Clay Eaters
by Gregory Kan

In Clay Eaters, Gregory Kan remembers his time on Tekong Island, while serving in the Singapore Armed Forces:

Tactics were rites

Strategies were prayers

The ways in which we learnt

To rearrange ourselves

Without words

Between the trees

Tekong Island was once populated by Malay and Chinese, with temples, schools, fishing and rubber plantations. In the 1970s, when Singapore gained independence and began its great urbanisation, the inhabitants of Tekong Island were forced to leave their homes and resettle on the mainland. The island was turned into a military training site.

Kan’s recollections of his time in the army are braided with fictionalised accounts of the islanders’ own stories, and with poems from other time points in Kan’s life – his childhood; the death of a pet cat, Gilgamesh; going back to his family home for Christmas. There is a certain understated, philosophical elegance to Kan’s writing, which readers familiar with his previous books (This Paper Boat and Under Glass) will understand.

The writing style in this book is even more pared back, which adds to a sense of equilibrium – it seems to me that in his previous books Kan sought to make sense of things, but here he has reached a moment of peace. In this book he simply makes observations and raises questions. He is still curious about the traps of memories and histories – still talks to and is haunted by the ghosts of the past – but it feels like a matured voice that is more comfortable sitting in the dark.

This book deals with memories and grief, which is what the living must carry. Nietzsche said, ‘Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders’. But the poet cannot forget:

Memory will not be

Still

Trying to touch the bottom

Of the deep lake

And return to the surface

Clutching god knows what

Blinking in the sudden light

Lucky to be alive

The poems don’t have titles or full stops. Like memories, they float on in capsules that bear no clear beginning or end. Memories are malleable and formless, and these poems too are flexible in their positions and interpretations. A title can help a reader make an ‘accurate’ reading of a poem, but leaving one title-less gives the reader a sense of having no solid footing. This is a classic Kan approach – subtly and skilfully sewing subtext through all possible means.

Kan’s interests go beyond his own memories. As he did in This Paper Boat – where he assumed the voice of the writer Iris Wilkinson (Robyn Hyde) – he tells fictionalised accounts from people who lived on Tekong Island. These include a military general, whose first-person accounts are presented as blog posts and military activity logs. The imagined narratives (based on real lives) and different ways of recording history add depth to the poet’s own experiences and recollections. They layer on top of one another, like dirt, like clay, like the bodies and stories that are buried in time. History is made up of collectives, and we are all clumped together.

The book makes time feel like a series of concentric circles – repeated and layered occurrences – where the pattern is only disrupted, albeit momentarily, by major events. Often, moments in the poems set on Tekong Island seem like metaphors for Kan’s life here, the past and present leaving imprints on the other like double-exposed film. When he writes of the places Gilgamesh has lived, he could be speaking of his dad.

This feeling of circularity and criss-crossing of connections is particularly strong in Kan’s writing of his difficult relationship with his father. He recalls his dad’s anger, his depression, and wonders at how that person sits alongside this mellowed-out version he has become since suffering a stroke. Writing openly about family can be a sensitive issue, and here Kan treads tactfully and respectfully, without forgoing his truth. He shows complexity that is without judgement, as if he turns an object in his hand in the sunlight. He writes of his father:

It was starting to get dark

At first he saw circles

One growing inside another

And then he was falling

He fell somewhere

Into a ripple of concentric circles

Rings inside an ancient tree

And then people were running over

And he felt voices ring out around him

And then hands

Kan wonders about the makeup of a life, and how we preserve its intricacies. His writing of military maps and the geography of the island could be symbolic of the maps of minds, and the geographies of memories. There is a constant traversing, through time and space. When he returns to his family home he finds his old belongings. At his own home, he notices the places where Gilgamesh used to be. A life is an accumulation of items and moments, and these are preserved in houses, in photos, in stories, in genealogy, in Kan’s writing of this book. He has collected a range of departures, both physical and metaphysical, and memorialised them through the writing of them.

This is a beautiful, clever and tender book that is at times surprisingly funny and light. Those who have read Kan’s previous books will notice a satisfying continuation of themes and imagery, like the swampy jungle that readers waded through in his other books, as well as the relationship between the poet and his family, in particular his father. Kan is a skilled writer who evidently enjoys burrowing deep into research for his projects, and this book is another vessel containing mixed histories. At first seemingly disparate in its narratives, the collection ultimately unites in a feeling of completeness, and there is a sense that the poet is hopeful and calm, looking forward to the future. It is the feeling of that rare, quiet moment when you feel like everything is going to be okay, despite it all.

I know how good things are

To be with the whole family again

Piecing our dreams together

In a wild mosaic

A basin

For other dreams