Tokyo Time, by Dawn Farnham

 T.A. Morton talks to Dawn Farnham about her shift into crime fiction

Though she has now returned to her native Australia, novelist Dawn Farnham is a former expat in Singapore, a place which inspired much of her fiction, including the Straits Quartet, which follows the struggle of two lovers, Charlotte Macleod, sister of Singapore’s Head of Police, and Zhen, triad member and once the lowliest of coolies, who beats the odds to become a wealthy Chinese merchant. Tokyo Time marks Dawn's first foray into the historical crime genre. It is again set in Singapore, against the backdrop of the Japanese Occupation, when the City State adopted a new time zone - Tokyo time.

The Plot Twist

Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) is currently underway - it runs at various venues until November 26.  To suit our strange times, this year’s theme is plot twist - embracing strange approaches, unexpected outcomes, sudden changes in direction, unlikely connections, and the unpredictable. Devika Misra reports.

The opening of SWF saw panellists debate the proposition: This House Believes AI is the Better Writer. Is AI an opportunity or a threat to literature? Can it make good writers better? These were questions addressed by panellists Colin Goh, the Singaporean writer, and creator of the Dim Sum Warriors comics; Arianna Pozzuoli, the Canadian-Singaporean poet and storyteller; Nessa Anwar, playwright and journalist; Marc Nair, Singaporean poet; Melizarani T Selva, Malaysian writer and poet. 

Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

 Devika Misra reports.

Singaporean-born, Paris-based Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, translator, musician, and now novelist. Her debut work of fiction Dear Chrysanthemums can be read as a novel or as separate interconnected short stories. Set in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, and New York, the protagonists are all victims of difficult circumstances; young Asian women, alone, vulnerable and struggling to survive displacement and sometimes violence and assault. Despite suffering lifelong mental anguish, they prove emotionally resilient and are keen to connect with the wider world as they construct different personas in challenging and ever-changing landscapes. 

Fantabulous Nonya cookbook author Sharon Wee dishes on the new edition of Growing Up In A Nonya Kitchen

Courtesy of Author

About the Author:

Sharon Wee was born and raised in Singapore, graduating from the National University of Singapore. She worked for Mars Confectionery in Hong Kong and China in the 1990s. She has an MBA from New York University and resides in Manhattan where she trained at the French Culinary Institute. Her recipes have been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post and she has given interviews about her Peranakan heritage. She chronicles her food experiences on Instagram @nonya.global. Sharon frequently returns to Singapore. 

Courtesy of Author

Synopsis:

This is a cookbook, and an intimate memoir, giving readers a sense of what it felt like to grow up in a Peranakan Chinese family ― descendants of local womenfolk and the earliest Chinese settlers to Southeast Asia.

As a fifth-generation Nonya (honorific for female Peranakans) from both sides of her family, Sharon Wee recollects her life in Singapore. She interviewed older relatives and recreated her mother’s personalized recipes, many orally passed down for generations.

Growing Up in a Nonya Kitchen was originally published in 2012. This updated edition includes revised recipes and cooking methods, with more detailed explanations and guidance for the young or unfamiliar cook to Peranakan food, spiced with a dose of humour. It also includes new contributions by subject experts on the heritage and beautiful cultural legacy of the Peranakans.

***

EC: Welcome to Asian Books Blog, Sharon. What an honour to have you. Thank you for sending me your wonderful cookbook, Growing Up In A Nonya Kitchen; it’s refreshingly novel that you’ve embedded a memoir plus cultural commentary on the world of the Peranakans that expand beyond cuisine. Why did you choose this blended approach?  

SW: When I considered publishing my book in the early 2000s, I was cognisant of the fact that there had already been a few established Peranakan cookbooks. Yet, very little was told about the significance of the food and how we ate – the moments we shared, the celebrations, the customs. 

I wove the memoir in to give readers a sense of our culture, and I revolved it around my mother’s life because she was from a vanishing generation of women whose lives focused on raising a family, keeping a home, all while being compromised in their education. Cooking was their currency. I’d like to think that this format of a cookbook memoir with headers elaborating on the dish, was not as common as what you see these days. 

The Plot Twists In Singapore

Southeast Asia’s largest literary extravaganza, The Singapore Writers Festival, will be held next month. Now in its 26th edition, this year’s theme is “Plot Twist”. 

Devika Misra spoke to Festival Director Pooja Nansi about what audiences can expect at the upcoming event.

