It Strikes Me That This Is the Gift with Hamid Roslan

Creative writing sucks, the Singlish beyond “Walao eggs so expensive what!” and other selected responses

We sat down for a coffee and a chat with Hamid Roslan, author of parsetreeforestfire, his first book. Questions of authorship, accessibility, sound, and artistic principles produced responses that proved enthralling, honest, and inspiring—a snapshot of Hamid, the author, and Hamid, the human being. Many parts of the discussion have been redacted or consolidated; as such, some questions may not follow from the preceding response. We hope you enjoy reading as much as we loved talking poetry with Hamid.

I think that we’re very used to having everything on time, and having everything in clear and simple language…but I don’t think that’s how anything works—I don’t think that’s how people work.

A scholar once said, “I’m not writing for my peers, I’m writing for posterity.” With regard to your own work, whom do you imagine your audience to be?

Hamid: …A readership to me doesn’t quite matter in the sense that I’m not going out to find my readers. For me, the more interesting question is what kind of reader do you find yourself [to be] when you’re reading my book…

While reading parse I was intrigued by what I felt to be an honest reflection on the uncertainty and uneasiness that undergirds existing…Where does your question or perception of personhood begin, [and] if it begins does it end?

Hamid: I’ve only realized that I’m concerned about personhood now…in a very particular sense. [parsetreeforestfire] is not about personhood; [it] is about speaking, about speech and about who can listen and who is able to identify what they are hearing and from there how they are able to construct—if they are able to—the speaker…

Oftentimes, there’s a sense in which you are only allowed to speak one thing: you and the language that you speak are supposed to be one, but suddenly when there are multiple languages at play, the seemingly logical option would then be to say, “Oh, but what is your real language? What is it that you really speak that you feel within you and is a part of who you are?”

That’s where I disagree with that formulation that you are what you speak.

What do you believe your gift is, to the world as a writer?

Hamid: I don’t know; I only have some questions that keep coming back that I am unable to find the answers for—that is the only reason why I have continued to write…Is that a gift to the world? Who knows?

I’m internally motivated by—you can call them—demons—you can call them—questions, and they result in things like this, in books—book, for now. I hope that someone will read my book and be like, “Oh my god, that’s me.” Alternatively, if they say, “Oh my god, this is not me,” I hope they ask, “Why?” because sometimes not every book is accessible to you, and you must learn to understand that, first of all, and secondly learn how to sit with the fact that something may be inaccessible to you.

I think that we’re very used to having everything on time, and having everything in clear and simple language…but I don’t think that’s how anything works—I don’t think that’s how people work.

How do you think one should approach investigating why a work is inaccessible? Because I feel I struggle with that while reading [parsetreeforestfire], asking “why can’t I connect, why am I different?”

Hamid: Now that’s the interesting question: why am I different?

The fact is, we’re all different people, we have different experiences, we come from different angles. I don’t want to prescribe how you should approach something that you don’t understand.

If we were to put this into a very concrete example: if someone is speaking in a language that you don’t understand, what are the ways in which you can at least try and understand the shape of the conversation? And that’s usually through how people are saying things, the sounds that you hear, where it’s taking place, what the context is—I think these are all things that we tend to forget, things that we can also use in reading, just as much as we use them in everyday life.

What drives your words apart? I’m curious to know why you have broken your words in a certain way, and I wonder [in the spirit of Audre Lorde’s essay] if this is your attempt to make the tools your own?

Hamid: In some sense, yeah, but also more practically, Singlish has always been a creole that people take lightly, [for it] tends to be very simple, in terms of its grammatical structure, its vocabulary, but what has always surprised me is how expressive it can be, even when it is such a simple and common register of language.

My decisions to write Singlish in a different way is informed by that as well; wanting to tell people, “Hey, Singlish is not just this cheap thrill you can throw out in a play to signal there’s a Singaporean auntie on stage, talking about how expensive the eggs are.” But you can elevate it to a position where it can talk about things that you might not even think it is able to say. So, one of the decisions I made for myself, that if I were to use Singlish, I would want it to be mine, and not something I would borrow from the community and then in an act of transcription then turn it into a poem.

What’s one prominent academic theory that comes to mind that you draw on in your work?

Hamid: [What is an Author? by Michel Foucault] is an essay that talks about how authorship is not about the person having written something and [that person’s] relationship with the text; what he proposes is that authorship is about a text and how people access the text, but that they set up a set of conventions to interpret it, and by that act of interpretation the author is created.

