Malaysia and Singapore

Introduction

A significant expansion of Singapore literature in the year under consideration was the emergence of the graphic novel as an important literary genre. Sonny Liew’s ground-breaking The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), the winner of the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize, will be discussed towards the end of this introduction. What this development does is to decisively widen what we consider literary works in the context of Singapore.

The inclusion of the graphic novel can be aligned with the growth of Singaporean autobiographies and biographies and the significance of the Malaysian Zen Cho’s work of fantasy fiction Sorcerer to the Crown (2015), mentioned in the previous bibliography. These developments have an effect on what we should seriously consider in the listing of Singaporean and Malaysian literary works in English. The growth of biography and autobiography continued unabated during the year, although there might be some difficulty in determining whether some of the works should be listed in a literary bibliography. As for Cho’s work, no work of fantasy fiction had an impact comparable to her novel, which was nominated for best novel for the British Fantasy Award and went on to win the Award’s best newcomer prize for 2016.

A perennial complaint in the English-language literatures of Malaysia and Singapore is the imbalance in the quantity of literary works of the two countries. Except for fiction, literary works in the other genres continued to be produced by Singaporean authors in larger numbers than those by Malaysian authors. There was no volume of English-language dramatic works by Malaysian authors during the year and there were only two volumes consisting exclusively of poetry (the third volume in the list also includes short stories).

The two volumes of poetry by Malaysian authors are noteworthy. One of the volumes is by the veteran writer of protest poetry, Cecil Rajendra, and the other is by Malachi Vethamani, who is a well-known scholar. Vethamani published the second edition of his bibliography of Malaysian literature in English during the year. The bibliography is significantly lengthier than the first edition and this can be attributed to the substantial growth of the Malaysian novel in English in recent years.

Another noticeable contrast between Malaysian and Singaporean literature in English is the division between local and expatriate Malaysian authors, with the Malaysian writers resident abroad receiving more attention than the locally-based authors. This situation is less clear-cut among Singapore writers. The literary environment in Singapore is comparatively more dynamic, with a relatively more active reception by the audiences and readers in Singapore to the locally produced works. A downside of this is the lack of international prominence that Malaysian authors like Tash Aw or Tan Twan Eng enjoy.

There were 15 volumes of poetry published during the year. Three of the volumes were written by Desmond Kon. Kon is a good example of some more recent Singapore poets who not only write poetry, but seriously reflect on poetry as an art form. Kon may be featured more prominently in 2016, but there are other poets who should be mentioned. Among them are Joshua Ip and Theophilus Kwek and, also, among the more veteran poets, Cyril Wong, Yong Shu Hoong and Alvin Pang. All of them have variously engaged in thinking deeply about poetry, in writing about their thoughts on the medium, or in the compiling of collections of poetry by fellow Singaporeans.

Although there were only two collections of plays by Singaporean authors published during the year, the collections by Faith Ng and Verena Tay are useful, as they provide us with the written references to some of their plays. Some of the plays have been performed in the past. It should be noted that Ng is an important emerging playwright while Tay is a more established figure who has been actively involved in writing fictional works as well, including the collection of short stories produced during the year. It is interesting to note that Ng’s volume was published by Checkpoint Theatre, which was co-founded by Huzir Sulaiman, a writer and theatre practitioner from Malaysia who has been more actively involved in Singapore in recent years.

Aside from written drama, the theatre scene in Singapore is vibrant, as attested by a good number of theatrical productions and the relatively good attendance by theatre-goers. Of the playwrights, Haresh Sharma should be highlighted, as he is now a dominant figure in Singapore theatre. There were performances of at least four of his works: Ghost Writer, Best of (His Story), Manifesto, and a translated version of his monodrama Rosnah, which was performed in the Malay language during the year. His play Fundamentally Happy, which was turned into a movie and released in 2015, was banned in Malaysia in 2016. This indicates that, although Sharma could be described as an establishment figure, his works do still arouse controversy, not only in Singapore, but also in Malaysia, as not only the film Fundamentally Happy but also some of his other works demonstrate.

There were nine volumes of fictional works produced by Malaysian authors during the year. Although this is less than half of the total number of volumes produced by Singaporean authors, it is a respectable figure and confirms the importance of fictional works in the Malaysian literary scene. Most of the works were published locally, except for the novels by Shamini Flint and Yap Chan Ling. The Malaysian publisher Gerakbudaya, who brought out four of the volumes, has proven important for Malaysian literary works in English.

There were 24 volumes of fictional works produced by Singaporean authors. Most of the works were published locally. Those works published abroad could be described as genre fiction and are not likely to produce the level of scholarly interest generated by the works of Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng. Ovidia Yu, like Shamini Flint in the Malaysian list, published another work of detective fiction. This volume in her Aunty Lee series which has some similarities with Flint’s Inspector Singh series.

Among the works that generated the most interest in Singapore was American resident Cheryl Tan’s Sarong Party Girls, which was published by William Morrow in New York. Tan’s work is an example of chick lit, but is likely to receive more serious scholarly attention than most other works belonging to this genre. One reason for this is that Tan’s novel is linguistically interesting, as it uses the local patois, Singlish, generously, and like Ming Cher’s Spider Boys, published in 1995, gives the lie to the belief that novels written in Singlish cannot be published abroad. Another work in the news by another American-based author, originally from Singapore, is Crazy Rich Asians (2013) whose film rights were acquired by Warner Brothers in 2016.

During the year, Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye received favourable reviews internationally. Early in January, the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer called it an “early candidate for the various best-of lists for 2016” and described it as a “multi-layered […] masterpiece”. The book was selected by the Economist magazine and the Philippine Daily Inquirer as one of their books of the year for 2016, the only graphic novel to make their lists. It was also selected as one of the year’s best graphic novels, not only by Publisher’s Weekly, but also by the Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR), and the Toronto Star, where it is referred to as “one of 2016’s most important graphic novels”. John Powers, writing for the NPR and the reviewer for the Booklist both describes it as a “tour de force”.

Even if one is conservatively reluctant to treat Liew’s graphic novel as literature, it is a work that has made a huge international impact, and must be treated accordingly. As a brilliant record of Singapore’s history from the graphic artist’s perspective, it is culturally important. As the Singapore history narrated by the Malaysian — born graphic novelist occurs before Singapore’s independence, it is also part of Malaysian history, and is thus a work that is of significance to both countries.

One problem in writing this Bibliography, is the proliferation of online materials that one has to deal with. This is not something that the researcher can ignore. In providing the URLs, I have restricted myself to research materials or individual web pages that are freely available on the Internet. Another problem is the URLs themselves, as they can be very lengthy. Where available, I have given the short URLs provided by the web sites and where these were not available, I have resorted to the short URLs provided by Google.