Book review: Pulp friction in Shubigi Rao’s look at banished books, alternative libraries

Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory Of The Banished Book

By Shubigi Rao
Non-fiction/Rock Paper Fire/Softcover/400 pages/$50 before GST at Books Kinokuniya in March/Free as e-copy from pulp-iii.com
4 out of 5

It is easy to lionise books and libraries. But what if a book is dangerous?

In the Venetian antiquarian bookstore Segni nel Tempo, bookseller Federico Bucci tells Singaporean artist and writer Shubigi Rao about some of the most dangerous books ever printed.

There is the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, an index of banned books first printed in the 16th century; and Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, a text fabricated to incite hatred against the Jewish people.

Bucci’s is one of the many voices in the third instalment of Pulp, Rao’s decade-long project on banished books.

Pulp has been greatly feted since its first instalment was published in 2016. Its second instalment, Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography Of The Banished Book, won the 2020 Singapore Literature Prize for English creative non-fiction.

In 2022, Rao became the first solo female artist to represent Singapore at the Venice Biennale with a paper maze housing copies of Pulp III, as well as a film. The exhibition returned to Singapore’s ArtScience Museum from Jan 6 to 24.

There is an apt irony that the midpoint of this project – supported by the National Arts Council – involves Rao questioning not just the establishment but even her own work that came before.

Pulp II looked at the destruction of libraries such as Vijecnica in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was shelled in 1992. Yet “the library is not sacrosanct”, writes Rao, “since it has also served as a means of exclusion, of reinforcing the apparatus of the state.”

Even the library world’s current obsession with technology comes in for criticism. Should digitisation come at the cost of curating and preserving physical collections?

In Pulp III, Rao moves away from valorising the codex – the bound pages with covers that most people today recognise as a book – to consider other forms of writing, libraries and preserving stories in the margins.

She looks at Kristang, which is spoken by Eurasian communities in Malaysia and Singapore, and Cimbrian, an endangered language in north-eastern Italy.

One of the book’s most fascinating excursions is into the overlooked history of texts in the Malay world. Rao engages Singaporean historians Faris Joraimi and Wei Jin Darryl Lim in rich discussions on syair, a genre of poetic ballads, and the overlooked work of women in lithography and libraries.

Faris likens batik tulis – hand-drawn batik – to literature or text, because the images and motifs are coded with their own specific meanings. “One etymology suggests that the word ‘textile’ predates the term ‘text’, and ‘textile’ goes back to the ancestry of text,” he says.

Rao also travels to what she calls “alternative libraries” around the world.

In Berlin, she visits Bayatna, an Arabic library founded by emigres and refugees. In South Korea, she meets activist Lee Jin-young, a former railroad worker who runs the online library Labor Books.

She confesses her shock at seeing the mass of books he has sliced up to be scanned, a “deboning and evisceration”. Yet she feels no sorrow for these gutted books, which are being uploaded as PDFs online to be more accessible to working-class readers.

Pulp III is dense with marginalia and riddled with curious lacunae, where Rao has mysteriously blacked out pieces of information in a kind of meta-censorship.

She has made the conscious decision to reduce her authorial presence and allow her interviewees to speak in long, unfiltered chunks. This makes for a meandering, more intractable reading experience, though it is clearly vital to her strategy of holding space.

The story of Rao’s family library, though barely mentioned here, continues to be the series’ emotional core.

In a fragment, she writes of her parents: “My mother’s first action after her wedding was to include his name in every book she owned… Later, he would claim this shared library as his own, having written her out of the pages long ago.”

Pulp has gone through a transmutation in each new stage, but remains delightfully labyrinthine as it gently and insistently queries the future of libraries. One waits to see how Rao will turn the next page.

If you like this, read: The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen (Profile, 2021, $49.22, Books Kinokuniya), a sweeping history of libraries from ancient Mesopotamia to Google Books.