All Is Utterly Changed: Representations of Space in Fistful of Colours

By Y-Lynn Ong
All is utterly changed, the map useless
for navigation in the lost city. Only an echo
remains
– “Change Alley”, Boey Kim Cheng¹

In Singapore, progress is inextricably tied up with loss – the disappearance of landmarks and the displacement of people. This is a common theme in Singapore literature. In his poem “Change Alley”, Boey Kim Cheng meditates on one such site of loss, the eponymous lane that was once home to a bazaar which ran from Raffles Place to Collyer Quay, and had been famous for its eclectic goods and moneychangers from the early 1930s.² Boey’s nameless speaker stands where the alley used to be, “searching still the place / for signs leading home”. The alley’s disappearance becomes emblematic of the wider physical and cultural erasure that accompanies Singapore’s urban redevelopment. For Boey, composing this poem in the 1990s just as the “streets lost their names” and “the river forgot its source”, Singaporeans were being severed from their own history.

Singapore’s growth, being limited by its tight geographical boundaries, is to a large extent achieved through urban “renewal” projects. Even civic landmarks, like the National Theatre (demolished in 1986) and the old National Library (demolished in 2004), are not safe from the insatiable need for more land and space to build high-rise homes and offices, roads, MRT lines and other infrastructure. This has been deemed necessary both to support a burgeoning population and to continually reinvent the city. As Ryan Bishop, John Philips and Yeo Wei Wei explain, a city’s growth results from “the spread of urban capitalism”; urban processes are “perpetuated by a number of forces underpinned by the fundamentally economic ones that govern modern existence, the locus of which is always the city”.³ For a city-state like Singapore, urban renewal is critical to survival. Urban planners and developers must anticipate the changing demands of the global economy and remake the city in ever-new configurations to attract investors, tourists and an increasingly international workforce.

But what is lost in the process? Singaporean literature has shown great interest in engaging with this question. In Boey’s poem, for example, a city is understood to be an organ of memory. As theorised by Mark Crinson, redevelopment results in the effacement of this urban memory, so that the city “can no longer act as a kind of guide or exemplar for the people living in it”.⁴ The city is also the site of collective memory according to Steve Clark – a kind of memory that can be “transferred between individuals and down through generations”. This is of particular importance to the formation of Singaporean identity, because “nationhood in a Singaporean context cannot be defined through ethnicity or language […] Individuals, rather than possessing personal recollections, are inter-connected through a distinctive collective remembrance.”⁵ Singapore’s unceasing redevelopment disrupts the accretion of this collective memory, affecting Singaporeans’ sense of identity and history.

This essay explores how literary texts represent space and place by examining four works of Singaporean fiction that were produced after independence in the shadow of modernisation: Suchen Christine Lim’s Fistful of Colours, Goh Poh Seng’s If We Dream Too Long, and Philip Jeyaretnam’s Raffles Place Ragtime and First Loves. Spanning three decades after 1965, these works reflect a period when Singapore’s landscape underwent a dramatic transformation. While most of the current discourse about representations of space and place in Singaporean literature has focused on absence, this essay attempts to map the traces of these lost spaces and what has replaced them. As Jini Kim Watson explains, texts that foreground the built environment tell us much more than “immediate and physical changes”, as they preserve all the “competing new and old relations, ideologies, and imaginaries deposited in architectural form”.⁶ The four chosen texts thus map not only physical space, but also anxieties about modernity and modern life.

Fistful of Colours and If We Dream Too Long: History, Memory and Urban Identity

Published in 1993, Suchen Christine Lim’s novel Fistful of Colours is ostensibly set in a single day of the life of its protagonist Suwen, but the narrative spans multiple generations of Suwen’s family – from colonial times, through the Second World War, independence and into contemporary Singapore. While recounting these familial and national histories, Lim also documents Singapore’s urban history, giving particular attention to bygone places like pre-war Geylang and Great World Amusement Park (1929–78). Lim describes the amusement park in its heyday:

    The Park was humming and buzzing with activities and gaiety.
    Within its large fenced-in enclosure were the open-air cinema,
    the getai or open-air stage for singing and comic sketches, the
    ronggeng platform for Malay dances and the Chinese opera
     theatre. Tucked in between the cinema, stages and theatres were
    numerous wooden stalls and zinc-roofed huts hawking cheap
    plastic wares: pails in gaudy reds and blues, utensils, toys, beads
    and buttons; aluminum pots and pans; poor quality clothes, towels;
    the minutiae of dressmaking like cards of bright buttons, reels of
    coloured threads, rolls of cheap satin lining, bales of cheap checks,
     packets of metal clips and boxes of buckles and beads. “Lelong!
    Lelong! Lai! Lai! Ten cents! Twenty cents only!” the hawkers called
    out to the housewives and their daughters milling under the glare
     of the naked light bulbs and gasoline lamps.⁷

Starting with the onomatopoeia of “humming and buzzing”, Lim builds up layers of sound to recreate the park’s sonic landscape. The alliteration of “pots and pans”, “cheap checks” and “boxes of buckles and beads” mirrors the cries of the hawkers, and the contrast of harsh plosive sounds with the more euphonic “Lelong! Lelong! Lai! Lai!” is cacophonous. Coupled with the runaway acceleration conveyed by the list of items for sale, the noise and buzz are palpable. In effect, Lim preserves the sense memory of Great World Amusement Park, allowing us to appreciate it as a place “where lives have been lived and [are] still felt as physically manifest”.⁸ With the park now demolished – replaced by the shopping centre Great World City – it no longer exists as a physical space. Lim’s novel thus becomes one of the few ways through which it can still be accessed.

Lim’s portrayal of Great World touches on the novel’s wider theme of space and ethnicity in Singapore. The hawkers shout in Malay and Chinese, and the park contains both a “ronggeng platform for Malay dances” and a “Chinese opera theatre”. The reader is invited to see Great World as a microcosm of Singapore, where people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds mix freely. However, Lim problematises this utopian image in a later scene, when one of the novel’s characters, Zul, waits for his fiancée in a Housing Development Board car park.⁹ Zul and Jan are an interracial couple, and Jan is going home to retrieve her belongings and confront her father, who objects to the couples’ engagement. While waiting for Jan, Zul recollects his childhood and reflects on how drastically his neighbourhood has changed. Gone are “the flame trees, the angsanas, the lallang patch, the muddy ditch (where he’d caught his first guppy) and the roadside barber’s stall under the angsana tree”, replaced by the “new concrete boxes” of a public housing estate. However, Zul still retains a mental map of his old neighbourhood. When he looks at the “neat row of two-storey HDB shophouses”, he still sees “the zinc and wood shops of the Chinese grocers and Indian dhobies” that used to be there. The built landscape becomes a palimpsest where traces of earlier forms can still be seen beneath the current forms, at least in Zul’s memories.

Lim links this spatial haunting to a kind of reactionary politics, where “the outer physical rim of our social hub [changes] faster than its core of age-old prejudices, cock-eyed perceptions and irrational fears”.¹⁰ Despite the modern and progressive image of Singapore that these landscapes project, racial prejudice still lurks beneath the surface, which in turn plays out in the sharp division between public and private spaces. While people may mix easily in public spaces, private spaces – such as the home and its attendant spaces of domesticity and intimacy – are still segregated. When Jan breaks the news of her engagement to her bigoted father, Zul must wait for her in the car park. He is not allowed into step into her family’s private space, an act that reveals the ethnic divides within Singaporean society. As Jan is eventually disowned by her father for marrying outside her race, their engagement is still transgressive. Lim therefore conveys this hypocritical attitude towards multiculturalism through her representation of space.

While such scenes in Fistful of Colours demonstrate how lost spaces linger on in memory, If We Dream Too Long suggests a different kind of haunting through the architectural remnants of Singapore’s colonial history. Goh Poh Seng’s 1972 novel follows its protagonist Kwang Meng as he tries to find his place in a rapidly changing world. Kwang Meng spends most of his time wandering through the city alone, and Goh spends the bulk of the narrative exhaustively describing these walks. In the novel’s opening pages, Kwang Meng walks through Singapore’s civic district:¹¹

    To his right, across the street, the Singapore Cricket Club stood
     patronizingly at the corner of the Padang. A relic of the colonial
    past, but still the same syce-driven cars were parked outside in the
     members-only parking enclosure […] The English are durable,
     he thought, passing Victoria Memorial Hall and Theatre on his
     right, then crossing Connaught Bridge towards the grey imperial
     Fullerton Building nearby. All these colonial names, indelibly
     stamped everywhere. No wonder the English still feel very much at
     home here.

