Poetry in Prison
To commemorate the 35th anniversary of Operation Spectrum, the PAP government's detention without trial of a group of social activists for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the state, we are pleased and honored to reprint three poems by former detainee and lawyer Teo Soh Lung, who wrote and drew while imprisoned in order to keep sane. The poems first appeared in Teo's book Creatures Big and Small: Poems and Drawings from Behind the Blue Gate (Singapore: Function 8 Ltd, 2018), with a preface by historian Michael Barr and an introduction by the author, both of which are also reproduced below.
Poetry in Prison
On January 1 1990, the Singapore media dutifully reported Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s New Year’s Message. “We ended the 1980s in good form”, he opened. “It has been a decade of self-renewal.... Let the 1990s be the decade when Singapore comes of age as a developed country.”
On the same day, in a cell in Whitley Centre, a young, hitherto energetic and idealistic lawyer called Teo Soh Lung wrote an eight-line poem about a spider hanging from her ceiling. This was her world now and would remain so for another six months until her release in June. Soh Lung was one of the last two political prisoners in Singapore of the original 22 who had been caught up in supposed ‘security’ sweeps in the first half of 1987. The alleged conspirators were a mixture of Catholic social activists and church staff, lawyers like Soh Lung, alternative theatre types and even a Harvard graduate with a knack for networking. In the words of Lee Kuan Yew when he was speaking in confidential meetings, they were guilty of being ‘do-gooders who wanted to help the poor and the dispossessed’. In public he accused them of being ‘Marxist conspirators’ trying to overthrow the state. So ran the imagination of the architect and driver of their detentions.
They were never charged in a court of law, or even in a regular police station, but they were charged and convicted in a relentless avalanche of state-sponsored fake news through the local press, radio and television. The credibility of the accusations against the group was by this stage incidental to the real purpose of the detentions. Following the old Chinese adage, the government was killing a chicken to scare the monkey. The lessons were there for the Catholic Church and anyone else with independent ideas about Singapore society, politics or justice: speak at your own risk.
Throughout all of this, Teo Soh Lung retained and fed her own imagination and is unique among the detainees in having put her imagination to paper. In days gone by she had imagined a caring and free society. This is what had gotten her and her colleagues into trouble with the Internal Security Department (ISD). In prison her imagination centred on smaller things mostly found in her cell. Spiders, ants, lizards, a cricket, a cockroach, a wasp, a beetle and mosquitoes. Apart from the cockroach and the mosquitoes, she loved them all. She was particularly fond of one little spider, and placed it under her special protection, even to the point of letting her other friend, Liz the Lizard, go hungry sometimes.
Such characters dominate this delightful book of poems, songs and drawings, ordered and dated in the order in which they were written. Soh Lung passed her time and retained some sense of personal balance by spending her 21⁄2 years in solitary confinement writing about and drawing her new friends. Many of these poems have no message beyond a delight in life:
Until you have seen
The lizards at play
You will never believe
They can be happy and gay.
Others express her frustration:
You sucked my blood
And now I’ve got you.
Dead on the wall
Killed by the sole of my shoe. A red spot, my blood....
Not quite John Donne, but a nice conclusion to a trilogy of poems about mosquitoes!
So much of Soh Lung’s emotional life in these dark days can be traced through the poems and drawings – though it helps to read them alongside her memoir, Beyond the Blue Gate: Recollections of a Political Prisoner for a fuller context and timeline.
The first three poems were written in August and September 1987, the months immediately after ISD brought her interrogation to an end – interrogations that included systematic personal humiliations, sleep deprivation and blasts of cold air from an oversized air conditioner – until her first release. Life as a detainee seems to have been disturbingly normal by this stage and so the poems of this period are light, almost whimsical. Yet there was nothing whimsical about her real state of mind. She wrote of this period in her memoir as one of ‘utter defeat’; regret piled upon regret as she signed away everything she believed in to be granted the favour of some freedom. “Why, I ask myself, was I such a weakling?”
