Sharlene Teo

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Ann Ang
Dated 16 Jun 2021

Sharlene Teo (b. 1987) is a Singaporean novelist and non-fiction writer. Her debut novel, Ponti (2018), won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award. An alumnus of the Creative Arts Programme in Singapore, Teo first wrote poetry and her entry won third prize in the 2005 Golden Point Award. She completed a degree in law at the University of Warwick with a minor in Creative Writing, before embarking on a full-time writing career. Teo is the recipient of the 2012 UEA Booker Prize Foundation scholarship, 2013 David TK Wong Creative Writing fellowship, and the 2014 Sozopol Fiction fellowship. In 2017, with support from the National Arts Council in Singapore, she was a fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme.

After reading for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Teo continued to pursue her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. Ponti was completed as part of her doctoral thesis, which also examined cultural representations for a western-centric book market by diasporic Anglophone Singaporean writers, focusing on the novel Mammon Inc. (2001) by Hwee Hwee Tan, the short story collection Lions in Winter (2009) by Wena Poon, and Cheryl Lu-lien Tan's Sarong Party Girls (2016). Teo’s critical essay makes a case for how cultural stereotypes lend stability to the fluidity and hybridity of Singapore identity, and are part of a self-marketing project that seeks to engage a broader Anglophone readership. Though the essay examines specific Singapore female writers, it also discusses how the figure of the postcolonial author herself is a commodity for consumption in the global book trade.

Teo previously taught on the MA in Creative Writing course at St. Mary’s University in London. She is currently a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent in the UK, with research interests in creative writing pedagogy, Southeast Asian historical fiction, Singaporean identity from a postcolonial perspective and the Asian Gothic, among others. She has spoken and written widely about the craft of fiction and non-fiction writing, including a talk on the movies and Malay myths mentioned in Ponti at the 2018 Hong Kong Book Fair and a keynote address at the 2019 National Creative Writing Industry Day at the Manchester Metropolitan University.

In the same keynote address, Teo describes herself as a writer who is both “anxious” and a “perfectionist”. Her advice is to manage one’s predilections as part of the writing process, and in a separate interview with Electric Literature, she acknowledges that “it takes a long time to get better at writing.” Despite giving up on the draft of a failed novel following her MA, she found herself starting on Ponti while living in a small “haunted” flat off Magdalen Street in Norwich. For Teo, one cannot be a writer without being a reader and, more than “external validation,” what is more sustaining is “the solace and surprise you get from reading and writing stories and trying to make sense of the world in words.” A writer’s voice comes from “confidence, comfort and practice” as well as connecting to the “multiplicities of language” through reading contemporary poetry (Spread the Word).

In her interviews, Teo often reflects on the complex notion of authenticity and cultural representation for writers from a minority culture. In the same interview with Electric Literature, she observes that the adage “write what you know” carries the “reductive assumption” that authors who are female and/or people of colour should produce narratives based on their own personal experiences.  She also notes earlier that the creative writing workshop and reading syllabus could include a broader range of story-telling possibilities. Instead of specific aesthetic orientations from Anglo-American literature, such as Carveresque minimalism or the Hemingway style, being treated as universal examples of good or bad writing, writers from other milieux generate an aesthetics of creative practice in their own right that should not be published simply because “it’s good enough”.

While best known for Ponti, Teo’s non-fiction and other writing have appeared in Tate Etc. and Wasafiri Magazine. Her essay on her first swimming foray to the Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond on Hampstead Heath in London was published in the collection At the Pond (2019). As part of her continued work on the uncertain contours of being an Asian writer in Britain, Teo contributed a piece to the anthology East Side Voices, forthcoming from Sceptre Books. As a writer deeply influenced by filmmaking, Teo also created a short film, Essential Animal, an anthropomorphic tale about how a lion and rabbit couple cope with the pandemic. The production was part of the digital playbook Life in a Cloud, at the 2020 Singapore International Festival of the Arts.

Ponti

Teo begun work on Ponti in 2012 while enrolled at the University of East Anglia. As the recipient of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award in 2016, which was awarded on the basis of an initial manuscript of 20 000 words, she was given £10,000 to finish her debut novel. Named for the long-haired and alluring female ghoul of Malay myth, Ponti is set in Singapore and narrated from the perspectives of three female characters: Amisa, her daughter Szu, and Circe. Teo’s novel reads very much as a female bildungsroman with a tropical gothic sensibility, and portrays the contours of feminine selfhood alongside the opacities of female friendship, with all three main characters failing to fulfil anxious societal expectations about feminine beauty and behaviour.  Set against the backdrop of a rapidly modernising Singapore, Ponti also delves into themes of loss and remembrance in its depiction of the relationships between Amisa, Szu and Circe.

