That Great Absence

By Sharmini Aphrodite

Review of bright sorrow by Jonathan Chan (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2025)

After Christ’s crucifixion, His apostle Peter is accosted in the streets of Jerusalem. A few nights previous, as the bread was broken and passed among the twelve disciples during the last supper that they would have together, Peter had said to Christ: Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you. Now, Christ is dead, and Peter, afraid of the same fate, goes back on his word. He denies Christ three times. The first time when a servant girl, in the flickering light of a flame, says that Peter had walked alongside Him. Peter denies this. The girl presses again; Peter denies again. This is the second time. The next denial has more witnesses, evokes a place as well as a person: Peter has found himself in front of a group of people, who point to his Galilean accent as proof he knew Christ, the Nazarene who had come from the same region—the two men, of course, having met out at sea. This is the third denial. And then the rooster crows, signalling the break of dawn.

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In the Bible, doubt and faith consider each other; they cannot be separated. Even Christ begged for deliverance from his death. Rather than being oppositional, one requires the other: it is in the soil of doubt that faith is suffocated, is nourished, lives and dies and lives again.

Jonathan Chan’s second poetry collection, bright sorrow (2025), pulls together these seemingly disparate threads of faith and doubt, negotiating how belief falters and is clarified. Chan’s poems echo through “the years of pandemic and eruptions of war and strife”. Dedicated to “those who pray/ and those who cannot”, the collection slips between personal detail crystallised by memory—

[…] blue is the
sweat across a bottle of soju
from Jeju, or the threads around
a hole on an old Nike shirt, or
the dust shaken from a pair
of running shoes.

 — ‘blue’

—and the splinter of political rage—

colonisers read the bible
it is a seduction, the promise
of a dispensation of land. 

— ‘biblicism’

Encompassing four sections (‘Continuity’, ‘Theology’, ‘Eschatology’, ‘Possibility’), bright sorrow cycles through faith and doubt, loss and longing, harrowing and revival. The poems contained within them are elegiac, with ruminations that are sparsely lyrical. Chan’s blank verse is clean and clear-eyed, pulsing with liturgical rhythm whose texture and thematics are often Biblical in nature. The collection’s second poem, ‘exit’, dives into canon already. The opening lines, “and after the war, and after/ father…” are reminiscent of the lyric tendency of the Bible’s genealogical verses: unadorned and sharp-edged, a turning of generation upon generation, but not without a musicality that is instinctual to one familiar with the text that that the collection—and indeed much of Chan’s oeuvre—is indebted to.

bright sorrow also surfaces a sense of ritual through repetition. A series of ‘prayer’ poems cluster in part IV (‘Possibility’), while ‘variations on a whale’ run through the text, ploughing the reader’s memory and enacting a calendrical continuity. Repetition in single poems evokes familiarity, with one coming to expect how certain lines or turns of phrase will land, like the words of a well-creased prayer or hymn:

… and sometimes there is a day
then, there is not a day. an aubade resists its

courage and death. an archivist feels an
intimacy of text. a worker directs the carcass

of a tree. tourists on bridges who must roam
will roam. Riders like postmen go home

to home.

— ‘elegy’

Heading most of the poems are dedications, lines from other pieces of poetry and Bible verses, the names of other artists and their works to which Chan is responding. This confessional mode is all-embracing, giving the collection the sense of communion. One such instance is the poem ‘mangrove’, written in the influence of the poet R. S. Thomas. The poem is headed by a verse from Isaiah (51:5): “the coastlands hope for me, and for my arm they wait”; and a line from poet Aaron Lee: “Lord—cross the eternal ocean with me.” Chan then launches into a rumination on the sea that is riddled with sacramental weight:

            was it like a church to me? sun breaking on
                        skin, crumble no closer to a weak 

                                    eucharist, spray crystallising as
                                                salt […]

The natural world continues to be rendered through the collection in such language: in the same poem, trees rising from the mangrove swamp are “aloft like a green cathedral”. In an essay, Chan details how R. S. Thomas’ “pursuit of the divine was made comprehensible by a response to the natural world”. The faith of Thomas, a late Welsh Anglican poet-priest, was as stark as the landscape he catalogued, with doubt a central feature of his writing. To Thomas, God was ‘that great absence’. This is also a theme that provides bright sorrow with its current:

God is that which surrounds the void.
God is that which enters it.

