Falling, Wilting, Blooming: Floral Futures in Mok Zining’s the orchid folios
By Sami Goh
Abstract:
Adopting Kafer’s suggestion that “a feminist/queer/crip ecology might mean approaching nature through the lenses of loss and ambivalence” (142), this essay seeks to explore the shared failures by orchids and women in Mok Zining’s the orchid folios. Importantly, I pay attention to how women’s relationship with artificial and withering orchids may change our relationship with built urban environments. I contend that despite how lifeless and objectified life in Singapore is, there are still ways to live and die within this city’s cool surface, there are still ways to relate with floral life. The novel’s florist, upon reflecting on childhood and recent memories, interlaces orchids in her experiences of feminine/queer/crip falling, wilting and blooming. Lovingly, I embrace the peripheral sensibilities and memories that unfurl adjacent to Singapore’s allochronic and necrofutures, insisting on alternative ways of feeling and being in our mediated floral futures.
“No one has searched my tea leaves for answers or my stars for omens, and my palms remain unread. But people have been telling my future for years. Of fortune cookies and tarot cards they have no need: my wheelchair, burn scars, and gnarled hands apparently tell them all they need to know. My future is written on my body.”—Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip
The preface of Mok Zining’s the orchid folios reads this quote from Alfian Sa’at: “Memory entering the head like a knife. / A girl’s hands slicing the heart in two” (11). This mesmerising imagery bleeds through Mok’s own poetic-documentary novella, where she likewise obsesses over historical and living memory. An opening scene features her florist-narrator, “sitting on cold tile, sobbing amidst the foliage of a past life” (17). The florist cries upon seeing the flora she once pressed with her mother, now scattered onto the floor. Whether by cutting or by pressing, a girl’s hands mediate both these scenes, and memory passes from the cool surfaces of tile and knife, into the most intimate of places. Cool surfaces also seem to describe Singapore perfectly, skirting the corners and outlines of “the Air-Conditioned Nation” (George 19; Jalais 90)—this city of “allochronic futurity” (Babcock 2), “terraformed coastlines” (Leow, Joanne et al.) and bio- and social engineered “seamless greenery” (Barnard and Heng 305). Our futures with floral and other non-human kin seem to be mediated by these cool surfaces. Still, these two intimate scenes elucidate how personal memory and our relationship with these surfaces—like the florist tends to her artificial orchids—are far more nuanced and contaminating.
I stay curious about our floral futures. In scholarship on Singapore’s naturecultures, it is always the government’s involvement that seems to be stressed. These narratives emphasise the state’s meticulous efforts in shaping local botany for their own purposes of social control and nation-building (Mcneill; Han; Barnard and Heng; Gulsrud and Ooi). They depart from mediatised depictions of the nation’s allochronic futurity, where “the city of the future is located in and visualized through Singapore, but in the process, Singapore as an actually existing place recedes into the background” (Babcock 6). As one of the settings in HBO’s dystopian television series Westworld, for instance, present-day Singapore appears as a spectacular and technologically-advanced city of the 2050s. Allochronic futures refer to the imagined futures that Singapore’s built environment and national aspirations help facilitate: futures of seamless, self-evident progress that obscure the realities of maintaining these veneers.
It is understandable then, that scholars have since tried to push against these portrayals and reveal their underlying realities. Their collective body of work conveys how creaturely and botanical lives have been biopolitically reorganised in Singapore, and ground the death-making and inauthenticity implicit in such practices. Manicured futurity comes at the expense of present (unjust) conditions. My fears rest however in the possible implications of these decisive claims. One way I have made sense of this comes from turning to another type of future: necrofutures. For literary scholar Gerry Canavan, necrofutures envelop “our deflationary belief that the conditions of exploitation and extraction that make contemporary society “function” are foundationally unsustainable and thus manifestly have no future, and yet despite this fact they will simply not be altered in any way, even if it kills us all” (9).1 When scholars emphasise the artificiality of our local botany and lives, Singapore’s “postcolonial triumphalism”2 (Lim 4 ) seemingly gives way to feelings of societal failure and capitalist realism. In the affective sense, this may inadvertently dismiss any lived connection we might form with the cool surfaces around us. But surely, there are ways to live and die within the city’s cool surfaces, artificial and lifeless as they are, and surely, these ways of relating with flora still matter?
