Malaysia and Singapore

Introduction

One prominent feature of the year 2020 was the effect of the pandemic on the literary scene in Malaysia and Singapore. It was not just a simple effect and it led to serious questions about the categories of drama and literature and about the exclusiveness or inclusiveness of literary bibliographies.

The strongest impact of the pandemic was on theatre, where a great number of performances had to be cancelled because of the fear that audience members in close proximity might lead to the spread of the disease. Economically, it led to the reduction or depletion of the financial returns of performances and all drama companies or amateur performance groups in Malaysia and Singapore were severely affected. Some drama groups and companies suspended their activities until theatre and performance venues were partially reopened towards the end of the year. Others resorted to online performances in order to continue to be active. For this, Singapore’s National Arts Council offered digital presentation grants for artists and companies to defray the expense of online production.

If drama groups and companies resorted to online performances, there were some key decisions they had to make. Should the audience access these performances for free or should they pay for them? Should the performances be live or recorded, or should their live online performances be recorded?

Changes in what theatre companies usually did could be seen in the significant shifts or modifications in their productions. Online performances, as we know, are not directly equivalent to live performances. These shifts were thus not only generic, but more significantly, involved a change in medium, and ultimately, of art form. These modifications or transformations are not what a bibliographer can ignore. One question that the bibliographer needs to ask is where to draw the line. The broadest consideration, as signalled by the last word of the name of this journal, is to draw the line between what is and is not literature.

Looking at the question of what literature is from the perspective of drama, the bibliographies in this journal are confined to dramatic texts and live performances. These can be traditionally classified under literature, although, arguably, drama as performance should not be strictly considered literature. However, there cannot be a concentration on just written texts — as in the case with poetry, fiction and non-fiction — as this will give an impoverished and distorted picture of the dramatic scenes and more general literary scenes in Malaysia and Singapore. Moreover, there are usually very few drama publications during the year and, in 2020, there was none at all, which was probably partly due to problems arising from the pandemic or to the diversion to other more critical financial and existential problems concerning the survival of drama in the region.

The pandemic and the move towards online performances added a further complication: what to be included or excluded by the bibliographer, largely hinging, as noted earlier, on issues of genre or medium. Should online performances be still considered as similar to the live dramatic performances that were a main staple, over the years, of listings of reports and reviews of drama in Malaysia and Singapore? Or are we moving towards the televisual or cinematic arts?

Recordings add a further complication. Live performances are one-off occasions. Recordings may be made, but they are for training or archival purposes. It is the live performance in front of a live audience that is central and where the art form is. But with online performances, recordings are a frequent complement and may even be critical, for practical or financial reasons. There were streamed performances with synchronous audience access, but even here, recordings were usually given as an option, as they increase the audience number and box-office takings.

What is clear is that any theatre company that resorts to online or digital performance has to cater to the medium, not only in relation to its technicalities, but also in relation to its aesthetic possibilities. It is not a simple or direct transference from one medium to another.

One of the digital theatrical productions during the year that did not quite tackle the medium satisfactorily was the Singapore Repertory Theatre’s The Coronalogues. What was done for this production was to invite nine writers to reflect more optimistically on the pandemic, with nine actors to read the monologues. In her review, Ong Sor Fern notes that “the bite-sized brevity of each monologue proved to be a hard pill for some writers and actors to swallow. The production as a whole felt patchy, with uneven performances and some writing that struck wrong notes” (https://str.sg/JdYS). While The Coronalogues might face problems even if it was traditionally performed as live theatre, given the way it was conceived and produced, the complications generated by producing it on the digital format did not resolve these problems and might have added to them.

