On 19 March 1952, some six weeks after his arrival in Malaya, General Templer, as President of the Federal Legislative Council, addressed the opening session of the Council to outline the manner in which he intended to implement the political Directive he had been given by the British Government. It dealt with an impressively wide range of social, economic, and political matters which brought out clearly his views on the immense number of complex problems with which he had to grapple.

Templer sent a draft of his speech to Lyttelton in London, which he said was “entirely in accord with Her Majesty's Government's policy”, and in his telegram of 12 March to Lyttelton, which he copied to Malcolm MacDonald, British Commissioner General for South East Asia in Singapore, he said that it had been “gone through yesterday by the Executive Council”.

In his telegram to Lyttelton, Templer said that during the past few weeks he had held a number of discussions with Dato' Onn, Dato E.E.C. Thuraisingham, a Ceylonese Tamil, who was the Member for Education, and other local politicians about responsible local government at grass roots level, which Templer referred to as the “parish pump level”. On 7 March, the Singapore Standard in a critical article written by S. Rajaratnam [then a newspaper journalist who later joined the People's Action Party (PAP) and became Singapore's first Minister for Culture and subsequently Singapore's longest serving Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister], said it was Templer's intention to limit Malaya's advance to self-government, to use Templer's own phrase, to “parish pump” level. This mention of the term “parish pump” which was to incur Templer's wrath, attracted a lot of attention, and Templer informed Lyttelton that he intended to issue a statement about it in his forthcoming address to be delivered on 19 March to the Legislative Council along the following lines:

General (later Field Marshal) Sir Gerald Templer, KG, GCB, CB, GCMG, KBE, DSO (1898–1979) had a traditional military education at Wellington College and the Royal Military College (RMC), Sandhurst (1915). He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Irish Fusiliers on 16 August 1916 and after the war, he served with them in Persia and Mesopotamia until he returned to England in 1922. He attended the British Army's Staff College from January 1928 to December 1929. He then served as a company commander in Egypt and Palestine during the Arab rebellions 1935–36, and was awarded a DSO and Bar and a Mention in Despatches.

At the outbreak of World War II, he was a Major, acting Lieutenant Colonel, at the War Office, London, and in September 1939, he served as an intelligence officer at the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force in France under Major General Sir F.N. Mason-Macfarlane. After he returned to England, he became Brigadier General Staff under General B.L. Montgomery, then commanding XII Corps, and was thereafter one of Montgomery's most fervent admirers.

In 1942, at the age of forty-four he became the youngest Lieutenant General in the British Army and he served briefly in North Africa and Italy. He reverted to the rank of Major General to command the 56th Infantry Division and then the 6th Armoured Division in Italy, where he was wounded in 1944 when a land mine blew up the army lorry in front of his staff car while travelling in convoy. The looted contents of the lorry fell on top of him and damaged his spine, and he was evacuated to England. He then worked in the War Office until he became Director of Civil Affairs in the British Zone of Germany under Montgomery, who was by then a Field Marshal commanding the British 21st Army Group. He regarded this period as valuable experience for Malaya although his time in Germany was marred by his having been involved in the summary dismissal at the end of World War II of Dr Konrad Adenauer, then Mayor of Cologne, for incompetence and inefficiency.

The policy of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom is that Malaya should in due course become a fully self-governing nation. His Majesty's Government confidently hope that that nation will be within the British Commonwealth.

2. In assisting the peoples of Malaya to achieve that object, you will at all times be guided by the declaration of policy expressed in the preamble of the Federation of Malaya Agreement and by the statement of the special responsibilities of the High Commissioner contained in Section 19 of that Agreement.

3. To achieve a united Malayan nation there must be a common form of citizenship for all who regard the Federation or any part of it as their real home and the object of their loyalty.

4. It will be your duty to guide the peoples of Malaya towards the attainment of these objectives and to promote such political progress of the country as will, without prejudicing the campaign against the terrorists, further our democratic aims in Malaya.

