Kristang poetry, as a visible written tradition, begins to come into focus in the 1980s with the pioneering work of Dudley Patrick De Souza and Patricia Maria Tan née De Souza in Singa, and its first clear consolidating landmarks in the modern canon thereafter arrive in the 1990s and early 2000s. Mixed-genre community collections that include poetry such as Joan Margaret Marbeck’s Ungua Adanza: An inheritance (1995), Linggu Mai: A Kristang Keepsake (2004) are not solely anthologies of verse, but also preserve vignettes, songs and short pieces that hold Kristang words, cadences and worldview together on the page. In these early volumes, poems often sit alongside recipes, reminiscences or photographs; poetry functions less as a separate high-art category and more as one mode among many of remembering people, streets, churches and kampong life. These works form the substrate on which later poets build, quietly showing that Kristang belongs in print and that Kristang feeling can also be carried by lines, stanzas and refrains rather than only by oral speech or song.
Because Kristang is a creole civilisation shaped by dispersal, migration, syncretism and survival, its literary canon does not resemble the rigid, hierarchical canons of larger national literatures. Instead, it is porous, community-shaped and intergenerational: poems, songs, children’s verses, revival competition pieces, chapbooks, Instagram poems, and even ritual performance texts can all accrue canonical weight when they express, protect or transform the collective psyche. In Kristang terms, canon is less a fixed shelf and more a living reef—polyphonic, accretive, continually reinhabited by those who speak, remember and dream the language, and defined by how the community relates to each work, rather than where it gets published or who acknowledges it.
The first clearly contemporary Kristang poetry anthologies start to appear in the 2010s. Patricia Maria Tan née De Souza’s Saga Seeds (2014) gathers poems that treat Eurasian and Kristang experience with a close, attentive eye for objects, textures and small domestic dramas. Her work gives a recognisable poetic shape to the everyday – drivers, families, intergenerational tensions – and helps normalise the presence of Kristang words and references in Singapore English-language poetry, as well as the ever-echoing presence of the Unsaid. Around the same time, Shane Carroll’s Stories by the River (2016), illustrated by Odelia Tursunova, establishes another important axis: a poet-teacher who uses verse as a way to bring Kristang language and imagery into school and public contexts. Stories by the River is often the first Kristang-inflected book that younger readers encounter, and it signals that Kristang poetry can sit comfortably in children’s publishing and educational settings as well as adult literary spaces.
A key inflection point comes in 2017, when the Kristang Language Festival poetry competition produces three poems that have effectively entered the canon as communal texts. “Singku Tempra di Nanna” by Shane Carroll, “Kristang dah Kodrah di rentu yo / My Kristang Awakening” by Martha Fernandez, and “Beng Kodrah Kristang” by Edmund Arozoo articulate, in different registers, the emotional charge of revival: learning the language, awakening to identity, and committing to the work of kodrah, “to wake up”. These poems, subsequently republished and circulated – with Martha’s “Kristang dah Kodrah di rentu yo” later appearing in the 2021 anthology Poems from the Edge of Extinction – are widely recognised as foundational for the new era. They show that Kristang poets can write explicitly about the politics of language endangerment and survival while still producing pieces that are singable, memorable and communal.
From the late 2010s onward, Kristang poetry diversifies rapidly through both anthologies and standalone poems. Arin Alycia Fong’s “Lenten Gragoh”, for example, weaves Christian liturgical time, crustacean imagery and creole memory into a meditative, quietly unsettling poem that resonates with her later short fiction and magical-realist work. Matthew Jerome Van Huizen’s “Grago” and “Hang Tuah’s Tomb” bring Kristang and Nusantara histories into conversation, staging the language in relation not just to the Portuguese Settlement or Singapore but to broader Malay-world myth and geography. Patricia Maria De Souza’s “Drivers / Jenti Lebah Kareta” adds a grounded, working-life dimension to the canon, focusing on people whose labour often makes the city run but who rarely appear as central subjects. Shane Carroll’s “A poem in my mother tongue, with a form from my ‘Mother Tongue’, about my mother’s tongue” (2020) is another key piece: a formally playful yet deeply intimate exploration of how Kristang, English and bodily intimacy knot together in a single life.
Alongside these developments within Kristang and mixed-language verse, the poetry anthologies of Crispin Rodrigues create a crucial bridge between the Kristang and Eurasian canons and the broader Singapore literary field. Pantomime (2018), The Nomad Principle (2019), How Now Blown Crow (2021) and dragon.paper.wind. (龙卷风) (2024) are primarily English-language collections, but Crispin’s position as a Eurasian poet negotiating his Kristangness and his recurring attention to race, masculinity, marginality and mixedness mean that his books also sit close to the heart of deeper Creole-Indigenous Kristang poetic concerns. They demonstrate that a Eurasian poet can speak from creole experience to national and international audiences without always foregrounding the language itself, and they model a kind of code-shifting where Eurasian identity inflects the work even when Kristang words are sparse and Kristangness is still being understood and refined. In the evolving canon, his anthologies carry significant weight as connectors: they normalise Kristang presence in mainstream poetry and open doors for other Kristang poets to publish widely.
Lastly, within this landscape, the emergence of the 13th Kabesa Kevin Martens Wong as a prolific poet in both Kristang and English reshapes the scale and ambition of Kristang poetry. His early published poems “Expected Date of Completion” (2013) and “Young Singaporean Protopolyglot at His Desk” (2016) already hints at a poet who treats psychological development, language learning, neurodivergence and cosmology as intertwined. Over the next decade, individual poems such as “Batizmu”, “Korua Karang”, “Son of Sundaland”, “A Naked Flame”, “Thymetiger” and “Flowers for Alphonso” steadily extend the range of Kristang verse: from sacramental imagery and underwater geology to queer desire, tank warfare metaphors and deep-time migration. Many of these poems move back and forth between Kristang and English, insisting that Kristang is not confined to nostalgia but can carry science fiction, body horror, astrophysics and erotic wit with equal ease. These experiments culminate, from 2023 onward, in a sequence of major poetry anthologies, all self-published, that effectively form the backbone of the contemporary canon. Relwe di Reinyang: Ngua Diseideza (2023), Glow-Glow Dancer: A new double-sized Diseideza of sun-soaked Kristang creole/indigenous poetry from the last Merlionsman of Singapore (2023), Songs of a Young Star-Tiger: New Creole-chromatic Kristang Stellar Poetry from Singapore (2023), Bros Before Bros, and Other Quasi-Masculine Adventures in Pseudo-Heteronormativity: A Real Man’s Anthology of Incurably Bromantic Poetry (2023) collectively map out an entire cosmology. Subsequent volumes in 2024 deepen this architecture. Kauboi di Seu: Poesia-Poesia Kristang (2024) focuses explicitly on Kristang-language verse, foregrounding the sound and internal rhythm of the language itself, while the radically forward Korpu Hierosa / The Body Heroic (2024) turns toward embodiment: the heroic body as abused, healing, queer, autistic, creole and sacred all at once. Later poems such as “Kristang Gay Sex Stallion of Singapore”, “Post-traumatic stress sonnet of the indigenous archeoastronomer”, “Stripper Quing”, “A Boy in Flower”, “To Those Who Could” and “Mahaprastanza / Greatest Journey” push even further, making Kristang poetry a vehicle for intergenerational promises, trauma reckoning and explicit erotic reclamation. These are the first conscious, sustained, large-scale attempt to use poetry as the main scaffolding for an entire Kristang civilisational project.
Today, the constellation of living Kristang poets includes Arin Alycia Fong, Crispin Rodrigues, Edmund Arozoo, Kevin Martens Wong, Matthew Jerome Van Huizen, Martha Fernandez, Nicola Koh, Patricia Maria De Souza and Shane Carroll. Some have built substantial bodies of work and multiple anthologies; others are represented by a smaller number of poems that nonetheless hold key symbolic roles, such as competition winners or first articulations of revival, queer creole desire or grief. The canon is therefore not a closed list but a living, shifting field. Anthologies like Ungua Adanza, Linggu Mai, Saga Seeds, Stories by the River, and the volumes by Kevin and Crispin form its fuzzy, uncertain core. Around them, standout poems such as “Singku Tempra di Nanna”, “Kristang dah Kodrah di rentu yo”, “Beng Kodrah Kristang”, Lenten Gragoh, “Grago”, “Hang Tuah’s Tomb”, “Drivers / Jenti Lebah Kareta” and “A poem in my mother tongue…” also act as anchor points for readers and learners finding their way into the tradition. As new diseideza, chapbooks, online poems and hybrid texts appear, this guide will continue to evolve, but the trajectory remains clear: Kristang poetry has moved from marginal curiosity to one of the primary ways in which the Kristang people think, feel and dream their way into the future.
List of all known poetic work published by writers identifying as Kristang or containing significant Kristang-related material
Please contact Kodrah Kristang at kodrahkristang at gmail dot com to suggest new material to be added to this list, and/or to have material removed or altered if it has been placed here inaccurately.