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

Devika Misra reports on a conversation between Rachel Heng, and some of her readers. 

Rachel Heng was born and raised in Singapore. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, and her debut novel, Suicide Club (Henry Holt / Sceptre, 2018), was much praised. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA. The Great Reclamation, her acclaimed new novel, explores Singapore’s rapid transformation from third to first world in just two generations. At its heart the story is one of unrequited love - a doomed childhood romance and a lost way of life, as both the novel’s protagonist Ah Boon, and his nation, come of age.

Eternal Summer of the Homeland: Agnes Chew talks about writing a story collection and being the Asia Winner of the CSSP

Courtesy of Author

Book Synopsis

The stories in Agnes Chew’s first fiction collection illuminate the complexity of choice when duty and desire collide, and what a person is willing to sacrifice. A daughter grapples with an unexpected discovery in the aftermath of her mother’s death. A husband struggles to understand his wife’s reaction to her pregnancy. An adolescent and a domestic worker exchange secrets whose weight they find they cannot bear. And in a corner of Changi Airport, a nondescript office cubicle, a patch of open forest, others strive to find meaning and home.

Courtesy of Author

Author Bio:

Agnes Chew is the author of Eternal Summer of My Homeland (2023) and The Desire For Elsewhere (2016). Her work has appeared in Granta, Necessary Fiction and Litbreak Magazine, among others, and her story, ‘Oceans Away from my Homeland’, won the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asia Region). She holds a Master’s degree in international development from LSE; her prize-winning dissertation, which examines inequality and societal well-being in Singapore, was featured in Singapore Policy Journal. Born and raised in Singapore, she is currently based in Germany. 

 

 

_________________________

 

EC: Agnes, welcome to Asian Books Blog, and congratulations on being the Asia Winner for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize as well as the publication of Eternal Summer of My Homeland. Let’s start with this: what draws you to the short story? 

 

AC: Thank you so much, Elaine, for your kind words and for this opportunity! I actually started out writing creative nonfiction, and when I ventured into the realm of fiction writing, the short story form felt like a natural (and conceivable) choice. The more short stories I wrote, the more I found myself drawn to the form. I appreciate its requisite focus on purity and intensity—the way it compels you to distil meaning within a compact space. It’s also a thrill to be able to write a short story within a feverish span of hours or days, especially when I compare it to the far longer process of writing a novel, which I’m now working on.

 

Now Boarding: Experiencing Singapore through travel 1800s–2000s

T.A.Morton gives a sneak preview of Now Boarding, an exhibition opening on May 27 at the National Museum, Singapore. 

In 1956, writer W. Somerset Maugham permitted Raffles Hotel to use his words for their latest marketing campaign. His words were, 'Raffles Hotel stands for all the fables of the exotic East.' Such a testimony from a well-known writer was priceless and Raffles promptly used them in their advertisements, on their menus and matchboxes. 

Sensing Visual Forms: Tse Hao Guang’s 'The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association'

Editor's note: We're delighted to feature a review of Tse Hao Guang's latest collection by another gifted Singapore poet, Mok Zining. Tse was previously featured on the blog here, and has also written for us here. Thank you both for gracing our poetry column! 

“The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association is a real place,” read the epigraph. “Please come in and touch everything.” Turning the page, I stepped in, finding a miscellany of things hanging suspended in the shifting light: a dragonfly wing, the words of Simone Weil, a landfill of folded plastic triangles, a Chinese idiom unstrung and reworked, rust disappearing at the oxidation of starfruit juice.

Such was my first impression of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (Tinfish Press, 2023), a collection rendered with lightness and light. This second full-length collection by Tse Hao Guang contains poems composed in a visual form that evokes fluidity and looseness; rather than verses of lines, each poem looks more like a constellation of words and phrases bounded by the page. Seen through the lens of the collection’s title, the visual form of these poems evokes the brushstroke movement in certain styles of Chinese calligraphy, in particular the cursive and semi-cursive scripts.

