Love, Femininity and Loss: A Review of Amanda Chong’s Professions

I have always had an affinity with confessional poetry and I suspect that this is because I grew up listening to Taylor Swift’s music. One look at Amanda Chong’s Instagram page will let you know that the celebrated Singaporean poet is also an ardent fan of Ms. Swift — she even has a stories highlight titled ‘TaylorPoetics’ that is dedicated to her analysis of the singer-songwriter’s lyrics. Perhaps this accounts for why I am so enchanted by Chong’s poetry.

I was first introduced to Chong’s poetry by one of my Junior College English Literature teachers but it took a while before I got round to purchasing Chong’s much-talked-about poetry collection, Professions (2016). If you find yourself wondering whether or not the collection is worth your shelf space (as I once did), I can assure you that it absolutely is.

image of professions

The collection was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2018 and consists of 41 poems which mostly revolve around the themes of love, femininity, and loss. In her poems, Chong captures the brutality of emotions through her imagery, but also writes about the potent moments in her life with clarity that is to be envied.

Love



image of the playwright

Chong’s clarity of expression is perhaps most clearly evinced in how she assigns each of her past relationships a definitive meaning, which she executes through character studies of her lovers in the context of their occupations. Indeed, it becomes very obvious that Professions is a double entendre once you come across poems like “The Astronomer”, “The Botanist” and “The Physicist” (just to name a few).

“The Playwright” is a poem that very clearly demonstrates what I have written about Chong’s poetry thus far. This poem functions almost like an exposé — in the poem, Chong chronicles a doomed love affair from “the first time [she] caught [her partner]/ stealing [her] words” until she “tired of him/ stealing [her] words for his scenes” and left him. There is a distinct sense of self-assuredness that comes through both in the content of the poem and the form that it takes: not only does Chong unapologetically expresses scorn for her partner’s disingenuity in his melodramatic writing (which sharply contrasts her honest verse), she also makes a mockery out of her former lover’s behaviour by decorating the poem with stage directions to parody the work of a playwright. Yet, while Chong-the-poet writes with ferocity, we also bear witness to the helplessness and suffering of Chong-the-lover who is relentlessly contorted into caricatures of herself: she was “a virgin, a crone, a crazed wife,” whatever her partner wanted her to be. Chong’s reflection on this episode of her life, then, also constitutes the poet’s attempt to understand how she lost and regained her sense of self. This brings out another dimension to Chong’s work: gender.

Femininity

image of office lady poem

The theme of gender – or, more specifically, femininity — features widely in Chong’s poetry. “Monsoon Girls” (one of the best poems in the collection, in my opinion) finds Chong contemplating the shared experiences among girls who grapple with the “monsoon” of their romantic lives as she chronicles how love damaged a friend who she had grown up with. Meanwhile, “Mandy” is a poem that explores the issue of slut-shaming girls who are unafraid to embrace their sexuality. But of the various poems that she writes vis-a-vis the theme of gender, “Office Lady” is a poem that particularly caught my attention. This is because the poem’s title is a cheeky misnomer. One might expect that a poem about an “Office Lady” would be a poem about the modern woman, one that perhaps celebrates her success or describes her struggles within the workplace. Alas, in this poem, Chong makes no reference to the persona’s line of work at all. Instead, the focus of the poem solely centres around the question of whether she can still “shack up with a man” as she ages. When this poem is read within the context of the collection, this portrait of the “Office Lady” becomes even more upsetting, as all the men in the collection are recognised for their professional capabilities. Indeed, in Chong’s poems, men are defined by what they can do while the “Office Lady” is lambasted for what she cannot do; the woman is appraised based on what she can offer to men. “Office Lady,” then, is a brilliant example of Chong’s social commentary on “the gender power dynamic of how women were excluded from professional life.”

Loss

image of Morning After

In “Office Lady,” traces of the theme of loss can be seen as the persona grapples with the loss of her youth. However, this theme is more explicitly discussed in poems such as “Bukit Brown” and “Morning After.” “Bukit Brown” is an elegy that every Singaporean reader should instantly understand the gravity of as the poem finds Chong ruminating on the impacts of endless urbanisation in the wake of the announcement that Bukit Brown would be redeveloped to cater to Singapore’s housing needs, while “Morning After” is a sonnet that deals with grief on a more personal scale. The latter poem is etched in my mind because I love the imagery that Chong conjures in this poem: “I held fast to faith in gears, how they jerk/ with such sureness of carrying on, claw/ onward tooth by damn tooth.” The shift from a tone of religiosity to the mechanic imagery is abrupt but perfect, demonstrating how the process of “carrying on” is in fact brutal and agonising. The way Chong uses run-on lines such that her words spill over while still fitting within ten syllables further connotes the start-stop motion of persistence. This was one of the poems that really convinced me of the greatness of Chong’s poetry.

Favourite Poems

There are, of course, many other gems within the collection. To conclude this review, I shall leave you with a full list of my personal favourite poems from the collection, in order of their appearance in the collection:

  • Visit to the Yakult Factory, 1995
  • Love Letters
  • The Explorer
  • Monsoon Girls
  • Burial Rites
  • Revival
  • The Physicist
  • Timbuktu
  • Morning After

If you would like to read Professions, you can purchase it at various bookstores in Singapore or borrow it from a public library. To find out more about Amanda Chong or Professions, you may visit her website.

By Hoh Zheng Feng Sean