This essay wishes to change the terms of the conversation by turning intently to our embodied relationship with these cool surfaces, through dead and artificial flowers. My orientation derives in part from what Alison Kafer has already outlined in my epithet. For feminist, queers and crips, “people have been telling [our] futures for years.” (1) Whether it be allochronic futures or necrofuturist ones, futures have always been inscribed onto us, our bodies, our relationships. This time, I wish to read them right as they unfold from us.
I also wish to argue that amid what Donna Haraway calls the “Plantationocene” (159), the orchid folios engages with the feminine, crip and domestic valences of women’s relation to local flora. Just as Jalais and Davis notice the resonance with “the demonization of certain non-humans and the vilification of [aberrant women]” in Singapore (Jalais discussing Davis 96), so do flowers share an affinity with the feminine here. Adopting Kafer’s suggestion that “a feminist/queer/crip ecology might mean approaching nature through the lenses of loss and ambivalence” (142), this essay ultimately seeks to explore the shared failures by orchids and women. The novel’s florist, upon reflecting on childhood and recent memories, interlaces orchids in her experiences of feminine/queer/crip falling, wilting and blooming. Lovingly, I embrace the peripheral sensibilities and memories that unfurl adjacent to Singapore’s allochronic and necrofutures, insisting on alternative ways of feeling and being in our mediated floral futures.
Falling Petals, Roots, Hair
Botanical necrofutures are stories about failures. They illuminate the political processes, affectations and labours that sustain Singapore’s perceived national and ecological ‘success,’ lamenting the deep artificiality and loss attached to our now curated greenscapes. As Kafer reminds, however, there is value in “stories that not only admit limitation, frustration, even failure, but that recognise such failure as ground for theory itself” (141). This leads her to consider questions like “What might [an ecofeminist] have learned about her connection to non-human nature if she had fallen in that mucky bog? How might her framing of nature shift if she had turned around that day, finding the bog too slippery for her loping gait?” (141). Kafer insists that we take failure seriously, noticing the affective shifts they encourage in our relationship with nonhuman natures.
For this reason, scenes of falling, like the one discussed in the first paragraph, are particularly moving and meaningful. They engage in a distinctly crip/queer mode of relating within built spaces, upsetting the ‘natural’ order and movement of things. When things fall, they break, topple and cry out. In the opening lines, the florist recalls:
I was about to leave. Then I tripped, knocked over the books I’d stacked to make a stand for my phalaenopsis. The pot shattered. […] One of the books on that stack—a dictionary—had fallen open […] I bent to pick up the dictionary, sent a flurry of flowers and leaves flitting to the floor. (orchids 17)
The transition between each action she makes feels seamless. Eliding the conjunction that would have connected her first bodily gestures (“I tripped”, “I bent”) to their immediate effects (“knocked”, “sent”), she interlinks the two. This lends a certain fortuity to her stumbling and stooping, so one action invariably leads to a series of mishaps—a broken vase, fallen books, and scattered foliage. These small failures are not just left as failures though. In fact, they allow for her to remember her late mother. Upon breaking her pot, the florist notices her orchid’s overgrown roots and considers repotting. Tenderly remembering it as a gift to her mother, she softly remarks, “My oldest orchid. It flowers, still” (17). Even with age, the florist reaffirms her flower’s continued bloom, expressing implicit appreciation for the memory it carries. Similarly, her dictionary lands “open,” (17) revealing old yellowed pages, while the contained foliage flutters out in a mesmerising down-spiral, triggering past memories. In the orchid folios, falling invites these accidental rediscoveries of familiar but overlooked flowers.