The resolution to the problem posed by digitisation and online media may very well lie with theatre companies and groups that are not only willing to change, but those that have a good understanding of the existing and emerging new media, both technically and aesthetically. Some companies have already made the change before the pandemic. Some were indeed originally conceived as multimedia companies and, except for the cancellation of their live dramatic performances, did not face a major stumbling block in continuing their work and in the digital transformations of their productions. A company that was originally conceived as a multimedia company, even though its major concentration was on drama, is Checkpoint Theatre. As noted by one of its founders, Huzir Sulaiman, a Malaysian playwright who now resides in Singapore,

We can no longer do live theatre because it’s not possible to get people together. However, Checkpoint Theatre sees itself as not just a theatre company, but a company which tells original stories across different media. So, we’re going to explore the things we’ve also wanted to do, such as video games, graphic novels and hip-hop tracks. (https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/node/290331)

I have discussed the problems faced by theatre companies and groups in coping with the pandemic at some length because it is a major bibliographical and existential challenge never faced before in the history of post-colonial Singapore and Malaysian theatre. This is also not an issue that will go away, even after the pandemic is over. Theatre companies will continue to explore multimedia possibilities for their productions as they will enhance the viability of these companies in a changing world. Some of them will, of course, be more properly described as multimedia or general arts companies, which the Checkpoint Theatre already is.

However, these developments will not result in the explosive expansion of literary bibliographies, such as this bibliography, as lines still need to be drawn. It is quite unlikely, for example, to reflect on what Huzir Sulaiman has said: that video games or hip-hop tracks will be included, unless they are based on, or influenced by, local literary works, in which case they deserve at least a passing mention. There might also be some cross-over conundrums, such as online dramatic productions that imbibe features of video games (which might be an issue faced in future bibliographies). In this connection, there is, in fact, a collaboratively created local program called Future Stage that allows theatre or arts companies to produce digital dramatic works with interactive and virtual reality features (https://str.sg/JhuJ).

As for graphic novels, the only local graphic novel that has been featured prominently in the annual bibliography of Malaysia and Singapore was Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), and I continue to maintain an interest in Liew’s works, including his use of comics in the fight against the pandemic in this year’s bibliography.

A feature associated with Liew’s work which might prompt the bibliographer to include non-traditional works is what we call literary quality. Literary quality might sometimes be elusive, but sometimes obvious in some works such as Liew’s graphic novel, with its sophisticated narrative construction. The issue of literary quality might of course lead to the inclusion of hip-hop tracks, rap numbers and song lyrics: many people, including me, consider Eminem, for example, a major American poet. After all, the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2017. Thus, if any local collections of songs or rap numbers are of obvious literary merit, the bibliographer will include them.

One consequence of the issues of genre and medium that emerge from the pandemic is the realisation that one has to be slightly more relaxed in the compilation of the bibliography, at least for the year 2020. The case of drama is obvious but, to be fair, this should be extended to other media or genres. One writer included in the 2020 bibliography is the Malaysian Claudia Tan. She is a writer on the social storytelling online platform Wattpad. Her first novel in the “Perfect” series, Perfect Addiction, which won the People’s Choice Award in 2015 and 2016 and has also been translated into French (2019), will now be adapted to film.

One problem with Claudia Tan’s work is that it is largely restricted to the medium. At the time of writing, the only printed versions available are the French translations. Fictional works that are restricted to the online medium have usually not been included in the bibliography. A prominent exception was Catherine Lim’s pioneering e-novella, Leap of Love (2000), which initially appeared only in its online version. Print is still clearly dominant today, and it is almost a test of a literary work’s worth that it has a print version.

Another concern with Claudia Tan’s work is the issue of literary merit mentioned earlier and the co-related issues of genre fiction or popular fiction as well as of cross-over genres or media. While the main concern in this bibliography is with mainstream or “serious” literature, the bibliographer must be alert to high quality works outside the mainstream or those that have created an impact.

A further concern with Tan’s work is the lack of localisation. When we look at genre fiction in Malaysian and Singaporean literature or at works that are generally out of the mainstream literature of the region, we can see clear local features, such as local characters in the detective fiction of Ovidia Yu and Shamini Flint, and local society and history in the juvenile fiction of Hanna Alkaf and Liew’s graphic novel mentioned earlier. Even Zen Cho’s Regency-era fantasy fiction has Malay magic and Malaysian or Malaysian-tinged characters (both human and supernatural). But the same cannot be said of Claudia Tan’s fiction. This may be a consideration in future bibliographies.

