Literature of Singapore
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Life in Singapore |
|---|
| Culture |
| Dance |
| Demographics |
| Economy |
| Education |
| Film |
| Holidays |
| Languages |
| Literature |
| Music |
| Politics |
| Religion |
| Singlish |
| Sports |
| Transport |
| GLBT |
| edit box |
The literature of Singapore comprises a collection of literary works by Singaporeans in the country's four main languages: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
While Singaporean literary works may be considered as also belonging to the literature of their specific languages, the literature of Singapore is viewed as a distinct body of literature portraying various aspects of Singapore society and forms a significant part of the culture of Singapore. A number of Singaporean writers such as Tan Swie Hian and Kuo Pao Kun have contributed work in more than one language; this reflects the influence across languages in the literary culture of this multi-ethnic, multi-language country. However, this cross-linguistic fertilisation is becoming increasingly rare and it is now increasingly thought that Singapore has four sub-literatures instead of one.
(The following paragraphs of this section are sourced from: "Creative Writing in Singapore" by Chandran Nair: The Introduction to "Singapore Writing" edited by Chandran Nair for The Society of Singapore Writers, Woodrose Publications, 1977)
Singapore has a rich heritage in Creative Writing in the Malay, Chinese, Tamil and English Languages. While there is more emphasis on social and patriotic themes in Malay, Chinese and Tamil, the writer in English finds himself (or herself) more comfortable in the analysis of the individual and his motivations. For the writer in Tamil, Chinese and Malay, a healthy concern with the particulars of everyday life (one could say the minutae of living) and the interweaving of these into the fabric of larger nationalistic, patriotic social events is in no way an offensive experience -- in fact it is expected. The writer in English seems more concerned with discovering an image of the individual self, or extrapolating human experience. The social milieu of the English educated is a middle class one and they have middle class pretensions. The middle class preoccupation with the self has over the years begun to pervade the consciousness of the modern Chinese and Malay writers and is what made it possible for their identification with writers using the English Language.
The writer in the English language was a comparatively later phenomenon. Creative writing in English is traced to the establishment in Singapore of an institution of higher education in the arts and sciences, Raffles College, which subsequently became the University of Malaya in Singapore together with the King Edward VII Medical College. One of the high points in writing in English was the early and mid-fifties when a rising anti-colonial nationalism was at play and contributed to the desire to be identified as "Malayan". The poems of Wang Gungwu, Lim Thean Soo and Augustine Goh Sin Tub from this period are in a category by themselves. Except for Wang who managed to move into some detached social poems, the rest are mostly personal and experimental in their use of language. The imagery is for most part forcedly local with rubber trees, durians, laterite etc appearing again and again as do words and phrases from Malay and Chinese. This led to the coining of the word "Engmalchin" to explain the highly rarefied, nationalistic application of such languages in poems in English.
In the mid-fifties and early sixties there rose a group of writers in English, only a few of whom are alive today--Ee Tiang Hong, Edwin Thumboo, Llyod Fernando and Oliver Seet. A "younger" group among whom Wong Phui Nam was most outstanding arose a few years later and moved away from the conscious Malayaness of their immediate predecessors, but found themselves unsure of direction; though convinced of their interest in writing. Edwin Thumboo's "Rib of Earth" published in 1956 was decidedly a milestone but had its strengths and weaknesses. Among the strengths are an individual voice, a willingness to extend imagery into readings from the past, an urge to explore the individual and what made it possible to be part of the whole, and yet a piece apart, at the same time. The weaknessess are mainly images that run out of hand because language is not firmly held, the need to be seen; to be in full control of the expression, its idiom and direction -- a too careful and pointed exposition of values and direction. One admires the craftmanship but feels the loss of the human being. Against this, Wong Phui Nam's "How the Hills are Distant" (1965) provides an indication of the less disciplined mind waging war, discovering in the self, new avenues, new dimensions. Phui Nam is essentially a participant, though his observation can be as dry, pointed and cutting as Thumboo's sixties poems. Phui Nam utilises wide ecclectic reading, weaving into the poems an inspired montage of the real and unreal. The poetry does not sooth; it awakens primal nagging.