5. The ideal of a united Malayan nation does not involve the sacrifice by any community of its traditional culture and customs, but before it can be fully realized the Malays must be encouraged and assisted to play a full part in the economic life of the country, so that the present uneven economic balance may be redressed. It will be your duty to foster this process to the best of your ability.

6. His Majesty's Government believe that the British have a mission to fulfil in the achievement of these objects, and that, even after self-government has been attained, the British in Malaya will have a worthy and continuing part to play in the life of the country.

7. Communist terrorism is retarding the political advancement and economic development of the country and the welfare of its peoples. Your primary task in Malaya must, therefore, be the restoration of law and order, so that this barrier to progress may be removed. Without victory and the state of law and order which it alone can bring, there can be no freedom from fear, which is the first human liberty.

The Kinta Valley Home Guard (KVHG) was established by the MCAcontrolled Perak Chinese Tin Mining Association (PCTMA), Ipoh, with the backing and support of General Templer soon after he arrived in Malaya in February 1952. It was an all-Chinese Home Guard, aside from a few senior European officers. Some 4,000 members were recruited and trained by the Government. According to General Templer's biographer John Cloake, it was what he himself described as his “biggest gamble”. Many of his detractors thought it would be a disaster to supply arms to what was to be a large Chinese Home Guard dominated by the MCA for the defence of what were predominantly Chinese tin mines, and referred to what had happened to some of the weapons supplied by the British to the Communist Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) in World War II, many of which were secretly hoarded at the end of the war to be used later against the British in the Emergency. Nevertheless, General Templer gave his support to the KVHG, which was often described as a “Chinese private army” because of its close connections with the KMT which had been prescribed by the colonial government in Malaya on 9 May 1949, and he played an important role in its funding, organization, training, and deployment. By 1954, when Templer left Malaya, it was reported that there were 323 tin mines defended by the KVHG which remained operational until the end of the Malayan Emergency in July 1960.

THE MALAYAN ECONOMY

The tin and rubber industries then constituted the main sources of revenue for the Malayan Government. They were, in fact, by far the most important sources of U.S. dollars in the whole of the British colonial empire, and the Kinta Valley in Perak, covering some 1,035 square kilometres, was one of the richest tin mining areas in Malaya and accounted for the major part of Malaya's tin exports to the United States. Malaya's tin exports to the United States.

Templer was concerned that the revenue earned from the export of both tin and rubber, mainly to the United States, was vital for Malaya's economy not only to build up the prosperity of the country but to continue to finance the ever-escalating costs of the counter-insurgency operations that were being carried out against the CPM.

The personae in Arthur Yap's poetry are often standing still, immobilized and yet moved to contemplation. The often-unnamed settings in his poems frequently receive a second or third mental visitation, as if inviting us to explore the treatment of the spaces and places of his poetry. This essay takes up Yap's poetic invitation while at the same time approaching Yap's poetry from a critical as well as pedagogical perspective. The first part of the essay deals with the initial frustrations and difficulties of reading Yap's poems, which are often solipsistic and reflexive, as if refusing to engage with social reality and hence not always amenable to a reading that probes for their engagement with social and cultural issues. As a reader, writer, and teacher of poetry and literary criticism, I draw on my personal encounters with Yap's writing in order to illustrate the uniqueness of his style and illuminate the nuances of his verse. The second part of the essay draws on basic concepts of urban and cultural geography to enable an examination of spaces and places in Yap's poetry. The last part of this essay looks at Yap's poetry through general insights offered by Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space and more recent and specific scholarship on the relationship between space and history in Singapore. These provide a useful starting point for understanding how Yap maps a variety of spaces and critiques spatial practices in Singapore.