Following her recollections, the florist falls to the ground, crying. With her interior feelings conveniently omitted from the narrative, readers may only infer them from surface gestures, like the contact she makes with cool floor tiles, and the fallen flowers strewn over its surface. The fallen flowers notably share some affinities with her: they both fell after opening a book or memory and presently reside on the floor. Falling entails encounters with memories, but these encounters, as well as the actual fall itself, hurt.
She elicits both these sensations of falling when untangling her oldest orchid, which she calls “the shattered phalaenopsis” (93). As a gift, this orchid holds the feelings the florist might have conveyed to her mother. Having absorbed the material disrepair of its pot, it becomes a medium to relive the likewise fragmented memories of her mother:
Late last evening as I unravelled the braids of the shattered phalaenopsis, I saw how the ends were white and shrivelled from neglect. You have to do it gently—it’s like combing hair, Mum had taught me. I remember her fingers running through mine, and mine through hers, until the final months when all of it started to fall. After she passed, I couldn’t make anything stay anymore (93).
Hearing her mother’s advice on proper combing technique, where she compares plant roots to hair, the florist overlaps this auditory memory with her current moment. With her mother’s simile, the florist’s physical straightening of plant roots coalesces with that of hair, allowing for this moment to swiftly slip into another memory. This memory involves the intimate combing of each other’s hair, and the transposed phrases (“running through mine, and mine through hers” ) only adorn their shared reciprocity. In running through the plant roots, she smoothens and tugs at them, recalling comforting somatic sensations no longer possible since her mother’s death. She does not clarify the exact subject of her loss however, so falling comes to convey multiple interwoven failures at once, such as her loosening grasp over orchid roots, their flowers, her mother’s hair, their mother-daughter moments, and their life together.
Her falling partly gestures toward her ‘failing’ bodily capacities. With an inexplicable resignation and finality, she declares, “I couldn’t make anything stay anymore.” She phrases this disclosure in the past conditional, including an almost diacopic arrangement ("anything", "anymore"), highlighting the sheer impossibility to presently and futurely hold onto all her material presences. Here, her "couldn't" confesses, not just to a physical inability (as in ‘can’t’), but a failure in her own attempts at safekeeping. It is as though the material worlds she once knew were falling apart—like petals, roots, hair—sliding hopelessly through her fingertips. While necrofutures may consider this loss of individual and botanical histories as irrevocable endings, the florist seems to accept them as personally embodied failures, ones she relives by unravelling her endearing phalaenopsis, rediscovering its damaged roots.
Tracing fallings as affective expressions of failures, I wish to clarify that though the flowers in the orchid folios are artificially cultivated, and though death implies an absence, the relationships we continue to form with them are expansive and generative. Her phalaenopsis may be a “melancholy object” (Gibson 286) through which she experiences memory and grief, but the florist also hesitates to commodify or project onto it completely. Soliciting the same intimacy she had with her mother, she relates those feelings to her present care of this orchid life. What flows between the shattered phalaenopsis, the grieving florist, and her (chronically ill)3 mother, and their collective failures—of breaking, falling and passing—could thus be a form of crip intimacy, “where unexpected intimate relations between human and non-human others” take place (Quinn 15).
Wilting as Flowers In The Sheets
If necrofutures are about failures, then allochronic futures involve rejecting these same failures. When scientific findings on Singapore’s orchids (Lim et. al.), for instance, are framed within narratives of forward progression (Begum), where even their appeal lies in triumphalist anthropocentric benefits like anti-aging possibilities or national pride, floral and human lives are expected to offer themselves up to these streams of the future. This insistence resonates with Teo You Yenn’s suggestion that Singapore’s postcolonial narratives are made from stories that suggest in order “to remain amazing, we must keep moving. Movement, motion, mobility—these are not cosmetic; they are about survival. If we stand still, we are doomed”. To fail does not only involve falling, but wilting away in a life of stasis, a life that remains still.