During this period (1950-1963), prose writing was almost negligible. Herman Hochstadt's "The Compact and Other Stories" is about the only collection. Lloyd Fernando, then a short story writer, published his first novel after 20 years. Of the other writers, Awang Kedua (Wang Gung Wu, again) had surest control of language and development of theme. It was however, poetry and not prose that surged forward in the sixties beginning with Robert Yeo, Dudley de Souza, Arthur Yap(died in 2006) and Wong May. The achievements of these writers were consolidated and enlarged by the establishment of "FOCUS", the journal of the Literary Society of the University of Singapore, so much so that when the next group of writers, Lee Tzu Pheng, Mohd Hj Salleh, Yeo Bock Cheng, Pang Khye Guan, Syed Alwi Shahab and Chandran Nair(now living in Paris) arrived at the University in 1965, there was already in existence within the confines of the University, a micro-tradition of writing and publishing in English. The arrival of Edwin Thumboo to the English Department from the Civil Service was an added impetus.
At around this time too, Goh Poh Seng (now living in Canada), who had actually taken a year off to do nothing but write in Dublin and London (and almost starved as a result), arrived to begin work as a Medical Officer at the General Hospital. He started "TUMASEK" a journal for the publication of Singapore/Malayan writing; the fourth such attempt -- the first being "WRITE" begun by Herman Hochstadt and others in the late 1950's; the second,"MONSOON" edited by Lim Siew Wai in the early sixties; the third, the aforementioned "FOCUS". "TUMASEK" however followed "MONSOON" into death after a few issues but Goh pushed forward undaunted and founded together with Lim Kok Ann, CENTRE 65 which presented the first ever "Poetry and Folk Music Festival" to Singaporeans at the Cultural Centre in 1966. The Centre provided Goh with the framework to develop as a playwright beginning with his "Moon is Less Bright" and going on to "When Smiles are Done". Goh later decided that his particular field was prose; "The Immolation" being his first novel.
The poets of the mid-sixties extended their style and techniques in the seventies and published in local and international journals and also in individual collections--Robert Yeo's "Coming Home Baby" and Arthur Yap's "Only Lines" in 1971, Chandran Nair's "Once the Horsemen and Other Poems" in 1972, and "After the Hard Hours, This Rain" in 1975. The impetus of the sixties was carried over into the seventies and among the names that emerged in poetry were Chung Yee Chong, Sng Boh Kim, Ernest Lim, and Geraldine Heng, who achieved a remarkable fluency of style in a single volume work, "White Dreams".
Here is what Edwin Thumboo has to say about some of these poets in his Introduction to "The Second Tongue": An Anthology of Poetry from Malaysia and Singapore, 1976
. . ." Arthur Yap, whose Only Lines appeared in 1971, is also a painter and short-story writer. His is the poetry of acute observation, one that distances and evaluates landscape, incident and situation through a decidedly wry, at times, laconic eye. Both the tone and the direction of the poetry come close to the borders of, but do not enter, irony.
"squat under the sultan's monument
is seen and appraised.
hands reached out spanning the years
to pluck the rambutans
the sultan had never eaten, throw the shells down river
a little later
the boat pulled from the Jetty, there was a lull
and then the landscape settled down." (Panchor)
And yet the same powers of observation distil gentleness and pathos as in the first section of 'tanah rata' where the painter and poet in Yap meet to arrange a scene which then gradually comes alive with passers-by. The colour and spaciousness of the prospect are reiterated in a gesture that takes us away from the foreground. But the moment we feel the picture is complete and our responses neatly arranged, we are disturbed by a new presence:
"to which we can add
to old woman weeding
nodding to flowers
gradually growing upwards
and ending where the slope begins"
The method, especially in the way it leads the reader, ought not to give the impression of fine verbal calculations only. Here, as in his other poems, Yap is deeply responsive to the human centre of things. There is hardly a poem in which this primary interest is not present. Suffering man is imaged obliquely in 'minimum excavation'; or explicitly in 'Old House at Ang Siang Hill'. The concern extends to an examination of relationships as in 'In Passing':
"you brought, from a friend, an l.p. for us to share
with regards. you exclaimed in chinatown that it
was all so intriguing while we, not wanting to
be perfunctory, left you to your intrigue, then,
at the airport, with its mural, its coffee, we
waited, while talking and talking, for you to comment
on the fine building, the mural assembling the sea-
front or, even the airconditioning.
but you were fumbling your bag for your sweater."
