Singathology
Official Launch
Singathology is a 2-volume Singapore anthology in our four official languages, featuring 50 new works by celebrated Singaporean writers on life and art. It was officially launched today at the National Art Gallery by Prof Tommy Koh. The venue was the site of the former City Hall which has been the focal point of many important events in the history of Singapore. It was here that Admiral Lord Mountbatten, on behalf of the Allied forces, accepted the surrender of the Japanese forces on 12 September 1945. Our first prime minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, and members of his Cabinet took their Oaths of Allegiance and Oaths of Office on 5 June 1959 here. It used to house his office as well.
The Age of A Number ( Introduction by Gwee Li Sui – condensed)
” What is it that makes the number fifty magical in the lives of individuals and formations? A country at fifty stands at a symbolic threshold it wishes that it understands in view of some fated awakening.Inching towards its own jubilee, Singapore encountered its grave loss when its most beloved Founding Father departed. Something perishes, and what survives awakes to the truths of its radical aloneness and its obligation to carry on.
The word “jubilee” originated from the Jewish Torah and has been attached to nationhood from the start. Its first use involved not just a celebration but also a commitment to social renewal that could address and transform the burden of the past. Thus, on a jubilee year, every Jewish household was to recover its own lost members and land be returned to its former owners. Slaves and prisoners were to be freed and all debts remitted. The effect of these procedures went beyond being merely conciliatory. They yearned for a social maturing that could honour divine nature and reach into the best of how humans treated one another.
Chinese philosophy, too, sees significance in the number fifty. George Orwell- who himself never reached fifty remarked ” At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.” At fifty, a life that still does not know where its centre is at this age is way behind on its own clock.
A nation, by contrast, follows a different, more open timeline. It can – if not damaged by external politics – go on indefinitely for many more cycles of human lives, for as long as destiny allows. At fifty, a country has only stopped dreaming the wide-eyed dreams of youth, embraced both the power and the loneliness of middle-aged idendtity, and taken the first steps of an old soul. Older generations lament that cruel time has eroded their place under the sun. The current adult generation struggles against the limits of what it can do and the pressure of an unclear path into the future. The young feel cheated of both a meaningful and enriching history and a sure place to call home.
It is at this point that a people’s literature rises to the fore. More than ever, what has seemed to be random and idle scribblings begins to look like something more, something that only age can help to reveal.
Writers at different ages, at any frozen moment in time, offer us a kaleidoscope of worldly truths.
This monumental two-volume work seeks to highlight that the suffix “ology” – from – logia in Greek – has the double meaning of a collection of thins and a field of study or interest. A nation is here being laid open for your scrutiny through fifty works by writers who have all been conferred one of Singapore’s two highest accolades: the Cultural Medallion and the Y oung Artist Award. These writers have been invited to help commemorate the living Singapore in their own ways, in any medium of their choice, and this anthology is the outcome. Together the pieces expose not so much a sense of who we Singaporeans are as what we give to ourselves, through our writers, as being about us.”
One of the 50 – Child, by K.T.M.Iqbal ( translated by A. Palaniappan )
Elders
become writers of poems.
Children
are God’s poetry in motion
On closer look,
one can understand the
connections between children and poems.
Poems speak to us in beautiful languages.
so, too, children,
Poems do not explain everything,
children, too,expound nothing.
Poems abound with symbolism,
children, too, speak with much gesticulation.
At times,
it is not understood
what the poem is saying.
Similarly, at times,
what the children say
is beyond comprehension.
Poems are tender,
so are children.
Imaginations abound in poems,
so, too, children are filled with imagination.
To be a creative artist,
one needs a child’s mind.
Children are naturally
endowed within.
Poems wrap themselves in melodious tunes.
Children succumb themselves to ditties and lullabies.
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