Leading the Philippine delegation was Dr. Marjorie Evasco, director of the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center of De La Salle University. Also in attendance were Ramil Digal Gulle, Dinah Roma, Francess Raymundo and Ana Ablaza Baluyot.
Hong Kong had the most number of invited participants, with David McKirdy, Pauline Burton, Mani Rao, Martin Alexander, Jam Ismail who also represented Canada, Madeleine Slavik, and Zheng Danyi, who is originally from China, .
The hosts were represented by a fresh generation of poets, led off by Heng Siok Tian and Felix Cheong, both of whom visited Manila a couple of years ago on a university reading tour organized by the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC). For Wordfeast they were joined by Terence Heng, Kevin Ho, Madeline Lee, Suchen Christine Lim, Chris Mooney Singh who also represented Australia, Paul Tan, Cyril Wong and Angeline Yap.
Literary doyen Kirpal Singh of Singapore Management University did the honors of leading off with a brief reading at the opening ceremony. An old friend and brand-new parent to week-old infant Christopher (together with proud mother Clarinda), Kirpal has been a frequent Manila visitor. He represented Singapore at the Asia-Pacific Poetry Conference-Workshop, which the Writers Union of the Philippines (UMPIL) and PLAC mounted in August of 2002.
It was only fitting that Kirpal would also do the honors of seeing off this event gate-crasher, virtually at the last minute, in fact helping me pack up inside a serendipitous suite of The Fullerton Singapore, one of the three six-star hotels in Lion City.
No, I wasn’t invited by the Wordfeast organizers, among them good friends Alvin Pang who conceptualized the event and Yong Shu Hoong who served as festival coordinator. But Alvin didn’t count on my powers of resiliency and determination. Or perhaps he knew I didn’t need an invite, but would find a way to join in anyway.
I say serendipitous, for as pre-Lunar Monkey Year destiny would have it, I had to consort with yet some old friends at The Fullerton, if only for a weekend. Thus it was that the hectic, frenetic 48-hour visit, from Friday to Sunday, inclusive of meetings with the hotel’s Communications staff and reps from the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), also gave me the opportunity to link up with the Wordfeast participants for at least a couple of choice readings.
Saturday morning I made it to the breakfast reading at Bebe Rumah Heritage Home, where a Peranakan cultural display proved singularly fascinating, besides providing a warm, homey ambience for the featured poets and audience.
The organizers had seen to spreading out the venues, although these were all by the East Coast, a "distant" half-hour’s drive from the city center. The Bedok Library and Marne Parade Library, spic-and-span community centers for the passionately literate, were joined in the extensive listing of venues by various restos, wine shops and bars, depending on the particular theme and time of the reading.
In effect, the poets were dispersed among these round-the-clock events, e.g. "Sea-Side Slam" at The Beach Hut Bar, "Buffet Reading: The Taste of Others" at Chilli Padi, "Poetry in the Flesh" at Siglap South Community Center, "Wine-Bar Reading" at Booze Wine Shop, "Moonlight on the Bay" at Cosy Bay, "Baba Breakfast" at Rumah Bebe…
"Baba" refers to the Peranakan masculine, or so I was told by the fine Singaporean poet and dramatist Robert Yeo, a good ol’ buddy from our Iowa rooming days, and whose treat it was for that hearty breakfast of minced curried fish, prawns in blachan (something like sweetened bagoong) and nasi lemak or coconut-flavored steamed rice. Robert himself is representative of what is curiously called a "true-blue Peranakan," meaning someone descended directly from the mixed marriages that resulted from early Chinese migration to the Malay peninsula. Chinese men or baba tied the knot with Malay women or nonya. Thus Nonya cuisine, as part of what comprised Peranakan tradition.
Joining us for our courtyard breakfast were organizer Alvin Pang and Felix Cheong, who brought along his khaki-clad, grade-schooler son. Inside, Marjorie and the rest tried to fit around the long, ornate dining table.