Lauded by Ian McEwan at the prize presentation as “a remarkable first novel in the making” (Bausells), the novel was also shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Award and the Edward Stanford Fiction Award with a Sense of Place Award, as well as longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and selected by Ali Smith as one of the best debut works of fiction of 2018. Picador Senior Editor Sophie Jonathan acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Ponti from Emma Paterson at RCW after a seven-way auction, and it was published by Picador (London) in April 2018 and by Simon & Schuster (New York) in September 2018 (Cowdrey). Ponti has also been translated into nine languages.

The pontianak dominates the novel as its central figure, specifically her popular representation deriving from the wildly successful trilogy of Singapore Malay horror films directed by B.N. Rao, which were released between 1957 and 1958 (HistorySG). In an author interview with Channel NewsAsia, Teo states that she was inspired by “Singapore cinematic history” in relation to the “golden age of the fifties and the sixties, after which there was a lull in the seventies”. By setting the beginning of her novel in the late 1960s, Teo was exploring what would happen if a trilogy of Pontianak movies was made then, when local cinema was declining in popularity. While the Pontianak certainly functions as a symbol of feminine beauty and power in Ponti, as well as excessive carnality and desire, it is overdetermined as a trope for belatedness and the return of the past. The novel in fact opens in 2003, and readers first meet Amisa as an aging beauty, having once starred as the ravishing but deadly Pontianak, while Circe, Szu’s ex-best friend from their childhood, encounters her youthful visage through the screen when she is tasked to work on a reboot of the series in 2020. As the novel cuts swiftly and cinematically between 2020, 2003, and the 1970s to juxtapose moments of sorrow and anomie experienced by all three women across the decades, Amisa’s spectral presence, both as the vampiric siren and as an individual who lives on in the memories of Szu and Circe, becomes the uncanny, haunting presence at the heart of Ponti.

Ponti as a Female Bildungsroman

In an interview with Sine Theta Magazine, Teo shares her thoughts about the universal aspects of teenage girlhood in relation to Ponti. Beyond stereotypes about frenemies, and the best-friends pairing of a popular and less-popular girl, Teo discusses how she sought to portray the teenaged girl’s deeply-felt affective terrain in terms of “the longing, ennui, intense introspection, the big, almost insurmountable hopes about life”. This places the novel squarely within the terrain of the female bildungsroman, which is concerned with the gendered narrative of socialisation within the novel as a form.

The novel opens in 2003 with Szu, who has just done a presentation in school about her mother’s long-forgotten films. In Szu’s first person narrative, her cruelly judgmental classmates remain unimpressed despite her best attempts to convey the eerie magic of the pontianak on screen, and she admits to herself that the female ghoul looks “clammy and defeated” (8). In the unforgiving economy of school-girl egos, poor Szu was hoping that Amisa’s beauty will help her attain a modicum of social acceptance so she will be less of an outcast. After she fails to do so, Szu has the uncontrollable urge to harass her desk-mate with the whispered confession, “My mother is a monster” (6). She is later punished by the teacher for disrupting the class. Indeed, as readers come to realise, Amisa is no shining starlet, and neither is she a nurturing and protective mother-figure. To some degree, she is metaphorically monstrous, due to her intense repugnance for Szu, which causes her daughter to adopt a constant posture of self-loathing. The pontianak, then, comes to also symbolise the gnawing anxieties that Szu experiences while growing up: the poor girl is doubly ostracized from the start, which sets the stage for Szu’s later friendship with Circe, when both girls are ostracised by their classmates at school.

Despite the underlying tragedy of the situation, this is alleviated by the novel’s humorous and occasionally melancholic perspective. Szu grows up amidst the heady atmosphere of spirit medium sessions in her home, which are conducted by her Aunt Yunxi for a living. This adds to the mystery surrounding Amisa in Szu’s eyes, and she views her large frame and awkwardness as a personal failure, compared to her mother. On her sixteenth birthday, she receives a gift that she describes as “a dress you would find on a cake-topping ornament” (25). Under the predatory eyes of her mother and aunt, she struggles into the dress, and wonders if she will be “trapped in [there] forever, in too-tight polyester with my sticky skin and body odour, a potato stench” (25). More than routine teenage awkwardness, this resolutely scatological emphasis militates against the niceties that one comes to expect of literature written in relation to youthful femininity. The occasion takes a darker turn when Amisa and Yunxi toast Szu over a traditional dish of century eggs and sliced ginger. She finds herself imagining the preserved egg as a “dinosaur’s eyeball lodged in [her] gullet” (27), and forces herself to eat it as her “mother taps her talons” (27). It is “disgusting and familiar” (27). Ugliness, and abjection of the self, define Szu’s life. 

