Hedwig Anuar (b. 1928)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Jonathan Chan
Dated 12 Feb 2022
In a preface to her slim volume of poetry Under the Apple Tree: Political Parodies of the 1950s (1999), Hedwig Anuar (née Aroozoo) wrote:
I hope these political parodies will still be enjoyed by readers and help to remind them that politicians have their human weaknesses and foibles, no better and no worse than the rest of us, and that we should beware of treating them like gods on pedestals.
(Anuar, Under the Apple Tree: Political Parodies of the 1950s, 9)
Under the Apple Tree was published somewhat belatedly in 1999, the first time all of Anuar’s poems had been consolidated in one publication. Writing between 1951 and 1956 as an undergraduate at the University of Malaya and a graduate student at Northwestern Polytechnic School of Librarianship, London, Anuar’s poems capture the effervescence of her involvement in student politics amidst the groundswell of anti-colonial fervour. As a parodist, Anuar’s approach was to imitate the styles of other writers and genres with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect. While the first poem in her collection was written as an undergraduate assignment, her later parodies accompanied her initiation into political life as a student in London in 1955.
Recruited by Goh Keng Swee, then a doctoral student at the London School of Economics, Anuar and several others stood for elections to take over the committee of the Malayan Forum, a student organisation that served as a precursor to the People’s Action Party. The existing committee consisted of leaders such as John Eber and Gladys Lim who were avowed communists, which was at odds with Goh’s vision of the forum. As Anuar recalls:
Dr Goh had always said he was non-communist, and in some ways, that position persuaded me to join him. I had first-hand experiences with the [Maria Hertogh] riots in Singapore as well as the Japanese Occupation, and from those experiences developed an aversion to violence. So while I could be seen as a “leftist” or a socialist – for instance being involved with James Puthucheary and Devan Nair – my anti-violence stance differed from that of the pro-communist group. (Anuar, “Goh Keng Swee as a Politician: Hedwig Elizabeth Anuar”, 18)
The victory of Anuar and her contemporaries in 1956 was described as “a coup” owing to their being relatively unknown (Anuar, “Goh Keng Swee as a Politician: Hedwig Elizabeth Anuar”). As Secretary, Anuar helped organised debates and talks, inviting politicians not only from Malaya, but also from across Africa, the West Indies, India, and elsewhere. They published and distributed a magazine, Suara Merdeka (Voice of Freedom), which is where Anuar’s literary career continued free from the aegis of Singapore’s government. Rajeev Patke and Philip Holden note that:
While the young men around her were busy getting the weary tones of T.S. Eliot into their verse, [Anuar’s] poems […] remain notable for their wit and robust handling of contemporary political realities. (Patke and Holden, “Malayan Poetry in English: after the Second World War”, 5)
Anuar’s commitment to political engagement was supplemented with humour, through which she was able to expose and criticise political actors in Singapore or elsewhere, whether in relation to social inequality, negotiations for merger and independence, or the machinations of the PAP.
Of the parodies in Anuar’s collection, “Fragments of a Wasteland” is styled most explicitly as a literary imitation (Anuar, 11). Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), a towering presence in English literary studies, is renowned not only for the power of its apocalyptic vision, but also for the allusive density of its verses. Drawing on Homer, Dante, the Buddha, and Sanskrit mantras, among other sources, Eliot’s poem vacillates between satire and despair in vignettes of British society. If the terror of Eliot’s vision can be attributed to his nervousness toward modern London, Anuar’s poem can be said to have emerged from a similarly compelling vision of 20th-century Singapore.
