By Jonathan Chan

An anthology is a bouquet of flowers, or at least, that is what is meant by its etymological sense. The word derives from a portmanteau in Greek, a fusing of the words anthos (flower) and logia (collection, from legein or 'gather'). The result anthologia was taken to refer to a collection of the 'flowers' of verse, whether they were small poems or epigrams, written by an array of authors.

This sense of the word 'anthology' had never been clear to me until I visited the debut solo exhibition of my friend, the Singaporean artist Dominic Thian. His show at the AC43 Gallery was titled Anthologies Unearthed and he meant to use the word in both senses – referring to gatherings of flowers and of writing – thinking about motifs buried in the collective culture and consciousness of Singapore. The flower as a cultural artefact and artistic motif, he explained of his exhibition, potently contains all the complexities of the human-object relationship. His paintings were exquisite, still-life renderings of flowers, whether set against other objects or floating on their own against deep hues of colour. How humbling, I thought, to regard the poems and essays of mine that had been anthologised previously, each as a beautiful flower.

In Becoming Global Asia, the anthology is the starting point from which literary scholar Cheryl Naruse outlines the historical development of Singaporean literature. The anthology moves from its 'historical association with canon formation and preservation' to later aspirations to 'unsettle Eurocentric literary values' by centering the writing of those once on the periphery. However, where the anthology can itself be flawed fundamentally, as Naruse cites of Collen Lye and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is in how its 'plural form can also reaffirm a problematic racial politics that relies too heavily on the performance of diverse representation and ultimately flattens difference'. The anthology is the genre that begins Naruse's interrogation of Singapore's literary history, which she argues is:

a form that was at once instrumental for state-led efforts in postcolonial capitalist development and used by Singaporean writers and editors to contest those imperatives. It is a literary and cultural site of contestation. […] because the changes in aesthetic and political priorities of the Singapore anthology track with shifts in Singapore's economic ideologies – namely, the developmentalism of early independence and Asian Values – the anthology yields understandings of the different cultural and political permutations of postcolonial capitalism.

The anthology itself predates the establishment of an independent Singapore, let alone a Federated Malaysia. As a genre, the anthology is fundamentally agglomerative. It is typically anchored in a key theme or idea curated under the auspices of an editorial team. The Singaporean poet Theophilus Kwek has described in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal how the literary scene of Singapore is said to suffer 'from a surplus of anthologies'. 'Since the pandemic alone – well past the peak of 'anthology fever' that accompanied the nation's 50th birthday – he describes, 'brave editors have contrived to tackle subjects as varied as faith, food, death, and being dumped. In their defence (and speaking as a repeat offender myself), the anthology is often held up as uniquely able to mirror the curious, cheek-by-jowl nature of our writing community, where poets and fictioneers of every stripe are just as likely to be brought together by chance or persuasion.'

The anthology in Singapore has been capacious in the role it has played both in reifying a certain literary canon, and challenging the values embedded within such a canon. The emergence of the bilateral anthology has historically sought to trouble the experience of separation of Singapore and Malaysia precisely through an imagined literary yoking. The Second Link (2023) stands as a conspicuous example of a contemporary anthology that gazes back on the severance and continued relationship between both polities. The anthology is composed of experimental poetry, academic essays, speculative fiction, memoir-esque short stories, and other contributions from writers from both Singapore and Malaysia. In the editorial conversation that begins The Second Link, editor Daryl Lim Wei Jie speaks of his encounter with Happy and Free (2013), Boo Junfeng's installation that imagines a Singapore that never separated from Malaysia, the tether between both countries left unsevered. The anthology takes as inspiration Edwin Thumboo's 1976 anthology The Second Tongue, also bringing together writers from Singapore and Malaysia in a single volume. Editor Melizarani T. Silva remarks also that she was 'born in an era when you couldn't really distinguish a Malaysian voice from a Singaporean voice. I wonder now, without looking at the profiles, would our readers be able to discern which voice [in The Second Link] belongs to which nation?' The Second Link, she surmises, is an anthology 'designed to celebrate a bizarre act of loving'.

