Madeleine Lee (b. 1962)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Shawn Lim
Dated 6 June 2020
Since y grec (2005) Madeleine Lee’s poetry has followed what she described as “poetic arcs,” themes that organise her poems around clearly defined subject matter. Her latest three collections are no exceptions: flinging the triplets (2015) and regarding (2018) are the result of artist residencies at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and National Gallery Singapore respectively, while square root of time (2017) offers a collection directly inspired by Lee’s work as an investment manager.
Critics and scholars associate Lee’s poetry with an illuminatory quality. In a foreword to Lee’s first poetry collection, a single headlamp (2003), Lee Tzu Pheng remarks on the work’s ability to “reinforce [our] appreciation of the unremarkable.” Separately, Suchen Christine Lim memorably describes this altered mundanity as a kind of “start[ling] [the reader] into seeing”. Lee’s own afterword recognises the “poet as observer,” claiming a “detachment” further qualified by Lee (Tzu Pheng) as a “sense of arrival at a state of calm self-possession”. For Nuraliah bte Norasid, Lee’s poetry espouses a “microcosmic focus” on life’s “small moments,” suffusing them with a measured “quietude” (“Critical Introduction”).
Yet, such “quiet” poetry is at risk of seeming tepid, lacking in the bristling energy associated with politically engaged writing; after all, Lee’s poetry can achieve its “meditative” quality because it has, to varying degrees, steered clear of the “predictable politicized mutterings that saturate too much of Singapore poetry,” as Neil Murphy notes (“A Poet of the Moment”). Lee’s recent work, however, corrects this assessment of the “quietude” in her verse. Here, readers encounter a new “startling into seeing,” a poetry that treats its gentle turn towards politics with subtlety and a characteristically feather-light touch.
flinging the triplets readily exemplifies this calibrated poetry in its engagement with the Singapore Botanic Gardens as an institution with colonial origins. On first reading, the reader will be struck by Lee’s cataloguing of her poems like so many botanical specimens, an approach echoed by the poems’ preoccupation with describing and explaining the curious characteristics of local florae. This nascent desire to collect, identify and classify resonates with what T. P. Barnard argues as the “survey modality” of colonial botanical knowledge, or the scientific making sense of, and so making use of, natural worlds in the colonies to service the project of imperial expansion (Nature’s Colony, 126). As he notes, the Singapore Botanical Gardens, since its establishment in 1859, functioned as an important global node and regional centre of colonial knowledge production, so much so that it can be regarded as “a colonizer in its own right, spreading a cultivation and manipulation of nature that continues to touch the lives of those throughout the region” (20).
Lee’s cataloguing arguably evokes the shadow of H. N. Ridley’s and I. H. Burkill’s “epic taxonomic compendiums,” their respective tomes the material result of directorial tenures at the Botanical Gardens, but more importantly, material emblems of Empire’s “symbolic control over the floral world of Malaya” (126). But in flinging the attempted domestication of the natural world through a “survey modality” is not without its difficulties. In the opening poem, “nutmeg”, the titular plant is identified, named, transported and cultivated across “oxley prinsep cuppage scott”. Such care, however, ill-prepares the reader for the nutmeg’s sudden explosion of its fruit:
when ripe the pala fruit explodes
exposing a bloody mess of red veins
not unlike sir thomas’ thick skull as it
gave in to arterio-venuous malformation
in his right frontal lobe (“nutmeg”)
The tropics articulate a recalcitrance against botanical discipline, catching the English tongue here with native names, all while mocking scientific description with a keen joke played on “sir thomas’ thick skull”. The next poem, “rubber,” offers another explosive piece that intriguingly fuses botanical function with historical scope:
the history of Malaya began
not in 1963 but a century beforethe rubber seed pod has three chambers
upon ripening bursts its contents
flinging the triplets far and wide
travelling through time to land
in empire handsif one rubs a rubber seed on the ground
for long enough
it can burn upon touching skin (“rubber”)
Here, Lee’s “microcosmic focus” nevertheless manages to startle us into a historical seeing. Seed propagation parallels the birth of postcolonial nations, as the rubber seeds are flung into, then away from, “empire hands”. National memory, it seems, continues to chafe at the history of Empire, a discomfort elicited as automatically and unconsciously as the skin, the primary locus of sensation that also marks the threshold between self and world, remembers the touch of softly burning rubber seeds.
