GSP168: Literature and Society: An Introduction
Choose ONE of the three poems from the menu below and answer all the following questions:
Poem menu
Malaca Grandmother’, Robert Yeo (198-99)
My Country, My People,’ Lee Tzu Pheng (277-78)
Malaise’, Toh Hsien Min (588-89)
1. Discuss how the diction of the poem is related to the tone of the poem by using specific examples from the poem.
2. Explain the images the poet uses and the sense (sight, taste, touch, smell, sound) they relate to by using specific examples from the poem.
3. Demonstrate critical analysis that explains the theme of the poem by pointing to specific examples from the poem.
4. Relate the images and theme from the poem to the social context of modern Singapore.
Malacca Grandmother by Robert Yeo (Ruo Qi)
Posted on April 1, 2013
Malacca Grandmother by Robert Yeo
WRITING SINGAPORE, P198-199
Grandmother, departures
Such as yours
And your brother to Southampton
Snap something in me
I don’t know what.
It is not that you won’t come back
Neither that your brother may not return
Nor that more than a person
An age has passed, of whom you were
The sole remaining representative
Could it be that I realize now
How your going has severed
(Something I could not then acknowledge)
Relationship to a family rich
In history, name and wealth
But aloof and strangely antique
Like the silver kerosang their Nyonya wear?
Your generation trespassing on mine
Left me with two tongues that i sputter
Recurrent memories of the towkay neo
Who would only sell me things in Teochew,
And an aggressive sense of modernity.
On Heeren Street,
The past peels in paint,
Even on this midday
Twilight is trapped in long, grey interiors.
Do the womenfolk here
Still grow up
In kitchens and in bedrooms?
Is there a house here that is the source
Of my indifferent Malay
And my Hokkien splutter?
Grandma, you have broken now
The tenuous links between
The Tans and the Yeos
Malacca and Singapore.
I guess
That is what
Departure’s about
Analysis: My Country and My People (by Lee Tzu Pheng)
on October 11, 2012
My country and my people
are neither here nor there, nor
in the comfort of my preferences,
if I could even choose.
At any rate, to fancy is to cheat;
and worse than being alien, or
subversive without cause,
is being a patriot
of the will.
I came in the boom of babies, not guns,
a ‘daughter of a better age’;
I held a pencil in a school
while the ‘age’ was quelling riots
in the street, or cutting down
those foreign ‘devils’,
(whose books I was being taught to read).
Thus privileged I entered early
the Lion City’s jaws.
But they sent me back as fast
to my shy, forbearing family.
So I stayed in my parents’ house
and had only household care.
The city remained a distant way,
but I had no land to till;
only a duck that would not lay,
and a runt of a papaya tree,
(which also turned out to be male).
Then I learnt to drive instead
and praise the highways till
I saw them chop the great trees down,
and plant the little ones;
impound the hungry buffalo
(the big ones and the little ones)
because the cars could not be curbed.
Nor could the population.
They built milli-mini-flats
for a multi-mini-society.
The chiselled profile in the sky
took on a lofty attitude,
but modestly, at any rate
it made the tourist feel ‘at at home’.
My country and my people
I never understood.
I grew up in China’s mighty shadow,
with my gentle, brown-skinned neighbours;
but I keep diaries in English.
I sought to grow
in humanity’s rich soil,
and started digging on the banks, then saw
life carrying my friends downstream.
Yet, careful tending of the human heart
may make a hundred flowers bloom;
and perhaps, fence-sitting neighbour,
I claim citizenship in your recognition
of our kind,
my people, and my country,
are you, and you my home.
