The pivotal role of a public poet in nation building

By Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

Perhaps, it is the fate of the first generation of writers after independence to be so deeply committed to the issue of nation and nation building. The writers who came later have not been exposed to the pressures, challenges, excitements and pain of a nation coming into being, specially a nation that is multi-racial, multi-cultural and therefore, exposed, perhaps, to tensions that are not apparent in a homogeneous society.

The role of a public poet does not confine to mere chronicling the past, codifying the life in the bygone era. It is to infuse flesh and blood into icons, legends that would eventually constitute the collective consciousness of the nation. Such a poet is both the reflector and the mirror of the nation, time in which he lives and a memory –builder who will carry the cherished memories of a nation to posterity with the corpus of his work.

Ee Tiang Hong citing Chin Woon-Ping, points out that “most striking feature of Thumboo’s poetry is ‘his sense of social responsibility, based on a conscious decision to eschew personal preoccupations and to be a public poet dealing with crucial issues of a developing nation’.

Bruce Bennett, critic and literary commentator is of the view that Thumboo’s verse, like that of his significant contemporaries indicates ‘ a less insistence concern with the poet’s ego and a more developed interest in a public, community-oriented poetry’ while it inhibited personal exploration it gives scope to ‘a firm critical intelligence and a developed sociological imagination’. In a study, Kirpal Singh identifies three cardinal stages of Thumboo’s poetry: first, the impressionistic lyrical mode; second, moralistic, direct or implied; and third, the imaginative, internalising a lived reality.

This tri-party division is useful. Anyone familiar with his full body of his work and the poems that he continues to write will see that he carries his style with him and adding to it through the experience of the poems that he produced.

“ On his influence on the growth of English writing in Singapore, Shirley Lim has written to the effect that Edwin Thumboo’s poems ‘ testify not only to a personal ambition and achievement but , especially for Singaporean critics and writers, to a larger persistence and importance which can only be interpreted as a literary tradition’.

Yasmin Gooneratne, also observes ‘Thumboo writes as a committed Singaporean. He is a poet of skill and maturity whose imagination has clearly been fired by the growth and change that have transformed his motherland, change to which-as a civil servant and academician –he had personally contributed”

On some instances, though the experience may be personal yet it is also a part of collective memory of the nation:

Yesterday
Silence growing on a stem,
Touch of rustic life:
a thin twig of smoke
following a dead creeper
among old branches
and both twisting
(old thoughts to new ideas)
Betrays a habitation.

Yet walk to the shadow
Of Mandai mountain,
I will show you a
Sleeping secret stream

In an academic paper entitled Re-privileging Asian Cultural Concepts; Reflections on Edwin Thumboo’s poetry to the volume Writing Asia: The Literatures in Englishes, Wimal Dissanayake observes, “In many of his poems, Thumboo explores the multiracial society of Singapore with great understanding and sympathy. The national identity of Singapore and how it clashes against the notion of cultural citizenship is central to the writings of Thumboo.

In multiracial societies, the fact that various ethnic groups enter into national community does not mean that they give up their distinct cultural traditions, histories, and social memories; indeed they are kept alive through diverse strategies. Cultural citizenship indexes the way these distinct groups who, while retaining their cultural identities, function as members of a single nation. In Edwin Thumboo’s poetry, one sees very clearly the implications of this phenomenon. Being himself of Indian and Chinese origin, Thumboo fully realises the considerata of cultural citizenship; hence, it is hardly surprising this theme animates much of his writings.

The twin concept of ‘uchi’ and ‘sato’ with all the overlapping and intersecting trajectories of meaning, enable us to probe into this aspect of Thumboo’s poetry. The dynamics of centrality, marginality and unity, exclusion and inclusion are configured in his poetry with a remarkable degree of sensitivity as he observed in his poem Ulysses by Merlion…

Despite unequal ways,
Together they mutate,
Explore the edges of harmony,
Search for a centre;
Having changed their gods,
Kept some memory of the race
In prayer, laughter, the way
Their women dress and greet.
They hold the bright, the beautiful,
Good ancestral dreams
Within new visions,
So shining, urgent
Full of what is now.

Perhaps, having dealt in things,
Surfeited on them, their spirit yearn again for images
Adding to the dragon, phoenic,
Garuda, naga, those horses of the sun,
The lion of the sea,
This image of themselves”

Wimal quoting Thumboo himself questions that ‘whether there is an anomaly, a discrepancy when we try to make use of concepts forged in one culture to understand the experiences of another…”

He questions if concepts of analysis that we employ in examining Asian work are forged in the West and one feels no compunction in using them. Second. It is the tension that is generated by the application of a set of concepts that originated in one culture in understanding the texts produced by another that makes the hermeneutic effort worthwhile. In addition, of course, in Singaporean case, cultural memory traces and sedimentations of china and India are only too apparent.

As Edwin Thumboo himself remarks, “Powerful as they were, the Indian and Chinese influences were absorbed into pre-existing, independent foundations.

The current internationalism, many centuries later, can be considered an update, but, it contains silhouettes of the old colonialism of which it is in certain ways a rehash, it is not all unmitigated sweetness and light.

Like the Indian and Chinese, its influences are most valuable when they enter our thinking, our style, and our capacity to analayse and synthesise, but directed by a spirit that is homegrown and home-oriented. The gestures of adjustment are new for the individual, but not for region and its people, or the total environment to which he potentially belongs. ”

“The way ahead” is a poem which encapsulates the living philosophy of a city of mixed ethnicities and many races that make it their ‘heaven’. The crux of the poem is that it is the people who make a city a hell or a heaven not the architect, the town planer or the civil servant.