Similarly, in Amisa’s girlhood chapter, she finds herself rejecting the life and family that she is born into. On one of her rambles in the mangrove forest, she encounters two orang minyak. In Malay folklore these legendary ghouls are covered with black grease and routinely abduct and rape virgins. However, in Amisa’s narrative, they turn out to be a couple in disguise, and on the run, as an echo of how the pontianak too has its human guises. In return for the young Amisa’s help, the woman calls Amisa “such a pretty girl” (36), the first time that she receives such praise in person, a heavily symbolic encounter where the hidden nature of both the besmirched woman and the young girl are revealed in a shared moment of kindness. This charged moment marks the beginning of Amisa’s awareness of her feminine beauty which would become an integral part of her selfhood, one that she flaunts back home in Kampong Mimpi Sedih with a “sinuousness and sensuality that harnessed the spotlight” (65). In defiance of the conservative perspectives towards sex which were common during the time, Amisa openly cavorts with the boys from the local charcoal factory, as a “barebacked animal fumbles in the tall grass with any handsome body” (71). 

Circe completes the trio as an apotheosis of the incomplete female bildungsroman, which may be defined by its critical distance from social expectations. In contrast to Amisa’s and Szu’s trajectories, we first meet Circe as a self-defined failure in 2020, without a prior account of her earlier years. She calls herself a “pathological quitter” (52) and views her divorce as proof of how she has not lived up to her mother’s expectations. True to Circe’s droll tendencies, she takes this as an occasion for existential self-scrutiny. “What is important?” she wonders, “that is something I would still like to know” (52). While some would read this as routine millennial angst, it becomes clear that Circe has begun a process of de-centring herself from the present in order to understand how her story links to the past. As with Szu’s narrative, the language is visceral and fetid: Circe “feel[s] this pit of old tune nested in [her] chest. It’s a physical thing” (51). By the end of the novel, Circe must harness the power of active remembrance to put to rest the demons of the past, namely her broken friendship with Szu, and lingering fascination with Amisa, resurrected by the Pontianak series reboot. While both Szu’s and Amisa’s early years are marked by a disjunction from the self and from their communities, where they hold themselves at arm’s length, and watch themselves in an obsessive theatre of the ego, Circe’s self-realisation occurs entirely through retrospection, which in turn suggests how the female bildungsroman is less of a chronological process and more of a subject position contoured by memory and bodily affect.

Feminine Bodies and the Gothic

Ponti’s aesthetic emphasis on a subjectivity centred in the feminine body, portrayed by turns as grotesque or banal in its everyday inconveniences, is matched by a Gothic sensibility in the narrative as a means to further portray affective resonances between the distinct narrative threads of Amisa, Szu, and Circe. Unlike conventional treatments of the Gothic genre, the effect is less mysterious and uncanny but plangently melancholic as readers wonder if these three women will transcend the gaps in their friendship, and their unfulfilled aspirations.

As readers follow Amisa’s progression from village girl to faux-film star, her death from cancer appears midway through the novel in Szu’s trajectory. When visitors to her wake begin to arrive, Amisa marries her boyfriend in her own thread, before beginning to act in the Ponti trilogy. The boundary between life and death, between memory and hope is uncertain, yoked together as it is by the skilful weaving of the narrative. There is a deep sense of pathos at Amisa’s wake, interwoven as it is with the ongoing progression of her life-story but also with Szu’s subsequent descent into depression and listlessness. Bringing the triply-braided narrative together is Circe, whose memories of Amisa and her laconic sense of alienation find uncanny resonances with Amisa’s own desire for authenticity and Szu’s unfulfilled yearning for motherly love. Collectively these gothic doublings depict a spectral form of female friendship in which identities are formed under the intense gaze of a fellow woman, or the scrutiny of their own conscience.

The effect of this is that the female body recedes from the spectator’s objectifying gaze to becomes its own generative locus of subjectivity, in terms of embodied and somatic sensations that condense experiences and emotions. Chronological time itself is embodied and weighed down in the style of the text, as Circe describes her morning ruminations as “old feelings [that] bubble up and leave a thin film over [her] waking day, like the skin on soup” (54).  As the character whose perspective dominates the flashback arcs of the narrative, Circe also has a tapeworm infection, which “has taken up a home inside [her], uninvited” (57). She dubs it “my Cestoda” but has no control over it; it “likes to travel around [her] body, take a gander, have a look-see” (57). It becomes clear that the worm functions as Circe’s conscience, an external eye on feelings and emotions which she finds too difficult to confront, many of which are conduits to unresolved encounters from her past. When she first sees Amisa on the screen during a company meeting on the pontianak movies reboot, she experiences “the bastard child of a feeling at once horrified and deeply moved” (59) and then adds, “My worm must like that. Plenty to feed on” (59). What is gothic, then, in this context, is the blurring of past and present through bodily effects which undermine a character’s stability of self as a source of deeply-felt introspection.