At the same time, these visual forms also call to mind such modernist poetic interventions as erasure and collage, as well as the Fluxus experimentation with concrete poetry, of which John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing’ is a precursor. Notably, Tse does not seem interested in the practice and idea of Chinese calligraphy as a “traditional” art form or pinnacle of Chinese classicism. This decentering of a uniformly defined Chinese cultural inheritance is evidenced by poems like and ‘is Chinatown your burden? limitless like the universe?’ and ‘two minute Buddha Jumps Over the Wall’. Rather, Calligraphy seems more interested in the possibilities that can be opened by rendering these found objects and languages in the intermediate spaces Tse occupies. A poem that demonstrates this generative stance is ‘this moment’, a free translation of the Chinese poet An Qi’s 《此刻》(cike), excerpted here: 

I was struck by how naturally the syntax of this poem, though very much inflected by the Mandarin, fit in Calligraphy. This free translation also brings a visual dimension that isn’t found in the original, lineated text. In their delightful mirroring of the sunlight “threading/ through” the rooftop, the words “17^th floor/ 16^th floor/ 15^th floor” themselves seem to direct the eye to fall, as light, upon the architecture of the poem. Like ‘this moment’, Tse’s two other “free translations” of An Qi’s poems, ‘so & so’s terrace’ and ‘hands part when day is not yet light’, are certainly highlights of the book.

Calligraphy signals quite a departure from Tse’s first full-length collection, Deeds of Light (Math Paper Press, 2015), which featured the poet at ease in a range of formal poems. Revisiting Deeds for this review, however, I was struck by the pertinence of its epigraph, taken from Goethe’s Theory of Colours: “Colours are the deeds of light, its deeds and sufferings.” What carries over from Deeds is Tse’s visual sensibility – his careful attention to the quality, color, and movement of light falling on an object or a landscape.

In Calligraphy, this sensibility is heightened and made performative. Images mutate and transfigure effortlessly. Reading ‘this morning I woke up w/ a quick laugh like the sun’, for example, I found myself thinking it read almost like a script or storyboard for a video poem:

In the space of a page, Tse weaves together a poem that morphs effortlessly from the image of nails (intimate, mundane) to the sun and moon (celestial, symbolic, grand) and back to dust (infinitesimal). Facilitating this cinematic effect is the loose visual form, which enables an image to shape-shift by unsettling the fulfilment of the poetic line.

The visual effect is more impressionistic in other poems, with their abilities to craft a sensation of visual form. A good example is ‘which is when charcoal was passed from her body to mine’:

While reading this poem, I felt as if images that rhymed visually – “chalk-lines,” “a solitary stroke,” the land “between river and river,” “that narrow stroke/ of road,” and the very action of paring – were rising to the fore of my mind. Unlike ‘quick laugh’, ‘charcoal’ uses few transitions and connecting words to create visual development. Tse instead pares each fragment down to its visual bone before composing them in a stream-of-consciousness logic. Indeed, the experience of reading Calligraphy feels like we are following the speaker’s mind as it moves about the world, picking up on and stringing together a range of found languages and images – including AlphaGo, Stephen Chow films, the work of artists like Ivan David Ng. The book’s title is in this sense less an overarching representation of the project than one of the many found poems gathered for this collection, as Calligraphy takes its name from an organization in Katong Shopping Centre that supports left-handers who wish to learn the art of Chinese calligraphy.

Something could probably be said here about how the collection exhibits a sort of “lefthandedness” in its occupying of the space between media, between Sinophone and Anglophone poetic traditions, and between languages. However, this was also where I, a maximalist, found myself wondering if there was an opportunity for the collection to experiment more with visual form in this intermedia space. What might a visual composition that plays with the type of typographic research undertaken in the concrete poetry movement and Chinese calligraphic scripts (which include not just cursive and semi-cursive scripts, but also the oracle bone and seal scripts) look like, for example? What are some possibilities between typographic poetry and the work of artists like Wu Guanzhong or Lim Tze Peng? What if the collection took its own epigraph at a more literal level and referenced not just the name of the organization, but also its locale in Katong? Still, The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association contains many moments of brilliance, beauty and whimsy, and I would be interested to see how its experiments with the visual might shape poetic practices in Singlit. 

***

Mok Zining is obsessed with random things: orchids, arabesques, sand. Her first book, The Orchid Folios (Ethos Books 2020), was shortlisted for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English Poetry. Currently, she is at work on an essay collection, The Earthmovers.

The Visible Invisibles: Stories of Migrant Workers in Asia, guest post by Shivaji Das and Yolanda Yu

 

Featuring a careful curation of unconventional yet universal life stories from a diverse cast of characters, The Visible Invisibles: Stories of Migrant Workers in Asia offers a human connection to the undocumented lives of migrant workers across Asia, presenting stories of adventure, love, hope, loss, guilt and redemption. It is written by an inter-racial migrant couple coming from India and China who have played a foundational role in giving voices to migrant workers across Asia and Africa through acclaimed platforms such as Migrant Poetry Competitions and the Global Migrant Festival.

