I dreamt that my grandfather was still a child

His tiny hand in his mother’s callused palm

Following the silhouette of his father, her husband.

And him––a man in Republican-era suit

An old, wet map clutched in one hand, and a

Large suitcase in another

In the dark

Three of them

Trailed their steps from sea to shore

With wind, with salt, with shattering light,

And my shadow yet unborn.

Grandfather looked at the paper in his uncle’s hand,

At the old pine planted in the drawing.

Its roots breached the border of the map,

Creeping down to the sand beneath his feet––

And still they stretched,

Serpentining into the South China Sea.

My gaze traced that narrow course,

Unsteady, yet pressing forward,

Till it reached

The sea’s heart––where waves tossed and rolled,

And a boat, breathing with the tide,

Hung on the verge of storm.

The scene shifts––I am on the shore, and on the boat.

Ear against the wooden grain,

I listen as the waves reach the dark chamber of the tree’s rings.

The rust of colonial ships

Voices collide in tongues of many,

Blood and flesh flung into the raging sea.

On the same plane they scrape, clash, pile up,

Accreting into abstract soundscapes,

Waiting––

For the monsoons to intersect, to hurl their cries at me

Awakening my tangled sense of belonging,

Half a radical fantasy I choose,

Half a recoil I cannot control.

In my body the two forces meet,

Spiralling into a vortex––

From top to bottom, from without to within.

Screams, rending cries––

Helpless as Munch.

Then suddenly, the Nusantara-charmed wreck

Breaks water, rising with the surge.

Time halts.

Holding my breath, I feel the sweat

Tracing lines down my forehead,

A blade etching my yellow face,

Splitting sight in two.

Like a chameleon’s eyes, each probes on its own––

Uneasy, vigilant.

In this very moment, new images erupt:

Here, Turner’s impressionistic glow, yellow and violet entwined;

There, their imperial dream,

Born of a radical romanticism.

And yet

A working country is hardly ever a landscape

Those who came from empires to enlighten

Could never guide the knife-wielding hands in the rubber groves,

Could never show them how to trace the soil they saw,

How to shape the bonds they felt.

The chiaroscuro that revealed God’s radiance

Failed to light the face

Of Chinese New Villages

Breathing beneath banana breezes and coconut fronds.

Or was it Baroque drama after all?

Or the Cold War’s abstract law?

No. No. No.

The candle held piously in De La Tour’s child

Could never depict

The fire of my mother’s hearth in the New Village kitchen,

Nor the dawn light pressing through Rothko’s

Windows of suppressed spirit.

 

Yes––

Light, always light––

Once heralding truth,

But never the light I see each morning

Breaking through the window’s crack.