This area had been the seat of the colonial government, and most of the colonial buildings remained even after independence, when urban redevelopment swept the city. Through his representation of these spaces, Goh implies that colonial attitudes still linger. The Cricket Club stands “patronizingly”, an anthropomorphism that perhaps reflects the feelings of superiority that the British administrators held towards their colonial subjects. Furthermore, the use of “syce”, a Hindi word used colloquially in British Malaya to refer to a chauffeur, coupled with the continued existence of a segregated space – the members-only parking lot – suggests that the hierarchies that shaped colonial society have simply carried on into postcolonial Singapore. To Goh, these buildings with their “colonial names, indelibly stamped everywhere”, are more than just landmarks or heritage sites; they preserve, in Singaporeans’ urban and collective memories, the scars of the colonial experience.

At the same time that Goh documents the continuity of selected aspects of Singapore’s architectural past, he also traces the changes that other parts of the country undergo. Crucially, he examines the process of land reclamation:

    The Government was reclaiming some one thousand acres of land
     from the sea. They could see the yellow raw earth of the reclaimed
     portion, […] Behind to their left, giant excavators were eating into
     the hills […] The massive arms of the painted cranes towering above
     them, were a skein of bright orange against the blue sky. The dusty,
     dry yellow earth was crying out for grass and for trees. No doubt
     they would be planted in the future. Along with the people.¹²

The imagery Goh uses here is violent, almost cataclysmic. Machinery dominates the landscape, where excavators “[eat] into the hills”, and the “towering” cranes prefigure the buildings that will be erected on the site. The reclaimed land is “raw”, bringing to mind an open wound. Goh makes visible the toil required to transform Singapore into a modern city, and demonstrates how land reclamation requires the destruction of natural landscapes. Here, Goh captures a snapshot of a landscape in transition, of a Singapore that is still in the process of becoming.

The land reclamation scene also unearths a prevailing attitude towards the natural world, where nature is simply a resource to be used. Kwang Meng exemplifies this attitude when his uncle invites him to join a business venture in Sabah with a logging company, and he “imagine[s] himself carving up a country, green and virginal”,¹³ an act of conquest which parallels how land is consumed during the reclamation process. Kwang Meng is so alienated from nature that he regards MacRitchie Reservoir Park as “something foreign and un-Singaporean”, its “green tranquility” such an alien experience that he compares it to “a bit of England, the England they read about in textbooks in school”.¹⁴ To him, nature does not feature in Singapore’s urban identity. As Philip Holden notes, when Kwang Meng goes for a swim in the sea, the busy shipping lanes around him “[serve] as a reminder of Singapore’s capitalist interconnectedness”.¹⁵ Kwang Meng dismisses the sea as “the universal trash can” even as he swims in it, and his attitude signals a dichotomy between urbanity and nature, where urban spaces are equated with modernity and economic progress, and natural spaces are only valued if they serve a function.¹⁶ Even MacRitchie Reservoir Park, a nature reserve, is adapted for recreational use. A “newly-built tea kiosk” serves drinks to park-goers and a “bandstand [is] being built out over the water”, turning the reserve into a mixed-use space that prioritises the needs of the “Sunday crowd […] in their Sunday dresses and […] Sunday faces”.¹⁷ Modernity thus becomes narrowly defined, as it is contingent on taming and developing these wild spaces, making nature subordinate to economic or social utility.

This narrowing of modernity has a knock-on effect on Singaporean identity. In his analysis of If We Dream Too Long, Jeremy Fernando posits that Singaporean identity is not fixed, but is instead in a state of constant flux as “the Lion City is a port – nothing more, and infinitely nothing less […] a port without a hinterland, without a ‘rest of the country’ […] the port itself is the country”.¹⁸ As the port is a purely urban space with a primarily economic function, it symbolises the limits of Singapore’s identity. When Kwang Meng walks through Tanjong Pagar, a neighbourhood that was then frequented by sailors on shore leave, he passes several shops selling “postcards of Singapore showing the garish sculptures of Haw Par Villa, scenes of Chinatown and of the Singapore River […] goods to tempt the sailors”.¹⁹ Though these postcards depict real and existing places, Kwang Meng feels no affinity with them because they have been stripped of their attendant lived experience. The postcard of Chinatown, for example, has little in common with his memories of his childhood home in Chinatown, “the musty, salty smell of the different varieties of goods stored in the provisions shop below”, the “small faces and ringing voice of [his] friends”, and “the thrills of their gambling sessions once a year with ang pow money at Chinese New Year”.²⁰ The commodification of space, flattened into products meant for export, prefigures the loss of personal history and cultural memory, and prevents a shared Singaporean identity from taking root.