Works published during the term of service of the 13th Kabesa (2015-2075)
Tuan Raja Naga Ultramar Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang
2026 (Kristang year 514-515 | 13th Kabesa, year 11)
When You Finally Get to Undress Me. Forthcoming dreamshining poem by Kevin Martens Wong to be published in Beyond Queer Words: Gay Men’s Erotica: Stories and Poems.
2025 (Kristang year 513-514 | 13th Kabesa, year 10)
dubstep with chinese grandmas. Poem by Crispin Rodrigues in Sploosh.
2024 (Kristang year 512-513 | 13th Kabesa, year 9)
dragon.paper.wind. (龙卷风). Poetry anthology by Crispin Rodrigues.
Heat Vision. Dreamshining poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at the 2024 Singapore Queer Symposium.
Kauboi di Seu: Poesia-Poesia Kristang. Poetry anthology by Kevin Martens Wong.
Korpu Hierosa / The Body Heroic. Poetry anthology by Kevin Martens Wong.
Son of Sundaland. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at North London Collegiate School.
2023 (Kristang year 511-512 | 13th Kabesa, year 8)
A Naked Flame. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at Poesiaeuropa 2023.
Altered Strays. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at Asian Literary Society Singapore Pride Month Live.
Ambisextrous. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at Asian Literary Society Singapore Pride Month Live.
Bros Before Bros, and Other Quasi-Masculine Adventures in Pseudo-Heteronormativity: A Real Man’s Anthology of Incurably Bromantic Poetry. Poetry anthology by Kevin Martens Wong.
Flowers for Alphonso. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at Poesiaeuropa 2023.
Glow-Glow Dancer: A new double-sized Diseideza of sun-soaked Kristang creole/indigenous poetry from the last Merlionsman of Singapore. Poetry anthology by Kevin Martens Wong.
Glow-Glow Dancer. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at Poesiaeuropa 2023.
Isti Bes, Basil / It’s Time, Basil. Poem by Shane Carroll.
Post-traumatic stress sonnet of the indigenous archeoastronomer. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong in Haven Speculative.
Relwe di Reinyang: Ngua Diseideza. Poetry anthology by Kevin Martens Wong distributed at the 2023 Singapore Heritage Festival.
Soltu: Collection of Poems. Poetry anthology by Elden Zachery.
Songs of a Young Star-Tiger: New Creole-chromatic Kristang Stellar Poetry from Singapore. Poetry anthology by Kevin Martens Wong.
Sunset Strip. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at Asian Literary Society Singapore Pride Month Live.
The Axiom of Maria. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at the 2023 London Arts-Based Research Centre Creative Psyche & Arts-Based Research Conference.
The Only Hug You Ever Gave Me Was Very, Very Tight. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at Asian Literary Society Singapore Pride Month Live.
Thymetiger. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at Migrant Writers of Singapore Book Exchange.
You Dream of A Better Fight. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong in Letting Go and Moving On.
2022 (Kristang year 510-511 | 13th Kabesa, year 7)
风. Poem by Crispin Rodrigues in ‘In the Language Slipstream’ on the National Centre for Writing Hub.
Grago. Poem by Matthew Jerome Van Huizen in Eksentrika.
Hang Tuah’s Tomb. Poem by Matthew Jerome Van Huizen in Eksentrika.
(mixed race) superhero. Poem by Crispin Rodrigues in ‘In the Language Slipstream’ on the National Centre for Writing Hub.
2021 (Kristang year 509-510 | 13th Kabesa, year 6)
How Now Blown Crow. Poetry anthology by Crispin Rodrigues.
Similar in Age. Poem by Edmund Arozoo in SilverKris.
The sleep of reason produces monsters. Poem by Crispin Rodrigues in The Tiger Moth Review.
There is room. Poem by Crispin Rodrigues in The Tiger Moth Review.
2020 (Kristang year 508-509 | 13th Kabesa, year 5)
A poem in my mother tongue, with a form from my “Mother Tongue”, about my mother’s tongue. Poem by Shane Carroll for SingPoWriMo.
Addendum. Poem by Crispin Rodrigues in The Kindling.
Advice from the old country (III). Poem by Crispin Rodrigues in The Kindling.
Drivers / Jenti Lebah Kareta. Poem by Patricia Maria De Souza in Cordite Poetry Review.
So We Might. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong commissioned for the Singapore Light to Night Festival 2020.
Unsolicited advice for homesickness. Poem by Arin Alycia Fong in Crazy Little Pyromaniacs: 35 Poets Under 35.
