Beyond Recognition: How Poets Reckon With Change

The last time I read some of the poems below, at Peace Centre before its redevelopment.

Earlier this month, I was grateful to be invited to give an assembly talk at Raffles Girls School, to around 420 students in Secondary 2. The original brief was to talk about the Singapore River, one of the locations for their upcoming learning journeys, but I decided to tackle the topic – change – in a more personal way.

Here’s a (lightly) revised version of what I said:

Your teachers have invited me to speak to you on the topic of change. How we in Singapore – this ever-changing city – deal with change, and how change finds its way into the stories we tell ourselves.

There’s a strange poetry to this. When I was last here in 2010, this campus was being used as a holding site for St Nick’s. Someone had invited me to be part of a panel discussion there: my first as a poet, and, as a 16-year-old, a thoroughly nerve-wracking experience.

But I also remember being in your shoes: 14 years old, in 2008. I was vaguely aware that Obama was about to be elected, but there was just so much else going on. It was the year of Twilight and Fearless. I was nursing my first crush, and writing some of my first poems: two events which may or may not have been related. Suffice to say, the defining experience of being 14 was ‘change’.

One school of thought says that when you look back, these changes will recede into the past and seem less significant as time wears on. I disagree. I think change marks us indelibly – both as individuals and collectively – and leaves traces that can’t quite be erased. We see these traces in our streets and buildings, in our own habits, and of course, in the things we write about.

And that’s because of a little inbuilt machine we have called ‘memory’.

If I asked you what your first memory was, each of you would come up with something quite different. For some of you, perhaps a first holiday: my own first memory is that of puffing a dandelion on a visit to the UK, when I must have been about two or three. For others, it might be of moving into a new home, or your first time trying chili padi.

My wife, a reporter, has just been speaking to Singaporeans who lived through the Japanese Occupation. Those alive today would have been children at the time, and can still remember their first glimpse of Japanese soldiers trooping through their kampongs, or family members being questioned. A good number of them, even now – 80 years on – cannot bring themselves to eat Japanese food.

The fact that these early memories have persisted suggests that there’s no taking back those changes. Change is momentous to us as children, and doesn’t stop shaping how we see and remember the world. It’s the reason why, when life-changing experiences take place, we say ‘core memory unlocked’. It’s also why so many storytellers and songwriters, when drawing on the well of their own experience, start off with some version of ‘once upon a time’. Things were like this, and then they weren’t: and I was never the same again.

Poetry is no different. The Scottish poet Don Paterson calls the poem a ‘little machine for remembering itself’, an invention that helps us preserve an experience, or conjure up the memory of something or someone that doesn’t exist anymore. Through poetic devices (like rhyme and meter) the words of a poem – along with the truth they contain – become familiar to us, as difficult to erase as a childhood memory.

From the Straits Times, 24 Nov 1968.

My mother’s first memory is of an event that you might have come across in your Social Studies lessons, the fire at Bukit Ho Swee. It was the second of two devastating outbreaks: the first, in 1961, had also left around 3,000 residents homeless.

On the slides, you’ll see how newspapers at the time reported the blaze. Here’s how my mother remembers it: her older sister, my Yi Ma, was returning from the market with a kettle full of coffee when she spotted plumes of smoke going up from one of the neighbours’ houses – and started screaming. Soon, everyone was grabbing whatever was valuable to them and racing out of the kampong. Yi Ma put her baby sister, my Mom, on her back, and ran up the hill to safety.

It's a dramatic story of love and survival. But there’s another memory beneath this one, which also illustrates these precious things in a different way.

At the time, my grandfather had dug a pond in the backyard of their kampong house, hoping to rear and sell fish for a few more dollars to feed the family. To prevent cats and birds from picking off the fish before they were fully grown, he built a zinc shelter above the pond. Then disaster struck – a few days of heavy rain washed toxic metal from the zinc roof into the pond, and all the fish died. Undeterred, he tried again, covering the pond with tarp instead of zinc. But then the fire came.

I learnt these stories at different times, from different members of the family. Obviously, the fire changed things for my family. They lost their home and had to move several times, from a relative’s apartment in Tanglin Halt to a new HDB flat in Commonwealth Crescent. In high-rise housing, my grandfather could no longer dig his pond and became a taxi driver, remaining one till he retired many years later.  