The first section of “Fragments of a Wasteland” focuses on “Mrs Mildred Barrington-Smith”, a British socialite. Deriving her social legitimacy as the “Wife of a V.I.P. in the C.S.O.”, the Colonial Secretary’s Office, the speaker alludes to elements that compose her “busy life” (Anuar, 11). She is a:
Social Welfare worker
Blood Transfusion donor
SATA Committee member
Golf-ball hunter
And animal-lover
And wondered why the natives were ungrateful –
(They only pick their noses and chew betel).(Anuar, 11)
In mocking such hypocritical displays of charity, Anuar eyes the white saviour complex held to by the British elite, one that invariably cascaded from the primacy of the British Empire’s civilising mission: “the grand project that justified colonialism as a means of redeeming the backward” by “incorporating them into the universal civilization of Europe.” (Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 3). That Barrington-Smith is imbued with the ability to pursue such interests is contrasted with the “Eight-penny meat rations” of 1950s England, itself in the midst of recovery from the detritus of World War 2 (Anuar, 11). This demarcates the material discrepancies within the British Empire, where the costs of governing the colonies were born by taxes accrued from within the colonies themselves.
The poem’s turn to matters of security is pre-empted by the observation that in England “the policemen are solid and real” (Anuar, 11). The militants of the Malayan Communist Party are treated with a certain juvenility: they enter the poem through a reworked nursery rhyme in “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, / Catch a bandit by his toe” (Anuar, 11). That the combatants are regarded as robbers obscures the ratcheting effects of social inequality and a consequent growing anti-colonial scorn. The segment’s conclusion attests to these material necessities: “Feed him, pay him, don’t say No. / For No spells O-U-T.” (Anuar, 12). While the colonists assuage their liberal instincts through charitable acts, the agitations pushing Malayans toward communist solutions suggest Anuar’s distaste for the British as well as the urgent demand for self-rule.
In the second section, Anuar turns her attention to corrupt government officials. The segment is prefaced by a quote from Blaise Pascal, mathematician and philosopher, in which he likens humans to a “feeble” reed, but a “thinking reed” (Anuar, 12). Pascal’s “reed” metaphor attests to the fact that humankind is “the weakest of nature” where “a vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him”, but holds an inherent nobility as “[man] knows that he dies and the advantage that the universe has over him” (Pascal, Pensées, 347).
Anuar’s invocation of the “reed” refers to a thinking “slant-eyed cheongsam reed” who approaches “Confucius in the cabaret” (Anuar, 12). “Confucius” is a stand-in for a government official of Chinese descent, a nod toward the scholar-official figure in China’s imperial courts. The “cheongsam reed”, by contrast, is a cabaret singer who convinces him to pay for certain favours. Anuar’s reference to Pascal’s “reed” offers not only a sense of the woman’s fragility, but also her cunning. One detects Anuar’s challenge in suggesting that her figures are Chinese without explicitly invoking their ethnic identities, though the phrase “slant-eyed” is more jarring than not.
The woman appears “fished up” by “stale, sharp-prodding light” to Confucius, a zoomorphic phrase that seems to demonstrate the dehumanisation of those at the mercy of those in power (Anuar, 12). The poem turns to lines of interwoven dialogue: “Old sir, your pocket’s full, I know, / So cuddle by my side”, following on from “Baby, it’s cold outside”, a sensual allusion to Frank Loesser (Anuar, 12). An itemised list of favours follows:
Certificates, forms and passes,
Identity cards and licenses?
All printed on dollar bills.
Your name for an S.I.T. flat?
An O. B. E. for your brat?(Anuar, 12)
Official documentation, preferential allotments for public housing, and chivalric honours litter the list of options. For the woman to cosy up to the man is to have access to social and cultural capital, facilitated by the dollar that cures “all your ills” (Anuar, 12). The Latin couplet that ends the section, “Venite adoremus”, translates to “O come let us adore him”, attesting to the deification of money in resource-scarce Singapore (Anuar, 12). This seedy depiction of bribery provides a contrast to the luxury of the British colonials in section I, albeit under the deep material inequalities of 1950s Singapore.
The final segment of the poem pulls readers out of the relative specificity of such encounters in Singapore and into centuries of colonial history. It begins: “Let us now praise famous men / And our fathers that begat us”, an invocation of the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus included in the King James Version of the Bible (Anuar, 12). Quoted ad verbatim, the lines preface chapters focusing on Christian patriarchs such as Abraham, Moses, and Solomon, with descriptions extolling their accomplishments. Anuar ironises this impulse to exalt. The patrilineal nature of her genealogy is a reflection of the preponderance of men involved in the colonial enterprises of commerce, naval exploration, and governance.