Soon after the extended repast, everyone went up barefoot to a second-floor room that displayed embroidered finery and an opium bed, albeit sans pipe or poppy, shucks. Marj quickly made up for that sorry lack, er, slack, with her spirited reading of English and Visayan poems. Among the other featured poets were our very own Francess Raymundo, Zhang Er who read her poems in Chinese, and Leonard Schwartz who rendered the English translations before launching into his own works, distinctive among which were serial suite verse that paraded Arabic-sourced English words.
Later that evening, I found time to rejoin the company of poets, but not before undertaking an on-site tour of The Fullerton as conducted by communications director Geetha Warrier. Now that inspection foray made me feel much like a visiting fireman indeed. Make that a glamorized sanitary engineer, who ooh-ed and ahh-ed with approval over the gleaming appointments in the capacious bathrooms of the Governor’s Suite and the Fraser Suite, let alone the spa amenities. (The beds were high and wide, the mattresses firm yet bouncy; but then those weren’t covered by our expertise.)
Halfway through the six-star tour, I kept making a mental note to find time to pay a courtesy call at the infinity pool overlooking the historic Cavanaugh Bridge and the winding Singapore River that led to the quayside restos and beer gardens.
But the afternoon was fully taken up by a great hunt for The One Ring from LOTR’s ROTK, without which I couldn’t make it back to a 13-year-old daughter’s beaming smile. Oh yes, such literary appurtenances do our blitz-shopping ways often account for. Finally found the item at Lucky Plaza, and also soon after, at of course a cheaper card swipe, at Kinokuniya Bookstore. There, failure stared me in the face, however, thanks to computer info that cult sci-fi writer Jack McKinney’s one last book – which the 16-year-old son has had me scouring the ends of the earth for – had been sold out two years ere. Foiled again. Found him his Star Wars series desideratum, though. Lose some, win some.
Finally caught up with the "Hybridity" dinner-reading at Nonnie’s, another Peranakan resto at a busy food strip on East Coast Road. Missed out on the first few readers, but managed to digitally shoot and video Marj anew, and Dinah Roma, who had been our Dumaguete workshopper years ago, and who has since distinguished herself with an academic stint at DLSU and reading-performances that also relied on dance.
Co-organizer Yong Shu Hoong inserted himself in the program, to no one’s lament but his partner Alvin’s laconic own. Then it was Madeleine Slavik’s turn, followed by her life partner, the dynamic Zhang Danyi – both of whom we had read with at a Hong Kong poetry fest in 2001, and for whom we had recently helped arrange a reading before our compatriots in London, led by (and thanks to) our embassy info officer, the much-awarded poet-playwright-fictionist Ed Maranan.
Heng Siok Tian capped the affair at Nonnie’s with three fine poems, then sidled up to us to express surprise over our determination to make it there "just to catch her." Our words; hers was the quizzical arch of the eyebrow.
Among the audience was Nadine Surreal, co-editor of the recently launched (in Manila) Our Own Voice literary journal. Ana Ablaza Baluyot, editor of the late lamented Musa monthly lit mag, we ran into on our way to Costa Sands Resort, where David McKirdy led the way for "a more intimate reading by and for ourselves," right by the beach.
There we assembled and grew slowly in numbers, our circle expanding on the grass close to midnight: David, Madeleine, Danyi, Marjorie and her daughter Mayann, Pauline Burton, the cute and feisty Mani Rao, the handsome Eddin Khoo of Malaysia, John Mateer from Australia, Chris Mooney Singh, Er and Leonard, and a late arriving Ramil, finally done for the day with his STB tours for Mabuhay magazine.
I must be missing two more, as I counted 16 of us in the circle at one point. Two rounds of a poem each, capped by a round of songs, with Marj, Mayann and Ramil summing up the memorable camaraderie, our little own splendor in the grass, with Usahay.
And that in turn sums up our guerrilla coverage of poets familiar and freshly met, at a festival that certainly struck one more positive blow for poetry in a region of kindred bards, all of whom love nothing better than to feast together.
Kudos to Singapore’s Wordfeast! May there be more.