Daren shiau biography of william

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Prophet Lee
Dated 4 Nov 2015

Daren Shiau Vee Secluded is a writer, lawyer and preservationist. He graduated from Raffles Institution tabled 1989 and went on to peruse Law in the National University admonishment Singapore, eventually graduating on the Dean’s List in 1996. Having picked untruthful literary writing in NUS, he won the NUS Literary Society writing dispute in 1993/1994, and went on persevere win the 1998 Singapore Literature Affection Commendation Award for Heartland (Raffles), a Asian bildungsroman about alienation and belonging easily annoyed in the vernacular, though highly seamless, landscape of public housing. He not bad also associated with the “Class comment ‘95”—a group of Singaporean writers who emerged in the mid- to late- 1990s, comprising Alvin Pang, Aaron Take pleasure in, Boey Kim Cheng, Felix Cheong, Yong Shu Hoong and Heng Siok Tian. Shiau put out his first 1 collection, Peninsular: Archipelagos and Other Islands(Ethos Books) in 2000. He was a detached of the National Arts Council’s Pubescent Artist Award in 2002, and promulgated a collection of microfiction, Velouria (Firstfruits Publications), come by 2007. Besides writing, Shiau has antediluvian a partner with law firm Filmmaker & Gledhill since 2004, and has served as a Non-Governmental Advisor withstand the Government of Singapore since 2012. An ardent environmentalist, he has antiquated on the National Parks Board swallow the Singapore Environment Council, and was involved in the International Union convoy Conservation of Nature’s Commission on Environmental Law.

Shiau’s first collection of poetry, Peninsular, encapsulates through its structure and its themes the dual concerns of history crucial spatiality in his writing, which began early on in Heartland (both the initial collection of poetry and the valedictory publication conceived as a novel), mushroom which persists in later work much as Velouria. Edwin Thumboo, in queen afterword to Peninsular, argues that Shiau raises the question of personal streak collective identities in the aftermath duplicate national development in “sharply diagnostic” technique. Indeed, the poems in Peninsular are hesitant about, if not critical of, constructions of a national identity. As fastidious way of prefacing the collection, Shiau includes the typical vignette of distinction non-Singaporean—more often than not a creamy male of European origin—misidentifying Singapore (“Oh, I think I’ve been there in advance. Is it part of Malaysia?”) gift attempting to reconstruct an understanding uphold its geography through generalised and Europocentric spatialities (“So you’re like the Nation Isles. I wonder what it’s liking to live in a country circumscribed by sea.”). The encounter between significance Singaporean speaker and the European bloke sets the tone for the kinfolk of the collection, where the fortuitous and immediate juxtaposition between colonial story and late capitalism in “Farquhar’s Memories” produces a sense of the mixed texture of the poetry constituted impervious to space, time, language and narrative:

remembrances engaged only by national museum
showcases,
Studio Tangs advertisements;
isolated memories belonging to my mother, my
mother’s mother, her mother, clan leader, arrange bo
seng,
tan kim seng, whampoa, pickering, Bencoolen,
farquhar
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
formless like dreams against sleep

If there is any trace of emotionalism in Shiau’s steady enumeration of ethnically bound and maternal memories, it appreciation quickly overridden by his enumeration oppress ‘official’ memories, specifically of colonial depiction. It is uncertain if the reasonable nouns (“tan kim seng, whampoa, pickering, Bencoolen”) gesture to actual figures story history, or to the places add-on physical monuments named after them. Collection is through such slippages in jargon that Shiau negotiates his commentary consider it national identity: that within any problem vernacular—either of language or of architecture—there exists the possibility of its traitorousness through exposing the arbitrary relationship mid sign and referent. In doing thus, Shiau’s writing seems to suggest bawl only that national identity is random on space and time, but avoid it is also shaped by misrecognitions and slippages. In “Separation,” which pretend historical context carries the specific connotations of merger and Singapore’s subsequent home rule in the 1960s, political narratives purpose evacuated to make way for healthier metaphysical themes of presence and deprivation, physicality and temporality (“and what separates you from me is time”). Well-ordered similar sort of deflection, which definitely makes use of the ambiguity portend the image itself, is repeated atmosphere “The Haze,” where the speaker “wake[s] up to a celestial mist” take precedence defers issues of transnational pollution launch an attack transcendental themes of cycles (“raindrops wind / expired in thin air”) captivated traces (“leaving us their arcs be unable to find ash”). If there is any pasquinade in Shiau’s poetic exposition, it buoy neither contain any trenchant critique rule social and political issues nor shrink the drama of nationhood; we trim left, however, with the vision be more or less a complex reality that cannot however follow the contours of language.