First Loves and Raffles Place Ragtime: Modernity and the Changing City

Like Fistful of Colours and If We Dream Too Long, Raffles Place Ragtime and First Loves operate in the intersection of post-colonial literature and urbanism, insisting on “the centrality of local cultures in urbanisms”.²¹ While Fistful of Colours documents Singapore’s past and If We Dream Too Long shows Singapore in a state of transition, Philip Jeyaretnam’s 1988 novel Raffles Place Ragtime and 1987 short-story collection First Loves present Singapore post-transition, as a new, modern city.

Raffles Place and the Central Business District feature in both of Jeyaretnam’s works. The redevelopment of this historically important district is used to illustrate the link between global capitalism, urban processes and identity – both national and personal. As Brenda Yeoh and T. C. Chang note, heritage buildings and monuments play a role in fixing national identity as they “reinforce belief in the existence, legitimacy and inviolability of the nation”.²² I argue that the redevelopment of Raffles Place through the 1970s and 1980s served a similar function. New skyscrapers and commercial complexes were retrofitted onto Raffles Place – the former seat of political and economic power in colonial Singapore – in order to consolidate Singapore’s new identity as a modern nation-state and economic powerhouse in the years following independence.

This stage of Singapore’s modernisation specifically occurred within the context of globalisation, with capital and labour flowing through a global network of cities linked by various financial and information services. As Saskia Sassen notes, “national and global markets as well as globally integrated organizations require central places where the work of globalization gets done”, and “cities are the preferred sites for the production of these services”.²³ For example, multinational corporations are entities that have expanded beyond the traditional borders of nation-states, and often operate in major cities around the globe due to the concentration of labour and infrastructure that can be found in them. However, globalisation has wider ramifications. In addition to the movement of capital and labour, ideologies and paradigms also flow through these interlinked cities. One such paradigm is the discourse of modernity, particularly how it is reflected in the urban environment and built forms. As Singaporean architect and academic Tay Kheng Soon has highlighted:²⁴

    The link between so-called International Style and international
     corporate capitalism was not consciously noted. Modernism was
     confused with modernity and modernization was confused with
     Westernisation […] The embracing of global capitalism and the
     cultural and aesthetic values it entails coloured everything.

Because of the unequal power relations that frame modernisation, “the discourse about architecture, urban planning and culture was and still is couched in the concepts and words of the industrial West”.²⁵ As these definitions and forms of modernity radiate from the West, they effectively reinscribe what Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as the “ideology of progress or ‘development’”²⁶ that justified the imperial project, and thus reinforce the metropolitan-periphery hierarchy into the 21st century. Modernity becomes both a goal and a reference point, as it constantly refers to the great metropolitan centres of the West. Cities on the periphery like Singapore must model these forms of modernity in order to remain competitive on the global stage.

Newspaper articles in the 1970s and 1980s tended to laud the redevelopment of Raffles Place. For example, a Straits Times article from 1980 detailing the redevelopment plan cast it as an “urban metamorphosis” that would transform Raffles Place into “a bustling financial and commercial hub” with “resplendent high-rise buildings, a tree-lined pedestrian mall along the banks of the Singapore River, and an underground train station”.²⁷ The redevelopment is treated like a rebirth, an opportunity to remake Singapore in the image of a modern city, as these high-rise buildings, malls and public transit systems were all seen as markers of modernity. In First Loves, the protagonist Ah Leong is awestruck by these new skyscrapers, and he compares them to the Raffles Place of old:

    Contrast the colonial buildings from which he has just walked:
     there are no winking eyes, no soaring towers, unless the cigar-
     shaped clocktower of Victoria Theatre is counted. […] Behind him
     English gentility, in front the soaring ambition of a nation-state,
     Ah Leong is awed yet also uplifted.²⁸

Unlike in If We Dream Too Long, where the old colonial buildings dominate the landscape, here they are overshadowed by a nest of new skyscrapers. As he walks, Ah Leong leaves behind the colonial buildings and crosses into the new city centre, and his act of crossing becomes a metaphor for progress, in which he symbolically passes from one era into another. In linking the “soaring towers” to the “soaring ambition of a nation-state”, Jeyaretnam draws out the intimate connection between urban form and the promise of success in a modern, globalised world. As a newspaper article from 1970 put it, building upwards was a “psychological breakthrough”, and breaking through to 50 storeys signalled that Singapore had “arrived as a major metropolis”.²⁹ Not only did the redevelopment of Raffles Place have economic benefits, it also remade Singaporeans’ urban memory and projected a new aspirational identity for Singapore.