As a whole, Ponti speaks from, and to, the perspective of a young women growing up in a fast-changing country, and so enriches the canon of bildungsroman novels from Singapore. These mostly feature male protagonists, beginning with If We Dream Too Long (1972) by Goh Poh Seng, followed by Gone Case (1997) by Dave Chua, and Heartland (1998) by Daren Shiau, though more recently Sugarbread (2016) by Balli Kaur Jaswal and The Gatekeeper (2017) by Nuraliah Nurasid portray the challenges faced by young women growing up. What distinguishes Ponti from these earlier works however, is its attention to femininity as a lived and embodied experience. Despite the novel’s international success, it remains very much a Singaporean novel at heart, and as readers follow Amisa’s progression from village girl to faux-film star, they also participate in a recuperation of a little remembered era of cinematic history in Singapore. Her early success and the subsequent commercial failure of her movies, and Amisa’s subsequent coming down in life is depicted with a bracing realism. Alongside Szu’s growing up years and Circe’s regretful recounting of the past, the gothic destabilisation of character perspectives can also be read as a triptych of feminine affect at three different phases of Singapore’s development.

The result is an unabashed feminine perspective that undermines conventional narratives of Singapore’s swift progress from third-world backwater to modern first-world nation. As Heng and Devan argue in their well-known study of State Fatherhood, “the past itself becomes a category produced by present causes to legitimate the exigent directives of the state” (205). The pervasiveness of this discourse is shored up by decades of state-promulgated “narratives of history and survival” (205). Ponti, in response, presents a gendered and divergent perspective on Singapore’s heady years of development from the late 1960s to its post-millennial orientation as a global city as the three protagonists confront their past selves and dream of alternative futures. The result is an intricately woven narrative structured by the daily anxieties of self-loathing amidst the imaginaries of feminine identity, which insists on the primacy of embodied perspectives, and aberrant chronologies in exercising an individualised narrative of the self.

Works Cited

“Pontianak—a Pioneer Horror Film Series.” HistorySG. National Library Board, Singapore. Accessed 22 July 2020.

Bausells, Marta. “Sharlene Teo on Her First Book Ponti, Writing ‘Losers’ and Dealing with Hype.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/19/sharlene-teo-ponti-interview. Accessed 22 July 2020.

Comma Press. “Keynote Speech: Sharlene Teo @ Ncwid 2019.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GY38w7hWV8. Accessed 25 January 2021.

Cowdrey, Katherine. “Picador Acquires Deborah Rogers Award-Winning Debut in Seven-Way Auction.” The Bookseller, https://www.thebookseller.com/news/picador-acquires-sharlene-teos-award-winning-debut-seven-way-auction-433161. Accessed 25 January 2021. Accessed 22 July 2020.

Electric Literature. “Sharlene Teo Thought Writing a Book Would Be More Like a Bjork Video.” Electric Literature, https://electricliterature.com/sharlene-teo-thought-writing-a-book-would-be-more-like-a-bjork-video/. Accessed 25 January 2021.

Fair, Hong Kong Book. “Ponti: Movies, Malay Myths and Local Monsters.” Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEWBVvxYu1g&t=2586s. Accessed 25 January 2021.

Heng, Geraldine and Janadas Devan. “State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality and Race in Singapore.” Bewitching Women, Pious Men : Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, eds. Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, University of California Press, 1995, cat04502a.

Hong, Cathy Park. “Cathy Park Hong and Minor Feelings.” Interview by Sharlene Teo, Wasafiri International Contemporary Writing, 2020, https://www.wasafiri.org/article/exclusive-extract-minor-feelings-by-cathy-park-hong/. Accessed 22 July 2020.

Spread the Word. “Sharlene Teo Shares Her Top Tips on Writing ‘Voice’”, https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/sharlene-teo-shares-her-top-tips-on-writing-voice/. Accessed 25 January 2021.

Teo, Sharlene. “Essential Animal.” Life in a Cloud, ed. Natalie Hennedige, Singapore International Festival of the Arts, 2020, https://www.lifeinacloud.co/chapter-fourhttps://www.lifeinacloud.co/chapter-four. Accessed 22 July 2020.

---. “New Voices, Face Mask.” Tate Etc., No. 43, 2018, https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-43-summer-2018/new-voices-sharlene-teo-face-mask. Accessed 22 July 2020. 

---. “Sharlene Teo: Author of Ponti.” First Look Asia, ed. Lance Alexander Yvonne Chan, Channel NewsAsia, 2018. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/video-on-demand/first-look-asia/lifestyle/sharlene-teo-author-of-ponti-10215866, 22 July 2018. Accessed 22 July 2020.

---. Ponti. Picador, 2018.

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