TO DRINK UP THE SEA
Islands of Weirdhope, the maritime expandalone to ECO MOFOS!!, by the fearsome pairing of David Blandy and Daniel Locke, is currently crowdfunding.
Scant hours left! The Backerkit campaign ends Tuesday. Go back it NOW.
You should back it because I am part of it. I will be in Four Fathoms Deep, an adventure anthology launching together with the core rulebook. I will be in very good company.
I am still writing my adventure. But I have a title, and I have a blurb:
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TO DRINK UP THE SEA
The tide is falling—continuing to fall. The tide has been falling for three days, now.
On the sand are jellyfish lumps, drying out. Look closer! Their tentacles are bundles of optic fiber.
On the surf is a dolphin, poisoned, dying. “Stay away!” he wheezes. His blowhole sputters blue blood.
In the middle of the bay the waves are breaking. What is it—a shoal, a wreck?
A head, a metal head, the size of a comet. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its temples. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its eyes.
Its eyes are open. It is awake. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its hungry mouths.
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This is a follow up to TO PUT AWAY A SWORD, the dead-mecha adventure I wrote for ECO MOFOS!!.
In SWORD the giant robot was an obvious metaphor for hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry. In SEA the giant robot will be the same. I keep writing about the same things; hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry is personal to me, I guess? I live in a petrogas town. Every breath I take reminds me of hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry.
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Was going to post some images / references that make up my moodboard for this adventure.
The first is the Salton Sea Monster, from the Hellboy / BPRD comics:
A kaiju sitting at the edge of a dead sea, spewing a deadly gas. I can’t help read her as a refinery gas flare.
But she also lays eggs. BPRD as a whole concludes by the world ending—but also beginning again, with the earth now an Eden for the amphibian people born from monsters like her.
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Another is “Dragon’s Breath”, one of five short stories in AS Byatt’s The Djinn In The Nightingale’s Eye.
I’ve never liked this story, but also I’ve never forgotten it: its disgusting dragon(s) like lava flows, like landslides. I believe Byatt wrote the story for / during the Siege of Sarajevo?
In it is the sense of unavoidable catastrophe. That to be human is to dodge around it, prod at it, find boredom in it, rescue what you can from it.
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The most recent is from my own life.
Last week, Senyar, a tropical cyclone, formed in the Straits of Malacca. This never happens in the Strait of Malacca, you understand? Ours are relatively halcyon waters, protected from monsoons, weather systems, tsunamis.
Not any more, I guess.
Hundreds have lost their lives in Sumatra and Thailand.
Senyar hit my hometown last Thursday. The wind wailed; the trees did jigs. I shut what I could, and tried to sleep. The next morning I woke to mess: pools of rainwater in the living room; a porch strewn with pots and branches; trunks and power lines had fallen all around town. (Later the news would report a hundred homes damaged.)
After checking in on loved ones the next thing I did was hurry to our favourite beach, to check in on our favourite mangrove trees. These trees would’ve been worst-hit by the storm.
They survived—though the bedrock around them has eroded further. I worry for them.
Still: our mangroves survived. They survived when concrete did not. During the night, a jetty platform owned by the Petron refinery collapsed into the sea. This is a platform where the tankers moor, to offload crude.
That morning I squinted at the jetty’s rump remainder, water gushing from its broken edge. (No oil spills, thankfully!)
Is the giant in TO DRINK UP THE SEA the cyclone storm, or the petroleum platform?
I don’t know yet. I’ll be writing to find out. It will be an ecocidal disaster, of course. But perhaps such disasters will be calamities for each other—
And I hope imagine us rescue ourselves from them, and belonging, transformed, to the world that comes after.
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Go back Islands of Weirdhope >>>HERE<<<
The Whine
On 13 June 2021 I delivered the closing keynote for the Freeplay Independent Games Festival 2021.
This was a privilege I felt I could only honour by speaking personally and candidly about what it felt like, to create from a context as self-marginalising as Southeast Asia.
Here is a recording of the speech, plus Q&A and additional comments:
Below is the text in full, with some of the accompanying images.
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THE WHINE
The whole of last week, I’ve been thinking about what to say to you, dear friends. But I have been distracted. You cannot hear it, because noise-cancellation technology removes it.