The Way Ahead

…There were the four of us,
A professor much travelled and artistic,
A senior civil servant who knew the way ahead,
The town planner and I ; I?
An average man, the man-in-the-street…

A city is the people’s heart,
..city smiles the way its people smile ..
A city should be the reception we give ourselves,
What we prepare for posterity.

The city is what we make it,
You and I . We are the city,
For better or for worse

Transcience

In the preface to the latest volume of Thumboo’s poetry, Rajeev Patke writes; “...Edwin Thumboo rings the changes on transience and evanescence even as it epitomises the spirit of endurance in what must not change: the principles of survival, remembrance, renewal and cherishing. Still Travelling embodies the Heraclitean logic of mutability and permanence held in dialectical tension. To be still traveling is to keep company with Ulysses and Cavafy, knowing that the point of traveling is not the arrival but the journey.

And what a journey it has been for, and with, Thumboo, as Singapore has travelled through the burgeoning legacies of Raffles, through the dark tense years of Japanese Occupation, through the wrenching separation from the Malayan mainland, to the transformation of an island economy into a modern, multicultural nation steadily treading the cautious path to modernity, ever changing as it participates in the circulation of global energies and economies, always still travelling.”

The pangs of changes mixed with sheer excitements of a nation coming into being is vividly realised in the poem “Victoria School” which closely associates with Thumboo’s growth as well as the growth of Singapore.

Victoria School

Nil Sine Labore

We felt but did not grasp
That truth, until the years,
The changing age confirmed severely:
Nothing without labour,
Nothing for free.

You grew us well,
Mother of our youth,
Gave grace to toughness,
Tuned mind and feeling.
Our teachers scolded out of love
We loved them with fervour
That only mischief has.

We learnt quarreled laughed,
Little enemies great friends
In class room lab assembly
Below the arches of the Hall
Upon the tower built by Amin
Bock Hai and their scouting gang
We shared our selves, and
Found ourselves: Henry Aziz Boey
Soon Khiang Beng Keng Peter Poh
Guan Noordin Eric Heng Hoe
Dhanabalan Teo Yong Chuan Seng,
Among the intricacies of calculus,
Adverbial phrase, The Rover
There was the steadying of the eye
As a thought struck deep with beauty,
Or growing symmetry, sudden revelation.
We did not feel the day go by.

Along the corridors fresh faces
Each year labour, discover fellowship;
Learn. They too will know
That here our better youth was spent,
That what we are was salted then.

We do not return to you,
Because we never really felt.

Some of his poems such as Uncle Never Knew and NTI demonstrate how vividly and insightfully he has captured the history of the nation and pangs, excitements of a nation coming into being.

Uncle Never Knew

He lived- if you could call it that- two streets off
Boat Quay north. Tranquil as leaves left in a tea cup.
Always alone but never lonely. The day bustles
Of barge and coolie ferrying rubber, rice and spice,
All energy and profit, for towkays and Gutherie’s,
Slipped past without ripple or sound or promise.
No enterprising cleverness to make his brothers
Happy, as nothing drew him to our hot meridian.

Often after rain, he would watch the day dry out.
But if a few lines drops caught the sun and glittered
Against that shining blue strip of Northern sky.
He was back in Swatow. At his table. Preparing
Ink and brush; fingering his father’s piece of jade;
Intoning Li Po, Tu Fu, and reading Mao. Sipped tea;
Fed his carps, while waiting for his drinking friend.

NTI

A special place where history
Turns and breathes in landscape.
Among our memories, a stir of
Earlier vision whose pulse transfixed
Stiff upper lip, black maria.
Your cool-green hills, sanctuaries
Of old intent, now relax their brows.

Mapping our growing nation still
Challenges, less introspective though,
More released in the farmer’s grandson.
Blue-collared, on the move between
Lecture and seminar, manual and instrument,
He meditates the application of a thought.
Your valleys adjust their flanks, fluently

Embrace the gifted places,
The Chinese garden, sun-dial,
Green roofs whose ancestral voices,
Now tuned tropical in accent, fit
These new splendours of your heart
Whose power expand, rise, disperse
Along our arteries, providing swift
Co-ordinates, cutting –edges to economy.

Here is science and engineers
The bold coherence of our lives.
Transformers, semi-conductors, micro-chips,
Energy control, hydrology, automation,
A rainbow spectrum, the sun’s secret core…
Instill patterns of skill as midmorning winds
Assert the day’s rhythm, the new learning,

All feeding this mortal invented island,
Held above the foam, the world’s fever.

Cultural historian

“As the pater familias of English poetry in Singapore, the laureate and cultural historian of his times; he is also the chronicler of the micro in the macro: like Thomas Hardy, who wished to be remembered for what he noticed of life passing, Thumboo notes the modulations of light across the evening sky, the mutation of dialects and tonalities to voice and accent, the metamorphosis of barge and coolie towers and ships that gleam, and the keeping of inner memories of the persons, places, times and kinships that have shaped his sense of what there is of life that must be kept keen in thought and vision.” – Rajiv Patke

We therefore should not be surprised that poetry reveals a concern for what one might adduce as Yeatsian proof for the kind of hypothesis articulated discursively by the American critic Fredric Jameson (and challenged by Indian critic Aijaz Ahmad) that writers born in countries that have recently recovered or gained nationhood after colonialism are often preoccupied with conscious and involuntary allegories of the nation, narratives in which the formation of identity at individual and group levels bears a homologous relation to the anxious and self-conscious search for identity at the level of community and nation.

To be continued