literary moment

i was in the same year as this brilliant guy, Alfian, in RJC who wrote amazing plays and poetry. People used to point him out to me back then and tell me he was an amazing writer. He's quite the high profile artsy guy now in the scene and i came across his blog. Loved reading it because it was always so full of fire-y comments and poetic little slice of life observations.

To my sadness, his blog has been down for a long time due to some server errors.....I only have one piece of his blog saved on a stray Sticky.

So here it is:
quite poignant stuff...amazingly sensitive eye and ear for detail

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2001-05-24 - 10:39 p.m.
The Writer's Family, Abridged

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My father is a fierce man. My mother is not so fierce. My father has a way with words such that sometimes when he wants to ask a question it ends up like an accusation. For example, 'Did you bring your wallet?' becomes 'You didn't bring your wallet,' and 'Are you going to school?' becomes 'You're not going to school.' It often makes me angry but I tell myself far worse than being hurt by bad words is to be hurt by bad grammar.

My mother also has a way with words. But her problem is not with grammar. Since I was young, she has been developing a repertoire of phrases designed to make me feel small, to make me desire smallness, such that I can climb back into her womb and lie still and sinless. Certain words and phrases recur: 'you don't love', 'you don't pity', 'knife in heart'. Far worse than being hurt by bad words is to be hurt by words which aren't.


My father works through symbols. When I come home late, I will find the things in my room damaged by his invisible rage. The phone line for my modem like a sliced vein, my favourite shirt a dissected tangram, theatre flyers wrung into paper croissants. But these metaphors are mine. The symbols my father uses are straightforward: 'If you come home late, you make people angry. If they are angry, their anger leaves a wake.'


There was a time when I bought a pair of do-it-yourself-hobbycraft insects, convinced I could pinfocus my restless energies into something constructive. I punched stencilled shapes out of flat wooden boards and eased edges into slots. A few nights later, coming home way past midnight, I noticed that having finished with my phone cable, my shirts and my theatre flyers, my father had chosen to vent his paternal anguish on my 3-day-old invertebrates.


The next morning I found them pieced together with glue. It was my mother's handiwork, but since I had thrown away the instruction manual, she had created a pair of mutants: the cricket with rickets, the praying mantis gone heretic.


My father is a fierce man, meaning, obvious. My mother is not so fierce; she is subtler. My father taught me how to write fiction: 'A boy comes home late. A father wrecks his room. This is a story. A boy comes home late. A father wrecks his room out of fury. This is a plot.' But my mother concentrates on the details. The disfigured insects now buzz to me: 'Do not break my heart, because even after I mend it I cannot restore it as it was before.' In this manner my mother taught me poetry.