Damien Sin (1965–2011)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Ann Ang
Dated 15 Jan 2024
Saints, Sinners and Singaporeans (1998) is Damien Sin’s only poetry collection, but like much of his other work, it makes an original contribution to Singapore literature for being an outlier to mainstream critical tradition. In scholarly surveys, Sin has received only two mentions related to his aberrance from received notions of good poetry (Singh, “Introduction”; Gwee, “The New Poetry of Singapore”). Reflecting, to some extent, the exuberant personality of its author, Saints, Sinners and Singaporeans — hereafter SSS — features a wide range of poetic styles, including the long ballad as a distinctive form, short aphoristic lines which almost seem to be missing a backing guitar, and the use of a casual lyrical register arising from the street slang of 1990s Singapore.
Sin’s poetry can be described as music lyrics set to the hard-edged bass of society’s fringes, crooned in a voice characterised by tender cynicism, and a self-styled melancholia threaded through with Singlish, Hokkien swear phrases and conversational Malay. Peppered throughout are clear allusions to Sin’s unusual literary education in the Drug Rehabilitation Centre, including references to Oscar Wilde in “The Wilde Ones,” in the refrain “wannabe Wilde” (Sin, Saints Sinners and Singaporeans) as well as phrases from eighties and nineties music culture, such as “lucky cool cats” and the “Best Years of Our Lives.” Prison as a setting would feature in his fiction as well as the poems “In the Belly of the Beast” and “The Ballad of Bentong Kalimuthu.” The collection opens with a number of spurned-lover pieces, some almost juvenile like “Love in Vain” and “Hippy Chick,” in their brevity and resemblance to nursery rhymes. The collection quickly modulates into weightier pieces underscored by social commentary, and a deep sympathy for the gang members, street hustlers and junkies on the margins in strait-laced Singapore. Sin’s poetry, like his fiction, is entertainingly accessible, but driven by a steadier impulse to examine the moral failings of a nouveau-riche society.
The tropes of the undead and of darkness, in Sin’s work, symbolise the state of such fringe individuals who are lost to the larger community. However, the dangerous glamour of hellfire and rock-and-roll — fuelled in part by the mid-nineties visual hype surrounding the big screen production of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) — transforms rebellion and exclusion into sources of identity. Appearing kitsch to some would be a poem like “Howl into the Abyss,” where to the refrain of “I howl,” “I shudder,” and “I weep,” the speaker recalls “the Devil’s contract” and hears “the abyss howl back” (Sin, Saints Sinners and Singaporeans). Later poems are less self-indulgent and foreground a further examination into despair and loneliness. “The Belly of the Beast” refers to the speaker’s time in remand, while also allegorising the state of society at large, where all will:
pass from belly to bowels.
Turned to shit and shat back on the streets;
hardened, hopeless and … helpless
Beyond raw emotion, Sin’s verse is an extended attempt to portray an underclass left behind by the shiny capitalism of globalising Singapore, and a section of society that rejects a comfortable heartland narrative situated in public housing estates.
One of the most important poems in SSS, “Working Class Nero” is perhaps the only Anglophone Singapore poem in the 1990s to expressly employ the term “working class.” In Sin’s collection, this cements the transition from the earlier horror imagery to an extended critique of the daily grind, employing the Roman Emperor Nero as an ironic touchstone. Unlike his debauched namesake, the working class Nero “wear(s) a Crown of Thoughts.” But the speaker also exudes the anarchist and narcissistic leanings of his chosen forefather. “Nero never works” and the speaker leaves
that for ‘Superheroes’,
And other costumed jerks
In an extended newspaper review on SSS, the poet and playwright Robert Yeo comments on how Sin views the fates of social outcasts as being predetermined, and so chooses to make his targets “the wealthy, the well-educated and the law enforcers.” Hailing Sin as the “only example of a working class poet at work here in English,” Yeo also draws attention to how most poetry in Singapore stems from a closed circle of graduate writers, while Sin “seeks an alternative frame of sociological reference” (Yeo, “It’s a Dark, Dark World,”) While this focus is at odds with Sin’s own privileged upbringing, his personal and extensive interactions in these social circles lends gravitas to how his poetry resolutely insists on their presence and bravado.
In the second last line of “Working Class Nero,” the speaker predicts his onward journey: “First, we’ll take the road to Damascus, / And then—onwards—to Eldorado…” (Sin, Saints Sinners and Singaporeans). Typically referring to an encounter on the road to Damascus in the Christian bible, which leads to religious conversion, the allusion is puzzlingly yoked with mentions of the fabled Hispanic land of gold, a common myth of Spanish imperialism in Latin America. Sin’s thinking can be further elucidated in the title poem “Saints, Sinners and Singaporeans,” which addresses, ostensibly, Jesus Christ nailed upon the cross. The poem is classically Sin’s for including a quick outtake on how Jesus was “so sweet as to cross [His] feet,” so they could save one nail, Singlish-style, “is it?” (Sin, Saints Sinners and Singaporeans) Critiquing false Christians, whom he depicts in some of the most striking imagery in SSS as “a pious chorus of victorious vultures,” the speaker laments,
You, who taught them not to love material things,
and they, instead, tried to make You—King.
