On Pigeon Poetics

 

Pigeon Poetics: Movements to, through, and from Southeast Asia

by Johann Yamin

 

The pigeon is a creature out of place, out of time. A nuisance, a sacred bird, a messenger, a companion. Pigeon Poetics: Movements to, through, and from Southeast Asia brings together a pair of video works, \ ˈpi-jən \ by Vietnamese artist and poet Lananh Chu and Terang Benderang (Clear and Vivid) by artist Khairullah Rahim from Singapore.

 

In both short films, the pigeon is a migratory being that becomes an unwitting accompaniment to the artists’ respective journeys between Southeast Asia and North America. In pairing their video works, the pigeon is constellated within a host of figures on the move: Immigrants, graduate students, migrant workers, and itinerant artists are shown to be tangled within wider flows of migration, both human and non-human. Chu and Khairullah’s video works contend with their own positions within this mix of mobile identities, finding converging points in New York City, where the pigeon’s ubiquitous urban presence conjures a broader media history of the pigeon as a carrier of messages, alongside its migratory history as an invasive species.

 

The film \ ˈpi-jən \ by Lananh Chu explores the characterization of the pigeon as “non-native, non-white, female, dangerous (spreading diseases), and criminal (damaging public property).” Employing handheld footage of New York City taken on the artist’s phone, urban landscapes in the film are punctuated by views of pigeons in the city resting on bodega awnings, congregating around seeds scattered over pavement, or scurrying around skittishly. Two distinct voices, one belonging to the artist, speak over these images, both considering the poor reputation of the pigeon. One of these voices introduces herself: “Black and brown. I’m a descendant of immigrants.” The camera gently floats and pans to follow the movement of a pigeon scuttling about Union Square Park, establishing parallels between the pigeon and racialized immigrant communities in the US in how they are framed, discussed, and imagined. At points across the film, the artist slows down or reverses footage, overlays landscapes and images, or incorporates screen captures from webpages and online articles. The fluidity of these images become a vessel for the artist’s exploration of liquid identities. Creating the work as a Vietnamese graduate student in New York City, Chu’s poetic script reveals the multivalent meanings embedded within the position of the “immigrant”. Her voice states within the film: “I’m not a refugee. Not a diasporic Vietnamese. Not a migrant worker. Because I can’t claim the pain I don’t experience as my intellectual property. Because not all immigrants are the same.” She continues with a litany of overlapping and contradictory subject positions: “They can be colonists settlers pioneers foreigners expatriates newcomers evacuees refugees deportees exiles aliens.”

 

Khairullah Rahim’s experimental documentary, Terang Benderang (Clear and Vivid), considers the varied registers of visibility and invisibility among communities in Boon Lay, a predominantly working-class neighborhood in Singapore where the artist lives. In the film, the artist uses footage that is often mischievously pushed towards abstraction. He uses digital zooms and overexposed images from a camera phone, creating purposefully grainy videos that are occasionally layered with digital elements like filters, ASCII art, and emojis. Pigeons both real and contrived are quickly intercut with a kaleidoscopic array of visual references that collapse the urban spaces and communities in Singapore, the US, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia—places where the artist has lived, studied, and worked. The short film opens with a montage of clips set to thumping electronic beats: In one moment, a flock of birds in flight are spliced with the grainy image of migrant workers in Singapore being dangerously transported in the cargo bed of a truck. Across the work are various other similar visual pairings between pigeons and migrant laborers in work or rest. In these moments, the pigeon becomes a symbolic carrier for the varied contradictory meanings that migrant laborers in Singapore find themselves entangled within: A necessary figure inseparable from the urban landscape—resulting from Singapore's overreliance on precarious, low-wage migrant workers from elsewhere in Asia—yet simultaneously othered by virtue of their non-native status. The opening montage is followed by a narrated story of unauthorized queer relations arranged surreptitiously through an online app. Spoken in Malay, the voice expresses pity over a man’s plight: “He is not from here. His wife is unaware. I don’t know. It must have been horrible.” Through these images and narratives, the artist’s home of Boon Lay serves as a site of departure for the transnational politics of mobile and immobile communities, illuminating both the experience of queer communities made to feel foreign in their home contexts and the dehumanization of low-wage migrant laborers in Singapore. It points towards the varied and overlapping experiences of movement, with communities made invisible through exploitation and erasure while simultaneously made hypervisible through policing and scrutiny. Khairullah’s film concludes with a poem, The History of Mirrors, penned by artist and poet, nor, and delivered as a voiceover by a child. The concluding lines of the poem echo the longing to be seen in one’s full likeness, even when obscured: “will you be my mirror / will you tell me who I am / when my sight eventually turns to grey / will you still keep me warm / and make heat with your touch / will you stave off my hunger / with the sound of your voice / in the absence of light / can I trust you not to deny me / of my likeness.”

 

These explorations of illicit desire located within tides of movement and labor find resonance in the poetry of Bhing Navato, who first arrived in Singapore in 1995 to be a domestic worker, originally hailing from the Philippines. Published in the edited volume by Kristian-Marc James Paul, Mysara Alijaru, and Myle Yan Tay, Brown is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore (2022), Navato’s poem “Shovel and Trolley” explores brown joy in the unauthorized relations that a migrant worker couple shares: “Impermissible, that’s what they think. / Falling in love here puts you on the brink. / For migrants like us they try to forbid. / This relationship that we have is a misdeed. / My brown joy, that is you for me / Who treats me like a queen for a day.” Through the poetics of the pigeon, this pairing of video works conjures the media history of the pigeon as a migratory body and messenger that pays witness to broader swathes of migration across, to and from Southeast Asia, and beyond. It is a hopeful invocation that, in the words of Navato, “Exhausted bodies still find a way.”