by the urban poor with the formal/transnational ones (Tadiar
81). Flyovers provide those travelling through flyovers easy access to spaces of
transnational narratives while keeping those representing informal labor and practices
(street peddlers, the urban poor) literally below. Flyovers physicalized Manilas global

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dream by means of easy access and unique perspective (Tadiar 84). Flyovers were a way
of discharging but not necessarily eliminating the so-called urban excesses (Tadiar 96).
Using this survey of various critical writings on the urbanization of Manila, I
argue that the urban production Manilas modernity is fundamentally horizontal in two
ways. First I point to the dispersal wrought by the literal explosion of the center. This
migration does not simply refer to the rapid urbanization of the geographical fringes but
to the development as well of multiple internal narratives and systems that often
compete with the narratives of other spaces in the metropolis. Tangential to this is the
so-called ruralization of Manila. The occupation of informal settlers in the center has
both physical and socio-cultural implications. This presence influences much of the
policies and patterns of urbanism that spatially articulate the tension between the
increasingly ruralization of urban space and the need to function as a city in a globalized
world. Such influences include the construction of infrastructures that negotiate,
partition and space out the conflicting and contesting narratives within the city. In a city
with no clear, physical center, it can be argued that, as Tadiar would posit, the center is
network more than any downtown center (Tadiar 84).
To speak then of Manilas modernity as one of horizontalized fragmentation is
not simply a matter of seeing it as a sprawl or even a city without a center but to see it as
a city in constant flux. It does not just refer to the earlier exodus towards the fringes but
to a perspective characterized by distance, dislocation and fragmentation.
Writers whose poems creatively engage urban experience draw their themes and
poetic material precisely from this idea of fragmentation. For instance, Jaime Dasca

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Doble in his poem The Sky Over C-5 Corner Kalayaan Avenue (2005) traces the
chaotic flow of the city as he comments on the impoverished state of a small community
in Manila. The disorientation is seen as the subject matter of the poem shifts from line to
line, describing children playing hopscotch on a busy street (3) with a pebble stolen
from the construction site nearby (5-6), illustrating the lack of a decent playground and
the danger of having children playing near hazardous sites; an old carpenter who
counterflows with traffic (7). Representations of luxurious brands mock the poverty as
towering advertisements boast of the good life (26). The poem ends with the image of
dogs commenting on the inhumanity of the chaos and impoverishment:
Two mangy dogs leashed on a rise
bark at all the confusion.
Their agitation lifts up to the sky,
to the clouds forming myriad masks,
of colors shutting out the very sun
(31-35)
Dobles rendition of urban space in Manila lies precisely in how the line cuts attempt to
trace the contours of confusion and chaos in a highway that ironically cuts through the
wealthier parts of the metropolis. The poem in itself is a highway and the images that
are presented counterflow this attempt to create a coherent and central picture of the
city. The incoherence is thus highlighted by the idea that Doble chooses two dogs that
do not possess in any way the ability to interpret human activity, as the final focalizer
for this chaos.
In Conchitina Cruzs What is it about tenderness, (2005) the woman-persona
(presumably an undertaker) attempts to gain dominion over a dead body by means of

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anatomical geography by naming the different parts of the body the way an urban
planner would assign street names. This familiarity with the body is contrasted with the
unpredictable city portrayed as a dark and savage jungle where streets sprouted
overnight like weeds and snaked their way into each others aimlessness (2-3). The
personal control is lost when the urban jungle invades the body through the descent of
maggots (12-13). There is no sense of control and cohesion and the body in time will
absorb these narratives. The bodies of Cruzs different poems which experiment on
form reflect this. Particularly interesting to this experimentation are Geography
Lesson and News of the Train. Here the reader does not find any body text but
footnotes to a blank page. Her experimentation on the different forms of poems which
shapeshift into different forms reflect this idea of a fragmented city whose form
ironically rests is precisely in its formlessness.

Singapore and the Modernity of Verticalized Compression

In this subsection, I unpack the idea that Singapores mode of urban production
is characterized by a notion of verticalized compression by drawing upon critical
writings on Singapore urbanism, most notably from Robbie Gohs Contours of Culture
(2005). Critical analyses of Singapores urbanism focus on the notion of wholesale
erasure of certain urban structures (Luck 2004; Yeo 2003; Powell 2002). My reading of
Singapores urbanism does not seek to dispute this notion but focuses instead on the
production of certain spaces. Verticalized compression I would demonstrate is the
subtext that negotiates various contesting and conflicting narratives in Singapore.

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Verticality is not just about the significant presence of high rise buildings and the
need to accommodate a growing population of locals and migrants within more limited
space. It points as well to its upward-mobile movement that is hierarchized, controlled
top-to-bottom management of urban production. Verticality is a critical subtext that
grounds the patterns of Singapores urbanism, one characterized by a sense of
compression. In the case of Singapore, the idea of the vertical cannot be separated from
the notion of compression. The compression I speak of, however, does not just refer to
meticulous economics of space but to the compression of narratives as well.

To

illustrate, I focus on two prominent and critical spaces: the typical Housing
Development Board (HDB) community and the Civic District.
HDB communities exemplify this notion of verticalized compression. HDB
communities are clusters of buildings within a relatively small number of hectares.
Walking around a cluster of HDB community buildings, one encounters a sense of
tightness in the way high-rise buildings appear as walls. The height of a typical HDB
building can range from 10 to 30 stories.

The typical HDB community then can

accommodate (and compress) as many as thousands of residents within such a small

space. Moreover, the HDB community compresses not just people within its space but
more importantly the dual narratives of cosmopolitan and heartland culture. As Goh
writes:
The spatial semiotics of ideology of the HDB is a crucial part of this modernist
collectivity, and its changing directives towards the millennium reflect the new
ideological battleground, and the new project of reconciling cosmopolitan
individualism with heartland collectivity. (Goh 77)

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Goh extends this analysis further by zeroing in on void decks. Open-spaced void decks
ironically compress the different state policies and other privileged narratives. As he
argues:
void decks played a more complex role in social construction Beyond this
physical openness and its facilitation of gazing, mingling and informal (though
necessarily legitimate and approved) socializing, community bonding in the
Singapore context is ever mindful of racial/cultural, neutralization, the creation
of empty spaces (voided of vernacular, ethnic historical and local cultural
particularities) in order to remove grounds for racialized politics and social
tensions. (Goh 78)
Open spaces in void deck therefore materialize the logic of the HDB narrative in that
they compress and articulate notions of surveillance as well as state policies on racial
harmony.
The busier parts in Singapore, the Civic District as well as Shenton Way,
articulate and physicalize as well this notion of verticalized compression. Like the HDB
community, the notion of verticality becomes immediately evident to the casual
pedestrian who are encounters the walled, overt presence of high-rise buildings which
compress and articulate Singapores posture as a global city. Peggy Teo et. al in Changing
Landscapes of Singapore (2004) list the different areas in which Singapore chose to excel in:
In particular, Singapore promoted itself in the following areas:
cruise and air hub of Southeast Asia;
convention centre;
education hub;
medical centre; and
arts and entertainment (Teo 155)
Walking along the busier districts in Singapore, one eventually encounters particular
buildings and sites within proximate distance which physicalizes this vision: Suntec for

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conventions, the Esplanade for entertainment and the Singapore Management

University along Orchard Road.
The city center compresses not only the different promises that Singapore offers
but as in the HDB community, the growing tension between local color and global
identity as well. To illustrate, I use as an example Gohs discussion on landmarks. Goh
outlines how historical architecture, cultural symbols are located within proximate
possible space:
Key landmarks in this Civic District a roughly L shaped area on the north side
of the Singapore river, up to Bras Basah Road and stretching to the foot of Fort
Canning include the Singapore Art Museum, Raffles Hotel, the Armenian
Church, St. Andrews Cathedral, the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, the
Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, and other buildings from the colonial period.
(Goh 30)

More than just preserving and maintaining these sites within the small geographic,
cultural and political center of Singapore, these sites simultaneously articulate
Singapores identity as a Southeast Asian nation and a global city. What the Civic
District thus conflates within the small space are imposed meanings as well. Landmarks:
are thus characteristically sites of narrative overlays by virtue of a
combination of their long history and wealth of associations, their co-option by
different institutions, discourses and media and their foregrounded experience in
everyday urban experiences
In the context of Singapore, landmark
designation is a project of tourist promotion, the attempt to create a national
discourse and identity of global progressivism and the management of
multicultural and multi racial relations all at once. (29)

Now, a good counter-example to further illustrate the comparison between

Manila and Singapore would be present-day Intramuros. Like the Civic District in

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Singapore, Intramuros is still preserved as a colonial city where one still see bungalows,
crafts and weapons from the colonial period. Unlike the Civil District however (and this
perhaps emphasizes the notion of distance and fragmentation), Intramuros is very much
distant from the spaces that articulate Manilas global economic stature. Intramuros in
fact is surrounded by spaces of poverty and impoverishment whereas in the Civic
District one encounters a sense of compactness where compressed spaces articulate
narratives of privileged cultural memory and nationhood.
In contrast then to how Manila replicates the notion of dispersal in the spatial
articulation of urban space, Singapore addresses the perennial problem of lacking space
in how it negotiates the reoccurring tensions by compressing space and condensing
meanings. In the case of the HDB community, the tall buildings that can accommodate a
considerable number of people conflate and compress narratives of multiculturalism
and ethnic diversity. As Goh points out, the open spaces of void decks ironically and
almost invisibly compress these policies on racial neutralization as well as notions of
surveillance. The central district on the other hand functions not only as narratives of
national identity but viable objects for tourist consumption. Verticalized compression is
not only evident in Singapores physical landscape in that the towering buildings of the
city not only stand as a testament to the citys economic prowess but as a series of walls
that seem to encase the crowd that walk between them. It is also more importantly seen
as an overarching narrative that orients and directs urban and cultural policies to
accommodate the tension between global and local forces.

21

The poets of Singapore who write about their city respond to this kind of pattern.
The idea of the vertical and the image of towering things seem to be a reoccurring image
in several works of Singaporean writers. We can go back to Edwin Thumboos much
quoted Ulysses by the Merlion where he describes the urban landscape of the growing
Singapore as one filled with towers topless as Illiums (Ulysses by the Merlion 25).
Alfian Saat, one of the poets included in the main body of this study, utilizes the image
of the elevator in The City Remembers (2001) as a metaphor for mechanization of
urban life in the city.
In his foreword to No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Poetry (2000), Dennis
Haskell quotes Philip Jeyaretnam who says that the Singpore writers situation is
claustrophobic; in a city-state there is no escape from the city, there is no country to go
to (Haskell 18). This sense of claustrophobia is not only seen as a response to enclosed
physical space but also to the suffocating aridity wrought from the experience of an
overtly controlled modernity. The poets in this collection lament the loss of identity as a
cost for this upward mobile direction of progress. This yearning for escape is
exemplified by Paul Tan (1994) in Train Rides where writing about a ride out of a
country drugged with / its modernity and its self-image (1-2) he explicitly states how
Singaporeans have spent too much time in claustrophobic comforts (16).

In both cases, I sought to demonstrate how the patterns of Manila and Sinapore
negotiate various often contesting narratives that move around in their particular
spaces. I also surveyed the ways in which certain poets write about their cities with

22

particular emphasis on these patterns. What of the gay poet then? In the third and final
subsection of this introductory chapter, I look into creative possibilities opened and
offered by gay poets.

Sex as Text
Positioning the Gay Poet in the City
Utilizing sexuality as a way to examine urban life is especially useful because
sexuality is relational itself. Sexuality practices are not merely private acts in that they
ultimately play vital roles in the production of urban space. Heterosexual intercourse
leads to birth and population growth within urban space. Economic activities generated
from consumption of various cultural texts (fashion, film, tourism) rely heavily on
advertisements that are in many senses inflected by representations of sexuality.
Homosexual identities and practices make for an interesting case because of the
kind of fluidity and interrogation they offer to these patterns and to urban space. As
Alan Collins in Cities of Pleasure: Sex and the Urban Landscape (2006) writes, [The] milieu
by which the clustering of homosexuals has long been a discernible feature (as least
since the classical era of ancient Greece) is the city environment (Collins 8). What
makes homosexuality and its relation to city space interesting is essentially an
experience of liminality. Examination of this relationship between homosexual identity
and space exemplify this kind of ambiguity and fluidity. In Capitalism and Gay
Identity (1983) John DEmilio discusses how structural changes wrought by capitalist
social relations and urban migration enabled individuals to move out of the structure of

23

the family, establish their own identities and create spaces that develop, sustain and
nurture such identities. His essay cites bars, YMCA gyms and living communities (103)
as places where gays and lesbians may commune and interact. For DEmilio, space
functions paradoxically in both enabling and at the same time minoritizing identities.
Lawrence Knopp (1995) echoes the idea as he argues that heterosexuality is still often
promoted as nothing less than the glue holding these divisions of labor (and indeed,
Western society) together. But on the other hand, these divisions of labour create
single-sex environments in which homosexuality has the space, potentially to flourish
(Knopp 149). Both Knopp and DEmilio position space as ambiguous one

which

simultaneously opens possibilities for forging new identities but also oppression and
violence.
Other critical works focus their attention not on homosexual men and women in
space but the notion of what is called queer space. Unlike DEmilios YMCA gyms and
neighborhoods, queer spaces are not defined but are in a way created or activated.
Sites, often public and open ones such as malls, bathrooms, streets and parks may be
used for gay sexual practices. Cruising was one of the earliest ways in which the city
was rewritten by men refusing to accept its strictures (Betsky 12) Queer space then is
something that is not built, only implied (17). Sally Munt in The Lesbian Flaneur
(1995) connects her own experience of wandering with flaneur figures in literary history.
The experience of homelessness for the lesbian flaneur is not a lack as it is as an
opportunity to create and recreate special experience. As she writes at the end of the

24

essay: Space is never still I zip up my jacket, put my best boot forward, and tell
myself that home is just around the corner (Munt 125).
The relationship between space and homosexuality highlights the idea that the
relationship is indeed an ambiguous and fluid one. The relationship between space and
homosexuality discussed by Knopp and DEmilio points to the opening and widening of
thresholds for possible new identities as well as narratives of repression and even
violence. The notion of queer spaces on the other hand points to those spaces that
require activation and reveals how narratives of spaces are impermanent and
destructible.
In the case of Singapore, the gay and lesbian movement has been increasingly
tied to the creation and appropriation of space. In Tipping Out of the Closet: The Before
and After of the Increasingly Visible Gay Community in Singapore (2001) Russell Heng
Hiang Khng traces the formation of gay and lesbian community in Singapore from the
1960s to the present. While his focus lies primarily on the formation of the gay and
lesbian movement, Hengs comparison between the liberation movement in the west to
the socio-political situation in Singapore reveals albeit tangentially the necessity of
space. Space and more importantly the creation of space become a necessary
determinant in the creation and production of identity. Indeed, the gay and lesbian
movement in Singapore has become a constant struggle to the creation and
legitimization of space. Heng cites that the earliest indications of such articulations were
the opening of a bar called Niche and the beginning of cruising culture in the 1980s
(Heng 83).

25

The social movement of the gays and lesbians however has also moved from the
creation of space to a movement of integration to the imagined space of the nation.
Kean Fan Lim in Where Love Dares (Not) Speak Its Name: The Expression of
Homosexuality in Singapore (2006) cites that one of the more prominent activities for
the gay and lesbian scene were the Nation coming out parties in 2001 and 2002
organized by the administrators of Fridae.com (Lim 145). The naming of the events are
not incidental for what the events truly wanted to show was that Singaporean gay and
lesbians do have a place in the city-state. This interplay between gay and lesbian identity
and a place in the nation is carried out further in the way the month-long pride season of
Singapore is named: IndigNation. Presently, a major event in the LGBT movement in
Singapore is Pink Dot. In one afternoon, members and supporters of the LGBT
movement wear pink shirts and gather in Hong Lim park. When seen from above, the
human pink dot creates an interesting contrast to the green and gray of Singapores
cityscape. Appropriation of space thus functions as a critical, discursive act for identity.
This liminal relationship of LGBT practices and identities to space in Singapore is
not only seen in the periodic appropriation of space but more importantly in the notion
of citizenship. As Lim writes, homosexuals are apparently tolerated only to the extent
that they remain interstitial spaces, invisible to public eyes, (Lim 137). There is also that
possibility that increasing tolerance to gay practices may have to do with discovering the
economic possibilities of the so-called pink dollar (Lim 130) -- highlighting then the
rather shaky ambiguous nature of gay identity: invisible yet relevant to the structured
narrative of the Singapore state.

26

This notion of fluidity in relation to space is also seen in Manilas LGBT scene.
The annual pride march in Manila cuts through the different busier parts of the
metropolis. The most recent march held on 4 December 2010 saw gay and lesbian
women marching through the streets of Tomas Morato in the middle of local and multinationally managed shops and restaurants (Ang Ladlad Pride March 2010). Malate is a
site not only known for its unique bohemian culture but also in how it houses gay
practices. The temperature of homosexual pleasure reaches an all-time high in the
annual White Party. On this night where gays and lesbians may come in [their] fiercest
and most luminous white costumes,(Task Force Pride 2010) the spaces of already
bohemian Malate are transformed into a topsy-turvy carnivalesque articulation of LGBT
identities.
There are certainly many other ways in which homosexual men and women in
Manila and Singapore find ways to appropriate and activate space. In the examples
mentioned, we find how such homosexual identity in many ways reveals the instability
of space. Space when appropriated can be a means to articulate varied kinds of
identities. Possibilities of resistance are activated from below, from the spatial practices
that articulate desire and eros. Homosexual experience of space highlights the
contradictory nature of space itself. In highlighting the ambiguous and fluid nature of
homosexuality, I argue that sexuality provides us with possibilities of engagement
precisely because it reflects the instability of space. Homosexual identity thus enables a
peculiar type of positioning: of being both simultaneously inside and outside the

27

discourses that operate, of being within and outside these patterns, offering various
perspectives in the way urban practices are rendered.
The focus of this thesis as I have said in the earlier part of this introductory
chapter however will be solely on how four gay poets exemplify this sense of liminality
in experiencing urban space. The choice is more of a practical one and not an attempt to
say that what these poets in question articulate can stand for all homosexual or queer
folk in Manila and Singapore for indeed the ways in which homosexual artists (through
other artistic genres) have articulated this notion of liminality are varied and plentiful.
By practicality, I mean that for one, works by gay writers are more prominent in terms of
the actual number of poetry collections produced. Singaporean poets like Cyril Wong
and Alfian Saat already have several books. The same can be said for Lawrence Ypil
and J. Neil Garcia. Collections do more than just anthologize a writers works and allow
one easier access to an extensive number of their poems. Collections also allow one to
create a more generalized picture of their concerns as poets. Collections are often
thematically arranged and so as far as this study is concerned, the convenience of having
collections in hand allowed me to construct and develop a stronger comparative
dimension to the poets works.
In reading texts produced by these gay poets, emphasis will be placed on how
this notion of liminality is activated and rendered in the way they respond to
metropolitan space. My reading of these four poets will look into the ways in which
such liminality is engaged and utilized through poetic technique such as imagery, tone
and enjambments.