At the launch of The Second Link in Singapore, Professor Wang Gungwu spoke of how his reading of the anthology seemed to recover a sense of a Malayan ideal, a hybrid national identity composed of the 'mixed crowd' of Malaya, emblematised by the syncretic 'Engmalchin', a composite of English, Malay, and Chinese written about in the student publication The Cauldron. Such an ideal was common to the ideological ferment of him and his university contemporaries in the heady era of decolonisation in the 1950s. The project of The Second Link, to him, seemed to recover this sense of Malaya in Malaysia, while it had persisted in some ways in the political and identitarian development of Singapore.

Beyond The Second Link, itself a peculiar commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the union of Singapore and Malaya as Malaysia in 2023, there seem not to have been quite so many literary anthologies uniting the works of writers across the Causeway. Some of this might come down to Malaysian language policy, marginalising the position of Anglophone literature. Some of it may stem from a lack of thematic anchors, or as is so often the case with many a literary project, a lack of chemistry between editorial team members. Malaysian Places and Spaces, an anthology edited by the Malaysian literary stalwart Malachi Edwin Vethamani and launched in November 2024, contains not a few contributions from Singaporean poets, though its concerns remain primarily Malaysian. To such ends, The Second Link editors have done their part to address the seeming rift that had emerged literarily, ever since the uniting ideal that led to the creation of some of the first literary anthologies in Malaya in the 1950s, composed of contributions from what we now consider Singapore and Malaysia.

Singapore poet and scholar Edwin Thumboo explains in his 2024 essay 'The English Anthology in Singapore and Southeast Asia', as part of the Singapore Literature Conference, that in Malaya, the 'making of a literature in English' was 'virtually a university affair. Almost all the first generation of poets in England and the Empire/Commonwealth were students of the English Language and Literature.' The first 'local' anthology he identifies was Litmus One for the Raffles Society, edited by Wong Phui Nam and Tan Han Hoe. Published in 1958, the anthology was principally a collection of university writing written between 1949 and 1957, including from notable journals such as New Cauldron and Write, as well as others such as The Undergrad, Pelandok, and The University of Malaya Students' Union Magazine. The editorial choices behind Litmus One revealed the growing influence of contemporary American verse at the time, informing two principles of selection: firstly that they would 'include any poem' judged to be 'neither bad nor indifferent', and secondly to 'present a bird's-eye-view of university verses since 1949'. Litmus One followed the publication of two of the first poetry collections written in English by Malayan writers, namely Wang Gungwu's Pulse (1950) and Thumboo's Rib of Earth (1956).

Working from memory, Thumboo goes on to identify successive anthologies in English: Herman Hochstadt's The compact: A selection of university of Malaya short stories 1953–1959, Thumboo's own The Flowering Tree: Selected Writings from Singapore / Malaysia (1970), edited within a fortnight for a secondary school symposium, followed by Seven Poets (1973) and the aforementioned The Second Tongue (1967). Thumboo describes The Flowering Tree as bringing together poets from across the English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil poetry communities, perhaps for the first time in one collection, though primarily to serve as a resource for secondary school students. Seven Poets was an attempt at consolidating the work of a burgeoning generation of poets of some standing, namely Thumboo himself, Ee Tiang Hong, Wong Phui Nam, Goh Poh Seng, Wong May, Muhammad Haji Salleh, and Lee Tzu Pheng. Muhammad Haji Salleh, who composed poems in both English and Malay, would go on to become Malaysia's National Laureate, receiving the National Literary Award in 1991 and the SEA Writers Award in 1997. By the time of the publication of The Second Tongue, Thumboo describes the establishment of a substantial corpus of poetry in Singapore and Malaysia, which was divided across six sections in the anthology: Growing Up, Moods and Persons, Folk Ways, Kampong and Town, My Country and My People, and Words.

Apart from Thumboo's active curatorial endeavours, so, too, would there be significant contributions by the poet Chandran Nair. Under Nair, his press Woodrose Publications would publish anthologies such as the multilingual Singapore Writing (1977) and short story collection The Sun in Her Eyes (1976), edited by Geraldine Heng. Naruse describes how anthology editors are 'rarely held up as creative beings', with their reputations as existing authors or professors conferring the role of the editor with particular prestige. It is these editorial efforts that would result in international publishers, such as the London- and Hong Kong-based Heinemann Publications, to begin publishing Singaporean writing.