But:
There is a whine in the air, in my head: like the sound an airplane makes, idling on the tarmac with its turbines spinning spinning spinning, keening.
Eee. It never ends.
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I live in a small town called Port Dickson. It is a petrogas town. There are two hundred metres between my front porch and the Shell Refining Company.
The Shell Refining Company produces up to one hundred and twenty thousand barrels a day. At night, its double gas flare lights up my bedroom with a never-ending sunset. Night or day those flares do not stop burning. Night or day, the plant’s loud turbine-whine does not end.
Roll a six-sided die:
1: You grind your teeth in your sleep. Your jaw hurts the next morning.
2: You play Doom. You hear the whine under all that glitch synth metal.
3: You lie awake. You watch the gas flare dance shadows on the wall.
4: You type out a twenty-three-tweet thread about colonialism in games.
5: You ring the refinery. They tell you they are compliant with regulations.
6: You jump out of bed to check the stove. The air smells sharp with gas.
Eee. It never ends.
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The refinery and its flare has snuck into my work a few times, now.
Fuel Buffalo, “Creatures of Near Kingdoms”, Zedeck Siew & Sharon Chin
Here is the linocut illustration that visual artist Sharon Chin made for the Fuel Buffalo, one of the animals in “Creatures of Near Kingdoms”, a bestiary-slash-herbiary of imaginary living things Sharon and I made together, in 2018.
Sharon and I live together. She is bothered by the whine, even more so than I.
The Beacon, “Spy in the House of Eth”, Zedeck Siew & Ben Brown & Zach Cox
Here is the lighthouse from “Spy In The House Of Eth”, an RPG adventure I wrote in 2020 for the dark fantasy tabletop-RPG “Best Left Buried”.
“Spy In The House Of Eth” is a hexcrawl, set in a region called the Ethland, named after the conquistador who annexed it. His descendants have turned the place into a vast agro-industrial monoculture: plantations, warehouses, processing plants.
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That is what Malaysia looks like: a petroleum gas flare lighting up rolling hills of agro-industrial monoculture.
It began in the colonial era, with the Empire’s need for rubber; then in 1917 British planters introduced oil palm. The forest clearing hasn’t stopped, since.
Eee. It never ends. Roll a four-sided die:
1: Think of a man who stole your slippers for his museum.
2: Think of a man who forced you into an internment camp.
3: Think of a man who put his name to your founding myth.
4: Think of a man who believed you and yours lived in trees.
My hometown was once called Tanjung Arang. Then a man called
John Frederick Dickson arrived. He was never important enough to learn about, in school; I know the details of his life only from what Google tells me.
He was president of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society for several years, apparently? They renamed my hometown in his honour: Port Dickson.
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Empire has since left. But we inherited its names, its imagination.
The term and idea of Southeast Asia was first popularised in World War Two. The field of Southeast Asian Studies was founded in Western academia, funded by Cold-War-era American foreign policy. They need to understand their periphery. This battleground for their proxy wars.
So peripheral we continued to be. And peripheral was the way we came to conceive ourselves. An adjunct branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. There is a village in my home state called Kampung LBJ – it was renamed after Lyndon B Johnson was brought there during a state visit.
What drives brown people to rename themselves in honour of Westerners?
Colonies leapt off the maps and into our heads. Roll a six-sided die:
1: You need to study hard so that you can get a scholarship to study in Australia.
2: You are told that it is an economic necessity to break into the UK-US market.
3: You have called the pontianak a “Malay version of the vampire” in online fora.
4: You grew up proud that your family owned a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
5: You know more about the politics of Baltimore than that of your own hometown.
6: You are told by your editors that your new book might need a Manglish glossary.
For the first twenty-odd years of my life, I was an airplane idling on the tarmac, turbines spinning spinning spinning, head full of exports destined for the metropole, somewhere I could truly matter.
Somewhere with access to Covid-19 vaccines, say.
Eee. It never ends.
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We have tried to make ourselves matter, over the years.
Malaysia during the Mahathir era was infamous for building biggest-longest-tallest monuments – the Twin Towers, Putrajaya – petroleum wealth spent in phallic enormity, as if that would shift compasses our way.