28

The thesis will be divided into two chapters that address two themes: the
everyday and the domestic. The first chapter analyzes the works of J. Neil Garcia and
Alfian Saat by looking into the ways in which they utilize everyday narratives as poetic
material and as a form of engagement. In this chapter, I look into the ways in which the
notions of verticalized compression and horizontalized fragmentation are seen in the
poems of Alfian and Garcia respectively. Notions of fragmentation and compression are
seen in the way Garcia and Alfian write about particular experiences and unsettling
conditions of difference in their poetry. I then extend the analysis and look at the gaythemed poems. In the same way that gay sexuality offers creative possibilities to reexperience and redraw space, the gay-themed poems of Alfian and Garcia utilize the
same notions of the everyday to render gay experience. In both the everyday is seen as
spaces and that become the cause of unsettlement but also of liberation and freedom. In
the case of Alfian, there is a movement in the way the everyday is positioned from an
experience of compression to one of safe enveloping. In Garcias case, gay experience
moves from an experience of homelessness and fragmentation to one of fluidity. In the
gay-themed poems of Alfian and Garcia, everyday space is seen as liminal and can be
inflected to articulate gay desires.
In my analysis of the poetry of CYyril Wong and Lawrence Ypil in the second
chapter, we move from the streets to the home. By making vital connections between
autobiographical sketches and a close reading of their poems, I demonstrate how the
interplay between space and sexuality is interiorized and how such a disposition is
materialized within the frame of domestic space through the lyric mode. Domestic space

29

functions as a critical mediator for personal and public narratives. The private poem
especially through the lyric mode functions as a kind of domestic space in itself, a space
different from the houses that have in many ways expelled them, where Ypil and Wong
negotiate and creatively render notions of home and city life.
The poem and the city as I have said in the introduction are essentially manmade works of rhythm and form. In this thesis, we will now look into how such the
patterns of the city are translated into an art form and how such a translation is inflected
by gay identity. In all these readings, I demonstrate how poetry is rendered as a critical
space where these patterns of spatial production are utilized and repositioned.

30

Chapter Two:
The Gay Poet and the Urban Everyday
Alfian bin Saat and J. Neil Garcia
To not serious consider sexuality in ones writing is to unwittingly inscribe heterosexuality in
ones work and assume its natural superiority over all forms of desire
-- J. Neil Garcia, Should Writing be Gendered?

This chapter examines how Alfian bin Saat and J. Neil Garcia utilize the notion
of the everyday in their poetry. The everyday consists not only of streets or flyovers that
cut through the metropolis and Housing Development Board (HDB) communities that
articulate a city-states multicultural vision, but also people and events that embody
everyday narratives of space. The everyday makes a viable point of analysis because it is
a problematic, contested terrain, where meanings are not to be found ready-made
(Highmore 1). The everyday is the site where differences and commonalities are
performed (2) and where narratives are materialized and transformed into habits. The
everyday is also invisible. As Ben Highmore reminds us, it is to the everyday that we
consign that which no longer holds our attention. Things become everyday by
becoming invisible. And if familiarity does not always breed contempt, it does
encourage neglect (21). To go back to the everyday is not merely to reexamine material
culture but to return to seemingly insignificant cultural objects that nevertheless orient
particular articulations of urban life.
The chapter thus extends the theorizing ofthe introductory chapter which
compared and contrasted the urban production of Manila and Singapore as
horizontalized fragmentation and verticalized compression respectively. Here, I look

31

into the ways in which Alfian and Garcia respond to such patterns of production. The
ensuing discussion is grounded on Michel de Certeaus notion of spatial practices in The
Practice of Everyday Life (1984). De Certeau in Walking in the City, privileges the act of
walking because it allows the walker (likened to writers of figurative language) to open
creative possibilities of spatial practices:
the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them
exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others,
since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege,
transform or abandon spatial elements. (De Certeau 100)
De Certeau likens urban planners and architects to grammarians and linguists who
develop the language of everyday space. In contrast, [the] long poem of walking
manipulates spatial organizations (101). For de Certeau, individual practices function
as a form of creative resistance. De Certeaus notion of creative resistance positions the
walker in a liminal position in that he is in the street planned by the urban walkers yet
devices unique ways to personalize his individual traffic. While most of the poems to be
discussed later on are not necessarily walking poems, the greater importance of de
Certeaus analysis lies in his emphasis on the role of individual practices in the
production of meaning within and through spatial practice.
He makes this clearer in Spatial Stories, where he distinguishes place from
space by positing that the latter is essentially practiced place (130) in that what
transforms these places into spaces are narratives. Personal narratives develop
individual spatial experience and allow one to generate new experiences of place:
In a pre-established geography, which extends (if we limit ourselves to the home)
from bedrooms so small that one cant do anything in them to the legendary,

32

long-lost attic that could be used for everything, everyday stories tell us what
one can do in it and make out of it. They are treatments of space. (122)
This chapter then looks into the different ways in which Alfian and Garcia utilize
everyday spaces and events in the way they render their own experiences and transform
these into unique spatial experiences. Alfian and Garcia make for viable comparison
precisely because of the way they put an emphasis on the importance of the everyday in
their writing. Alfian is a Malay Singaporean playwright and poet. After being the top
Malay student of his Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) cohort, Alfian was
admitted to the Raffles Institute and Raffles Junior College (Interview with Klein 16-17).
He then moved on to study medicine at the National University of Singapore but did not
finish his studies. He is currently a student of Communication at Nanyang
Technological University. His plays include Asian Boys Volume 1 (2000), Landmarks: Asian
Boys Volume 2 (2003), Happy Endings: Asian Boys Volume 3 (2007) while his collection of
poems are One Fierce Hour (1998), History of Amnesia (2001) and the unpublished The
Invisible Manuscript. Critical scholarship on Alfians works highlights the presence of
everyday imagery in his poetry. In Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore
Literature (2009), Poon et. al write that [poets] like Alfian Saat train an eye on
everyday images so naturalized they escape notice, mining them for poetic potential
(Poon et al 373). Alfian affirms this idea in his interview with Ronald Klein in Interlogue:
Studies in Singapore Literature Volume 8: Interview II, (2009) where the enfant terrible of
Singapore (Interview with Klein 33) mentions the vital connection between the everyday

33

and the construction of political rhetoric: I tend to see a lot of political action being
done every day by people who are not even aware of it (Interview with Klein, 35).
Alfians poems demonstrate this kind of critical engagement. His position is one
which provides an alternative vision of Singaporean society. As David Birch (2009)
writes, Alfian is intent in much of his writing to expose the artificiality, pretence and
dishonesty of those people, policies and practices which deliberately deceive and
obfuscate in the name of the state. (Birch 148). In his poem, Trawler for instance
Alfian likens election propaganda to trawlers that throw rhetoric in four directions /
and four official languages (Trawler 7-8). The poem is a critique not only of election
propaganda but of Singaporean society who according to him are mouthless [fishes]
(19-20) that are hooked by such rhetoric. The connection to the everyday is seen in how
Alfian utilizes the street and images on the street to render this form of political
criticism.
Critical scholarship on Alfians works seems to establish a connection between
his ethnicity and its impact on the notions of identity in his works. While we can thus
argue that Alfian speaks more as a marginalized Malay man than as a gay individual we
also find that two of his longer and more emotionally charged works ( such as
Singapore You Are Not My Country and We Are Not Yet Free) are informed
precisely by the experience of homosexual repression. In his play, Asian Boys Volume 1
Alfian stages both Singapores handling of queer capital and its posture as a traditional
Asian state (Lim 390). The play follows the journey of gay characters as they time travel
through pivotal events in Singapores history which include the Chinese migration to

34

Nanyang (Singapore) in the nineteenth century, [the] Japanese occupation during the
Second World War, the detention of several local presumed Marxists under the Internal
Security Act in 1987 (391). Alfians play [pits] these Asian boys in their varied
manifestations against the city-states national history, ambiguous cultural policies and
postcolonial sexual mores (391). In this play, Alfian uses gay characters and everyday
objects (such as a carpet from IKEA) and historical anecdotes to articulate a rather
humorous yet nevertheless alternative vision of Singapore society.
J. Neil Garcia on the other hand is an academic and a poet. His book Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics (2003) is a collection of these essays on issues related to
Philippine literary criticism and culture. He has also written and published works
concerning gay culture in the Philippines. His Philippine Gay Culture: From Binabae to
Bakla, Silahis to MSM (2000) is a foundational work on gay studies in the Philippines as it
is one of the first to critically explore the formation of gay identity within metropolitan
space. Together with another poet Danton Remoto, Garcia edited the three volumes of
Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing (1992, 1998, 2009).
As a poet, Garcia sees gender and sexuality as a consequential aspect of his
individuality. In Should Writing be Gendered? he writes:
My homosexuality has never, for one second, struck me as been immaterial and
inconsequential to my very being inasmuch as everywhere I look, whatever I do,
whomever I speak with, everywhere I go, I am reminded of the unlawfulness of
my desire, of the demonic difference ascribed to me by my sexuality. (Garcia 163)
Garcia insists on the need to thematize homosexuality in his works for he believes that
to not seriously consider sexuality in one's writing is to unwittingly inscribe

35

heterosexuality in one's work and assume its natural superiority over all forms of
desire (164). Most of his poems demonstrate this sense of awareness in that they map
out the life and melancholy wrought from gay life along the contours of the metropolis.
Gay love and desire can be found in the jeepney (Cypher, 2), the cinema (Subtheatre
and Subtheatre 2). The temptation and the desire for warm bodies can be found as
well in the streets (Bakal Boys) and in the beauty parlor (Real Men: A Cycle).
The discussion for each poet will first begin with an analysis of poems which
highlight the ways in which Alfian and Garcia experience these notions of compression
and fragmentation through everyday images. In this chapter, I demonstrate that there is
a difference in the way Garcia and Alfian utilize the everyday in their gay-themed
poems. In the case of Alfian, there is a movement from the way the everyday is
positioned from confinement to enclosure. In the case of Garcia, the movement is from
fragmentation and placeless to a sense of fluidity where identity in flux is seen not as a
circumstance for lament but of opportunities for creating new forms of identities. I
demonstrate how everyday space is rendered as liminal space by Alfian and Garcia. As
in de Certeaus notion of spatial practices, everyday space is utilized as material to
articulate difference, unfamiliarity and pain but also as possibilities for creative
individual practices.

Forever Each Others Ghosts

Compression and Fragmentation in the Poems
of Alfian and Garcia

36

De Certeau argues that spatial practice rests on a creative negotiation between

the concrete space and individual practices. The ensuing discussion looks into the ways
in which the notions of compression and fragmentation are seen in the poems of Alfian
and Garcia. Spatial experience for Garcia and Alfian are fraught with experiences of
discomfort and aridity.
These are seen on the level of theme and language use. Alfians poetic technique
can be likened that of Allen Ginsburgs whose political critiques and eroticization of
desire are crafted and creatively sustained by the utilization of everyday objects and
ordinary language. In the case of Alfian, the notion of compression is seen in the way
everyday images and often place-specific scenes (such as an HDB flat in Simei and a
specific secondary school) are utilized to create a sense of confinement. Everyday images
are seen as objects that materialize the confining experience of routine. Alfians use of
deceptively simple language helps create this irony.
For Garcia on the other hand, the notion of fragmentation is seen in the
reoccurring trope of self-splitting in his poetry. Garcias poems, unlike those of Alfian,
are set in non-specific places. There is in Garcias poems a sense of disorientation and
placelessness. This is seen not only in the recurring trope but in the thick and rich poetic
language that Garcia utilizes.
In what follows, I read several poems which demonstrate such notions. I begin
with poems that explore the concept of family and domestic space. While it can be said
that domestic space is private space, the emphasis of the ensuing discussion is on how
Alfian and Garcia utilize the everyday in constructing the domestic. I finish this

37

subsection with a discussion of several poems on outside space in which the notions of
fragmentation and compression are evident in their creative vision of spatial experience
in Manila and Singapore.

The City as Portrait: Confinement and the Notion of Framing in Alfian Saats Poems
Most of Alfians poems in One Fierce Hour and A History of Amnesia do not reflect
the kind of glitter and glamour found in Singapore tourist brochures. Alfians Singapore
is not a city where neon lights drape the shoppers street of Orchard Road. His
alternative vision of Singapore society is fraught and littered with dark images and
posits that whenever there is light, there are shadows. Alfians use of dark and often
grotesque portrayal of the everyday is hinged upon the idea of confinement as this is
through everyday objects. Alfian develops this through listing and framing. Everyday
objects are introduced one by one, line by line and at the end of the poem, confine the
poems subjects. Framing is an appropriate term for this idea of confinement because
the scenes painted here are, in many ways portraits themselves: images of people frozen
in time and in the everyday narrative that has confined them.
The challenge in these critical illustrations is to locate the ways in which gay
sexuality inflects poems which at first sight have nothing to do with issues in sexuality.
In my close reading, I demonstrate that these illustrations of confinement reproduce
dominant narratives. We find in Alfians poems an overt disgust and ultimately
resistance to the depiction of the typical. As an enfante terrible, Alfian is the resistant and
rebellious son who refuses to reproduce the narratives of the ideal constructed through

38

images of the typical. Alfian utilizes the materiality of the everyday as poetic material to
craft this lucid aesthetics of confinement.
Poems on domestic space illustrate this notion of confinement within the notions
of everyday domestic routine. In View From A Window (Simei St 1, 11:22 PM), Alfian
does not only show that one is trapped by routine but also utilizes dark and rather
imagery to develop this rendition. We find two frames in the scene:
looking out
at the next block
at the curtains on the next block
at shadows opening cupboards
and closing them, noiselessly
at housewives washing dishes
framed by socks on window grilles
at wooden slots for air-cons
at rusty holders for washing poles
(View From A Window, 1-9)
The first frame is the speakers window where he observes an HDB flat across and the
second one is a portrait of the housewives as they go about their routine. Here,
materializations of everyday domestic routine are the ones that do the framing and
confinement. The speaker calls our attention to objects that drape the scene as the
routine of housewives washing dishes (6) is framed by socks on window grilles / at
wooden slots / at rusty holders for washing poles (7-9). The commonplace objects do
more than just provide us with a literal frame for the scene but prepare us as well for the
way in which the speaker perceives the housewives as lifeless individuals trapped

39

within the frame of domestic routine. Their movements are limited precisely and only
by the cyclical and repetitive act of cleaning.
The speakers own frame thus covers the entire scene as the speaker regards the
housewives as faceless shadows (4), then as soulless individuals viewing a wall / at a
columbarium / at ghosts behind their plaques (11-13). The poem thus ends with the
speaker commenting on the lifelessness of the scene as he likens the scene to looking at
gravestones (19).
Family Portraits likewise illustrates Alfians vision of lifelessness in routine.
Here, Alfians position as a rebellious (and gay) son is more evident and his notion of
resistance, clearer. In the poem, we find snapshots of daily lived experiences of three
family members that represent and play stereotypical roles: the son in school; the
housewife mother who takes care of the house and the father who works. That this
poem in itself is divided into three sub-poems which focus on one member of the
family develops this idea that they are somehow framed by routine. While the son, the
mother and the father are all given voices (i.e. each section poem is told from a different
first-personperspective), the choice of identities given to each character (mother, not
wife ;father, not husband) reveals that this very much about the son (who perhaps
represents Alfian himself) and his attitude towards the stereotypical representations of
familial roles.
The son is stuck in school with a marked badge [with] a Latin motto / Hope for
the future / The future is hope / Or something (Family Portraits 1-4). The specificity
of the place and the autobiographical reference is evident in that the motto seems to

40

point specifically to Raffles Institution

(Hope for a better age)and Alfians own

dismissal of the promises of a bright future and mobility. Moreover, the opening lines
prepare us for what the son tries to do in the poem. Alfians technique of listing creates a
tension in which we find the son trying to break free from this routine. The first line four
lines give us a clue as to how this is rendered. At first, the son seems to be following the
set narrative of the ideal by articulating what his badge means but then takes the idea
back by showing indifference to it. Everyday images are used to show how the son
attempts to create a back and forth struggle to be dissident and even rebellious:
At times black crows try to interrupt
When we sing the National Anthem
It is difficult to maintain
The whiteness of my shoes
Especially on Wednesdays
I must admit there is something quite special
About the bare thighs of hardworking Scouts
Seven to the power of five is unreasonable
On Chinese New Year
Mrs Lee dressed up
In a sarong kebaya
And sang Bengwagan Solo
The capital of Singapore is Singapore
My best friend
Did a hero thing once
Shaded all As
For his Chinese Language
Multiple-choice paper
(5-26)

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The sons portrait is a disparate listing of scenery, general knowledge and personal
experiences in school. The list features the sons back-and-forth effort to be rebellious
about what is imposed on him. In the first two stanzas of the excerpt, there is a tension
between the notion of soiling and cleanliness: the presence of black crows interrupting
the oral affirmation of nationhood is contrasted with the sons still trying to follow rules.
A news clip and a geography lesson item follow a subtle hint of homosexuality and a
complaint concerning a mathematical problem. In all this, the sons attempt to be
disobedient is continuously cut off by everyday knowledge and events. Towards the
end, the frame locks the son in: in our annual yearbook / There is a photograph of me /
Pushing a wheelchair and smiling / They caught me / At the exact moment / When my
eyes were casually closed (27-32).
The housewife mother on the other hand is trapped within the frame of domestic
routine: watching sitcoms (33-35), laundry (47-50) and cooking (52-53). She echoes this
peculiar sense of boredom and repetition by almost repeating the same question twice:
What to do/ What else to do? (70-71) The repetition functions as echo as she faces the
wall, the poetic borders of a frame that traps her within the routine of domestic space.
We are introduced to the working father in the last part of Family Portraits.
The fathers portrait is a frame within several frames as he finds himself facing the wall
ironically of motivation posters / one with a sunset / one with a parachutist (89-92).
The posters depict two paradoxical scenarios: on the one hand, they show scenes of
escape (of vacation and of a man in free fall). On the other hand they also mirror the

