written by Delphine Van Der Biest

What happens when voices separated by class, language, or borders begin to speak to one another through poetry? Call and Response: A Migrant / Local Poetry Anthology (2018), edited by Joshua Ip, Rolinda Onates Espanola, and Zakir Hossain Khokan, brings together over thirty migrant poets and pairs them with local writers in a powerful literary exchange of realities and perspective.

Joshua Ip is a Singaporean poet, editor, and literary organiser whose work reflects a sustained interest in migration, identity, and transnational dialogue. His poetry often navigates questions of hybridity and belonging in a postcolonial, multilingual society. His creative practice embraces formal experimentation and cultural layering, offering a poetics that reflects both rootedness and movement, locality and transnationalism. In both his verse and his community initiatives, Ip foregrounds migration as not just a theme but a structural principle of literary engagement. Through Sing Lit Station, the literary non-profit he co-founded, Joshua Ip has contributed to cultivating a dynamic space for collaborative and community-based literary production in Singapore. The organisation supports emerging and established writers through workshops, residencies, and publications, with a particular emphasis on collective creativity and inclusion. Notably, projects such as Call and Response and its sequel bring migrant and local writers into direct dialogue, pairing their poems and stories to highlight the shared and divergent experiences of displacement, labour, and belonging. These anthologies exemplify a relational poetics that values exchange over isolation—an ethos that reflects COLLAB’s commitment to socially engaged literary responses to migration (poetry.sg, n.d.; Sing Lit Station, n.d.; Teck Heng, 2015).

Among the anthology’s co-editors is Zakir Hossain Khokan, a Bangladeshi migrant worker and award-winning poet who has lived in Singapore since 2003. Drawing from nearly two decades of lived experience in the construction industry, Khokan’s poetry and advocacy give voice to the struggles, homesickness, and resilience of the migrant worker community. Through initiatives like One Bag, One Book and his co-editorship of Call and Response, he works to build bridges between migrant and local communities—demonstrating how literature can foster both connection and recognition across social divides (Zakir Hossain Khokan – 艾金森, z.d.). Also co-editing the anthology is Rolinda Onates Espanola, a Filipino poet and migrant domestic worker, whose participation reflects the anthology’s commitment to centering migrant perspectives not just as subjects, but as co-creators of literary dialogue.

The editors of Call and Response: A Migrant/Local Poetry Anthology set out to create not just a collection of poems, but a shared space of dialogue—a literary meeting point where voices that rarely encounter each other in public life could speak directly, side by side. For Zakir Hossain Khokan, the project was a response to the invisibility many migrant writers face despite their literary talents. He envisioned the anthology as a “first bridge” between migrant workers and Singaporeans, where poetry could act as both a mode of expression and a form of social recognition. For Rolinda Onates Espanola, the project affirmed poetry as a personal and communal form of liberation—”a vacuum,” she writes, “that sucks everything in to clean everything out.” Her reflections stress how writing became a space of dignity, especially in a context where legal and economic structures often limit self-expression. Joshua Ip offers a self-reflexive lens: he began with conceptual hesitations about labels like “migrant” and “local,” but found himself chasing after his co-editors, who had already begun building the anthology through action rather than abstraction.

Together, the three editors challenge traditional hierarchies of authorship, subverting the idea that migrants are only subjects to be written about rather than creators of meaning themselves. The structure of the anthology—where each migrant poem is paired with a local writer’s creative response—turns the call-and-response form into an ethical practice: one of listening, answering, and mutual recognition. The book’s division into three thematic sections—distance and space, love and desire, and rage and reflection—reflects a range of migrant experiences, from longing to protest, while also revealing the emotional resonance and literary craft shared across both groups. Rather than enforcing a fixed idea of what “Singaporean poetry” is, the editors embrace multiplicity, letting difference sit alongside understanding. Their vision is not utopian, but relational—rooted in the belief that poetry can model the kinds of understanding that institutions often fail to create. As Espanola movingly puts it, “In the art of poetry, we are all equal… it takes courage to call—it takes heart to respond.”

Before tending to some of the poems in the anthology, I’d like to take a closer look at the call and response structure as not only a literary mode or formal strategy, but a cultural practice with a long history and wide range of uses.