Shivaji Das is the author of four critically acclaimed travel, art and business books. He has been actively involved in migrant issues and is the conceptualizer and organizer for the acclaimed Migrant Worker and Refugee Poetry Contests in Singapore, Malaysia and Kenya and is the founder and director of the Global Migrant Festival. He was born and brought up in the north-eastern province of Assam in India, but is now a Singapore citizen.

Yolanda Yu’ s Neighbor’s Luck, a collection of short stories, was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Award 2020. She is a co-organizer of the Singapore Migrant Worker Poetry Contest and Global Migrant Festival, also an event host and coordinator for outreach for the Chinese migrant worker community. Born in North-Eastern China, Yolanda moved to Singapore on scholarship in 1998 and has been living there since then. 

So, over to Shivaji and Yolanda…

The Forgotten Promise, guest post by Paula Greenlees

UK-based Paula Greenlees lived in Singapore during the late 1980s. She fell in love with Southeast Asia and tried to travel as much as possible around the region and beyond - travelling down a crocodile infested river in Australia with a baby is something she won’t forget! 

Her second novel, The Forgotten Promise, is told through the points of view of two Eurasian women, Ella and Noor. Ella, is evacuated to England, a country that is alien and hostile to her.

Malaya, 1920: Ella and Noor make a promise in the shadows of the jungle. A promise that life won't let them easily keep. Malaya, 1941: Ella is running her late father's tin mine in the Kledang hills, while Noor works as her cook. When the war that felt so far away suddenly arrives on their doorstep, Ella is torn from her family. Her daughter Grace is left in Noor's care as Japanese soldiers seize the mine. Ella is forced to make an impossible choice that takes her to England, thousands of miles from home. She is desperate to be reunited with her loved ones. But will the life she returns to be anything like the life she left behind?

Here, Paula discusses how family memories, history, and the experience of living in Singapore inspired her novels…

IF you fancy going to the Singapore Writers Festival, read this!

Singapore Writers Festival 2022 (SWF) opened on November 4, and continues until November 20th.  Here, Pooja Nansi, poet, educator and, since 2019, Festival Director, talks to Asian Books Blog 

Q: The theme for this years’ Festival is “IF”. Why was this chosen? How and why is it relevant to writing now? 

A: As the Festival celebrates its 25th edition this year, we are entering a time where the world is emerging from a pandemic, and we’re dealing with plenty of conflict, change and uncertainty globally. Things feel a little fragile at this moment. The Festival’s 25th edition also leads us to a kind of "quarter-life crisis" in that we’re reflecting on the Festival’s legacy, thinking about what could have been, and what lies in its future. We were inspired by local poet Cyril Wong’s poem “If…Else”. “If” is an interesting word that holds space for both regret and possibility, and allows for retrospection and ideation. Through this year’s programmes, we invite Festival-goers to join us in imagining and reimagining possibilities, with the literary arts as a starting point. The act of writing itself is a creation of possibilities. It is one of the safest ways of exploring different scenarios and taking risks. You can rewrite the past, change the present and imagine futures. We hope that the theme of “IF” reminds us all of how through literature, we create fictional worlds through our interactions with books, play with text, dream up scenarios, imagine the unfolding of narratives, indulge in fantasies, and transcend the boundaries of time, space and geography. 

Quite Lit, and Rightly So: Celebrating 20 Years of QLRS

Publisher Fong Hoe Fang introduces the QLRS editors

Clearly, in-person events have returned in style to Singapore’s poetry circuit. The past fortnight alone has been a buzz of activity, with a series of readings hosted by ocean-crossing nonprofit Singapore Unbound (don’t miss the upcoming Gaudy Boy reading!), as well as a stellar evening with the stalwart series Spoke & Bird, and competitive spoken word event Outspoken at Blu Jaz Café. In this firmament, one occasion stands out for its more reflective quality – a thoughtful pause before the summer flurry – namely, the launch and reading of Quiet Loving, Ravaging Search, the 20^th anniversary anthology of the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS).