42

confining situation of the father. In our eyes, the father too is a poster boy of a framed
typical scene, of being trapped in the office.
The title of the poem is ironic: there is no family portrait. The son, the mother
and the father are separate from each other, with each one tasked to fulfill his or her
assigned productive role; the mother who accedes to her role in the domestic realm; the
father as the breadwinner confined in the enclosed space of the office; and ultimately the
son, resitant, who tries to the continuation of such narratives. Moreover, in isolating
each family member into different portraits and depicting them in discomforting
illustrations, Alfian makes his critique known. The subtle hint at homosexuality, found
at the center of the sons portrait thus proves to be central to the poets vision of resisting
a future he does not wish to be a part of.
In the two poems discussed so far, we find how this experience of confinement is
hinged on the notions of routine as these are materialized by everyday objects. Alfians
gaze is directed at how everyday narratives are not far from neutral. The materiality of
the everyday is hinged on the constant reproduction of such ideals. As we have seen so
far, gay subjectivity in Alfians poems is seen in how he seems to reject this notion of
reproducing these narratives that are especially bred and cultivated by familial roles, the
basic unit of the state itself. The emphasis on family is equally important. Natalie Oswin
in The Modern Model Family at Home in Singapore: A Queer Geography (2009)
quotes Lee Hsien Loongs definition of the ideal Singapore family (as one made up of a
man, woman and with children) and argues that the family and the affairs that have to
do with the construction of domestic space is underpinned by a heteronormative logic

43

(Oswin 257). Alfians dark and grotesque portrayals reveal both his disgust in and
rejection of such narratives.
This interplay between the notion of confinement, routine and lifelessness as
these are framed by the poets vision of disgust is seen in his urban writing. The
reproduction of a fixed narrative as this is articulated in the everyday is a confining and
entrapping experience that renders its citizens into objects similar to Ezra Pounds
apparitions of faces in a crowd in A Station in a Metro. What sets Alfian aside,
however, from all of these poets who seem to render urban experience in almost similar
ways is his overt sense of disgust at the scenes. From the realm of the domestic all the
way to the streets, the vision covered by Alfians spatial stories features a rejection of the
reproduction of such narratives.
Unlike the two poems discussed earlier, Good Morning (Images from an HDB
Estate), highlights the overt presence of decay and lifeless in the interface between the
inside and the outside. Far from being a space of sanitation and peace, the HDB space is
littered with images of unwanted noise and waste.
The poem begins with a sense of shock and unwelcome noise: Someones alarm
screams unanswered (Good Morning 1). The color of the typical routine of everyday
is blackened by the speaker as he brings the image of an amorphous crowd of residents
dragging themselves from the bed: Faceless people rise from the / dark asphyxia of
unfamiliar beds / lined by the harsh glare of the sudden toilet bulb (3-5).

44

The scene shifts from the bedroom to the bathroom where the act of bathing is
presented as an act of cleaning not only the body but the spirit as well. The technique of
listing is darkened by the tone the speaker adopts:
The gecko stares with lidless eyes, a witness
To private rituals, the fleshy shames confronted
Behind the security of a latch.
The flabby breasts, the rashes,
The scabs, that would not heal
the retching, and blood, thighs, sighs, incontinence
in horror of their nakedness
they cleanse away yesterdays sweaty guilt.
(5 12)
The act of cleansing is portrayed paradoxically as a scene of disgust as an animal stands
witness to a long list of bodily rituals. The geckos lidless eyes, a possible reference to
Eliots The Wasteland, are witnesses as well to the image of a ruined body. The listing
he makes does not seem to connote cleanliness at all but instead highlights the scarring
imperfections of the body. The lone and singular indentation highlights the notion that
these imperfections are given bodily substance hinged upon the body (fleshy shames,
sweaty guilt).
This notion of permanent scabbing is carried over figuratively as the scene shifts
from the bathroom to the outside where the dirty water gurgles through the drains
(16) implying that filth can only be displaced. Filth, dirt and the concept of dirtiness
although washed away are simply carried outside where we find filth literally
everywhere. The speaker points us to birds and their songs of shit (15) urine on the
stairs newspapers curled / around glassy-eyed fish / the girl with cigarette burns on her
face; (22-24). Like the body that is permanently scarred, the world the speaker occupies

45

in is permanently scabbed with filth. As in the two poems discussed earlier, the speaker
seeks to distances himself from the scene. He chooses to retreat but only a step back
from a narrowing world (26). That the speaker chooses to take a step back implies that
there is no where else to go, that he can go only as far to escape this narrowing world
where filth is precisely like water that washes it away it only circulates. This notion of
circulation in turn enriches the all too apparent irony of the title. Mornings universally
represent new beginnings, the washing away of the old. The irony lies in how the
cyclical notion of purification in the morning is mocked by the circulation of filth in an
increasingly compressing world.
Alfians frequently quoted urban poem The City Remembers echoes these
notions of entrapment. Here, the streetlamp, the morning train, the traffic light and the
elevator (objects that ironically regulate motion and mobility) collectively comment on
the faceless, isolating and exhaustive conditions of urbanism. People in this city (treated
and addressed once more as an amorphous faceless crowd) have become mechanized
and locked within a confining narrative of progress. The blinking street lamp that
punctuates the street comments on the citizens incomplete interiority: your soul
finding its form (14); the train, an object for mass transportation that ushers in and in
many ways compresses the crowd comments on the vulgar loneliness of the crowd
that looks elsewhere (34); the traffic light points at the directionlessness of the people
ironically as they simply follow the ebb and flow of the red and green lights (47).
In personifying these objects, Alfian shows the irony that in the end, it is the
citizens who are the machines; they are the mechanized ones that power a faceless city.

46

The image which concludes the poem, the elevator, in itself is a commentary on the
confining and verticalized narrative of Singapores modernity:
When you are in me, limbo is not
An option, not when my gift to you
Is a vertical metaphor: hell below,
Heaven above, and in between,
Your life on earth, rising and falling.
( 58 62)
The tone these everyday objects utilize develops this irony. The morning train appears
flustered and frustrated: Why do you not look at each others / Faces? Is the scenery
that arresting, / one housing estate giving birth to another copy?(19-21) The traffic light
and the elevator on the other hand speak of a kind of helplessness in the directionless
state of the crowd. Taken together, the tones develop a lament for the crowd that has
become mechanized, automatic and trapped within a particular system.
What we therefore find in the poems that we have discussed so far is a clear
connection between Alfians domestic and urban writing: there is a sense of lifelessness
in repetition, in the process of reproducing more of the same. This positioning is made
more pronounced in his final poem in A History of Amnesia. We Are Not Yet Free
combines these experiences of confinement with his political criticism as these are
inflected by his subject-position as a gay man. Reminiscent of Ginsburgs poetry We
Are Not Yet Free features various techniques and writing styles (lyrical, narrative,
journalistic) as the poem presents Alfians commentary on the Josef Ng incident.1 Like
most of the poems that have been discussed so far, Alfian turns his gaze to everyday
1

In a footnote to the poem, Alfian alerts us to two articles Chronology of a Controversy and A Review
of Josef Ngs Performance by Lee Weng Choy. One can access these documents at
www.happening.com.sg/commentary/index.html

47

spaces and objects and utilizes these to poetically perform his rendition of the incident.
The incident in itself functions as a critical point of departure that Alfian utilizes to make
his larger claims about the confining experiences of Singapore and ultimately as his
position as a poet.
One finds once more the reoccurring trope of framing in the poem. Here now,
the focus is on how media seems to force an issue by framing a particular subject. The
double meaning of framing (that of taking pictures and of being set up) cannot be
more obvious:
I was one of those
Deceived into believing
That the obscenity was in what
You did, and not
In the hands of that one in the audience
Who decided to frame you in a photo
Graph, thinking of a headline,
Settling on Pub(l)ic Protest. You,
Facing the wall, with your hands on your
Crotch, it was as if you knew,
As if you had posed for them, the image
Of a man clutching his privates
As a camera zeroed in like a scalpel on his back[.]
(We Are Not Yet Free, 31 43)
In Alfians use of the double meaning of framing, the wall that Josef Ng faces becomes
increasingly ambiguous: on the one hand, it may point to the walls of the performance
stage but on the other hand, it can also refer to the public image which has been
constructed by the media.

48

We Are Not Yet Free also positions the poetic critique that Alfian offers. The
more awkward enjambments Alfian makes in this narration of Josef Ngs framing is key
to this positioning in that these highlight Alfians sense of breaking away from the
framed images. This is ultimately contrasted to the more disciplined and calculated
precision line breaks in the succeeding subsections of the poem. This is especially seen in
his repetition of I doubt in the following lines where the speaker seeks to break away
from the created images:
I doubt
A crystal sigh
Rippled through
Midnight estates
Bandaged in peace
I doubt
There were boys
In the heat of self-abuse
Who substituted fantasies
Of swimming pool buddies
With nightmares
Of the lallangs serrations
And the handcuffs click.
I doubt
Records were shattered
In the department
tabulating
Indices for Moral Health
I doubt
Men walked the streets
Assured that their genitals
Were safe in the hands
Of the police.
(109-132)

49

That these more lyrical lines follow an excerpt from a newspaper sets the contrast and
the positioning Alfian makes. This becomes more apparent as towards the end of this
longer work, Alfian likens his poem to a counterfeit poem which functions as a foil to
the images created by mainstream narrative.

In this sections discussion, I have alerted us to the various ways in which the
everyday is utilized by Alfian to create an experience of confinement. Everyday objects
create a frame which entraps the poets subjects by means of routine and a narrative that
demands the replication and reproduction of the ideal. It is here that we are able to see
how Alfians sexual identity functions as a form of present absence. As reproduction is
the product of heterosexual relations, Alfian as a gay man reveals a subject-position that
seeks to resist the narrative of the typical and the ideal. Alfian positions himself in the
outside and the grotesque visions his poetry depicts are shadows to Orchard Roads
lights.

Forever Each Others Ghosts: Self-splitting in J. Neil Garcias Poems

This section invites us back to Manila. We recall what I have posited in the
introductory section of the thesis where I argued that the metropolitan body of Manila is
characterized as horizontally fragmented. In this section we look at how the grammar of
such fragmented metropolitan form, to use de Certeaus vocabulary, is projected in
Garcias works and transformed by his various spatial practices.

50

I would like to begin with a brief anecdote. I watched my first drag queen show
in 2007. Before the fierce neon lights and the rave music amplified by sound equipment
from France (something the club actually boasted of) invited guests and cruisers to the
dance floor, the denizens of the club were invited to listen first to Mariah Carey and
Whitney Houston as they lip-synced to the song When You Believe. Eventually the
stage lights dimmed and the partying began. I would later on find Mariah and
Whitney outside the club with make-up still fresh yet wearing plain shirt and jeans,
cursing about some jerk while hailing a jeepney (transportation mostly for the masses)
for a long ride home. A series of putang ina niyas (he/she is a motherfucker) trailed the
smoke-belching jeepney as the vehicle carried them away from the safe and wealthy
haven of Manilas wealthy and globalized space. The glamorous hope for miracles
which they once sang in a dress of equally glittering sequins seemed only confined
within the doors of a club whose pleasure-seeking denizens have long since forgotten
their heavily made up faces.
I remember this scene as I begin to write about Garcias poems. Like the life and
fate of the drag queens in that club, speakers in many number of Garcias poems depict a
kind of splitting. Like Alfian, Garcias response to the everyday is not a happy,
optimistic one. While Alfians perception of confinement is seen in the dark and
decaying everyday, Garcias notion of the fragmented everyday is seen through the act
of (self) splitting. Garcias poems exemplify particular experiences of fragmentation in
the way the self and the characters live dual often incoherent identities. One finds as
well a particular kind of violence and pain in this notion of self-splitting.

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Garcias reading of metropolitan gay culture in Philippine Gay Culture reflects this
notion of splitting selves in different ways. In his historicizing of gay male identities,
Garcia argues that the dominant view of homosexual identity is that of the inverted
male, that is a woman trapped in a mans body (Garcia 223). An incongruity then
occurs between an individuals interior self and public front. It is precisely because of
this dominant perspective that present-day men who indulge in homosexual practices
(labeled as MSM or men having sex with men) find it extremely difficult to see
themselves as gay men (232). The rejection comes from the idea that, informed largely by
dominant macho culture, they do not see themselves as women trapped in mens bodies.
There is then that attempt on their part to split action and identity. Garcia, however,
rejects this perceived separation between act and identity for he narrates that in a lot of
their workshops, the participants are allowed a certain night to be campy and a drag
party is held for which everybody gets to cross dress (232). We find that Garcias notion
of homosexual identity in metropolitan space is essentially grounded on various
experiences of splitting.
At this juncture, it would first prove useful to briefly mention Ronald Baytan,
another gay poet who was Garcias student in the University of the Philippines. Like
Garcias, Baytans gay poetry is informed by the notion of fragmentation. Baytans
poems like Transience and White Angel portray the bodies of lovers as split parts in
order to depict how gay desire is temporal and fleeting. Baytans use of the lyric,
however, challenges his themes as the precise and disciplined construction of the lyrical
text seems to nevertheless create a sense of wholeness to what seems to be depiction of

52

the fragmentary and fleeting notions of desire. In Garcias poems, on the other hand, the
form lends to the reinforcement to themes of fragmentation. By form, I mean not only
the syntax and diction of the body text but also the focus and the language that in itself
proves to be a tool for disorientation. I will begin my reading of Garcias poems first by
looking at his representations of the gay mans body, and then move to his more urban
poems. In all, we find how this conflict is eventually resolved by a sense of resolution.
The tension between these multiple identities proves to be the center of Garcias
speakers.
In the long poem Kaluluwa the speaker finds himself humbled and angered by
the souls presence and existence: you are certainly better / who kills me over and over
/ just by a single pitying glance (Kaluluwa 10 12). The soul is the foil to the
speakers own body in that it is able to endure, outlive and exist beyond the bodys
shape. Another poem which highlights this sense of fragmentation and difference
between the body and its perceived interior is Invert. Here, Garcia uses the house as a
metaphor for the body. The speaker sees himself as a haunted house: Possessed of
womansoul / I am house / to her hauntings (Invert 1-3). This notion of womansoul
goes back to Garcias initial critical analysis of the Filipino gay male in Philippine Gay
Culture as essentially males turning into inward females became of their
homosexuality (Garcia 3). Of particular interest to this sense of self-splitting is the
presence of violence and pain:
my bellys
kitchen boils
with her thickening

53

brew of salt
Plates smash with plates
in the air
of my hunger,
while a pet mouse
eats a home
into my mouth.
(4-12)
Hunger as a primal bodily urge becomes the site for this violent interaction between the
body and the desires of the womansoul. The short brief line breaks emphasize this kind
of pain. As readers, we get to experience as well the pain this tension creates as the slow
and sluggish pacing of the rendition isolate the specific words that highlight this
experience of pain: boils, smash, eating through ones body. Towards the end of the
poem, this sense of disconnection between the body and the soul is given a sense of
compromise as the speaker eventually learns to live with this womansoul womansoul
in manbody (49) but acknowledges that there will always be differences between them,
that they forever of each other shall be ghosts (51-52).
Garcia utilizes this notion of self-splitting in the way he writes about everyday
matters. His vision of fragmented identities is carried over as a reoccurring optic in the
way he perceives urban experience. Garcias poems often creatively interrogate issues
that have to do with the impoverished state of poorer communities in the city. There is, I
would argue, a connection between Garcias subject-position as a gay man and his
critical and creative affinity with poverty as a reoccurring theme. He writes in his
closing remarks in the theoretical portion of Philippine Gay Culture2:

After this, Garcia moves on to analyze gay-themed literary texts in the other half of the anthology.

54

What feminism teaches us, and what we have learned from this short
engagement with Philippine gay history, is that the disparities of gender
ineffaceably mark the inequalities of our current day lives. Poverty feminizes;
ethnicity too. Women certainly are feminized. And homosexuals, and all the
other underdeveloped, deviant, immature groups constantly marginalized,
violently othered people in our corner of this sad and perilous world. ( Garcia
245)
We thus go back to the anecdote I shared earlier on. The drag queens, Mariah and
Whitney, once they have returned to the dressing rooms, not only discard the dresses
and scarves of glitter and glamour but strip away as well the wealthier dreams signified
by the apparel on the floor. What we therefore find in Garcias creative urban texts is a
weaving of various narratives of marginality and suffering. We find encounter the same
experience of violence and self-splitting that we have seen in his more personal poems.
Garcias image of the self-splitting gay man becomes his creative point of departure.
In Poem, the violence of the city becomes apparent as the faceless city is seen
as an entity which allows one to simply die:
The train that stops the traffic
did not stop for the boy at play
outside his home. Today his home
is torn for limb for limb by the government
that let him die in the meanness
of his childhood: accidents happen.
No ball however flew streetwise.
No small hands swiftly flung caught death midair
by the jaw. He was skipping but a foot away
from their lean-to. The train barely licked
the door as it blew body and soul away
so gently, he did not even think
it was any more painful than his hunger

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or the sharply pointed dreams that came from it.

