Kristang poetry sample
Text from Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (17(4), October 2018)
Lenten Gragoh
by Arin Alycia Fong (2018)
On Monday I come home to the smell of
gragoh; Nanny is drying prawn paste
by the kitchen window. It smells fishy in the
back bathroom. Like period blood.
Tuesday the entire house smells
like salted fish. Nanny is frying sambal belacan,
the smell of the Straits flooding,
crusting the cabinets with salt and grime.
Wednesday smells like something has
died. Our heads crossed with ash.
Nanny asks what’s my sacrifice this Lent
as she beheads a chicken for Curry Devil.
Thursday’s supper is bread and Ribena.
Nanny cleans out the sotong.
Father James washes the altar boys’
feet, among other things.
By Good Friday all smells have died.
I eat a hot cross bun and drag my soles to
church to kiss a statue
of the Lord’s bloody feet.
Easter Sunday; Sambal Sotong in the fridge.
Belacan in jars. The longer you keep the Devil,
the tastier it is. I enter the kitchen.
Nanny’s already there
like Mary Magdalene weeping
at the tomb.
I smell the sea again.
It has risen.
An AI-Dreamfished Analysis of “Lenten Gragoh”, by Arin Alycia Fong (2018)
Arin Alcyia Fong’s “Lenten Gragoh” uses creole language as a poetic engine that imports smell, texture, labour, and memory directly into the poem, doing semantic work that English alone cannot. Words such as gragoh, sambal belacan, Curry Devil (kari debal), and sotong are not ornamental local colour but structural carriers that compress histories of trade, Catholic ritual, domestic survival, and maritime life into single lexical units. In Kristang poetics, food words are rarely neutral nouns—they are engines of time, place, and identity—and here they function as anchors through which Lent itself is creolised and reinterpreted.
The poem is deeply grounded in oral roots and performed intimacy, unfolding like a spoken recounting of a week rather than a formally “composed” liturgical reflection. The day-by-day structure mirrors storytelling rhythms common to kitchen-table narratives: Monday smells like this; Tuesday like that. The repetition of “Nanny” situates her as both a domestic authority and an oral transmitter of tradition, someone whose actions speak more loudly than explanation. The poem reads as something that could be told aloud while cooking, cleaning, or waiting for food to finish frying. This performed closeness collapses the distance between reader and speaker, recreating the intimacy of being in the house as smells accumulate and linger.
Through its sensory progression, the poem demonstrates elastic time and non-linear memory, a core feature of Kristang poetry. Liturgical time (Lent, Good Friday, Easter Sunday) does not proceed cleanly forward; instead, it folds into domestic cycles of preparation, decay, fermentation, and return. Smell becomes the medium through which time stretches and contracts: salted fish crusts the cabinets, the house smells of death, then empties out, only for the sea to “rise” again at the end. The past—ancestral kitchens, older religious practices, maritime memory—erupts continuously into the present. The resurrection is not only theological; it is sensory and cyclical.
In keeping with Kristang poetic tradition, everyday life is treated as sacred material. Drying prawn paste, frying sambal, cleaning sotong, eating bread and Ribena—these acts are given equal, and sometimes greater, weight than formal church rituals. The poem quietly suggests that holiness resides less in abstract doctrine than in what stains the hands and fills the air. Even the Catholic calendar is metabolised through food preparation and domestic labour, reframing Lent as something enacted bodily rather than merely observed. The kitchen becomes a parallel altar, one that smells, rots, preserves, and feeds.
The poem’s power is sharpened by its use of humour, camp, and emotional honesty, especially in its refusal to sanitise bodily and religious realities. The comparison of fishiness to period blood is deliberately confrontational, collapsing taboos around menstruation, decay, and sanctity. Lines like “Father James washes the altar boys’ feet, among other things” deploy a dry, knowing camp that punctures institutional reverence without needing to explain itself. This humour is not flippant; it is a survival strategy, allowing the poem to hold reverence and critique in the same breath.
Although the poem does not foreground sexuality explicitly, it operates firmly within non-normative relationality. The speaker’s relationship to Catholicism is neither obedient nor rejecting; it is intimate, ironic, embodied, and unresolved. Authority figures—priests, saints, even Christ—are filtered through domestic and sensory frames rather than hierarchical ones. The grandmother figure becomes the primary theological interpreter, aligning the poem with Kristang traditions where kinship, care, and meaning are often organised outside official structures.
As cultural memory and futures work, “Lenten Gragoh” archives a way of being Kristang that is at risk of erasure: Catholic yet irreverent, ritualised yet sensorial, grounded in smell and food rather than abstraction. By preserving these textures in poetry, the poem ensures they remain legible to future readers who may no longer recognise the smells or practices firsthand. The final resurrection of the sea is not only Easter symbolism; it gestures toward continuity—the return of taste, memory, and cultural presence despite cycles of loss and suppression.
Finally, the poem enacts a quiet but firm resistance to respectability. It refuses clean religion, clean kitchens, clean metaphors, and clean histories. Blood, rot, grime, and desire are not edited out to make the poem more palatable to institutional or literary norms. Instead, the poem insists that Kristang life—like its food—ferments, smells, offends, and deepens with time. In doing so, “Lenten Gragoh” stands squarely within the Kristang poetic lineage that values truth over decorum and lived integrity over sanitised heritage.