By Tamara S. Wagner

Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature: Volume 5: Robert Yeo
George Watt
Ethos Books (2005) / 282 pages / SGD22.81

"The crossroads of history converge on Yeo", writes George Watt in the very first monograph on Robert Yeo's life and work. One of Singapore's most established, prolific, and culturally important writers, Yeo forms an excellent choice for a detailed, book-length, discussion of its literature. For the study of English-language writing currently being produced in contemporary, post-Independence, Singapore, the Interlogue series is without doubt a vital source. It is the starting point of any scholarly discussion of what the series itself has so importantly, although provocatively, helped to demarcate as 'Singapore literature'. But while the first four volumes have concentrated on different genres and their development in both pre- and post-Independence Singapore, having indeed been conceived with the view to provide an outline as well as an introduction, volume five constitutes an important departure.

The first book in the series to concentrate entirely on the work of a single author, it is a crucial contribution to literary criticism of Singapore's ever-increasing wealth of English-language literature. Most significantly perhaps, this new interest in detailed monographs on individual writers shows that it is high time that their work is taken seriously as the subject of critical analysis and a worthy field of literary criticism. If this long-delayed move away from a mere rehearsing of Singapore's history, politics, and above all, the 'emergence' – that embarrassingly patronising term – of its literature means also a leaving behind of the self-conscious anthology or the introductory article for unspecified "other" readers, and of which two-thirds always seem to be obliged to describe Singapore's location on the globe or a globalised world before dealing rather perfunctorily with somewhat randomly selected texts, so much the better. It is too easy to sum up any post-colonial nation's literature as 'emergent', to call it 'vibrant' (a particularly meaningless adjective), or to praise its 'diversity' – always with that implicit feeling of surprise that can be so jarring. To subject it to rigorous literary analysis and set it firmly within the criticism of world literature, the so-called New Literatures in English rather than the now somewhat outmoded terminology of the post-colonial (a particularly vexed term in a Southeast Asian context at any rate), however, is to substantiate most significantly the very viability of conceptualising a Singaporean literature or its study. To give both the respectability and the currency they deserve, there needs to be, first of all, a move away from talk about their 'emergence'.

George Watt does all that, and if the opening of his book is curiously self-conscious and tentative in engaging with its subject material, its structure promises a break with the genre of the post-colonial biography. In fact, it reallocates most of the biographical material in "a discrete chapter, which appears unconventionally at the end of the book", and hence, despite its intrinsic interest, it is moved securely out of the way of literary analysis. It is an important step that perhaps most compellingly paves the way for the discussion of Yeo's writing. That the study nonetheless starts with a caveat is understandable, given that the choice of just one of Singapore's growing number of writers necessarily has to be a deliberate one. However, Watt's book is by no means the first monograph on a Singaporean writer, and this is surely important as a reassessment of Yeo's centrality in Singapore's literature and culture, Watt's re-presentation of this relevance, and above all, the study of individual Singaporean writers at large.

Lim Yi-En's Women in Bondage: The Stories of Catherine Lim, for example, came out in 1999, followed more recently by Catherine Lim's own first non-literary work, a postmodern memoir with the pointed title Unhurried Thoughts At My Funeral, released at the beginning of 2005. The same year saw the publication of a comparative study of one of Malaysia's best-known writers, David Lim's in-depth The Infinite Longing for Home: Desire and the Nation in Selected Writings of Ben Okri and K.S. Maniam, and also my own book-length study of Singaporean and Malaysian fiction. Recent collections such as The City of Forgetting: The Collected Stories of Gopal Baratham (2001) or Tigers in Paradise: The Collected Works of Philip Jeyaretnam (2004) similarly capitalise on growing interest in the discussion of individual Singaporean writers, while The Merlion and the Hibiscus: Contemporary Short-Stories from Singapore and Malaysia (2002) has finally made available a wide selection of short stories to an international readership. Equally important, Singaporean Literature in English: A Critical Reader, edited by Mohammad A. Quayum and Peter Wicks, has perpetuated the Interlogue tradition in gathering together new and seminal essays on Singapore's literature, helping to prepare the way for further, book-length, studies. The editor's note to George Watt's study, however, most significantly testifies to this important new development: it starts off with a promise that this "is the first of several books planned on individual authors".

But if this new series is expected to branch out and encompass the ever expanding literature of and about Singapore, with all the problematic disentanglement of Singaporean diasporas this might entail, what singles out the work of Robert Yeo as a particularly good choice for its commencement is his position at the 'crossroads', in more senses than one. Watt indeed makes much of this metaphor: "Yeo sits at a linguistic crossroads: [...]. He sits at a literary crossroads: [...] For Yeo at the crossroads the strength and value of [a] writer is the ability he or she has to fuse 'the personal with the social'." Most strikingly, "[t]he crossroads of history converge on Yeo," and hence he can at once embody and express "various converging cultural forces". This imagery of meeting and convergence criss-crosses Yeo's work, which moreover cuts across genres as it leads us across Singapore's literary history. Early post-Independence Singapore saw him as a protest writer and more recent years turned him into a self-conscious embodiment of what Watt emphatically terms the post-colonial hybrid and his "poetry of identity (Singaporean and individual)". Watt further argues that "England and Singapore make two poles of Yeo's cultural identity", and that his cultural relevance works in tandem with his literary significance.

Hence, Watt shuttles between, firstly, an account of Yeo's frequently provocative position, including for example the "new and unwanted relevance" of The Singapore Trilogy, one of Yeo's best-known, most controversial, yet now canonised, works of drama, secondly, his position in world literature and its different traditions, and thirdly, his unique importance as a Peranakan writer, which partly runs counter to his representative function as one of Singapore's most established dramatists, poets, and novelists. Watt speaks intriguingly of "myths of origin which account for his [Yeo's] family's presence in Singapore". But what Watt indicates as a problem is in fact an enormous source of potential. Discussing the construction of what Benedict Anderson (and Homi Bhabha in his wake, though in a very different vein) has diagnosed as an imagined nation – or better known as the imagined community – Watt suggests that Singapore faces a difficulty because of its very versatility: "Singapore, unlike those nations with a shared past, did not have one to draw on. It had many pasts – European, Chinese (of various and not always mutually appreciative clans), Malay, Indian (from different sub-continent cultures and ethnic groups), Peranakan, and Eurasian." It is, however, precisely those traditions of mixture, of convergence, of markedly different ideas of sharing a past, that significantly denote literature of and about Singapore's Peranakan and Eurasian communities as the most stimulating development in Singapore's contemporary literature. That Robert Yeo's future work, his forthcoming autobiography included, seeks to make more of Straits Chinese, or Peranakan, history, indeed promises to be his most exciting contribution to Singapore literature and culture yet to come.

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