Poet Marylyn Tan on why she is unafraid of being seen as a "disobedient woman"

Gaze Back was published in 2018, and it’s being picked up by the University of Georgia Press for distribution in North America. What’s next for you?

I’m currently working on a book called Oscar Rosary – it’s a reference to Oscar Wilde – and it’ll be out later this year. It’s quite different from Gaze Back because it’s much more personal. It talks about my relationship with religion, as well as my earliest experiences with queer figures. And Oscar Wilde is such a mythicised figure – he’s a concept, almost. So using that, and just putting Singaporean symbolism all over it – there’s a poem in the book about slaughtering chickens. That came from my parents, when they – very suddenly – decided to tell me how to slaughter chickens over dinner.

My parents love to spring these types of things on me: The other day they were telling me about how they wanted me to dispose of their bodies. They’re very laissez-faire about the idea of death – which is nice, I think, because I feel a lot of people’s parents threaten them with the idea of their deaths.

You’ve referred to yourself several times as a “disobedient woman”; you mentioned that your debut book, Gaze Back, came from a place of “discontent.” Where does all this come from?

It’s a reaction to the kind of disciplines that I was subjected to when I was a child. And it didn’t take at all: People would be like, ‘you can’t be rude. You can’t hurt people’s feelings’ – but I realised that the people who don’t hurt anyone’s feelings will end up suffering themselves.

There is definitely a certain way to perform ‘goodness’ as a woman. When you grow up religious, there are a lot of rules dictating what you can or cannot do. I feel like when you grow up in an all-girls school, there’s this additional instinct to value what is well-mannered and polite and convenient for the status quo. And I think pretty much that’s generally what school is, right? Pious obedience.

Weirdly enough, there was less of a certain sort of policing in an all-girls school. The general consensus is that you’re all girls – so if your bra strap is showing, it’s not kosher, but there isn’t that reaction of: ‘There are men around!’ From what I hear from my friends who went to co-ed schools, as a girl, you become very aware of the male gaze. You constantly, constantly have to think about how you appear to boys, whereas I didn’t actually think about that until I was older.

Since you became the first female winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for English poetry, you’ve often been referred to in terms of your gender. Do you ever tire of that?

Sometimes I feel, ‘Why does my gender have to be such a big deal?’ But as my friend, the filmmaker Kirsten Tan, says: ‘I identify more with being non-binary, but I’m happy to be listed as a female filmmaker, because there are just so few of them.’ And I feel the same way. It’s okay to make a big deal out of my gender, because we haven’t really come that far in terms of representing women in poetry; if it’s going to be ground- breaking, I’m happy to break that ground.