// MATH PAPER PRESS

MATH PAPER PRESS, an imprint of BOOKSACTUALLY is a small press publisher of poetry, new wave novellas, full-length novels, and essays. Its eclectic range of literary and visual works also

includes photography collections, memoirs and young adult fiction.

MATH PAPER PRESS also distributes books by small selected presses.

. . .

// THE INVISIBLE MANUSCRIPT poems by Alfian Sa’at

 

   

ALFIAN SA’AT’S first unpublished collection of writings composed when he was 22, it was first distributed unofficially to selected friends and colleagues. Bearing passionate testimony to private and public memories, this gathering of poems and prose fragments documenting the intimate challenges of homosexual longing gives voice to an invisible minority still struggling to be recognised today. Now published at last, this book, full of fierce confessions, ambivalences and flinty epiphanies, will shock and devastate. Here is an uncompromising confluence of unfulfilled desires wrought through language by one of Singapore’s most outspoken and critical voices.

Published by MATH PAPER PRESS (2012) Distributed by MATH PAPER PRESS

ISBN-13: 978-981-07-3949-2 Retail Price: SGD 16.00

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“This book does not exist. It has to be willed into existence. What I have written here is not a testimony to a kind of life that has to bang its drums and whisk its flags and deploy its parades and marches to say the obvious: We have a right to exist. Neither is this book a quilt woven by hands stitching names of loved ones with painstaking sequins nor a thousand candles weeping into paper cups illuminating bowed faces. This book neither celebrates the living nor mourns for the dead. For a simple reason: both the living and the dead have names. Fragments of this book exist only between mosaic toilet tiles and in locked diaries and the groaning of a name through gritted teeth, a name that will be forgotten in a matter of weeks. Once these fragments are brought together, the book ceases to exist. These words are nothing but shadows and echoes; a boy typing away on his computer while his parents are fast asleep, jotting down epiphanies with a borrowed pen, dreaming up a new language where words are incapable of harm. But these pages are fast gathering together, the sentences are assembling themselves, the unacceptable is coming into being. But gay people are the figments of gay imagination. Gay voices are siren songs, and sirens are the mythical product of a rich but incredible oral history. There is no such thing as a gay community: all of you are unlabelled volcanic islands, many of you submerged under the ocean’s surface. You have no claims to any kind of map. For the book to exist the author must will himself out of existence. He must sacrifice himself to the oppressor’s logic. He will say: This book is in your hands, but it was written by nobody. He will also say: It is not me who is telling you this. He will conclude: These words wrote themselves, and you sense what they mean because they are written in the only language I know and the only one that you can hope to understand.” — Excerpt from The Invisible Manuscript by Alfian Sa’at

Published by

MATH PAPER PRESS

by BooksActually No. 9 Yong Siak Street

Singapore 168645 t / +65 6222 9195

http://booksactually.com/mathpaperpress.html

Math Paper Press is a small press publishing by BooksActually that deals with short experimental novellas, poetry and essays.

Math Paper Press also distributes books by selected small presses.

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For more enquiries or to place an order, please email : booksellers@booksactually.com

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