Anuar lists Portuguese governors who established a colonial presence in India and Malacca, “Alphonso d’Albuquerque, / Francisco d’Almeida / Ruy de Araujo”, all of whom advocated for conquest as a means of dominating the spice trade (Anuar, 13). There is, however, a literally genealogical element to their mention given that the Eurasian community of Malaysia and Singapore largely trace their heritage to Portuguese settlers. The speaker then moves to recognisably Asian figures, “The river Rajahs, / The Hang Tuahs”, royal figures from India and Malaya who partook in transactions with the colonists amidst fractious domestic politicking (Anuar, 13).
The genealogy’s focus then turns to the British “Drake and Hawkins, / Lancaster” and Dutch “Van Diemen” (Anuar, 13). Francis Drake was known for his expeditions to North America and the Caribbean, Richard Hawkins to Latin America, and James Lancaster to Penang and Sumatra. Anthony van Diemen was the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. Each name is presented without description apart from the “incomparable / Raffles.”(Anuar, 13). Anuar’s invocations demonstrate the sheer scale of the enterprise of empire, one that burrowed its tendrils far beyond Southeast Asia, galvanised by the exigencies of trade and naval control. The speaker describes these men who “did business in great waters”, before providing a list that reads like goods in a ship’s inventory:
Rhinoceros’ horns and lice’s liver,
Sandalwood, ebony, ivory, camphor,
Tortoise-shells, dragon’s blood, pepper,
Peacock’s tails, opium, tin and rubber …
Forever and ever,
Amen.(Anuar, 13)
Adding to the preponderance of lists in this poem, Anuar isolates the impulse to itemise, an act that is bureaucratic and reductive. The conspicuous absence of the natives from where these goods were taken demonstrates the dehumanising logics of extractivism – the process of extracting natural resources to be sold in global markets. The shift from ‘exotic’ items such as “dragon’s blood” to “opium, tin and rubber” alludes to the dominant items traded in the region, of which Malaya produced significant amounts (Anuar, 13). Just as the section opens with an invocation of the Bible, the final part mimics the Lord’s Prayer. This attests not only to the deification of capital alluded to in section II, but also the accompaniment of commerce and colonisation by Christianity.
Out of this, the poem turns to rallying cries for independence. The jarring invocation holds echoes of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1864), declaring:
Government of the people,
By the people …
Who are the people?
Tida-apa-la!
Mana-boleh-la!(Anuar, 13)
The rhetoric of decolonisation is set at odds with phrases in Malay that suggest the futility and impossibility of such an endeavour. What follows suggests the true inheritors of a colonial genealogy: not the dignity of self-determination, but the imperialism of the United States. As the speaker contends:
And I on USIS news am fed
And drink the Coke of Paradise.
Saikerei!
Long live Emperor MacArthur!(Anuar, 13)
References to the United States Information Service are accompanied by “Coke”, a metonym for the flood of US-made products. (Anuar, 13). This augurs the ideological contest between the US and the Soviet Union that would dominate the 20th-century, but also the courting of US capital by an independent Singapore. The invocation of “Saikerei” is a reference to the call to bow in reverence to authority figures in Japan, but also the changing of hands from the Imperial Japanese Army to American power (Anuar, 13). The reference to “Emperor MacArthur” calls to mind the famous 1945 image of a towering General MacArthur beside a diminutive Emperor Hirohito, even if MacArthur insisted that Hirohito retain the throne while holding on to de facto power (Anuar, 13).