'Tastes Like A Bot, But Is Not': New poetry by Daryl Lim Wei Jie

Guest post by Laura Jane Lee

Daryl Lim Wei Jie’s sophomore collection Anything But Human is a provocative incantation of sensations and sensuality, of detritus and the mundane. The volume hails a marked departure from the poet’s momentous first collection, A Book Of Changes, landing it more on the irreverent, tongue-in-cheek side of things, as poetry goes.

Anything But Human takes its title from Wang Xiaoni’s poem ‘A Rag’s Betrayal’ (一塊布的背叛), in which she writes, “Only humans want secrecy / now I’d like to pass myself off / as anything but human.” (trans. Eleanor Goodman). With this epigraph and title, Lim ushers the reader into an immersive vignette of objects made strange. Amongst these are snapshots which one perhaps can only describe as “delightfully unpleasant” – an oxymoronic feat within itself – evoking  incomprehensible sensations in the reader’s body with lines such as “The cough caught in my / throat flowers into a bulbous alien fruit”. Lim’s poems boldly traverse regions of distaste and pleasure, a pleasure rooted in physicality skirting but narrowly avoiding the sexual; as when he writes “They call me a daughter of disorder. See you / at the dungeon later, dry but preferably wet.” 

Another prominent theme of Lim’s poems is the thrill of lush decay, speaking of compostable orchids and orangutans, richly marbled and melting sleep, and silverfish unmaking knowledge out of circulation. These are poems which run rife with the postapocalyptic stench of late capitalism, in both the domesticity of the compliant toilet and the dying oranges in the fridge; to the Costco-like supermarket of ‘Junkspace Rhapsodies’. Not only does Lim conflate the mundane and the grotesque (which are often not so different). In the poem ‘Cloisters’, he invokes the toasts bearing images of Christ and the Virgin Mary fetching exorbitant prices on eBay, and in doing so juxtaposes food, spirituality, and capitalism, arguably the primary non-human mainstays of contemporary society. While these brilliant and humdrum idiosyncrasies running throughout the book easily set Lim apart from most of his contemporaries, it is also against the backdrop of such deftly woven paradoxes that his inventive reinterpretations of Bai Juyi pale in comparison. The lacunose translations seem to lack the same urgent yet languid flippancy of Lim’s original poems, and would perhaps find a better home in a separate volume of similarly reinterpretive poems.

These shortfalls are few and far between, largely outshone and more than redeemed by the experience that comes with reading the rest of the collection. The reader is served enthralling sensations of putrefaction alongside slices of the quotidian, societal observations of the variety seen on SINGAPORE ON PUBLIC NOTICE (@publicnoticesg), as in ‘Narrative (II)’, in which the persona asks permission to pee on insects before doing so, and closely observes the plastic packaging growing out of bushes. One wonders if Lim is the very prophet he writes of in ‘The Prophet’s Day Out’ (for Wong Phui Nam) and ‘The Prophet’s Last Warning’; the reader can’t help but notice that the collection, written pre-pandemic, speaks of occurrences such as “Parliament is closed today, but so are / the KTV lounges” and “The air-conditioning doubles as disinfectant… The air-conditioning doubles as reinfectant”. 

For all the simultaneous sharpness and listlessness of his poems, Lim’s Anything But Human features lines of strange, shaking tenderness, all nestled amongst the debris. For visceral human emotions to feature amongst things which are “Anything But Human”, is for them to be heightened and distilled to a singular shade of essentiality and desperation. Equally interesting is the handful of lines strewn carelessly across the poems, which provide a provocative political commentary, issuing from the mouth of what seems to be a half-hearted commentator. Anything But Human is not without surprises – it is at turns most ostensibly human.

Upon this reviewer’s first reading of the collection on the MRT line, somewhere between Tan Kah Kee and Chinatown, she scribbled the following comment beside the first poem, ‘Expression of Contentment’:

"Tastes like a bot"

Perhaps the comment would now be better revised to: “Tastes like a bot, but is not.”

***

Laura Jane Lee is a poet from Hong Kong, currently based in Singapore. Under her former name, she founded KongPoWriMo, Subtle Asian Poetry Collective, and is the winner of the Sir Roger Newdigate Prize.

Her work has been awarded in various international competitions including the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, Out-Spoken Poetry Prize and the Poetry London Mentorship Scheme, among others. She has been published and featured in journals and newspapers such as The Straits Times, Tatler Asia, HKFP, HK01, QLRS, ORB, and Mekong Review; and will be reading at the 52nd Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Previous pamphlets include chengyu: chinoiserie (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020) published under her former name, and flinch & air (Out-Spoken Press, 2021).