Major oil and petroleum corporations such as Shell and Esso were also involved in sponsoring anthologies, competitions, and creative writing seminars in Singapore, such as the 'NUS-Shell Short Plays Series' in the 1980s. Naruse argues that such activities accorded these oil and petroleum companies 'goodwill by portraying some notion of social responsibility and humanitarians', which are arguably at odds with current environmentalist sensibilities, but nevertheless highlight the influence of state developmentalism and global economic imperatives on literary production in Singapore.

By contrast, literary production sponsored both by state institutions and publishers such as Federal Publications for the Ministry of Culture and the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information also played a role in the development of the anthology in Singapore. The Poetry of Singapore (1985), part of the Anthology of ASEAN literatures, was another of Thumboo's editorial undertakings. The provided substantial budgets and editorial autonomy to each ASEAN member state in the presentation of its literatures, with funding provided by ASEAN itself. Under his editorial eye, the first volume for Singapore produced was in Malay, followed by English and Tamil and Chinese later on. Cheryl Naruse describes this effort as pushing back against 'the imperatives of legibility with an aesthetic of translation'. It would find a spiritual successor of sorts in An anthology of English writing in Southeast Asia (2012), edited by Rajeev Patke and containing writing from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore.

These represent more contemporary manifestations of ASEAN-wide literary anthologies, though of course Thumboo's vantage point would privilege the Anglophone. They also represent, perhaps, the diverging literary paths that would unfold in Singapore and Malaysia. In Singapore, given the status of English as an official language alongside Malay, Tamil, and Chinese, it would continue to receive official funding and support. By contrast, Anglophone literature would be designated a 'sectional' rather than 'national' literature (sastera kebangsaan), as per the National Culture Policy of Malaysia. These anthologies, of course, also represent the outsize role Thumboo played in the shaping of an incipient literary canon in Singapore. As Singapore's most influential and prominent gatherer of flowers, scholar Jini Kim Watson, writing in Contemporary Literature, describes Thumboo as valuing the 'correlation between built form and nationalist ideology', particularly within the postcolonial frame of Singaporean poetry in the 1970s and 1980s. In The Second Tongue, she observes, 'the images most useful to his project have to do with the modernizing physical landscape.' In Interlogue II: Studies in Singapore Literature, Rajeev Patke also wrote that 'the poet in Singapore bears an over-determined relation to the development of the state into nation, especially during the first few decades of the history of poetry in Singapore'.

The seeming drought of anthologies, let alone bilateral or international anthologies, would come to an end by the early 2000s. The ensuing two decades would see the emergence of a new kind of anthology, a bilateral anthology that found its correspondence with Singapore's policy of pursuing bilateral economic cooperation. Such was the period of the free trade agreement, of comprehensive strategic and economic partnerships. If Thumboo is the central figure in previous undertakings, the dominant figure in these two decades of bilateral anthology-making is the poet Alvin Pang. Where the anthologies of previous decades see a role in nation-building or literary canonisation, the anthologies which Pang would oversee as an editor seem to stem primarily from literary friendship, the warm interactions between poets across nations, but also from a certain anxiety for the global recognition of Singaporean poetry.

Some of these bilateral anthologies have an explicitly diplomatic provenance. Love Gathers All: The Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poems (2002) finds its origin in a gathering hosted by then Singapore Ambassador to The Philippines Jacky Foo, where Singaporean and Filipino poets gathered to share their work. This visit by Singaporean poets to Manila in January 2001, including anthology editors Alvin Pang and Aaron Lee, would be reciprocated by Filipino writers participating in the Singapore Writers' Festival after. With the editorial aim of being 'inclusive rather than canonical', the agreed theme would be love 'in all its glorious variegation'. Animated by the energies of literary friendship, the anthology was co-published between Anvil Publishing in Manila and Ethos Books, featuring not only poems of romance and familial love, but erotic poems, which are framed as 'a first for Singaporean writing'.

