Qualities of Care
Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . This is how Wikipedia introduces Mr. Chia Thye Poh: "Detained under the Internal Security Act of Singapore for allegedly conducting pro-communist activities against the government, he was imprisoned for 23 years without charge or trial and subsequently placed under conditions of house arrest for another nine years – in which he was first confined to the island of Sentosa and then subject to restrictions on his place of abode, employment, travel, and exercise of political rights." Appropriately for an encyclopedia, the language is objective and careful. Poetry can be care-full in another sense, by being an empathetic companion to the victims of political injustice, to walk with those who have been unfairly treated. Alfian Sa'at's poems about Mr. Chia Thye Poh, just published in the Evergreen Review, are some of the best political poems I know. In a drily laconic but deeply compassionate styl...