The poem concludes with a sense of Eliot’s apocalyptic vision: from “Western windows” comes “A pale uncertain light”, the upending of a Europe-dominated global order (Anuar, 13). Despite the cynicism of the previous stanza, the speaker insists “Merdeka’s chant comes faint and slowly, / But eastward, look! the stars flame Red!” (Anuar, 13). The hesitance of the poem’s conclusion reveals flashes of the geopolitical emergence of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Self-determination continues to draw near, though at the behest of what kind of political ideology remains unclear. Anuar’s engagement with Eliot, as Patke argues, is able to navigate between “a too literal kind of imitativeness” and the danger of “going off on a tangent from the cultural and historical specificities of the region from which the poet writes.” (Patke, “Canons and Questions”, 51) The effect of this is Anuar’s most engaged display of a kind of poetic dexterity in her collection, reflecting her absorption and refraction of the debates of the early 1950s.
Anuar’s use of parodic forms as pathways to engage with contemporary political issues continues with “The Ballad of Davy Marshall” and “Love Match”. In a sub-heading to “The Ballad”, Anuar notes her “apologies to Walt Disney’s “Davy Crockett”” (Anuar, 14). A song parody, the poem’s verses roughly match the cadence of the “Ballad of Davy Crockett” (1954), a mythic elevation of folk hero Crockett: an American soldier, frontiersman, and Congressman for Tennessee. The ballad as a form is defined by its orality, one that enables the generational transmission of folk stories in verse, tracing a mythic beginning and ensuing adventures. Perhaps Anuar identified Marshall as a “frontiersman” in his own right, broaching the psychological and political frontiers of independence, though this glosses over the settler colonialist myth that the figure of Crockett contributed to.
Each stanza follows a consistent rhyme scheme and like the song, resolves on a coda featuring the lines “Davy, Davy Marshall” (Anuar, 14). Compare the following stanzas from both ballads:
Born on a mountain in Tennessee
Greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree
He killed him a b'ar when he was only threeDavy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier
(“The Ballad of Davy Crockett”)
Davy came to Singapore one fine day,
Took to lawyering and made it pay,
Talked to folk ’neath the old apple-tree,And promised them freedom and liberty.
Davy, Davy Marshall,
Champion of liberty.
(Anuar, 14)
As Anuar amply demonstrates, what is most intoxicating about a song parody is its accessibility, one that augurs the potential for it to be disseminated and sung with aplomb. Her “Ballad” plays out not as an elevation of Marshall’s negotiating successes, but as a deflation of his legacy. The grafting of this setback upon the mythic melody of Davy Crockett foregrounds the shape of her ridicule.
Upon arriving in “London with a motley crew, / UMNO and Lib-Socs and PAP too”, with Marshall leading the Labour Front, they are faced with the condescension of British Secretary of State for the Colonies Alan “Lennox-Boyd”, who “murmured, / ‘I’ve heard it all before.’” (Anuar, 14). Lennox-Boyd oversaw the independence of Cyprus, Ghana, Sudan, and Malaya through the 1950s. The departure of the delegation is followed by Marshall’s return to Singapore after “[stopping] for tea with Mr Nehru”, who had achieved his bid for India’s independence in 1947 (Anuar, 15). Unflatteringly, Marshall is presented as “[Meeting] the Press and [shouting] at Lee Kuan Yew” before swearing ‘“I’ll resign,” then “I won’t.” (Anuar, 15). The reiteration that Marshall is “The man who says ‘will’ and ‘won’t’” is particularly scathing, pre-empting his eventual resignation as Chief Minister (Anuar, 15).
Anuar ironises the mythic qualities of the ballad of Davy Crockett by grafting the political downfall of Marshall onto its form, effectively presenting his “foibles”. That the tune of a song serves as a mnemonic allows it to enter a broader consciousness: one imagines Anuar’s parody sung jeeringly amongst university students of her time, embittered by the failure of Marshall’s promises. Anuar’s parodic descendants find themselves in the likes of Mr. Brown, who reworked CeeLo Green’s “F*** You” (2010) as “Tuck Yew” (2015), to critique the then Transport Minister’s handling of MRT breakdowns.
