Exegesis:
L: Two: Common Naga”, is a co-authored series of a dozen poems taking the form of a chiasmus. A chiasmus involves repetition in the use of, structure, or concept of the text in a reverse or paralleling order. Chiasmus is a Latin term from Greek χίασμα, "crossing", from the Greek χιάζω, chiázō, "to shape like the letter Χ”. In “Two”, the two writers attempt to write to, as and with the "Common Naga”. They write individually before rewriting each other -- the crossing(s) embodied by the chiasmatic form. Writing is twisted into a sticky contact zone that nets and shadows the hidden, unknown, and radically other.
A: In making the Naga—a Southeast Asian mythical entity—the name for a resource commons from which it formulates content, "Two" examines, through its own misdemeanours, Singapore's eligibility to serve as the site from which Southeast Asia is narrativised. The "Common Naga" refers in each of its semantic encounters finally, and thus commonly, to capital—a real everywhere in excess of its historical and geographical determinations.
In the four-part poem featured here, the writers have written as Common Naga.