We Make Spaces Divine

by Pooja Nansi

These poems walk through cities in bodies that don’t belong. They speak through moments in migration, music, film and pop culture. These are poems as acts of resistance, renewal and reclamation. Poems that make shrines of grimy corners. They are dancing till the sun comes up and laughing in the face of anyone who says they cannot take up space.

Genres: Poetry

156 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Pooja Nansi is an educator and poet who believes in the power that speech and performance can lend to the written word. She has published two collections of poetry, and co -written a teacher’s resource for using Singaporean Poetry in the classroom . She also curates a monthly Spoken Word and Poetry showcase called Speakeasy at Artistry Cafe.

Reviews

[ash | songsforafuturepoet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had the fortune to attend an absolutely magical live performance of We Make Spaces Divine by Pooja Nansi and musician Isuru Wijesoma. Pooja Nansi has a beautiful way of breathing life into her words. Her poems danced in call and response with the enchanting musical accompaniment from Isuru Wijesoma's classical Hindustani-blues fusion, creating something almost like a hypnotic trance.

It is rather bittersweet to know that I cannot ever again recreate the feelings I felt during her performance through reading the poems on my own. When I read the poems, I feel the remnants of the force of her breathing, the way she enunciated and empahsized certain words, the pauses she chose. Those remnants overlay my own voice in my head when I read the poems, creating a unique meta experience where I can observe the difference in my interpretation and the author's original interpretation of her works.

Pooja writes on being brown in Singapore with anger, joy, hope, and grief; these emotions come up through loving music, food, and dancing, through snapshot moments with her family, through kinship and friendship, through simping over celebrities on TV, through everyday racism and its intergenerational impact.

I enjoy her prose - at times it is crisp but warm, at times cutting with the force of a knife, at times spicy like chili, at times cheeky and playful.

Some poems that I enjoyed:

Amitabh Bachchan - a poem about a schoolgirl crush on a celebrity, paired with the sexy jazzy music and the way Pooja Nansi infused her passion into the way she read the poem, it was most memorable in my mind. My favourite line was is he puffing at that cigarette or trying to create an orgasm. I can totally relate.

Everything is so fucking temporal - heart wrenching poem about yearning for people to last forever

Mustafa Centre Blues - I visit Mustafa often but I am keenly aware of my presence as a Chinese person and what that often come with. This poem brings up nostalgia, appreciation for the superstore, and awareness that I will experience Mustafa differently from most people there

[Darshini Evelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.0 ⭐️

The last time I picked up a piece of Singaporean Literature, voluntarily was close to 3 years ago when I took H1 Literature in English.

Singaporean Literature provides us with a feeling of homecoming, where we get to read books by homegrown authors, effectively allowing us to delve deeper into our roots by exploring what it truly means to be Singaporean.

Pooja Nansi’s poetry collection was beautifully written and thought out. She eloquently brings out what it means to be a minority and the true meaning of belonging here in Singapore as an expatriate.

There are elements where she quotes the successful business magnate-Mustafa Shopping Centre, whilst showing parallels of the immigrant struggle that the minorities have in Singapore.

I was not the target audience for this collection as I have not encountered racism in Singapore and I am a 2nd-generation Singaporean.

But the poem that I resonated with was Maybe I Am on page 63. Being the first in my extended family to do various things, I am often judged and ridiculed. However, that poem was a reminder that I have practised from the start of my adulthood- I will never dim my light, just to make you feel secure about yourself.

It was a reminder that we need to take up space-no matter if it’s a crack in the wall or an arena. We need to speak up, stand our ground and take up that room.

We matter, despite our skin colour.

Favourite Quotes:

- “My rib cage is not a storage solution.”

- “What are the sins of my race, Beloved, what are my people to thee?”

- “Your voice. […] Aspirates its consonants. Needs to be used. Even when it breaks. Reminds you there are centuries standing behind you.”

[Artemis · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars? I really liked the title, which was what drew me in. It was interesting to read about places I've been but not experienced as a minority. Actually thought the poems would've pushed the concept of spaces further – but still, I liked the sparse inclusions of pictures, quotes, and mother tongue. Honestly, for some poems I felt that there could be more anger and the demand to be heard/seen/recognised, like in "Are You Singaporean?". I don't belong to the minority, but the minority friends I know get so upset at how micro-aggression or casual acts of racism is so everyday and normalised. And they are tired. But this doesn't mean we should stop resisting against the status quo every time we encounter it.