Then follows a song called “Detention without Trial”, which is rather more sombre. It is a rage against the ISD and the Internal Security Act, and a poetic act of defiance to match the actual act of defiance that saw her returned to prison seven months after her release: she and eight other detainees had renounced the lies they had told as part of the conditions of their release. This particular song seems to have been started before her release and completed in May-June 1988, after her re-arrest. This was a particularly angry period for Soh Lung as she was railing against not just the injustice of her own detention, but the arrest of her lawyer, Francis Seow, which left her without representation during critical hearings.
Thereafter follows the bulk of the book – poems, songs and so many drawings in which Soh Lung expresses her love of the little things that made up her life. But the whimsies of the first detention and the rage of “Detention without Trial” had been replaced with something new. In this period the tone is heavily aspirational, looking for hope and hoping for freedom. Emotional transference is commonplace in these works as Soh Lung envies the spider his freedom; a cuckoo in a tree outside her cell sings so sweetly, “feeling so free”.
The darkness is there too:
O grain of sand in a mud pool
You are but a stupid fool.
You can wish upon the stars and moon But you’ll never be able to move.
Gradually, but with increasing frequency as the dates roll forward, poems more overtly about herself and her incarceration are interspersed among songs of lizards and cockroaches and the like. Soh Lung’s personal plight and her interactions with lawyers, visitors (family) and even her guards begin to intrude, beginning with “I have Nothing More to Lose,” dated July 1988. Her family’s quest for legal representation eventually took them to the UK where they engaged a Queen’s Counsel, Anthony Paul Lester (later, Lord Lester) which kept her hopes alive, but gave her frustration a new edge at the same time.
During this period overtly political songs and poems like “Make Me a Martyr” and “For My Friends (who were released)” start appearing, until they reach a crescendo towards the end of her detention when her scheduled release in July 1990 started to loom larger than hopes of either a reward for promising to be ‘good’, or legal redress. “Freedom of Speech”, “Justice”, “Politics” and “Power” are among the last entries, along with this snippet from “A Prisoner’s Life”:
A prisoner’s only right is her right to food. Everything else is a privilege
She who asks for more is a fool
“Lizzie” (written in March 1990), almost derailed her release. It was a song about a lizard without a tail, and in unconscious irony, Soh Lung thought the song lacked a satisfactory ending. She consulted Patrick Seong, her lawyer and asked if he could ask his young daughter, Elizabeth, for a suggestion – something that was not, it seems, unusual. Soh Lung dictated the poem to Patrick, who copied it down in his illegible lawyer’s handwriting, and this was the mistake. Show me all your notes said the guard. Why are you writing about lizards when you are here as a solicitor? What are you hiding? By this stage Patrick was furious at the intrusion into his confidential discussions with his client and in a dangerous act of defiance he flushed his notes down the toilet. In a move that would be comical except for its context of intimidation, an ISD officer threatened to scour the drains and reconstruct the notes!
Soh Lung’s detention came to an end a few weeks ahead of schedule, on 1 June 1990. This left just one member of the ‘class of 1987’ still in detention for another few weeks – Vincent Cheng. His release, just before Lee Kuan Yew stepped down as prime minister, brought this round of detentions to an end – though it left a cone of silence over the truth that was barely dented by the publication in America of Francis Seow’s memoirs in 1994. The first time that Singaporeans were able to read the voice of the detainees themselves was in 2008 with the publication in Singapore of my chapter in Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism in Post-War Singapore. Since then, there have been several publications correcting the lies that were generated by the official history, and Soh Lung has made one of the more important contributions to that project with her memoirs. This book of poems and songs is not, however, part of that effort.
Creatures Big and Small is the re-creation – or perhaps ‘revisitation’ might be the right word – of her life and mind as she struggled with life in Whitley Centre. It almost failed to see the light of day. ISD kept all Soh Lung’s prison drawings and only returned them to her two years later, whereupon she tossed them into a drawer, disregarded for years. We can be grateful that she has revisited her younger self and shared this collection and its Chinese ‘transcreation’ with a wider audience.