However, while Ah Leong marvels at Raffles Place partly because “it is constructed with the sweat and labour of Singaporeans”, these nationalistic stirrings are undercut by his realisation that the architecture “is only a reworking of modern Western forms”, and the skyscrapers “all too often bear the names of foreign companies, foreign banks”.³⁰ And while he is initially drawn to Raffles Place because it reminds him of the Bayon, a Khmer temple famous for its many towers of intricately carved stone, he must acknowledge that Raffles Place is dedicated to “the god-king commerce not the god-king Jayavarman”.³¹ The redevelopment of Raffles Place may be an attempt to project a new Singaporean identity, but it is primarily a capitalist achievement. Modernity is inextricable from the systems of capital that are centred on the West. Colonialism has simply been replaced by the neo-imperialism of globalism, as highlighted by the dominance of Western architectural forms in Raffles Place.

Furthermore, modernisation atomises space, as it creates urban spaces which entrench class and social divisions. Space in the office towers of Raffles Place is compartmentalised, consisting of “cool sanctuaries” where occupants are “protected by tinted glass”³² and insulated from the outside world. Crucially, these spaces are policed and therefore exclusionary. When Ah Leong enters one of the office towers to interview for an office boy position, he first has to go past building security, and before he can enter the offices proper he is stopped by “the haughty stare of the receptionist” and barred from going further.³³ These divisions also play out in Raffles Place Ragtime, when Connie, a corporate lawyer, gazes out of her window:

    [Connie] looked down at the road, the traffic getting heavier as
     lunchtime approached and more people emerged from buildings.
     On the opposite pavement, sitting furtively in the shade, was an
     old woman. Beside her was a red plastic mug. As Connie watched,
     the stream of passersby grew into a torrent. Yet she saw no coins
     drop into the plastic mug until a European gentleman in a suit
     passed that way.³⁴

Here, white-collar professionals flow between spaces, and the imagery of moving water in “stream” and “torrent” implies their freedom of movement. In contrast, the old woman sits stationary on the pavement, a public space. Access to the privately managed urban spaces of Raffles Place is a class privilege enjoyed by these white-collar professionals to the exclusion of others. The old woman and Ah Leong are barred from entering these private spaces and their air-conditioned comforts. Their physical discomfort – the old woman sits in the shade to avoid the heat and Ah Leong is sweating profusely when he goes to his interview – demonstrates how modernisation has not benefited everyone equally. Here, spatial stratification moves in lockstep with social stratification.

Jeyaretnam seems ambivalent about modernity and its effects. When Connie gives some money to the old woman, she starts talking about the weather, telling Connie that “it rain[s] nowadays at any time of the day, not like in her youth when she first came from China; then it had only rained in the afternoons, indeed almost every afternoon”. The old woman insists that the development of Raffles Place caused this change, claiming that “the tall buildings […] confused the weather; it was wrong […] very wrong”.³⁵ The disturbance of the natural order is posited as an unseen environmental cost of modernity.

The ambivalence extends to the way modern offices are represented as sites of “worship”. Jeyaretnam likens the labour of Raffles Place workers to “tapping ritual prayers into word processors”,³⁶ and portraying them as supplicants to capitalism, a system which supplants the processes of the natural world and exerts its own norms. When Vincent, an ambitious young financial analyst, breaks from his normal routine and leaves his office outside of his designated lunch hour, he “[feels] the buildings on all sides pressing down on him […] as if watched by a thousand pairs of eyes behind office windows”.³⁷ Even though he is senior enough to leave the office whenever he wants, crossing Raffles Place in the mid-afternoon is enough of a transgression that Vincent feels “an overwhelming desire to retreat from the wide emptiness”, return to his desk, and resume work. Crucially, the pressure that Vincent feels to conform and be a productive citizen is coming from within himself, and the claustrophobia and paranoia he feels about breaking his routine are projected onto the built environment. Raffles Place becomes a kind of Panopticon, conceptualised by Foucault as a symbol of social control, where Vincent has so completely internalised these societal norms and pressures that he polices himself and “becomes the principle of his own subjection”.³⁸ To Jeyaretnam, the modern skyscrapers of Raffles Place belie a darker shift in society, where the worship of productivity and material wealth reduces a person’s worth to the value of the work they produce.

