Magical Islands
Weekly Column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.
Yesterday I was asked by a student writer of the school's newspaper to recommend a recent read for an article about students' reading habits and preferences. This was what I wrote back to her:
"I just finished reading Rachel Heng's novel The Great Reclamation, and I loved it. It is a bildungsroman, but it is also an epic. The story follows Ah Boon from boyhood in a fishing village to adulthood in the government. In the process, it also traces the trajectory of Singapore from the last days of British rule to the heady times of the country's post-independence development. What is lost in the rush to modernize? What does modernization do to one's sense of self? These are questions that the novel explores with keen sympathy and insight. And with magical islands to boot."
What I could have added to modernization but did not, was the question about what is lost in the rush to statehood. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of colonialism, but neither am I a fan of the nation-state, with its strict territorial boundaries and its rigid definition of citizenship. What is lost when a group of people organize themselves into a nation-state, whether that be Israeli, Palestinian, Catalan, Scottish, or Chinese? Too much, I fear.
A vital aspect of the imaginative power of The Great Reclamation lies in its magical realist vision of these beautiful islands, east of Singapore, around which fishermen could haul in a great catch and still never drain the sea of its life. The islands don't belong to anybody and they belong to everybody. The fishing village, prospering because of these magical islands, proposes an alternative political arrangement free of the state, and an alternative relationship to nature and its bounty. Although the title of the novel refers apparently to the land reclamation project carried out with ruthless efficiency by the independent, modern state, in the novel's vision of the village and the appearing-disappearing islands, the title also points to a political reclamation of an old civic ideal.
Jee Leong Koh
January 18, 2024
"I just finished reading Rachel Heng's novel The Great Reclamation, and I loved it. It is a bildungsroman, but it is also an epic. The story follows Ah Boon from boyhood in a fishing village to adulthood in the government. In the process, it also traces the trajectory of Singapore from the last days of British rule to the heady times of the country's post-independence development. What is lost in the rush to modernize? What does modernization do to one's sense of self? These are questions that the novel explores with keen sympathy and insight. And with magical islands to boot."
What I could have added to modernization but did not, was the question about what is lost in the rush to statehood. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of colonialism, but neither am I a fan of the nation-state, with its strict territorial boundaries and its rigid definition of citizenship. What is lost when a group of people organize themselves into a nation-state, whether that be Israeli, Palestinian, Catalan, Scottish, or Chinese? Too much, I fear.
A vital aspect of the imaginative power of The Great Reclamation lies in its magical realist vision of these beautiful islands, east of Singapore, around which fishermen could haul in a great catch and still never drain the sea of its life. The islands don't belong to anybody and they belong to everybody. The fishing village, prospering because of these magical islands, proposes an alternative political arrangement free of the state, and an alternative relationship to nature and its bounty. Although the title of the novel refers apparently to the land reclamation project carried out with ruthless efficiency by the independent, modern state, in the novel's vision of the village and the appearing-disappearing islands, the title also points to a political reclamation of an old civic ideal.
Jee Leong Koh
January 18, 2024
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