ENCOUNTERING YAP'S SOLIPSISM AND REFLEXIVITY

I first encountered Arthur Yap's poetry alongside those of Edwin Thumboo and Lee Tzu Pheng as an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore. Unsurprisingly, I was frustrated by Yap's poems; unlike other poems such as Thumboo's “Ulysses by the Merlion” that cements the relationship between poetry and nation building and Lee's “My Country and My People” that is wary of being co-opted by patriotic discourse, Yap's verse seems hesitant about saying anything in this regard. Yap's poems read frequently like arrested departures; they are often negations of the past without any promise of a movement into the present or future.

Like William Butler Yeats and Gertrude Stein, Arthur Yap, whose work is also regarded as modernist in theme and style, expressed a fascination with things. For W.B. Yeats, in his famous poem “The Second Coming”, it seems as if all things — social norms, cultural values, political aspirations — associated with European civilization had fallen apart and were ruined in the wake of World War I, as seen in the apocalpytic tenor of the oft-quoted line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (1956, p. 184). Gertrude Stein, on the other hand, offers a more optimistic outlook on things, claiming that “[c]ontinuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything” (2004, p. 25); Stein's compositional craft takes up everything around oneself as suitable material for the poetic imagination. And then there is Arthur Yap, whose treatment of things expresses a sympathetic yet critical sensibility, observing how “some things remain / some things pass, / some things are tired” (The Space of City Trees, 2004, hereafter Space, p. 4), and pointing to how we are often caught up in “a habit by which the world moves” such that “people will not look at the centre of things” (p. 78). In his poetry Yap personifies things, calmly observing how they come, go, or grow weary; at the same time, he calls things out to us, drawing our attention to our habitual distraction and unwillingness to look closely at them. And perhaps, Yap suggests, this unwillingness or inability to pay close attention stems from the way in which Singaporeans have grown used to treating what they have around them as objects rather than as things.

This chapter argues that Arthur Yap's poems take a “thing-like” approach towards the landscape, people, and bits and pieces of everyday life that make up Singaporean society after the country's independence in 1965. By a thing-like approach, I mean that Yap's poetry actively transforms what we would normally think of as common and functional objects with a set or defined utility into strange and multifaceted things. The representation of things in contemporary literature and culture is a subject on which literary and cultural critic Bill Brown has written at length.

Arthur Yap's poems which portray the human condition and the environment through everyday scenes in public spaces demand an interpretation that radically challenges the anthropocentrism and nature-vs.-culture dualism of Western classical humanism. Nature is a prominent presence in some of Yap's poems, and conspicuously absent in others. Both its presence and absence are intertwined with the human sociocultural environment shaped by historical forces. Underlying this relationship is an ecological perspective that informs the subject matter and poetics of Yap's poetry, which can be considered “ecopoetry” to a certain extent. Although Yap's work shares ecopoetry's ecological awareness and concern with environmental issues, it refuses to be confined to any narrow definition of ecopoetry as “a new brand of nature poetry” (Bryson 2002, p. 3). This is the case partly because of its subversive postcolonial mimicry of Eurocentric perspectives on the human/nature relationship, and partly because of its central concern with daily urban life. While the characteristics of ecopoetry as described by American and British critics can shed some light on Yap's poems and poetics, they are inadequate for a fuller understanding of Yap's thematic concerns with the relationship between nature and culture, which are significantly different from those of the British and American nature poets whose work some critics consider early ecopoetry.

In his definition of “ecopoetry”, J. Scott Bryson traces “the history of nature poetry … back to the roots” of the English language, from Beowulf to Blake, to English Romantic poetry, and eventually to “a new form of nature poetry” produced by “antiromantics” such as Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, and Wallace Stevens, among others (2002, p. 2). Bryson's definition of “ecopoetry” draws on Robert Langbaum's discussion of a paradigm shift in twentieth-century poetry from traditional “nature poetry” largely as a result of scientific discoveries such as those in evolution and geology (p. 2). According to Langbaum, “the best twentieth-century nature poetry ‘defines itself precisely by opposing, or seeming to oppose, the pathetic fallacy …’ which characterizes overly romantic nature poetry” (quoted in Bryson 2002, pp. 2–3). In the poems of twentieth-century antiromantics, Langbaum maintains, one feels “in nature an unalterably alien, even an unfeeling, existence”, thus carrying “empathy several steps farther than did the nineteenth-century poets who felt in nature a life different from but compatible with ours” (quoted in Bryson, p. 3).

