Ageing is an unlooked-for process, one that’s perhaps difficult to put into narrative form. When you’re young you acquire more skills, quickly in your teens and early twenties, and then more slowly in your middle years. This is the romance narrative, a hero on a quest of self-development. Then, in your fifties and increasingly in your sixties, your ability in some areas begins to slowly erode, imperceptibly at first. No one’s ever taught you the process of giving things up, especially while still having curiosity and engagement with the world. The only narrative mode that works, perhaps, is irony. I do find, as – if my memory serves me rightly — I’ve written before here, that the world now often makes a shallower impression on me. I forget the contents of books I’ve read quite quickly, and I sometimes wonder if anything from them persists; that new Mandarin vocabulary that I’ve checked on to be able to talk more precisely with my mother-in-law crumbles away, accompanied by other characters and phrases I thought I mastered years ago. I’m planning to go to Japan later this year, and find that the phrases, along with the hiragana and katakana I memorized five years ago, for a pre-Covid trip, has completely vanished. I make time for daily Duolingo sessions, but find I’m more adept at developing strategies to overcome gamification, and unlocking those treasure chests, than committing to deep learning. I go back to a computer to perform a routine task that I haven’t done for some months, and I have to google for a video of how to do it, realizing, while I’m watching the video, that I’ve done this before, perhaps three or four times.
My counselling training and its emphasis on active listening has bought me some time, but I’m also becoming conscious of another trait that accompanies ageing: that of falling into too many words, of getting lost in storytelling. I was chatting to a younger friend a few days ago. She asked me about how I’d become an academic, and when I got to my experiences in Hunan in the 1980s the story I was telling suddenly ballooned, and went off at a tangent. I wasn’t aware of this until a few minutes later, when she gently prompted me about the rest of my career. So in reading, then, the impression stories make on me seems to be growing less. In telling my own story, though, the grooves of remembrance go deeper with each recounting, so that I have to consciously move out of them, and start afresh.
That said, I have read four books in the last month that have made a deep impression on me. I’m writing this month partly to make that impression stick, so that when I return to this post in a year’s time I’ll still be able to recall their contents.
The first was Dina Zaman’s Malayland, an account of different and competing visions of Malay identity and its relationship to Islam and nationalism in Malaysia, after the end of UMNO hegemony. I’ve always liked the author’s writing, and this book mixes autobiographical reflections on her own shifting identity with discussions with intellectuals and civil society actors. The book is critically informed with reference to both academic work on Malaysia and the social construction of ethnicity, and it’s also beautifully written. As a proximate outsider to Malaysian politics, I don’t know enough to fully evaluate her observations and judgments, or indeed the validity of the identity categories, such as “the Ethnocentrists,” “the Professionals,” or “the Islamists,” which are used to demarcate chapters. One thing that struck me in reading, however, was Malayland’s skepticism about Malay liberals who, from a position of privilege, make a binary division between urban and rural, educated and uneducated. There are haunting parallels here with the inability of the liberal left worldwide to confront the rise of populism arising from social inequality, not simply in Asia but also Europe and North America.
The second book I read was Amanda Lee Koe’s second novel Sister Snake. I remember reading the author’s book of short stories, Ministry of Moral Panic, soon after it was published, in 2012. This was one of those rare moments in the Singapore literary landscape when a new voice starts speaking in a radically new way, a little like the publication of Alfian’s One Fierce Hour over a decade previously. I’d admired the technical beauty of Lee Koe’s second book, Delayed Rays of a Star, and it intersected with a research project I myself had worked on, and then abandoned, that touched on sexuality and transnational celebrity in the twenties and thirties. Yet I found the characters left me cold. Sister Snake left me feeling much warmer. It’s joyfully queer, placing the Bai Suzhen myth within the context of contemporary New York and Singapore. By having Xiao Qing, the green snake sister, come from New York to visit her white snake sister in contemporary Singapore, Lee Koe artfully negotiates the problem of “information dumping” – historical and social contextualization for a non-Singaporean audience, and at the same time defamiliarizes the social landscape of the city-state. The novel’s slightly cartoonish and playful for most of its length, but then becomes intensely soulful in the last few pages. But there are also wonderful asides or moments in the text that throw the reader back on herself, and ask unsettling questions.
I read very few academic books in literary studies nowadays: when I do turn to scholarly texts, I find myself more frequently drawn to history or sociology. However, I did enjoy reading Angelia Poon’s recent Global City Dilemmas and Anglophone Singapore Literature. There’s always a pleasure in seeing a colleague’s work, and working method, come together from a series of essays into a whole that’s larger than its constituent parts. Angelia (somehow I can’t quite call her “Poon” here) close-reads a variety of contemporary Singapore texts, from Balli Kaur Jaswal through Alfian and Kevin Kwan to Amanda Lee Koe, to show how they critically interrogate elements of the social in the city-state, and larger globalised imaginings centred on Singapore. The discussion of the texts is insightful, proceeding through a series of dialogues with a series of theoretical frames. The terms of this dialogue are made possible, I think, by a strong sense of historical and literary location from a scholar who has lived through generational change in Singapore. When discussing Walter Mignolo’s concept of decoloniality, Angelia mentions the Argentinian semiotician and literary theorists revision of the Cartesian “I think therefore I am” to “I think where I am.” As Singaporean literature becomes globalised, and much of the best scholarship on Anglophone literature, at least, is increasingly written by scholars not resident in Singapore, the book reminds us the book that a useful tacit knowledge comes from everyday acts of dwelling, from the Singapore classroom, and from chance encounter. That knowledge that informs the process of reading, not perhaps so much in a readily identifiable critical perspective, but in a rich texture to the analysis, a tracing and opening up of fault lines that moves beyond binarisms, and refuses to reify an unchanging authoritarianism as its object of critique.
Finally, here’s a book that came from nowhere: Arthur Koestler’s 1941 novel Darkness at Noon, now in a new translation by Philip Boehm. I came to Koestler by a circuitous route, from my historical research on S. Rajaratnam’s London years. Koestler. like Piroska Feher, was a Hungarian refugee who escaped a disintegrating Europe to sojourn in the British capital. Rajaratnam would have read Koestler’s fascinating memoir of his escape from France, The Scum of the Earth, through his subscription to the Left Book Club. Yet reading takes on a life of its own. Darkness at Noon is set entirely in a prison cell in a dictatorship that closely resembles Stalinist Russia. Its protagonist, Rubashov, was once a leader of the revolution, but now finds that the dictator, Number One, has turned against him and detained him. The novel follows Rubashov’s last days as he waits for a certain death, but its richness comes from its complex exploration of the psychological processes of confession to a crime that one did not commit, of coming to live with a story that is, in the final event, a necessary lie. Strangely, this novel spoke to me as I’ve attempted to write an account of my career, aware, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, of how forgetting comes with age, and the need to record what I lived through. Yet there are very different ways to tell such a story, none of which of course approach the radical extinction of self that Rubashov chooses. Perhaps I can say that Koestler’s story jolted me out of the grooves of my own story, a way of telling I’d grown used to, and to think again about who confession is directed towards. Above all, I was struck by Koestler’s examination of the dialogues that the self enters into in the absence of interlocutors, even though his ultimate vision is an unremittingly bleak one.
Four books, then, that have enriched my life over the last month, and which may persist with me not so much in terms of content but in the ways of seeing and recollecting they suggest.