Literary prestige, currency, and recognition would also figure as central to such a mode of literary and editorial diplomacy, with a recognition that the book plays a role in promoting an 'international regionalism'. Following on from Love Gathers All was Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia. Editor Pang describes his engagement with Australian poetry as dating 'to a decade of literary activism in the region and beyond – an attempt by Singaporean poets both to make known our presence and to reach out to kindred spirits.' It was John Kinsella, an Australian poet, who pitched the idea of the anthology at the Perth Festival, and Pang who had in mind poetry as a way to 'begin a discourse' and 'break up the conventional (and often fraught) parameters that had hitherto characterised the bilateral relationship'. Several key points are made – Australia's historic reticence toward deepening cultural ties with the Asia-Pacific, Singaporean students selecting Australia as a destination, the ways that both countries are islands, have colonial pasts, and function in English against a backdrop of multiculturalism.            

A curious addition to this roster of anthologies, with ties perhaps less intuitive, is Double Skin: New Poetic Voices From Italy and Singapore. The anthology's two editors are Pang and the Italian poet Tiziano Fratus, featuring a selection of six poets from Singapore and six poets from Turin in Italy. Co-published between Ethos Books and Torino Poesia Press, the anthology is distinct from previous efforts by dint of its bilingualism. All of the contributing Singaporean poets are translated into Italian, and the anthology's Turinese poets are translated into English. The book can be flipped, with the Singaporean poets read in one orientation from one end of the book and the Turinese poets from the other. If Pang saw his role as that of a literary diplomat for Singapore as a nation, Fratus saw a similar role in promoting poetry from Turin, having edited a similar anthology with Scottish poets in the same year. Herein one sees the loosening of a regional imagination, perhaps in concordance with the widening economic ventures of Singapore's trade relationships.            

The anthology that perhaps caps off this period of the bilateral anthology is Union: 15 Years of Drunken Boat, 50 Years of Writing from Singapore (2015). Unlike previous anthologies, Union is an explicit collaboration with a single journal, Drunken Boat, rather than a national representative. Singaporean writers outnumber their counterparts from Drunken Boat by quite a bit across the anthology's 640 pages. Alfian Sa'at, Boey Kim Cheng, Ee Tiang Hong, Elangovan, Amanda Lee Koe, Jeremy Tiang, Koh Jee Leong, Chandran Nair, Tan Chee Lay, and Simon Tay are among the anthology's contributors of poetry and prose. They are presented alongside a dazzling array of noted literary figures, whether canonised through Pulitzer Prizes or other forms of national recognition: Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, Palestinian luminary Mahmoud Darwish, esteemed British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, noted Korean poet Ko Un, and Camille Dungy. The international composition of Drunken Boat might call into question the extent to which the American-Singaporean presentation of the anthology is apt, but nevertheless successfully cultivate the impression of a parity between esteemed international writers and writers from Singapore. This, in turn, mirrors the maturation of Singapore's imbrication in the global neoliberal economy, a 'cultural and political [permutation] of postcolonial capitalism', as Naruse might describe.

Yet, the book invariably takes on a bilateral tenor between Singapore and the United States, more than a decade after the two countries' Free Trade Agreement signed in 2003. The anthology, again, finds its origin at a literary festival, this time the 2013 American Writers Festival in Singapore. Ravi Shankar, the anthology's editor alongside Pang, relates the story of the founding of Drunken Boat on a Brooklyn rooftop, looking to Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Softblow as prominent models. Shankar relates an admiration for Singapore's 'writers on the vanguard of linguistic experimentation', 'thriving small press literary scene', and 'evocative and lively literary and arts culture'. In return, Pang asserts that both countries are 'post-colonial societies founded not on the basis of tribe nor creed, but on particular ideals, unity in diversity and equality before the law', and 'as New World nations distinguishing themselves from the past'. By hewing close to the world's imperial centre, perhaps Union stands as the most monumental of these bilateral anthologies, a worthy destination to mark Singapore's ascension to global recognition.            