Arthur Yap was predisposed to silences. I had only ever spoken to him twice in my life, but we had been writing letters back and forth until a year before he passed away on 19 June 2006 of nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Standing before his coffin at his funeral, I could not believe that the poet who had befriended me and encouraged me to keep publishing my own poems was really gone. Gentle and soft-spoken in real life, his reticence had not been a consequence of indifference. I always believed that his silences stemmed from a desire to reserve quick judgment, an inclination that informs his poetry as well. I have tended to equate his general sense of restraint with kindness. In his poems, this quality of restraint opens up a spectrum of conflicting interpretations; the poet is like a quiet but generous host who has invited a whole range of readers to wander and settle comfortably inside the spacious house of his poetry.

Kindness was probably not what literary commentators had in mind when they underscored Yap's “private sensibility” (Singh 1999, p. 15) and his refusal to engage with nation-building discourses in outrightly opinionated and political ways in the poems. During an interview, Yap had once answered “no” to a question about whether he was in sympathy with the opinion of Edwin Thumboo, a poet regularly regarded as a literary pioneer in Singapore, that “the writer must explain his society, bring into focus the forces, whether healthy or pernicious, which move society” (quoted in Wong 2009). Yap seemed to express views that emanated from a temperament that was clearly not comfortable or convinced by the call for poets to take a public role on issues such as the formation of a national identity. In an earlier essay of mine, I made a case for the claim that the great majority of poems in Yap's oeuvre confront social discourses through an unwavering position of uncertainty and scepticism, in which contradictory attitudes are often juxtaposed and left without one winning out over the other. Hovering between a conscious and an involuntary response across a range of implied or explicit attitudes ranging from uncertainty, through ambivalence and ambiguity, Yap's sense of a Keatsian negative capability is bounded to a position of liminality that runs counter to any straightforward critique or analysis of socio-political concerns.

Especially during his later years, Arthur Yap was generally regarded as a private and reclusive figure who kept out of both the public eye and Singapore's literary scene. Indeed, criticism about Arthur Yap's poetry often contends that his poems are more concerned with a general human subjectivity existing in an anonymous, modern urban space rather than with specific particulars of Singaporean society or history. In contrast to this prevailing view of Yap's writing, this chapter focuses on his direct engagement with and literary explorations of Singaporean local spaces that show us an active and democratizing engagement with everyday life in Singapore. I argue that Yap frequently utilizes encounters with such spaces to map moments in Singapore's social and cultural history, and to explore a complex relationship with personal and national memory in ways markedly different from other local poets of his generation. Yap's allusions to local space are therefore of special significance, given that in much of his verse he pares poetry down to its bare essentials, favours understatement, and only makes rare but precise references to identifiable places in Singapore.

Much of my exploration of Yap's engagement with local space and time will be interdisciplinary. While drawing upon both art history and local topography, my investigation is also informed by a critical tradition hitherto rarely referred to in discussions of Yap's work: historicism. For reasons of perceived political and pedagogical expedience, Singaporean literary criticism has until recently remained highly influenced by the traditionally hermeneutic, textually focused critical schools of New Criticism and Formalism. As a consequence the idea of the poem as an autotelic or selfenclosed artwork prevails in Singapore. In his own country therefore Yap is predominantly characterized as an almost self-effacing poet who is constantly making large, generic, and universal points that transcend the specificities of local culture and society. Yet, at the same time, Yap's work is often characterized by its ambiguity and ambivalence. These qualities might suggest that we too, as reader-viewers of Yap's work, need to exercise caution and probe the ambivalence surrounding the poet's self-effacement of his biography and background. In a significant number of poems Yap offers tantalizing glimpses of concrete and specific geographical, historical, and cultural particulars that invite readers to reflect on the implications of these details.

