We’ve been here a month now, getting used to new rhythms of life. The time we spend outside in Singapore is much less than in Vancouver: we don’t cycle to the shops or walk downtown. Here it’s the MRT or the bus, journeys that often take an hour or more. There are signs of change in our lives, too. I have a little purple coloured senior citizen’s card for public transit, which means that each trip never exceeds a dollar. We also find ourselves much more conscious of the need for a seat: it’s a strange, unconscious inevitability of the body, and the age at which I refused offered seats has now passed. We plot in advance which part of the train is likely to be less crowded, and move along the platform to get best access to it. Planning ahead, we often take a longer, less crowded route. If we’re going downtown at peak times, it’s often better to get the red line which goes all the way up north to Woodlands and then curves back down: it’s ten minutes longer than going by the green East-West line, but seats are much easier to find. There are sights in the way, too. Abandoned factories past Yew Tee, and then the War Memorial on the Hill at Kranji, like the conning tower of a submarine, and then a slow curve through Woodlands round to Yishun, were the line used to start when I first came to Singapore. It’s only at Bishan that you go back underground.

            For the first time in a few years, I’ve been reading more Singapore Literature, although still not with the intensity I did when, as an academic in the area, I had to keep myself current in the field. I’m curious in particular about two contrasting Singapore novels that I’ve read that represent very different kinds of literary production, both of which appear frequently in my social media threads.

The first of the novels is Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation. Whereas the title refers to the reclamation of land for what is now Singapore’s East Coast Park from the 1960s onwards, the novel has a wider historical reach. It is set in a Chinese rural kampung, beginning just before the Japanese occupation and ending in the 1960s, after Operation Coldstore and merger with Malaysia in 1963, but before separation. The novel’s interesting in a number of ways. It attempts to tell history from below, by focusing on the perspective of the kampung dwellers, and in particular the protagonist Ah Boon, who grows to adulthood over this period. The movement through history is mimed by a romantic narrative, in which Ah Boon gives up his childhood sweetheart and true love Siok Mei for his English-educated wife Natalie, exchanging both political commitment and membership of an organic community for the charms of the developmental state. The novel also has a magical realist element: early in the narrative, Boon helps the villagers discover a series of islands that wax and wane in number each month with the moon: they are fertile fishing grounds, but one of his final acts in the novel is to betray their location to officials of the developmental state, who will make use of them as raw material to fill in ongoing reclamation work. Again, there’s a deeper narrative current here: the magic, spiritual knowledge, and older ways of apprehending the world are erased by the rationality of modernity. The reclamation of human souls mirrors the changes in the environment, the shifting sand settled and compressed into solid land.

            I found the novel very readable, and the brevity of this format means that I won’t focus so much on its many good qualities. It’s found resonance not just with international readers, but also with many younger Singaporeans. For me, however, there was an unresolved tension between the magical realism and the historical narrative that ultimately softened its socio-political engagement. The early scenes of the kampung and the natural world are beautifully done, but they almost seem airbrushed: there’s no abuse or exploitation, and even miscarriages, or illnesses such as tuberculosis, or the pain after manual labour are aestheticized: muscles, for instance, are described as “aching sweetly after a long day’s work.” Patriarchal traditions can be overcome by a simple act of will. This aestheticization is rhetorically necessary to valorize the world of the kampung against the spiritual emptiness of development, but it does encourage a reading of the text that leaves out the poetry of development itself: the fact that Ah Boon, as Heng shows, and his generation of people who became Singaporeans found themselves in and through this new story. The novel is prefaced with an epigraph from Singapore’s first Minister for the Arts and later Minister for Foreign Affairs: “We do not lay undue stress on the past. We do not see nation-building and modernization as primarily an exercise in reuniting the present generation with a past generation and its values and glories.” Yet in the speech that this quote is taken from Rajaratnam isn’t saying that pasts drawn from one’s own life or that of one’s parents or caregivers should be forgotten, as isolating it in this way implies. Rather, the quote comes as part of Rajaratnam’s skepticism about the construction of fictive, imagined national pasts of civilizational glory in the process of decolonization, and is part of an imprecation to “wear our nationalism lightly.” I’d love to teach this text in dialogue with others such as Isa Kamari’s Rawa, K.S. Maniam’s The Return (about Malaysia but also about the reinvention of self in modernity), and indeed a very beautiful recent short story by Mohamed Shaker, which I’ve just read, and which links tides and rhythms of the human body to the protagonist’s family history of life in a kampung on Pulau Brani.

The second novel I read was Myle Yan Tay’s catskull. There’s an interesting immediate contrast here in the paratextual elements of the novel. The Great Reclamation is published by Penguin Random House, full of praise quotes from The New York Times, NBC’s The Today Show, and the like. Catskull, in contrast, is published in Singapore by Ethos Books: it has an arresting cover, and praise quotes from locally published authors and cultural workers. I was intrigued to read it because I’d come across the author’s writing in various fora: as part of new dialogues in Singapore about race and racism, and in the play Brown Boys Don’t Tell Jokes, which I didn’t get to see when I was away from Singapore earlier in the year. The novel tells the story or Ram, a JC student who becomes a vigilante, punishing those who exploit others in Singapore. It’s got strong narrative energy, and also complexity, and it’s very Singaporean in that Ram  – without giving away the whole plot – eventually achieves a kind of redemption by getting three A grades for ‘A’ level! The novel’s uneven in contrast to The Great Reclamation, but appealing in its unevenness. 

Of course, the international/local contrast with The Great Reclamation doesn’t necessarily stand up in practice: Tay is a product of Yale NUS College, and, like Heng, has an American MFA. Writing and reading are increasingly globalized. Yet reading the two novels made me think more about what the “local” might be, and the way in which we frame personal histories, and create prosthetic histories of events beyond our direct experience.

            At the end of October, we finally contracted COVID, and our peripatetic wanderings across Singapore have been cut short for a week or two while we recover. More time for reading, I guess, before we emerge again.