Perhaps sick bedrooms, as static uncommodified spaces, are irreconcilable within this neoliberal and meritocratic nation. In the orchid folios, Zining recreates the dimly lit bedroom in the ending poems of the novella. She swaps white-coloured pages for black, and includes wavy bright outlines of orchid roots that stretch across the borders of every page. Inside these pages, the florist dreams:
{ there are limbs
in the sheets
someone
it must be,
you,
panting, sepals
no, shirt—your shirt
shirt, damp
with sweat, there was
screaming
when you woke
a sound
pushing against
clammed vocal
folds
clams of your
folded
sepals muting
your scream
budding
along your
vocal stem
(orchids 94)
Dreaming and waking, the florist and her orchid are jumbled in this disorienting sequence. She opens with a depersonalised view of her bedridden body, but until she deduces, “it must be / you,” she fails to register who she is (in the next line, she even recognises her shirt first as sepals). Perhaps in trying to ground herself, her moments of self-recognition all follow with a sensorial appreciation. She is “panting” and “damp in sweat”, both senses that exude moisture and imply some form of psychosomatic exertion, anxiety and distress. Although she (mistakenly) attributes these sensations to “running” (97)—an active outdoor movement— they are intricately related to her bedroom experience and dreams of becoming an orchid. The florist thus introduces movement and moisture exchange back into the ‘static’ bedroom4, troubling “long-standing assumptions that nature and the environment only exist ‘out there,’ outside of our houses and neighbourhoods; […and] that only certain ways of understanding and acting on one’s relation to the environment (including other humans) are acceptable” (Kafer 145).
This sequence also blurs the boundaries of static’ floral embodiments, reframing these botanical worlds to be involved in affective and voiceful struggles. Waking from the bedroom scene, the florist slips into an orchid’s body, and her wakefulness here lends immediacy to her experiences. This immediacy only heightens with the subsequent jolting of screams up her stem. Her floral vocal expression is unfortunately impeded however, as conveyed by her alternating wordplay (“clammed”, “vocal / folds”, “clams of your / folded / sepals”) that precariously shuffles between constraining human interventions and her bodily suffocation. Here, she even overhears that her flowerhead will soon be removed. With her attention to discontinuous noise, the poem’s fragmented structure and content come to embrace a “dissonance” that characterises “the reality of chronic illness […as] disruptive and too often persistently so” (Nielsen). These disruptions, while initially discomforting for her, eventually aid in her realisation that orchids continue to thrive despite these dissonances and interventions, as is the case for those living with chronic illness and sickness too. After her flowerhead is pruned from its stem, the florist concludes that “in / my dream / i / was / a cutting. else / where a / pulsing / continues, / root / to leaf / to stem” (100–101). She may wilt, but she finds assurance in the stem left behind. Silently waiting and quivering, it anticipates its next bloom.
Scenes of apparent stasis and wilting in the orchid folios are also moments of dynamic movement, pain and sense-making. As in falling, failure does not remain just failure. The florist’s sensations of pain and dissonance are understood as intrinsically meaningful through the perspective of her orchids. For them, these affects are prerequisites and corollaries for blooming in the Plantationocene.
Choosing Mediated Floral Futures?
In this way, the florist’s bedroom dreams allow her to be more forgiving towards her past experiences of falling, wilting and failing. In another, they help her to reframe the femininity and artificiality so often tied to her floristry profession and life in Singapore. Even in mediated positions that compromise on feminine and floral independence, possibilities for lush floral futures thrive.
In her dreams, her relation with orchids is material and inseparable, but this relation was already felt from her interactions with customers and colleagues. Recalling one customer’s misogyny, she realises that “in his eyes […] my plants and I are one and the same: trivial, domestic and primed for a life of objectification” (30). Society subjects girls, women and orchids to a similar magnifying glass, projecting futures onto their bodies. They either prime themselves for objectification within allochronic futures, or stay trivial and domestic in necrofuturist ones. In this context, her reply to her customer’s snide remarks becomes meaningful:
Yes, I said. I play with lives for a living (30).
