Re-centring the margins: Reflections on the Singapore Literature Symposium 

Re-centring the margins: Reflections on the Singapore Literature Symposium

Theophilus Kwek

Allow me to begin these reflections with an apology. While this is a literary Symposium, I am not in any serious academic sense a student of literature. My own postgraduate training was in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, which, though highly interdisciplinary today, was closely associated at its birth with sociology and anthropology (see Zetter 2018). And so I confess to having attended these past two days’ proceedings with something of an amateur ethnographer’s eye and ear. Listening to the perspectives and personal histories shared virtually in this intimate-but-deterritorialised new normal, a theme that has emerged again and again – one that seems to mark a way forward from this Symposium – is the idea of re-centring the margins; of our nation, our discourse, and our inquiry.

As a child of the 90s (‘the last of the Millennials’), I came to Singapore literature in the early 2000s, barely a decade after the cohort of poets published between 1994 to 1998 (including Tan 1994, Pang 1997, Chia 1998, and others). In a happy parallel with my teenage joy at entering a ‘grown-up’s world’, there was a distinct sense at the time of the arts coming out of the margins, to the centre of public life. As Prof Wee mentioned in his opening remarks, the Esplanade opened in 2002; a few years later, the School of the Arts opened in 2008 and some of my peers were in its first cohort (Wee 2021). During these years, the literary arts staked their claim to representing the Renaissance City, albeit as what Tommy Koh would later come to call “loving critics” (Koh 2019). After No Other City was published, several other anthologies emerged as efforts, in their own distinctive ways, to re-centre creative writing in English, and poetry in particular, as the art form with its finger on the pulse of the city (see for instance Lee and Pang 2000, Poon et al 2009, Ng 2010, Shiau and Lee 2011).

My own first publication was in one of these anthologies, a book of poems on the Merlion co-edited by Prof Edwin Thumboo, whom, it must be remembered, made the journey from detained student radical in the 1950s to Emeritus Professor (Thumboo et al 2009; see also Loh et al 2012). With this re-centring comes a kind of acceptability. Those who were here yesterday would remember Alvin Pang’s anecdote of the rugby player, contributor to No Other City, who turned up sheepishly at the contributors’ photoshoot. I clearly was, and still am, no rugby player. But I imagine I felt a similar sense of arrival when I shelled out from my pocket money at fifteen (at a school book fair, no less!) for the very first of many poetry collections in my possession, A History of Amnesia by Alfian Sa’at (2008). 

A foremost concern of migration studies is precisely with the movement of ideas, persons, activities, and spaces from the margins to the centre. Equally, we are and ought to be concerned with who (and whose perspectives) gets left in the margins, or who gets displaced from the centre, and moved to the margins (see Mahler and Pessar 2006). Yesterday, we heard poignantly from Isa Kamari – and today, from Annaliza Bakri – about a profound sense of displacement that echoes in much of the Malay writing from the post-independence period, a sense that the cultural life of a community has been sidelined, even put at risk of being erased or written over. In the panel I’ve just chaired, we also discussed how the dynamism of different linguistic communities, and indeed the realities of whole linguistic worlds, have been glossed over as Anglophone writing has taken centre stage.

I think we, in our limited capacities as organisers, are acutely aware that despite our best efforts at ensuring a diversity and balance of voices on every panel, this Symposium would still fall far short as a representational platform. We are grateful to all of our speakers for diligently making room in their own discussions for the work of others, so that voices other than their own have also been heard at this Symposium. I personally think this Symposium will have added something to our discourse if it has pointed us in the direction of inquiring further after the margins, and understanding the processes of marginalisation. Even more so, going from theory into praxis, I hope this Symposium has in some ways nudged us in the direction of re-centring the margins in our writing and in our lives.

This Symposium has also been displaced, twice. As some will know, a series of unfortunate events led us to move from our original venue at The Arts House, the seat of the country’s first Parliament, to the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) campus, and finally here, into the global commons of the internet. With the closure of The Substation in the city centre still fresh in everyone’s minds, and many performing groups experimenting with reaching audiences virtually during this time, the parallels are somewhat uncanny (Elangovan 2021, Stanley 2021). But there’s something curiously appropriate about this. As O Thiam Chin shared earlier today, so much of our writing now takes place on, or responds to, the internet. I, for one, rely heavily on the internet for the research that goes into my poems, and would readily confess to also using an online thesaurus and rhyme generator when I have deadlines to meet. But from the organised chaos of the SingPoWriMo Facebook group, to the cycle of Zoom readings and panel discussions now in full swing, it’s both exciting and unsettling to observe how the world we’re writing in is now – to return to a term I used earlier – deterritorialised.

Perhaps it’s telling that Aaron Lee, one of our panellists yesterday and a co-editor of No Other City, also told us about a more recent anthology he has worked on that uses hashtags for section breaks (Lee and Chia 2017). From the first generation of post-independence writers who saw a new nation coming into being, to a second generation who responded to a swiftly changing urban landscape, we find ourselves now in a moment where the ‘imagined community’ we speak to, from and against exists predominantly in the virtual space of the internet. What are the new possibilities, risks and inequalities experienced by those at the margins in this new terrain? Where, indeed, are the margins?

One community I am proud to support is the Migrant Writers of Singapore, a multi-lingual, multi-national collective that, while territorially defined, has done so much of its organising and outreach online, especially under COVID-19 (Kwek 2020). Lest we think that it is technology, however, that is primarily responsible for bringing their voices from the margins to the centre, we ought to remember that technology can so often be a double-edged sword, deepening some divides while patching over others. It is instead the work of writing – by which I mean, at its core, the protection, promotion, and profusion of multiple voices – that has all through our history, and is still today, doing the heavy lifting. So, in this commons of ‘Singapore Literature’ that we share, build, and define together, let us continue to be aware of where the margins lie, of how we may ourselves have been complicit in the histories of marginalisation, and of what we must do: the constant work of re-centring the margins. Of holding on to a hard-earned space, yes, but never ceasing to make room for others.

(Delivered 9^th May 2021, published 9th June 2021)

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