Poems I liked:
- Maybe I Am
- Night Songs
- Everything is so fucking temporal
- Mustafa Centre. A Fact Sheet. ((I liked the footnotes! also I did not know it used to be so big and was forced to close, but again I am not surprised at how Singapore is with heritage stuff))

Some lines I liked:
- "I tell this to my friend / and she says / well we laugh at them / and they laugh at us / and that is the Singaporean way. / Lighten up. / It's just a comedy show. / I have never felt / more tired." ((on a side note, I do not quite like our local kind of humour haha))
- "it's so urgent isn't it? This business of living, we don't have forever"
- "When I go to see her, I am frightened because we do not know how to hold grief, especially when it is not ours." and "I remember that poetry exists to say the things words alone cannot."
- "Tolerance is a synonym for erasure." and "What can we build / with our real / and righteous rage?"

One minor gripe is I kinda wished there was a content page so I could find the poems easily without flipping through the entire book :') Also, perhaps because I finished this after reading Bright Dead Things and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, for me it felt that stylistically it was not as strongly consistent throughout the book – or maybe it's just me, lol. Some sentences felt a bit too try-hard for me, which rubbed me the wrong way, and I couldn't dislodge the feeling that sometimes Mustafa felt like it was being romanticised. But, overall it was still an insightful read into the lived experience of the author and the multicultural experience in Singapore.

[mm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poet Pooja Nansi's latest collection – her third – gives insight into the life of a migrant child growing up in Singapore. Like always, Pooja gives voice to the brown female, so seldom heard from. I wish I had her writings when I was growing up. I would not have felt so alone.
As she states:
'Deliver us from racial harmony. Forgive us our alienation.
We are resurrecting the selves
we've buried.'
in 'Nachangeh Sari Raath or Everybody Get Your Motherfuckin Roll On'.

Her prose poetry just flows taking us from Mustafa Centre to hiphop clubs, through politics and the systemic racism that exists.

Loved it, and highly recommend it.

[O · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pooja's third poetry collection is a gorgeous tapestry - of belonging, identity, where you've been and where you're going. She lovingly traces out the spaces of her childhood, youth and adulthood, from her parent's home to dark nightclubs to Mustafa Centre. But this is not a placid collection, far from it. She brims with vivacity, sadness, rage, and joy, touching on subjects of history, politics, immigration and race. A powerful piece of work that is essential reading.

[Fernando · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quarantine book #2

"Some cities you visit and some you inhabit" and among them there those "I do not know will not know would die to know but could never know even if I time travelled". These words hit home, as do the stories of immigration, especially now that I have taken one plane ride to arrive in Singapore, my new home.

Thank you @pnansi for offering me a chance to explore my divine spaces and for taking me dancing with your words while I can only dance by myself in my hotel room

This edition is by @booksactually 's #MathPaperPress

For more #SingLit go to #onebookSingapore
#onebookAsia

#QuarantineReading

[Uma Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book on race, art, the fragility of fleeting intimacies, interpersonal spaces, music and love. A book doesn’t get more Singaporean than this gorgeous, breathless collection of prose poems.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars*

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A culture so deep and so vast I will never fully fathom. Pooja’s words are life; the raw pulsating rhythm of energy and pain, translated for us to vicariously feel.

[Rachel Loh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you, I understand better now

[r.x. ang · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved everything about this book of poems - it's a speedy read, full of colour, vibrance and vigor, and always, beneath words, gyrating to a lively soundtrack of hip-hop music.

[Silk Javeri · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked this one up hoping for a joyful celebration of the minority experience. That was what was promised anyway. Didn’t find that at all. The author is seriously limited in her expression and her experiences. Her writing came across boring and flat, some of it more like rambling Facebook posts than poetry. I also got the sense that she thinks her very ordinary life and feelings are worthy of deep attention and interest. There are so many cringe moments! Like a whole poem about her Instagram stories where her friend is dancing ---??? That’s a diary entry, not an experience that anybody else needs to read about. Sure a good poet can make mundane subject matter into something any reader can connect with but I don’t think this writer is skilled enough. I don’t think that’s even what she’s attempting to do. She’s just so limited to her sheltered life that she truly thinks this stuff is worthy of putting on the page. It’s sad it’s like the person who goes to one party or travels one time and cannot stop talking about it. When she wrote “I represent Marine Parade so hard” it summed things up pretty well …here are the whiny ramblings of a privileged expat with not much depth or independence, thinking she is “of the street.” I’m supposed to read some irony into that line but it’s telling of her privilege. She should maybe come out of her protected bougie bubble and learn about actually living life before writing this yawn-inducing stuff.