Malaysia and Singapore

Introduction

One of the problems of compiling a bibliography is generic. A related problem, which is quite often bracketed with genre, is quality. If one looks at the novel, there is a tendency, which is not always easy to do away with, to focus on naturalistic or realistic novels and to place lesser value on other genres, such as science fiction, horror, medieval fantasy, crime and detection, amongst others. For the English-language literature of Malaysia and Singapore, popular genres are important, and some writers are appreciated well beyond the borders of the two countries, such as Zen Cho for medieval fantasy, and Ovidia Yu and Sharmini Flint, for their detective novels. They are important not only in producing works of quality, but in the localisation of their narratives. The Singaporean and Malaysian aspects of the works of Yu and Flint cannot be ignored and if one wants to look for medieval fantasy with a Malaysian tinge, one looks at the work of Cho. One eagerly awaits the next works of Cho and Flint. Yu is represented in the 2018 bibliography with The Betel Nut Tree Mystery, which is the second novel dealing with the amateur sleuth Su Lin.

Of popular genres, horror seems too important to be overlooked, if one were to engage in a comprehensive survey of the literatures of Malaysia and Singapore. In the Singapore context in particular, horror may be seen as a reflection of psychological reality, possibly even of the Singaporean psyche and, at one period in the history of Singapore literature, it came close to being mainstream, as it had not been not a minority genre written by only a few writers.

One tendency of Singaporean horror in recent years is that it is not only written in prose. In 2018, Christina Sng’s collection of poems, A Collection of Nightmares (2017), won the Bram Stoker Prize for its “Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection”. Horror poetry is certainly not the exact equivalent of horror stories written in prose. While some of Sng’s poems are plotted as stories – though more sketchily than if they were written in prose – one is more struck by the startling and gruesome imagery, tales, than by their narrative development, as illustrated in the following lines from her poem, “The Art of Weaving”:

Mommy sat daily at her spinning wheel

Weaving reams of human skin

From the dust we slept in.

When she turned a hundred and three,

She taught the craft to me,

Reminding me time and time again

Never to drop a stitch

Or snag the cloth on

The sharp edges of my spiny flesh.

Sng’s poetry might not be as localised as the authors mentioned earlier; an attempt to do this might result in the unnecessary exoticisation of her work.

There were several collections of poems published by Singaporeans during the year. Among the more significant is Alvin Pang’s What Happened: Poems 1997-2017. This is a volume of selected poems by one of Singapore’s more important younger-generation poets. The volume has been thoughtfully edited by Ruth Tang. Surprisingly, however, although there are reviews of the collection in the Hong-Kong-based Cha magazine and the Philippine Star, there was none in any of Singapore’s major newspapers or magazines. The advantage that Pang has over many other Singaporean poets who are almost totally dependent on local response is his international presence. From a global perspective, this is not the first collection of his selected poems, with previous ones including collections of his translated poems in Swedish, Serbo-Croation and Macedonian.

Singaporean poetry may not only be cross-generic, as is the case with Sng’s horror poetry mentioned above, but some poetry collections also include pictures and graphics that are not merely a peripheral or decorative supplement. Marc Nair is both a poet and photographer, and his collection published during the year, Vital Possessions, includes his poems and photographs, both of which are integral to the volume. Also of interest is the highly popular Common Life, with poems by Lee Tzu Pheng and drawings by Ho Chee Lick. The drawings are essential to the poems. In an important sense, they precede the poetry, as Lee drew her inspiration from them to write her poems rather than being mere after-thoughts or after-effects to visually enhance the volume.

I mentioned the possible extension of the bibliography for Malaysia and Singapore to include graphic novels in previous introductions. The blend of the poetic and the visual in Nair’s and Lee’s collections appear less problematic in a literary bibliography, with poetry being a literary genre in its own right. The graphic novel, however, is both a genre and a medium and, unless we are dealing with graphic novel adaptations of literary works, the verbal element is not, or is not derived from, a traditionally recognised literary art form. Whether original graphic novels are literary demands a holistic judgment that is not problematic with Sonny Liew’s monumental The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2016) but is less so with other graphic narratives.