But hearing these stories changed me too. They changed what I knew about my family and how I saw myself in it, part of a tightly-knit fabric of sacrifice and dependence. And so years later, I wrote this poem about that episode:

Zinc

No one knows how it happens. No one knows how it
happens. No one knows how it happens. It happens
like this: a father builds a pond in the red earth. Fills it  

with fish – half a year’s savings – which will sell for
more in a few months. Rain washes poison off their zinc
roof, killing the fish, but he tries again: builds a rack,   

runs a length of fresh tarpaulin over the side. Within
days the fire, envious, comes. His oldest daughter runs
up a slope, a girl on her back, her brothers close behind 

and carrying whatever they can. There is no saving
the house, or its treacherous roof, even the fish, that will
be singed into the earth. For years afterwards he drives

the graveyard shift, watches the sky for rain, saves
the pomfret at dinner once a month for his littlest one.
Or so my mother, who still loves the fish, remembers.

(First published in QLRS)

Thankfully, change isn’t always this abrupt. More often, it takes place at a snail’s pace, and you barely notice it happening. Schools and housing estates are rebuilt. Train lines start and stop, bus routes come and go. Even within familiar spaces, like that of an old hawker centre, our favourite stalls open and, within a generation or two, close.

Change comes slowly but surely, even for those who try to sink roots.

In the years after moving out of Bukit Ho Swee, my family experienced decades of change in some of Singapore’s oldest neighbourhoods. Walking to school at Prince Charles Crescent, my mother would catch the wonderful aroma wafting from Van Houten’s chocolate factory in the old Tanglin Halt industrial estate. Running alongside the pavements were a medley of streams and drains: the upper reaches of the Singapore River, which gave the estate its Hokkien name: boh beh kang (‘no tail river’).

Today the factories are long gone, and the river turned into the Alexandra Canal, flanked by park connectors. Young families have moved into Dawson’s new HDBs, more than four times the height of the chap lau chu (‘ten storey flats’) which caused such a stir when they were first built.  

From CNA Insider, 15 Aug 2021.

In 2014 – ten years ago – the Government announced that the Tanglin Halt would be redeveloped, spelling the end of an era for a housing estate that was once the HDB’s pride and joy. By then, my family had long moved to another flat in the Delta estate, just a stone’s throw away, where my cousins and I went to kindergarten.

But as the deadline for the remaining residents to leave grew closer, something drew me to Tanglin Halt: a place that existed so clearly in the memories of those close to me, but for me thus far, only in the imagination.

I started helping out with a nonprofit called MyCommunity, which was organising house visits to help residents prepare for relocation. In addition to understanding their worries and frustrations about moving, we also took the opportunity to collect oral histories from long-time residents, which were full of memories from their early days in Tanglin Halt. Listening to these stories, which made up a tapestry of the disappearing estate, I felt strongly that they had to be preserved in some way.

With MyCommunity’s support, I started working on a set of poems based on the oral history recordings. Here’s one, which hews quite closely to how the resident originally shared it:

 Mid-Autumn

Last time after six you see all the children
go down to the tracks hold their lantern
not like the kind you see today got light
got battery last time is use cellophane
red blue orange wrap around the bamboo
make rabbit make aeroplane make 包青天
like from the TV show yah very colourful  

nearby all the shops the market can see
they will hang the lantern along outside
so we will come every child holding one
lighter one packet of candles wah the most
exciting time so we will all come and see
and choose our lantern everyone choose
this year which character they want to be 

young that time don’t have those luxury
you know today that kind of game so these
are the things we do light candle go down
to the railway because dark better to see
so many things I will forget but this one
like brand new like that our childhood fun
now you don’t know now very sad already 

(First published in QLRS)

Each of these poems feels like just a small jigsaw piece in my attempt to learn what life in Tanglin Halt was like. And even though the full picture will always be beyond my grasp, putting these memories into words, one by one, has been my way of slowly colouring in a landscape that saw so much change within just a few decades.

All of us have our own landscape of change. Whether vast or intimate, it’s there in the background of our memories, like the slowly fading wallpaper against which everyday events cast their swift shadows.

Approaching this landscape, as I’ve tried to do in the two poems I’ve shared with you so far, requires us to figure out what poetry’s role is in confronting change. Even the best poems can’t turn back the clock. But poets have figured out some ways of deploying their ‘memory machines’ to help make sense of what change means.

The first is by counting the costs of change; essentially, by reminding the reader what has been taken away and may never come back. My poem about celebrating mid-autumn in Tanglin Halt tried to do this in a not-so-subtle way – starting with ‘last time’ and ending with ‘now very sad already’, it readily establishes that everything in between has gone the way of the past.

Other poets have achieved this with far fewer strokes of the pen. In Lee Tzu Pheng’s poem ‘Singapore River’, the focus, at least initially, is on a process of deliberate and extensive change – the ten-year operation which came to be known as the Singapore River Clean-up. It isn’t hard to draw the parallels between the “detritus and silt” which are flushed out of the old lady’s arteries, and the coolies and traders who once hawked their wares along the river banks. The poem sets us up to see their removal as a good thing (“designed to give new life”), but the letdown is devastating. “Now you can hardly tell / her history”: sure, the patient’s medical history has been erased, but so has the history that made this grand old lady special in the first place.  

