Reflecting On The Merlion: An Anthology of Poems by Edwin Thumboo

Reflecting On The Merlion: An Anthology of Poems Reviews

• 
  mantareads

  > Ignore the rich narrative legacies of the different cultural streams in Singapore
  > Bury your head in the sand and say Singapore is a cULtUrAL dEsERT created by a soulless state dominated by Progress and Development, while dismissing all the nagas, dragons, saints, and gods of this region with the most perfunctory of reasons
  > Barely do any research into the the culture, religion or classical history of Southeast Asia, all while braying about how you want to weave together a new cultural mythology, want to commemorate Singapore's historical connections to the region
  > Choose a grotesque tourist icon done up by some marketing exec in 1966 instead.
  > Call it poetry
  > Profit from your own smug hypocrisy
  
  The thing was a marketing logo designed and devised to promote tourism in 1966 for the Singapore Tourism Board. There is nothing "mythical" about it, no matter what flowery bullshit its creators want to spew.
  
  The fact that so many of our celebrated poets try to shoehorn some semblance of "myth" into it, as if the Merlion came before the nation, as if it weren't some grotesque marketing icon -- strikes me as a stunning act of misinformation and/or hypocrisy.
  
  In a city so full of history, story, tragedy, mystery -- they had to choose a MASCOT aimed at TOURISTS to...weave a national mythology? The appalling hypocrisy of complaining about a developmental state all while profiting from its symbolism. Goodness gracious.
  
  And while we're on the subject of "myths"? It's telemachus this, odysseus that, thetis or menelaus. The whole collection is clotted with allusions to greek pantheons. I think the word "naga" appears only once in this 92-page book - and even then, it appears in Thumboo's foreword.
  
  If you read this collection you could almost believe the lie that we live in a little nook with no prior cultural substrate, no Ramayana, no Mahabharata, no XiYouJi, no Hikayats. Sang Nila Utama seems to be the only dude these very learned versifiers can namedrop. Where is Hanuman, or Rama, or Wukong, or Hang Tuah, or Sang Kancil? Don't you think they would have had some choice words for the poor monstrosity hatched by Alec Fraser-Brunner too? Wouldn't you expect a little more research done for these wordsmiths who want to wax so lyrical about this country's "aquatic ancestry"? (But no! Not even one reference to that old Palembang lineage [beyond good ol' sAnG n1La uTaMa of course]! Nor of the old Laksamanas! Nor of Ming China and Malacca!)
  
  Noooooo, it's just emoboi2000BC being emo next to the Merlion, because Thumboo said so. So much for paying homage to our deep maritime past.
  
  As if we did not have a sea-full of stories, of heroes and demons and saints from India, China, the Nusantara. As if we were so poor we had to depend on some self-important shepherd-lords on some shrunken shore.
  
  Poets tell lies. This is true. But the lie sitting at the centre of this collection is an appalling one, repeated again and again, that Singapore is some sort of cultural desert that needs a fucking MARKETING ICON to make its mythos.
  
  I am not interested at all in the Merlion. But if I had to be, I am not interested at all with what Ulysses or Telemachus or Thetis would think. Why do I have to cast my net so far? Why should these people so far away give a fuck? If I had to, I would wonder what the Orang Selitar, the Orang Laut, the lightermen and the karayuki-san and the impoverished rickshaw coolies and the HDB flats and the tigers and the mousedeer and the Chengal trees and the manatees and the mangroves would have to say, encountering it. Encountering these flat, moany melancholies about this stupid iCoN.
  
  The poorest thing in this collection is not the cultural substrate of our nation and its peoples, as many of these poems seems to imply. No, it is the imaginative ambition and the extent of the research these privileged so-called poets of Singapore have done into the place and the people they claim to speak for. THOSE are the most impoverished and insulting things here
  
  A stunning act of cultural betrayal.