Our ethno-nationalists love talking about the Sultanate of Malacca as the model Malay Muslim kingdom – an Empire, really, with dominion over large portions of the Nusantara, comparable in might and stature to other Empires: Maurya, Mongol China, Macedonia.
With such an interrupted history, we have no trails to trace, except those our old masters left us. We measure ourselves by how much we fill their shoes, outrun their steps. Roll a four-sided die:
Image source: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/malaysia-prepares-to-deport-myanmar-asylum-seekers-and-detainees-despite-outcry
1: You buy oil extraction rights in other third-world countries.
2: You arrest refugees, send them home to their oppressors.
3: You put your international airport on Orang Asli burial land.
4: You adulate your coup government in three-storey murals.
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Whenever I make or write or design, half my mind is occupied by the whine.
Roll a six-sided die:
1: You yourself think your manuscript needs a glossary of common local terms. You write the glossary, delete it, then write it again.
2: You calculate how much you will need to describe a durian – should you say it is spiky? Do you have to say it smells like garlic?
3: You get a message: “I love your adventure, but I’m too afraid to run it myself, I know nothing about SEA, what if I get stuff wrong?”
4: You suspect your peers see you as a competitor. There is only one seat for your identity at the table. You hate even thinking this.
5: You type out a twenty-three-tweet thread explaining why a Disney animated movie will never be a triumph of SEA representation.
6: You lie awake, going over everything you said on a forum, fearful you have mischaracterised an aspect of your society, your context.
Actually, put the dice down. Don’t roll. All the results apply, all at once, all the time. Eee goes the whine. It never ends, it never ends, it never ends.
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The awareness of being seen as representative. Even right now, at this moment, talking to you, dear friends, I feel it coming up behind me:
The need to hold the torch for my context. The duty to speak on behalf of, to do justice, to shine a light on. Ambassadorial bullshit. The idea that my value is in being representative, that I am incentivised to be representative. Not something that was asked of me, ever; nor something that I wished for –
Yet there, a psychic burden put there by power relations, by material realities, history and geography. The same reasons why I am two hundred metres from a petroleum refinery.
The Western gaze, a background whine in the mind, a mental death I need to get over, every single time I sit down, before I can even start to make anything living.
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Let’s finally talk about games.
The long-term game project I’m working on is a series of zines collectively called A Thousand Thousand Islands.
A Thousand Thousand Islands began in 2017 as a research project by visual artist Mun Kao. He wanted a closer look at pre-colonial material culture. It frustrated him that our imagination of the past had been abridged into a single figure – the Malay warrior.
“Some 300 protestors … calling on the Yang Di-Pertuan Agong to intervene in what they claim were acts of insults against the monarchy, Malays and Muslims.” Source: https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/510959
Roll a four-sided die:
1: You wear trousers and a tanjak as tall as your own face.
2: You are brandishing your keris, with its thirteen waves.
3: You are bowing before your king, saying: “Ampun tuanku.”
4: You are ready to fight invaders, to die for god and soil.
Don’t roll, by the way. That random table is a lie. It is only ever tanjak and keris and Islamic feudalism. An ethno-nationalist monoculture.
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Considering how rich this region was with dyes and patterns, with peoples and genders, with myths and magics, how did we become so impoverished?
These last four years, Mun Kao and I have made zines inspired by:
Five adventurers, “Drawings Part Two”, Mun Kao
Crocodile folktales from the Linggi River; Thai cat manuals; Batek pacifism; haunted bungalows in the Cameron Highlands; precolonial Chinese settlements in Borneo; Kelantanese monsoon festivals; tamu bazaars; weaving practices in East Lombok.
Each booklet describes a setting: an archipelago, a people, a community. Each the centre of its own mandala.
Here’s the creation story from Hundred Red Scales, our latest zine:
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Hundred Red Scale, “Hundred Red Scales”, Mun Kao & Zedeck Siew
“ In the time before time, Pa the man-god swam the breadth of the sea so he could be wed to the goddess Hundred Red Scale.
Hundred Red Scale’s gift was beauty: she had a jewelled hide, gleaming in every shade of ruby.
Hundred Red Scale’s genius was love: she learned passion from her mother the earth, and practiced her lissom arts with orchid and otter, tiger and tern, heaving river and hard mountain.
Lover to all, she was loved by all.
