Mei scrutinizes my growing pile of library books. “Wow Jie you’re reading a lot of local stuff.”
“I’m trying to decolonize my mind,” I reply.
I am, for the first time, seriously diving into my own country’s literature. I have abandoned my nation’s body of work for so long.
In the memories of my childhood, the local selection in bookstores like Popular Bookstore or Borders featured the horrible black book covers with bad font of Russell Lee's True Singapore Ghost Stories, Adrian Tan’s The Teenage Textbook, and shelves stocked with Catherine Lim. I would head straight for the classics section, reaching for the Brönte sisters and Virginia Woolf, seeking the length and depths of lineages my country didn't seem to have.
My country seemed unwritten, but I wasn't really searching, not really. Too caught up with cheerleading and dance and school, I never really took the time to look; the single university module on Singapore literature had seemed to cover all the necessary bases. To my young, haughty eye, the formalism of the same old poets: Anne Lee Tzu Pheng, Robert Yeo, and Edwin Thumboo, seemed static and unexciting.
Apart from that one class on Singaporean literature, the majority of the English Literature courses at the National University of Singapore ten years ago studied the British and American canons— Shakespeare, Joyce, Isherwood, Richardson, Williams. The books we read featured protagonists who left home, intrepid pioneers who pushed the frontiers, restless souls who left their quiet towns for, if not the big city, then the untouched wilderness. In contrast to the little literary canon Singapore had, their traditions were wide and deep, rich and fraught, meaty with centuries of experimentation and refinement.
I dismissed my country's paltry cultural offerings. Like the protagonists I read about, I left my unwritten city for lusher pastures.
In contrast, Culture, the uppercase sort, was everywhere in New York City. The air pulsed with the vitality of scrappy writers trying and failing to make their literary debuts, as well as names so well-known even non-readers quoted them. Culture, the uppercase sort, was also everywhere in a Literature PhD department at a fancy graduate school. Everyone was clever, ironic, cosmopolitan. We read Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida. Balzac, Cortázar, Lispector. Yan Lianke and Gao Xingjian.
Culture, the uppercase sort, was everywhere, but mine nowhere in sight.
Suddenly, from halfway round the world, I started searching for books from Singapore, or about Singapore.
I filled up form after form requesting Harvard Library to purchase books from Singapore publishers Ethos Books and Math Paper Press. "I'm going to grow the Singapore Collection at Harvard, and make it the biggest outside of Singapore," I happily told anyone who would listen. I must have filled up over 50 purchase requests. To my knowledge, none were ever approved.
Once or twice a year we flew back, touching down on the tarmac at Changi Airport. Homesick for something I only now know how to name, I would visit local bookstores and pile chapbooks of poetry and non-fiction into my groaning suitcase. To read when I miss h̶o̶m̶e̶ Singapore, I told myself. Each time I rifled through these independent shops, stealing away little bound books of my country's literature, I couldn't help feeling that I was squirrelling away little trinkets of a home I had abandoned. Guilt that could be assuaged by making reparations toward my country's writing.
But also fueling these frantic occasions of holiday stockpiling was a growing anxiety— had there really been so many books by local authors? They all looked exciting. When did the marketing and publishing industry become so sleek, when had the front covers of work published by Ethos Books become so recognizable, so "on-brand?" Suddenly, there are shelves and shelves of Singapore literature. Suddenly, it's #SingLit. When had that happened?
My inarticulate city has been busy— has always been busy. And I was very, very late to the party.
I am learning my country the same way I learn most things: by borrowing as many books as I can, maxing out library cards, toggling between different library memberships on the NLB app.
