The familiar street names on unfamiliar roads leap at me. In Singapore I often travel along Grange Road and go to College Road every day. To walk psychically in Norwich is to lean against creamy blocks of Caen cathedral limestone, visible from almost every corner of the city, and fall sideways into a preserved leaf of history.

As a (re)lapsed Catholic I revel in arches of stained glass and stone tracery, and the fact that Norwich holds the distinction of being the only complete English city to have been excommunicated by the Pope. As an esoteric I relish the merchant’s marks etched on the pillars and the doorjambs, clotted with dirt, the leavings of idle scribblers or intent-heavy tradesmen, melding crosses and monograms, the seals of whom adorn the church walls standing today. As a tropical city girl every body of water is my friend and I am flush with the sight of the River Wensum. And as a reprobate I am charmed by the drunken brawls with police and unconscious figures sleeping in puddles on the pavement captioned ‘Only in Norwich’.

Walk me in the labyrinth of the Cloister Garth like an energetic parasite clinging to the pale underbelly of your wanting. Invoke as a favour to me the name of Mother Julian, or Juliana, the anchoress and strict recluse who lived in a little cell barnacled to the side of the parish of Conisford, outlying Norwich. Mother Julian was the author of the earliest English surviving book to be written by a woman. She lived in the days of King Edward the Third, when it was still commonplace to refer to a time as earmarked by a monarch. The concept of monarchy is also alien and familiar to the Singaporean consciousness, which alternates between repudiating and babying its past as ex-British colony.

Mother Julian was a mystic and a woman who lived well past the average lifespan of women in her time. These are both things that fascinate me. She had asked to be struck with grave illness (“in youth, at the age of thirty”) which she successfully received. Julian came so close to death, the last rites were administered to her, and this extreme physical anguish resulted in a series of revelations, or ‘shewings’, of the divine, visions of suffering bloody and visceral.

The thing that present-day mystics, writers and gender-conscious theologians often find significant about Mother Julian’s work is her characterisation of God as both mother and father—indeed, she calls the soul the child, and Christ the mother. Personally, as someone hyper-aware of the paternalistic daddy dom powers of the state, and a deep fondness for the many-gendered figures of the mother goddesses of my heart, this appeals.

 X V I
REVELATION S

of

Divine Love,

Shewed to a Devout Servant

of our Lord, called

MOTHER JULIANA,

AN

Anchorite of NORWICH:

Who lived in the days of KING
EDWARD the third.

Published by R.F.S. Cressy.

8 May 1373

What stands out to me most, in the concept of revealing truths to a servant of the divine, are two things—devotion and the disavowal of self-deception. In many ways Norwich is easy to romanticise as a city of stories ripe for clumsy retelling, as part of a time-capsuled fantasy, as part of a longing for the rustic act of making goat’s whey and being able to pop down to one’s local stone mason. Even as an astral projection I imagine myself rifling through your pockets under the half-timbered beams. In this way we look for reinvention, both of the city we are born into and the city to which we escape. In this way we are always looking to redevise the self. We hold on to All that is Made, a smooth roundness in the palm of one’s hand, slightly bigger than the yolk of an egg, tempting us away from burying and babying our pasts, quenching the need to beg for visions, shewing us the ghosts are inexcisable (having been here longer than we). Almost knowing to put it in our mouth, to incubate it in the pursuit of oneness.

Marylyn Tan is a queer, female, Chinese Singaporean writer-artist.  Her first child, GAZE BACK (Lambda loser, Singapore Literature Prize 2020), is the lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed. Her work trades in the abject, vulgar and pleasurable, striving to emancipate and restore the alienated, endangered body. Find her in her natural habitat: @marylyn.orificial (IG) & @grinchfucker (twt/X)

We are delighted to host four writers in virtual residence, with support from the National Arts Council of Singapore. Joyce Chua, Marylyn Tan, Lisabelle Tay and Jerrold Yam will be in virtual residence from June to December 2024.