This made her husband unhappy. Pa the man-god felt jealousy. Swimming the sea, on their return journey, she coupled with the fishes they met. And these fishes raised hymns to Hundred Red Scale.
Hearing praise for her, but none for him, her husband became enraged. He murdered her: cut off her head and hands and tail. Broke her teeth. Drank her blood.
After which Pa the man-god departed, leaving her pieces there, counting on the sea to swallow his sin.
But the waves fell in love with Hundred Red Scale, even as they ate her. They could not forget. Where they broke they whispered songs of her love – and in such places mangroves grew:
Trees whose bark still weep the colour of the goddess Hundred Red Scale’s beauty. ”
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These aren’t RPG setting gazetteers in the conventional sense. There are no keyed streets, no border maps. How are the islands arranged? Grab your stack of zines – drop them on the floor. A zine-drop table.
All founding myths are true. There is no centre to A Thousand Thousand Islands. A city may aspire to be a metropole. Its zine is as slim as the zine about a rural village among the paddy hills.
We’ve tried to build worlds without the shorthand of statistics, taxonomy, or price lists in gp. Roll a six-sided die:
1: You see farmers replanting a field. What do their work-songs say?
2: You meet a hat-stylist. How many ways can you adorn your head?
3: You work with a boatwright. What kinds of prows does she carve?
4: You enter the emigre quarter. How do they describe their homeland?
5: You walk in the forest. What words must you avoid speaking aloud?
6: You wait for your audience with a god. Who waits here with you?
There is no better format to explore these things. Tabletop RPGs are about building and breathing life to worlds; I’d argue their potential in this regard is unparalleled.
Think about it: what is a roleplaying game, but a seed of imagination designers give to players and gamemasters – so they can grow imaginations of their own, to care for and grow together at their own tables?
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But these zines – like all my work, when I can finally get over the whine – are not meant to represent any place, any people. If you pick them up hoping for an explication of – and therefore a command of – Southeast Asian history or Malaysian politics, you will be disappointed.
These zines weren’t written to speak to you.
Sharing sirih, “Drawings Part Two”, Mun Kao
They are for us. Mun Kao and I are centering ourselves, tending to our own garden. Tending to the needs of our selves, our land. The zines are seed bombs we are throwing against the Malay-warrior monoculture in our minds. Seed bombs to rehabilitate our own imaginations.
One day, maybe. Maybe. These seeds will grow trees tall and thick enough to screen us from the whine.
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But – here. You can have a seed bomb. The nice thing about a seed is that, with your care, it could sprout in your own garden. If you want. Let it flower in your mind.
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In 2016, Royal Dutch Shell sold its Port Dickson operations to the Shandong Hengyuan Petrochemical Group, a Chinese conglomerate.
Ever since, the Shell Refining Company has been the Hengyuan Refining Company. They expand the plant. The double gas flare is now a triple gas flare. Though our masters change often, the drive of imperialist capital stays.
Eee. The whine in my head remains.
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Every evening, as the sun sets, the birds of Port Dickson return to roost. They don’t live in trees; they live in the Hengyuan Refining Company. They nest amid the machinery. They are there because it is warm, and safe – snakes cannot traverse the refinery’s industrial scree.
The whine doesn’t seem to bother them, oddly. Maybe they shout over it. They are twenty-thousand strong. The racket they make is louder than anything.
The birds cackle and sleep and shit. They present an actual problem to refinery operations; their shit is a slipping hazard for workers. I know the plant has consulted ornithologists for ways to deal with the problem.
Soaring Bird-of-Paradise, “Creatures of Near Kingdoms”, Zedeck Siew & Sharon Chin
The ornithologists told Hengyuan: “As long as the refinery is here, the birds will not be going anywhere.”
If you will allow me one last turn of this already spinning, turbining metaphor:
Dear friends:
The things I’ve heard yarned about here, at Freeplay, about art and activism, about indigeneity and resistance, about poetics and play – thank you for having me.
We are birds, squawking together, roosting in ravaged homes – homes, nonetheless – sharing space. Thank you for sharing your space with me. May we continue to shit on the powers that poison us, and sing against the whine.
Thank you.
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My sincerest thanks again to Freeplay, and to festival director Chad Toprak, for the invitation.