Unlike drama, whose confrontation with the pandemic was comprehensive — affecting content, genre, medium and even questions pertaining to its continued existence — the effect of the pandemic on the other genres was largely on content. In poetry, there were Felix Cheong’s In the Year of the Virus and R. R. Pravin’s Singapore Bluegrass & Other Quarantine Poetry. There was also, in non-fictional prose, Christina Thé’s Diary of a Former Covidiot, and the anthology curated by Shamini Flint, Unmasked: Reflections on Virus-Time.

In relation to medium, coping with the pandemic could be seen in the increased interest in online publications. Singapore’s National Library added more books to their online collection. There was also the curious case of free poetry publications from an established literary publisher. Online poems by local writers have been freely available on the Internet for at least a quarter of a century. However, this is the first time that free first-edition volumes of poetry from an established publisher are made available to the public: Colin Goh’s The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Singapura and Joshua Ip’s Farquhar, both published by Ethos Books.

For poetry in general, there was the usual imbalance between Singapore and Malaysia. While there were 24 volumes from Singapore writers published during the year, there were only two from Malaysia. There is the general feeling however that, while there is a large number of poetry books published by Singapore authors, the scholarship on more recent poetry is lagging behind. We are clearer, from a scholarly perspective, about the older generation of poets.

The greater clarity on the older poets can also be seen in the scholarship on Malaysian poetry in English, but in this case, there is a lack of poetry written by younger Malaysians. With this in mind, it is sad to note the passing, during the year, of the major older-generation Malaysian poet, Salleh Ben Joned. We should also note the passing of another major Malaysian writer, K. S. Maniam, who is well known for his novels The Return (1981) and In a Far Country (1993).

The Malaysian fiction publications, as was the case in previous years, were well represented. Joshua Kam’s How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World, the winner of the Epigram Books Fiction Prize for 2020, was published during the year. Zen Cho made a genre move from Regency-era fantasy fiction, to wuxia, or Chinese sword-fighting narrative, in The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water. While juvenile fiction is usually excluded from the bibliography, I am making the exception again for Hanna Alkaf due to her impact on the Malaysian literary scene and her international reputation. Her novel The Girl and the Ghost was a finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for young readers.

It is interesting that the prize for Kam’s novel was awarded by Epigram Books, a Singapore publisher. With the award to a Malaysian author, Epigram’s Fiction Prize is now more clearly a regional award and not confined to Singapore. Literary publishers play an important role in the development of the literatures of the region, but they are worried about their survival, which was made worse by the pandemic. This was a concern expressed by Edmund Wee, the CEO of Epigram Books during the year. The bookshop, Books Actually, closed its physical outlet in 2020, due to the adverse commercial impact of the pandemic, and is now solely an online bookshop. Fortunately, Books Actually’s literary publishing arm, the curiously named Maths Paper Press, survives.

There were some interesting developments in fiction from Singapore. The major poet Cyril Wong, continued to write prose fiction (in addition to the two volumes of poetry published during the year). His style and content are interesting, as they go beyond the usual practice of current writers of realistic fiction, delving into the fringes of the genre and reaching out towards fantasy and the contemporary possibilities of more traditional narrative genres such as the fable.

Apart from Wong’s This Side of Heaven: A Novel, another work of prose fiction written by a writer than one associates more with poetry, is Snow at 5pm: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet by Koh Jee Leong. Here, as in Wong’s work, there is an exploration of the boundaries of what fictional prose is supposed to do in the work and of the relationship between poetry and prose.

In a conventional year, I would have given more prominence, in this Introduction, to the content and reviews of the work by Kevin Kwan published during the year. But Kwan, whose latest novel is less Singaporean and more Asian-American, seemed to be a remote presence during the pandemic year and more distant from the more immediate and relevant worries that we faced here.

One should always be on the lookout for Singapore and Malaysian writers who are resident abroad, and even those who have acquired foreign citizenship, like Kwan. Many Malaysian writers, for example, are foreign residents or have become foreign citizens. Even writers who are critical of their country — such as Preeta Samarasan, who wrote an article during the year about the racism in Malaysia that forced her to live abroad — are still of clear relevance. They give us a more complete picture of their earlier home country, whether it be Malaysia or Singapore. But the same cannot be said about Kwan, who seemed to have slipped out of clear view at least for the annus horribilis of 2020.