David Marshall would be succeeded by Lim Yew Hock, who is featured in the epigraph to “Love Match” through his description of talks regarding the merger of Singapore and the Malayan Federation: “Well, gentlemen, the love-making has started. As you know yourselves, once you start making love, there are always chances of a marriage.” (Straits Budget) Anuar’s poem takes up the analogy in neat burlesque (Patke and Holden, “Malayan Poetry in English”). Playing out dialogically, Anuar anthropomorphises Singapore as a lady trying to woo Malaya, a reluctant gentleman. Throughout, the overtures of the lady are a reflection of the eagerness of the Lim government, declaring the “prospect [of marriage] thrilling” while playing up the fact that the lady is “rich” and “well connected” (Anuar 16-7). The gentleman, contrastingly, gives various reasons for his hesitation, including “feeling queasy” over having a “treasurer-cum-wife” (Anuar, 16).
Yet, Anuar underscores the inevitability of such a union, describing how the gentleman knows “he can marry no one else himself”, and the observation of “passersby” that “It’s clear each one can’t live without the other.” (Anuar, 18). The speaker’s assertion that the marriage will “take place”, causing the “Colonial Office” to “[Lose] Face” does not bear out in history, even though it testifies to the hopes held by the Anglophone elite at the time, one that believed that the people of Malaya “possess most of the requisites for nationhood” in 1956 (“The Way to Nationhood”).
The two poems that close Anuar’s collection each display her continued engagement with postcolonial politics: “Suez Canal Blues” engages with the nationalisation of the Suez in Egypt, effectively ending Britain’s status as a global power, while “The Ballad of City Hall” focuses on the domestic stakes of local government. Much like “The Ballad of Davy Marshall”, “Suez Canal Blues” is crafted in the style of another ─ Irish poet Louis MacNeice. MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music” begins:
It’s no go the merry-go-round, it’s no-go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined up with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.(MacNeice, Poetry of the Thirties, 72)
Anuar’s poem, by way of comparison, begins as such:
It’s no go the Asuan Dam, it’s no go foreign aid,
It’s no go the promises that were so lightly made,
It’s no go conventions, it’s no go treaties too,
The Suez Canal’s Egyptian and
the ships are passing through.(Anuar, 19)
Like “Davy Marshall”, “Suez Canal Blues” is a primarily narrative poem, with each stanza ending on the decisive lines “The Suez Canal’s Egyptian and / the ships are passing through” (Anuar, 19). The intentional bisection of her stanzas occurs right at the point that she introduces a near-rhyme. One thinks as well of its reminiscence to the carving out of the Suez, which in effect bisecting the Isthmus of Suez. Each stanza begins anaphorically with “It’s no go”, referencing MacNeice while demonstrating the breakdown in agreements culminating in Suez’s nationalisation (Anuar, 19-20). “It’s no go”, to the Asuan Dam, a project from which the US withdrew funding, to “conventions”, and “treaties”, as well as to “oil”, with Egyptian seizure of the Suez effectively blocking European access to oil supplies (Anuar, 19).
Equally, it’s “no go the battleships”, a nod to the potential reputational damage done to European nations in the event of a military reclamation of the Suez (Anuar, 19). In similar fashion to the lists in previous poems, Anuar namechecks the perpetrators of military aggression: British Prime Minister “Sir Anthony” Eden, French Prime Minister “Monsieur” Guy Mollet, and US Secretary of State John Foster “Dulles” (Anuar, 19). The poem concludes with a sense of anti-colonial solidarity, an unabashed defence of Nasser being “clearly within his rights” (Anuar, 20). Here, Anuar demonstrates her communality with other formerly colonised peoples, their aspirations emboldened by the reclamation of national assets.
