Literature in Singapore: Thinking Through Literary-Cultural Development Since 1965

Literature in Singapore: Thinking Through Literary-Cultural Development Since 1965

C. J. W.-L. Wee
English, School of Humanities
Nanyang Technological University

Welcome to the Singapore Literature Symposium 2021, organised by the Singapore Studies Research Cluster of the School of Humanities at NTU. The symposium hopes to take tentative stock of mainly, though not exclusively, literature in English in Singapore – literature in all its manifold forms, even for a supposedly small country, is beyond what can be realistically managed in a limited symposium. Our main goal is to be exploratory, as what is of interest to the organisers is the lack of a clear sense of the directions literary development has taken since 1965 – at least among the organising committee!

The year 1965 was the complicated year in which our literature abruptly ceased to be either Malayan or Malaysian literature: was this the tabula rasa moment when literature from Singapore started anew? This is an entire area to be explored in itself and yet it is an issue that has become either irrelevant or forgotten – literary culture and history twice written over, we might say. As one cultural observer provocatively posited in 1994, at a Singapore Heritage Society forum on ‘Our Place in Time’: ‘To put it simply: Singapore, in many ways, is the product of forgettings. Singapore occurred, and continues to sustain itself, as a result of recurrent acts of forgettings. Forgetting is the condition of Singapore’ (Janadas 1999, 22). I will return to this point a little later.

National identity and modernisation were two key terms that dominated the first two decades after independence in 1965 – what nation-building was or should be, unexpectedly, played a significant part in state rhetoric and the public sphere in the city-state. These two items were central though of course not the only concerns of the literature of that era. Those first decades witnessed the primary importance of poetry linked with the teaching staff and students in English at the University of Singapore, and the extra-university literary scene connected with them, and – what I have always found a little counterintuitive, even curious – secondary work in the novel. Since then, we have, with greater wealth and with more funding poured into literature and the arts, also seen greater numbers of people involved with literature and a concomitant growth in diverse literary forms (certainly in literature in English) than could have been imagined in the 1960s and the 1970s.

It is perhaps in the 1990s that nation-building weakens as a notable literary focus. And what happened in literature? Poetry continued – indeed expanded. The novel also progressed, if initially a little more slowly. By the time Amanda Lee Koe’s collection of short stories, Ministry of Moral Panic, was published in 2013, there were Singaporeans living overseas who were writing and getting published; there were more and varied experiments in poetry, including spoken word poetry; there were more novels published; and the short story as a form became more pronounced – as attested by Lee Koe’s collection.

The expansion was also true in the visual arts and theatre – witness the prominence of playwright and public intellectual Kuo Pao Kun (Rae 2020) and visual and performance artist Tang Da Wu from the 1980s (Wee 2017). Have we since the post-independence years – when Singapore was (in)famously known to be a provincial and pragmatic society of shopping centres – become a more varied and ‘normal’ cultural community that befits our having become a first tier (if perhaps lower division) global city? In 1960, when Singapore had gained self-rule status, though still controlled as a part of Great Britain, the then-minister of culture S. Rajaratnam (1987, 119) pronounced, ‘We do not regard culture as the opium of the intellectuals or as something to tickle the fancies of gentlemen or gentlewomen. For us the creation of a Malayan culture is a matter of practical politics ... [and] nation-building.’ What has happened to the narrative of the nation and nation-building that was explored in the 1960s and the 1970s, as we moved into the 1990s and beyond?

I would like to reflect briefly on two points of time – one more generally from 1965 to the mid-1970s and the other more precisely in 1993 – as part of this prelude to the symposium. I do not offer arguments per se about these two moments, but only an attempt to review them and see how they might help us reflect upon our literary-cultural trajectory from 1965 to now. The first, maybe unsurprisingly, is associated with Lee Tzu Pheng’s now iconic poem, ‘My Country and My People’, written in 1967 (Handal 2015). Of this poem, Lee (1999, 20) has written, ‘It used to amaze and dismay me, how this poem tended to be misread, misunderstood and, I believe, even misused: being touted as a “patriotic” piece or its opposite – anything but the balanced poem I thought I had achieved (after twelve drafts!).’ It is worth our while to read this poem again:

My country and my people
are neither here nor there, nor
in the comfort of my preferences,
if I could even choose.
At any rate, to fancy is to cheat;
and worse than being alien, or
subversive without cause,
is being a patriot
of the will.

