Edgeland Visible (III)

III. Devastation

Written by Leonard Yip
Dated 1 Jul 2024

I first came to my edgelands in the midst of their dying. 

The old railway once formed the Singapore-Malayan Peninsula line, the route by which thousands of Malaysians and Singaporeans negotiated the borders of both countries. Beneath green jungle of astonishing intensity, the tracks had been removed three years ago, such that it was just packed earth forming the trail now known by walkers and naturalists as the Green Corridor. 

My friends and I took to the Corridor often once we found it. At night, only the far roads’ hazy glow and our bicycle lamp-lights illuminated the path, figuring moths as fireflies in their lancing beams. We rode by the First Diversion Canal, where it flowed onwards through long grasses into the Pandan River, one broad line of dark against another dark. I could sense a precious, fragile mystique about this thin land. Between old railway stations and trees that felt older still, it was as if time had paused briefly here, where it breathlessly overtook the rest of the country around us. It felt like a thing we hadn’t lost just yet. 

But the Corridor was only ever awaiting the next age of its changing. Falling under the National Parks Board’s fastidious purview, the land was slated to undergo redevelopment into a paved cycle-path. Gradually, the trail was bordered up behind iron fences, denied more to me with each month. Albizia trees, in whose canopies roosted the sharp-winged raptors I loved watching, were felled. I remember seeing industrial cranes bisect the corridor where the canal wove under it. The stink of mud lingers in the waist-high trench, a field note from 2015 remembers. The girders are not so high that they can escape the stench of ruined earth. I’d come to know these edgelands by the dew on my hands, and the press of earth into my feet. Losing them felt like losing a part of my own body, an amputation of some kind. I would walk past the fence and feel my throat seize up.

The shock of grief, the loss of words for it – these were responses I found common also to many of the poems published in No Other City. Taking the form of elegy, they record similar devastations of land and self, mourning the loss of flora and fauna that have grown significant to personal memory through the proximity of the edgelands. First published in 1991, Leong Liew Geok’s ‘Trees Are Only Temporary’ recounts the felling of her own beloved Albizia tree. She records a violence done to it, with the language first of abduction, then of murder: ‘vanished without smoke’, the tree is ‘shot from one spot’. ‘Screaming is unproductive’, she writes at the poem’s close, ‘for instant trees come / quick from any nursery. / Trees are only temporary / in a flourishing garden city’. Sardonic in its acquiescent assessment of this city’s condition, uprooting and replanting trees, the dry irony of the poem’s final note serves as counterfactual to languages associating trees with tools. Irreplaceable from any other nursery, there are emotional significances attached to Leong’s fallen tree, exceeding Barnard and Lee’s instrumentalised perceptions of nature. Watching it grow, then die, from her window, Leong grieves for it as if it were human, challenging triumphal narratives of modernisation by reminding us of the personal cost that development incurs.

Such development has come to define the Anthropocene, and Macfarlane observes that this epoch is perhaps 

best imagined as an epoch of loss – of species, places and people – for which we are seeking a language of grief, and even harder to find, a language of hope. The cultural theorist Sianne Ngai suggests that, when shocked or grieving, we find ourselves able to speak of the experience only in “thick speech” […] A drastic slowdown and recursion of language occurs, a rhetorical enactment of fatigue and confusion. Tenses work against one another. There is a “back-flowing”, a loss of causal drive, a gathering of hesitancies and stutters.

Reading Ngai’s theories, I am reminded of the words dying in my mouth as I walked up the fenced-off Corridor. Speech thickens too in Ho Poh Fun’s ‘katong’ (1994), as land by the sea is reclaimed and the coastlines of the titular neighbourhood are crumbled into something altogether unrecognisable. Ho’s imagery, recalling the lushness of her surrounding ecologies, does not summon back their presence so much as it underscores their irreclaimable loss – ‘no turtle advances […] beneath steep palms / and tall windbreaking casuarinas’, and ‘no lallang field is ever set ablaze / nor cocks crow – resonating dawn’. These images are echoes of a past that the present has collapsed, giving way to the ‘new rhythms of life pervading’ what the developed stretches of Katong have now become. Ho presents these rhythms as a halting, staccato harshness:

a community centre – a cinema – 
a multi-storey carpark – a poly-clinic – 
a children’s playground – a supermarket – 
food centres – bin centres – 
a shopping complex equipped with
fast-food restaurants – banks –