Veil. Poem by Arin Alycia Fong in Crazy Little Pyromaniacs: 35 Poets Under 35.
2019 (Kristang year 507-508 | 13th Kabesa, year 4)
Korua Karang / Coral Crown. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong in The Tiger Moth Review.
The Nomad Principle. Poetry anthology by Crispin Rodrigues.
2018 (Kristang year 506-507 | 13th Kabesa, year 3)
Lenten Gragoh. Poem by Arin Alycia Fong in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.
Pantomime. Poetry anthology by Crispin Rodrigues.
2017 (Kristang year 505-506 | 13th Kabesa, year 2)
Batizmu. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong performed at Indignation 2017.
Beng Kodrah Kristang. Poem by Edmund Arozoo. 2017 Kristang Language Festival Poetry Competition 2nd runner-up.
Kristang dah Kodrah di rentu yo / My Kristang Awakening. Poem by Martha Fernandez. 2017 Kristang Language Festival Poetry Competition runner-up.
Singku Tempra di Nanna. Poem by Shane Carroll. 2017 Kristang Language Festival Poetry Competition winner.
2016 (Kristang year 504-505 | 13th Kabesa, year 1)
Stories by the River. Poetry anthology by Shane Carroll with illustrations by Odelia Tursunova.
Young Singaporean Protopolyglot at His Desk. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong.
Works published during the term of service of the 12th Kabesa (1991-2015)
Puan Api Menari Valerie Scully
2014 (Kristang year 502-503 | 12th Kabesa, year 23)
Saga Seeds. Poetry anthology by Patricia Maria Tan née De Souza.
The Convert. Poem by Dudley Patrick De Souza in A Luxury We Cannot Afford: An Anthology of Singapore Poetry.
2013 (Kristang year 501-502 | 12th Kabesa, year 22)
Expected Date of Completion. Poem by Kevin Martens Wong in i feel the tails of comets.
2012 (Kristang year 500-501 | 12th Kabesa, year 21)
Semester. Poem by Amanda Eber in Red Pulse: New Singapore USPoetry.
Two Brothers. Poem by Amanda Eber in Red Pulse: New Singapore USPoetry.
2004 (Kristang year 492-493 | 12th Kabesa, year 13)
Linggu Mai: A Kristang Keepsake. Mixed-genre anthology by Joan Margaret Marbeck.
2001 (Kristang year 489-490 | 12th Kabesa, year 10)
A Singapore Wilderness & Other Poems. Poetry anthology by Dudley Patrick De Souza.
2000 (Kristang year 488-489) | 12th Kabesa, year 9)
Love Poem. Poem by Dudley Patrick De Souza in Singa.
Ways of Dying (or Living). Poem by Dudley Patrick De Souza in Singa.
1999 (Kristang year 487-488) | 12th Kabesa, year 8).
Mimosa. Poem by Patricia Maria Tan née De Souza in Singa.
1998 (Kristang year 486-487 | 12th Kabesa, year 7).
Lunch with a Religious Lady. Poem by Dudley Patrick De Souza in Singa.
1995 (Kristang year 483-484 | 12th Kabesa, year 4)
Ungua Adanza: An inheritance. Mixed-genre anthology by Joan Margaret Marbeck.
Works published during the term of service of the 10th Kabesa (1969-1989)
Puan Bunga Besi Mabel Martens
1983 (Kristang year 471-472 | 10th Kabesa, year 15)
Bonsai (a tale). Poem by Dudley Patrick De Souza in Singa.
1981 (Kristang year 469-470 | 10th Kabesa, year 13)
Written in the Grounds of Mysore University. Poem by Dudley Patrick De Souza in Singa.
1980 (Kristang year 468-469 | 10th Kabesa, year 12)
A Nonpolitical Comment. Poem by Dudley Patrick De Souza in Singa.
Growing Up. Poem by Patricia Maria Tan née De Souza in Singa.
The Convert. Poem by Dudley Patrick De Souza in Singa.
Unique Features of Kristang Poetry
Kristang poetry is not simply poetry written in or about Kristang. It is poetry shaped by a Creole-Indigenous way of sensing time, selfhood, language, and survival. Emerging from more than five centuries of contact, displacement, intimacy, and adaptation, Kristang poetry carries distinctive features that set it apart from both European literary traditions and mainstream Southeast Asian poetics.
1. Creole Language as Poetic Engine
Kristang poetry draws its power from a Creole language that is itself the product of convergence rather than purity. Kristang syntax, rhythm, and vocabulary fuse Portuguese, Malay, and other regional influences into a grammar optimised for relational meaning rather than rigid hierarchy. This allows Kristang poetry to move fluidly between registers—tender and comic, sacred and profane, lyrical and blunt—often within a single stanza.