Anuar turns her attention to Singaporean politics in “The Ballad of City Hall”, the only poem in the collection written on her return to Singapore in 1957. As with “The Ballad of Davy Marshall”, the juxtaposition of petty politicking against a grandiose structure heightens an anticlimactic sense of comedic effect. Inspired by Mayor Ong Eng Guan’s decision to remove a “bauble” from City Hall, the poem centres Anuar’s critiques of the PAP at the time. Anuar ventroliquises the town councillors:
No more shall Tanglin come before
Kampong and Chinatown slum
I’ll give you clinics, lamps and roads,
I’ll make this Council hum.[…]
And since Mayor Ong’s a V.I.P.
It’s obvious that it follows
He works so very hard that he
Is bound to need more dollars.If he gets seven thousand a month
And gives some to charity,
He’ll only have left just enough for himself
And a bit for the PAP.(Anuar, 21-2)
Anuar’s observations of the party seem as prescient now as they did then. They span the provision of public services like healthcare and infrastructure to the redistributive tendency that sought to equalise Singapore’s socioeconomically disparate regions. They further home in on the sense of the “PAP men” being above reproach in their servitude, a beguiling self-righteousness underpinning salary increases, She observes the feebleness of the “Lib-Socs” and “Labour Front” in being unable to claim seats in the State Assembly, trying to “solve the riddle of / A covetous PAP” (Anuar, 22). Herein remains a sense of continuity with present political realities as the PAP continues to win widespread favour from the electorate despite its flaws. Ironically, Ong Eng Guan was sacked from a later position as a cabinet minister and expelled from the PAP altogether in 1960.
As a poet of pre-independence Singapore, Anuar’s parodies demonstrate the breadth of her commitment to decolonisation, self-government, and equality for all people. And yet her writing, despite having been described as meriting “a place in any anthology of Malaysian poetry that has a historical import”, remains underappreciated (Ee Tiang Hong, “History as myth in Malaysian poetry in English”). Patke observes that:
[Anuar’s] work could be said to have been ahead of its time […] with what she accomplished in terms of modernity in verse within a colonial context, and a latent postmodernity that predates the term. Her accomplishment has not yet had the impact on Malayan writing that it deserves.
(Patke, “Canons and Questions”, 49)
That Anuar’s work remains relatively unknown amongst a Singaporean readership can be attributed to several factors: the appearance of her work only in university magazines, a relative lack of popular or critical attention, or even the perceived sensitivity of her subject matter. One hopes this introduction will contribute to helping her find her elusive readership. That Anuar’s style has found its descendants in memes and song parodies attests to the posterity of her work, her political savvy, and her wit.
Works cited
Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Anuar, Hedwig. Under the Apple Tree: Political Parodies of the 1950s. Singapore: Landmark Books, 1999.
Anuar, Hedwig Elizabeth. “Goh Keng Swee as a Politician: Hedwig Elizabeth Anuar”. Goh Keng Swee: a public service career remembered. Eds. Barry Desker and Chong Guan Kwa. Singapore: World Scientific and S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 2012.
Ee Tiang Hong. “History as myth in Malaysian poetry in English”. Ed. Kirpal Singh. The writer’s sense of the past: essays on Southeast Asian and Australasian literature. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1987.
Hayes, Bill. “The Ballad of Davy Crockett”. Cadence Records. 1954.
Khai Q. Nguyen, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, and Theophilus Kwek. “Of Conscience and Blood: Independence Days in Southeast Asia”. Asymptote Blog. 20 Aug 2018. Web. 26 Apr 2021.
Lim, Beda. “Talking of Verses by Malayan Students”. Magazine of the University of Malaya Students’ Union (1949-1950).
MacNeice, Louis. “Bagpipe Music”. Poetry of the Thirties. Ed. Robin Skelto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
“Malayan Poetry in English: after the Second World War”. The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English. Eds. Rajeev S. Patke and Philip Holden. Oxford: Routledge, 2010.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. 1670. Ed. Léon Brunschvicg. Reprint, Paris: Hachette, 1909.
Patke, Rajeev S. “Canons and Questions of Value in Literature in English from the Malayan Peninsula”. Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Companion. Ed. Mohammad A. Quayum. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.
“The Way to Nationhood.” New Cauldron. Hilary Term, 1949-1950.