Pointedly refusing the hierarchies of a secular social order, the poem concludes that Saints, Sinners and Singaporeans should revere the gentle wisdom and precious lessons, / of a lofty Truth above religion” regardless of whether they do homage to the Son of Man or the Son of God (107).
This surprisingly intimate turn towards a spiritual encounter is Sin’s central ethical challenge to readers. What do we make of a body of writing that plumbs the depths of human desire and sordidness, only to conclude in favor of love and human compassion? Literary commentators were clearly at a loss to find a critical foothold. When asked about horror writers in Singapore, including Sin, Robbie Goh remarks that such writers acquire a sense of power through such tale-telling, because the supernatural deals with repressed fears and anxieties (Ong, “Print-to-Scream”). But Sin’s moral preoccupations seem far more complex, especially when he employs slang orthography and a noticeably colloquial register in his verse. At the invitation of Kirpal Singh, Sin spoke on a Singlish forum with writer Colin Goh and actress Eileen Wee at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in 2002 (“Singlish Forum”).
When SSS is read in its entirety, Sin emerges as a maverick of style and allusion, presenting, ever so politely, the middle-finger to poetry proper. “Bengston International” contains just three lines, in Chinese characters, its Hokkien transliteration and an English translation as an interlingual play on making sure one’s coffin will be lovingly sealed with honour. In “The Wilde Ones,” the refrain of “everybody wannabe Wilde” co-opts Wilde’s precocious dandyism alongside American colloquialisms. The addressee is an unnamed person just returned from Taiwan, the object of the speaker’s affection as an “Angel-child” (Sin, Saints Sinners and Singaporeans). Elsewhere, Sin’s use of lexis such as “kena” and “suay,” full rhymes employing Singlish stress patterns, and substitutions of “U” for “you” locate us firmly in the linguistic milieux of 1990s Singapore, coincidentally the era of pagers and internet chatrooms.
Possibly the most troubling aspect of Sin’s poetry is his portrayal of women as sexual objects. In many poems, the speaker adopts a voyeuristic perspective. “Last Gang in Town” is spoken, in first person, from the perspective of a guy hitting the streets in search of girls. Riding the MRT when he does not have a Rolls Royce, he asks his audience to “Come a little closer I won’t hurt / I got X-Ray eyes I can see through your skirt” (Sin, Saints Sinners and Singaporeans). “The Princess of Geylang Serai” again features a similar persona, who trails “Her Majesty” from Joo Chiat Complex to Blk 27 Eunos Crescent. Saluting her as the daughter of a “Queen of the ’80s SPG scene [who] pulled some sailor off some ship” (Sin, Saints Sinners and Singaporeans), women are desired entirely for their looks and for sex. Ironically, it is the femme fatale who is assigned full agency despite the onlooker’s predatory perspective. Though Sin’s later fiction, notably in Classic Singapore Horror Stories books 3 and 4, does portray more fully the psychology and emotions of female characters, the women of SSS are dangerous sirens remaining desperately out of reach, and eliciting in turn, a predatory masculine craving. “…poem for one” opens in delirium, addressing a “barefoot dancer in the sand” out of the speaker’s reach. He intones, “on your ghost I spill my seed,” as the poem quickly transits into an orgiastic scene, which with its overripe full rhymes, veers just short of horror into humour (Sin, Saints Sinners and Singaporeans). Ostensibly in the voice of “poet / monster Damien Sin,” the poem closes with an admission that “my eyes they saw, and my heart desired / so let them burn in hellfire” (Sin, Saints Sinners and Singaporeans). The only female figure to escape sexualization is that of the mother, to whom a dying junkie returns hopelessly from the doctors, in “going back to mother.”
Replete with the sensory overload of romance, drugs and music, the saints and sinners of Sin’s poetry collection are to be found within the self-same person. The “sin” in Singapore is not merely the materialistic excesses of a convenient pragmatism, to which the rebel in Sin was inherently opposed, but the error of blindness towards the fullness of humanity. Good and evil are intimately entangled in Damien Sin’s universe, and the poetics of his only collection speak to further transits across false divides between high and popular culture; and between poetry and music. Like its larger-than-life author, Saints, Sinners and Singaporeans is a hopelessly desiring parody offered to a society that would reject such a love-song out of hand.
References
“Singlish Forum.” The Straits Times. 18 May 2002.
Gwee, Li Sui. “The New Poetry of Singapore.” Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysian Literature II. Singapore: National Library Board, 2009.
Ong, Suzanne. “Print-to-Scream.” The Straits Times. 25 October 2002.
Sin, Damien. “One man's art, another man's turkey.” The Business Times. 9 January 1993.
Singh, Kirpal. "Introduction." Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature. Eds. Singh, Kirpal and Ronald D. Klein. Studies in Singapore Literature. Singapore: Ethos Books, 1998. 9-17.
---. Saints Sinners and Singaporeans: A Collection of Poems. Angsana Books 1998.
Yeo, Robert. “It’s a Dark, Dark World.” The Straits Times. 15 January 2000.
