The last time so many people died in Singapore was WWII

Singapore poet Gwee Li Sui covers topics ranging from anti-vaxxers to his father's death in Look How We've Already Forgotten

- Clement Yong

Open Gwee Li Sui's Look How We've Already Forgotten to any page and you are guaranteed to be whisked back to a surreal, forgotten time.

Not just a generic period of mask wearing, SafeEntry check-ins and daily monitoring of news, but something much more specific: The exact moment Phase One of Covid-19 restrictions turned into Phase Two, the mooting of the Singapore-Hong Kong travel bubble, when panda Le Le was born despite it all, and when the Singaporean poet himself tested positive for the coronavirus while watching newsreels of Russia's shock invasion of Ukraine.

With over 150 short poems written in the thick of the pandemic splayed dramatically across pages, this collection of broadly chronological and very funny exclamations and laments is pulled together with running prose commentary.

The post-apocalyptic voice functions like contextualising museum labels to the poem artefacts. Together, they become a poetic epic that mewls and jibes at a time that, for its weirdness and the rush to move on, has since been largely excised from national and social memory.

Gwee, best known for his Singlish translations of children's tales like Winnie-da-Pooh (2023) and The Leeter Tunku (2019) for The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, which inspired this book's cover illustration says: "The last time so many people died from the crisis in Singapore was probably World War II with the Japanese Occupation, but we don't commemorate it.

"We wanted to make up for lost time. But we forget that by not acknowledging the common traumatic experience we went through, we are short-changing ourselves."

As at June 2024, 2,102 people have died of Covid-19 in Singapore. The Republic recorded over three million cases. Gwee points out that the coronavirus still kills thousands a month globally.