SHAPING SPACES: Literature and the Environment in Singapore

In wanting, therefore, to discuss the ways in which Singaporean writers, especially poets, have responded to the notion of environment, it has to be clearly stated that this word is taken to mean every aspect and facet of a human being's experience outside of himself; that is, environment is everything external to a human being. Defined this way, environment would best be understood as space, or more accurately spaces, for no individual inhabits only one or specific space since at any given instant our senses are impacted upon by a whole variety of spaces -- physical, emotional, cultural, political, psychological, etc.

Let me begin by citing one line from the poem Changi by Koh Tat Boon. One of the visible facts about the Singaporean environment is that everything changes so fast that what is here today is gone tomorrow, thus making memory problematical!

The Changi I knew is buried.

This poem was written some 30 years ago but continues to reverberate today precisely because it captures that very frightening fact of Singapore's development: that the Island's environment, even the basic landscape, cannot be taken for granted, that environment, for Singaporeans, is constantly on the move and therefore a subject both of fascination as well as anxiety. For my generation-- and the writer above is of my generation-- Changi was associated primarily with a good swim in sea waters. Then came the decree that Changi beach would be reclaimed (which has meant pouring sand into the sea to make more land...) in order to build an airport. A feat of architectural construction then became for Koh a fact of loss and sorrow, even if only because it tellingly confirms the non-recovery of the original Changi as experienced by generations of Singaporeans.

So if space(s) determines people, and small spaces inhibit while large spaces expand the individual's world-view, is it any wonder that writers have paid special attention to the way(s) in which the environment has played a very crucial role in defining the larger Singaporean identity? In 2000, two young poets, Alvin Pang and Aaron Lee, came out with a collection of poems which expressed a multifarious response to Singapore's environment. Because Singapore is perceived to be mostly urban this anthology was titled NO OTHER CITY: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry. A few relevant lines for purposes of noting just how insightfully our poets have gleaned our larger environment should suffice here:

Singapore River

The operation was massive;
Designed to give new life
To the old lady.
We have cleaned out

her arteries, removed
detritus, and silt
created a by-pass
for the old blood.
Now you can hardly tell her history.

We have become
So health-conscious
The heart
Can sometimes be troublesome.
(Lee Tzu Pheng)

Then, as if almost in response to the above-quoted older poet's indictment (for indictment it seems to be!) of a policy which in the process of cleaning up leaves the natural environment squeaky clean in a clinical kind of way, the younger poet Koh Buck Song asks

How much more can we extend
The borders of our troubled turf?
How much longer stall
The incessant, relentless
Beat of the ocean's roar?
(Reclamation)

Read together (and in the anthology the two poems are laid out side by side) these lines point clearly to an ever-increasing anxiety on the part of the writers (Koh Buck Song is younger than Lee Tzu Pheng by a good fifteen years!)that Singapore has begun to appear more and more like a hospital where the "ocean's roar" is kept at bay only through a very deliberate policy of "reclamation". Now what do we make of a people who don't hear the lapping/roaring waters of the rivers/oceans/seas? And in order to get closer to the deeper irony we recall Singapore is an island, surrounded by water.

I do not believe the hiatus manifest in the poems above is just simply one of "nature" versus "artificial". I believe the poets are attempting to probe deeper into the layers of our being and asking and wondering what the net result of all these grand schemes of "reclamation" in the name of progress is going to be, especially as it affects and moulds and shapes the psyche of the average Singaporean. The emotional cost, they seem to be suggesting, is going to be more than is recognized, all the more so since the "erasure" of the natural is done so subtly and in the name of delivering an even better future for the nation. Only thus can we make adequate sense of Lee's statement that in becoming so health-conscious the heart can sometimes be "troublesome".

At the end of this engaging anthology of poems, the well-known Singaporean architect, Tay Kheng Soon, writes:

The rain pours, this is the tropics after all. But somehow the rain does not wash away the heavy air that sits on the city's soul. Only the pavements get cleaned. And the planners who do not know about "air" are now frantically twiddling the knobs and pulling the levers to turn Singapore into a hub: a communication hub, a science hub, a knowledge hub, because they fear dissolution. For only the free can spontaneously re-invent themselves to face a new day; tweaking mechanical contraptions will not prevent them falling apart when the design limits of the machine are exceeded. A leaf falls on my plate, has foreign talent arrived?

Tay's lamentation about the loss of freedom and spontaneity, while underlining his own position vis-à-vis the imposition of government policy on land-use without total concurrence with the larger polity, also hints at a more worrisome danger: the letting-go, out of sheer frustration, of pent-up emotions which, if one reads his entire essay between the lines, are lying in wait for their moment of intense release.

Little wonder, then, that Singapore's poet-guru, Edwin Thumbed, can say:

Where the dark veil hangs careless
Merging with star-whispers
The sum-total is a phantom city.
(Fingers Of the Cape)

Thumboo's poem has that haunting image (repeated) that "only the moon is real" -- why? Because the moon is too far away for us to interfere!. Our vision of the moon and the stars is shaped by the clarity of their impact: and in a city where cityscape determines practically every view it is hard to imagine how a people's vision could be rid of the interlocking surfaces of intrusive environmental change.

Where no owl cries its kill above city blocks
And the moon does not dominate
A night landscape
Stars as bright as street lights allow.

This is the way Simon Tay's poem, Singapore Night Song begins and one assumes the following lines are going to elaborate the emptiness suggested here insofar as the natural environment has been taken over by the city's bright lights. But, no.. The poem's conclusion is a sober reminder of the fundamental reality confronting all Singaporeans:

If you cannot learn to love
(yes love) this city
you have no other.

And this is indeed true -- we cannot inhabit just any city because this city, this Singapore is where we belong, this is home. And this, I submit, is where the nub of the issue resides: most of the literary responses to Singapore's environment have complained about the manner in which change is thrust upon the environment without careful thinking-through of consequences; the short-term projections of a quick result triumphs over the long-term prospect of psychological damage. Singaporeans therefore turn inwards for nourishment and succor, the environment largely either failing, or limiting or disenfranchising the common man's ideals.

Let us bring this brief excursion of ours into the ways in which Singapore writers have responded to the environment by looking at a few lines written by Keith Tan. For the 27-year-old, the environment is most surely a way of re-examining history and the socio-geopolitics, which emerge from historical recognitions :

To remember the living and the dead
To see, in the hulking towers of a hundred storeys
And in the pond of luminous lives,
And in old photographs of my grandmother's traveled face,
The testimony of irresistible time:
Our never-ending, ever-urgent chase....

And so we stand, at century's end,

To pause and consider the work of man
Before it fades into oblivion....

The future gestures as a felt and unseen hand,
A half-hinting, seducing chameleon
That puzzles us, tempts us
Beyond the edge of any map,
Till we wander maples, trackless, timeless
Visionaries in an original world

Sowers of new seeds on new soils,
Builders of bridges
Defying measure,
Across this current-tormented ocean.

People believe the environment is as much shaped by us as we are by it: the Singapore story seems to suggest that the environment's domineering role goes well beyond simple shaping. Here the environment becomes us as we project our own images and visions upon it, choosing to locate it in our mind's eye as that which impacts rather than allowing it to take its organic path of growth and decay. And it is here, where, sometimes, the heart can be troublesome.

Kirpal Singh teaches at Singapore Management University