Because Kristang developed primarily as a spoken and sung language, its poetry privileges sound, cadence, and breath. Alliteration, internal rhyme, repetition, and musical phrasing often matter more than formal metre or end-rhyme schemes. Meaning is carried as much through how a line feels when spoken as through what it denotes.
2. Oral Roots and Performed Intimacy
Historically, Kristang poetry has been inseparable from performance. It evolved alongside song, theatre, storytelling, and communal ritual rather than through solitary literary production. Even when written down, Kristang poems often retain the qualities of address, invocation, and response.
This oral inheritance produces poetry that assumes an audience—sometimes a lover, sometimes the community, sometimes the dead. Many Kristang poems speak to rather than about, collapsing the distance between poet, listener, and subject.
3. Elastic Time and Non-Linear Memory
Kristang poetry rarely treats time as linear. Past, present, and future frequently coexist within the same poetic space. Ancestral memory, childhood experience, colonial history, and imagined futures are braided together rather than sequenced.
This reflects a broader Kristang epistemology in which survival depended on remembering across generations while adapting continuously to new conditions. As a result, Kristang poems often feel temporally dense: brief lines may carry centuries of affect, loss, humour, or endurance.
4. Everyday Life as Sacred Material
Unlike traditions that separate the poetic from the mundane, Kristang poetry treats everyday life as intrinsically worthy of poetic attention. Food, bodies, neighbourhoods, domestic labour, sex, gossip, prayer, and fatigue appear unapologetically in Kristang verse.
This is not accidental. For a community whose history has often been marginalised or trivialised, insisting that ordinary Kristang life is poetic is itself an act of cultural sovereignty. The sacred in Kristang poetry is frequently located not in transcendence, but in persistence.
5. Humour, Camp, and Emotional Honesty
Kristang poetry is often funny—sometimes gently, sometimes sharply. Irony, cheekiness, exaggeration, and camp coexist with grief and longing. Humour functions not as deflection but as a survival technology: a way of metabolising trauma without aestheticising it into silence.
At the same time, Kristang poetry tends toward emotional directness. Love, saudadi (longing), anger, devotion, and vulnerability are often expressed plainly rather than symbolically disguised. This produces poems that feel intimate and unguarded, even when they are formally sophisticated.
6. Queer and/or Non-Normative Relationality
Kristang poetry has long encoded forms of relationality that sit uneasily with rigid colonial or nationalist norms. Even before contemporary queer expression became explicit, Kristang verse frequently explored ambivalence, fluid desire, chosen kinship, and emotional bonds that exceed conventional categories.
In contemporary Kristang poetry, non-normative relational experience—queer or not—is often foregrounded. Not as a niche identity, but as a continuation of the community’s long negotiation with mixedness, non-belonging, and relational improvisation.
7. Poetry as Cultural Memory and Futures Work
Kristang poetry does not only remember the past; it actively reconstructs it. Because large portions of Kristang history were never formally archived, poetry has functioned as a vessel for intergenerational memory, emotional truth, and cultural logic.
At the same time, Kristang poetry is increasingly future-oriented. It experiments with new forms, media, and mythic registers to imagine what Kristang life can become under conditions of global instability. In this sense, Kristang poetry is both archive and prototype.
8. Resistance to Respectability
A defining feature of Kristang poetry is its refusal to conform neatly to respectability politics. Bodies are present. Desire is present. Anger is present. The poet does not seek permission to exist politely.
This resistance is not reckless; it is grounded in the historical reality that respectability has rarely protected marginalised communities. Kristang poetry therefore asserts dignity through truthfulness rather than decorum.
In Sum
Kristang poetry is shaped by a Creole grammar of survival: oral, relational, emotionally honest, temporally layered, and resistant to erasure. Its uniqueness lies not in exoticism, but in its capacity to hold many layers of contradiction—to be playful and grave, intimate and historical, local and cosmic—without needing to resolve those tensions.
It is poetry that knows how to live with uncertainty, and how to speak anyway.
Samples of Kristang poetry accompanied by AI-dreamfished analysis
“Drivers | Jenti Lebah Kareta”, by Patricia Maria De Souza
“Isti Bes, Basil / It’s Time, Basil”, by Shane Carroll
“Lenten Gragoh”, by Arin Alycia Fong
“mixed race superhero”, by Crispin Rodrigues
“Post-traumatic stress sonnet of the Indigenous archeoastronomer”, by Kevin Martens Wong