Zine Workshop / Embrace your inner creep, yo.
I often wonder whether the things I think about are really so strange, niche and eccentric – and the answer, which is a resounding yes, is answered in places like USP where many students look at you in mild amusement when you tell them you write poems for a living. Thankfully, this was not the case this evening. I brought along my (much diminished) collection of zines that I’ve gathered since leaving the UK and we spent nearly three hours cutting shit up, to make a mini-zine of our poems.
I’ve done this with lots of people, and I can say that if you feel like doing something similar with a group of novices, keep the materials limited and the options open (I once made the mistake of trying to explain the golden mean to a group of feminists during a short hour-long session.) It often feels as though no-one really understands anything I’m saying – and indeed they don’t – until they get stuck in, and see that it’s really very simple. Not only is it simple, it’s absorbing. On top of that it’s rewarding, especially when you find a way to make something cool out of something very ordinary, like old issues of The Straits Times. I don’t think making a zine will improve your poetry, but I think the ideas behind it – experimenting, trying things you haven’t done, cutting and pasting and building on the ideas you see in other zines – are the same as writing poems. And since I’m the first to confess that you can’t really teach people how to write poems, you must find techniques askance for limbering up the hesitant mind.
If only there was such a technique for awkward social situations. I’ve just come back from a really nice night which was a nice mix of performance art, dance, music and life-drawing. At such events you meet a lot of expats, and I’ve had many conversations about how weird / irritating it can be when ex-pats talk to you simply because you have foreignness in common. But as someone who mixes among artists because I am one, this becomes complicated when you meet someone with whom you have both foreignness and artistry in common. I will be blunt: blackness and foreignness is a rare combination in Singapore. But I’ve watched people squirm and cross the road enough times to know that some people are uncomfortable with talking to someone of the same race when in a different culture. You feel as though you’re being honed in on, scrutinised, singled-out, or that you’re a magnet for the creepy person with no social skills who needs an excuse to talk to people. I fit one or two of those descriptions, but I never make up excuses for talking to people. You’re either interesting to me or you’re not. And I always hope, despite the strangeness of the context, that people will be gracious enough to assume interest, not desperation, when I speak to them.
But it’s common in every social group, particularly for people raised in a Diaspora and/or within the dominant culture. How many times have I sensed some kind of weirdness when I’ve introduced two people of the same cultural background, not my own? And how many times have I found it weird when someone has done the same for me. On the one hand, there’s an obvious sense that you should know the person already – why have we been introduced by someone totally different, when we live in the same place / go to the same clubs / attend the same university? And yet, it’s really weird if you speak to someone because you have your blackness – or foreignness – in common. I think it’s to do with the fact that we’re at a fault-line when it comes to thinking about how we interact with people from different social groups. I’m not sociologist, but I know that this has been documented: we want things to happen naturally, but there are no social codes (after all, manners are there to make awkward things easier). I would have thought that, as a rule, having at least one other thing in common besides your foreignness would help, but I guess I’m alone on that one too; the chances are not everyone feels as conspicuous and self-aware as me, and possibly they don’t over-think it later.
No worries.
Weirdness, onwards.