Offering floristry as a career that allows her to play with lives, she gives herself agency by likening her care for orchids to a child’s play. Her retort certainly troubles her customer’s expectations of floristry too. Contrary to his assumption that florists are gentle and meek, she expresses apathy towards floral life and presents herself as cunningly cold. Even so, the use of personal pronouns in her confession draws our attention to the complicity of her actions. Unlike her customer, she seems to recognise the orchids not as objects, but living beings “with lives.” Taken together, the florist puts on a malicious impression, but indirectly points to the feminine and floral embodiments that have been objectified at the hands of those in power, including herself. While the phrase “for a living” refers primarily to her floristry profession, it literally reminds us also of how work entwines with daily living. Read this way, her statement further suggests the need to play with orchids in order for her to carry on living. After all, this is her only means of realistically spending her life with orchids—she has to embrace a mediated floral future where orchids are artificially tampered.
Why is this so? For one, accepting that orchids have agency in spite of their objectification makes it easier to accept her own position. Like an orchid cultivated and trimmed in an air-conditioned flower store, the florist had straightened herself to fit into Singapore’s meritocratic education system and had dreamed of working in a “glass building” (76). Learning from their shared situations, she comes to realise that unlike necro- and allochronic futures, falling, wilting and failing are not endings for orchids. They impart her mother’s wisdom to convey that “life’s more than a ladder, you know” (90). Tending to the roots of her orchids, she learns to grow sideways and asynchronously and, against social pressure, opted to be a florist. The orchids move her, just as she has moved them.
Coda: “My late bloomer”
Having felt disempowered by meritocratic narratives since childhood, the florist tried to avoid societal judgement by distancing herself from those disadvantaged like her (orchids 78), and to pursue a reputable corporate job that proves she could overcome her learning disability (87). After her mother’s passing, life as she knew it collapsed and she felt aimless (37, 59). By interweaving her feminist/queer/crip experiences alongside the lives and deaths of her orchids, she follows the roots of artificially hybridised orchids and discovers ways to make sense of her built environments anew. As she says “Orchids have their own timeline, flowering once every six to nine months. My late bloomer, Mum used to call me” (107).
Orchids live and die by their own floral times—filled with accidents, disruptions, pain and blooms. In the novella’s concluding poem, the florist says, “in my / dream / i opened / an eye / it bloomed / an orchid” (113). Neither necrofutures nor allochronic ones make space for feminist/queer/crip ways of relating to contemporary naturecultures, but perhaps imagining floral futures through orchids just might do.
This essay was originally written for an undergraduate module at Nanyang Technology University (NTU), Singapore, for The Environment and Cultural Production course, taught by Dr. Ada Cheong.
Endnotes
1 I like Canavan’s suggestion that necrofuturism is “a depressive version of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism […] whereby the attempt to preserve what you value […] becomes in itself an obstacle to that preservation” (9). In some ways, dismissed Singapore’s botanical natures as unnatural and hybridised curations—and therefore, undesirable—obscures the desires and attachments we may still form with them.
2 For Eunice Lim, “The postcolonial triumphalist assembly line is characterised by a rigorously manufactured and maintained sense of the nation’s achievement, which is characterised by a reiterative demonstration of the young nation’s stark differences from its colonial past and an outsized emphasis on its clean, pristine, cosmopolitan image” (47). As she shows through her essay, memoirs like Charmaine Leung’s 17A Keong Saik Road, skirt around postcolonial triumphalist depictions of sex work, instead situating sex work back within ongoing affective relations.
3 Before her mother’s death, all hair was lost, a sign of a potential chronic illness.
4 This observation is perhaps inspired by Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality in her book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self.
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Sami Goh is an English Literature undergraduate at NTU. Enthralled by broken things and departed dreams, she delights in mad girl studies. One day, they dream of becoming a jellyfish.
In this winning essay of the 2024 Singapore Unbound Awards for the Best Undergraduate Critical Essay on Singapore and Other Literatures, Sami Goh explores the floral futures of Singapore, as posited by Mok Zining’s the orchid folios.