By Claire Betita de Guzman

Utama
Ng Yi-Sheng
Epigram Books (2025) / 360 pages / SGD 26.90

There are stories we inherit so deeply that we forget they are stories. Through generations, we learn them as history, repeat them as fact, and eventually allow them to become part of a place's identity.

But origin stories are rarely as straightforward as we would like them to be. The trouble with them is that the more familiar they grow, the less we think to question them, even as each retelling embellishes and strips away the contradictions that made them human. What remains is a version that is easier to remember, easier to celebrate and perhaps easier to believe: a past where heroes grow larger with every telling and the people, who helped shape the tale, slip out of it.

So what happens when a writer returns to one of these foundational stories and looks at it again – not as a single, tidy chronicle of kings, kingdoms and heroic beginnings, but as something grander, stranger and yet still far more human? What if, in telling how a nation came to be, he leads us into its contradictions and ambiguities, and into the marvellous, mythical possibilities the old versions left behind?

This is the territory that poet, fictionist, playwright, researcher and activist Ng Yi-Sheng opens to us in Utama, a mythic retelling of the rise of Sang Nila Utama, the legendary Prince of Palembang and founder of Singapura. A finalist for the 2026 Singapore Literature Prize, Ng's first original novel draws from Malay lore and historical accounts, allowing history, mythology, fantasy and imagination to coexist.

As a writer whose own work is shaped by Southeast Asia, by its people, its peculiarities, its tangled histories, I find the premise irresistible. We have always been bound to one another, by trade routes, by migration, by the long reach of empire. And yet how much of that complexity survives in the stories our nations tell about themselves?

Those expecting a straightforward origin story may be surprised. Utama feels like stepping into a half-remembered legend, one that keeps turning its gaze from its famous protagonist to the figures gathered around him: queens and warriors, rulers and exiles, scholars and courtiers, who are also fathers, mothers, daughters and sons. People and mythical beings alike, their lives brush against the ambitions of kings, and it is their presence that unsettles the old image of the solitary hero who makes history with his own hands. And it is here where Utama reminds us that our histories have never belonged exclusively to official records. That they, too, live in oral traditions, legends, religious beliefs and folklore.

Spanning centuries and drifting between regional powers, the novel unfolds in three parts, beginning in 1025, 1279 and 1299, and takes the shape of a mosaic. It opens with a disgraced Chinese scholar, exiled and adrift on the monsoon seas. From there, the narrative scatters into stories of its own, all intersecting with Sang Nila Utama's rise: fields turning gold, simple farmers becoming queens, banished wives suffering then flourishing in an all-women community, warriors facing sea serpents in ways one would never expect. Sang Nila Utama's presence is at its centre, and yet, not really.

For me, the book is most compelling in its feminist and decolonial pulse. Sang Nila Utama himself is a distant and deeply flawed figure, a catalyst for change rather than a pristine icon of nobility. The novel loosens the grip of the old chronicle tradition, the Malay Annals from which this tale is drawn, which sees history through a patrilineal lens of kings, conquests and divine right, and turns its attention from the monarch to those who stood beside him.

Utama is as much a decolonial reclaiming of Maritime Southeast Asian myth as it is a feminist re-visioning. It was empowering and, frankly, thrilling – to meet women who, in older tellings, so often appear as little more than bargaining chips in a marriage, and to find them speaking with voice and agency. The widows Empuk and Malini are given rich interiority, political awareness and motives of their own. The 39 banished wives sustain a realm through their labour, diplomacy, resilience and wisdom. Queen Beni of Bintan and Puteri Tanjung Buih each come into their power and, in doing so, come to know their true desires.

Ng pushes back against the Western and imperial habit of reducing history to the deeds of 'Great Men'. This passage is perhaps my favourite in the novel:

"Nobility is a myth. We repeat it only because it preserves our power. The future belongs not to those of purest lord, but to any rascal with the daring to seize its course," Lebar Daun tells his daughter and wife of Sang Nila Utama, Wan Sendari.

By lifting up the voices of women and indigenous sea communities, and by showing royalty in all its flaws, Utama reframes the founding myth of Temasek. In this reimagination, it is no longer an inevitable act of royal destiny, but a complex, collective human story, shaped by those who are usually left in the shadows.

Utama eschews obvious tropes, weaving queer resonance through its most intimate bonds. The ties among princes, warriors and advisors, for instance, carry echoes of a fierce emotional intimacy between men. Drawing on regional shamanic and animist traditions, the novel also touches on non-binary and gender-transcendent spiritual states, in figures such as Ratna and Mambang, and of course in Empuk and Malini. By including queer desire and gender fluidity in the lore of pre-colonial Singapore, Ng suggests that queer possibility was always part of the regional landscape, long before colonial law imposed its rigid moral codes.

The book does pay for its ambition. There is a considerable cast, a wide geographical canvas and multiple perspectives. Utama crosses centuries and shorelines in a handful of pages, and the story, carried so swiftly, moves like a boat from island to island. Figures rise out of the dark, are given one vivid moment, and are released as history draws the tale onward. Readers who long for a taut single thread may find themselves dizzied, even lost.

Though I revelled in the novel's many voices, it can feel like a string of linked mythic vignettes, each a lantern lit and left burning on the water. On reflection, I have come to see this as a form that echoes the scattered, wandering nature of oral tradition. Moreover, readers who come expecting Temasek to be the setting throughout may be surprised too. The island is less a stage than a far horizon, the shore towards which centuries of migration, strife and myth slowly drift.

Thankfully, Ng's prose is lush, heightened and distinctive. His sentences are accessible and yet seem to understand that this is not a story meant to feel entirely ordinary. The ending of each chapter gives one the feeling that it wants to sound like a tale that has survived centuries of retelling.

Utama is an attempt to reclaim Singapore's precolonial past, much as writers like Amitav Ghosh have reimagined the Indian Ocean world. It restores a vision of Southeast Asia as a vibrant, interconnected maritime region, rich in cultural exchange, spiritual traditions and rival centres of power. It is a world that colonial narratives have too often pushed to the margins of history.

Ng does not offer a final answer to how Singapore began. He offers something more intriguing: the proposition that the stories of our beginnings can be revisited, questioned and reimagined, without losing their power.

_____