I came in the boom of babies, not guns,
a ‘daughter of a better age’;
I held a pencil in a school
while the ‘age’ was quelling riots
in the street, or cutting down
those foreign ‘devils’,
(whose books I was being taught to read).
Thus privileged I entered early
the Lion City's jaws.

But they sent me back as fast
to my shy, forbearing family.
So I stayed in my parents’ house,
and had only household cares.
The city remained a distant way,
but I had no land to till;
only a duck that would not lay,
and a runt of a papaya tree,
(which also turned out to be male).

Then I learnt to drive instead
and praise the highways till
I saw them chop the great trees down,
and plant the little ones;
impound the hungry buffalo
(the big ones and the little ones)
because the cars could not be curbed.
Nor could the population.
They built milli-mini-flats
for a multi-mini-society.
The chiselled profile in the sky
took on a lofty attitude,
but modestly, at any rate
it made the tourist feel ‘at home’.

My country and my people
I never understood.
I grew up in China’s mighty shadow,
with my gentle, brown-skinned neighbours;
but I keep diaries in English.
I sought to grow
in humanity’s rich soil,
and started digging on the banks, then saw
life carrying my friends downstream.

Yet, careful tending of the human heart
may make a hundred flowers bloom;
and perhaps, fence-sitting neighbour,
I claim citizenship in your recognition
of our kind,
my people, and my country,
are you, and you my home.

By the 1970s three items in the poem had become emblematic in thinking of immediate post-independence Singapore. The first is the question of the challenges entailed in nation-building. Who are ‘My country and my people’ [emphases mine]? Lee flips this formulation at the end of the poem to ‘my people and my country’: do not let the abstraction of the ‘country’ start first, she suggests. The second item is Singapore’s well-known multi-ethnic population: please also do not say ‘my people’ too easily, without working through the challenges to be able to make this claim with conviction. The third component is intensified infrastructural development, including public housing blocks for a ‘multi-mini-society’: will the blandishments of a new, urbanising society assist newly-minted Singapore citizens in forgetting the historical tensions that divide us? This question then returns us – as brought up at the start of my remarks – to the need to forget, here applied to inter-ethnic tensions and even less-desired landscapes where ‘the hungry buffalo’ once existed in the city-state’s history if economically viable nation-building was to be a successful venture. How have these three concerns, we may ask, transmuted into our contemporary moment? How do they remain with us – or do they remain with us? Or have newer questions completely supplanted these earlier concerns about life in Singapore?

The symposium invites presenters and the audience to reflect upon the questions just mentioned and also on the evolving pluralism in both aesthetic formats and content in literature in more recent years – years that witnessed significant change in the government’s understanding of what cultural and physical infrastructure might be for post-industrial advancement, as seen in the Economic Development Board’s and the then-Ministry of Information and the Arts’ policy paper, Singapore: Global City for the Arts (1992). Singapore was no more to be a pragmatically-oriented city-state. Arguably, this second moment led to the opening of The Esplanade – Theatres by the Bay in 2002, an institution that covered the needs of the performing arts, and to the Arts House in 2004, an institution that from 2007 has become a key programme partner with the National Arts Council to co-organise the Singapore Writers Festival. The possibility for vital change in cultural policy was already heralded in the important Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (1989) – but no one could have quite imagined the longer-term transformative capacity of the Council’s Report.

Originally, we were slated to contemplate our literary-cultural questions, perchance appropriately, at the Arts House (TAH), with that institution as a venue partner. In the end, TAH said that they were unable to accommodate the event. But, perhaps also appropriately, we will now discuss what might be thought of as arts centres and sub-centres online.

By 1993, the creation of the Singapore Arts Centre (later to be renamed as The Esplanade – Theatres by the Bay) was proposed. The 1990s was a decade that would behold an expansion of and experiments in literature and the arts – there was an increase in poetry and the emergence of performance art, for example, and, above all, there was the founding of The Substation in 1990 under the leadership of the late Kuo Pao Kun, with state support. And early in that same decade, the arts community will learn that an official arts centre was to come about. What did it mean that the expanding and expansive literary, visual and performing arts sub-centres soon would engage with a publicly-supported arts centre?