So, there is a difference between the author as a person and the author figure. For me, having read that, I came to an understanding that I didn’t need to be so concerned with trying to understand what my voice was as a writer, because suddenly the question of whether the voice was an authentic one no longer mattered. Because if my authorship no longer had to specifically rely on me but instead what other people are able to interpret from what I’ve written, then it stands to reason that I can create the text, or I can play with languages and words and text and references in such a way that I can construct a kind of figure that I want people to see.

But to make things even more interesting, what would happen if the kind of figure you saw was always coming in and out of perception…[which] goes back to the idea of the coherent and the incoherent persona—that if you can create a figure like that, then to me, what happens is that people will be forced to understand how they are constructing that figure.

It strikes me that this is the gift…the gift of honesty, which is the most humane gift, and it’s fascinating to think about the gift of honesty revealed in concealment…Which would lead me to ask, what are your own artistic principles?

Hamid: …Pursuing a thought, a concept, an idea or an image to its conclusion is, to me, something that I deeply respect…if someone is able to do that, it may actually have very real consequences on how they live their life or how they see the world, because there’s no turning away once you’ve discovered something for yourself—it’s impossible to say, “Oh, but that’s just theoretical, that’s [just] stuff that remains in the book…there are always stakes…And the stakes are always about how can I understand myself and my relationship to the world that I’m in: what are my responsibilities to myself, and what is that relationship to the rest of the world.

I would like to think that the project that we’re all engaged in, whatever that might be, must have consequence; otherwise, it’s just a thought experiment. It’s just mental acrobatics—that’s it.

When I was reading [parsetreeforestfire], it feels like it goes from one thought to the next, almost like prose—very flowy writing. How did you negotiate this relationship between the rhythm of the poetry and the form?

Hamid: …Because you’re playing with several different languages, it’s going to sound incoherent…So, the most important thing for me was to try and find some way of making all of the sounds cohere; or alternatively, to not cohere…That’s one of the ways I tried to tame the text, and I suppose that same principle applies to the structuring of the book as well.

But at the level of the line, it was mostly about sound; I was very conscious as I was choosing words, “what would be intelligible to who?”

…[For example] In the third section, forest, the footnotes are saying something very different from the English, because they’re coming from very different positions…I’ve set it up [such] that they have different assumptions about what they’re talking about, and because of that they head in different directions…

What do you believe poetry enables you to do that’s unique from other artforms?

Hamid: I think for me poetry is the root of all speech, and in poetry you can really find the core of what it is you’re trying to say…because there’s a lot more space to play within poetry than there is in…different forms [of writing].

In fact, I came to poetry; I didn’t think of myself as a poet in any sense. My story was I wanted to write plays at first, and then I took a playwriting class at NUS, and this was the beginning of my frustrations with creative writing because it demanded that because I am this I must write in this way. So, then I was like, “Plays are not a space in which I can figure out questions.” Plays always felt to me a bit more didactic than the other forms.

So, then I moved to short stories.

Then when I moved to short stories it was also a problem because, again, it was about representation, but there were also problems with that representation, and [although] the space for experimentation was slightly more than in plays…it still didn’t work because it felt too static for me…poetry felt like the space where you can ask questions and explore…

Then it came full circle because I became very concerned about performance of speech and of poetry being spoken out loud—which comes back to plays [which] are all about bodies and space, speaking and talking.

In my head, I still believe if I can figure out the questions I have in poetry…I can find a way to transfer some of that thinking and questioning into prose and plays.

…[Poetry] is such an open-ended form, and people think just because it’s open-ended means you can do whatever you want—true, you can, and then you’ll end up with crap.

But if you discipline yourself, if you pay attention to what you’re writing instead of just thinking that this is a space for me to say whatever it is I want to say, then I think some very interesting things can happen.

At that, each of us released a visibly silent breath of air, grateful for the time we’d had to share with each other. Our conversation ran a whisker short of 2 hours, and it was high time for rehydration. We poured our fourth or fifth round of filtered water into our child-proof plastic cups, rattled off a few more questions about Hamid’s work, and shortly made our leave from the faux-vintage coffee shop with overpriced coffee but a bang for the buck conversation!

Courtesy of the Yale-NUS Writers' Centre

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by Alex Horne and Kukhanya Magubane