FEATURES / EDGELAND VISIBLE
II. Edgelands in the Making
Written by Leonard Yip
Dated 1 Jul 2024
Two heartbeats exchange their rhythms.
First, the sparrowhawk’s, slowing from the animal rush of the hunt as he stoops and tears into the dying zebra dove. Then mine, quickening behind the window, as this wild, sharp scene swoops into my garden and rips my gaze towards it.
I shift. Rimmed fiercely in gold and sable, the wide curved eye of the sparrowhawk meets mine. The moment tenses, coils, then explodes. He takes flight in a detonation of torn feathers across the timber deck, rising on thermals, through the African Tulip seeds silvering the air. Wheeling west, his wings beat above the road running beneath the rain trees, over the dirt track where the old railway used to run. The canopies of the Albizia trees welcome him here. They have watched over this place through its many becomings, where dropwings skim the gossamer kingdoms of the wet morning grasses, buzzing over the clay-stained canal beneath the track.
Dug decades ago to drain the storm-sodden grounds, children descend the canal’s steps. They catch tadpoles, run the dirt trails, then grow old and watch their children do the same. All the while, the canal wends out the other end of the trail and its thin jungle hem. It passes by bungalows, a school, and a grass plain, where bougainvilleas bloom in the lateness of the monsoons. Taking their falling petals, it drifts stormwater and flowers on into the Pandan River that Pang writes of.
This hybrid topography of human-natural overlaps has partial origins in a governmental overture to beautify modern Singapore, since its independence in 1965. The ‘Garden City’ program was introduced in 1967, planting over 55,000 trees in the first three years of its enactment. In the program’s intent are echoes of the English stenographer Ebenezer Howard’s similarly-named vision. Howard dreamt in 1902 of garden cities which could be an ‘alternative to the overgrown and congested industrial city and the depressed, depopulated countryside’. Already expressed in this resonance was the idea of a mixed, urban-natural space, providing haven for citizens. Also part of the motivations behind greening the Singaporean city, however, were the economic associations with the optics of natural abundance. Lee Kuan Yew, one of the chief proponents of the Garden City program and Singapore’s first Prime Minister, wrote that
the best way to convince visiting CEOs to invest in Singapore was to ensure that the roads from the airport to their hotel and to my office were […] lined with shrubs and trees. […] They would see right into the heart of the city a green oasis […] Without a word being said, they would know that Singaporeans were competent, disciplined, and reliable.
Lee’s language interlinks the country’s natural beauty with the economic capability of its people. Under a state narrative of productivity, ‘shrubs and trees’ become the syntax of industry, speaking in Lee’s stead to foreign investors of efficiency. Barnard claims that this language of instrumentalised nature still influences Singaporean responses to landscape, as citizens ‘see the numerous trees, flowers, and shrubs more as tools that beautify the country’.
Arthur Yap’s poetry, however, operates with a grammar running counter to such language. Published four years after the Garden City program’s launch, his poetry offers alternative ways of spatial sense-making. Yap’s 1971 poem ‘expansion’ observes how
the line of sponge houses
soaks in the sky
as the sponge sky
seeps into the houses.
where once houses hung from sky
they are now clutches.so one urban expansion
has to lean on another
or they die
Before Shoard even coined the term, Yap’s poetics already anticipated the interfaciality of edgeland space: houses and sky intermingle, such that urban constructs ‘[hang]’ in ‘clutches’ like organic fruit. Yap gestures towards the coming-together of manmade and natural into something beyond the two, and in doing so, Jini Kim Watson identifies how he creates a counter-spectacle to state linkages of economy and landscape. Where Lee’s language marries ‘green [oases]’ to the ‘[competence]’ of citizens, Yap ‘delinks the logic of production from the productive landscape itself’. Urbanity goes beyond ‘the signifying forms […] of state progress’, seen as an enveloped integration with the natural world, each thing ‘[leaning] on another’ in symbiosis. Reworking ‘the gleaming new forms of Singapore’s modernity [as] an opportunity to deflect the imagination into previously unthought’ ways, Yap’s work offers an alternative lens through which to understand the city’s ‘remarkable spatiality’.
Shoard spent the 1990s mapping the as-yet-uncategorised bastard countryside of Britain; in the same decade, poets Aaron Lee and Alvin Pang attempted to chart Singapore’s rapidly-changing landscapes, two decades before the latter would write ‘Clementi’. As a way of canonising a vocal tradition concerned with Singapore’s topographic specificities, they called for submissions to an anthology of urban poetry – a ‘mapping, however tentative, of our common urban and human landscape’. This poetic cartography was published in 2000 as No Other City, the same year as Shoard’s ‘Edgelands of Promise’. Lee and Pang had discovered ‘an evolutionary trail’ – a young, still-evolving tradition – ‘of recent Singapore poetry [about its unique terrain] and its developing themes’.
Poetry, Lee observes, was one way through which Singaporeans could wrestle with an accelerating, changing landscape, developing ahead of their ability to process its alteration. Coastlines shift; great metal machines unload sand and soil in massive quantities as part of land reclamation projects, disappearing the ocean under carpets of rose natal grasses and casuarina trees. Those go in time, too, as bulldozers churn the earth again to prepare superstructures of metal and glass. The edgelands disappear as fast as they form.
