Lunch Break – “Singapore Pastoral”
“Lunch Break” is a poetry column appearing every fourth Friday of the month. Look for insightful appreciations of contemporary poems from around the world. This month, columnist Lim Xin Hwee examines the ramifying ironies in “Singapore Pastoral” by Daryl Lim Wei Jie. Sign up for notifications here.
Singapore Pastoral
By Daryl Lim Wei Jie
The crows are fresh
with the scent
of our gloriously burnt dead
Around the corner
the boys rehearse the conquest
of our regional partners
The rumour is it’s earmarked
for a spaceport, or sex tourism, despite
the legions of mosquitoes
World wars
are ways
to avoid cremation
Granduncle used to tell us
how it always smelt
of pigshit
The last tiger roams
with incredibly low
triglycerides
An old man drowns, feeding
the reeds, which we will use
to make our rice blue
Anything But Human, Singaporean poet Daryl Lim Wei Jie’s second book of poems, tackles the absurdity of the hyper-industrial era and our inability to keep up with the rapidly changing world. In the words of its publisher’s blurb, it “emerges, squeaking and poorly oiled, from this rubbish heap we’ve all piled up. […] These poems attempt to wring the last dregs out of language. This collection grasps for a poetry beyond our collective exhaustion.” Ironic and philosophical, the poem “Singapore Pastoral” from this new book caught my attention.
A pastoral poem, according to Merriam-Webster, is “far remote from the realities of any life, rustic or urban.” Typically, pastoral poems romanticize the countryside for its supposedly quiet and untouched character. When I first read the title of Lim’s poem, I thought, what countryside does Singapore have? The ironic title compels us to think about the ways in which we preserve (or not) the natural landscape of Singapore, and how we have chosen to utilise it.
Underscoring the poem is a sense of contradiction. Beyond the poem’s title, there are surprising conceits: crows are “fresh” with the scent of the “gloriously burnt dead”, “world wars / are ways / to avoid cremation”, a tiger is depicted as vulnerable and weak (“the last tiger roams / with incredibly low / triglycerides”). The theme of death is apparent, but so is the theme of transposition and renewal. The old man drowns and returns to the earth, “feeding / the reeds”, thus giving birth to new life. However, the optimistic idea of circularity and renewal is critiqued and satirised. The abovementioned reeds are eventually harvested “to make our rice blue”. This satire is directed at how we get “blue rice”, a fancy consumer good, from dead people and things, and our obliviousness to this irony.
There is also in the poem a contrast between an industrialised landscape and a pastoral one, which quickly resolves. The pastoral is selfishly exploited for the political and the personal. The writer successfully displaces images of the countryside far away from our imagination. He mocks Singapore’s nostalgia for the natural landscape with an anecdote by the speaker’s granduncle (“Granduncle used to tell us / how it always smelt / of pigshit”). The anecdote gently reminds readers that the greenery in Singapore was once associated with agriculture instead of “conquest”. Compelled to serve military service for a period of two years, “the boys” train in the outskirts of urban Singapore to conquer the country’s neighbours. What remains of our natural landscape is tainted by the desire to expand our borders (by land reclamation with sand from Indonesia and Cambodia, for instance) and industrialise further by exploiting “our regional partners”; nothing in the country is spared. The quietest corners and the deepest recesses that enshrine “nature” as-is are becoming less robust because they no longer serve as a respite away from the hyper-industrialised city.
The poem contains a series, not a sequence, of tercets reminiscent of the haiku. Each stanza captures a unique scene, which are loosely related to each other. The stanzas point out an absence – they describe the context and circumstances of nature as we currently experience it, instead of being a blatant pastoral that depicts nature itself. The fate of our biodiversity (“The last tiger”) is implied throughout the poem. Lim makes it clear that the only way we can write a “Singapore Pastoral” is by addressing what we have lost and by relying on implication.
LIM Xin Hwee has a keen interest in language and how people use it. A member of the writing collective /s@ber, she has written many things, important and unimportant. She graduated from NTU with a degree in English and Linguistics.
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