Em-dashes disrupt rhythmic development, gouging gashes into the poem’s visual arrangement. Scansion slows severely; Ngai’s ‘drastic slowdown’ and ‘hesitancies and stutters’ obliterate the vividity and easy grammar of the trees and lallang fields. The descriptions of the new present are barren, stripped of softness and ornamentation, and ‘tenses work against one another’ as the present grinds the past into non-existence. Across Ho and Leong’s poems, grief works to slow and thicken language, whose loss is quick and unceremonious. In both poems, the tenderness of the speakers’ immediate surroundings – loved and cultivated over long years of their growing – are lost at a pace that accelerates beyond their ability to process it. Their choking backflow of logic fights against this horrifying speed of loss, complicating understandings of land which oversimplify its devastation.

In The Nature of Poetry (2019), Thumboo and Valles attribute the rise of the ‘urban nature poet’ to ‘the happy interplay of several factors such as Singapore’s tropical island setting where human settlements have to maintain a delicate balance with scarce natural resources’. The language here is blithely zen, obscuring the country’s razing of itself beneath self-congratulatory phrases such as ‘happy interplay’. As a poetry anthology commissioned by NParks, it remains beholden to a narrative of successful management, but the work of Ho and Leong are powerfully-mournful elegies to read against such narratives. The edgeland poet offers us a language of grief with which to critically interrogate decisions made over land usage. Where policymakers strive to make the best use of space, they must not do so blind to the unquantifiable costs of such action. Even scrubby, unused land might still be woven into the personal significances of those who live in it. 

As the Green Corridor awaited its repurposing, the heritage enthusiast Jerome Lim continued to walk its trails. Lim became both archivist and harbinger of these threatened edgelands; remembering them for what they once were, and presaging the forgetting which might accompany their loss on his blog, The Long and Winding Road.

Writing of the railway station I used to cycle past after the canal, Lim remembers how ‘it was a magical place that had the effect of taking one far away from the madness of a Singapore that had come too far too fast. Now a sorry sight behind an unsightly green fence, its still green settings [are] a much-altered one scarred by the removal of the [railway tracks]’. Grief slows the grammar of Lim’s prose, as it does in Ho’s poem. Language operates retroactively, and too late: its past tense attempts to describe an effect now irretrievable, a dying thing speaking of a richer past.

This richness inspired many creative projects at the peak of the railway’s activity. Lim’s iconic station was the nexus of the drama in L. Krishnan’s 1952 film ‘Antara Senyum Dan Tangis’ (Between Smiles and Tears), the terminal around which its characters gravitated towards and away from each other. Once the trains stopped, the tone of such creative response slid over into haunted memorialisation. SGFilmhunter, a blog charting 20th century Singaporean film locations, recreated Krishnan’s camera angles by superimposing film-stills over modern photography into moving GIFs:

The film-stills’ movement judders eerily against the photograph’s static colour – like a spectre of the memories bound to the station, conjured back and trapped in place.

Rob Cowen writes of similar haunting presences experienced in the edgelands in Common Ground (2015). Venturing into Bilton’s disused railways, Cowen reflects on how ‘some places exude such a strong sense of their history that it’s impossible not to think about what went before’. I experienced this sensation on each return to the trail – once I learnt its history, I could not walk the Green Corridor without imagining its past. I thought of the journeys separating and reuniting families, rhythms of longing, loving and losing becoming bound with the railway. How many of these were witnessed by the soil under my feet, layered into the earth? Like the GIF, the dirt seemed to thrum with these ghosts of passage: countless individual moments of heartache and waiting, as the whistles blew, and the wheels ground the sleepers away into the night. In its compacting beneath the bitumen of a new cycle-path, the violence of development extends not just around the earth, but upon it as well. Old histories are relegated into the ground. Yet the edgelands are where the ghosts of these histories still permeate the soil. 

Chitra Ramesh’s poem ‘Merlion’ (2019) deals with how memory persists out of its subterranean margins. She evokes the history of Singapore’s modernisation, where swamps were drained and zinc-roofed villages razed to make way for public housing: 

if you dig the marshy wet soil
you might find the roofs of my kampong house
roosters might mumble under those roofs 
fish may be still gasping through their gills
among the flowers in my garden 

[…] 

Under the expressways
our thatched houses lie buried.