It even looked beautiful
(Poem, 1-15)
Splitting and disorientation are evident throughout the poem. On the level of the poems
dramatic situation, the sense of splitting is of course seen in the violent manner in which
the boy dies. The form and structure of the poem highlight as well this sense of
fragmentation. While the poem has a clear form in terms of the way stanzas are
organized, the awkward line cutting and more importantly the imprecise metering of
syllables suggest a kind of disorder and disorientation. Ultimately, the sense of
disorientation in the body of the poem is seen in the way images and concepts, all
centered on the idea of the body, are convoluted: the boys body becomes a house; the
neglectful government (although represented possibly by the train) is given hands that
tear the boys body; later on the train itself is given bodily characteristics (The train
barely licked).
In all, the ambiguous title reflects the ambiguous and often disorienting feel of
the poem as this is seen in the body of the poem and in how the concept of the body is
treated. In this sense, the disorienting feel that Garcia paints, however hidden under the
poems form then mirrors in various ways the disorienting feel of Manilas urban
landscape.
Another poem which highlights this sense of splitting is Passion and Unselfish
Love in a Carnival. Here Garcia assumes the identity of a self-proclaimed carnival
queen (Passion and Unselfish Love in a Carnival 1) who as it turns out, is a woman in
a shooting gallery game. The notion of splitting is seen in various ways: the woman sees

56

herself as a queen of the carnival and as somebodys lover; the poems dramatic
situation is split between the carnival and the house.
Up in her self-proclaimed throne she considers herself different from the other
freaks such as the human spider. The turtle boy. / Twins linked to each other by their
pensises. (39-40) not only because of the latters deformed and strange nature but more
importantly because freaks are those / for whom there is no more hope. Or love (2930). The so-called carnival queen is thus happy with her double life, a life that she sees is
denied to the other freaks whose freakiness lies precisely in their jointed
abnormalities.
We eventually discover that the woman lives a different life and subjects herself
to shame in order to support somebody. She reveals that there is someone waiting for
her and she remarks that hes happy / I come home to him at just the right time / where
money is tight for my sweet (44-46) and that I love him so much I can see myself a fish
/ swimming feverishly in soup forever (56-57). There is therefore no difference between
the carnival and this lived space she shares with her partner. In both, she remains
oblivious to the idea she is by her own definition a freak too, stripped away of dignity
and entrapped in a domestic partnership devoid of love: I think its true he loves me,
too. / After all he says it right after Ive said it / and given him what he so pityingly
takes (58-60). The title of the poem passion and unselfish love then speaks of how she
has unwittingly split herself from the truth of her situation.
Like Poem, Passion and Love is a lamentation on material and spiritual
impoverishment. Garcia utilizes images such as week-old water (6) and dust and rust

57

seeping in like a cold (14) to subtly present a space fraught with dilapidation and
neglect. Upon the ridiculed carnival queens body are woven narratives of poverty and
violence brought about by the consistent act of self-splitting. That Garcia chose the first
person perspective for this creative rendition highlights his affinity with this own fictive
subject that represents the impoverishment and violence wrought by the gay experience
of self-splitting in metropolitan space.
Such a notion is made even more apparent in The Conversion where Garcia
goes back to a particular and peculiar way of teaching an effeminate boy to man up. The
speaker in the poem is a retrospective man who recalls how he was subjected to familial
and communal humiliation as he is physically punished and coerced to man up. The
title of the poem in itself has religious connotations in that the persons conversion
makes consistent referring to the Christian notion of conversion through baptism of
water:
It happened in a metal drum
They put me there, my family
that loved me. The water
had just been saved just for it, that day.
The laundry lay caked and smelly
in the flower-shaped basins.
Dishes soiled with fat and swill
piled high in the sink, and grew flies.
My cousins did not get washed that morning.
Lost in masks of snot and dust,
their faces looked tired and resigned
to the dirty lot of children.
All the neighbors gathered around our
open-air bathroom []
(1-15)

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We observe two things here. As in the previous two poems discussed, images of poverty
and impoverishment prevail in the scene: water is insufficient and therefore must be
saved up; proper sanitation and domestic care are absent; the lack of space is
highlighted by communal spectatorship. The necessity of the boy to affirm his
masculinity becomes the central concern of the community that day.
Secondly, the alternating indentations highlight this sense of splitting as they
develop a tension between strong and soft imagery. The poem begins with something
concrete and hard how the so-called conversion happened through a strong and
metallic household object. The second line shocks us in a way that we find out that the
kind of violence subjected to the speaker was done by the people who were supposed to
love him. The next few lines develop this tension between strong and violent and soft
imagery as they highlight the intention of the conversion: the laundry is seen as both
caked and smelly in flower-shaped basins.
The narrative then jumps from this public humiliation in his youth to adulthood,
when he grows up feeling happy now that [he is] / redeemed (45-46). In reiterating the
religious notion of redemption, the speaker emphasizes as well the idea that to be true to
ones biological body is a way to be morally good. Yet there is nothing quite redemptive
or morally sound in his conversion for while sees himself rewarded for seeing the light
and acknowledging his masculinity I got my wife pregnant with the next. / Our four
children, all boys, are the joy of my manhood, my proof. (4749). The water is still a
problem / and the drum is still there (54-55). The drum is symbolic of his material and
spiritual impoverished state. It lingers on to remind him that nothing has changed: he is

59

still poor and by constantly hitting his wife and drinking with the uncles, he finds
himself needing to assert his masculinity again and again Better off dead, I say to
myself / and my family that loves me for my bitter breath (76-77). The violence of selfsplitting is evident not only in this corrupted version of baptism but in the way he
transfers his angst and anger through domestic violence.
Thus in this poem, the sense of self-splitting is highlighted not only in how ones
personal identity is forced upon the person but on the kind of violence that was used to
create and maintain such an identity. The experience of poverty proves to be an
important backdrop for such rendition in that the material impoverishment mirrors the
kind of violence and dilapidation of selfhood.
In all readings, we find how Garcias vision of urban realities (particularly
poverty) is fraught with the notions of fragmentation. Such a notion is hinged precisely
on his critical perception of gay identity in metropolitan space as essentially a consistent
experience of self-splitting. His more personal poems reflect this. For Garcia, poverty
and homosexual identity share experiences of impoverishment in varying degrees.
Fragmentation is all in Garcias poems. The fragmented metropolitan body becomes the
reoccurring trope that highlights experiences of human impoverishment.
Going back then to de Certeaus notion of spatial practice, we find how much of
the writings of Alfian and Garcia are informed by the grammar of the everyday. The
notion of compression is evident in the way Alfian perceives the everyday as a sense of
confinement. The family seems to be a critical and important space for Alfian because
the family becomes a site where narratives of the heteronormative are compressed along

60

with the other values that are made manifest through the everyday. The notion of
fragmentation for Garcia, on the other hand, is seen in the notion of self-splitting and
this is made especially apparent in his perception of gay identity in metropolitan space.
In Garcias works, such a perspective is transformed into a poetic vision that utilizes the
experience of fragmentation in varied experiences of marginality and impoverishment.
In the next subsection, we look into the ways in which these notions of
compression and fragmentation are used to articulate gay desires. As in de Certeaus
privileging of individual practices, the grammar of the everyday is utilized to articulate
the pain and pleasure of gay desire.

A Simile Running the Wrong Way

The Everyday in the Gay-Themed Poems of Alfian Saat and J. Neil Garcia

This subsection discusses the more explicitly gay-themed poems of Alfian and
Garcia and how these are inflected by both spatial experience and sexual identity. In the
case of Alfian, there is a movement from confinement to enveloping. For Garcia, there is
a change from splitting to one of fluidity in spatial experience. In all this, I demonstrate
how, as in de Certeaus notion of spatial practice, the eros and pleasure of gay
experience are used to activate the liminal experience of space.

A Switch is Flicked: From Confinement to Enveloping in the Poems of Alfian

The ensuing discussion covers poems from his two published collections and The
Invisible Manuscript, a collection of unpublished poems that deal with the gay desire. I

61

demonstrate how in these poems the notion of compression is still evident but there is a
gradual movement from confinement to enveloping where everyday sites and imagery are
used as a cocoon that shelters gay love and desires.
Alfian situates these articulations of gay desire and love-making in closed, often
packed, spaces. Enclosed space functions merely as a kind of setting for such practices of
intimacy to take place because what we ultimately find is that what encloses and
shelters these desires are everyday objects. This then is what differentiates Alfians
gay-themed poems from the ones previously discussed. In the previous discussion, we
found how the sense of confinement is created and manifested through everyday
objects. In these poems, Alfian still utilizes the act of listing but this time he rips the
notion of routine from the everyday objects and rewires them to articulate desires
beyond the narrative of the typical and even the ideal.
Gay desires articulated in these closed spaces do not mirror the kind of
confinement that we find in his poems on ordinary everyday routine. Alfians gaythemed poems contrast the lifelessness and experience of aridity found in the poems
that connote confinement. There is light. There is pleasure. There is life. In these poems,
we are introduced to a different Alfian Saat, one who has not been choked and rendered
pessimistic but one who has utilized and activated space to articulate desire and identity
that is truly his, as they are given life by the speakers. In what follows, I discuss how this
notion of enveloping is created first in and through public spaces and through certain
everyday narratives.

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In MRT Platform 6:43 AM we find the speaker fantasizing about someone in a

train. The scene is reminiscent of the train in The City Remembers as the poem is
packed with images of lifelessness. In this station, the speaker finds himself surrounded
by inattentive army boys (MRT Platform 6:43 AM 7-8), immobile office workers (9-10),
housewives sewing clothes (11-12). Amidst all this, the desire which the speaker has
gives him crystals around [his] eyes (25) rendering him alive as the rest in this packed
train where people are made immobile by notions of routine. Alfian also utilizes mobile
closed spaces to talk about gay desire in other poems. The Kiss and The Great
Escape set intimate scenes inside cars. Both poems highlight the idea that love can be
found and lost, that desire can be as fleeting as the speed of the car that encases them.
In 6 Notions of Intimacy, the speaker portrays a brief intimate scene of a
couple holding hands at the back of the bus. (6 Notions of Intimacy 1). Elements
from the everyday are initially seen to condemn this act of social impropriety:
you provoke the engine's choked outrage,
the hellish heat under your seats.
The scandalized sunlight is heaping
veils of modesty on your rousing laps.
Forbidding signs are glaring at you.
(2-6)
The elements from the everyday are initially seen to be moving against this act of
intimacy with words and images like choked and sunlight permeating and veiling
the couple signaling how these elements might be closing in on them. The foreboding
activated by this sense of condemnation seems to come from everywhere, from the
engine that bellows beneath them, the seats directly under them, the sunlight, the signs

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of prohibition. The tone the speaker adopts also helps create this growing sense of
foreboding. The actual position of the speaker in all this is ambiguous. On the one hand,
he can be the one holding hands, yet on the other he can simply be an observer. In either
case, we find how the speaker seems to be either part of the everyday elements that
pierce through this violating intimacy (if he is an observer) or is very much aware of this
intimacy (if he is actually the one involved).
The scene shifts from one which forebodes confinement to one of enclosure as
images of dissidence deflect the glare and stare of the disapproving elements. The sense
of mockery and the arrest of space are emphasized in the next lines:
One slashes a cigarette but the one that makes
you laugh is that which bars a limp-wristed hand
waving a hanky. (That stands for No Littering?)
Two men holding hands, even the graffiti on
the seat that says: "Jenny is a damn good fuck"
pales to schoolboy whimsy. Well, squeeze
his hand a little harder. Not because you
don't care but care too much to let him
ride beside you with his fingers un(g)loved.
(8-13)
The use of slashes here does not only point to the No Smoking sign in the bus also
signals us to a break and a shift in the way the alternative everyday scenes will be used.
The scenes of vandalized dissidence now help create an imagined space where the
couple finds the silent conviction to continue with this act of intimacy. The speaker too
joins in the shift and makes his actual attitude towards the act known as he moves from
a warning of condemnation to one of approval. This notion of enclosure is ultimately
realized with an act of enclosure itself with the hand of lover tightening its grip.

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Alfians gay-themed poems on public spaces also demonstrate this sense of

enclosure. Plaza Singapura, a poem on gay cruising in one of the busy shopping malls
along Orchard Road utilizes the different bodily senses and fuses these bodily senses
with images from everyday space. The opening lines emphasize a tension between sight
and sound.: Two men talk. / Eyes hope for the sign of a gleam / In the others, like a
first star. (1-3). Visual imagery at first is seen as something starry, extravagant and
hopeful. Speech on the other hand [hisses] like steam (4). Speech here is regarded as
an object of propriety, a civil noise among tongues / Burnt by strange tribal welts of
longing (5-6) ascribed to an ideal (perhaps heteronormative) social code.
The men stop speaking and instead choose to nod and smile and by so doing
a switch is flicked (7). The switch in this respect does not just privilege the experience
of sight through the use of light imagery but also highlights a shift (a different kind of
switching) as well the focal sense from the sight to touch. The image of the men as
naked light bulbs, (8) contrasts how they were previously perceived as just gleaming
singular stars. The description is one of which combines both sight and touch: the heart
white-hot, filament thin (10). The experience thus moves from sight and sound to touch
as caresses in the stairwell (11) take over.
The sense of hearing likewise is activated but is only used to contrast and
position the outside. From the sound of a child tumbling down the steps (11) to
footsteps of families ebbing outside, the sound imagery like an echo emphasizes
paradoxically both the outsides absence and its overt presence. The dichotomy thus is

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outlined by the senses themselves: close-contact bodily intimacy of the inside in

Singapore is contrasted with the civil noise of the outside.
Towards the end of the poem, they hold each other, still in fear / but this time of
losing themselves in / or simply losing, their shipwrecked embrace (21-23) The speaker
however is quick to emphasize that what separates them is not shame or futility (25)
but the idea [that] they had avoided the territories / on each others skin / [could] have
singed them with love (26-28). The temporal nature of Plaza Singapura rests on the idea
that men must remove themselves not because of the civil noise outside but merely
because of choosing to retain the brevity of the encounter. This sense of cocooning is
made more realized by how the noise which demands civility is eventually silenced at
the end of the poem.
Particularly interesting as well in Alfians poems on gay desire is the reoccurring
use of images from National Service (NS). While images and practices from NS may not
necessarily be construed as part of the everyday (as compared to other spaces and
practices), the logic which sustains the NS program, I would argue, is still hinged on the
heteronormative and masculine narrative of Singapore society: the sons of Singapore
must be able to defend their country when called to arms. The army, made up of
readily-enlisted young men, contributes extensively to Singapores overt show of
strength. This is particularly evident during National Day where vehicles roll their way
in Singapores center and jet fighters knife through the sky. Alfians NS poems in
contrast, play with these notions of strength and masculinity to creatively render gay

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desire. Alfian rips images from their original disciplined, machismo context and uses
them to articulate dissident gay pleasure within enclosed spaces.
Half a Soldier utilizes images from NS exercises to trace the contours of lovemaking: Again, my fingers reach / To decipher the Braille of your moss (1-3). He
moves on to conflate these images of love-making with NS exercises and jungle:
stumbling / through thorns, fungi blistered bark (touch), wounds that long for
smothered darkness (16) in a fur of night / [that] sniffed in the intimate musk of
stars (18-19). As in Plaza Singapura the sensuality of the encounter is seen in the way
various bodily images are used to highlight the pleasure of love-making. Sensuality this
time around is highlighted by the experience of the wilderness in NS exercises: the
lovers soft and furry touch, connoting the lovers pubic hair, the lovers musk, the
natural scent of the lover and so on. The speakers rendering in many ways, functions as
a simile / Running the wrong way signifying then a not only a desire but images that
have been recontextualized to articulate such desires.
In Making Love in Army Bunk Beds is Wrong, Alfian uses conventional
masculine images to develop this kind of cocooning and enveloping. The poem begins
with an image of enclosed space itself: Under the mosquito nets we did it (Making
Love in Army Bunk Beds is Wrong,1). What envelops the act however is not the
mosquito net but army rhetoric that while maintaining its sense of masculinity, has been
rewired to articulate the pleasure of gay desire. The pleasurable power play between the
speaker and the lover is created as the speaker deploys army rhetoric in the way the
lover inspects and plays with the speakers body:

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We did it. The friction of kneecaps.

My elbows were up for your inspection.
I would have punished you if I could
not see my reflection in your polished eyes.
You would have made sure that my heart
was marching to some timing and a tune.
Here a joint cracked, so there was pity.
Here a muscle showed its small hump like a
souvenir of a night exercise, so there was pride.
Here a sprain begged for extra rations of kisses.
Here the skin marked a border, so your alert
guard eyes could discern which territories
belonged to the sun and which are reserved
only for these barefoot intruders that are
deployed from the encampments of your breath.
(7-22)
The repetition of we did it signals this bridge from merely physical enclosure to one
where these items from army rhetoric are utilized by the speaker to describe lovemaking. The language of army discipline is used to enclose the act of love making in that
each army exercise corresponds to a particular part of love-making: the cadence of the
march becomes the beat of the heart as the excitement rushes in; the cracking of the
joints and the lump of the muscle, a sign of pain and pleasure and finally of temporal
possession of the territories of the body itself.
Alfians liminal response to the notion of spatial compression is thus seen in his
consistent utilization of the trope of enclosed spaces. In his gay-themed poems, this
notion of compression is given a more positive signification. In all these poems, Alfian
demonstrates how everyday spaces and notions of masculinity articulated within the
context of NS can be utilized to articulate gay desire. His poems which utilize everyday
images and narratives highlight ironically the possibility of opening space.