Call and response is a dialogic structure in which one voice initiates a statement—the call—and another voice offers a direct or implied reply—the response. Rooted in African oral traditions, it is a cultural practice that emphasizes collective participation, rhythm, and interaction, commonly found in music, religious rituals, participatory forms of politics, and storytelling. In literary contexts, it functions as a mode of exchange, where paired texts or voices engage in dynamic interplay, creating meaning through contrast, echo, or continuation (Crawford, 1995; Diallo, 2019). Call and response carries a deep diasporic meaning, rooted in the experience of forced displacement and cultural survival. The form was carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans, becoming a vital mode of communication, resistance, and community-building in the Americas. In the diaspora, it evolved into a structure of survival—appearing in spirituals, sermons, blues, and later, poetry and performance—where the call expresses longing, pain, or protest, and the response affirms presence, solidarity, and recognition. The call and response structure mirrors the diasporic condition itself: the scattering of people across borders, and the need to remain connected through language, memory, and collective expression (Akinyemi, 2012).

In contemporary contexts, call and response continues to embody the rhythms of migration and the politics of belonging. It allows displaced voices to be heard and answered, asserting that diaspora is not defined by silence or rupture, but by relation, echo, and continuity. Call and response is both a product of migration and a method for surviving it. It turns displacement into dialogue and estrangement into relation. As such, call and response is more than a stylistic device—it is a diasporic poetics (Callahan, 1990; Diallo, 2019).

In what follows, I will analyse three calls and responses from the anthology, one of each of the three sections. My approach is guided by the idea that call and response is not only a poetic form, but a way of expressing what it means to live in-between: between countries, languages, and emotional worlds. I’m less focused on technical analysis, and more interested in how these poems speak to each other—as I believe the anthology’s power lies in its resonance.

The poems in Call and Response were created through a collaborative process rooted in community, mentorship, and mutual respect. The anthology began with migrant poets—many of whom discovered their voices through workshops and competitions like the Migrant Workers Poetry Competition and events organised by Sing Lit Station. Editors Zakir Hossain Khokan and Rolinda Onates Espanola took the lead in gathering poems from male and female migrant writers, many of which were then translated into English. These pieces became the “calls”. Next, editor Joshua Ip invited local poets—including both established and emerging names—to choose from several migrant poems and write a poetic “response”. The local poets were given full creative freedom to respond in their own style, producing an anthology that forms a poetic conversation across backgrounds, languages, and lived experiences. The editors intentionally took a light-touch approach to editing, aiming to preserve the distinct voices of both migrant and local poets, and to challenge narrow definitions of what “good” poetry looks like. As Joshua Ip reflected, the anthology questions who gets to define poetic standards, and invites readers to confront their own assumptions about language, authorship, and value.

Thematic section 1: Distance and Space

The first poem pair I chose explores distance not just as geography, but as emotional exile—from home, from family, and from the self.

Md. Riazul Islam Riaz’s “Dead Body of an Expatriate” begins with a striking request:

“If I die in a harem, / In exile, far away / Take my dead body / to my mother’s lap.”

In simple but evocative language, Riaz voices the quiet desperation of a migrant worker imagining death far from home. It is a monologue from someone who is physically present in Singapore, but spiritually still rooted in the home he left behind. The poem reads like a final will, but also a prayer—for return, for dignity, for forgiveness. His longing to be physically reunited with his mother, even in death, reflects the deep emotional cost of labor migration. It’s a plea not to be abandoned in foreign soil, and a reminder that exile doesn’t end at the border, but follows the body. Even more than physical return, what he seems to crave is recognition—that someone will remember him, pray for him, and forgive him for his absence:

“If there is not enough money / to send off my body, / Keep me in your prayer…”

Min Lim’s “I Do Not Want to Die” is the poem that responds—but it doesn’t offer comfort. Instead, it deepens the pain and complexity of distance. Her poem is set in a different landscape—urban, cold, and emotionally fractured. Where Riaz’s speaker longs for a mother’s touch, Lim’s speaker is estranged from her mother entirely:

“My mother hunches into her body of liquor. / Her daughter approaches, searching / for a mother to spare.”