The newer library branches in Bedok and Orchard are sun-filled and shiny. The bookshelves are streamlined, wavy. The Tampines branch even has bookdrop robots that know how to return 'home' when they get full. Patrons dutifully upend tote bags of books into their yawning mouths. Anddd there they go— gliding along their designated path, carrying precious cargo. When curious kids stop before them, they pause their single-minded odyssey, patiently waiting till the coast is tyke-free before continuing on, unperturbed. I like walking beside these metal couriers as they go about their unflappable way, these denizens of the library cradling books with spines that have become a little bit more bent, a little bit more loved. Other library robots slide past the shelves, impassively scanning the book spines, animated by sticker anime-girl eyes, unblinkingly making sure the books are in order.
Source: Mothership.sg
On the other hand, the branches at Geylang East, Marine Parade, and Chinatown are older, crummier. The concrete is stained and the vinyl seats scratched. The buildings all have a hunched, misshapen feel, like wrinkled, deflated creatures. They are plaster-colored, their doors peeling with paint, with greying, well-trodden carpets. The exhibits in the lobby often look like they were done by kindergarteners; cut-out letters pasted on huge swathes of coloring block. There are no robots here. Instead, a delightfully large number of grumpy old men in flip flops, reading Lianhe Zaobao or Berita Harian and sleeping in armchairs. These older libraries are both less welcoming and more— the way a single, misanthropic aunt can somehow be the reluctant heart of the family.
After returning to Singapore last year, there was a time I wanted to visit all the library branches, energized by a weak delusion that it would make me ‘more local.’ As if traversing the length of the island to the Woodlands or Choa Chu Kang branches was a monomyth that would overcome the ache of ‘not fitting in.’ As if ticking off every library branch on a checklist (Ang Mo Kio branch? Check. Pasir Ris branch? Check.) would close the distance in conversations with estranged friends. I realized that 'collecting experiences' like this was, ironically, a pretty touristy thing to do, and have since given up that Grand Tour, happily sticking to my usuals instead.
Regardless of which branches I go to, all of them now have a 'Singapore Collection'— shelves that flex humble but versatile knowledge for this island-city-state-country. All the books call to each other, have inscrutable rhizomatic affiliations. Invisible spider webs of association tangle, gossamer-like, from Arthur Sze's poetry collections to books about the futuristic, biophilic architecture of Gardens by the Bay. Photography nostalgically preserving HDB estates lost to redevelopment deposit secret sediment onto a monograph of Chua Mia Tee's paintings, which seep plop, plop onto a compendium of orchids in Singapore. Teo You Yenn’s This is What Inequality Looks Like has talismanic connections to Sonny Liew's graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, and mycelium networks to Balli Kaur Jaswal's Erotic Stories for Punjabi Ladies.
Susan Orlean decribes how, "on a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistable." At the library's ‘Singapore Collection,’ I brush my fingers along the spines (What kind of Singapore do I want to read about today?) and it feels like I have closed the gap between myself and my country, just a little.
When I say I am decolonizing my reading list, I actually mean I am localizing it.
This journey has been so humbling. A fact: Despite the best intentions of the single university course I took, I still don’t know anything about my country’s literary history.
Actually, very few Singaporeans do, a fact the editors of Unfree Verse: Singapore Poetry in Form point out in their introduction. I am slowly learning the canon, discovering my city through the words set down by others.
And what joy! Some make me feel so salsa-dancer emoji, and I slurp them up like bubble-tea pearls.
For example, in Ng Yi-Sheng’s short story “Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist,” botany is used as a bio-weapon to subvert imperialist rule, and ends with a monstrous Vanda Miss Joaquim attacking Raffles Hotel and trapping the Queen of England— who had come to visit her little commonwealth island— inside the Royal Suite. I've loved this story for years. Orchids are weird and alien AF. The image of Singapore's national flower as a grotesque tendril-invading kraken upon the colonial estate of Raffles Hotel is Ng's bold hentai tentacle monster loveya-byeee gift to British rule. It is also a stunning reminder of how our weird lil' country is fertile, if slightly overdetermined, ground for the freakiness of science-fiction.
