Clay Eaters
Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan. AUP (2025). RRP: $29.99. PB, 128pp. ISBN: 9781776711536. Reviewed by Tim Grgec.
At 18 years old, all male Singaporeans are required to undertake two years of military service. Over 20,000 recruits are enlisted every year, starting with nine weeks of basic military training on Pulau Tekong, or Tekong Island, on Singapore’s north-eastern coast. Since 1987, the island has been used exclusively as a training base for the Singapore Armed Forces. The native islanders—mostly Malays, Chinese, Teochews, and Hakkas—were resettled on mainland Singapore, though it’s said that their ghosts have stayed behind, haunting the young trainee soldiers at every step through the jungle.
This is the setting for much of Gregory Kan’s third poetry book, Clay Eaters. In 2001, Kan moved with his parents from Singapore to Auckland. Six years later, when he turned 18, he was summoned back to Singapore for compulsory military service. In Clay Eaters, as in his first collection This Paper Boat (AUP 2016), which was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for poetry, Kan reflects on the lasting trauma of his two-year service: of the ‘yelling / And the constant hammering of weapons / At things in the trees we couldn’t see.’
Divided into four sections, Clay Eaters is a continuous stream of artful prose poems. Like the overgrown jungle the recruits trudge through, there are no boundaries to the pages. Without titles, one poem flows into the next, blurring the past and present of a narrator questioning how Pulau Tekong has shaped him. Kan’s memories of this tropical hell are scattered with third-person histories of the island and its fables. But there are also ghosts back home in New Zealand, like Kan’s beloved cat Gilgamesh (to whom the book is dedicated). Kan also traverses familial tensions, which centre on an aloof father whose stroke and years of smoking have rendered his voice ‘full of ashes.’
‘Staring out into the dark canopy from our bunks at night / The island didn’t seem like a place for people,’ Kan’s speaker tells us. This sense of dislocation, of not belonging, pervades the collection. Pulau Tekong is inhospitable to those passing through. The acidic soil dyes the earth red, ‘and can support only the most resilient / weedy shrubs.’ Kan’s writing is at its most vivid when recalling the brutal conditions he and his fellow recruits endured, such as marching through the ‘troublesome-looking / bushes’ and over the ‘exposed, dry, raw inflamed’ clay. The ‘suffocating’ jungle looms darkly above them, ready to swallow the trainees at any moment. While the language is vivid, Kan’s simple rhythm mimics a soldier’s life governed by discipline, rigor, and survival:
‘Certainly, there was an uneasiness to the place
Certainly, I felt like we didn’t belong there
Like we were barely tolerated there
Heavy arms as we dug ourselves into the red clay earth
Heavy feet as our boots struck the red clay earth
And the trees
Endless trees running deep into the red clay earth.’
The refrain recreates a harsh thudding, giving sense to the physical demands of military life. The ‘red clay earth,’ while ‘brittle under the tropical sun,’ is unyielding and torments the young recruits who struggle through their drills in the heat. The association with physical torment is a reason why one of the speaker’s ‘oldest friends’ jokes Pulau Tekong should be ‘Pulau TEKAN,’ as ‘“Tekan” is a Malay verb for “press” or “pressure.”’ Tekan is ‘also slang for hazing and punishment,’ we’re told, suggesting many of these young men, like the speaker, view their induction to the military as an unwelcome rite of passage.
More unnerving than the jungle of Pulau Tekong, however, are the ghosts of the island’s former settlers—the farmers, fishermen, and villagers—who were forced to vacate for Singapore’s military. The most chilling of these encounters comes from Uncle Chee Boon, a well-known army instructor, who, when trekking with his students up a mountain, is interrogated by a mysterious old woman. ‘What are you all doing here,’ she demands of him, ‘do you know the rules of / this mountain?’ And yet, when later laughing off the incident, Uncle Chee Boon learns none of his students ‘saw an old woman.’ Kan’s speaker seems bewildered by the encounter, questioning whether it really happened: ‘But / they must have seen her go past, or at least surely / heard them speaking in Malay?’ he thinks. ‘No, they hadn’t / seen or heard a thing.’
Clay Eaters is full of paranormal unrest. It’s hard to know what to believe, and what Kan’s speaker believes himself. The narrator’s mixed feelings towards military service are hard to separate from the constant sense of unease that dominates Pulau Tekong. ‘We had all become superstitious,’ he says, ‘Our lives were rituals / In heavy gloves / Steel-soled boots / And thermal imaging devices / Tactics were rites / Strategies were prayers.’ Here Kan deftly shows the reverence needed for a successful military culture—to command and obey without question is its own kind of religion and belief in the supernatural. The nine-week experience is designed to spook the recruits into submission and prepare them for combat, though it’s the ghosts of the island that prove a scarier imagined enemy.
But Kan does more than grapple with the nightmares of Pulau Tekong. His speaker is also deeply affected by the loss of a cat, Gilgamesh, who, like his Mesopotamian namesake, ruled the house as ‘part-god.’ Kan’s tone is more delicate in these domestic poems, which playfully poke their nose into different parts of the book. ‘I like to think that this house was really yours,’ his speaker recalls, ‘maybe too small, sometimes / But a world just for us.’ The personal pronoun ‘you’ addresses the cat directly and invites a greater sense of intimacy to these pages. It’s as if we’re there on the couch with him, this ‘warm loaf’ of a cat, who once felt ‘so close and suddenly / So far.’
Some of Kan’s domestic poems, however, reveal the limits of his matter-of-fact prose style. For instance, in one poem, his speaker tries to make sense of his father’s stroke and the irrevocable effects it’s had on the family. What could’ve been a powerful lament on siblings drifting apart instead reads like a bullet-pointed diary entry. ‘He’s eleven years older than me,’ we’re told about the speaker’s brother: ‘He left the house when I was about seven / My sister followed a few years later / I think they both felt bad that / I was left alone with Mum and Dad.’ While such poems still help to colour the edges of Kan’s wider family narrative, the matter-of-factness lacks the emotional force such an affecting realisation deserves.
For Kan, as one can assume for most Singaporean men, his time on Pulau Tekong was life changing. It’s the ‘place of nightmares,’ his speaker reflects, haunted by everything he’s seen and heard. Clay Eaters attempts to put these ghosts of the past to rest. While not explicitly anti-war, the collection reveals the guilt of participating in military operations, and implicitly, in the ongoing displacement of Pulau Tekong’s native villagers. That version of Kan—at eighteen, the unwilling combatant—is now a ghost haunting the speaker of the present.
The speaker constantly doubts his memories that ‘will not be / Still,’ as if there’s a disbelief in his past actions. ‘Every few years,’ he says, ‘I need someone to tell me / That what I thought happened / Actually happened.’ Clay Eaters is a collection about the kind of person Kan might have been, had he abstained from military service. It’s also about how different things might’ve been with his family if his siblings had not left to live overseas, or if his father hadn’t suffered a terrible illness. The speaker is left ‘to wander / Looking for what we have lost / On that other side of silence,’ as if contemplating these alternate realities and versions of himself. In a telling moment, the speaker admits to having not ‘been back to Singapore since the army.’ This startling collection of poems, however, suggests some corner of Pulau Tekong’s ‘red clay earth’ will always be with him.
Tim Grgec is a writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara—Wellington. His first book of poetry, All Tito’s Children, was published with Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2021.