The child in this poem isn’t seeking to return to home, but to a version of her mother that may no longer exist. The physical closeness of the mother-daughter pair is distorted by addiction, silence, and emotional debris. If Riaz’s poem is about the hope of reconnection, Lim’s is about the failure of it—the speaker reaches out, but the response is delayed, uncertain, or missing altogether.

Both poems speak to what it means to be adrift, whether across continents or within one’s own life. In pairing them, the anthology doesn’t resolve their tension but exposes it, allows it to exist, breathe, be.  Both are haunted by loss and longing, and both position the mother as a symbol of emotional refuge—or its absence. Both poems also end with a lingering sense of disorientation and unspoken sadness. Riaz writes:

“Let me take my last flight / In your precious tears / And please try to forgive me.”

While Lim writes:

“I ask if she is coming over, / but she had to leave / her toes wrinkling in the shower.”

In their own ways, both speakers are asking the same question: Will someone meet me, even here, even now, even at the end? Riaz’s poem is literal and direct, while Lim’s is fragmented and impressionistic—but both expose the hardship of emotional and physical exile, and both use poetry to try and bridge these distances.

Thematic section 2: Love and Desire

The second poem pair I chose explores a kind of love shaped not by presence, but by absence, distance, and emotional weight. In this exchange, love is not a source of comfort, but a burden, a longing, a wound.

Mahbub Hasan Dipu’s “Distant Love” begins with a simple memory:

“Your words in that evening / still humming (in my head).”

What follows is a tender but heavy confession from a migrant who has left behind both romance and family. The speaker reflects on the emotional cost of his departure—on the loneliness of highways and the mirage of the city—as he embraces the demands of his new migrant life:

“You said that, / one needs resources to dream, / capability for being loved, / and to earn to be happy.

For all these, / I have embraced this distance, / and began a new journey of migrant life.”

These lines show how love, for the speaker, has evolved from being a freely given emotion to now having become conditional, measured in labour, money, and time. The heart becomes a weight:

“Carrying this heart heavy with distant love / turns me into ‘a depression’.”

The poem’s final shift to the speaker’s mother, with her “broken frame” and unanswered questions, expands the sense of longing. Beyond romantic desire that haunts him—it’s also familial obligation and the grief of absence. He has missed funerals, aging, and everyday moments.

Yeow Kai Chai’s response, “Latent Voids,” is formally experimental—a poem built entirely from the letters and words of Dipu’s original, rearranged into an anagrammatic ode. This is a brilliant formal choice: instead of echoing content, Yeow rearranges Dipu’s language, creating a response that feels fractured, dreamlike, and deeply emotional. In this way, the form itself reflects the themes of the original: fragmentation, longing, and rearranged identity.

“a never distant heart / and of this depression / turns heavy / o love tear me”

These broken, reassembled phrases mirror the speaker’s inner world—memories jumbled by time and separation, grief that cannot fully speak. The response also carries a sense of urgency and intimacy, almost like a whispered reply to Dipu’s letter:

“would you come / frame my hopes / my mother’s voices broken in / wait for…”

By using Dipu’s own words, Yeow Kai Chai collapses the boundary between call and response—the responder becomes the echo, the shadow, the unsent reply. The result is a delicate conversation where nothing is said directly, yet everything is felt. Together, these two poems explore love as something suspended in time, stretched thin by migration, fractured by loss. While Dipu writes from a place of direct emotion, Yeow writes from within the echo. And in that echo, resonance takes over presence.

Thematic section 3: Rage and Reflection

For the final section, I chose a poem pair that doesn’t just describe anger—it quietly burns with it: the rage is restrained, but unresolved. Rea Maac’s “Scarecrow” is a raw reflection on the invisibility of migrant workers, drawing a striking metaphor between the speaker and a scarecrow: present, working, but never truly seen.

“In the middle of the crowd / standing alone in silence / because no one notices its presence.”

