How to write it in a place where you feel at home? In a society in which rights and opportunities are limited, we need to tell different, says Amanda Lee Koe Singapore.
Amanda Lee Koe lives as a writer in Singapore and New York. The 29-working Years as a literary editor for “Esquire” and the literary journal “Ceriph”. Her debut novel “the Ministry of public arousal” was Shortlisted for the International prize for literature in 2017. We met you in Berlin.
DW: you tell the stories of people on the margins of society. How do you find your protagonists?
Amanda Lee Koe: Especially in a place like Singapore, where there is a kind of a fixed national Narrative, it is important to tell from another, not from Mainstream-influenced perspective. For me, it was actually quite natural, because such a social outsider, appearing in the Singapore typical literature often. It was not difficult for me to write because I’ve never really felt in Singapore home. It is easy for me to sympathize with characters that tend to be on the edge of society.
You were born in Singapore, now live in two cities, New York and Singapore. Where do you spend more time?
I moved almost four years ago to New York and since then a lot of back – and-traveled. I can’t tell you where I spend more time rings. At the Moment it feels to me like a split existence. It is sometimes quite strange, because if it is the one place you can see the other much clearer. Therefore, it is interesting to get both perspectives.
The fact that they are at two completely different places with completely different traditions, life, your Writing influences?
I can hardly answer, because it is a couple of years ago that I “have written to the Ministry of public arousal”. At the time, I was much younger and lived also in New York. After I grew up but in Singapore, am, in our post-global-capitalist era, it seems to me like I have all these different point of view, has always been in me. I had to come in Singapore, a place that is so restrictive, always very to myself. I don’t think it changed my work, where I am now.
Your writing style has been as spraying, electrifying and cheeky, but always as a profound and sensitively described. Feel you characterized yourself correctly?
That sounds tempting. But I find it quite odd when you think as a writer about what people say about you. In my work plays no role. When writing, everything has to come naturally from a self. If this is not possible, it is artificial, and you notice that in the Text. Sometimes it is difficult for me to talk about Aesthetics or techniques in connection with literature from Singapore. I feel a bit out of place. But then I think, this is an interesting Position from which I can work.
You are now 29 years old. Still very young….
I was naive when I wrote the book.
How old were you at that time?
I was 23, almost 24.
In some of your stories, you write about old people who look back on their lives. How have you managed to be so deep in the Psyche of her characters invade?
I think I’ve always been an old soul since I was very young. Therefore, it was for me also very difficult to close friendships. But above all, I think that empathy is, for me, as a writer, the most important thing. I have the feeling that I’m überempathisch predisposed. This could be an old person or a tree in the Winter, the lay a hand on me, suddenly, much too deep. (laughs)
This is sometimes a bit uncomfortable, but I believe that this aspect of yourself so deeply in something’s place, must have its cause in the fact that you want to understand the Other. I’m always on the search for the secret of life – by whom or whatever. Whether it’s an object, a Situation or a person: I think this is the way how you go in depth.
One of her stories has to do with the colonial history of Singapore. You write about Maria Hertogh, a Dutch girl who was adopted by Malaysian Muslims. Why has their fate in their eyes so important?
In school, we get in the context of the story of Maria Hertogh, only a single, very simple lesson to be administered: and that the harmony of the various ethnic groups in Singapore is very important. Let it never more to such a race riots, as then, the thing with Maria Hertogh come! (Editor’s note. d. Red.: The uprising due to the Maria Hertogh broke out in 1950, after a court had decided that the child had been raised by a Muslim family, should be handed over to his biological parents in the Netherlands.) The matter was always treated as a question of race. The school was never questioned, why the riots broke out at all, or how it came to the Situation. My story is in this respect a reaction against the simplistic history education in Singapore. They teach us to look at very complex relationships in the past, only in basic, simple Patterns.
It is important to break taboos?
When my book came out in Singapore on the market, all thought, I just wanted to provoke. But that was not my intention. That was just the way I wanted to write. If I’m breaking with conventions, the better. But I think if you have a concern, it is important that you stay with it quite naturally.
The title of your book, in English, means “Ministry of public arousal”, in English the “Ministry of Moral Panic”. What a Ministry you had in mind?
Amanda Lee Koe loves to have fun
(laughs) “Moral panic” is a sociological concept, in which – to put it simply – something Bad that happens, a certain Segment of society is blamed, so that the action is represented with a certain tendency. Since I come from a place like Singapore where everything is controlled and instrumentalised, I wanted to imagine just what it would be like if something of this order would also be subject to management under. I mean, the title is more of an invitation, the systems in which we live and which remain invisible for us to think through.
The political circles in Singapore behavior is usually very discreet. But this summer, a massive public debate about the legacy of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew broke out. His sons – Lee Hsien Loong, the elder, is the current Prime Minister and his daughter are arguing about what should happen to Lee Kuan Yews the house. The only family Zoff or of political importance?
That was in Singapore a huge thing. On the one side, the. what of family drama, such as in a gossip-series, but on the other hand, that just makes it all the more worse Even if Singapore is very cosmopolitan, it is in a traditional Asian society is extremely rare that the dirty Laundry of a family is washed in Public. But I find that accurately shows what it is actually: That our Prime Minister is talking about a private family dispute in Parliament, shows the problems of Power. I find it quite irritating that he will notice that it is a bit strange to speak in Parliament about something like that.
“The Ministry of public arousal” was her first book. You already have a title for the next?
No, not yet, but it is a novel that encompasses very many different time periods and perspectives. It takes place in all sorts of places in the world, just not in Singapore.
Her first book was very well received and received several important prizes. You the not when Writing the next under a lot of pressure?
Strangely, not. That may have to do with the fact that I have not taken my stories, as I wrote you at the time, very seriously. I wasn’t thinking so crazy about you. That was a kind of Ufo that passed by with lots of feelings and energy. I have not thought out the Whole as a literary construct. But in the novel I’m writing now, it seems to me that I meet the, what I would like to achieve according to my own ideas as an aesthetic experience. I take this project more seriously, and for that, I actually greater pressure. But the opposite is the case, just because I take it seriously.
The interview was conducted by Sabine Peschel.
Amanda Lee Koe: “the Ministry of public arousal”, translated from English by Zoë Beck, publishing culture books, Hamburg 2016, 222 pages