Wong Phui Nam (1935-2022)
FEATURES / DEAD POETS’ SOCIETY
Written by Andrew Devadason
Dated 31 Oct 2023
Wong Phui Nam’s “Candles for a Local Osiris” thrums with the restless energy of a landscape in fragments, simultaneously claustrophobic and vast. Even the ebb tide with which the poem opens can only temporarily take leave “from its mangrove edges, / from the houses subverted into mud”. Though the poem seems to take on a fresh vantage point from section to section, each is unerringly bounded by the life of an uncaring city, with its “massed vehicles” and “indifferent crowds”. I find it difficult to look on for long, to fully allow myself to enter into the pathos of a god brought low by death. I find it difficult to look away.
How do we encounter the eponymous Osiris, his broken body ripe for reassembly? In the poem’s sixth part (“Song”), we dwell on a moment of hesitation at the gate through which the errant god will return, “[w]hen the time breaks”. I feel closest to the speaker at the confession that they are “afraid to enter though the flesh/is loud elsewhere with its dying”; it is precisely flesh that is perhaps curiously absent in the poem’s ambit. Individual embodiment seems to be a deferred concern, displaced into the noise and “savagery of the heart/howling in a dream of quiet towns”.
What space is needed for an uneasy vigil, candles lit for a corpse expected to return “hungry from burial in our local earth”? How do we mourn what rests well within our horizons? The poem's speaker offers no more answer than I can. For years I have sat with the myth of Osiris as a starting point for writing a body in parts—a task I cannot take on without flinching. In Wong’s transposition, I find an invitation to stay with the uneasiness; with the flinch.
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Begin a Puzzle By Its Edges*
*Editor’s Note: We recommend reading the below poem on desktop.
1) How many models of forceps
did Isis hold, picking her way
through layers of limestone
till she found the pair
that lets her lift epidermis
curling from the rock?2) What impression has surgical steel left
ridged on the soft flesh of her fingers?3) Was the touch-me-not shuddering
beneath her feet alone?4) On steps leading down to the river,
what question did she ask of the fish
darting between reflected lights,
the lazy winks of passing turtles?5) What crooning songs did she sing
to herself and to the waters
as she wetted the ends of her thread,
practiced her suture before she had
quite enough skin?6) How many times did she hold a membrane
to the runoff at Redhill, its lateritic crest
cut conveniently down to size,
till she could siphon a truth-teller’s blood clean?7) What answer did she give the mynah’s reddened eye
when she held liver dripping in her hands and failed
to offer her shoulder as a perch?8) Did the strangler fig’s low-hanging roots recover
from the night she sharpened her scalpels?9) Who saw the sinews she hung out to dry
beneath the auras of expressway streetlamps?10) What nameless shapes did she pull
from wax hardened in ashy pools
over the still-growing grass?11) When the black dog with scraped elbows
and orange spots above its eyes whimpered,
did she scratch between its ears?12) When she filled your lungs with the bellows
of her own breath, how badly did it burn?13) When the morning broke
on the first day of your wholeness
and the dawn spread her unblemished fingers,
did Isis still reach for the knife?