— ‘prayer (xxix)’

Yet doubt contains within it a seed of desire, for one can only want what one does not immediately possess. This sense of God as absence—and absence as generative—thrums throughout bright sorrow, whose preface to the poem ‘prayer (xiv)’ references the theologian C. S. Song: “That space within you is the reign of God.” Where are those spaces in Chan’s collection? The divine lurks in the everyday, not merely in rituals but in the spaces between them. A routine commute is described as:

gliding down the expressway,
the grey stretch dim beneath
a halogen light           

— ‘traffic’ 

Such language is still, rhythmic yet restrained; as James Baldwin would have put it: “as clean as a bone”. There is a quality to such language that is not empty; rather it is measured, allowing for the interplay of statement and implication as wind through the wooden hollow of a flute might produce music. The journey itself is worthy of perusal, with mundane elements—a road, how it is lit—paused over, made meaningful because they have been the effort has been made to inscribe them from memory onto the page. To linger over the mundane is a form of worship, or, as more aptly described by the oft-quoted Simone Weil: absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Yet, when it is required, Chan’s collection goes for the marrow with surgical precision, sharpening and heightening this attention. In the aforementioned ‘biblicism’, Western Christianity is skewered for its abetment and encouragement of Zionism:

a theology
of empire is untethered
[…]
how covenantal,
when the lines fall in pleasant places,
bisecting the bodies of Palestinian Christians.

Chan highlights here the plight of Palestinian Christians, abandoned by the “theology of empire” and sacrificed for imperial interests. In addressing what Reverend Mitri Raheb calls Israel’s multi-front targeting and erasure of “land, holy sites, and people” in an effort to erase them from both the land and history, Chan evokes not just anger but solidarity. The poem ‘prayer (xxvi)’, dedicated to the Palestinian Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac and Gaza, reads

[…] in
Bethlehem, a silent God does
not ignore the suffering. he is
born to be trampled, shot,
bombarded, and
scorned.

Christ’s fragility here—his humanity prefacing his divinity—evokes what liberation theologists consider to be a key feature of His solidarity with the oppressed. The Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino, one of liberation theology’s key writers, notes that Christ’s earthly presence should be read as “God’s way of being in solidarity” with the suffering.[1] Born to parents who were turned away from every inn they encountered, raised by Mary and the carpenter Joseph in the backwaters of Galilee, arriving into Jerusalem not on a chariot but on the back of a donkey, executed for political reasons between thieves: the earthly Christ is no conquering king. He was without cradle at His birth or calvary to save Him from death, a God who walked and died among His people.

Continuing in this vein of liberation theology, other poems in bright sorrow closer consider the death penalty in Singapore and issues facing migrant construction workers, the latter being a community with whom Chan has worked and still continues to engage with. The poem ‘art therapy’, for instance, evokes rice fields that are “tessellated” like “platelets”, rendered in paint from the memory of a landscape of a distant home as the “two brothers from Bangladesh” to whom the poem is dedicated find a moment of respite on the canvas, even as “the crayon wax/ is crumbling like ash”. This outward eye for material conditions, emotional interiority, and landscape places Chan’s collection not merely in the closed ambit of the confessional, but within the wider world.

And it is the wider world that Chan never turns his eye from, even at his most granular and personal. Another key theme of bright sorrow is the world in which it exists. Environmental apocalypse is a key concern of Chan, who evokes apocalyptic theological language in the title of ‘eschaton’, written in response to Yeo Siew Hua’s 2018 film A Land Imagined. In the film, a construction worker from China goes missing in one of the many land reclamation sites that bulwark the ever-expanding Singapore. Chan details the fact that each “Singaporean grain of sand” is extracted from other nations, whose own labour allows for the scale of Singaporean economic life:

[…] here i sat on
the innards of a Cambodian mangrove.
there, i strolled along the bed of a
Malaysian river.

