History and the Writers
Sharing Borders Revisited
By Gwee Li Sui
The story of the now out-of-print, two-book Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysian Literature (2009) began a lifetime ago. I was a young Assistant Professor finishing my first contract with the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. My five-year bond, which had funded my doctoral work in the eighteenth century at Queen Mary, University of London, was in its late stage. I would be free at last, and then Emeritus Professor Edwin Thumboo came a-knocking. This was in 2006.
Not many who cherish Sharing Borders realise that it was part of a grand book series Thumboo, in his mid-seventies, had envisioned. The first title for “Writing Asia: The Literatures in Englishes” had been From the Inside: Asia-Pacific Literatures in Englishes (2007), edited by him and Rex Ian Sayson. Those emphatic words “Literatures” and “Englishes” should reveal his keenness about regionalisation and indigenisation. Volume One was ambitious but chaotic, dipping into regions from Hong Kong, Macau, and the Philippines to Australia and New Zealand.
Thumboo’s plan was for subsequent titles to be more situated. He enlisted Professor Mohammad A. Quayum, Wong Phui Nam, and me because of our similar belief that Singapore’s and Malaysia’s literary tradition in English could not be told apart. It surely makes sense to treat that mid-twentieth-century creative burst at the University of Malaya as what generated the momentum we continue to ride on today. Yet, an odd, anachronistic trend was gaining traction that, on the one hand, flirted with some sense of pre-independence Singaporean literature and, on the other, erased the status of English-language writing in Malaysia.
This therefore highlighted the need for some clarifying work to stave off the excesses of national identity. From the start, senior colleagues had cautioned me against such an undertaking because it would compromise my own research plan. A shrewd careerist might have taken heed, but my thought was that research on Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, and Immanuel Kant was in no hurry. Those great figures had time. A critic worth his salt ought to embrace his worldliness, respond to urgent instincts, and plough the soft soil.
My conviction came with my worry that the gap between received knowledge and lived reality in Singapore was growing too wide. What more Singaporean literature could mean had stagnated; for example, in poetry, we might then be in the age of Pooja Nansi and Marc Nair, and yet the research was still stuck at Boey Kim Cheng. The tendency was to treat everyone writing since the 1990s as a type of Boey, in love with introspection – and this model was flawed. It simply was not future-ready.
Our project began slowly. For decades until recent times, Thumboo’s Malaysian road trips with writers had been a thing. You may go look for scattered mentions of these in poems and stories by previous batches of “chosen ones”. My own Thumboo adventures started with our drive from dawn up to Melaka to lunch with Quayum and Wong, who came down from Kuala Lumpur. We talked about the fundamentals – the goals, the structure, possible titles, potential contributors – and everyone was home by dusk.
Over the next year, we continued to interrogate our touchpoints and to re-think the scope. More months would follow when we found ourselves having to re-adjust for the slow-forming slate of contributors. A few initial choices turned us down. Quayum and Wong’s half was meant to address English-language poetry, fiction, and drama in Malaya and to discuss even writers whose writing life took off later. Thus, alongside Ee Tiang Hong, Lloyd Fernando, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, there were Rex Shelley, Gopal Baratham, and Goh Poh Seng, whose professional careers had long suppressed their creative side.
K. S. Maniam and Robert Yeo were far less meaningful to feature early, and they came into my half. By that time, we were already settled into a more intuitive divide between the volumes. Also, if Book Two could not balance Singaporean and Malaysian representation, it was primarily because that period saw Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng just publish their first novels. Many long-recognised Malaysians had gone into Book One while others such as Leong Liew Geok, Dave Chua, Huzir Sulaiman were part of the Singaporean scene.
This point, in fact, helped to stress what Washima Che Dan and Noritah Omar would thematise in their essay for my volume. “Writing Malaysia in English: A Critical Perspective” pointed to how conditions in post-independence Malaysia led to the marginalisation of English-language literature. Finding Washima and Noritah to write was itself a godsend since no one else I approached was able or willing to broach the subject. While Professor Anne Brewster’s essay on Boey had come in first, mere weeks upon my request, Washima and Noritah’s involvement was secured almost a year later.
Singaporean literature being vast and its critics few, I relied on a bifocal way to maximise its study. This was to have each literary medium covered by writer-specific essays and a period survey. So, with fiction, essays on Catherine Lim and Philip Jeyaretnam came with Eddie Tay’s sweep that took us right up to Wena Poon. With drama, David Birch’s discussion of Haresh Sharma and Alfian Sa’at was set against K. K. Seet’s review of phases in theatre. Given the sheer number of post-independence poets, a survey of poetry required two chapters – the first by Cyril Wong being on poets from the late nation-building period.
My chapter on what I called the “New Poetry of Singapore” examined how and why poets from the mid-1990s wrote in our changed socio-cultural terrain. The irony must be noted here that, in that era of poetic blossoming, critics were flocking to talk about fiction instead. Professor Rajeev Patke had been an exception. As an early New Poet myself, I felt the neglect of our work personally and thought to set the record straight about what we were and were not doing. I would do what Wong, in Book One, was doing for the University of Malaya poets, surely his age’s New Poets.
Sharing Borders, as you see, was never about canon-making – a charge sometimes repeated. It was rather an academic testament before we all forgot of a time when literature was truly regional in its expectations. Writing was not composed desirously to gain international fame but to respond to a distinct sense of existence. We the editors were further conscious that our reliance on various scholarly voices was a refusal to survey either literature with a single grand narrative. The chapters went where their respective critics took them; in this sense, the twin pillars had been history and the writers.
When Sharing Borders came out, the books were deceptively slim as the font was kept small and the text densely packed. It was launched at The Arts House on 29 October 2009 as part of the programme for that year’s Singapore Writers Festival. The National Book Development Council of Singapore – now known as the Singapore Book Council – organised a full-day symposium in celebration: there were lectures and workshops on the two countries’ poetry, fiction, and drama and panels with writers from across the generations.
By that time, I had already left the university for months. Nobody could gauge the impact of such a purposeful work or whether there was even an impact. Nor did anyone expect there to be no more earnest collaboration on the same theme and no continuation for the “Writing Asia” series. Thumboo has since come to believe that the project nonetheless awakened my academic interest in Singaporean literature. It did make me think a lot, but, in truth, where it succeeded was in firing up my desire to write creatively full-time.
Gwee Li Sui has seven volumes of poetry to date. His other works include Myth of the Stone, Singapore’s first long-form graphic novel in English; non-fiction titles on poetry and Singlish; a Myanmar-inspired picture book; and Singlish translations of classics by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Beatrix Potter. A familiar name in Singapore’s cultural scene, Gwee has edited several literary anthologies and written and lectured on a range of subjects.