A Singapore Observer on the Road:
Chai - Travel Poems
by Marc Daniel Nair
Reviewed by David Fedo
“Who is writing poetry now that explores connections with place and travel?” wonders
David Miller, the blogger and editor of the online Traveler’s Notebook, with more than a touch of
exasperation. “Are we moving towards a language and poetry where place names, geography,
knowledge of terrain, and ‘identity’ based on place is no longer relevant?”
This is an interesting and even provocative question, despite the fact that “travel literature,”
including epic poems and more modest verses containing the adventures and reflections of people
on the move, are as old (at least in the West) as Homer’s Odyssey, which goes back all the way to the
eighth century BC. (As schoolchildren around much of the world know, the Odyssey chronicles
Odysseus’, or Ulysses’, famous ten-year journey back to Ithaca from the exploits of the Trojan-Greek
war.) The Mahabharata, in Sanskrit, with all of its travel and other adventures, dates at least to the
fifth century BC. And readers familiar with medieval English literature undoubtedly will remember
Geoffrey Chaucer’s late-fourteenth-century work, The Canterbury Tales, which, mostly in verse,
records the sometimes ribald stories of a diverse group of pilgrims on their way from South London
to Canterbury to pay their respects to Thomas Becket, the slain and sainted archbishop.
But fast-forwarding some hundreds of years later, and in answer to Miller, poetry which
deals with the poet/narrator moving from one place to another, or settling outside of his or her
home base, is still alive and quite well, thank you very much, although travel writing in prose still far
outstrips in volume that in verse. One such excellent contemporary example of a poet/traveler is
Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States. Collins’ travel poems—for example,
“Traveling Alone”—portray ordinary people, the flight attendants in airplanes or waitresses in
unfamiliar hotel coffee shops, living their lives as the poet lives his, often uneventfully but
nonetheless meaningfully. What happens occurs not so much in the actual engagement between
the two, but in the reality or fiction imagined by, or interpreted through the consciousness of, the
poet.
It is thus a pleasure to come across a new book, Chai – Travel Poems, written by a young
Singaporean, Marc Daniel Nair, and just published by Red Wheelbarrow Books of Singapore. (This is
Nair’s second book; his first was called Along the Yellow Line, Select Books, 2007.) With the
exception of the introductory poem, “Confessions of an Ambivalion,” about Singapore’s own
Merlion, this handsome volume, available in hardback and paperback, consists of sections starting
with Bali, Indonesia, and continuing on through Vietnam, North Luzon, Philippines, and ending with
India. There are 44 works in all, most of them short lyrics, and most with carefully-wrought stanzas
of two, three or four lines.
Nair is well known in Singapore through his presentations in Poetry Slams; in fact, he won
the first Singapore-Malaysia Poetry Slam in 2007. He has also set some of his work to music, with a
band of his own creation. But I find that the poems in Chai are most often “quiet,” and that the
poet is contemplative—there are few crescendos, and not a lot of conflict or clamor, in this book.
There is certainly drama and tension, as there always is in good poetry, but Nair’s is restrained and
usually internal, as it is in the travel poems of Billy Collins. The poet in Chai is a wonderful observer
of the life around him, wherever he happens to be, more than he seems to be a “performer.” He
muses, thinks and ponders. And in doing so, in often elegantly-crafted verse, the fields and rice
paddies and villages and people struggling to make a living, and even Sonia Gandhi’s motorcade,
come alive with images and sounds that seem not just precise and real but true.
To Nair, watching carefully, travelling enlightens, shows contradictions and defies
expectations. In one of the best poems in Chai, “Notions of a Lone Backpacker,” which introduces
the Bali section, he begins:
I wanted to find a postcard Bali,
with untainted acres of padi, children
chasing ducks across narrow mud banks.
I saw myself stepping into light
that lifted me through rice terraces
twirling with parasols of saffron.
But this isn’t the Bali he discovers. Instead Nair finds tourists waking “on water-borne beds,” and
“women with oiled hair pulled tight” no longer in the fields but now haggling “on sidewalks over
factory-made bags.” He concludes:
I never imagined I would be counting out
the hours in bottles of Bintang, while the locals
shade their eyes from the glare of sunsets,
as children race after the old ice-cream truck
when it clatters past the padi fields
into the Viceroy [Hotel], although
it never once slows down for them.
Disappointment and a certain disillusionment thus stalk Nair’s book, from “the crush of Kuta,
cycles and touts” in Bali, to the Hmong villages in Vietnam where “dogs are raised as pets, / then are
sold to be slaughtered,” and to the Catba Cave in Halong Bay where “fishermen often return empty
from/ casting their nets at this World Heritage site.” In “The Face of Mountains” (in the North
Luzon, Philippines section), an old man, farming his terraced gardens, is soon to be forgotten by his
family:
Sons come every six months in city shoes
with wailing kids who skin their knees.
The wives prefer the town’s one hotel.
Your sons will stop coming here
when you die.
And since the rain will “wash away more terraces each year,” it “makes/ strangers of men who will
never call it home.”
Even in India, the country of Nair’s forefathers, reality tarnishes the illusion. In “Remains of
a Kingdom,”
hard-eyed junkies
trespass the tide, crossing in coracles to
smoke away their reasons among the temples.
And yet, having acknowledged the disorder of the world, Nair still finds much consolation in
it. This occurs in numerous ways, including through the images and feelings that come from the
drinking of chai—an aromatic spiced tea, familiar to many even in Singapore. In the title poem of
the volume, “Chai” (in the India section), Nair begins beautifully, conjuring up family, tradition and a
kind of modest past glory:
I am drinking chai in the land of my fathers,
steeped in the aroma of time and place.