Yap's poems are subtle commentaries; they reveal rather than explore in the way that much of Chandran Nair's poetry is exploration. 'Once The Horsemen'(1972) communicates the variety of Nair's poetic world, and the note of urgency with which he attempts his themes. Image and metaphor abound, are part and parcel of 'the wrestle with experience'. For the raid into the inarticulate to achieve what Shelley called 'new materials of knowledge' amounts to an essential self-understanding to harmonise the ways of thought and feeling. By taking many themes as grist for his maw, Nair's poetry ranges over the feelings of a Hindu bride to the Roman emperor, Caligula. The simultaneous forays into life and language and the myths and legends of East and West, have strengthened and extended the coordinating power of Nair's idiom. At their best they are capable of passages of this quality:
"walk the vinyard, where love grows.
the vines climb the trellis
into a sun no longer drying
and the wind that once roared vengeance
is gentle on the skin, penitent.
walk the vinyard and be content while the fences come down
one by one." ('after the hard hours, this rain')
The achievement here is of a high order. Tone merges with rhythm and rhythm moves obedient to a compound of thought and feeling. There is no hustling for effect that at times disrupts some of the poems in 'Once A Horsemen'. Snug in their context, the words create and project fully what the poet intends.
But each poet has to define his or her own exploration. Some show a certain caution, nurse their resources 'stylistic and emotional' to gain a slower but less erratic development.
Almost without exception, Lee Tzu Pheng's poems have clarity and richness of texture. There is a nice balance between the potential of her subject and its realization. Her poems are neither over- nor under-written. Her subjects are familiar but the way they are shaped identifies them as attempts to gain an integrated response to the bed-rock of experience principally of human relationships. At the core is the need for a more inward and real contact, in circumstances of stress, of living in a time when the old life is under pressure. There is an unusual but typical tact and modesty because the 'I' in her poetry does not attempt to quarrel with or dominate her world, but instead seeks individual motives and meanings in accommodations between herself, circumstances and environment. This is because the 'I' is not the conventional ego, but rather an identity, a sensitiveness, a consciousness whose reaching out is powerful yet modest in its assumptions.
"Must I like an oyster
repose in the shell,
hearing only the dumb scream of the sea-surge
outside, moving me against knowledge,
and perhaps will, to new habitations,
new graves;
or shall I let in, now,
a small grain of sand,
suffer its torment
and harden this sickness
to pearl." ('A Thought')
A central problem consists of the poet's encounter with the world at large, between an active humanity and the harsh aggressiveness imaged in the 'scream of the sea-surge'. Thesis-antithesis; the synthesis is that movement to new 'knowledge. . perhaps will. . . new habitations'. There is the choice of protecting oneself against the world, shutting it out, or letting it in; to suffer and through that gain a thing beautiful. She opts for a commitment to troubled waters. This spirit informs her poems, so that while they each deal with their particular theme or occasion, they also relate to her basic position as in 'Nightpiece', 'New Year's Morning' or 'Prospect of a Drowning'. Lee's most notable poem to date, 'My Country And My People', brings together personal and public history with candour. By straddling the two worlds, by subsuming the public to the personal, the poem acquires both a wider frame of reference and an intimacy that would otherwise be lacking. Lee speaks on behalf of a generation:
"My country and my people
I never understood.
I grew up in China's mighty shadow,
with my gentle, brown-skinned neighbours;
but I keep diaries in English.
I sought to grow
in humanity's rich soil, and started digging on the banks, then saw
life carrying my friends downstream.
Yet, careful lending of the human heart
may make a hundred flowers bloom
and perhaps, fence-sitting neighbour,
I claim citizenship in your recognition of our kind.
My people, and my country, are you, and you my home."
In addition to her usual range of technical resources, Lee has very skilfully, in the last stanza, utilised phrases "hundred flowers bloom?, fence-sitting neighbour" that harbour a special potency in politics, national, regional and international.
(The following paragragh is sourced from "Journeys:Anthology of Singapore Poetry", 1995, edited by Edwin Thumboo)
Today the younger poets writing in English, Leong Liew Geok, Angeline Yap, Boey Kim Cheng,Heng Siok Tian, Paul Tan, Yong Shu Hoong, Cyril Wong and Felix Cheong, show a more "diffusive" sensibility: rather than treating the self as linked to a core or primal place or time (Singapore before independence, a childhood haunt), their poems are conscious of the change and flux, the dispersions and returns which are appropriate to comtemprorary Singapore society.