More provocatively, the piece returns us to the scene of colonial knowledge production in Malaya, with the rubber seed a potent symbol of the “economic botany” that undergirded “the maintenance and expansion of Western influence” in the region (Colony, Barnard 94). Indeed, as Dutch botanists perfected the process of mass quinine production at the Buitenzorg (present day Bogor) Botanic Gardens, it was at the Singapore Botanic Gardens where the British successfully cultivated the Amazonian rubber tree and refined the extraction process of its valuable sap. The Malayan rubber industry, having its origins in the Botanical Gardens, epitomises “how imperial science could solidify the economic foundation of empire,” with widespread ramifications for the region’s environment, communities and hence, their respective histories (123). The quiet recognition of the botanical history of Malaya in flinging raises pertinent questions on the ripple effects of empire without descending into diatribe or didacticism and, as evinced above, offers poems deftly poised at the tense moment before they burst their contents, allowing a historical survey that loses none of its immediacy and intensity.
Musing on specific works of art in her recent collection, regarding, Lee articulates a continued engagement with history. The best example is perhaps “national language,” a piece written in response to Chua Mia Tee’s 1959 painting, National Language Class, displayed at National Gallery Singapore. It is Lee’s attempt to “show the audience how [she] ‘see[s]’ the artworks [ . . . ] it is multi-sensorial—we hear the comments from the viewers, we feel the emotions of the subjects, we imagine their lives, the background, the smells, the sounds” (Bakchormeeboy, “Museum Musings”). Here, poetry gives life to the painting’s subjects, each observed and woven into a dramatic scene that cuts deep into issues of national identity and its connection to language.
In the Gallery’s collection, Chua’s depiction of a Malay language class is positioned by the museum as an emblem of a rising nationalism, symbolised by the designation of Malay as Singapore’s national language. The polity that is indexed by the title’s use of ‘national’ is, however, ambiguous. At the time of painting, it seemed likely that Singapore would join the Malayan Federation; if that came to be, ‘national’ would then refer to a united Malaya. This slippage between historical actuality and the Gallery’s nationalistic necessity is explored in Lee’s poetic conversation with the work. Indeed, the disconnect contemporary Singaporeans have with their ‘national’ language is apparent: after all, 60 years later, Singaporeans would still wish “they [c]ould vanish” when “asked about / our national language”. This embarrassment is writ large on the painting’s main subject, the “chinese boy / bespectacled,” struggling to “say / his teochew name / with bahasa intonation”. Does the poem thus imply that, for all of Chua’s apparent social realism, our national identity has been forged on linguistic differences rather than commonality? Or does it posit an equality still to come, symbolised by a common language spoken round a table, obviating the need to hide our deep embarrassment, like that “girl / in the red floral skirt / who has hidden herself / almost completely from view”? Lee’s poetry reads against the institutionalised grain of art, articulating a response arrived at when “we sit, quietly too, to take [the painting] all in” (Bakchormeeboy, “Musings”).
Certainly, quiet contemplation brings to Lee’s poetry an illuminating historical awareness, an observation further bolstered by the poems “mr loh” and “incik”. The first is written in response to celebrated painter Xu Beihong’s portrait of Lim Chee Gee, better known as Lim Loh. In it, the industrialist tycoon’s fortune “entitle[s]” him to the painting of an elegant “paper fan” that masks what is in reality a disability: the “smoother prosthetic right hand / lost earlier in the brickworks of redhill”. By contrast, the second poem speaks to Tchang Ju Chi’s Untitled, Unfinished, a portrait of “just a malay man / in a black songkok”. Lee translates the apposition of both paintings at the Gallery into a poetic contrast that registers the socioeconomic inequality persistent even in the subjects’ afterlives as art. The fortune of the first allowed him to preserve for posterity the image of the consummate fan-wielding literati-tycoon; the anonymity of the second allowed for nothing but historical erasure, historical forgetting. Lee’s poetry encourages us to think through the ways in which our art institutions condition our habits of seeing and writing, while further returning us to our positions as readers and viewers, from which we can recognise, and perhaps resist, the ways in which are touched and inflected by history.
