Voices make a dent in space

Anshul Tiwari
Nov 3 · 3 min read

Singapore Writers Festival 2019

Art by Chris Riddell

From being inspired to action to being transported into a different space lit with imagination, where the land is promising, the sun is on the rise, breeze is fresh and new ideas come unfettered, it has been a singularly special day listening to some key writers who have developed voices to make a dent in space, a ripple in time, so to speak, sharing their stories with a uniquely personable, candid and humorous voice at Singapore Writers Festival 2019.

I went to the festival with zero expectations, and came out utterly washed with new ideas and alternative viewpoints. Learning from strangers is learning at its best because you don’t attach your biases to it; You don’t attach the weight of meaning on the knowledge you receive; You do not value one piece of advise over another. Age, race, sex become footnote detail because every writer no matter what their place or identification in this world, is a particularly luminous expression of our boundless soul.

The day started with Pico Iyer, a writer who I have followed for many years, ever since I started reading English literature really, but never had a chance to meet. In a voice that has been cultivated over decades, Pico’s advise came unadulterated, and with such economy of expression that one wonders if he speaks in such lucid prose, what joys his written prose must bring to his editors or publishers. He said that when writers remove language from their prose, it’s when they reach the heart of the meaning and come close to their story, without any barriers of entry. This struck a chord. I had a similar experience reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E Frankl.

I always felt chafed reading Dostoevsky or Murakami translated into English, knowing that some of their language constructs were demolished to make way for English. How much of the writer’s voice was preserved, if any, during translations? Can you feel their soul? Pico tells us that you can. The soul of the writer is not in the prose, it’s in the telling, their story.

Watching Chris Riddell create his politically charged cartoons — which he does for a living as a resident cartoonist with the Observer — one cannot shake the feeling that he has two persons living inside him. One who draws, other who does the rest of it — eat, talk, live etc. He created cartoons with breathtaking ease on the spur of the moment as his co-panelists talked about their stories on the refugee crisis.

Sharon Bala reading from her book

Chris brought his scathing satire, his political acumen and his charming prose into the mix as well. His humour isn’t dry like you imagine a political cartoonist to be, rather it is a fully embodied response — moist with emotion. I cannot tell you how moved I was after watching him create “Swarm” — the image of the three-year-old Syrian boy who’s dead body had washed up on the beach.

Spunky, funny, and Malay to the very last fibre of her roots, Hanna Alkaf calls herself an unapologetic Malay writer. A journalist by background, she wrote her first book as a quest to create stories for her 19 year old self — one who read Enid Blyton, and Roald Dahl because there weren’t any local alternatives in Malaysia at the time. Her first novel is The Weight of Our Sky — a coming of age Middle Grade novel about a young girl growing up in the aftermath of 13 May incident in Kuala Lumpur— of which she read a moving and “conflicty” segment to the audience.

As I round off my evening with a chance meeting with two very good friends at the outskirts of the festival, I can’t shake the feeling that I have learned new things about myself, as though a part of the curtain is lifted before my eyes and a new light is seen from behind — something which fills me with hope and new imagination. All in a day!

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