[edit] Literature in English
Singaporean literature in English started with the Straits-born Chinese community in the colonial era; it is unclear which was the first work of literature in English published in Singapore, but there is evidence of Singapore literature published as early as the 1830s. The first notable Singaporean work of poetry in English is possibly F.M.S.R., a pastiche of T. S. Eliot by Francis P. Ng, published in London in 1935. This was followed by Wang Gungwu's Pulse in 1950.
With the independence of Singapore in 1965, a new wave of Singapore writing emerged, led by Edwin Thumboo, Kirpal Singh, Goh Poh Seng, Lee Tzu Pheng, Arthur Yap,and Chandran Nair,. It is telling that many critical essays on Singapore literature name Thumboo's generation, rightly or wrongly, as the first generation of Singapore writers. Poetry is the predominant mode of expression; it has a small but respectable following since independence, and most published works of Singapore writing in English have been in poetry.
There were varying levels of activity in succeeding decades until the late 1990s when poetry in English in Singapore found a new momentum with a whole new generation of poets under the age of 40 now actively writing and publishing, not only in Singapore but also internationally. Since the late-1990s, local small presses such as Firstfruits and Ethos Books have been actively promoting the work of this new wave of poets. Some of the more notable include Boey Kim Cheng, Alvin Pang, Cyril Wong, Felix Cheong and Alfian bin Sa'at (who is also celebrated as a playwright). The poetry of this younger generation is often politically aware, self-questioning, transnational and cosmopolitan, yet frequently presents intensely focused and highly individualised perspectives of Singaporean life, society and culture. Some poets have been labeled Confessional for their intensely personalised writing, often dealing with intimate issues such as sexuality.
Drama in English found expression in Goh Poh Seng, who was also a notable poet and novelist, and later in Kuo Pao Kun, who also wrote in Chinese, sometimes translating his works into English. The late Kuo was a vital force in the local theatre renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s, being the artistic director of Substation for many years. Some of his plays, like The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole (1984) and Lao Jiu (1990), are classics of the genre. Stella Kon gained international fame with her now-famous play Emily of Emerald Hill a monologue. About an ageing Peranakan matriach, it has been produced in Scotland, Malaysia and Australia. The sole character has been played by men as well as women.
Fiction writing in English did not start in earnest until after independence. Short stories flourished as a literary form, the novel arrived much later. Goh Poh Seng remains a pioneer in writing novels well before many of the later generation, with titles like If We Dream Too Long. Although she began as a short story writer, Penang-born Catherine Lim has been Singapore's most widely read author, thanks partly to her first two books Little Ironies - Stories of Singapore (1978) and Or Else, The Lightning God and Other Stories (1980), which gained prestige by being incorporated into texts for the GCSE, as well as to her Asian themes of gender-dominance, which marked her as a distant cousin to Asian-American writers such as Amy Tan. She has also been writing novels, such as The Bondmaid (1998) and Following the Wrong Gods Home (2001), and publishing them to an international audience since the late 1990s. Han May is the pseudonym of Joan Hon who is better known for her non-fiction books. Her science-fiction romance Star Sapphire (1985) won a High Commendation Award from the Book Development Council of Singapore in 1986, the same year when she was also awarded a Commendation prize for her better-known book Relatively Speaking on her family and childhood memories. Rex Shelley hails from an earlier colonial generation, although he began publishing only in the early 1990s. His first novel The Shrimp People (1991) won a National Book Prize. Another National Book Prize winner Su-Chen Christine Lim's works are much more feminist-inclined, although she has moved beyond such distinctions in her latest novel A Bit of Earth (2000). Around this time, younger writers emerged. Clare Tham and Ovidia Yu also wrote short stories. Playwright Stella Kon put forth her lesser known science-fiction novel, Eston. Gopal Baratham, a neurosurgeon, started as a short story writer and later wrote politically-charged works like A Candle or the Sun (1991) and Sayang (1991), which courted some controversy when first published. Augustine Goh Sin Tub who began his writing career writing in Malay, burst on the literary scene after his retirement with more than a dozen books of short stories, most of which were founded on his own personal history, thus making them part fiction and part non-fiction. Works like One Singapore and its two sequels One Singapore 2 and One Singapore 3 have found fans among the different strata of Singapore society and well acclaimed by all. Of the younger generation, Philip Jeyaretnam has shown promise but has not published a new novel since Abraham's Promise (1995), while Colin Cheong can lay claim to being one of Singapore's most prolific contemporary authors.