While Pang's efforts in the realm of bilateral anthologies have been directed elsewhere since, new anthologies have emerged to fill their gap. This is the aforementioned 'anthology fever' described by Kwek, fuelled in large part by the frenetic literary exploits of Joshua Ip and the ready partner they found in Math Paper Press. While not all published by Math Paper Press, the period saw such anthologies as the twin-cinema anthology collecting Singaporean and Hong Kong writers Twin Cities (2017), the regional publication The First Five (2018), the series of Call and Response anthologies (2018 and 2021) collating poems written by Singaporean and 'migrant' poets, the 684-page To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry from America, Australia, UK and Europe (2019) co-edited by Boey Kim Cheng, and Get Lucky (2015) and Get Luckier (2022), both co-edited by Eric Valles. Each anthology reflects a not-insignificant degree of personal motivation, whether in personal ties between poets from Singapore and Hong Kong, the editorial team composed of Singaporeans and migrant workers for Call and Response, Boey's own peripatetic inclinations in his writing, and Valles's subjectivity as a Filipino Singaporean.

Each anthology described above stands as an interesting project in service of particular poetic and literary aspirations: early work in canonisation, nation-building activity, the construction of regional goodwill, expressions of literary friendship, jostling for international prestige. One anthology that seems to take a different starting point is Gwee Li Sui's curious volume Man/Born/Free: Writings on the Human Spirit From Singapore (2011). Prepared as part of the 2011 event Spotlight Singapore in Cape Town, as part of a formal Singaporean delegation to South Africa, Gwee's anthology 'showcases the trials of the human spirit as expressed by Singaporean writers as well as their varied explorations of conscience.' In his editorial, Gwee contends against the 'social and technical implements of modernity' that have conspired to create new forms of discrimination. Gwee seeks to make 'an ethical case for eternal vigilance, that proverbial price of liberty and, may I add, equality', to which he describes that all people in the twentieth century have 'become spiritual children of Nelson Mandela and siblings to South Africans'. The central image is of Mandela's imprisonment on the basis of conscience, a stubbornness against injustice also articulated in the literary voices of the anti-apartheid Black Consciousness Movement. Gwee resists making overt critiques of the abhorrent conditions of apartheid, for to do so may have been to unwittingly describe Singapore's role as a destination for apartheid profits.

This illustrates the double-bind faced by Gwee: while editing a volume envisioning a brighter and freer future for others, he remained bound by funding from the National Arts Council withdrawn at the last minute before the delegation's departure for Cape Town. Part of this might have been the added result of Gwee choosing only to anthologise Singaporean writers, many of which have been critical of the state. He writes:

What [Mandela's] sentence really stands for is the generations of suffering under racial hatred and distrust, a whole legacy of imprisonment lived in the head. It is this powerful sense that makes the prison a far more universal symbol, one we can extend here not just to the Singaporean writings on confinement by James Puthucheary, Tan Jing Quee, Aaron Lee, Alfian Bin Sa'at, and others. We can also relate it to Edwin Thumboo and Ting Kheng Siong on colonialism, Abdul Ghani Hamid and Elangovan on the disenfranchised, Anuar Othman and Alvin Pang on racial discontent, Lee Tzu Pheng on gender inequality, Kirpal Singh and David Leo on the abuse of power, and Amiroudine on the violence of modernity. This image further lets us explore how spiritual and reflective questions of freedom can be in writings by Masuri S N, Goh Poh Seng, and Boey Kim Cheng.  

One sees in Gwee's effort a different trajectory for the bilateral or international anthology from Singapore, moving beyond the surface of diplomatic correspondence toward a more profound engagement across common struggles, contentions, and values. What are the modes of connection across writers beyond the existing frames of a national or regional imaginary, away from the funding conditions under bilateral institutions, less enticed by the glamour of writing festivals and prestigious publishing circuits? Gwee's project suggests one possible pathway beyond, anthologising a history of Singaporean poetry through the lens of conscience, concerned less with cultural capital and literary recognition and more with something more fundamental about the politics of craft itself.

In a time of political, economic, social, and environmental upheaval, when Singapore is experiencing a more pronounced precarity in its foreign relations, and when the nodes of the Internet have made national boundaries more porous, one can only wonder if the bilateral or multilateral anthology will continue to serve their purposes in bringing together writers across borders. Perhaps new possibilities will arise: a Nusantara anthology, an Asian Tigers anthology, or even anthologies unconcerned with national framings altogether. A careful curator must collect the flowers once they have begun to bloom.

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