Read a review of Laura Jane Lee's 'flinch & air' here! 

Oral History as a Practice of Care: Theatres of Memory from Singapore's industrial history

 

Block 115 Commonwealth Drive, Singapore's first flatted factory.

Editor's note: Our poetry column takes a break this month as I dip into a new, brilliantly-told industrial history of postwar Singapore, published by Pagesetters. 

Last weekend, I found myself in a cavernous stairwell at Block 115 Commonwealth Drive, tiptoeing to see through the high, grid-like windows as a faint mustiness settled over me. The banisters were cool to the touch, smooth with decades of use, while cigarettes flattened into corners told of the building’s more recent occupants. I followed the tinkling of a windchime onto one of the upper corridors, where a door swung open to reveal shelves of clay figurines and – hunched at a long table – a potter at work. Save for the glossy poster on the wall outside, I could well have imagined men and women arriving in neatly-pressed uniforms for an afternoon shift at Roxy Electric, Wing Heng, or another of the many tenants to have occupied Singapore’s first flatted factory since it opened in 1965.

Guest post from Jayanthi Sankar

Though Jayanthi Sankar is a native of India, where her books are published, she lives in Singapore.  Her fiction often explores the diversity of her adopted home. She believes in ever expanding the scope of her creative world. While developing her fictional universe, she interacts with the characters she forms and shapes to create a whole new world. For her, writing a novel is process that she truly lives and she delights in experimenting with her storytelling. 

Here she discusses her two historical novels, Tabula Rasa and Misplaced Heads, and her collection of short stories, Dangling Gandhi. 

So, over to Jayanthi…

Indie Spotlight: Building a community by writing - How my memoir about divorce connected people from around the world during the pandemic

Indie Spotlight is a column by WWII historical fiction author Alexa Kang. The column regularly features hot new releases and noteworthy indie-published books, and popular authors who have found success in the new creative world of independent publishing. 

 

One of the advantages of indie publishing is the freedom to bring our work to readers without adhering to the traditional model of book production. The freedom to share our work in progress with readers can help a writer determine whether her work resonates with the audience, and helps the writer improve her skills along the way by readers’ feedback. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing to you author Ranjani Rao. During the year of pandemic, when we were all stuck at home, Ranjani wrote a memoir on her divorce experience. While writing, she began sharing her progress via a subscription letter. Occasionally, her subscribers would receive sneak peaks of excerpts of her book. Through sharing, she not only built her readership, but created an entire community for people with marital problems who were looking for someone to articulate their feelings. 

As an indie author myself, I can say for certain that knowing our work touches the lives of our readers, and that our writing gave them emotional release, is one of our biggest rewards for our hard work and efforts.  And now, over to Ranjani to tell you her amazing journey. . .  

On Being Blue: In conversation with the editors of 'Atelier of Healing'

Editor's note: Given the upheavals of the past two years, a theme that has surfaced repeatedly at discussions and readings of poetry is the power of the form to comfort and restore, especially when solutions or explanations seem out of reach. At an event organised by the Migrant Writers of Singapore last month, for instance, many poets responded directly to the themes of 'anguish' and 'loss', reliving and sharing catharsis through poetic encounters. 

For this month's poetry column, I spoke to the editors of a recently-launched online anthology on trauma and recovery, Desmond Kon and Eric Valles (who both previously featured on the blog here and here). Published by Squircle Line Press, Atelier of Healing is a free e-anthology, and may be accessed at this link. 

Lion City Lit: Celebrating Forty Years of Transforming Lives

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore, so we occasionally highlight book-related events in the city. Celebrating Forty Years of Transforming Lives is the 40th anniversary commemorative book published by Lions Home For The Elders, a leading Singapore charity.

The book tells the story – in words and images – of how the first home was established in 1980 on the void deck of a Housing Development Block (HDB) in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10, thanks to the hard work and fundraising by Lions Club volunteers, and approved by the then Department of Social Welfare. 

Chairman of the Lions Home Henre Tan, says in his foreword: “In spite of all the constraints on us all during these difficult and demanding days, we did decide to keep to our plan to produce a worthy and insightful narrative of the Lions Home For The Elders, from its humble beginnings to become one of Singapore’s leading nursing homes caring for the elderly.” 

