FEATURES / EDGELAND VISIBLE
I. A ‘Riverrimmed Reefknot’
Written by Leonard Yip
Dated 1 Jul 2024
In his poem ‘Clementi’ (2019), Singaporean poet Alvin Pang describes the titular neighbourhood as
a riverrimmed reefknot of […] woods, mosques, stadium, pool, defunct purposebuilt buffet edifice, bioswales. Park connectors haunted by the Great White God of the waterway (photoevidence on request) (saidtobe komodo dragon wor, sureornot), a maw bigger than the monitors that monitor the stream and get picked on by otter gangs. Greyheads and whitebellied lurkers, raptorial and sometimes rapturous, hauling telelens on extended tripods. Wings bluelasering the wavers while the abacusclacker of massrail passings encount indifferent intervals.
Pang’s work does not pretend towards neat, organised overview of place. A riotous composition of poetic sensitivity to rhythm and prosaic attention to detail, ‘Clementi’ formally embodies the area it describes: a chaotic compress of countless different lives, seething together at once. The terrain of poem and place defy categorisation – religious, recreational and natural structures of ‘woods, mosques, stadium’ build together undifferentiated, vowels and consonants accelerating together with restless rhythm.
Set loose from containment, things collide and intermingle freely here. The vernacular of its residents mixes with hushed myth: a lizard water-god, ‘saidtobe komodo dragon wor’, the suffix a Singlish invocation of emphasis, and ‘sureornot’ the incredulous response requesting confirmation. Genres as well as languages smash into each other, the great lizard’s high mystery fraying into gangland turf war as smooth-coated otters vie with monitors for territory. Language turns loose; ‘Greyheads and whitebellied lurkers’ describes both middle-aged, enraptured birdwatchers and the watched raptors themselves, semantic similarity melding human observer and animal subject. Words come together in onomatopoetic portmanteaus, birthing a new soundscape for this strange place, where urban and natural generate new forms: the ‘abacusclacker’ of a passing train, consonants clattering against the skimming, sheeting ‘bluelasering’ of wings slicing the water’s edge. This place is an interface of lives morphing into one another, a land animated by accommodations and adaptations.
Pang’s lands are my lands. I know this ‘riverrimmed reefknot’ for myself, these taut words suggesting the landscape’s own denseness. I grew up in it, tracing my way through park connectors and bioswales to canal edges, where linen-scented laundry outflow washes into loach shoals glittering in the water grasses. A landscape such as this can be frustrating to read. Theories and poetics of either urban architecture or sublime, untouched wildness fall flat, insufficient for making sense of a space as mixed between the two as this. They are lands at each other’s margins, neither fully wild nor urban. Its richness draws from all its composite qualities, coalescing into one, incredible and inscrutable.
However young and tentative in its capacity to fully encompass their characteristics, there is a name for places like these. Journeying into the fringes around urban settlements at the turn of the millennium, the British writer and activist Marion Shoard sought to bring about fresh visibility for landscapes previously consigned to the imagination as desolate wastelands. Though ‘unruly and often apparently chaotic’, this terrain of ‘warehouses and rubbish tips, road interchanges and sewage works’ is ‘frequently swathed in riotous growths of colourful plants, both native and exotic’. This land ‘betwixt urban and rural’ was ‘a kind of landscape quite different from either’, where human infrastructure married itself to the wildness of nature, springing new ecologies into life. Walking Molesley Heath’s infilled gravel, Shoard found an unexpectedly-vast array of flowering plants, cultivated by the mineral wealth of various soil types deposited there by builders. Such floral diversity would have been impossible elsewhere, and Shoard argued that this previously-unrecognised space – with beauties and potentialities unique to itself – must occupy a named category of its own: edgelands.
Shoard’s essay, ‘Edgelands of Promise’ (2002), quickly rooted in the consciousness of thinkers and artists. A decade later, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts followed Shoard’s trail into the edgelands, making expeditions into these unstructured borderlands to explore its interstitiality. Their resulting observations interrogated further qualities of this new category of landscape. ‘If you know these places where overspill housing estates break into scrubland, wasteland’, they write, ‘if you know these underdeveloped, unwatched territories, you know that they have edge’. Their diction suggests that the edgelands are more than simply hitherto-unseen spaces. Read through a grammar of failed boundaries, as areas of ‘overspill’ where things ‘break into’ one another, the edgelands are also spaces of challenge to existing categories and understandings of landscape.
Reflecting on the edgelands of her native Cape Town, South African novelist Henrietta Rose-Innes argues that we must embrace how edgelands can reject categories, as this establishes them also as places containing the potential for connection. ‘The existence of these transitional spaces […] challenges traditional concepts of a separation between the human and the natural – a duality that is ecologically destructive, serving to distance human beings from their environment’, she writes. Elevating the edgelands into a position of greater recognition can establish them as places where encounter is rife, crumbling conceptual and physical divisions between natural and urban. Both challenge to category and potential for encounter animate the riot and rhythm of Pang’s poem. The boundaries of language, genre and form break down as he writes the Clementi edgeland’s dynamism, uniting human life and architecture with the more-than-human presences around them.