Another one: After Singapore's first Prime Minister— the lionized and controversial Lee Kuan Yew— passed away, an anthology of poetry titled A Luxury We Cannot Afford was published, examining his estranged legacy to the local arts scene. I fell hard and fast for Amanda Lee Koe’s "Last Night I Dreamt that H was in Love with Me"— irreverent, desire-filled love letters to our dead father-figure. Structured as intimate letters to H, who, in the context of the anthology, we all know is a tongue-in-blushing-cheek reference to LKY's English name 'Harry,' the persona 'Amanda' writes, "Oh H, if you are, as we christen you, The Founding Father, then clearly you make of me an Electra." Later, she cooes, "Look at me, pouting at some vision of you. You're more concept than man, H, just as I am more affect theory than girl."
I think about this piece a lot. Can imagine it in ~sparkling tildes~. Reading it, I became convinced that the coy, coquettish literary-type baby-girl persona could be the most undervalued— yet radically joyful— way of subverting the steely-eyed, legislation-heavy brand of authoritarianism Singapore practices.
Local writers who dare to play with the bodies of Singapore's ironclad leaders, making them our lovers, our family, our besties. [Recently playwright Alfian Sa'at, commenting on Minister of Home Affairs K Shanmugam's smear campaign against journalists and activists objecting to the aggressive passing of the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act, merrily started calling this phlegmatic minister "sis"— "I often wonder whether the obsession that sis has (yeah I'll just normalise calling Shanmugam sis from now on) for a few activists is because as co-opter in-chief he had failed to win them over, as totems and trophies of the irresistible rightness of the PAP way. It's like sis went seow after kena reject, how else can you even explain it?"]
The possibilities are ✨endless✨.
On the other hand, other local works are more ehh, and a familiar aversion arises.
“Some of Edwin Thumboo’s poems are really... quite bad, aren’t they?” H grimaces. We smile at the blasphemy.
The Singapore literary scene is currently going through a #MeToo moment. In our current denationalized online climate, it is, tragically, a tired story: a man preys on young female employees, creates toxic workplace, and gets away with it for years.
It is tragic because so many such stories have come before. And tired because the tragedies keep coming. In Singapore, this particular story implicates a beloved literary institution that many called home.
Some of the writers I'm currently reading have rushed out social media posts distancing themselves from or boycotting BooksActually. Others are calling for more nuanced responses in ways that don't hurt the work the veteran establishment has achieved, especially with its publishing wing Math Paper Press. However, now with the knowledge that this work was done by young women who were exploited, sexually harrassed, and underpaid. Others are reminding us not to forget the bravery of the women who stepped up to tell their story.
What stands out to me in the conversations the exposé revealed is desire. Not the inappropriate desires of a flawed man and irresponsible employer, though his misconduct should never be minimized. But the desire for literature— the ennobling ambition for the local literary scene to succeed— and how this desire, in the case of BooksActually, slowly justified an ecosystem contorted by abuse.
Writing about the allegations surrounding BooksActually, Ruby Thiagarajan states, "The publishing and book industry runs on the passion of its workers. That’s not a compliment." There is a tendency to romanticize the noble business of writing and book-selling, especially in a young literary scene that only recently graduated from “immature” to… to what? It is generally agreed that the arts scene here isn’t “mature” enough, but where exactly are we? There’s something about this desire— “I want local lit to succeed,” that is tripping me up, has energizing but disquieting resonances.
This desire is at once the local literary scene’s most exciting characteristic, as well as its most dangerous. Dangerous because in the clear-hearted eagerness for “local art to succeed,” people have 'closed one eye' on bad business practices, or neglected to lay the foundation for a healthy culture of cultural commentary— yes, even criticism. Not just promotional content. The tension in this desire for local lit to succeed at all costs is something I want to keep in mind as I continue exploring the canon.
I’m still only scratching the surface. But with each dip into a piece of local work— good, bad, or meh— I feel a little more filled-in, some small unfamiliar pride beating a tiny drum in my chest.
You have a stake in this, it seems to whisper. Read your country.