Xin Wei THOW

Review of Koh Jee Leong’s Connor & Seal: A Harlem Story in 47 Poems, published in QLRS Vol. 19 No. 4 Oct 2020

Excerpt:

This effort to understand is not made out to be easy: in Seal’s frenetic musings in ‘I have been barking at the sun the bone’, he asks:

what shall I choose from the catalogue
the causes are so many and so urgent
defend the sloe impeach the president
the dialectic has mushroomed to dialogue

Where does one find the time for this in this age where so much commitment is demanded so urgently; where does one find the motivation when there is no new thesis in the dialectic, but only an endless dialogue?

Despite the effort required, however, the overall architecture of the book encourages us to take the act of understanding and the dialogue it engenders positively. Here I want to turn to the image of the mandolin, a recurring motif in Thomas and Beulah that appears in Koh’s epigraph to Connor & Seal. This instrument is double-strung: that is, each note has two strings that are plucked together. In doing so the sound produced is louder and more resonant than with one string alone. But I am also thinking of another double-strung instrument I happen to be familiar with, the Javanese siter, where the two strings for each note are deliberately tuned slightly away from each other, in order to create a fuller sounding pitch when struck together.