#YISHREADS April 2024
By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob
Apropos of nothing, why not a comics-themed column? This month I’m featuring graphic novels and other illustrated texts, almost all contemporary works from the 2020s relating to Southeast Asia… but with one exception: a modern classic, documenting the devastation of Israeli occupation in Palestine.
Lots of overarching thematic resonances here, bridging both fiction and nonfiction. Whether these authors are describing Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Palestine or Sri Lanka, they’re all drawing on common themes of repressed history, using both image and imagination to process national trauma—or at least try to grasp its enormity.
Palestine: The Special Edition, by Joe Sacco
Fantagraphics, 2007
I've had this in my collection for years, but found myself daunted by its thickness, its wordiness, its sheer heaviness of content. Given current events, right now seemed like a pretty good time to hunker down and read it.
Sacco visited Occupied Palestine from late 1991 to early 92, in the midst of the First Intifada (1987-93); his comic series was first released in nine issues from 1993 to 96, finally appearing in a single volume in 2007—with a foreword by Edward Said, no less. This edition also comes with a prologue, where the author reflects on the process and limitations of the work—some Palestinians actually cast the work aside when they saw it, believing his style of illustration dehumanised them (when it was just the way he drew people at the time!)—but also emphasises that he created it, cos in the 90s, the only side you heard from in the West was the Israeli side.
And yes, the work's harrowing. Over and over, he sits down with victims and relatives in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, sipping over-sweetened tea, listening to their horrific treatment under Israeli occupation: physical abuse in jail, heartless judges allowing police to spend week after week searching for non-existent evidence, children shot in the head and denied medical care, olive trees burned, houses bulldozed. But it's not just stories: he recounts the everyday cruelties of seeing Israeli soldiers and settlers patrolling the streets, roughing down bystanders, shaking down cars at roadblocks, making life impossible even for him as a visitor. And because reading about a lot of this would be unbearable, he shows it: the mud and squalor and hailstones rattling through rooves, toilets without walls.
What breaks up the litany of trauma (besides the comics format, which allows for more visual variation) is his willingness to share complexities. He doesn't portray the Palestinians as saints: he meets local feminists who talk about cultures of wife-beating and forced marriage; he winces at the casual equation of Israeli oppressors with the global Jewish community; he wearies of the children demanding shekels...
And he reveals his own follies, when his interviewees ask him what good one more journalist can do; when he catches himself thinking about the warzone in terms of a comics tableau rather than real life. Oh, and yes, he depicts Israel too—he's guiltily glad to get back to clean showers and nightclubs and girls who don't wear hejabs—and actually tries to engage with Israelis about their POV. Even the progressives don't look good, though—even if they know the Occupation is unjust, they don't want to give up their standard of living, and they're tired of having to answer to the moral quandary. (Not unfamiliar—how much do I as a rich Singaporean benefit from blue-collar foreign labour? How much would I sacrifice for justice?)
It's deeply strange to compare his Palestine to the one of the current news cycle—there's an eerie déjà vu when he visits UNRWA schools, including the School for the Deaf that was recently bombed; when he ends his Gaza journey by approaching the Egyptian border at Rafah. This is a world without cell-phones or the Internet, so he's being passed from speaker to speaker; if he misses an appointment he misses the appointment. But it's still noticeable how much the Palestinians prize the English language and the chance to share their stories to foreigners; how desperately they need to prove to the world that they're human—just as they do now, with Twitter and TikTok.
Horribly sad to consider how things got worse after this period—this is before the Second Intifada, before the Wall—but then, the interviewees don't express hope; they express a despairing love for their land, a weary admission that they can do nothing else but hold on. The closest thing to optimism is a man who says all things pass—the Byzantines, the British Empire, and of late, the Soviet Union. The land will return to them, inevitably. But how many generations can it take?
Incantations Over Water, by Sharanya Manivannan
Context, 2021
Yeah, you could call this a graphic novel, but that doesn’t capture how the text is more poetry than prose. It’s a monologue about mermaids, slipping between the voices of a mortal and a mermaid, centred on the author's Sri Lankan Tamil heritage (Ilankai, she notes, means "glittering") and the coastal city of Batticaloa/Mattakalappu.
So we've got legends of the sunken continent of Kumari Kandam, Suvannamacha's romance with Hanuman, the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami—but she's also reaching out across the world for resonances in other mermaid/selkie legends: Yemanjá of the Yoruba, Iara of the Amazon, Sedna of the Inuit, Hans Christian Andersen's “The Little Mermaid”, even Mathabu'l-Bahri, mother of Sang Nila Utama in the Sulalatus Salatin. (Sharanya used to live in Kuala Lumpur and participate in the Singapore literary scene, so she’s got connections to our island too.)
All to create a gorgeously illustrated meditation on womanhood and longing, deeply witchy and sensuous, the language exhibiting the poet's trademark shuttling between sensuous everyday English (“still water, sweet water... strong water, show me the way”), erudite English (words like “cambered”, “benthic”, “aragonite”) and Tamil (whole untranslated, untransliterated poems from Avvaiyar).
