Singapore's second literary battle is effectively over. The first — begun in its early years of independence — concerned the creation of a worthwhile literature by Singaporeans against the pressures of a colonial legacy. Its outcome was a small but stable body of canonical voices, against which a new battle was soon waged from the late-1990s. That second struggle had found the institutionalised form too suffocating and aimed to move Singaporean writing beyond having fixed centres and margins. The plan was to empower it and to render it more versatile, more able to embrace innovations as well as to reassess traditions.
It is at this exciting point in Singapore's bumpy but eventful literary development that Starry Island appears. Edited by Fiona Sze-Lorrain with Frank Steward as Mānoa's long-time series editor, Starry Island is a fresh experience of what it loosely calls New writing from Singapore. The anthology goes as much through familiar terrains such as Boey Kim Cheng's haunting memories of place and Alfian Sa'at's sensitive heartland stories as through unexpected ones such as Wena Poon's charming tale of friendship between two mainland Chinese in Singapore. Karen Kwek's and Ng Yi-Sheng's cheeky stories — one realistic, the other speculative — and Grace Chua's new poems are invigoratingly good too.
To be sure, this is an elegant book in both its presentation and its choice of entries. The anthology is highly conscious of the immediate paradox a mere mention of Singapore conjures up, a small but stubborn spot in Asia sharply defined by dying, vibrant cultures as well as thriving, sterile urbanity. This awareness is not so much described or argued as shown to us through the generous use of beautiful photographs of both Singapore's changing cityscape and early-twentieth-century Chinese and Peranakan families. The visual contrast spotting the volume overtly serves to impose a form on a selection of texts that would otherwise pull in way too many directions.
Whether the essential plan is then to cut deeper like a surgeon or simply to leave tensions as marks of exotica is less certain. This question is not helped by how we are also kept clueless throughout as to what ‘new writing’ exactly means. It certainly does not involve historical time since the oldest inclusion here is Khoo Seok Wan's translated Chinese poems from the colonial times. The book does not limit itself to recent or unpublished works either, and there are a number of well-known entries from a few years to a few decades back. The appearance of young, strong voices — perhaps best represented by Amanda Lee Koe and Nicholas Liu — gives a foretaste of what newness in Singaporean literature must mean increasingly. Yet, one wishes that such voices are in the majority rather than set as configural surprises.
Newness can also concern technical experimentation, and, in this respect, contributions like Desmond Kon's hit the mark better than others. However, this sense of the new also does not seem to be the anthology's overriding interest. If we believe that reminding ourselves of origins in Singapore can help make things clearer, we cannot be more mistaken. Chris Mooney-Singh's competent pantun written about and at Siri Nagar, Kashmir — among others — show that Singapore as place or culture is not a consistent focus, and that is good. But the list of contributors highlights people with varying lengths and depths of relationships with the country, from citizens to expatriates, from immigrants and emigrants to frequent visitors. One wonders whether the same is done with the representation of other national literatures or this is needed here to prove the thesis that island cultures are, by nature, liminal, amorphous.
The danger I fear most is turning real. ‘New writing’ seems just to mean new literature in the most casual, awkward sense possible, the postcolonial sense. Singaporean writing is new in implicit opposition to the old literatures of the West and the ranging large civilisations of Asia. Such a treatment, if meant, diminishes the project's potential as it presents an attractive, even coy, selection with no real wish to guide the reader into a comprehension of the long literary struggles or even of each work's themes. Surely, it is high time that international attention, while welcome, confronts complexities because Singaporean literature urgently needs it – this may well be the new, third literary battle to fight. For example, granted that the book is not obliged to consider more established names, one still asks why there is repeated preference for Chinese works over works from Singapore's minority languages.
If there are faults in Starry Island, they are noble ones because they hardly arise from a lack of curatorial effort. As a traveller's big-picture introduction to Singaporean literature, this volume does prove its eagerness to exhibit technical and thematic diversity with a keen eye for quality. It satisfies the orientalist's curiosity, gives a calm portrait of distant complexity. One is pleased with the vivid experience, thrilled by the graceful turns of some half-familiar imagination, and warmed by the flamboyant flashes that can come from an island culture. Never mind that, whenever one remembers to ask if this is about Singapore being politically fifty years old or culturally centuries old, or both, or something else, one never quite gets an answer. Pleasure returns like a tide telling us that it is, after all, new literature.
