• Home
  • About
  • Collective
  • Authors
  • Forthcoming
  • Announcements

s/pores

new directions in singapore studies

Feeds:
Posts
Comments
« Learning Me Your Language
Editorial »

Introduction to “Learning Me Your Language”

January 2008 by spores

Philip Holden


Wang Gungwu is best known as a historian of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and for a stellar academic career commencing at the University of Malaya in Singapore and culminating in periods as Vice Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, and Director of the East Asia Institute, National University of Singapore. Like many of his contemporaries, however, Wang was a young adult at a turbulent time when modern Southeast Asia was being made during the period of decolonization immediately following the Second World War. The University of Malaya, where Wang studied during his undergraduate years from 1949 to 1952, was caught up in this process. Its new name, replacing those of its colonial predecessors Raffles College and the King Edward College of Medicine, pointed to the future of an independent Malaya. Yet the process of decolonization, especially for members of the Anglophone elite who attended the university, was also riven with conflict. By 1948, the brief “Malayan Spring” of post-War political pluralism had given way to the Malayan Emergency, a conflict in which Marxist guerillas conducted an insurgency against the colonial state.

Writing in the student magazines The Cauldron and its successor The New Cauldron, undergraduates at the University debated the shape that the new Malayan nation that would take; like later governments in Singapore and Malaysia after 1965, they strove to imagine a new national culture that might emerge after colonialism and that would reflect the multicultural nature of the new nation-state. An editorial in The New Cauldron called for “a courageous attempt at synthesis” of all the different “tributary traditions” that had been kept apart by a colonial plural society (“The Way to Nationhood” 6). Central to such synthesis would be the evolution of a common Malayan language that “would arise out of the contributions these communities” might “make to the linguistic melting pot.” This language would then “wait for a literary genius” to give it “voice and a soul, a service which Dante performed for the Italian language” (5). These hopes might seem naive given the hindsight that history now affords, yet they did give rise to attempts to write poetry that responded directly to a Malayan environment, mostly in English, but also initially in the artificial interlanguage of “Engmalchin,” incorporating English, Malay, and Chinese, the three most dominant languages in Malaya at that time.

Wang’s poetry collection Pulse, published in 1950, was perhaps the most lasting achievement of all the university poets. As Wang himself was to remark in retrospect in his article “Trial and Error in Malayan Poetry,” the project the poetry undertook was perhaps too ambitious, and the quality of writing is uneven. Yet Wang’s unique position among his fellow students as someone who was functionally trilingual (he published poems in Chinese and Malay, as well as those predominately in English) made his contribution unique. His first poem, “Moon Thoughts,” for instance, draws on imagery from both Chinese and British traditions, mixing imagery from Tang poetry with that from the English Romantics, and adding local “coffee dregs” and “rubber trees” to negotiate with, at times awkwardly, an “impure” cultural environment. Later poems, such as “Three Faces of Night,” are more successful in the complex manner in which they represent a Malayan urban landscape and a multilingual environment, using devices such as direct translation (“cool tea” for the Chinese liang cha 凉茶), or phonetic transcription (“fun” for fen 粉 rice noodles). The best poems in the collection express in equal measure both the exhilaration and the uneasiness of a rapidly changing society emerging from colonialism. Other English-language poets in Malaya, and later in Malaysia and Singapore would follow, and produce more substantial oeuvres, but Wang’s contribution has lasting value as the first collection of English-language poetry to attempt to articulate a distinctively Malayan voice.


Work Cited:

“The Way to Nationhood.” The New Cauldron. Hilary Term, 1949-1950. 3-6.

Philip Holden is associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore, teaching and researching Singaporean and Southeast Asian Literatures. He is also currently vice president of Singapore Heritage Society.

Advertisement

Related

Posted in 02 archives & memory | Tagged literature, postcolonial, student activism |

    • https://spores.wordpress.com/about

      The s/pores e-journal aims to provide a multi-disciplinary platform for the dissemination of works investigating different aspects of historical and contemporary Singapore society... more
  • Recent Comments

    1. Kingston Sim on A fierce Cantonese woman – growing up in Singapore in the 60s by Chan Wai Han
    2. Kingston Sim on Going to Where the Silence Is by Fong Hoe Fang
    3. Tom Lee on Being d/Deaf in Singapore: A Personal Reflection of Deaf Culture and Identity by Phoebe Tay
    4. Maria BOEY on Being d/Deaf in Singapore: A Personal Reflection of Deaf Culture and Identity by Phoebe Tay
    5. Let’s look at ‘d’ art – Apocalypse Later on Looking at ‘d’ art: Fab or fad? by Alvan Yap
    6. Noor on My experiences and perspectives on the lack of empathy in psychiatry by Nurul Fadiah Johari
  • Issues

    • 01 inauguration
    • 02 archives & memory
    • 02 archives & memory II
    • 03 commemoration
    • 04 if
    • 05 detention
    • 06 the arts I
    • 07 men in white
    • 08 intellectuals
    • 09 the arts II
    • 10 so what
    • 11 the pOp cUltURe Is-U
    • 12 seX spaces in Singapore
    • 13 after l thought
    • 14 "Yang Tersirat"
    • 15 bookshops
    • 16 Being Young in the 1950s
    • 17 History and Critical Pedagogy
    • 18 Exploring Disability Studies
    • 19 Growing Up in Post-1965 Singapore
    • 20 Bicentennial 2019 Biennale
    • Commentaries
  • anti-colonial art civil society communism Cultural politics economic development editorial education environment exhibition feminism films gender globalisation health and medicine history identity labour unions literature media memorial migrants multiculturalism music nation-building oral history philosophy poetry & prose policy political detention pop culture postcolonial race & ethnicity socialism social memory student activism theater

  • Links

  • Food #03

    Theatrex Asia

  • Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Singapore License.
  • http://s22.sitemeter.com/js/counter.js?site=s22spores Site Meter

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

WPThemes.


Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • s/pores
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • s/pores
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Copy shortlink
    • Report this content
    • View post in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar