Two Singaporean writers have recently provoked state opprobrium with their attempts to present and preserve alternative histories of the city-state. Familiar to many is graphic novelist Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, which has swept prizes at home and abroad, including three Eisner’s Awards this year. Liew’s fictional biography of “Singapore’s greatest comics artist,” the eponymous Charlie Chan, is notable not only for its “thrilling postmodern style” but also how it retraces the hopes (and ultimately, the disappointments) of progressive activism in Singapore, from the heady days of post-war collective action to betrayal and repression under a new political establishment. By weaving the stories of real-life activists into Chan’s recollections, Liew leaves us with a tantalizing “what if”: what if something of this history still lives and breathes under the surface of the modern city?
Jeremy Tiang’s novel, State of Emergency (released earlier this year by Epigram Books) takes a different tack. It incorporates fastidiously-researched vignettes from several turning-points in the political history of Singapore and Malaysia–from the Batang Kali massacre of 1948 to the “Marxist conspiracy” of 1987–into the multi-generational narrative of a single Singaporean family. Tiang, also an award-winning translator (and five-time Asymptote contributor), is remarkably successful at re-animating these forgotten episodes. Moreover, by allowing a different acquaintance or relative to narrate each event, he explores how entire communities must live with the echoes of arbitrary detention, harassment and censorship. And just as in The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, what comes to light is an unbroken genealogy of those who have dared to hope against these circumstances.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, both works had their National Arts Council grants withdrawn: in Liew’s case, explicitly on account of the book’s “sensitive content.” They represent only two more prominent instances of how funding decisions and other measures have been used to discourage artists from questioning official nation-building narratives, or engaging too critically with politics in Singapore. The ensuing debate around censorship, however, has missed a quieter and more hopeful angle. Far from standing alone, Tiang and Liew are part of a distinguished lineage of writers in Southeast Asia who have resolved to retell the region’s turbulent political history from the ground up.
A pioneering figure in this canon is Han Suyin, perhaps better known for the Academy Award-winning Hollywood adaptation of her autobiographical novel A Many-Splendored Thing. Born a century ago in Henan, China, Han trained as a physician in Beijing, Brussels, and London and quickly found herself caught in the upheavals of the era: her first husband, Tang Pao-Huang, was a General in China’s Nationalist army and a close associate of Chiang Kai-Shek. Following his death and the success of A Many-Splendored Thing—steeped in the cosmopolitan intrigue of late imperial Hong Kong—she married Leon Comber (a British Special Branch officer) and moved to Malaya, opening clinics in Johore and Singapore. It was here that Han witnessed first-hand the brutality of the British “Emergency”: a twelve-year campaign to eradicate the Communist movement in post-war Malaya.
Han’s novel And the Rain my Drink—a work of reportage as much as it is of fiction—stands as one of the most compelling, and historiographically important, accounts of the period. From fine-grained passages exposing the squalor of British detention facilities and the cynicism of their superintendents, to sympathetic accounts of relationships wrecked by mutual suspicion, Han delivered a devastating critique of a hapless regime which succeeded only in “turning a passively non-cooperating community into deep hostility.” She paid a high price for this: amid public outcry over her work, Comber had to leave the Special Branch, and the couple eventually separated in 1958. But her novel survived, testifying to another side of history even as the Emergency came to be touted as a British “victory.”
Mechanisms of repression stayed in place, even as Singapore and Malaysia entered a new, independent era. Though many provisions of the 1948 Emergency Regulations Ordinance were later repealed, powers of preventive detention were retained and strengthened under the Internal Security Act of 1960, and later—in Malaysia—the Security Offenses (Special Measures) Act of 2012. As they were deployed against opposition politicians and progressive activists in both countries, providing the inspiration for parts of Liew’s and Tiang’s novels, other writers also came to pen alternative histories of these events. In doing so they challenged the official portrayals of those targeted as “Communists” or “subversives,” and created opportunities, through fiction, for audiences to identify with these individuals and their causes. Significantly, many did so not in English, which became the medium of official discourse in Singapore, but in other languages relegated to the status of “Mother Tongues” or “dialects.”
Some of these authors were themselves politically active. Former journalist and politician Said Zahari, who served the second-longest period of political detention in Singapore at seventeen years, produced a book of Malay-language poems while in prison (many of which were translated and published abroad during his incarceration) and later wrote two memoirs about his political journey. He Jin, who fled detention in 1963 and worked with the Voice of Malayan Revolution—a radio programme of the Communist Party which ran from 1969 to 1981—published a Chinese-language novel called Ju Lang (The Mighty Wave, recently translated by fellow activists Tan Jing Quee, Loh Miaw Gong and Hong Lysa), which follows a group of middle-class students drawn into the anti-colonial protests of the mid-1950s.
But one of the most striking voices among post-independence writers is that of Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, a teacher by profession and recipient of Singapore’s prestigious Cultural Medallion. In addition to forging a distinctive, modernist idiom to record the lasting repercussions of repression on the inner lives of former detainees, he has also succeeded in bringing these stories into the mainstream of contemporary Malay fiction, especially with ground-breaking novels like Dalam Keasingan (In Isolation). Most recently, his 1998 novel Ziarah Cinta (The Widower) has appeared in an accomplished translation by Alfian Sa’at, who was interviewed in Asymptote’s Fall 2016 issue. The narrative plunges directly into the troubled mental state of intellectual and former detainee Pak Karman, who loses his wife in an accident, and must reckon with both his heartbreak and his past. Though it has been years since his release, unanswered questions continue to haunt Pak Karman—has it all been worth it? how much, exactly, has he lost?—and true release seems ever more elusive.
In their quest to record a “people’s history” of Singapore and Malaysia, these writers (and translators) have bequeathed us with a “people’s literature”: a growing corpus of work that not only recaptures the human dimension of political struggle, but also registers the human cost of an otherwise benign official narrative of development and stability. We ought not to read their works in isolation, but as one of many traditions that—not unlike the movements they depict–has remained resilient, hopeful, and alive to our times. It is their collective legacy, after all, that furnishes us with a more nuanced understanding of who we are, and our shared past and present are both the richer for it.
Theophilus Kwek’s poems, essays and translations have been published in The Guardian, The Philosophical Salon, The London Magazine, and the Asia Literary Review. He serves as Editor of Oxford Poetry, and recently won the Berfrois Poetry Prize. He is Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Singapore.
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