From its opening lines, Maac’s poem sets the emotional tone of alienation. The speaker is voiceless, abandoned, and used. Like a scarecrow, she’s expected to stand still, to do her job silently, without complaint or recognition. The poem unfolds as both lament and warning: that choosing not to listen, not to see, is a kind of moral blindness and quiet complicity.

“You can hear the pleading / but you choose not to listen / you can see its suffering / but you were blindfolded by arrogance.”

By the final lines, the metaphor of the scarecrow becomes personal and unmistakable:

“I know because I’m / a scarecrow in a foreign land.”

This closing confession roots the emotional pain in the specific experience of being a migrant worker in Singapore—always there, but structurally excluded from the community and its rewards.

What makes this pair especially compelling is how Pooja Nansi’s response poem is a blackout version of Maac’s original. Nansi uses the exact same words, preserving Maac’s voice, but blakcs out (“▇▇”) most of the poem. The result is the remaining words making up a single sentence:

“In the middle / alone / trying to be heard / but / you / only / hear the pleading / of the / affluent crowd / because I’m / a foreign land. “

By not rewriting but reframing, Nansi models a form of respectful literary listening where the response does not overwrite the original, but amplifies it. This gesture of near-verbatim repetition becomes powerful in itself. In a book that’s all about dialogue, Nansi’s blackout poem offers an unusual kind of response: one that does not seek to explain or reinterpret, but to echo and honor the voice of the speaker. It is a recognition that some rage needs no translation.

Across these three pairings—from longing and separation, to love stretched by distance, to quiet rage and the demand to be seen—what struck me most wasn’t just what these poets expressed, but how they expressed it to each other. Call and Response is not just an anthology title; it’s a structure, a metaphor, and a cultural inheritance. It draws from a long history of oral traditions, especially within African and diasporic cultures, where communication is rhythmic, collective, and relational. In spirituals, sermons, chants, and songs, someone calls—and someone answers. However, the power lies in the connection, not the conclusion.

In this anthology, that practice becomes literary. The “calls” from migrant writers are not rhetorical devices—they are lived expressions of grief, longing, and hope. The “responses” from local poets are not solutions or corrections; they are forms of witness, re-interpretation, and affirmation. Together, they create a network of voices—not a straight line from question to answer, but something more rhizomatic. To call something rhizomatic is to describe a structure that grows horizontally, non-linearly, and in multiple directions at once. This reminded me of Édouard Glissant’s metaphor of the mangrove and his concept of ‘poetics of relation’ as portrayed and further developed in Odile Ferly’s (2012) eponymous work on women writing in diaspora. Like mangrove roots or underground stems, rhizomes reflect the unpredictable, entangled nature of diasporic experience: the idea that identity is not rooted in a single origin, but spreads across languages, histories, and bodies. Call and Response mirrors this. The poets in the anthology don’t respond in fixed pairs or binaries—they weave, echo, branch out. Their poems form a network of relation, where meaning arises not from singularity, but from interaction.

Through this structure, Call and Response shows us that poetry can be a form of migrant relation—a way of bridging the distances shaped by policy, inequality, and silence. In each section, the emotional core of the migrant “call” is distinct: a plea for dignity in death, a confession of love made heavy by exile, a cry of frustration at being unseen. And in each case, the response doesn’t overwrite, but entangles—creating a shared, layered poetics.

What I’ve come to appreciate most through reading and writing about this anthology is that call and response isn’t just a poetic form, but becomes a way of imagining how we live with others. It asks us to listen, not to dominate the conversation. To respond, not to resolve. To sit with a voice without trying to fix it. This is the logic of the rhizome: tangled, imperfect, but alive with connection.

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Callahan, J. F. (1990). In the African-American Grain: Call-and-Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (2nd ed.). Wesleyan University Press.

Crawford, E. (1995). The Hum: Call and Response in African American Preaching. Abingdon Press.

Diallo, D. (2019). Collective Participation and Audience Engagement in Rap Music. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25377-6

Ferly, O. (2012). A poetics of relation: Caribbean women’s writing at the millennium (1. ed). Palgrave Macmillan.

Ip, J., Onates Espanola, R., & Hossain Khokan, Z. (Eds.). (2018). Call and Response: A Migrant/Local Poetry Anthology. Math Paper Press.

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