The 40th anniversary book was originally intended to be launched at the Lions International Convention, scheduled to be held in Singapore in June last year, when 20,000 of the charity's supporters were expected to attend. But like many events, the launch was cancelled and the book was recently launched at a hybrid event broadcast from Singapore, beamed live around the world, and attended in person by 50 people, following coronavirus safe distancing procedures.

Singapore-based author and publisher Ken Hickson, who was previously responsible for Asian Books Blog's Lion City Lit column, steered Celebrating Forty Years of Transforming Lives from its beginning in mid-2019, to completion close to two years later. He says: "I want the book to not only provide a faithful record of a remarkable Singapore institution but also to meet clean and green standards." He achieved his second aim by sourcing suitable paper from sustainably managed forests in Asia and using a local printer, Times Printers.    

Edgeland Visible: Reading Singapore’s Terrains of the Anthropocene

Editor’s note: Here in Singapore, public conversation has in recent weeks revolved around the fate of the island’s forests – sanctuaries of diversity within a crowded city-state. This month’s guest post by Leonard Yip, excerpted from his recently-completed MPhil dissertation, explores the trajectories of place- and nature-writing in Singapore poetry, and draws our attention to how the ‘twin languages of grief and hope’ cast a familiar terrain in new light.  

***

In his poem ‘Clementi’ (2019), Singaporean poet Alvin Pang describes the titular neighbourhood as 

a riverrimmed reefknot of […] woods, mosques, stadium, pool, defunct purposebuilt buffet edifice, bioswales. Park connectors haunted by the Great White God of the waterway (photoevidence on request) (saidtobe komodo dragon wor, sureornot), a maw bigger than the monitors that monitor the stream and get picked on by otter gangs. Greyheads and whitebellied lurkers, raptorial and sometimes rapturous, hauling telelens on extended tripods. Wings bluelasering the wavers while the abacusclacker of massrail passings encount indifferent intervals. 

Pang’s work does not pretend towards neat, organised overview of place. A riotous composition of poetic sensitivity to rhythm and prosaic attention to detail, ‘Clementi’ formally embodies the area it describes: a chaotic compress of countless lives, seething together . The terrain of poem and place defy categorisation – religious, recreational and natural structures of ‘woods, mosques, stadium’ build together undifferentiated, vowels and consonants accelerating together with restless rhythm. 

Set loose from containment, things collide and intermingle freely. The vernacular of Clementi’s residents mixes with hushed myth: a lizard water-god, ‘saidtobe komodo dragon wor’, the suffix a Singlish invocation of emphasis, and the incredulous response ‘sureornot’. Genres as well as languages smash into each other, the great lizard’s high mystery fraying into gangland turf war as smooth-coated otters vie with monitors for territory. Language turns loose; ‘Greyheads and whitebellied lurkers’ describes both middle-aged, enraptured birdwatchers and the watched raptors themselves, melding human observer and animal subject. Words come together in onomatopoetic portmanteaus, birthing a new soundscape for this strange place, where urban and natural generate new forms: the ‘abacusclacker’ of a passing train, consonants clattering against the skimming, sheeting ‘bluelasering’ of wings slicing the water’s edge. This place is an interface of lives morphing into one another, a land animated by accommodations and adaptations. 

Pang’s lands are my lands. I know this ‘riverrimmed reefknot’ for myself, these taut words suggesting the landscape’s own denseness. I grew up in it, tracing my way through park connectors and bioswales to canal edges, where linen-scented laundry outflow washes into loach shoals glittering in the water grasses. A landscape such as this can be frustrating to read. Theories and poetics of either urban architecture or sublime, untouched wildness fall flat, insufficient for making sense of a space as mixed between the two as this. They are lands at each other’s fringes, neither fully wild nor urban – edgelands. 

This term was first coined by the British writer and activist Marion Shoard in 2000, to describe the land ‘betwixt urban and rural’, which was ‘a kind of landscape quite different from either’. It describes many of Singapore’s terrains which do not fit cleanly into urban or natural categories, where human infrastructure marries itself to the wildness of nature, springing new ecologies into life. These terrains, however, also exceed the term’s original, Anglocentric definitions. Where Shoard understood the edgelands as a transitional zone between city and countryside, Singapore’s small landmass and extensive development mean that the countryside is city. The edgelands detonate out of the compression between our dense neighbourhoods and teeming biodiversity – both products and victims of our land-altering and devastating. Great metal machines up-end the forest, laying down concrete drains where macaques sneak into backyards and morning glories bloom over fences. These go in time, too, as bulldozers churn the earth again to prepare new superstructures of metal and glass. The edgelands are terrains of the Anthropocene, disappearing as fast as they form.