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Barring All Readings: From Splitting to Fluidity

In this subsection, I demonstrate how Garcia utilizes the notion of
fragmentation and dislocation as a way of articulating gay desires. In the gay-themed
poems of Garcia, there is a movement from an experience of lack of centeredness to one
characterized by a sense of fluidity. The lack of fixity is not something to be feared or
lamented but as something to be embraced and utilized for pleasure and more
importantly for creation of new identities. The next discussion covers Garcias poems on
open space as well as how he utilizes Christian images as a trope for the articulation of
gay desire. We also find in all these renditions a keen emphasis on the temporal notion
of such experiences. Such fleeting experiences are not discomforting but opportunities
for pleasure.
The unstable signification of identity that we have seen in texts like Poem is
given a more positive signification in Garcias more gay-themed poems. Here, we find
once more his sense of affinity for poor people. Of particular interest in these plays on
fluidity is the trope of linguistic play. In Bakal Boys (bakal is Filipino for steel or
metal) space becomes the identity of a group of boys hanging around a particular site:
They got the name from the context / in which they are solicited: / in a shopping mall,
upon flagstone (1-3). Naming is one of the most privileged kinds of linguistic practice
in that the act imposes not only markers but ultimately identities. What the speaker does
in this poem however is to systematically recreate the seemingly genderless description
of the boys. To the speaker, the bakal boys become objects for voyeurism as the lines with

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subtle sexual connotations mention: standing in wait like that / on boyish legs and feet
could take its toll, / and fagged out Thus the crutches / on which to bring to bear the
vigils brunt [emphases mine] (Bakal Boys 16-18, 20-21). The identity of the bakal boys
then is sexualized by the voyeuristic speaker as he creates a new identity for them, one
that is within and beyond the context established in the beginning of the poem:
But barring all other readings
I think of one poetic in their name:
bakal boys, boys of steel
The image captures much, much more.
Hewed to steel, it hews them in turn:
its tensile strength, its durability
of which their crotches may partake
(21-27)

The boys lounging around in the supermall are thus given two names: bakal boys /
boys of steel with the latter coming from the voyeuristic speaker himself. Boys of steel
marks not only a kind of identity the speaker imposed upon the men. It is also one that
is grounded by an eroticism of the boys on the street, with boys of steel being a
reference to Superman, man of steel and in the change from the crutches to crotches.
For the typical shopper, the boys may be the casual and usual bystanders but to the
speaker, the boys are potential sites for pleasure. The bodies of the boys become open
spaces themselves, a site where names and all their implications can be written.
Another poem which deals with this play on signification through gay desire is
Cypher 2 which finds the poems speaker fantasizing about an individual inside a
jeepney. The fluidity of identity is seen in how the notion of the cipher changes from

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one person to the next as the desire is gradually articulated. As in Bakal Boys, the
sense of fluidity is rendered through the trope of linguistic play:
You are it:
blind as love
on a last jeepeney to nowhere,
it gazes past all
that should be our sorrow:
I am not she,
nor blind,
but thats no trouble
because she cant be blind
like us,
like you can be
to my sorrow,
like I already am
to yours. I am it.
(Cypher 2, 1-14)
The notion of anonymity is central to the poems trope. It (a pronoun which opaques
identities) is consistently used and passed around like a tag game in the poem and
points to various images such as the jeepney ride to nowhere and the idea of the lover
as blind echo as well the sense of placelessness and incoherence we find in the poems we
have discussed in the previous subsection. In this linguistic play, the notion of
anonymity is what brings the gay discourse to the fore as desire is rendered as an act of
reading:
I know how to see
as you see: with the skin
which reads another skin,
like a book warm with people,
with the beauty and sorrow
of people []
(15-20)

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The sense of namelessness is what grounds the experience of desire as well as the ability
to reconstruct meanings and narratives. That subjectivity however is lost when the first
name of the speaker is revealed and the play comes to an end:
You light a cigaret
and are happy, sorrow
turning ash in your mouth
John, John, you are not he
because you know
and see me.
(32-37)
Garcias poems on open space thus place emphasis on the temporal pleasure of resignification as this is wrought by gay desire. Anonymity and fluidity brought about by
the gay subjects horizontal gaze are the beginning and the end of pleasure.
This play on the temporal and re-signification is also evident in Garcias poems
that utilize images and concepts of Christian imagery as tropes to articulate gay desire.
As in the use of NS poems in Alfians poems, Christian imagery may at first not
necessarily constitute a part of Manilas urban everyday but, being a Catholic country,
much of Filipino mores and social dynamics are grounded on the narratives and valuesystems of Christian faith. One encounters along Epifanio Delos Santos Avenue (EDSA),
the highway that cuts across the metropolis, several billboards that invite one to listen to
the word of God. At the heart of EDSA is Our Lady of EDSA, a gigantic statue of the
Virgin Mary erected in memory of the 1986 People Power Revolution, overlooking the
traffic and smog of the major highway. Such a presence is not only material but is in
many ways engrained in the collective Filipino psyche. Reynaldo Iletos prominent and
alternative study of the Philippine revolution Pasyon and the Revolution establishes a

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connection between the narrative of the passion and death of Jesus Christ, known as the
pasyon, to the ideologies propagated by the Katipunan revolutionaries. National
elections are often decided by swing votes of religious groups that vote as one block.
The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) was and is still a force to
reckon with when the bishops disagree with the stance of the government. Months in
calendars are often reddened with Christian holidays.
Aspects of the Christian mythos thus permeate the everyday of Filipino life. In
his works, Garcia takes these practices and popular beliefs and reassigns them to signify
experiences of gay desire. In to the handsome boy no more than 20 but already
unmistakably man, definitely, who goes to sunday mass 7 on the dot not a fail, no, not
for once late, we find the speaker fantasizing about the boy he regularly bumps into in
Church. Here, the speaker not only uses the everyday space and ritual of Sunday
worship to articulate this desire but also concepts from Christian faith as these are
performed within the Eucharist:
but before we go in peace, are shooed out for the worlds taking
the one in smock iterates, we are family
and we sing god is our father, brothers all are we
lyrics i trust will see me thru another week
of boys no more than 20 but already wonderfully men
and never bless their boy hearts late for mass
(and other no-nonsense, dead-serious stuff)
only i think it odd
how in between songs i get the strangest urge
to grab this lovely brother
for the sack
(incest must run in the family)
(to the handsome boy 13-24)

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Here, the speaker takes various aspects of the Eucharistic ritual to express his secret
desire for the young boy. There is in all of this an emphasis on the experience of peace.
The end of the Eucharistic celebration marked by the phrase Go in peace to love and
serve the Lord is not seen as a peaceful departure but as a nuisance which would
separate the speaker from his object of desire (shooed); the notion of brotherhood
which is emphasized by a recontextualizating of the song Let there Be Peace on Earth
(with god as our father, brothers all are we) and how the speaker sees his desire as
form of incest. The kind of inner albeit temporary experience of peace is found in this
space. That the poem is actually simply one long sentence with its long title spilling over
to the poem with no hint of punctuation highlights this sense of the temporal. The
emphasis here is not on the temporary nature of the experience but the brief experience
of centeredness, of peace elucidated by the experience.
Garcias darker poems about gay life utilize as well the notion of Christian
imagery. In these poems, Garcia defamiliarizes Biblical imagery to describe experiences
of gay pleasure.
In A-12 he imagines the mythical garden of Eden and paradoxically reassigns
new meanings to it to signify pleasures of gay space. The A-12 the poem speaks of is a
pseudonym of a male prostitute, Adams, twelve, bikinied, in a row (A-12 1) in a gay
bar. The reference to Adams in itself is a sexualized play on the biblical Adam. Adam in
the biblical narrative was for most part naked but was only made aware of his
nakedness after committing the original sin by eating the forbidden fruit. Here, the
Adam is already naked and is the epitome of carnal pleasure and concupiscence. The

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naming presents a rather paradoxical kind of positioning. Adams-twelve gives him a

mark and thus in a way an identity in this bar. On the other hand, this identity renders
him unidentifiable a numbered pseudonym marking him as merely one of
commodified bodies involved in sexy dancing and sultry service. This Edens garden
revisited / this late into salvations heyday (9-10) becomes a site where signifiers are
confused and taken from their religious context and rewired to articulate paradoxically
into practices of the sinful and the carnal. The speaker is aware of this as he calls the
site a place for a revisionist show (2). The bar is a site where these narratives are
revised. In this bar,
No tree offers knowledge of good
for evil is but a matter of opinion
Here, nobody complains of anything
except when G-strings snap out of key,
beer less yeasty, strobes, peek-a-booing none
could see God blowing bubbles in the shower.
And Eve is a transvestite lip-synching floozy
with heavy-ball earrings and torch-singing mouth,
Adams apple lodged telling in her throat.
(5 13)
The paradise alluded to here is the garden of temptation and perversion. There is a scene
of fun and pleasure for everyone: men in G-string, men wet and wild, a drag show, a
show featuring angels in tie (14), the mistress of this garden being a Satan a shedevil eating fire from a spit / on which roasts the babyfat of lost boys (16 17). Notions
of morality here are arrested and everyone is invited to take part in dark sexual fun
because sinning is deemed a necessity / after all. The greater the fall, / the more glorious
the resurrection (19 21).

These lines indicate not only perversion of Christian

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narrative but ultimately the temporal nature of the experience in the bar. The kind of
pleasure (and pain) that happens in the bar, stays in the bar. Resurrection here may not
refer to the physical rejuventation of the body, but merely a resurfacing back to the
actual world. The more he loses himself, the greater part of his self is regained a
revised, often perverted version in itself of the Christian notion of the fortunate fall.
We find Adams- twelve standing once more at the end of the poem, this time
naked, in a row / like serpents charming the first Paradise (30-31). Adams-twelve is
more than just an individual macho dancer. He represents the perversion of the bar
which in turn represents the denizens the bar accommodates. They too are naked,
stripped away of all clothing and guardedness, anonymous to each other, tempting and
tempted in this temporary paradise both lost and found where signifiers are in
pleasurable disarray.
Another poem which utilizes this Biblical imagery is From Gethsemane. The
poem is set on a Maundy Thursday during the Christian Holy Week. The poem is a
carnal retelling of the Christs agony in the garden. At the very beginning of the poem, a
gay man is likened to the solitary position of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane:
Maundy Thursday, and you sit in a gay bar alone (From Gethsemane 1) Here,
Gethsemane is once more seen as a site for temptation (just as how Jesus was being in a
way agonizingly hesitant to go on with his suffering) and as a threshold (as a temporary
space between the Last Supper and the coming violence) where we find the guest at the
end of the poem leading a serviceman out. The temptation is carried out in a
conversation between the manager and the customer:

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Fernan, the floor manager, comes, makes talk.

Softsell, hardshell, in that order. He removes
his earring and starts playing it in his mouth
rolling it along his lips like the stud
whose future he sells down a river of spit
Youre new here, whats your trip? That tall one
with acne is eight inches. Just slightly used,
so youll have to teach him a few tricks.
Dont worry, he learns faster than you can come
to conclude hes not worth it.
That dark boy is a master. No complaints
from customers so far
(From Gethsemane 2-13)
The structure of the poem highlights this experience of anonymity in that there are
actually three voices that are speaking here (the narrator, the addressee and Fernan) but
the lack of punctuation or any form of typographical signaling to indicate who is talking
creates a kind of blurring. In this apparent lack of clear delineation in the dialogue, we
find ourselves as readers in the same kind of darkness that the people in the poem find
themselves in. This sense of disorientation amidst the experience of darkness and
anonymity is further highlighted in the next lines where we find it more and more
difficult as readers to identify who is speaking and who is being described as
conversational language, pricing as well as faces are convoluted:
Bar fine is a hundred. Upstairs room ditto.
Service is two-fifty fixed, fixed. Ante ups with
ones kicks. Straight sucking is cheapest.
His face in the blinking lights is a mask
constantly shifting textures. He frets,
threatening to give you the best ever,
mildly exciting, but beautiful like the movie star
who plays Christ in the seasons passion films.
Even before you can think He is there,
the same smile, the same eyes
you keep wanting not to fall into

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(20-27)
Here, the sense of anonymity and fluidity is seen not only in the way we lose ourselves,
not only in this convolution of images and voices but also in the way we cannot seem to
identify who is playing which role in this corrupted and carnal biblical retelling. The
temptation is offered by Fernan who is also seen as a Judas whose earring glints still
more brightly / than any thirty pieces of silver can (35-36). The speaker is seen as the
waiting Christ figure but as he receives the man who looks like Christ, he becomes the
Judas figure who kisses this figure (30). The darkness offers not only an experience of
anonymity but a play on the fluidity of narratives and identities.
In these poems which combine the dark experience of being in a gay bar and
biblical imagery, Garcia takes the narrative of a Christian mythos and contextualizes
them ironically to highlight the pleasures of concupiscence. The narratives of suffering
and salvation are rewired into a space in which these articulate bodily pain and
pleasure. Christian narratives which in many ways function as a critical bedrock of
Filipino mores are utilized to articulate desires made and cultivated in the dark.
Darkness thus promises not only the experience of anonymity but the opportunity to
remake and reposition particular narratives and everyday knowledge.
In the poems of Garcia, we find that experiences of everyday fragmentation and
dislocation are used to render the experience of incoherence on the one hand and
fluidity on the other. His poems on urban life demonstrate how incoherent identities in
the city leads to experiences of impoverishment and suffering. When the night sets in,
this sense of incoherence functions as bedrock for new experiences, created under the

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shroud of darkness which promises anonymity, pleasure and the queer interplay of
both.

In this subsection, we looked into the ways in which Alfian and Garcia arrest,
utilize and deploy the experience of compression and fragmentation in the everyday to
articulate gay desire. As in de Certeaus notion of individual practice, narratives and
space, narratives in space function as open sites for creative possibilities.

The Poem as Spatial Practice

Chapter Conclusion
Places for de Certeau are transformed into spatial stories by personal narrative.
In this chapter, I sought to demonstrate how the patterns that characterize the urban
production of Manila and Singapore enter the ways in which two gay poets write about
what it means to occupy and to be gay in these particular spaces. Garcias and Alfians
transformations are infected precisely by their various experiences gay identity. The
responses are ambiguous ones: on the hand, discomforting and arid and on the other
hand productive and full of life. For Alfian, this articulation is still rendered within the
frame of the experience of enveloping. For Garcia, chaos and disorientation are
transformed into experiences of pleasure.
It comes to no surprise then that de Certeau likens individual practices to a long
poem of walking. Poetry as I have said in the introductory chapter is an individual
rhythmic response to stimuli. The poem for Alfian and Garcia functions as a space in

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which the structure, the rhythm, the grammar of space is arrested and transformed in
various ways to not only articulate experiences of difference, impoverishment and
violence but also as opportunities for individual rejuvenation.

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Chapter Three:
Domestic as Site and Sight
Cyril Wong and Lawrence Ypil
What does a house speak? It speaks of certain enduring affections, it speaks as well of absence,
neglect, common infidelities of distance, distraction, forgetting.
Resil Mojares, Coming Home
The domestic has constantly been utilized as a viable point for engagement in
various literary and cultural traditions. We can think of how Gaston Bachelard in The
Poetics of Space (1958) establishes an intricate connection between memory and domestic
architecture. Mari Hughes-Edwards (2006) in her analysis of Carol Ann Duffys poetry
argues, the central paradox of the interpretation of domestic space is that the home is
intensely private and yet concurrently a public arena (Hughes-Edwards 122). In House
of Memory (1997), Filipino historian and writer Resil Mojares orders his autobiographical
sketches, writings on history and colonial criticism by assigning his various essays to
different particular parts of the house. Suchen Christine Lims short stories in The Lies
That Build a Marriage (2007) utilize the scene and space of the domestic to talk about the
unsung, the unsaid and uncelebrated in Singapore. In the story The Morning After
for instance, a mother grapples and comes to terms with the idea of having a gay son.
While the entire story is set inside the house, the mother casts her worried gaze on what
she perceives is judging outside world: What if the army finds out? He hasnt
completed his national service yet. What if the Singapore Public Service Commission
finds out and takes away his scholarship? (The Morning After 13). The living room
then becomes a critical space where the mother-narrator negotiates the tension between
coming to terms with her sons identity and the perceived prejudices of the world. In all

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these, we find how the domestic perspective grants a sense of intimacy to human
experience and social mores.
This chapter thus explores the ways in which Cyril Wong and Lawrence L. Ypil
utilize the frame of the domestic as a way to view human experiences. Utilizing the
same critical approach I deployed in the previous chapter, the discussion aims to explore
how narratives on urbanism and sexuality enter even the most private and locked
spaces and how these in turn produce particular discourses that have to do with theme
of dislocation and incongruity. The reading of these poems will be supplemented by a
discussion of the lyric mode. The chapter will not be an exhaustive critical commentary
on lyric poetry per se, but on how the lyric mode as a form is used by both Ypil and
Wong to articulate these themes of dislocation. Towards the end of the chapter, I
demonstrate how poetic space functions as a domestic space itself, one which the flow of
these urban narratives alongside personal experiences and how such a construction is
rendered through the precise and unique transformation offered by the lyric mode.