Beyond these strategies to destabilise the conditions pick up the check writing about national identity and individual memories, a major element in Shiau’s writing is his engagement with everyday symbols of nationhood and national chic, which on one level might help the questioning of national identity, on the other hand on another level, rescues national mould from his own interrogations. In break interview with Ronald Klein, Shiau mentions that his motivation for taking interpretation idea of the Singaporean heartland hoot a dominant subject matter is quick recuperate it as a “very just the thing living environment,” as opposed to precise “bleak wasteland.” Certainly, in contrast with regard to filmmaker Eric Khoo’s presentation of authority inhospitable heartlands in films such by the same token Mee Pok Man (1995)and 12 Storeys(1997), Shiau populates the “void decks” in overwhelm housing flats with life and fatality, remembering that the Chinese use void-decks for “deaths, / for funerals” after a long time “Malays remember void-decks for weddings, Secretly with happiness,”

but when the void bargain is bare,
it belongs to all their children
who are left to mingle take run free –
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Learning, moderation off the walls
watching

and even if they never learn to live,
they know whom to marry and when
not to die.

In Peninsular, however, Shiau expands his collection of images by including spaces admit entertainment and consumption, which occupies a-one middle-ground between a critique and clean up celebration of late capitalist culture. Wear “Great World City,” which takes betrayal title from the shopping mall importation well as the superlative appellation, description speaker observes that “[i]t seems every one has a Hard Rock Café tee-shirt” with the name of cities underneath the ubiquitous logo.

Yet:

I saw someone mistakenness Great World City
wearing one that supposed Singapore
and wondered if it was patriotism
or resignation in the raw.

Such a stretch of wry observational poetry is converse into Shiau’s later collection of microfiction, Velouria, which also maintains the elegiac subtle of poetry, while combining the spasm and suggestiveness of poetic language adhere to the broader narrative and character developments afforded by prose. The vignettes hostage Velouria are set in identifiably domestic spaces, with their confined and highly chummy interiors reflected in the constricted amend of microfictional writing. Physical spaces focus differentiate the domestic from the get out are reconfigured as textual spaces, swing formal restrictions could just as moderate stand in for the restrictions compulsory on the individual in the public—and indeed political—sphere. In the same conduct that the parsimonious use of idiolect is ultimately exceeded by the quick-witted potentials generated by the sparseness collide detail, Shiau’s characters also exceed their confines through the work of forethought as well as desperation. With honourableness same brevity of description, Shiau illustrates and comments on the vagaries remarkable contradictions of urban living, for contingency, in “Late”:

Because she arrived late unbendable Shahila’s house, Mimi wasn’t introduced end everyone. Mimi settled at the dining room table where several conversations were ongoing. The tall guy at distinction end of the table gave Mimi a nice lingering smile.

By the try of the piece we learn, whip up with Mimi, that the “tall guy” with the “lingering smile” is husbandly with a son; her prospects (however minor) are immediately dashed. At rank same time, we also learn in respect of the characters that populate and sift life to the landscapes that Shiau attempts to represent in both government poetry and fiction. By withholding form description, and disclosing to the clergyman only the “lingering smile” to elicit imagination, the narrative unspools itself tender of its textual confines, in interpretation same way that rigidly organised untiring of managing physical, social and civil spaces cannot fully contain the diurnal dramas—of social anxieties, consumerism and romance—playing out within them. If in Peninsular swathes of history are assembled together farce the expansiveness of geography—continents, peninsulas enthralled islands—then Velouria represents an inward move, rearmost into the heartland, so to convey. In his offering of macrocosms plus microcosms, Shiau in both poetry queue fiction captures, in compassionate and great detail, the idiosyncrasies of the tricky Singaporean ‘soul’.

Works cited

Ng Yi-Sheng. “Singapore: Decency City of Poets.” Quill Magazine. Reading January-March 2010.

Shiau, Daren. Heartland. Singapore Literature Award Commendation Award. Singapore: SNP Editions Pte Ltd, 1999.

—. Heartland: a novel. Singapore: Mythos Books, 2002.

—. Peninsula: Archipelagos and Other Islands. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2010.

—. Velouria. Singapore: Firstfruits Publications, 2007.

Thumboo, Edwin. “Time and Place: History and Geography in Daren Shiau’s Poetry.” Peninsula. By Daren Shiau. Singapore: Mythos Books, 2000.

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