There is another underlying generic problem that might have an effect on the possibility of including graphic narratives in a literary bibliography, and this has to do with length. Similar to the classification of novels when compared to short stories, graphic novels are lengthy: Charlie Chan Hock Chye’s 324 pages make it possible to consider it a graphic novel. Graphic novels may also have complex narratives. This is partly a consequence of their being extended standalone works and not part of a series made up of shorter works. Most graphic narratives produced in Singapore and Malaysia do not meet these criteria and should be classified as serialised comic books instead of graphic novels. Their concomitant literary quality is also not as high as that achieved by Liew’s work. Thus, my prediction that the bibliography would have to be extended to include more graphic novels has not quite come to fruition.

A medium that is often associated with literature is film. Like the graphic novel, films have to be treated in their own right and are not merely derivative literary works. They are not listed in a bibliography such as this as they deserve their own listing. However, there are films that are based on literary works, and in such cases, although the films themselves are not listed, responses to them may be relevant to the original literary works or to the contexts for the analyses of the literature and culture of the country.

This is the case with the Hollywood blockbuster based on Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians. I have not listed the film, but the responses to the film provide a good indication of the reception to the novel as largely catering to a western audience. In this respect, the film was hugely popular, breaking box-office records and earning a substantial profit for the production company. However, the film flopped in some countries in the east, such as China and Korea. In Singapore, where it was viewed with suspicion, it was regarded as not being representative of Singapore.

The two major Singaporean complaints about Crazy Rich Asians, which also apply to the novel, were that it was not ethnically representative of Singapore and it was not really reflective of the Singaporean rich. The film and novel feature Chinese characters prominently, with inadequate or slanted representation of other ethnic groups. Some argue that the Singaporean rich do not behave in the way we see in the film and novel. Arguably, it might be more representative of a minority of rich Singaporeans or their hangers-on and not the Singaporean rich as a whole. A counter-argument would, of course, be that fictional works can never be satisfactorily representative of people, regardless of whether they are grouped according to their nationality, ethnicity or socio-economic class.

A minor problem with Kevin Kwan is his nationality. Kwan is no longer a Singapore citizen, and would in fact be arrested if he set foot on Singapore. His potential arrest has nothing to do with his creative writing, but with a peculiar, draconian law that requires Singaporean males of a certain age to be conscripted even after they cease to be Singapore citizens. In spite of this legal problem, the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board had no problem in supporting the production of the film. Likewise, the scholar of Singaporean literature would have no problem considering Kwan a Singaporean author, as he continues to have a strong interest in Singapore in his creative works.

Citizenship or residence is of course a minor problem with other authors as well, but it is difficult to take the works of authors such as Lau Siew Mei, Balli Kaur and Simone Lazaroo out of the Singapore context, in spite of their association with Australia. The same can be said about a host of other writers, some of whom retain their citizenship but spend much of their time abroad, such as the major Malaysian writers Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng. The same can also be said about Shirley Lim, who is an Asian-American writer, but whose association with Malaysia and Singapore remains strong. At least a handful of other writers associated with Singapore, such as Rachel Heng, Charlene Teo and Kirstin Chen, live and publish their works abroad and are included in the 2018 bibliography.

The perennial problem of balance between Singapore and Malaysia still exists. The Singaporean poetry scene is vibrant, and this is attested by the number of publications by individual poets. But the same cannot be said about Malaysia. Even the Malaysian publication of fictional works this year is not as good as in some previous years. I hope this will improve. Nevertheless, I am encouraged by the Malaysian scholarship of its literature, and this can be seen in several publications in online journals published by Malaysian universities. Two of these journals, Asiatic and SARE, have become important sources for academic articles on Malaysian and Singaporean literatures in English.