Beyond Clementi, the city-state of Singapore itself is arguably an edgeland-writ-large, one which succeeds and exceeds the definitions of Shoard’s young theory. The island’s tiny landmass of 725.7 square kilometres is incompatible with Shoard’s understanding of the edgelands as expansive stretches between an urban zone and a wider countryside. Residential neighbourhoods and skyscrapers all across Singapore compress parks, nature reserves, and pockets of remaining rainforest between them. When the country is city, the edgelands are experienced not in a transition between them, but within the heart of urban space itself. Insurgent jungle ecologies adapt to urbanity: wildflowers erupt around traffic dividers, long-tailed macaques break into jungle-bordering houses, and migratory vultures roost in the eaves of multi-storeyed hotels deep in the city. The overspill and interface of the edgelands is seen as much in the grass verges at my doorstep, as in the forest-bordered expressways leading away from it.
Despite this, no literature to date has theorised Singapore’s terrain as an edgeland. The term has been absent from the lexicon of discussion surrounding Singaporean landscape writing, and no studies have recognised this mixed topography as occupying such a distinct category. Existing analyses often create divides between strictly urban- or nature-writing, or lean towards understanding nature only as in constant contention with man, such as environmental professor Timothy Barnard’s claim that ‘Singapore has been an island in which humans have contained nature to suit their purposes’. Even when poets Edwin Thumboo and Eric Tinsay Valles hint at interfacial hybridity, noting the ‘rise of the urban nature poet’, this idea is mentioned without further exploration. Although critical writing has not yet stumbled upon the edgelands, many Singaporean writers and artists who have lived within this terrain have already been responding to its uniquenesses through their work.
The term offers much potential in critically reading the particularities of this landscape, and how to respond to it. My task in this dissertation is therefore to chart this nascent tradition of edgeland writing in Singaporean literature, bringing it to visibility within its particular geographic context. To do this in light of the term’s absence from critical writing on Singaporean terrain, I piece together this tradition across disparate, trans-modal platforms – from government-funded anthologies and self-published photography albums, to internet documentary and small-press poetry collections. I read them against the British edgeland writing following in Shoard’s trail, exploring their continuities and discontinuities. I show how these Singaporean edgeland projects are illuminated by, but not obedient to, such texts, creatively navigating the challenges and confluences of their own locality.
The lack of critical writing on Singaporean edgeland response means that this essay will take on exploratory form, and I work my own field notes of living within the edgelands into my analyses. I grew up drawn to the unexpected flarings of life within my neighbourhood, yet also mystified by the lack of name or text describing these urban-natural collisions. This essay is therefore partly a work of personal un-lairing, learning to read the edgelands which have captivated and frustrated me. My essay’s hybrid form is doubly important, not only because of my locality’s context, but also for the epoch in which we live: the Anthropocene. Singapore’s edgelands are direct products of this era of alteration, as terrain is constantly repurposed and developed. Structures encroach on ecosystems, bringing us ever closer to natural life, necessitating sensitive navigations of this coexistence. Donna Haraway argues that Anthropocene writing ‘[demands] a certain suspension of ontologies and epistemologies […] in favour of a more venturesome, experimental form’. She suggests the idea of ‘sympoiesis’, making-with, as a model for writing – in an epoch defined by our immense impact on the world around us, our navigations of this age must acknowledge, engage and accommodate the life-forms this impact brings us closer to. Similarly, Robin Wall Kimmerer believes that the extensive alterations of the Anthropocene require ‘an intertwining’ of disciplines collectively allowing us ‘to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other’. Kimmerer’s writing takes the indigenous practice of braiding sweetgrass strands together as an Anthropocene methodology, weaving scientific detail with personal recollection and ancestral tradition to register the extent of the world’s changes to place and people. Adopting these models, the form of my essay aims to be a sympoietic braiding of multiple edgeland explorations. Weaving critical analyses of edgeland art together with my own experiences of living in these fringe-scapes, personal experience crucially informs academic rigour, rather than threatening it – answering Haraway’s challenge to become more ‘ontologically inventive’.
The modernisation of the Anthropocene, however, has simultaneously estranged us from the world around us. Reflecting on an increasing ‘aloofness’ towards the natural world, the writer Robert Macfarlane charges that ‘on almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship’ with our surroundings. This is especially true within the ultramodern city-state of Singapore, where developed infrastructure also insulates us from the woods and the wildness at our door. This intensifying detachment risks rendering the land only a shallow backdrop for Singaporean lives. The essay’s hybrid form also responds to this estrangement – charting the undocumented terrain of Singapore’s edgeland tradition, through personal experience and multimedia artwork, it forms a deep map of the edgelands. Deep maps interweave geography with memory, story, and emotion, contributing to a personally-involved mapping of place. This militates against the two erasures of the age of estrangement, and the over-simplified narratives of Singaporean relationships to landscape.
My essay’s trajectory traces the path that Singaporean edgelanders have made through their explorations. The edgelands of this country remain subject to the alteration of the land, and their changing registers as desolation for those who have relationships to it. This devastation heightens the edgelands’ potential to act as spaces of challenge, for artworks recording such losses dismantles triumphal, greenwashed narratives of state and city planning. But the edgelands also re-mantle ways to understand Singapore’s space. Its interfacial confluence of life teaches those living within it to see and celebrate its richness, elevated into a sacralisation which brings us into deeper communion with the more-than-human presences we share these spaces with. Together, the edgelands generate languages of grief and hope by which this Anthropocenic terrain can be read. Learning these languages allows us to run the spectrum from mourning, to cherishing, to protecting them – living in an age of entanglement, rather than estrangement.
