By Chesna Goh
Text in the City is a campaign that aims to promote Singaporean poetry using an interactive mobile app and a writing competition. Revolving around the various geographical locations in Singapore, the app features artists’ audio recordings of the poems as well as fun trivia and archival photos to provide a more holistic approach to a literary understanding of our nation. Divided into six geographical different zone, the app also features poetry trails and curated tours by guides from the Singapore Heritage Society.
On the Sixth of October, I attended Text in the City’s poetry reading at Kinokuniya Orchard and it was an eye opening experience as I’ve never attended any poetry readings prior to this. The three poets that were reading were Gwee Li Sui, Terrence Heng, Tse Hao Guang and they all read from a carefully curated list of poems that fit the theme of Singapore.
The biggest impact the reading had on me was when veteran poet, Terrence Heng read of one of his first few poems titled ‘Postcards from Chinatown.’ While remarking wryly that he wrote this in 1997 when we (most of the audience members were like myself, barely past twenty) were wee babes, he detailed its particular significance. The poem was inspired by Smith Street Complex and Block 1 Upper Pickering Street which used to house his paternal grandparents and hence forming bulk of his childhood memories.
Racks of clothes along racks of clocks, as
if ticking away the fashion of the eras.
Fortune telling weight machine, I never
stepped on one before. Durian sign sale,
bicycle underneath no-bicycle sign.
….
That was in the background where I walked,
background of the closed down emporium,
background of the foreign worker outside
an unopened shophouse. Background wet market,
background unanswered responses to the cajoling
from the hawkers in the background hawker centre.
Background, backstage.
Our performance dictates a different set of scripts.
….
I’ll sell this as distinctly local. Our whole stage of
rojak culture and the embracement of strolling
down the street back into the tour bus. Shiny shiny
trishaws and fluorescent T-shirts peddle you around
the incorporated country. This is Singapore,
ladies and gentlemen, although you don’t see
the locals anywhere.
Written in a period of intense modernisation that was fuelling Chinatown’s commodification, his poignant poem struck a sobering chord with me because it made me question how I constructed my notion of what a Singaporean identity is and on further introspection, realised that this poem alienated and made me feel like an outsider to my own country and its heritage.
An old photograph of South Bridge Road in 1997
My paternal grandparents though Singaporean, are estranged, and the maternal ones that I am close to reside in Malaysia. Furthermore, my father who is English educated and spent a good number of years working abroad may possibly be the saddest representation of what the Olden Singapore and its heritage was like. And I, only actually achieving consciousness well in my tWeenage years(because really, aren’t our pre-pubesence years all just a blur of playgrounds, birthday cakes and rotting milk teeth), realised my constructed notion of Singapore was contingent on its modernity— westernised cartoons on Cartoon Network, sunday breakfasts at a Macdonalds situated in an air-conditioned shopping mall, Enid Blyton borrowed from the nearest public library, my OshKosh overalls, my Barbies etc.
So when Terrence spoke of the ‘ticking away of the fashion of the eras,’ and how heritage and culture has been reduced to nothing more than ‘fake pigtails stapled to the back of Chinese hats’, he was equal parts scathing and nostalgic for a past that seemed very foreign to me. I’ve never seen Chinatown as more than a tourist trap in the day and chic gay heaven come sundown.
Backstage (Gay) Bar right in the heart of Chinatown
To me, those ‘shiny trishaws and fluorescent T-shirts’ have just been assumed to be part of the national identity that I have always subscribed to, (and am realising belatedly that Kampong Glam and Little India has undergone similar white washing by the government). The possibility of it existing in another, less homogenised and less artificially crafted state was in all honesty, something I’ve never spent much consideration on. In other words, while I have noticed that those overpriced Kueh Tu Tu hawking uncles speaking in broken english to stupid tourists may seem a little out of place, I’ve never imagined them existing on their own and belonging to another time. Unlike Terrence Heng, my Singaporean identity never had a ‘before’ (or the pre modernised Singapore) to serve as a comparison and is instead solely constructed around the now.
Back in the first week of school, I quoted Shklovsky in a forum posting, stating that ‘art removes objects from the automatism of perception’ and this instance really exemplified how art defamiliarises and as it does, forces us to reconfigure previous perceptions. And I guess I’ve now come full circle.