The Body In Third Person

Dislocation as Theme in Wongs and Ypils Poetry
Cyril Wong has written several collections of poetry and is often regarded by
critics and peers in the Singapore literary scene as a confessional poet. Specifically,
Wong is regarded as Singapores first openly gay poet (Ng et. al 12). [Wong] always
[makes his] own voice, [his] own personality, very clear in the poems (Interview with
Klein, 217). His own Masters thesis in the National University of Singapore, From Ararat

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to Averno: An Analysis of Plot in Louise Glucks Poetry (2008) in which he analyzed how
Glucks last six poetry collection are held by plot in which the poet negotiates with a
world without certainty (iii) and how these negotiations are laden with
autobiographical sketches, highlight Wongs own emphasis on the biographical
interplay between the poem and the poet. Seemingly personal experiences color the
tranquil depiction of anguish, melancholy and spiritual hunger for tangible human
relations. Unmarked Treasure (2006), the collection to be used for this chapter, exemplifies
this technique. Wongs persona is a ghost haunting particular spaces after a successful
suicide attempt.
Lawrence L. Ypil is a Cebuano from the southern Philippines who moved to
Manila for studies and work. After graduating from the Ateneo de Manila University
with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology, Ypil studied medicine at the University of
the Philippines College of Medicine. In his fourth year, he left medical school and
pursued a Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies degree at the Ateneo de
Manila University. His collection, The Highest Hiding Place (2009) contains poems he has
written from his undergraduate days.
Both Wong and Ypil highlight explicitly the role of sexuality in their relation to
the world. In both their creative work and critical commentaries such experiences hinge
upon particular experiences of dislocation and incongruity. This sense of estrangement
and dislocation is not only evident in Wongs and Ypils rendition of familial
relationships but also in the way they perceive their corporeality. There is a dislocation
between the self and the body. In Wongs case, he realized that he was gay earlier on in

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Primary school and such an experience made him feel different from his peers
(Interview with Klein 207-208). There were instances, Wong narrates, when he even
contemplated suicide because he found it impossible to reconcile his homosexuality
with the beliefs his Catholic family adhered to (Interview with Klein 208). This sense of
dislocation is especially evident in Unmarked Treasure, where we find this estrangement
played out by the trope of ghostliness. Wongs persona in the collection, as we will see in
the succeeding discussion later on signifies not only a severed connection from the body
but creates as well a kind of perspective in which the limitations of corporeality and the
urban mores of repetition are interpreted and reimagined.
In an essay, Impermanent Residencies (2007), Ypil likens gay life to the
experience of living in a guest room. A real life experience grounds this metaphor. Being
the youngest and unexpected, he was given the guest room in a house meant for a
family of three (Ypil 32). In the essay, he narrates how his life in his small village, his
school and his family was similar to the experience of living in a guest room, of being
both an insider and an outsider, of being a [having] a seat at the feast but only at its
edge (34). Akin to living in a guest room, gay life is seen as an experience of transience.
As he writes towards the end of the essay: to be a guest in ones house is to live in a
room knowing you will lose it. To face a mirror that has memorized your shape enough
to break it. To know the right time, the perfect time to leave it (34). At the end of
Impermanent Residencies, Ypil brings this experience of estrangement to the body. To
be gay thus is to speak of the body in third person (33). This is best illustrated in his
own works where his speakers often talk in the third person perspective. Moreover,

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Ypils experience of dislocation is a multi-layered one often more pronounced than

Wongs. Unlike Wong, whose urban experience is primarily limited to Singapores
cityscapes, Ypils experience of Manila is a probinsyanos tale of voyaging into a much
bigger city. We can thus go back to John DEmilios assertion of how the experience of
travel and migration enables the possibility for the creation of new identities.
Probinsyanos who move to Manila for studies (and eventually work) often live without
parental or adult supervision and they often lease apartments and other kinds of living
spaces. These point not only to experiences of homelessness and distance but also of
transience: one does not own any space. Towards this, dislocation then becomes an
important recurring trope in Ypils poetry precisely because it points to his dual
experience as a gay individual perpetually loitering and claiming spaces that he might
(or will) eventually lose. Urban migration affords the dual experience of coming out and
ultimately the sense of estrangement that comes with such an identity.
While these experiences of dislocation and estrangement may not necessarily be
unique to either Ypil or Wong in fact, it may to an extent, speak of the experiences of
gay men in general what is interesting about Ypil and Wong is precisely how these are
creatively articulated through the frame of the domestic. Both poets portray domestic
space from an imagined distance. Because the house appears distant, sight becomes the
most activated sense and the writing from a particular distance becomes a heightened
experience of observation.
While Wong sees the house in the same way as Alfian as a space for
confinement his gaze is focused on the interior, on familial relationships and not on the

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outside. Wongs speakers are often physically inside the house. Moreover, the house for
Wong is seen as a kind of body. In his poems, the house-as-a-body is a place that breeds
boredom through repetition and the imposition of dreams that are not his. To dream
about death means to be severed from this body, to imagine a discontinuity between the
self and the impositions of the house-body. To linger as a ghost means to go beyond the
entrapment of physicality. Moreover, as the ghost is a residue of the body, it is both of
the body and beyond the body and can thus position itself beyond the limitations of the
body. Ghostliness in this respect is not so much about haunting as it is about the kind of
perspective he adopts as he imagines himself liberated from the constraints of the
parental home.
While Wong imagines himself as a ghost, Ypil positions himself in particular
locations in the house. The highest hiding place can be likened to a spot in the house
where one observes things and events like childhood and familial relationships pass. As
related to us in his critical commentary, the distant positioning the speaker adopts is
characteristic of his poetrys dramatic situations as much as it is a real experience for the
poet. Although the house he writes about seems to be the one in Cebu, Ypil recreates
this in Manila. Thus the kind of distance which undercuts Ypils poems is presented to
us first as a gay son who has since experienced a particular sense of estrangement at
home and as someone writing about this home from an actual physical distance and
within a spatial milieu characterized by experiences of dislocation.
Wongs and Ypils renditions of strangeness are not only personal but also
lyrical. For Wong, the poem has to have oral beauty [to] it, some music. You cannot just

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live in the realm of ideas and explain them and call it a poem. It has to have a hypnotic
quality about it when you hear it (Interview with Klein, 228). On the other hand,
fragmentation is evident in Ypils lyricism. We find that his speaker often talks in broken
sentences and even trails of to unfinished thoughts. Unlike Wongs poems where line
cuts often lead one to a complete sentence or thought, enjambments in Ypils poems
emphasize fragmentation and brokenness. In his Masters thesis, Speaking in a Strangers
House: Lyric, Speech, Locale and the Writing of The Highest Hiding Place (2010) Ypil provides
us with a window to his technique. He writes that while some of the poems talk about
childhood and family life in Cebu, a city in the south of the Philippines, these poems
were in fact written in Manila (Ypil 4). As such, the poem on home, like the letter of
return, ironically then exposes the poets inevitable state of dislocation, as if to lyricize
home was to speak of it as if from afar, knowing full well that this state of alienation, this
state of afar may ironically be the closest one can ever get to more fully understanding
it, and returning to it (26).
Critics who have engaged with the lyric mode have often positioned the form
that rhythmically disrupts the cadence of the everyday. Northrop Frye (1985) in
Approaching the Lyric positions the lyric mode as something that may be prove to be
disruptive precisely because of how it differs from the routine: In the lyric, then, we
turn away from our ordinary continuous experience in space or time, or rather from a
verbal mimesis of it The private poem often takes off from something that blocks
normal activity, something a poet has to write poetry about instead of carrying on with
ordinary experience (31). Such a disruptive potential elucidated by Frye can be found

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nowhere else but in language itself as Marjorie Perloff (1990) argues: But how do we
talk about such lyric writings? The answer is that language not structure becomes
central (28). Mutlu Konuk Blasing in Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (2007)
echoes the sentiment: [The lyric poem] offers an experience of another kind of order, a
system that independently of the production of the meaningful discourse that it enables.
This is a mechanical system with its own rules, procedures and history (Blasing 2). In
the lyric mode, words are chosen not simply because of their appropriateness but
because they fit into a poets rhythmic calculation. The lyric mode is both personal and
rhythmic. To locate then the uniqueness and, going back to Frye, the intervening and
disruptive potential of the lyric mode, one must examine then how the rhythms offer a
sense of thematic resonation to the thematic concerns of the personalized I.
What is unique to Ypil and Wong however is how such urban forms one
characterized as compression and the other as fragmented are treated in a liminal
way. Compression and fragmentation which, as I have argued earlier on, can be seen as
features of the urban fabric which characterizes the landscape and spatial experience of
Singapore and Manila, are lyricized and utilized by Wong and Ypil as techniques for
poetic engagement. In the case of Wong, there is that intricate containment of
melancholy and anguish that is seen in most of the poems brevity. In the case of Ypil,
there is the weaving of various threads that have to do with the whole notion of
fragmentation and dislocation. Thus, through lyricism, Wong and Ypil do not just write
about urban experience but engage as well the rhythmic nature of the city. In this
chapter, the analysis will also look into the ways in which the rhythmic forms Wongs

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and Ypils lyricisms contribute to the domestic transformation of private and urban
experience.
In the next subsection, we will look into the ways in which Ypil and Wong
creatively render these experiences of dislocation through the frame of the domestic.

A Kitchen Table Emerges

Domestic as Site
My goal for this subsection is to demonstrate how Ypils and Wongs
representations of domestic space are developed through the notion of dislocation
wrought primarily from the dual experience of homosexuality and (quite paradoxically)
spatial experience of the urban. I will pay particular emphasis as well on how such
representations are effectively articulated by the lyric mode.

I Sang A Song: The Ghost in the House

Unmarked Treasure follows a particular narrative. As readers, we follow the ghost
as he navigates through and accesses different parts of the house. One can even see the
book as a house in itself. These parts of the house, associated with and clustered into
particular kinds of memories are divided into sections partitioned by an untitled poem.
The first part, sectioned by a poem on the speakers imagined death scene in the
bedroom leads us to the speakers notion of a weary and exhausting life. The untitled
poem on the mirror and cabinet invites us to a section where the speaker-ghost talks
about his fronts, his public self. The selections partitioned by an untitled poem on a long
corridor introduce us to poems which like the winding and seemingly endless path

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explore the whole idea of repetition. While the use of the house as central metaphor
seems to imply that there is a kind of intimacy to these memories, the use of the ghost as
the collections primary persona implies a kind of distance.
In Unmarked Treasure, the experience of dislocation as this is played out in
domestic space is seen as a movement from desire for freedom to an experience of
banishment and homelessness. The introductory poem End Song prepares us for the
entire collection by establishing the motif and the tone for the narrative. So Im finally
dead, (End Song 1) the speaker says. Death here is seen as a kind of relief, a relief
from a life of melancholy. The poem introduces us not only to the thematic narrative of
the collection but to a particular emphasis on the lyrical mode the retrospection takes:
I sang a song
once as a child, then awoke an adult
to sing the same song, although
with an irony this time
that was beautiful but sad.
Beautiful and sad
(1-6)
A lifespan is seen as a gradual ruination of the musicality of childhood. The repetition of
the words beautiful and sad emphasizes that while the song seems to be the same,
there is a sense of melancholy towards it. Beautiful but sad tells us of this change
while Beautiful and sad implies a kind of resignation in that the speaker
acknowledges how the theme of the song is both an experience of beauty and
melancholy.
The motif of ghostliness which the poem brings, establishes as well the kind of
perspective that Wong would eventually bring into his creative commentary.

This

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ghostly intervention of the present can be seen in the way the speaker contemplates on
his concept of the afterlife: I hope to sing again after my coffin / closes like a mouth
then [entering] the present like an echo -- / the ghost of an aria in the living air (7-8, 1112). These last lines suggest two things: first, they point to the idea of ghostliness as an
experience of liminality. In this case however, being in limbo does not mean shuttling
between the world of the living and the dead but between past and present. It means to
visit the past and past lives with the knowledge of the present. Secondly, the use of
sound imagery does not only prepare us for the ghost imagery but directs us to the use
of the lyric mode itself. The reexamination of his familial and urban life are rendered
through a mode which best approximates the act of singing. The rhythm and practices of
ones past life are arrested and rendered in an aria that is the speakers own.

To

reexamine ones life means to sing about it as an echo. Like a ghost which is the residual
element of the body, an echo is but an amplified remnant of the original sound.
The bedroom poems build on the theme and tone established in End Song. In
the untitled poem, the speaker sees himself dying, and thus falling asleep for the last
time, and finally staring at his own dead body half-open mouth on the brink / of a
word or yawn; hands lying / on either side of the body (5-8). A mirroring takes place.
The speaker identifies with the body but finds himself removed and different from it.
Those were his hands. Those were his eyes. The poems in this section are in a way similar
to this: the speaker-ghost finds himself looking at his house portrayed as a kind of body
that has since expelled him.

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First Home begins with the speaker [waking] up in the place where [he] used
to live (First Home 1). Stillness is all in this poem and the lines divided into couplets
that isolate and focus on one object at a time suggest this. The notion of haunting is
emphasized by the seemingly mystical mood of the spatial recreation. Objects appear
one by one, quietly, blatantly/ dreamlike (2-3). The idea of the house as a kind of body
is then established through the images that connote confinement and fixity: closemouthed cupboards (3) and chairs with arms tied behind their backs (4).
As in End Song, the images that connote monotony is contrasted by wind
imagery. The speaker sees his young self staring at the outside where clouds are the
vast sails of ships / billowing with the futures unstoppable gale (17-19). In these last
lines, we find the childlike and adult interpretations of clouds converging. The speakerghost brings back memories of how he imagined the clouds once upon a time but
shadows this gentle innocent imagery with hints of violence. The precise line breaking
makes this contrast more apparent. In this revisitation, the childlike dream of setting sail
becomes a foreshadowing of a violent kind of escape.
This desire to escape the house is developed in the next two poems. In Turning
Back, the speaker recalls how his mother commanded that [his] hair / be gelled into a
helmet (Turning Back 1-2).

The helmet which signifies both encasement and

protection goes back to the secure yet entrapping notion of home. What is also
important to identify and highlight here is how the mother seen here as an imposing
figure, demands a particular image for her son.

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We ultimately find in the next poem Flight Dreams, a subtle breaking away
from the gender-neutrality of the collection. As in Turning Back the notion of
confinement is woven onto the narrative of parental imposition of (heterosexual)
visions: I would attain / a degree, a job, remain a Catholic, marry a nice girl (Flight
Dreams 6-7). The enumeration and conflation of all these different requirements
(curriculum vitae information, religion, marriage) within a singular sentence strengthens
not only the notion of compression but highlights as well (as in the case in Alfians
poems) heterosexual expectations of productivity. The speaker is expected to replicate
particular dreams and visions.
The dream of flying exemplifies once more an escape from the house. The result
however is not completely a liberating one. In fact, the childs desire to be catapulted
from that claustrophobic / room of [his] parents dream of [his] future (19-20) is
transformed into a narrative of banishment and placelessness. The experience of flight
this becomes two-fold: for the younger speaker, it points to a particular desire of escape
from the monotony of confinement. For the speaker-ghost now contemplating on what
has transpired in his life, it speaks of banishment. The change in scenery from
homeliness to a haunting experience of unfamiliarity marks this gradual shift from the
desire to escape to one of banishment, transience and homelessness:
Then I discovered a part of me that rose up
in a hundred bedrooms that eventually
looked like each other, when a strangers
hand or mouth would push me back into myself
(11-14)

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Wongs poems on the house thus highlight a vital connection between the body and the
house. Houses are bodies and bodies are houses and both create an experience of
confinement. The trope of ghostliness thus establishes two things: on the one hand, they
articulate the notion and experience of confinement. The subjects vision of the past is
one that is fraught with images of stillness and of dreams and expectations that are not
his. On the other hand, the ghost motif through the wind imagery also articulates a
desire to escape, to be severed from this corporeal, physical image. This desire for
expulsion ultimately sets off a narrative of transience and homelessness. Such an
experience can be a cause for loneliness but this position as an outsider helps carve a
critical vantage point for engagement.

What Else? Distance in Ypils Poems on the House

Like Wongs representations on domestic space, Ypils poetic revisioning of
homely life is one fraught with experiences unfamiliarity, difference and dislocation.
Sight once more becomes the most activated and utilized sense in Ypils house poems.
Whereas Wongs speaker is a ghost, Ypils recurring persona is a child. Whereas Wongs
notion of dislocation wrought from gay experience hinges on the experience of spatial
and corporeal confinement and is played out through a movement from desire to
banishment, Ypils sense of estrangement is rendered through an interplay between
nearness and distance. The house becomes a distant space, even if the speaker is often
inside it. We find a sense of disconnection and dislocation not only in the dramatic
situation but also in how the language is used, through broken sentences and

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incomplete thoughts, Ypils speakers often talk in the third person, emphasizing once
more the dual experience of the I as both present and absent, identified yet distant.
In the ensuing discussion, I discuss how this notion of distance is fraught in the
way Ypil (re)constructs domestic space through the persona of a child and the use of
various images and language.
Loneliness and isolation are highlighted in Childhood where the title of the
collection comes from. Here, the speakers childhood self sees the house from a solitary
vantage point. The images themselves already provide this sense of disconnection. In
this solitary positioning where the experience of sight is all, the speaker goes back to his
childhood self and enumerates the different things he sees by playfully coloring them.
Intimacies are blue, (Childhood 5) and a singular leap alone down the stairs is seen
as a red-carpeted (3) extraordinary leap. The otherwise active imagination of the child
is contrasted with the sleepiness and silence of the world around him where the soul
[is] asleep beside body (4). This image of slumber highlights this sense of disconnection
(a soul split from the body) and amplifies the speaker-childs loneliness. This
juxtaposition between play and rest culminates in the poems last lines:
The day asleep beside the reckless rush home.
Jump from the highest hiding place.
Knife through the lonely run.
As when the promise of a waiting smalls long kept.
(17-20)
This sense of dislocation is not only evident in language use the use of incomplete
sentences is quite evident but more importantly in how these fragmented articulations
give us a hint to the poets fragmented vision. The first two stanzas alone highlight this

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technique. Here we find how the sense of fragmentation in the personas gaze is seen not
only in his inability to focus on one particular object but more importantly in how his
revisions of space are fraught with deliberate mix of the abstract and the concrete:
As when there was always something to be done:
Run the long yard. Hide the white sigh.
A red carpeted jump over the steps of stairs.
The soul asleep beside the body.
To be young was to love the blue intimacies,
Something tied like a knot
Tumbling through the thorned bush,
Gathering quick the small keeps.
(1-8)
The sense of dislocation in Childhood is thus multi-layered and in many ways
grounds the thematic implications of being in this highest hiding place. As in his
insights in Impermanent Residencies, the spatial experience is characterized as
distance within (paradoxically) proximate space. Tangential to this is the overt
experience of tranquil loneliness. The child is seen in a nook in the house as the
quietness of the world passes him by. The speakers separated from his childhood self by
time, eggs his past self on to move. Still, the world slumbers on and the child watches
time pass, alone, quietly. This sense of distance provides a perceptive perspective that is
simultaneously (and quite paradoxically) impaired. Fragmented poetic language frames
the poets vision of a broken world.
Room echoes these themes. Here we find the speaker remembering how his
bedroom was severed from the natural flow of things. This sense of disconnection is
further transformed into a commentary on the way isolated lives are lived:

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What else was there to want?

Other people,
Yes. But sometimes only.
Decent lives were lived
Without them
Without sons and murders
And lost coins
And tenderness given
And even if only.
(Room 13-21)
The isolated and dissonant room is symbolic of the speakers disconnected state. Here
the speaker recalls several Gospel parables (the prodigal son, the lost coin) that have to
do with the notion of losing and eventually finding. The parables point to an experience
of homecoming. In this instance however, the speaker seeks to disengage himself from
these experiences and renders them unnecessary. As in Childhood, the form of the
poem and the way in which language is used help develop this theme of brokenness.
The line breaks emphasize a particular sense of hesitation and eventual retreat. The
speaker gives a reply to his own question, Other people but eventually takes it back
Yes. But sometimes only. The hesitation shows a kind of stepping forward outside
into the world and then back again.
As in Wongs poetry, distance is not only seen in the way Ypil relates to domestic
space but to family as well. Ypils poems present an inability to fit into the picture of the
family.