Despite Arthur Yap's disavowal that there is any symbiotic relationship between his painting and poetry, the similarities between his visual canvases and his written verse are palpably obvious. In an essay about the relationship between poetry and painting, Wallace Stevens (1951) points out that “often a detail, a propos or remark, in respect to painting, applies also to poetry” (p. 160). Stevens elaborates on the parallels between the two practices and concludes that “it would be possible to study poetry by studying painting, or that one could become a painter after one had become a poet, not to speak of carrying on in both métiers at once, with the economy of genius, as Blake did” (p. 160). Stevens’ proposition takes Horace's ut pictura poesis (“as is painting, so is poetry”) a step further. Not only are the processes of poetry similar to those governing painting, a similar aesthetic reflex also binds commentaries on art and poetry.

Stevens’ formulation is especially pertinent in the case of dual practitioners — poets who paint or painters who write poetry. With William Blake, Paul Klee, D.H. Lawrence, Hermann Hesse and David Jones, poetry and art are bound by the same aesthetic and thematic concerns, fed by a common pool of impulses and obsessions. Indeed the reciprocity or crossfertilization between poetry and painting is a key Modernist impulse that is well-documented. William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Paul Eluard and Wallace Stevens all drew inspiration from their artistcounterparts in the quest for new poetic modes and themes, often looking to art for what cannot be expressed in words, while Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee aspired to the lyricism of colour, voice, and form that they found in poetry. In the case of poet-painters, art and poetry complement, reinvigorate and reinforce each other. Arthur Yap, as a poet and painter, inherited this Modernist alliance of art and poetry, which can be seen most clearly in his predilection for abstraction in both his paintings and his verse. There are few truly ekphrastic poems in his oeuvre, by which I mean poems that respond to particular paintings; neither are there poems about painters or poems consciously advocating any aesthetic school or movement. But there is a substantial body of poems that mediates between art and poetry, conducting lyric meditations on the aesthetics of perception and compositional issues, exploring the relationship between seeing and making.

Chances are if you are reading this book, you have already been introduced to Arthur Yap and his work through one of the numerous anthologies of Singaporean poetry and writing, or by way of several critical sourcebooks on Southeast Asian or Singaporean literature in English. Yap's consistent presence in these anthologies and collections suggests that he is an important and influential figure in both national as well as regional Englishlanguage literary landscapes, and it is regrettable that, unlike some of his contemporaries, no one volume was dedicated to his multifaceted creative output during his lifetime. The present collection of essays addresses this critical lack by gathering new and innovative work on Yap's prose, poetry, and painting written by an international group of scholars and critics. This introduction briefly summarizes the critical reception of his work and then discusses it in terms of three discursive modes of analysis, or literary and textual methods of examining our lived experience and living environment, both in specific terms of Singapore's history, society, and culture and in more general terms of modern life's concerns and predicaments. Some of our contributors examine, with renewed emphasis, important topics in Arthur Yap's writing that have been the subject of earlier critical essays, such as his erudite wordplay and laconic voice, his apparently reserved and ambivalent attitude towards social and national issues, and his thoughtful treatment of urban space and the cityscape of modern Singapore. In addition, this collection also includes essays that shed new light on Yap's literary transformation of mundane objects into multifaceted things; the connection between his verse and the natural environment as a nascent form of ecopoetry; the powerful stillness and silence in his paintings that resonate with his laconic poetic persona; the desire and affection expressed in his mapping of the queer spaces of the city and in the sheer sensuousness of his travel poems; and the social and cultural commentary of his short stories, which have never before been critically examined. It is hoped that the essays included here will pave new ground for future scholarship on Yap's work in different genres and media, such as his paintings and their exhibition at international venues, his rare but dazzling pieces of short fiction, as well as his own linguistic and literary criticism.