In 1993, at the landmark ‘Art versus Art’ Substation conference, the first arts conference in the city-state, Janadas Devan (1995, 54) argued for the maintaining the vitality of artistic sub-centres: ‘The moment The Substation leaves The Substation for the Singapore Arts Centre, all that The Substation represents will die – not literally but symbolically.’ A prescient viewpoint when taken from our present, 28 years later, with The Substation’s impending closure in July 2021 (National Arts Council 2021; Substation 2021)? Janadas went on to add that it is necessary "to keep in tension the relationship between one of kind of art and another – or in practical terms, the tension between The Substation (the sub-centre) and the Singapore Art Centre, a tension which, if it doesn’t already exist, one must create and sustain. Only that art which refuses to reduce differences to an exclusive order, even as it continues to promise an order – for how can art exist without such a promise – only that art which refuses to simplify what it promises, only such art can save us. Only such art is absolutely necessary." (1995, 55)

Art from the sub-centres that refuses to reduce differences to the possible singularity of ‘an exclusive order’ is vital, that art is ‘absolutely necessary’. But this does not mean that a centre can be avoided or even should be avoided: it is the “tension [in] the relationship” between sub-centres and an emerging centre that needs also to maintained. Did the arts community agree with Janadas then, in 1993? Do we agree with that assertion now? Where have we now gone to with a more professionalised arts scene, the proliferation of artists and the expanded range of artistic experimentation, along with substantial government arts funding and infrastructure enlargement since the 1990s? These are some of the issues that the organisers hope that this symposium will engage with. Thank you.

(Delivered 8th May 2021, published 9th June 2021)

Wee, C. J. W.-L. “Literature in Singapore: Thinking Through Literary-Cultural Development Since 1965.” Singapore Literature Symposium, 8-9 May 2021, Web. Opening Remarks. https://www.ntu.edu.sg/soh/research/singapore-studies/sls-2021-opening-remarks.

References

Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts. 1989. Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts. Singapore: [Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts].

Economic Development Board and Ministry of Information and the Arts. [1992.] Singapore: Global City for the Arts. Singapore: Economic Development Board and Ministry of Information and the Arts.

Handal, Nathalie. 2015. ‘The City and the Writer: In Singapore with Anne Lee Tzu Pheng’, WWB Daily. https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-city-and-the-writer-in-singapore-with-anne-lee-tzu-pheng.

Janadas Devan. 1999. ‘Forgetting to Remember.’ In Our Place in Time: Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, edited by Kwok Kian-Woon, Kwa Chong Guan, Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh, 21-33. Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society.

Janadas Devan. 1995. ‘Paper 4: Is Art Necessary?’ In Art vs. Art: Conflict and Convergence. The Substation Conference 1993, edited by Lee Weng Choy, 50-56. Singapore: The Substation.

Lee Tzu Pheng. 1999. ‘My Country and My People.’ In Our Place in Time: Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, edited by Kwok Kian-Woon, Kwa Chong Guan, Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh, 18-20. Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society.

National Arts Council. 2021. “Media Statement – Permanent Closure of the Substation”, 2 March. https://www.nac.gov.sg/about-us/media-centre/press-releases/media-statement-permanent-closure-of-the-substation.

Rae, Paul. 2020. ‘The Feeling of Being Watched: Lived Confucianism and Theatricality in Kuo Pao Kun’s Mid-1980s Monodramas.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 21 (2): 225-237, doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2020.1759885.

Rajaratnam, S. 1987. The Prophetic and the Political: Selected Speeches and Writings of S. Rajaratnam, edited by Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq. Singapore: Graham Brash.

Substation. 2021. “Overview, Key Messages and Frequently Asked Questions”, 2 March. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56fcaa737da24fa2afc22beb/t/603dae1de3f24a5f0d72dfee/1614655029116/The+Substation+Overview+and+FAQs.pdf.

Wee, C. J. W.-L. 2017. ‘Body and Communication: The “Ordinary” Art of Tang Da Wu.’ Theatre Research International, 42 (3): 286-306, doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883317000591.