In Lemon Tree, the speaker-child silently witnesses his fathers show of

strength as he cuts down trees that seem to deprive a fruitless lemon tree of light

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(Lemon Tree 1-8). Here, the silent son seems to liken himself to the lemon tree:
passive, stationary, the beneficiary of a fathers strong actions. Such a connection
between the lemon tree and the speaker becomes apparent towards the end as the father
lifts a dull dead trunk / to the light / for his son to see (21-23). The identity of the son
here is ambiguous. It may refer to the lemon tree who has become subject to the fathers
concern or to the son which the lemon tree represents. The fathers show of strength is
for the lemon tree as much as it is for the son.
Ypil as a son sees himself in many ways like the lemon tree which grows tall but
bears no fruit (1-2) not only because he is gay but more importantly because of how he
appears distant and different from his fathers expectations. In Being A Son, the
speaker-child walks around the house and [enters] the afternoon room / and everyone
else sleeping with their mouths open, their legs (Being A Son 2-4). As in
Childhood, silence is all and the act of slumber when juxtaposed with the speakers
own silence emphasizes this kind of loneliness. He eventually wanders into his doctorfathers office where he finds him attending to patients. Here, the distance is not merely
between the speaker and the unnoticing father. It refers as well to a dissonance between
the fathers expectations and as what the now adult speaker realizes, what the speaker
would grow up into. The speaker sees himself as part of a wish (27) yet also part of
the bad dream (28) as well. Such a theme of dissonance recurs in another poem
Photograph of My Father where the speaker over a dinnertime conversation refuses to
acknowledge the physical features he shares with his father.

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The kind of distance Ypil creates in his poetry speaks not only of the way he
relates to domestic space but to human experience itself. Intangible human experiences
are transformed into spaces as he writes in Drought: Now all the wounds become a
place (Drought 17). The kind of distance which Ypil creates through the kind of poetic
space he carves out of words is one which does not speak of physical distance or an
imagined distance from family. It speaks as well of a particular vantage point from
which one can see transformed space and one can amplify human experience. Here, he
stands the threshold of familiarity and difference. Like the child in Childhood, Ypil
takes intimacies and the silence of the world and colors them in unique, personal
strokes.

As reflected in their own commentaries, being gay for Wong and Ypil evokes this
particular sense of unfamiliarity and estrangement. These experiences of dislocation are
reconstructed as recurring tropes in their poetic rendition of domestic space. The house
is seen as something distant and different. This sense of distance is highlighted not only
in their rendition of physical domestic space but also in the various notions connected to
the idea of the domestic: the inability to imbibe a particular image and to fit into a
particular frame.
The patterns of spatial production that characterize their milieu quite
paradoxically are utilized as vital poetic fabric. For Wong, this sense of compression is
seen in the way the house is seen as a confining experience of repetition and boredom.

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For Ypil, the sense of dislocation is seen in the way his child speakers see themselves
severed from otherwise connected spaces.
The distances created become a source of loneliness but also offer a heightened
sense of awareness. For Wong, this is carried out through a ghost imagery which allows
him to navigate between the desire and exile. On the one hand, there is freedom and on
the other there is a particular kind of placelessness. While for Wong placelessness
becomes the effect of this kind of desire, Ypil transforms any kind of human experience
into a place, the highest hiding place that Ypil speaks of a vantage point of solitude
where one can engage human experiences as essentially an experience

sight. The

fragmented and broken lyric amplifies this brokenness and distance. In the next
subsection, we will identify how such disconnection from the house is projected into the
way both poets view urban experience.

When We Saw the City

Domestic as Sight
We will now into the different ways in which these notions of dislocation and
estrangement wrought from gay identity as these are framed through and by domestic
space are projected into the way Wong and Ypil render urban experience. The sense of
dislocation that one would find in the house poems of Wong and Ypil is the same one
which they utilize as a creative frame to view spatial experience. The discussion would
thus be centered on how this sense of difference becomes a creative way to re-vise and

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re-activate urban experience. Estrangement not only elicits experiences of difference but
also develops an optic that is simultaneously personal and engaging.

Ive Seen Better Pictures of Men: The Child Voyeur in Ypils Urban Writing
Ypil brings his child persona in his city writing. Whereas the solitude of the child
in his house poems seems to mirror Ypils own experience of estrangement and
difference, the curiosity of the child-persona in the city mirrors in many ways Ypils own
discovery and playful reception of Manilas urban landscape. There too is a vital
connection between Ypils child persona and gay identity. Ypils own journey into
Manila is representative of the experience of many individuals from the provinces who
have discovered their sexual identity as they have voyaged into the city. As DEmilio
argues in Capitalism and Gay Identity, urban migration affords an enabling
experience: movement from the familial cocoon of the rural to the space of the city
widens the threshold for the production of new identities gay identity, as I have said,
is one such identity. In Manila, provincial students, most especially those who attend the
universities along major university belts, lease condominium units or bunk with other
resident students in dormitories. Miles from family, they draft their own schedules as
well as locate places they wish to haunt and loiter around in. There is a sense of
adventure and pleasure in the exploration. Night time opens possibilities for the young
gay man who has his own watch and who has bed and room beyond the boundaries of
parental gaze. Ypils own critical commentary in his creative writing thesis reflects this
interface between urban discovery and the birth of his gay subjectivity:

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This dislocation was also informed by a deep-seated sense of difference: a

difference which would find its ideological locus in my then growing recognition
of my homosexuality, While the physical dislocation proved the more obvious
context and concern of the poems, what also seemed evident reading the poems
was the extent to which this physical dislocation seemed the mere explicit
counterpart of the figurative exile I always felt in my experience of being gay [.]
(Ypil 4-5)
The gaze is an important aspect of gay subjectivity. Gazing forms the genesis of
gay subjectivity. It leads to other acts that have to do with gay practices. Cruising is one
such example. The gay cruiser is a wanderer perpetually searching, discovering and
momentarily finding sources for pleasure. Gazing in many ways empowers and brings
to life the gay subject. The gaze of Ypils child persona is tempered precisely by this
sensibility of wonder and eventual eroticized discovery. My discussion of Ypils poems
in this section will focus first on how most of his city-writing is characterized by a sense
of distance and voyeuristic play as these are carried out through the articulation of
Ypils child persona.
In The Discovery of Landscape, sight still retains its role as the privileged and
most activated sense as the city is observed from a clear distance and is seen as a
clustered symbol of magnificence:
When we saw the city,
we believed again in time.
Line of the tall spires and the bend
of a bright sky.
(1 4)
The speakers vocabulary reflects a childs wonder: the tall structures are not referred to
as buildings or skyscrapers but spires. Moreover, in using we, the speaker invites both
his addressees as well as the readers to this retrospection and to gaze once more at the

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city as an awesome man-made creation that exemplifies some of the defining

characteristics of modernity:
We believed again in perfectibility
(if not perfection), in the fresh
(if not the new).
We named it progress. The past
was not warm, so we named it dead.
We named everything we could not touch
passed. We believed
again in what was large.
(8-15)

We find in lines 11-14 a particular emphasis on the notion of naming. The act of naming
(most especially in its biblical sense) functions as a discursive practice of ownership. In
this case, this landscape that highlights this sense of greatness is labeled and claimed by
the speaker as signifiers of progress. The pronouncement by the speaker affirms the
modern vision not only of progress but of the privileging of the individual as well.
What we also find here is precisely how the sense of wonder developed and
sustained by Ypils childlike persona seems to be inseparable from the experience of
voyeurism. The curiosity of Ypils childlike persona is essentially voyeuristic. In this
poem, the lyricism, (in particular, the repetition of we believed again) emphasize and
reiterate a particular hypnotic quality of this gaze. Towards the end of the poem
however, we find this repetitive and hypnotic pull temporarily broken and then
returned:
When we made the step back

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Look. There. Clear measure

of the flock on the far tip,
of all the missed trips.
When we saw the city
(18-22)
The dashes here emphasize a break in several ways. On the level of the sentence, the
dash signifies a different, differentiated thought. On the level of the poems dramatic
situation, it signifies a break from the speakers attention as well as the readers. In using
we, the speaker and the readers are at once drawn towards this hypnotic allure and
are made to be part of the interruption. Finally, we find as well a kind of excitement the
speaker feels as he [makes] the step back (18) and sees something different, something
missed (Look. There.). Although we find the speaker looking once more at the city,
the dash, the final item at the end of the poem, reveals a kind of differentiated position
the speaker makes. The dash establishes the contrast the last line makes with the first
one which ends with a comma in that given the way it was utilized in the poem the dash
seems to hint once more of another interruption. That the collection actually begins with
this poem in a sense also signals to us as well the positioning that Ypil makes.
In The Discovery of Landscape, we encounter several poetic techniques that
Ypil devises in his city writing, all of which are tropes which we found in the way he
frames domestic experience. Once more, there is an experience of distance, illustrated in
the poems dramatic situation and the utilization of fragmented language. This time, the
child personas dislocated gaze does not highlight a sense of loneliness and dislocation.
The broken gaze provokes voyeuristic play. We find that, as far as Ypils city writing is
concerned, brokenness speaks not only of estrangement wrought from gay identity but,

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as in Garcias case, a viable opportunity for engagement. In Ypils case, h sees the objects
and places in the city as parts dislocated from their wholes and these provide a
reclamation of space that is both unique and personal.
In some poems, we find these parts which were originally severed cohering
towards the end. In At the Ballet Rehearsal, for instance, the speaker chooses to focus
on each body part bit by bit: the knees and the arm (4) as they are hoisted into the air
and the torso and thigh (10) gracefully moving and arcing in the air. He likens the
movement of the ballet dancers to the writing of a story and the finale, a denouement
where everything, all parts of the body [falls] into place (13).
This sense of voyeuristic play is also brought to the readers themselves. In the
poem Yellow, he presents a casual scene in the city, of people moving around, and
attending to typical affairs on the streets. The speaker however chooses to focus on the
color yellow, the only thing that all these individuals share: a girls shirt on the train
(Yellow, 2), a young mans band (3-4), a note (6), a womans set of teeth (8), the tarmac
(9), the light of a handphone (12). As the speaker moves on, we see that for the speaker,
yellow is not only descriptive but also prescriptive. Yellow is a marker of sorts, as he
says:
Yellow line
we dont cross.
We dont look back
at the yellow eye
of the sick stranger.
(17-22)

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The technique employed by Ypil the use of line cuts to cleverly direct our attention
towards a particular image may remind us of that famous imagist poem by William
Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow where the precise cutting forces the reader to
focus on the seemingly mundane and typical images of a typical sight at the farm. Like
the readers of Williams wheelbarrow poem who in a sense get to see the different
images because of Williams line cutting, we now get to see the yellow in Ypils poem.
But the picture that Ypil creates for us disorients. Because our attention as readers is
focused on the yellowness of things, the flow of the everyday humdrum is arrested. In
what seems to be scene of moving people (a girl on a train, a man passing a note, two
people on an escalator), the redirection of our attention towards the color causes the
scene to freeze, or at the very least disrupts the smooth spatial flow one may get when
reading the scene:
Yellow which I follow
on a girls shirt on the train
and a boys yellow
band on his arm
and in bright yellow ink
on the note a man slips
into the hands of the woman
with yellow teeth.
On the old tarmac: yellow.
In the small heads
of flashing bulbs
in a phone: yellow.
(1 -12)

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Through the precise breaking of lines and the lyrical recreation of urban pace, Ypil thus
brings the experience of fragmentation to us through a distortion of the experience of the
reading of spatial writing. Like the speaker-child who colors his world in Childhood,
the act of reading about the seemingly mundane is given literally new color not only
through imagery but through lyrical rendition.
Ypils more gay-themed poems illustrate this creative engagement through a
voyeuristic play of parts. He encounters in the poem The Love of Books a picture of
two men reading two books under a single lamp (The Love of Books, 12). The scene is
not without a sense of loneliness as the image evokes certain memories for the speaker.
These scenes appear distant:
Ive seen far better pictures
of this love between two men:
two legs entwined, two hands
held tight, a whisper in the ear
thats meant to mean we close
our eyes when no ones looking close.
(1-6)
We find, as in the previous poems that we have discussed, a particular emphasis on
parts. Especially notable in this poem is the repetition of certain words - two, close
and later on, same all of which point to a particular bond between the two lovers.
Two thus signifies a particular bond between the two lovers. There is then a sense of
completeness in this voyeurism. Nothing else can be said or done. Another thing worth
noting here is the fact that in a rare instance, Ypil utilizes the first person perspective in

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his writing. The gaze of the persona in this poem is thus given more individuality and
agency.
This sense of individuality and agency becomes especially pronounced in the
next lines:
Yet still, I find myself
returning always to this picture
of two boys who dont know well
each other yet, but choose
to read two books
together under the same lamp.
(7-12)
The playfulness of Ypils child persona begins with a kind of identification: the subjects of
the speakers voyeuristic gaze are boys and not men. There is also a contrast in the way
two is utilized, in that the word does not imply a sense of intimate connection. The

speaker believes the picture is incomplete and so he playfully recreates the scenario by
adding a more intimate narrative to the encounter:
Wholl turn the page at just
exactly the same moment
when the page of one, says Bless
and then the other ends: me Father
for Ive sinned. The sin that says
its wrong to end another brothers
sentences. Or to decide its time
to turn it off: the light, the lamp.
The book thats still not done,
thats left half-opened face to face
thats meant to mean we read
what cant be said by hand
when were not reading.
(13-23)

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The emphasis on parts is especially pronounced in the way the speaker recreates his
scene detail by detail (light, then lamp). The imagined act of sexual intimacy is subtly
hinted at by parts, as this notion of intimacy is ultimately repositioned as an act of
reading by the hand. There is more to this than simply Ypil adding a scene of greater
physical intimacy. The speaker not only often sees things as fragmented but he
ultimately he fills in the gaps he himself creates. Like the book that is left half-open and
undone in the poem, he recreates new perceptions and stories.
Bad Driver, Good Lover, a sub-poem in Paradise Village: Sketches offers a
challenge to this critical commentary on Ypils aesthetics. Paradise Village: Sketches is
a poem on a village in Ypils hometown of Cebu. In Bad Driver, Good Lover Ypil
brings his pleasure-seeking city voyeur into the way he fantasizes about the drivers
body. The utilization of parts to create this experience of pleasure is once more
pronounced:
Because hes just too hot
for us to touch
well only watch
him get down shirtless
to it: the sputtering wire,
the flat tire, moored
at the edge of the road, the old car
with its hood open.
(Bad Driver, Good Lover, 1 6)
The use of we here is not incidental. As in Discovery of Landscape, the speakers
gaze not only provides him with a sense of pleasure but, through the emphasis on each

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detail, we too as readers are invited to this pleasurable act of voyeurism. As in Yellow,
the spatial experience brought about by his gaze is brought to the readers. The speakers
gaze is the readers. This becomes especially pronounced in the sub-poems last lines
when this unified gaze between the reader and the speaker subtly collides with the
close-knitted social dynamics of the speakers less urbanized milieu and thus ends this
act of voyeurism:
We want to pull him
over now. Be perfect if
hed bend us over,
too. We hope he does
not know our mothers well.

(16-20)
In the poems that I have discussed, I have pointed out the various ways in which
the dual experiences of distance and dislocation that characterize Ypils notion of gay
identity and are ultimately pronounced in his writings on domestic space become a
viable form of urban reclamation. Distance and dislocation are not only themes in Ypils
poetry but are tropes which he utilizes to creatively render the voyage of a gay man into
the city. The child persona which we find in his house writings is sustained and utilized
to highlight the exciting discoveries of urban space and the eventual experience of an
imagined yet personal form of reclamation. We can thus go back to the Discovery of
Landscape and begin to see how the discovery is not so much about the discovery of a
new urban space as it is a pleasurable revelation of how landscapes can be toyed with
precisely through a playful, queer gaze.

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Then It No Longer Mattered: Repetition in Wongs Urban Writing

Cyril Wongs representations of the urban are likewise extended projections of
his creative rendition of domestic space. In Unmarked Treasure, Wongs speaker-ghost
leads us to a narrow doorless and windowless corridor (as the untitled poem describes
to us) and into the section where we find poems that touch on notions of repetition in
the city. In developing the narrative of a ghost haunting particular spaces in the house
and showing that the city and its social dynamics are just as accessible as any part of the
house, Wong makes the vital connection between the house and the city. The city as
metaphorized by this seemingly never ending corridor is thus no different from the way
the house is portrayed, as a body which houses recycled and entrapping dreams and
visions. Repetition in the city is not just seen in the experience of space, but more
importantly in relations as well. The notion that Singapores modernity is characterized
as essentially a spatial experience of compression is seen in these varied experiences of
entrapment.
As in Wongs poems on the house, this sense of confinement is transformed into
an aesthetics of confinement mainly through his speaker. As in Ypils case, there is a
vital connection between Wongs consistent persona and the kind of gay subjectivity
that is presented in his works. Whereas Ypils child persona performs the pleasurable
experience of gazing and discovery, Wongs ghost exemplifies the notion of the
wanderer a trope which we saw in his writing on domestic space. Wongs ghost
persona is a haunting flaneur both similar and different from Walter Benjamins. Like

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the Benjaminian flaneur, Wongs ghost is a liminal figure both inside and outside of
the sensibilities of the city. On the other hand, because the city (and all its entrapping
notions of repetition) is represented as a kind of body, the ghosts alientation (and
therefore the gay mans subjectivity) is a bodily, corporeal one. This then is the milieu
that Wongs ghost persona works around with. The kind of wandering we find here is
not a physical as it is one that places emphasis on the notion of perpetually searching.
Searching, wandering is part of urban experience. The dislocation which is especially
pronounced in his writing on family life is projected and utilized as a creative sensibility
that repositions and reclaims urban experience.
In the discussion that follows, we will first look at the various ways in which
this connection between the confining experience of urban life and the corporeality of
the body is established by the speaker. Next, we will look at how such interface is
utilized to render gay life in the city.
Train establishes this connection between bodies, the city and the notion of
mechanized routine. The urban critique of the poem lies primarily in its brevity and
precise use of line-cutting:
At every moment we are
changed, yet we
clutch at bars
engraved with our fingerprints
from Boon Lay to Pasir Ris,
keeping our stiffened bodies
adamantly still, along
the trains singular direction
(Train, 1-9)