In this ritual of taste and thought I am stirred
to the greater history of my own clan,
frayed like a seam, split along
the migrant edge of my heritage.
Each sip of chai
is a history of familiarity,
a little nudge of rumor, a strain of beating music,
a symbol of what I have never truly left behind.
Then Nair returns home to Singapore, “armed with bags of tea distilled into promise,” and “treading
the lines between flight and longing.” Love of the past and its comforts warm the heart, Nair seems
to be saying, but there is also the necessity of moving on:
I am drinking chai in the land of my fathers,
I am drinking chai in this land.
In these two lines I take “the land of my fathers” to be India (the old life), and “this land” to be
Singapore (the new).
I admire the smooth flow of “Chai,” with its repetitions, images and rhythms (“a history of
familiarity,/a little nudge of rumor,/a strain of beating music,/ a symbol of what I have never truly
left behind.” Here the poet is utterly in control of his craft, insightful and suggestive, opening up his
world to the reader.
But if for Nair there is consolation in tea, family and the old land and rituals, there is even
greater consolation, although not without some ambiguity, in religion—or at least there seems to be
in my reading of Chai. In “Buddha Next to Ganesh Next to Rama Next to Sita” (in the Bali section),
Nair, in writing about the gods lining the road to Denpasar, says “All things come through faith.” But
not to everyone in every place. In “Conversations with Marcus” (Bali again), Nair writes:
In Germany, churches are reformed
by camera flash and graffiti, but in Bali
God inhabits every space, even for one
called verruckt—standing outside the circle.
And in “Reshma and the Universe” (Bali), Nair continues in this vein:
When God moves inside you,
he blesses with the kind words of strangers.
now your peace is everyone with a smile.
pray your faith will be a narrow road
to a home not made by man.
Belief is a hard journey and may be unpopular, Nair appears to say, but when arrived at has its
genuine blessings.
There is a lovely poem, “St. Francis Xavier” (India section), set at the Saint’s tomb in a
basilica in Goa, with the body “boxed in an alcove/ too fragile to be touched by common men.” Nair
is among the pilgrims who come to pay homage to the great man whose missionary work, as many
Malaysians and Singaporeans will recall, took him hundreds of years ago throughout Southeast Asia,
even to Melaka. And there is an even lovelier poem, “Inside the Chapel” (again in Goa, in the Indian
section), in which Nair becomes very personal. Here it is in full:
On the threshold of St. Catherine’s,
a nun’s silhouette beckons me over
a stone floor to the empty wooden cross.
Here, in this unadorned life,
no candles are lit in place of prayer,
no incense can cloud a miracle.
Sun spills through the open doorway,
under the weathered eaves where I stand,
lighting my feet before the way
to the Maker. It is just enough to see,
to find a place where I can kneel
in thanks.
In its brevity and simplicity, it would be easy to overlook the power and beauty of “Inside the
Chapel,” with the beckoning nun’s silhouette, the life shorn of all earthly trimmings and trappings,
the sun pouring into the chapel, and the spare image of a worshipper kneeling before his God. A
great photographer or filmmaker might do the scene justice, but for now, Nair’s poem will do just
fine.
Of the other poems, I admired the gritty sensuality of “The Escort” (Bali); the evocative “Phu
Quoc Island” (Vietnam), with is “fish sauce” and “islanders strung together like Roman galleons,/
urging a beached boat off a sandbar”; the wry humor of “Roads” (the Philippines), which makes fun
of the commercialization of Christmas in Manila; “Light, from Another Land” (India), about Nair’s
heritage; and “Sonia Gandhi”s Motorcade” (India), with Gandhi, waving her hand, and being driven
by suffering women scrambling to eke out a living.
There are some poems, however, that just didn’t work for me. Several seemed to be short
prose paragraphs unsuccessfully disguised as poems. These included “Municipal Hall” (Philippines)
and “The Woodcutter” (India), which are both flat and lack the energy and sharp images of Nair’s
more inspired work. And as hard as I tried to understand “Reading Borges on Train No. 554” (India),
with tigers as “prowling symbols,” among other things, I just didn’t get it. (Of course, Borges himself
can be impenetrable, too.)
Still, the virtues of many of Chai’s poems far outweigh the unevenness found in others. And
I would be remiss if I did not conclude this review with a strong thumbs up for “Confessions of an
Ambivalion,” Nair’s decidedly contrary view of Singapore’s icon, the towering white Merlion in
Marina Bay. Nair’s Merlion is not Edwin Thumboo’s famous tribute. “I have not been a dutiful
sentry of your shores,” Nair’s lion-mermaid narrator confesses as the poem begins, “spewing
recycled water” and claiming instead to be merely “a creature of myths”:
They made me believe I was a hero, but I have
never fought any invaders before. My laser eyes
glimmer softer than the city lights at night.
All I can do is what everyone does: complain.
This is the anti-hero, and Nair’s deft new take on what is likely Singapore’s number one
visited tourist destination (well, perhaps Orchard Road is in first place), is both a droll and humorous
poke at Singaporeans and of the Singapore nation itself—and yet it is also another instance of Nair’s
disappointment, too. Is the Merlion more a tacky tourist’s totem than the symbol of the country’s
power and might? Where is Singapore’s real glory? When looked at closely, things are sometimes
not what we wish or expect them to be, and to Nair, a gifted poet and thoughtful observer, that’s
just the way the world is.