If both flinging and regarding follow poetic arcs that present a salient historical awareness, then square root of time, standing in between these two publications, is possibly an exception. This collection stands out for its treatment of mathematical themes hitherto unexplored in Lee’s poetry, a detour largely inspired by her work as an investment manager. Taking a cue from Lee’s foreword, the collection can foremost be read as an exercise in “applied math,” a reading of statistical mathematics in “relationships of the non-mathematical sort”. Yet this exercise is at times at risk of being too literal; in the titular “square root of time” Lee incorporates a litany of square numbers and their roots to mark the progression of life: “when I was four / my brother came / so we were two”. If not literal, the exercise certainly risks cliché. In an attempt to wrest “alpha” from its mathematical context as symbolic notation, Lee places it into a predictable linguistic context—so in “alpha” Cecil is the alpha lion that “dominates / over several females / a matter of pride”.
Taken more abstractly, the “square root of time” could be read as an attempt by Lee to square the roots of her poetic œuvre. The closing lines of “alpha,” “but cecil is dead / shot for a trophy,” references the 2015 shooting of Cecil the lion at Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, a line deliberately chosen to mark the persistent presence of an ecological sensibility in Lee’s poetry. But these moments are certainly rare. The collection often indicates instead the endpoint where statistical terminology runs up against poetics, the limit at which mathematics appear as a seemingly intractable “arc” that constrains rather than liberates the poetic imagination.
Even so, square root of time remains significant because it presents a different Lee, a persona that, while unseen, has always simmered under the cool surface of her poetry. In particular, the reader will be drawn to poems in this collection that approximate personal confessions (“mean,” “systematic,” “specific”). In them, the reader registers a swell of affect surging underneath the professional, rational mask of the investment manager. There is foremost the “i” in the piece “volatility,” the “i who [has] big picture clarity / who possess many-life calmness,” a description that approaches a self-reflexive allusion to the quietude with which Lee’s critics have come to associate with her. This quietude is in “volatility” stamped as an “unflappab(ility),” a “low emotional volatility”. This “good new terminology” (statistical? financial?) however, is contrasted against the speaker’s subsequent intimation that she still “grapple[s] daily with short termism / and the minutiae of gut-busting germs”. Therein is a hint of exasperation, an emerging shade of “emo vol” precipitated by the frustratingly tedious work the speaker has undertaken. The speaker seems ready to burst her contents, but there is nevertheless a recognition that the language of effusive confession runs contrary to the language of finance, mathematics and professional conduct—a tension marked finally by the terse declaration, the (non)feeling of “an abnormal distribution”.
This tension is further explained by the preceding piece, “deviation”. In spite of its title, the poem concerns itself with a restrictively undeviating career, that “road or path or pathway” that “is going more or less one way / very clear very direct”. The following stanzas close this rapid, one-track ascension to the upper ranks of the company with a final, disturbing “deviation”:
what do you mean you do not realise
we are fast tracking you
earmarked for higher and bigger thingssomewhere on an overpass
jump (“deviation”)
These startlingly personal poems position square root of time as “an abnormal distribution” among Lee’s collections. They represent the peaks of Lee’s “emo vol,” waves of feeling that emerge in stark contrast with the apparent “quietude” of her previous collections. Whether one welcomes this glimpse of a different Lee may depend on one’s preferences in poetry, but it reminds us that to read Lee is to remain in constant expectation of being startled into seeing. With strong undercurrents of emotion flowing beneath her calm and composed verse, Lee’s poetry can be characterised as one of tense control, standing “uncertain,” yet always “stable / enough for such / geometry”.
Works cited
Bakchormeeboy. “Museum Musings: An Interview with Madeleine Lee, Inaugural Poet-In-Residence At The National Gallery Singapore’s Words on Arts Series.” Bakchormeeboy. 1 Feb 2019. Web.
Barnard, Timothy P. Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. E-book.
Lee, Madeleine. a single headlamp. Singapore: Firstfruits Publications, 2003.
–––. flinging the triplets. Singapore: Firstfruits Publications, 2015.
–––. regarding. Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2018.
–––. square root of time. Singapore: Ethos Books. 2017.
Murphy, Neil. “A Poet of the Moment.” Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. 4.3. (2005). Web.
Nuraliah bte Norasid. “Critical Introduction.” poetry.sg. 4 Nov 2015. Web.