Michael D. Barr
Flinders University
Adelaide, Australia
Introduction
This collection of rhymes and drawings were composed during my detention under the Internal Security Act. I was detained twice – from May to September 1987 and again from April 1988 to June 1990.*
In solitary confinement throughout my incarceration, I was compelled to seek solace and companionship in little creatures that lived in or visited my cell. Observing them occupied a large part of my time and kept my mind busy and sane. They were fascinating. The bigger creatures like the lizard and the toad were certainly aware of my presence and we learned to co-exist peacefully. They were unafraid of me and minded their own business just as much as I minded mine!
Coping with indefinite detention can sometimes be challenging. The fear that I would never be released was a recurring thought. In this regard, the ISA is a powerful and cruel tool of repression.
The Buddha likened the mind to a “wheel of fire”. I discovered mindfulness by occupying my time with drawing and composing rhymes. Sometimes I sang or recited these rhymes to the lizard and the toad. They seemed quite entertained!
On my release in June 1990, the Internal Security Department retained all my drawings. After two years, they were returned to me. I did not look at them until my brother, Eng Seng, displayed some of them for a brief private exhibition in 2009. After that, they were kept away until now.
Twenty-two poems have been transcreated into Chinese by my friend, Lim Pai, who is a writer and a poet. I thank him for the wonderful works.
I also want to thank the family and estate of Elizabeth Srinivasagam for a generous donation, without which this collection would never have been published.
Finally, this collection is my tribute to the little creatures which accompanied me through a part of my life.
* Details can be found in my first book, Beyond the Blue Gate: Recollections of a Political Prisoner, revised edition 2011, Function 8, Singapore.
Teo Soh Lung 2018
The Lost Beetle
Enough of it
Do not disturb me
I am too tired
And all I want is sleep.
Last night I flew into your cell Attracted by its bright lights
You were asleep
And in the course of my exploration I fell onto my back
Big as I am
I was unable to turn over
So here I lie for many hours
Trying with all the energy in my legs To flip over and avoid arrest.
Do not be afraid
I will not disturb you
In this cell
All insects live with me.
The lizards and spiders roam my walls The ants clean my floor
They have their battles for survival But I do not intervene.
I have the occasional visitor like yourself The grasshopper, the bee, the wasp
The millipede and the butterfly.
They leave when they have seen enough And if they are lost
I arrange for their departure
To the big field I know that is just outside.
Please take your rest
I will say goodbye to you When you have slept enough.
6 August 1987
The Lizard
You look so funny without your tail What did you do to it?
Or more appropriately
How did you lose it?
Just last night I saw you
Busy chasing flying insects Round the fluorescent tube You were so swift and graceful!
Stretching over two wires
Your tail securely fastened to one For balance
You waited, wide-eyed.
I was impressed
Your mental prowess
Your patience while you stretched in wait For those unfortunate creatures.
Ah I saw you
Snap your foe
You chewed him up
Then chuckled with satisfaction.
Your body soon became a bloated tube And shortly after
You disappeared
Presumably contented with your catch.
So what happened to your tail tonight? What did you do to it?
Or more appropriately
How did you lose it?
6 August 1987
The Cricket
Two nights ago,
You woke me from my sleep;
Gently, I told you to go, but you refused to leave.
Then as if you understood my words,
You ended your song and gave me peace.
Last night you sang again,
But only for awhile;
But tonight, your voice has taken flight!
Are you going to sing throughout the night?
Ami I to sleep with your shrill voice
ringing in my ears?
Is this the price I have to pay so as
to keep you here?
Poems and drawings reprinted by permission of author Teo Soh Lung. "Poetry in Prison" reprinted by permission of author Michael Barr. First published by Function 8 Ltd in 2018.
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