[edit] List of Singaporean writers
- Aaron Lee, poet and lawyer
- Abdul Ghani Bin Abdul Hamid
- Alfian Sa'at, playwright, poet and fiction writer
- Muhammad Ariff Ahmad
- Gopal Baratham, neurosurgeon and writer
- Boey Kim Cheng, poet
- Colin Cheong, poet and novelist
- Felix Cheong, Poet
- Michael Chiang, playwright
- Rohani Din
- Ivy Goh Nair, Journalist and writer
- Goh Poh Seng, poet and novelist
- Han May, novelist and writer
- Philip Jeyaretnam, novelist and lawyer
- Rama Kannabiran
- Russell Lee
- Lee Tzu Pheng, poet
- Liang Wern Fook
- Catherine Lim, novelist
- Su-Chen Christine Lim, novelist
- Shirley Lim, poet and critic
- Chandran Nair, poet and Artist
- Alvin Pang, poet and editor
- Villayil Raman Gopala Pillai, Malayalam Novelist
- Daren Shiau, poet, novelist and lawyer
- Rex Shelley, novelist
- Robert Yeo, playwright and Poet
- Kirpal Singh, poet and critic
- Huzir Sulaiman, playwright
- Hwee Hwee Tan, novelist
- Colin Tan, poet
- Tan Swie Hian, poet, translator, calligrapher, and artist
- Simon Tay, poet and lawyer
- Tan Tarn How, playwright
- Edwin Thumboo, poet and academic
- I Ulaganathan
- James Villanueva, textbook-writer, poet, novelist, playwright
- Cyril Wong, poet and countertenor
- Eleanor Wong, academic lawyer and playwright
- Arthur Yap, poet
- Yeow Kai Chai, poet and journalist
- Yong Shu Hoong, poet
- Ovidia Yu, playwright and novelist
[edit] Selected works
[edit] English
- After the Hard Hours, This Rain - Chandran Nair (1975)
- Army Daze - Michael Chiang (1984)
- Star Sapphire - Han May (1985)
- Below: Absence - Cyril Wong (2002)
- The Bondmaid - Catherine Lim (1995)
- The Brink of an Amen - Lee Tzu Pheng (1991)
- Eight Plays - Huzir Sulaiman (2002)
- First Loves - Philip Jeyaretnam (1988)
- Fistful Of Colours - Su-Chen Christine Lim (1993)
- Foreign Bodies - Hwee Hwee Tan (1997)
- Frottage - Yong Shu Hoong (2005)
- I Chose to Climb - Colin Tan (2001)
- If We Dream Too Long - Goh Poh Seng (1973)
- Mammon Inc. - Hwee Hwee Tan (2001)
- Man Snake Apple - Arthur Yap (1988)
- Once the Horsemen and Other Poems' - Chandran Nair (1972)
- Ricebowl - Su-Chen Christine Lim (1984)
- Singapore Accent - Ivy Goh Nair,aka B J Wu (1980)
- The Shrimp People - Rex Shelley (1991)
- The Space of City Trees - Arthur Yap (2000)
- The Stolen Child - Colin Cheong (1989)
- A Third Map - Edwin Thumboo (1993)
- City of Rain - Alvin Pang (2003)
- Unmarked Treasure - Cyril Wong (2004)
- The Visage of Terrorism - The Hounds of Hell - James Villanueva (2006/2004)
- A Visitation of Sunlight - Aaron Lee (1997)
[edit] Chinese
[edit] Malay
- Jangan Tak Ada (collection of poems) - Muhammad Ariff Ahmad (1990)
- Diari Bonda (Mother's Diary) - Rohani Din (1997)
- Anugerah Buat Syamsiah (An Award for Syamsiah) - Rohani Din (2001)
[edit] Tamil
- Cantana Kinnam - I Ulaganathan (1966)
