Singapore Fiction and Poetry in English: A Note

'Yes,' I would reply. Then there would be a pause. 'So,' I would then resume, 'shall we begin?'

'Ah, yes, of course.' And away we would go, into facts and figures about courses, syllabuses, professors, seminars, academic excellence and records.

It would be later, during a break for tea, or lunch, that I would explain that though right now I was in my role of visiting journo on a tour of Singapore's university campuses at the invitation of its tourist board, my card was right, I was the literary editor of The Daily Star, my real interests were literary (but not that I wasn't having fun right now, no no no, please!) and so, where were the poets and writers here, the ones who wrote in English?

'Ah,' they would say again, 'yes, yes, we have English language writers here.' And would try to help me out. Like my hosts at the Singapore Tourist Board. 'We weren't prepared for this,' they informed me, 'but you could look up the English department people at NUS (National University of Singapore) when you visit them.'

But I was out of luck. It being vacation time, the campus was deserted. Where, after my meeting with the business school folks, the manager for corporate development pointed to the green rise in front of us and said, 'The English department, over there on top, but right now it's deserted.' Then shook his head, 'You know, they almost closed the department several years back. Nobody could find any use for English literature.' It was my turn to say 'Ah!' English lit departments, same story everywhere.

But a campus devoid of poets and writers didn't mean I didn't get to talk on subjects Singaporeans think about, and which conceivably are the raw stuff of literary endeavours. What you see and feel around you is what you write about. So, while waiting with the aforesaid manager--I wished I hadn't forgotten his name-- for the university bus to take me and my guide Ken back to our car parked way over on the other side, we chatted about Singapore, about its obsession with being number one (number one airport, number one university, oh, how the smaller among us dream of being the biggest in some ways!), about the fetish for efficiency and change ('our alumni come here to visit and complain about not being able to recognize the campus from year to year'), about Singapore's bureaucracy obsessively churning out ever more studies about how to be number one, about the globalization of English and its impact of native languages--that very day a professor of Chinese had written in the Straits Times lamenting the fact that the young Chinese no longer cared to learn their mother tongue, that they considered it old-fashioned and backward. The themes of change and flux, of tradition and modernity.

It was the same story on the other campuses I visited. Nobody available. Or I'd missed them by ten minutes. Which is what happened with Kirpal Singh, lit man about town, editor of a book of short stories and teacher at Singapore Management University. But then Dr. Chen of SMU later provided me with his email address, we communicated, and what you see on this page (as well as occasionally will see more of in the future) are entirely due to his kind help.

In between the campus visits, locked in a very tight schedule, which made enquiries outside academia impossible, I poked around in bookshops. Not much there. Catherine Lim, Hwee Hwee Tan, a few others, and some 'expat' stuff--books by foreigners in Singapore about Singapore, mainly British. But without the foreigner's anxiety. About which I started to wonder. What you notice in Singapore is how comfortable the ex-colonial masters are, perhaps a mark of how seamlessly Singapore seems to have transitioned into its postcoloniality. Compared to India's struggle for independence from the British, Singapore's bid for freedom from colonial rule seems a most gentlemanly affair, a series of co-ordinated moves to eventual self-government. Overall, Singapore has had no Sepoy Revolt, no Jalianwala Bagh massacre, no Surja Sen, no mass uprising against colonial rule, no 'Quit Singapore' movement. In fact, the opposite seemed to be true: a sort of pride in the colonial 'connection'. Sir Raffles, who founded modern Singapore, is everywhere: Raffles Class on Singapore Airlines jets, Raffles Hotel, Raffles this, Raffles that. Most unlike us in South Asia, where I can't imagine a Clive Class on Indian Airlines, or some colonial wedding cake of a Clive Hotel in Dhaka. Inside the Singapore Tourist Board building there were rooms named after European explorers: Costeau, Hillary. And when I pointed it out, the good folks there looked nonplussed. Then walked around and finally found Admiral Han room for me, in a dark corner.

And--though I could very well be wrong about it, since the observation is based on a cursory reading-- inevitably it shows up in Singapore's English language prose and poetry. As in real life, so too in Singapore's fiction, the white man-- or the representation of him/her-- is one of at ease. Where unlike in some of the best fiction written by South Asians, there seems absent that large, overarching theme and backdrop provided by the nationalist struggle, by the continuing divide between the Western and the non-Western worlds. Where speaking Singlish seems about the limit of revolt against prevailing order. Even our earliest extant narrative text in English, in 1835, by Kylas Chunder Dutt, begins, 'The people of India and particularly those of the metropolis had been subject for the last fifty years to every species of subaltern oppression...' I don't think there is quite the equivalent to this in Singapore's English language fiction, the postcolonial's semiotic defining of the self, the empire writing back. Their writing is funny, smart, modern, engaging, cosmopolitan, but it doesn't seem to have that. There is Vyvyan Lo's--who lives in London and I don't know if she's originally from Singapore--just-published novel Breaking the Tongue, set in Singapore, which does explore questions of loyalty to one's family and country, the role of language in culture, and the place of race, racism and ethnicity. But I think it would still be the exception rather than the rule. Unless Singapore's writers engage with the larger concerns, with, say, history’s squat, the pull of ideologies and the growth of the post-Raj state, it remains to be seen how much resonance they will have in the rest of Asia.

But then, like the students who do trouble to learn Chinese in Singapore, maybe I am just being old-fashioned and backward.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.