Ramesh’s imagination figures national and personal history as fantastic revenants haunting the city’s underworld: disquiet roosters in the soil, and fish clinging on to amphibious half-life. Childhood memories persist uncomfortable in the earth like stubborn residue, the ‘gasping’ of fish suggesting a suffocating struggle for survival. The past continually buzzes, however threatened, against the present. Ramesh’s landscape is an edgeland of chronology as well as ecology, containing and conjuring memories back to populate the imagination, ensuring their remembrance.

Worries over remembrance fray persistently at Lim’s writing, fretting that redevelopment will become ‘a disturbance that threatens to have us forget the joy that was the corridor of old’. This is an anxiety endemic to life in the Anthropocene. The editors of Arts Of Living On A Damaged Planet write that ‘as humans reshape the landscape, we forget what was there before. Ecologists call this forgetting the “shifting baseline syndrome”. Our newly shaped and ruined landscapes become the new reality’. Memory becomes critical in refusing this geographic amnesia. The art recording the haunting of the edgelands is crucial to such remembrance, for ‘ghosts remind us. Ghosts point to our forgetting, showing us how living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces’. The spectres summoned by Ramesh and SGFilmhunter add nuance to Shoard’s observation that in the edgelands, ‘we see history as in the stratified layers of an archaeological site’, for their earth-bound ghosts confront our eyes with the past. When edgeland art is held hostage by the past in the archival of its devastation, this holds us accountable in turn, to ward off the easy forgetting that Lim writes of. 

Like Lim, as I returned to the Corridor before its enclosure, I experienced a premonitory dread at what it might lose; the memory which the remnant dirt and sleepers preserved. But there was also a selfishness to my worry – I wanted to keep its little kingdoms of light and birdsong for myself. I worried that if the asphalt made the trails easier to walk, others would discover the Corridor, threatening its cloistered quiet. Cowen, however, reminded me of the counterproductive exclusivity to such hoarding. Recalling his own anxieties as Bilton council hacked his edgeland into a similar cycle-path, he registers distaste at people experiencing the edgelands through one generic road, rather than its desire-lines and unkempt profusions. He then realises that he has only known the edgelands this way because they were opened up for him by his parents, bringing him into the scrub for walks in his childhood. 

I found myself echoing Cowen’s chastisement of himself: ‘could I really be against others having the same opportunities?’ He comes to see these new cycle-paths as a way into the edgelands for people who do not yet know them; as entrances to entrancement. ‘Maybe as people cut through the meadows or cross the viaduct on their bikes […] the woods and river will grow in their imaginations. Entranced, they’ll wander off the track, cut their own paths and slowly become transformed. It happens to us all’. I would consider this deeply, across the Green Corridor’s gradual reopening, and through the conditions under which I write now. The country retreated into lockdown as the coronavirus pandemic tore through the world, and on my daily runs through the newly-paved Corridor, I saw people taking to it in unprecedented numbers, with new desperation. Families played together on the grassy slopes beneath great saga trees. Runners stopped mid-stride, stilled into wonder by sunsets unobscured with vehicular exhaust. The edgelands had become places of nourishment, providing a sense of connection to the wider world around us, when the isolation of lockdown had turned our prior detachment from it sour. This, I thought, was how the ‘joy of the corridor of old’ might continue to animate the corridor of the new – with more people on the trails, imagining its histories, discovering and responding to it. 

Cowen’s reflections remind me of the possibility for future connection that arises even out of the edgeland’s devastation. This is a hope glimmering also in Peter Chow’s poem, ‘Trace’ (2019). Remembering how his parents would ‘hold hands and jump on the rumbling tram / following the railroad track’, Chow bemoans the demolishing of these tracks to make way for new roads. Like Ramesh’s asphyxiated revenants, he decries how modernisation ‘would rather suffocate’ these memories ‘with more hot asphalt’. Yet even in the ‘overturning [of] the sea’ and the ‘reshaping [of] the century-old landscape’, melancholy coincides with potentiality, as Chow ‘[hears how] the North-South Highway will connect islands and islets’, pulling isolated lands and lives together. I thought of the complexity of this relationship as people swarmed the Corridor around me. I remembered how, last summer, the track’s new routes had allowed me to run their length to a dear friend’s home for breakfast – one unbroken rhythm of footfall from my own doorstep to hers. And even as the railway once carried my mother north into Malaysia, I imagined my future children, cycling south down the trail into the city. The edgelands hold us accountable to the past, but they also release us into new possibilities. They are, as Simon Sellars writes, ‘where the future waits to happen’.

IV. CELEBRATION >