by Vincent Gan

Two days ago I attended an event “A Room with a View” (part of the annual Singapore Writers Festival), which featured a panel with three writers who were all at some point in time writers-in-residence at NTU: Dave Chua and Yong Shu Hoong, two local writers with distinguished literary careers, and Miguel Syjuco, a Filipino writer currently based in Montreal who had won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize for his debut novel Ilustrado.

The event started with the writers reading short excerpts from their more recent works, followed by some questions prepared by the moderator, and finally an interactive Q&A session. Yong kicked things off by reading four poems from his recent collection, and both Dave Chua and Miguel Syjuco read short excerpts from their own prose fiction. Among the works read, Yong’s very memorable poems “Tracing” and “The Final Resting Place” spoke to me best. According to the poet, “Tracing” had been inspired by the recent Malaysian Airlines disaster—and perhaps that made the lines “the beauty of poetry is not what’s there, / but what’s not there” particularly poignant and moving. Likewise “The Final Resting Place” evinces the same preoccupations with absence, loss, and death in the context of our urban environment. For someone who had rather limited exposure to Singapore poetry, I was pleasantly surprised at being able to viscerally relate with many of the themes and motifs in Yong’s poetry.

In the next section of the event, the writers reflected on the idea of what it means to be writing within academia during their respective stints as writers-in-residence. What exactly did this “room with a view” (the theme of the event) mean to them? Miguel Syjuco stressed the importance of creative writing programs within and outside university that function as a safe haven where young writers can try their hands at creative efforts in the company of like-minded people, and where they are offered a space to safely “fail”—a terrible word to hear in Singapore! There was also a general consensus among the writers that the academic environment was generally conducive for writing and provided them with the opportunity for interaction and intellectual exchange with faculty staff, other writers/artists, students in the university, etc., all of which very fruitful for conceptualizing new works.

I must say that one question posed to the writers in the Q&A section really struck me. Extrapolating the theme of “the room with a view” from a physical space (i.e. the writer’s office) to a metaphor, the member of the audience asked if the room actually becomes a panoptic structure that ultimately imposes certain constraints on the kind of works the writers produced. In other words, is this “view” from the room indeed a window of opportunity, or conversely something that restricts their creative imagination to churn out works in a self-justificatory manner? Yong responded by saying that it is the job of the writer to make the room his—although he was somewhat coy on how exactly this ideal process can be achieved. He did mention however that when Boey Kim Cheng was here as the international writer-in-residence (at the same time Yong himself was the local writer-in-residence), Boey had spent most of his time outside his room by taking long bus trips to the university. (At this point it admittedly became unclear if Yong was referring to the physical or figurative “room.”) Possibly, Yong said, Boey wanted to witness first-hand how Singapore has changed from the Singapore he once knew. It’s interesting that Yong’s remark here implicitly raised the question of whether it is always easier to write as an “outsider” looking in, as someone who bears a lighter burden of “expectations.”

Incidentally, one rather facetious reason why I had attended this event in the first place, apart from the excitement of meeting authors whom I normally wouldn’t have the chance to, is the happy coincidence that E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel of the same title (A Room with a View) is one of my favorite books of all time. The panel discussion provoked some afterthoughts in me that are strangely resonant with a wonderful quotation I recall from the novel:

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

In some sense, is it not the case too that the writer has to stand somewhere? A writer can never be “positionless” and write with a view or perspective from nowhere. The important thing, perhaps, is not to achieve a “transparent” kind of writing by breaking out of the “room,” but to be always and at all times acutely aware of the “shadow” he is casting. In the case of Singapore, that might mean finding a way of understanding, working through, but resisting the complete acquiescence to discursive pressures (from the state or otherwise) that may act on the writer in the course of his creative efforts. Writing as a Singaporean writer therefore doesn’t stem from a static identity which the text simply passively mediates or articulates; but it reflexively feeds back into the construction of this very identity. As we’ve seen time and again throughout the course (e.g. the Straits Chinese community “writing back”) such a project can never take place outside a “room with a view,” and maybe even more so for the category of national literature, but neither is it completely determined nor defined by the perimeters of the “room.”