Another poem in the ‘Eschatology’ section, ‘after the blight’, ends a scene of ecological devastation with a “final, rumbling, tidal wave of pure light”. Here, then, we see the extinguishing of the world not merely as its ending, but as its beginning. Out of nothing, a world emerges, as it does in Genesis: Now the earth was formless and empty…

Meanwhile, the first of a series of poems titled ‘variations on a whale’ invokes the Old Testament character of Jonah, taking reference from the illustration of this character’s story in the 14th century poem ‘Patience’.[2] Jonah, who “flung himself/ into the ocean to flee from the sight/ of mercy”. Jonah, who “wanted the Ninevites dead”, whose tale was not “merely of disobedience/ but anger, hatred, spite”. Jonah, who languished in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights, having thrown himself into the sea after refusing to heed God’s command to preach to the people of the city of Nineveh about grace and repentance. In the belly of the whale Jonah prays for deliverance, and God acquiesces. The whale spits Jonah out and he journeys to Nineveh to fulfil his mission. But there is no neat, heartwarming tale: Jonah continues to scorn the Ninevites he preaches to, deigning to be among them, a detail that is difficult to digest: “the pit of a stomach/ holds no sweetness, only the wretched/ heat of digestion”.

Like many stories in the Bible, this is not one with which a believer can easily make their peace. This same tension is inherent in the sea that Chan constantly evokes, an influence drawn from Christian tradition, in which the water represents rebirth in the same stroke as it represents the potentiality of death—in ‘mangrove’, "the slice of a paddle is an act/ of faith”.

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After ploughing through political and environmental upheavals, bright sorrow ends on a more intimate note, as Chan closes with the wedding of friends (‘faithfulness (ii)’) and winds down with the slow exhalation of ‘elegy’, where he considers the minutiae and ennui of the everyday—"the evening rain/ empties itself onto the grass. the grief balloons/ and then behaves”. Yet it is worthwhile to consider these poems within the orchestra of the whole—the self and interiority as not isolated but part of the tapestry of the world. For in ‘elegy’, Chan considers the same questions that swirl through the collection, tying the collection together—"faith itself” is “like a cavity”, God an absence that gnaws through the churn of the everyday.

All this draws back to the central question of bright sorrow: what does one find in absence? After denying Christ three times, Peter is not left alone to wander the cavern of divine abandon. The resurrected Christ appears to him again in the Sea of Tiberias, on which desiccated light must have shone as it did on the Sea of Galilee, where Christ had first called Peter to be his disciple. After eating breakfast on a boat loaded with catch, Christ asks Peter three times if he loves Him; each time, Peter answers yes. Each yes folding on each of the three denials that had been uttered a lifetime ago.

And so, one of Christ’s last requests to Peter is: follow me, feed my sheep. Today, Peter is known as the rock of the Church. What of that dark night in Jerusalem, of Christ praying for deliverance in Gethsemane? When one follows the thread of doubt that punctures the Bible, overthrowing kingdoms and prophets, raising the dead and healing the sick, one has to face that doubt is not a harrowing of faith but its underlining.

One may turn their back on faith, but faith is a stubborn thing; as dogged as God Himself in His absence. For there is a tradition in Christian belief and practice in which doubt enhances instead of negates, as theologian Daniel M. Bell Junior writes—"To believe and hope and work for liberation in such a situation [of captivity], when we are fairly sure that we will not live to see the fruits of our work, is to incarnate in our own days the cross of Christ”.[3] Both lament and libation, bright sorrow continues a centuries-old tradition in which doubt is the strength of faith:

you leave a church to break
a ritual language.
praise God who turns our grief to light’

— ‘prayer (xx)’

Endnotes

[1] Jon Sobrino, The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1994).

[2] ‘Patience’ is a poem whose writer is an unidentified Pearl or Gawain poet.

[3] Daniel Bell, Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Keep Suffering (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2001).

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Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, and grew up in Johor Bahru. Her short stories and writing on literature, art, and history have appeared online and in print. She is the editor-in-chief of SUSPECT, a journal of Asian literature and art. She holds an MA in History from Nanyang Technological University and is currently pursuing a joint PhD in Southeast Asian studies (National University of Singapore) and History (King’s College London). Her current academic project focuses on indigeneity, state-making, and more in twentieth-century Sabah, while her research interests include anticolonial movements, agricultural histories, orality, and the history of revolutionary Christianity in the Global South. Her short story collection The Unrepentant was recently published by Gaudy Boy.

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