And of course, deep connections with other works by Sharanya I’ve written about on this site: The Altar of the Only World, which I reviewed last April, and The Queen of Jasmine Country, which I reviewed the April before that.[i] (I swear, I didn’t plan to be so regular with my cycles!)
The Pandemic Cookbook: Some Voices and Dishes in the Years of a Novel Coronavirus, by Hsu Li Yang and Sonny Liew
Epigram, 2022
Despite Liew’s Eisner Award-winning fame, I’ve heard rather little buzz about this. It's basically a documentary in graphic-novel form, based on interviews with diverse actors in Singapore's response to Covid-19—nurses Margaret Soon and Chen Jing, policymaker Dr Kenneth Mak, health journalist Salma Khalik, MPs He Ting Ru and Rachel Ong, academic Woo Jun Jie, migrant worker Alam Rakibul.
It's playfully illustrated—there are homages to superhero comics, horror comics, children's books—but cumulatively, it presents a nuanced and pretty comprehensive perspective on what the country did right and wrong, from our shifting stance on masking to our treatment of migrant workers. No polemic, and quite a bit of acknowledgment about the competence of the Singapore government—but also not shying away from the fact that there are systemic issues at the heart of our culture that need to be addressed, e.g. our acceptance of migrant workers as an underclass.
It's kinda fascinating to consider the turn that Liew's made in the years since The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), which positioned him as a critic of Singapore—he's consistently returned to issues of medical humanities instead, going on stage in Edith Podesta's play Becoming Graphic (2017); also collaborating with Dr Hsu for the publication The Antibiotic Tales (2019). Almost like he wasn't a rebel at heart: just someone who cared about the historical record as much as scientific fact. Preservation of memory and preservation of life.
Also of value to history: the appendices to this book don't just container explainers for Covid-19 diagnostics and vaccines; they also feature (in tiny tiny print!) Hsu and Liew's Baffled Bunny and Curious Cat comics, published in the Straits Times and on social media during the early days of the bug, always with dates printed due to changing situations.
Hard to believe that in 2020 we were being told to accept that 30,000 people would probably die in Singapore from Covid-19. (The current stat is only 2,024.)[ii] Recent history is so damn easy to forget.
Batu Belah: The Untold Story, by Arkadia and Faezal Tan
AlterEgo, 2020
And now for some fiction! Got this at a stall at Singapore Comic Con, part of a bunch of Malaysian comics in the Evening Rumours series—created between 2017 and 2020, they follow a duo of turbaned reporters tracking down supernatural legends in a steampunkish version of Malaya in 1875, industralised and militarised but not quite colonised.
This particular comic is a retelling of the moralistic Malay folktale “Batu Belah Batu Tertangkap”, in which a mother is so damn sick of her disobedient children that she seals herself up in a rock, never to be seen again. (Relatable for parents, but it’s essentially telling kids to behave or they’ll lose everything they have.)
Arkadia and Tan tell their reinvented version of the story out of sequence, so that you thoroughly identify with the reporters uncovering the evidence piece by piece, perspective by perspective, with the emergence of the original tale coming almost as a surprise after a vivid expository sequence about cannibalistic monsters. What’s especially wonderful is how, after a black and white newsprint opening, we shift into the style of a vibrantly illustrated children's picture book for the nested narrative. It’s both deeply appropriate and inappropriate—I bloody love how inventively and coherently it subverts the source material.
And yes, like so many other works here, this dwells on the corruption of land: an evil unleashed when a sacred mountain is mined; the need to return to one’s roots and community, however, horrific.
After Lambana: Myth and Magic in Manila, by Eliza Victoria and Mervin Malonzo
Tuttle, 2022
This is urban fantasy with a Filipino spin, set in the thoroughly recognisable capital city—MRTs, Jollibees and night markets—but it’s a Manila of an alternate timeline where magic exists, though reduced and suppressed after the betrayal of the diwata-led nation of Lambana.
The plot itself has noir vibes—though Malonzo drenches his shadows in colour, loads of red and turquoise, shifting the hues for parallel realms—as the terminally ill Ignacio and his mysterious friend Conrad walk the (dis)enchanted streets, meeting strange women and awakening forbidden memories as they seek relief for Ignacio's pain, uncovering the tragic truth behind this fallen land. Less of a bestiary of Philippine folklore than I'd have expected: there's a whole motif of the sirena/mermaid, but no other iconic creatures of legend in the spotlight. (The diwata don't quite count, being basically demigods.)
Overall, gorgeous vibes and gorgeous art... and an oddly familiar sense of doom and hypervigilance against authority that one might associate with the police-state era of Duterte and the younger Marcos. But maybe it's typical of being anywhere in the 21st century if you're a marginalised minority or involved in activism?
Endnotes
[i] Sharanya Manivannan’s The Altar of the Only World is reviewed in #Yishreaads April 2023. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2023/4/28/yishreads-april-2023. Her The Queen of Jasmine Country is reviewed in #Yishreads April 2022. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2022/4/29/yishreads-april-2022.
[ii] From Worldometer, last updated 13 April 2024. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore/.
Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.
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A month of graphic novels? Glorious. Ng Yi-Sheng is our guide to the tragic, the fantastic, and the pandemic.