Ironically, even though the operation was intended to fix the patient’s arteries, it is the loss of history that comes at a far costlier price – trouble in the heart.

The second approach that poets have taken is to memorialise the landscape as it once was, and thus preserve in the space of the poem what has already disappeared in real life. These poems tend to be situated in the ‘eternal present’ – a world in which time stands still, and the past is still with us.

Daryl Lim’s ‘Sungei Road’ is a wonderful example of this. As the last line implies, the poem takes us back to the “last day of Sungei Road”, the sprawling thieves’ market along the Rochor River where Jalan Besar MRT station now stands. Nothing of this vibrant scene remains today, but it is so vividly captured in the rich sensory texture of Daryl Lim’s poem that you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Of course, scattered throughout the poem are details that hint darkly at death, from the “dead baby’s birth cert” in the very first stanza, to the death that comes even for fish and flowers in this place. All of these clues point only to one conclusion, just as the deliberations around the fate of Sungei Road can only have one outcome. And yet – for a moment – the poem stops time in its tracks, catching what remains (like the ashtray!) even as the life of the market burns brightly away.   

Finally, some poets have decided not to focus so much on what has changed, as what remains essentially unchanged. Beneath all the layers of experience, like a hard kernel at the centre of a fruit, we often find that the human heart develops a certain resilience, a kind of shield or shell that allows it to brave the weather.

A poem that illustrates this is Cyril Wong’s ‘My Grandmother Takes The MRT For The First Time’, written from the perspective of the grandmother herself. “Singapore has trains now”, she says, and in the same matter-of-fact tone, “we’re no longer young”. Much of the heartache of the poem lies in the fact that though the city gets faster with time, she herself is slowing down. The city is going so fast that it ”smashes into itself”, but not her. “I’m not busy”, she tells us. “I can get off at any station at any time”.

Now, while so much seems to be in flux, some things have clearly stayed the same. Although she may appear to be a little old lady looking silently out of the window, this grandmother’s inner voice – which is what we hear – remains chatty, observant, and self-aware. Listen to her: “I can just say I’m going to the market, / but I won’t tell them in which neighbourhood”. Here is someone carving out her own way in a city that’s changing all around her, as the poem’s first few lines suggest that she always has.

Ultimately, this is a poem that tells us about change, by pointing us to how the self endures and moulds itself around change. Cities are redeveloped, homes are built and demolished, children grow up. Sometimes, calamity strikes – in the form of a fire or an eviction notice. But whether change comes fast or slow, people shoulder the cost, run up the nearest hill, and start over again.

Some time ago, I learned about a phenomenon called ‘canopy shyness’, which refers to how some species of trees, growing closely together, fit their crowns around each other’s to obtain a maximum amount of light. Each tree finds its way towards the sky, shaped in the process by sun, wind, rain and fire – as well as by whatever changes take place in the lives of the trees around it. We, too, absorb the effects of change, and learn to grow steadily and carefully around each other.

Textbook example of canopy shyness - from Wikipedia!

Quite aptly, it was in Tanglin Halt that I found a real-life example of canopy shyness, by the old train tracks which are now known as the Rail Corridor. There, the rain trees on either side of the path have grown so closely together over the years that their crowns seem to be joining hands and dancing, across an invisible aisle. Even though all the residents have moved out, the estate has left its mark in these trees – which will hopefully remain for years to come.

Let me leave you with one last poem. Thank you all for listening to me today.

Corridor
Old KTM tracks

The raintrees' dance takes lifetimes, years
longer than our music, passing in quick step,
is sovereign to itself, oblivious
of events and, by its own slow grace,

          invisible. At this edge of the estate  
          they rise at arms' length, toes to the line
          to keep every heel and turn,
          so practiced are they in their variations  

that even now, in the silence of the rails
their branches still stretch by habit
across the aisle. Forgetting themselves,
each comes within a breath of another's crown

          then stops, carrying in its spread fingers' shade
          an imprint of the next living thing, as sky
          cracks open unannounced, a bare
          blue river in between. Nothing wanes 

this force of life in them. More than
time has covered the tracks, and on either side
saved for a while, a seam of someone else's
land unfolds into green. No wonder

          the quiet still kneels to meet us here,
          a sanctuary so familiar. We walk
          with an unaccustomed ease, not touching.
          Our joy is the joy of trees.

(First published in QLRS)

Do drop me a line at hello@theophiluskwek.com if you’d like to quote from, or reproduce, the above text (or the poems in it). Thanks for reading!