The violence which creates and destroys the edgelands extends not just across the earth, but into it as well. Redeveloping land erases and builds over past traces of life, razing ecologies, histories and memories. Because of this, the cultural activity which articulates our relationship to the edgelands often does so through a language of grief and memory. Chitra Ramesh’s poem ‘Merlion’ (2019) evokes the history of Singapore’s modernisation, where swamps were drained and zinc-roofed villages razed to make way for public housing: 

        if you dig the marshy wet soil
        you might find the roofs of my kampong house
        roosters might mumble under those roofs
        fish may be still gasping through their gills
        among the flowers in my garden 

        […] 

        Under the expressways
        our thatched houses lie buried. 

Ramesh’s imagination figures national and personal history as fantastic revenants haunting the city’s underworld: disquiet roosters in the soil, and fish clinging on to amphibious half-life. Childhood memories persist uncomfortably in the earth like stubborn residue, the ‘gasping’ of fish suggesting a suffocating struggle for survival. Wistful, yet resolute, Ramesh’s landscape is an edgeland of chronology as well as ecology, containing and conjuring memories back to ward off their forgetting. This language of grief and ghosts is critical for surviving in the Anthropocene, because it refuses the geographic amnesia of what ecologists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ – when our landscapes become so altered that we forget what was there before. Ramesh’s edgeland poetry is held hostage by its summoned spectres, and this holds us in turn accountable – to remember the stratified layers of meaning and home-making beneath our feet.

The edgelands, however, can also be read with a language of hope as much as grief. The same sensitivity which allows us to mourn what is lost enables us to imagine what might still be possible, between the human and more-than-human presences that compose these places. Observing smooth-coated otters returning to Singapore’s city-centre reservoirs and waterways, Cyril Wong’s ‘Otter City’ (2019) both wrestles with and affirms the tentative relationships forming within the edgelands’ compress:

        how long have we been watching
        with love and envy -
        leaving us lovers and doubtful
        urbanites to lumber back to the m.r.t.,
        noting sporadically trees
        we cannot name – tembusu
        or angsana, we wished we knew –

        and that sudden, darting shrew
        skirting us between office buildings.
        those otters still
        whirling through our minds –
        our date complete; not just
        with each other
        but with a whole republic
        of life thrumming beneath our feet. 

Wong’s verse initially charts estrangement and frustration. Ocular connection between otter and observer produces only a reminder of how alien each one seems to the other. The watchers appear to be drawn apart from the wild rather than reconciled to it, so detached they cannot even name the trees. 

Yet something wonderful happens in the poem: the otters stay ‘whirling through [their] minds’, extracting the transfixed watchers from the self-obsession of their date, and extending the occasion’s opportunity for intimacy to ‘a whole republic of life’. The phrase unites our manmade polity with the creatures slinking back through this city, becoming as much a part of it as the watchers. Wong’s poem finds its way ultimately to a kind of entrancement – human and animal test the waters, learning to shape the colliding spheres of their existence. The path blazed by Wong’s work illuminates how the twin languages of grief and hope might help us to read these complicated, threatened terrains: tracing a route from what we are not, into the possibility of what we could be; one entire ‘republic of life’, living, nourishing, and benefiting each other within the edgelands’ interface. 

***

Leonard Yip is a writer of landscape, people, nature and faith, and the places where these intersect. He recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of Cambridge, where he wrote his dissertation on multimedia representations of the edgelands of Singapore. His writing has been featured in Moxy Magazine, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, and Nature Watch, the quarterly publication of the Nature Society (Singapore). He lives in Singapore, where he is currently furthering his work on the edgelands and other terrains of the Anthropocene. More of his work can be found at leonardywy.wordpress.com. 

Note: Alvin Pang's and Chitra Ramesh's poems can be found in 'Contour: A Lyric Cartography of Singapore', ed. Leonard Ng, Azhar Ibrahim, Chow Teck Seng, Kanagalatha Krishnasamy, Tan Chee Lay (Singapore: Poetry Festival Singapore, 2019). Cyril Wong's poem is published in 'The Nature of Poetry', ed. Edwin Thumboo and Eric Tinsay Valles (Singapore: National Parks Board, 2019). 

Cover photo by Theophilus Kwek.