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The precision in the way the lines are written contributes to the way this idea of
repetition and singularity of direction is developed in that almost each line in this nineline poem ends with a reference to the passengers: we are, (1) we (2), our
fingerprints, (4) and stiffened bodies. (7) In isolating these words at the end of each
line, we find the passengers changing from humanized wes to cold stiffened bodies
as they journey from one end of the East-West line to the other (5). Stiffened bodies
which may refer to corpses connote how the experience of routine renders the living
body paradoxically lifeless. The brevity of the poem provides a sense of irony. A ride
from one end of the East-West line to the other normally takes an hour yet here we find
the transformation through the brevity of the poem to be quite fast. The brevity hints us
to how fast bodies decay through mechanical repetition.
This sense of repetition in the city is pronounced as well in poems that deal with
desire. Although Part of a Discussion does not seem to make any references to urban
spaces and objects, we find that Wong adaptation of the Adam and Eve story is still
hinged upon the connection between bodies, desire and the cyclical notion of repetition.
In this retelling, the fruit of Adam and Eves disobedience is not entirely banishment
from paradise but boredom: Eve: Except nothing happens. That was what the fruit was
/ about: one bite and boredom exploded like juice to fill our / mouths (Part of a
Discussion 1-3). The juice which points to boredom would refer to bodily sweat (9) and
thus alerting to the idea that boredom and repetition is essentially a bodily experience.
Boredom becomes a vacuum which the body must fill. Adam assigns a word for
it: desire (12). That it was Adam who realized this insight makes this reference to the act

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of penetration even more interesting as it is of course the male figure (or the masculine
figure) who makes the act of penetration possible. The notion of repetition is introduced
by Eve who says that [frustration] follows. Then weariness. Cyclical. With an /
unstoppable rhythm: our hearts keep the time, drum out its / indifferent tempo (13-15).
Eve anticipates that desire can get weary and tired and so Adam replies: We will have
each other / Or more of us if we have to (16-17). The poem suggests that boredom and
the cyclical hunger for desire are part of human experience. This makes more sense if we
explore the biblical reference further. The fall of a man is theologically seen as the
beginning of the narrative of mortality, the concept of the body as a gradually decaying
entity and of human concupiscence. The poem claims that to be human is to desire and
to remain hungry for carnal satisfaction.
Wongs more explicitly gay-themed poems illustrate this idea of repetition as
well and, like Train and Parts of a Discussion, emphasize how such an experience
cause a kind of bodily exhaustion. Both poems are patterned in similar ways. Both
begin with a lament and end with resignation and acceptance of these experiences of
repetition. This sense of bodily weariness is evident in Promiscuity as the speaker one
day realizes that:
Then it no longer mattered
whose body it was that pinned
me to the bed, as long as I was
pinned. Do you love me?
was the hardest question I had
to answer.
(Promiscuity, 1-6)

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The utterance which marks the beginning of the poem articulates this sense of
weariness. Then marks a turn (and a realization of that turn) in the speakers life. The
seeming lifelessness of the repetition, moreover, is further seen in how the focus of the
love-making falls merely on the faceless body and what the body does. Moreover, in
juxtaposing pinned and the question Do you love me? in the same line, Wong alerts
us to how this notion of repetitive experience is pinned to the body.
What we find in Aubade is not only an interplay between the trope of having
faceless lovers and the notion of repetition but ultimately how the body itself becomes
configured to the cyclical rhythm of urban life Wong confronts the hard and harsh
realities of being left by many different lovers, waking up to a bed half-empty and in the
end having to keep up with the routine of the everyday:
Getting up. Harder
with each indifferent hour
I remain in bed.
Soon, sunlight enters
the room like a lover and
everything is touched.
The self sliding shut
over something not quite meant
to be imprisoned.
(Aubade, 1-9)
The periods in the opening stanza punctuate the constant agony and the difficulty of the
experience. Here, the punctuations and the line cuts give us access to the speakers
stream of thoughts as each image and idea is conjured one by one. The speaker realizes
that there is no time to mope or think about the loss as the day calls him on:

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Some days the process

is delayed brief comfort of
nothing in the head.
But the day demands
I heave off the bed
anchors into sea.
(10-15)
Abandonment becomes part of the routine and words like loneliness / creep back into
spaces / between each heartbeat (16-18). Wong uses the italics to emphasize difference
between his own thoughts. Here the loneliness of the city becomes part of the speakers
body. He is in fact inserting it into the very rhythm of the body as he in turn clocks in to
the rhythm of the city. The poem thus deals with several intertwined kinds of rhythm:
the rhythm of the day as this highlights the cyclical experience of urban life and as these
become pulses of the speakers the body.
Wongs urban poems thus extend the ghostly motif vis--vis his representation of
domestic space in several ways. Wong writes the totalizing experience of urbanism unto
the body. The poems on the house help prepare us for this commentary because the
house and urban space are essentially spaces of confinement and exhaustion wrought
from the experience of repetition. Like the house, the exhausted urbanized body
becomes the corporeal space for such narratives to be written unto. The poems that talk
about human relations suggest that this notion of repetition is very much ingrained in
the personal as much as it is a narrative of public. The poems on desire in human
relations make this articulation more apparent as this sense of homelessness and
strangeness becomes a kind of insatiable desire. Desire becomes a kind of melancholic

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rhythm which resonates with the repetitive of the city itself, the very sad song which the
speaker-ghost remembers as he brings his eyes to a close. The lyric form amplifies this
kind of lament and critique of urbanism. As the kind of aria sung after death,
melancholy is given form and to be a ghost means to sever one first from the house-body
and from the body which has exhausted itself with the repetition of things.

In this discussion I have outlined the ways in which Ypil and Wong apply the
domestic perspective in the way they creatively render urban experience. Dislocation, as
we have established earlier on, is a recurring theme in Wongs and Ypils poetic and
even autobiographical writings. This experience of dislocation is pronounced in their
city writing. Distance and dislocation here provide Ypils child persona an optic which
he utilizes to playfully recreate urban experience. As he likens the house to a body,
Wong likewise writes notions of urbanism to the body. By positioning himself as a
ghost, Wong imagines himself distanced from the typified and repetitive rhythm of the
city. Wongs trope of a wandering ghost is simultaneously here and there, possessing
knowledge of the space and the social relations and existing beyond it.

The Poem as Domestic Space

Save for a handful of poems, the gay presence in Unmarked Treasure and The
Highest Hiding Place is not that overtly evident. In this chapter, by connecting several
anecdotes from biographical sketches, I sought to demonstrate how these experiences
wrought from gay identity are deeply embedded in the ways in which the house,

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arguably the most familiar and intimate of spaces, is represented and how such
representations enter the way they examine urban life. In their autobiographical
sketches, both poets perceive gay life as essentially an experience of dislocation. This
becomes especially pronounced in their writings on domestic space. Moreover, the
spatial experiences of compression and fragmentation that characterize their milieu are
utilized as poetic material in these renditions of domestic space.
In both, the lyric mode is utilized to amplify this experience. The fragmented
cadence for Ypil mirrors this sense of disconnection. Wongs lyricism mirrors the kind of
aria he sings of a life characterized by a melancholy. As mentioned earlier in the
introductory section of this chapter, the lyric poem draws its power from its disruptive
potential. In this chapter, I have demonstrated how Cyril Wong and Lawrence Ypil
utilize the lyric form in the way they rewrite urban experiences. Experiences of
dislocation do not only highlight a particular sense of loneliness and alienation. These
also have creative potential which may be used to activate new experiences of
perceiving the city. Both Ypil and Wong transform this experience into a kind of
perspective in the way they write about their cities. The lyric mode amplifies this sense
of arrest because he urban experience is given a personal cadence and form. Both Ypil
and Wong realize this potential as they take the arrest and disrupt the rhythms of the
city through their poetry and make their voice more pronounced. For Ypil, the broken
poem highlights not only his fragmented self but, more importantly, the kind of
engagement he makes with the urban. For Wong, the lyricism he offers is a unique aria
that laments but ultimately gives voice to one who chooses to detach himself from the

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ebb and flow of repetitive urban experience. The emphasis on the body then as a site for
such repetitions and the use of the ghost to epitomize this sense of imagined liberation
becomes more realized.
The poem thus in a way becomes the poets very own domestic space itself. This
space, I argue, is different from the house which has since expelled them. The space of
the poem, created and governed by its own lyrical rhythms is the highest hiding place,
the unmarked treasure, which mediates narratives of distance, anguish and strangeness.

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CONCLUDING CHAPTER
To Write the Wrong
Writing as Presence, Presence as Writing

In 1994, gay writers and academics in the Philippines came out with the first
volume of Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. The book whose title in Filipino
means to unfurl, a verb often associated with the act of coming out, was a first in a
country predominantly populated by Catholics and governed by faithful dogmatic
interpretations of Catholic doctrine. It showed not only the sundry creative and
wonderful ways in which homosexuality can be lived and enjoyed (Garcia xviii) but
also the physical pain and spiritual anguish experienced by gay men especially in
private and privatized urban spaces.
In his preface editor and poet Danton Remoto makes a bold declaration Hindi
niyo na kami mabubura (You can no longer erase us) (Remoto ix). Remotos statement is
provocative on two levels. While he speaks of the pieces collected, selected and
published in the anthology, the declaration is also an existential and even political one:
we are gay, we exist and we are here to stay. The statement provokes and even taunts. In
using na, a word used to emphasize immediacy or evoke a sense of finality, Remoto
articulates what he hopes would be the end of a particular form of silence and to the
immediacy of making a permanent mark in physical and imagined space. He speaks
also to the niyo (the other) and tells them that any effort made to erase them now is
almost impossible. Remotos use of the denotative and connotative meanings of

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erasure is interestingly provocative for what he evokes in the end is precisely the
power of writing as an act of identity-making: that writing is a form of presence and
presence, a form of writing. Hindi niyo na kami mabubura then speaks not only of the
published poetry and prose in Ladlad and their possible entry into mainstream literature
but refers as well to the possible writing and weaving of new narratives into the fictions
and history. For both the contributors and editors of Ladlad writing then becomes a
discursive act for the personal and political and what is at stake is ones spot in material
and imagined space.
In 2010, Singaporean gay and lesbian writers reached the end of a two-year
project and released GASSP: A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose (2010).
Although lagging behind when compared to their Filipino counterparts by two books,
the anthology in itself is rich. The section divisions give one an idea as to how the gay
and lesbian writing came about in Singapore. Similar to Remotos position on the act of
writing, the anthology editors and foreword writer place emphasis on the role of writing
in the articulation of identities. In her foreword to the book, Audrey Yue placed
emphasis on the role of place and space as a site for gay and lesbian discourse. Spaces
for Yue are sites where multiple identities are negotiated, mediated and performed (Yue
6). Yue argues that the writings in the anthology hold together the postcolonial sexual
futures that characterize the local diversity of the socially stratified and multilingual
community and the radicality of the nascent gay and lesbian movement (6). Writing
thus provides a space for such an engagement to take place. In many ways, the works

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published in the anthology function as space for such negotiations and articulations. The
text in many ways functions as an indelible mark in space and as space itself.
The thesis thus affirms this triangular interplay between place, sexuality and
poetry. In the thesis I have tried to demonstrate how the poetry of four gay poets are
informed not only by their sexuality but their sexuality in relation to a particular place.
For this thesis I chose to compare two cities which share particular similarities as well as
differences.

Both

cities

negotiate

various

competing

narratives

(local/global,

ruralized/transational, heartland/cosmopolitan) that increasingly become more tensed as

both are propelled by globalized orientation. While the thesis does not aim to be a
commentary on the global processes, one cannot speak of urban production in
contemporary times without placing it alongside the discourse of globalization.
As Lin and Mele write in their introduction to a subsection in The Urban Sociology
Reader (2005), [modern] cities are creations of the capitalist system (Lin and Mele 13).
We therefore could not begin our analyses of their poetry without looking at the many
ways in which narratives of capitalist modernity enter the process of urban production.
Thus, in the introduction I argued that the ways Manila and Singapore negotiate and
mediate such flows and differences are horizontalized fragmentation and vertical
respectively. For Manila, this negotiation is carried out by horizontalized pull in which
excesses and mess as Tadiar would put it are constantly spaced out. To experience the
city of Manila therefore is to experience a sense of dislocation, distance and
fragmentation. For Singapore, the negotiation is rendered through a sense of verticalized
compression. With limited space to work with, the compression that characterizes the

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modernity of Singapore is not only done spatially but socio-culturally as well. Such
urban productions inform the way various identities and in the city and inflect the way
in which gay identities are created and performed.
In the two body chapters of the thesis, I sought to locate the ways in which such
renditions are made. In all, we have seen how the different conditions that have to do
with the urban experience in capitalist modernity inflect the sensibility of the gay
subject. The first chapter focused on how Alfian Saat and J. Neil Garcia copy and
represent these notions of compression and fragmentation in the way they write about
everyday space and practices. I argued that being gay gives Alfian and Garcia the
opportunity respond to these spaces and concepts and differently. The everyday is seen
as a space of liminiality and it is through this liminality that Garcia and Alfian are able
to offer alternative renditions of the everyday. The poetry of Alfian and Garcia thus
mirrors this kind of liminality copying the notions of compression and fragmentation
and then using these to reactivate spatial experience inflected by gay experience. For
Alfian, this notion of confinement is especially pronounced in the way he utilizes the
everyday to critique the demand to reproduce a particular image. Garcias aesthetics of
self-splitting on the other hand is very much informed by his notion of gay subjectivity
of an overt tension between the inner self and the outer selves. Moreover, his writings
on the city his gaze directed at issues that deal mostly with poverty and spiritual
impoverishment establish the vital connection between the marginal experience of
poverty and gay subjectivity in urban space. We then see how his affinity with the
materially impoverished individuals in the city is very much informed by his notion of

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gay subjectivity. The trope of self-splitting thus highlights the violent and impoverished
state of gay subjectivity. In the second part of this chapter, I located the many ways in
which Alfian and Garcia utilized these same patterns of production to articulate gay
desires. Gay subjectivity thus is located precisely in their liminal response to space.
From the outside going in, the second chapter, Domestic as Site/Sight explored
the ways in which Cyril Wongs and Lawrence Ypils creative and poetic reconstruction
of private space is projected into the way they view urban space. Ypils poems however
personal illustrate the possibilities created and afforded by urban migration. Wongs
melancholic renditions of urban space highlight the lifelessness wrought from repetition.
Different from Alfians own renditions, Wongs gaze is directed not on the political but
the personal. Dislocation and distance as trope could be seen in the way they reconstruct
domestic and urban space. Of particular interest in this chapter was well is how these
poets used the calculated precision of the lyric form in arresting and rewriting these
patterns of urbanism.
Through these chapters, I have tried to show how this interplay between
sexuality and urbanism enters the ways the various facets of spatial experience: the
public and the private. In all, I hoped to show that being a gay poet is not just about
being gay but performing such desires and practices within a specific space, responding
to those spaces rhythms and arresting and rewriting them.

To the Stars, To the Stars

Invitation For Further Research

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The thesis may be extended in various ways. One obvious possibility is to apply
the kind of reading I did to other gay poets in Manila and Singapore. Given time and
space constraints, I was forced to omit other gay poets such as Singaporean poet Ng Yisheng and Filipino poets Jaime An Lim and Ronald Baytan. Ngs Last Boy for instance
offers a particular interesting challenge in that most of his works extensively borrow
images from myths, legends and other literary contexts. Can one therefore still situate
Ng in a particular spatial context? What possibilities of reading does his more
cosmopolitan poetics offer?
A Filipino gay poet which may seem to be of interest would be Ronald Baytan.
Like Ng, retellings figure in much of Baytans works. In his dissertation, Baytan clarifies
that these retellings inform his project as a gay poet: By rewriting these stories and
legends, I would like to resurrect the voices of the marginalized subjectivities that have
been excluded from the grand narratives of the Chinese Filipino culture (28). Baytan is
thus clear in the way he positions these Chinese retellings, as a set of narratives against
the homophobic and conservative culture of the Chinese Filipino community that has
chosen to forget its same sex past (27). Particularly interesting in Baytans retellings is
his emphasis on the body as a marker of transience. Such a notion is carried out as well
in his poems on lovers where there is keen emphasis on bodily pain and pleasure.
The city for both Ng and Baytan seems to be absent yet the various notions of
compression and fragmentation/dislocation are still present. An interesting challenge
would then be to locate the ways in which Ng and Baytan erase the urban landscape yet
apply the patterns that govern their production to a certain degree.

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Another way to apply the findings of the thesis would be to look at other forms
of writing (prose, plays) and other cultural texts (such as film) in analyzing the interplay
between cities and sexuality. The analysis need not be limited to gay men alone. Dianne
Crisholm (2005) in Queer Constellations utilizes a Benjaminian perspective in reading the
prose narratives of writers like Samuel Delany, Robert Gluck and Gary Indiana to
expose the catastrophe of late urban modernity that redevelopment conceals
(Crisholm 8). Crisholms emphasis on prose narratives locates the various ways in which
queer writings intervene in the production of history and what she calls collective
memory. Crisholm connects the destruction and reconstruction of queer space to the
ruination of urban experience and locates the ways in which queer prose writing carves
out these spaces for forms of critical and creative engagement. A viable text for this as
study and as a viable point for departure would be the recent GASSP book which seems
to represent different writings from the LGBT community of Singapore.
One may also utilize the theoretical apparatus I used in analyzing Manila and
Singapore in the introductory chapter. In my comparative reading of Manila and
Singapore, I called our attention to the ways in which other poets responded to the
spaces of Manila and Singapore. I alerted us to the ways in which these notions of
compression and fragmentation are present as well in the poems of other writers. Of
particular interest for instance is Filipino poet Conchitina Cruzs urban poetry. The
female voice in the poetry of Cruz is quite apparent in her works. Moreover, there seems
to be a tension between fragmentation and coherence in her work. Poems like
Geography Lesson and What is it about tenderness echo these notions of

126

fragmentation. On the other hand, poems like Elegy where she represents the city as a
familiar room where memories are near and often accessible, counter this notion of
fragmentation and chaos. It would then be interesting to locate the ways in which these
urban patterns and experiences are negotiated by a female voice.
Having lived in both Singapore and Manila, I can say they are both cities of
possibilities and adventure. Singapore as an open, global city attracts tourists, investors
as well as skilled and educated potential employees. The messy uncertainty in Manila on
the other hand continuously offers unpredictable adventures. The literary and creative
scenes of both cities echo this kind of attraction. The lights and sounds of the cities are a
mine of creative and critical possibilities.

127

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