in all the places i could not find you

By Hamid Roslan

Author's Note: On Oct 1, 2021, I saw Raden Saleh’s ‘Fighting Tigers over the Body of a Javanese Man’ at the Upper Belvedere in Vienna and was promptly haunted by a man who died in 1880. Following that encounter, I kept a series of notebooks in which I spoke to Raden Saleh through my writing, and copied his paintings and drawings, and the portraits that survive of his likenesses. He guided my hand, and my life, it seems, over that year, but committed no words of his own to my pages. On Oct 3, 2022, Raden Saleh left me as suddenly as he appeared. I no longer write in those notebooks. Following a trip to Dresden and Maxen in the summer of 2022 to track Raden Saleh down, I made a chapbook/map, which was exhibited at the show PUBLIC COMPONENT at Pratt Institute from Sept 12 to 23, 2022. The chapbook/map is a part of a larger project I am working on titled The Encounter. 

This project was generously supported by the Pratt Institute Graduate Student Engagement Fund and the Pratt Writing department. I would also like to thank Werner Kraus, Marid Helbig, and the Residenzschloss in Dresden, Germany for their assistance. Title font by Benoît Ferran.

Hamid Roslan is the author of parsetreeforestfire (Ethos Books, 2019), a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize 2020. His prose and poetry can be found in Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis Press, 2022), New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022) and in other literary journals. Find him at https://hamidroslan.com.

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PoetryJee KohHamid RoslanComment