Along with these office workers, places are also valued according to the work they produce. A key driver of Raffles Place’s redevelopment was the economic benefit it would bring. Newspaper articles emphasised that the new office towers and shopping centres would “provide exciting prospects for the creation of a new city”, and “strengthen the existing tourist facilities along Orchard Road”, driving Singapore’s economy by attracting more tourists and foreign investment.³⁹ Redevelopment would displace pre-existing businesses – such as the Chettiar moneylenders⁴⁰ and moneychangers, and the lightermen who ferried cargo through the Singapore River⁴¹ – but their disappearance was justified on the grounds that these were “dying businesses”⁴² being naturally pushed out by the invisible hand of the market. With their removal, the Singapore River would become a recreational site, “with fishing and boating possibly becoming the ‘in’ thing”.⁴³ However, there was a trade-off. Removing these businesses and the communities that had grown around them effaced communal memory, leaving behind no trace of their history for future generations.

Jeyaretnam depicts this untethering of history from space in First Loves when Ah Leong imagines what would happen if Raffles Place were suddenly abandoned:

    *Will the sea, pushed back by programmes of land expansion, roll in
     to reclaim what belongs to it? […] Until centuries later when the
     sea will again be drained away and Raffles Place (like the Bayon
     does today) stand as an architectural wonder and archaeological
     mystery?⁴⁴

Removed from capitalist systems and the enterprise of making money, Raffles Place becomes an empty shell as it does not retain what Tay deems the “aesthetics of place – local, specific, rooted”,⁴⁵ or an urban memory specific to Singapore’s history.

Jeyaretnam’s characters ultimately sour on this version of modernity and are alienated by its empty materialism. This alienation is, in turn, projected onto the landscapes around them. When Connie realises that she has been living her life according to societal expectations, “too readily accepting the lash of the whip that sought to drive her on, blindly, like a horse with blinkers”, she looks at the “lighted squares of other flats, the rows of streetlights and the lights of cars hurrying to their destinations”⁴⁶ and sees in their uniformity the constraints placed on her by Singaporean society: the pressures to work hard at a respectable job, to get married, and to have children. When she decides to quit her job, she effectively rebels against the model of a productive citizen. She wants to find meaning in her life, an aim or motivation that will lead her out of the regimented squares and rows. However, although she has decided to leave, what she will do next only has “some vague shape in her mind”. Much like an abandoned Raffles Place, Connie is unable to think of herself beyond the capitalist systems that have defined her, at least for now. Through Connie, Jeyaretnam implies how Singapore’s over-emphasis on productivity and economic progress manifests in a kind of existential ennui in its citizens, which are then deposited into his representations of the urban landscape.

CONCLUSION

Literature can function as a historical archive, documenting and conserving spaces that would otherwise be lost. Through their representations of space, literary texts can not only fill in gaps in our urban memory and therefore redefine Singaporean identity by shoring up our collective memory, but also dramatise various anxieties about modernity, such as racial prejudice and the environmental impact of urban development. If, as Suchen Christine Lim mused in 2009, “[Singaporeans] are a people who live in the perpetual newness of the present”,⁴⁷ Singaporean fiction like Fistful of Colours and If We Dream Too Long acts a corrective to this state of amnesia by reconnecting Singaporeans with their history.

In First Loves and Raffles Place Ragtime, Jeyaretnam examines the causes and effects of urban redevelopment and embeds them within global capitalism. The redevelopment of Raffles Place projects a new identity for Singapore as a new, modern and global city, and signals a break with the island’s colonial history. However, Jeyaretnam takes a critical look at these new urban forms and problematises them. Some spaces in Raffles Place are exclusive, which demonstrates how inequality undergirds access to modernity. Furthermore, the society symbolised by these skyscrapers reduces people and places to their economic value. History and heritage have no place in this system unless they can be used to generate capital. Here, Jeyaretnam broadens the scope of the literary archive, as his texts not only record the changing face of Raffles Place but also a sea change in society’s class structures, priorities and goals. Space in Jeyaretnam’s fiction becomes an artifact, and literature, through its representation of space, becomes a way to document otherwise intangible things and preserve them for future study.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Lucinda Williams for her advice and Librarian Michelle Heng for her enthusiastic and tireless support during this project.

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